“I’m sorry, Joan is not here,” said a figure in jodhpurs with aviator goggles, who opened the door of what looked like a motel room in Los Angeles. A dusty palm tree could be seen in the courtyard.
“Who is this, please?” Felicity asked politely.
“Her roommate, Amelia.”
“Amelia who?”
“Amelia Earhart.”
The famous aviatrix had disappeared in 1937 over the Pacific Ocean on the last leg of her around-the-world flight, the first for a woman. All sorts of theories surrounded her disappearance, and some said that she’d been captured by the Japanese and executed before the end of the war. Others claimed to have seen her alive in China. One report had Earhart living in the United States under an assumed name. It was generally believed that she had been a spy. Amelia Earhart had been another one of Felicity’s adolescent obsessions, and the subject of another term paper. She’d read a book written by two flight engineers who had analyzed in detail the condition of the plane and had concluded that mechanical errors and fatigue had most certainly caused an accident. According to them, the plane and its two passengers were at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But Felicity never believed it. The mystery of the vanished Electra twin-engine had preoccupied her for a whole year.
“Great,” typed Felicity. “You’re one of my old crushes.”
“Thrilled,” Amelia responded. “Interested in flying?”
“Not really. I’ve lived in New Orleans all my life. Never had the urge to get in a flying box. No control.”
“Would you like to come in?”
Felicity scratched her crooked nimbus, then walked through the door into a room strewn with the aftermath of a serious drinking party. Empty bottles of scotch lay all over the floor. Women’s lingerie was strewn over the furniture. Amelia made no apology. She sat down on the couch and bade Messiah sit next to her. Felicity remained standing.
“What attracted you to me?” Amelia lit a cigarette.
Felicity thought for a moment before answering. “Your drag. You know, your goggles, your scarf, your leather jacket. The look. Aviatrix. Cool. And your disappearance. The mystery. You pushed the envelope. That’s a phrase they coined after your time. Your courage. I would like to push the envelope, too.”
She’d said too much. The trouble with having taken typing. There was a prolonged silence in the world of the aviatrix. Then the reply: “You hit on it with the scarf and the leather. We are basically a leather-and-silk-restraints club.”
“We?”
“Charles Lindbergh, the Germans, the Red Baron, the explorers. Our taskmaster is Fred Nietzsche. It’s 1937 around here all the time. The music is Wagner. We are naturists. I flew naked once or twice.”
“Is dying young part of the deal?”
“Definitely! That’s what explorers are: scouts into humanity’s future feelings. Humanity’s future feeling in 1937 was for death. There was a thirst for death, a passion for it. We were drunk with water from the fountain of death.”
“It wasn’t so pretty by 1945.”
“Well, no, that’s the trouble with the masses. They vulgarize the work of elites. Death was an art for us. The fucking peasants and bureaucrats turned it into a production quota.”
“The world seems to be on the verge of something like that now, Aviatrix,” typed Felicity. Messiah sat cautiously down on the far end of the couch.
“Big time. Disgusting. Death without heroism. Piles of bodies. But let’s get back to you. Why do you call yourself Messiah, anyway? You want to save the shithouse?”
Felicity blushed. She typed: “Blushing. I have no idea. There are a lot of phonies running around claiming to be the Messiah, so I thought I’d subvert them. I could be the Messiah. You do believe in God, don’t you?”
“Guess what?” replied Amelia Earhart. “I don’t. I’m dead, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of God. Besides, the Messiah is a Semitic notion.”
“Are you an anti-Semite?” Felicity challenged.
“Definitely! Can’t be Übermensch without a worthy adversary. Jews are the worthiest.”
“Okay. You’re a racist. Get ready to pop your goggles. I’m black.” Messiah gave Amelia the finger.
“Sigh. I must treat you like a slave, then. Take off whatever rags you are wearing and prepare for a whipping.” Amelia stood up, reached behind the couch, and picked up a horse whip.
The game had gone too far. Felicity wondered whether the flush of excitement that hardened her nipples was worth losing her on-line dignity. Why had she told her the truth? She could have been anything. After all, who knew that this cyber-Amelia wasn’t black? Or Jewish? Self-loathing, Felicity knew, was the muddy source of a lot of sexuality.
“I’m not into subjugation. Why don’t we try it the other way? I could beat your little blond ass instead.”
Amelia took a long time to answer. “I am only a locus. I am only an occasion. I have no body. I can provide you with a fantasy, but it has to be consistent. I cannot be both superwoman aviatrix and masochist. It’s not in my logic.” She put away the whip.
Felicity wrote: “I’m sorry. Would you recommend someone more poetic, gentler, sadder? I don’t think I can deal with Nietzschean will freaks right now. I’ll call you sometime, okay?”
“Roger that. Try Ovid. Roman poet. Exiled. Very sad. Over and out.” The motel room dimmed, and Messiah found herself alone in the desert with the blue sky.
Felicity took a very long shower and mourned her blasted integrity. Her distress was compounded by a new awareness of her unconscious megalomania. Messiah, my ass. As the water pummeled her dark little Creole ass, she considered what opportunities she was missing by remaining so stubbornly honest and provincial. She could pass for white and fuck cyber-John Wayne. She could pretend to be a man and Amelia Earhart would be hers. She could be anything she wanted to be in the brave new world of cyberidentity. New Orleans had taught her that much; life was a masquerade, and disguise was essential to the enjoyment of the flesh. Carnival—carne vale, the farewell to the flesh—was the essence of her city.
The phone must have rung while she was showering. The message on her machine was delivered by a flat female voice. “The party you met this afternoon would like to complete the transaction by the end of the day tomorrow. Another call will follow this one, to set the time and place.” Mullin was biting.
Felicity primped slowly. She had no appetite. If Joe intended to take her out to dinner before they went dancing, she wouldn’t even be able to look at the food. In Miles’s days of drugs and roses, everything she looked at made her hungry. The world was a luscious menu. Aland of acid had been slowly eating away at her since Miles’s death. It was making the colors fade and turning her appetite into rage. Felicity removed some of her rings and rummaged through her closet for something more conventional than her usual punk uniform. She settled on her only dress, a sleeveless black linen number. The mirror returned to her the image of a little girl playing dress-up.
When Joe Di Friggio appeared at her door, he looked like a special delivery package from Chippendale’s. His Italian suit was too perfect, he reeked of cologne, and a thick gold chain was visible beneath his open-collar silk shirt. She almost asked him if he’d ever danced for money.
Joe gave her a tightly furled red rose and a computer disk.
“The Kashmir Birani file. I downloaded what we have.”
Felicity was touched. She locked the door behind her and surveyed the magnolias and withered azaleas on both sides of the street. Two Shades stood smoking on the sidewalk, looking glassy eyed on the world. She was fond of the Shades, who had appeared out of nowhere one day and now occupied public space all over New Orleans. They were tattooed all over, except for the face, with body parts that coincided in all respects with their own. They had feet tattooed on feet, hands on hands, and so forth, but since the drawings were of necessity smaller, the shades looked as if they were cradling a body that had somehow adhered to their own. It reminded Felicity of a Robe
rt Johnson lyric: “I’m closer to you, baby, than Jesus to the cross.”
They were very much like herself. The only difference was that they were poor runaways who’d escaped diagnosis and were self-medicating instead. The first time she had pierced her nipple, it had been an alternative to suicide. She’d been taking Zoloft, an antidepressant that had made her serene enough to consider the ultimate antidepressant, death. A tattoo artist, a friend of Miles’s, had dropped by and, after hearing her rambling defense of suicide, had offered to pierce her nipple. “A foretaste,” he said, “of invasive self-assault.” It had worked. From that time, she’d pierced herself every time she’d wanted to die. Every ring in her body was a memento of the urge to end it all.
“Bums,” Joe commented tersely.
“They’re okay. Benign vegetarians. They’ve committed themselves to this earth.” Felicity threw a kiss in their direction.
Joe put a police light on top of his Camaro and parked right in front of Café Sbisa on busy Decatur Street.
“You eat like a bird,” said Joe, watching her push a shrimp around with her fork. Café Sbisa was dark, mirrored, discreet, old-fashioned, steeped in bay leaves and sea salt. Waiters slick as Dracula, their manner at once familiar and haughty, bent close to whisper the specials, and perhaps to smell her hair and check out her tits. There was a crooner at the piano upstairs, not exactly Harry Connick Jr. but definitely smoky and Italian and a little edgy, slightly chipped like her fluted champagne glass.
“You got class, Joe.”
Joe was proud. Actually, Sbisa was a bit over his budget, but his cousin Tony worked here. All his cousins were waiters. In New Orleans the waiting profession was hereditary. Tony had done some time for spousal abuse, but the sentence had been drastically reduced when fifty waiters had shown up in court to testify to his good character.
“Like a bird,” he repeated, looking with regret at the shrimp diablo à deux.
“Actually, birds eat all the time. Who were those naked men, anyway?” She sipped some more champagne. “The preacher isn’t here. You can tell me the rest of it.”
“They gave the names Fabricius something and Cleo something. Just cruising for a good time, and bam. There’s a lot of that these days. We pick ’em up stuck in daisy chains, with bottles up … excuse me. This is not dinner chat.”
“Gay bashing,” said Felicity.
Joe had no sympathy with political correctness. “We call ’em queers where I come from. They go fishing with worms, they catch gators sometimes.”
“Surely you don’t think homosexuality is unnatural,” she teased.
“Afraid I do. Men and women were built for something specific.”
“Yeah. Consuming shrimp diablo à deux.”
“This Kashmir Birani case … is it a good-paying job?” Joe enquired, changing the subject.
Felicity sensed again that there was a deeply serious man behind the surface of pretty-boy cop. “Not really. I think my uncle hired me out of pity. I’ve been doing nothing but domestic bullshit since I hung up my shingle.”
Joe was watching her mouth. No shrimp had yet passed that plump red lower lip. The upper quivered slightly. A kiss, thought Joe, will make it stop.
“You follow people, right?” he said.
“Sometimes they follow me.” She lifted a forkful of diablo, then set it back down. Her tongue briefly probed her upper lip. The crease above was narrow but distinct. Miles used to say, “The angel that put his finger there was one skinny motherfucker.”
“I’d follow you,” said Joe, with an expression of greedy interest.
“What if I told you I was gay?”
“I would say, no way.”
“You think it’s curable?”
“Don’t believe in it. Two holes don’t make a whole, if you’ll pardon me.”
“So what do you call lesbians, Joe?”
“Doughnut slappers.” He grinned.
“I’ll have to remember that one,” Felicity said acidly. “What if I told you that I was black?”
Her compulsive honesty again. Felicity wondered if relentless honesty was a disease. Perhaps she ought to avail herself again of one of the many kinds of pills that had adjusted her not so long ago. But they hadn’t been specific enough. What she needed was a pill to curb honesty. A pill to make a date go smoothly. A pill to make her hungry. A pill to make her ignore blatant unfairness.
Joe looked her over carefully.
“I’d say my interest is doubled.”
“You don’t believe in same-sex love but you’re all for interracial dating.”
“Something like that.”
Felicity would have liked to dislike Joe, but she couldn’t. She was ashamed for having accepted this date only because she wanted the Kashmir Birani file. It was dishonest. Not only was she compulsively honest; dishonesty made her ill. She decided to level with Joe.
“Joe, I only came on this date to get the Birani file. I’m telling you this so that you can hate me now, instead of later. I’ve been having a tough time lately.”
To her surprise, Joe was not upset. He reached over and touched her hand. It was a warm, friendly gesture. “Everybody’s having a tough time these days. Something is going on in this city. You can tell me whatever you want. I don’t have any evil designs.… Well, maybe one.”
Felicity laughed but felt like crying. She found herself telling Joe the story of Miles, her boyfriend, killed by the mean city.
Joe listened very carefully. He’d worked Vice undercover and was familiar with a lot of characters. The musicians’ milieu was well known to him. He’d listened to some great music in the city’s clubs while stalking one dealer or another. When Felicity finished describing the horrible night after they’d come home from Tipitina’s and Miles had taken his final shot, Joe reached across the table and took Felicity’s hand again.
“I used to work Vice. I know the dealers. You want me to find the scumbag who sold him the shit?”
Oh, no, thought Felicity, liking the feel of his wide, rough palm over her fingers; I hope he doesn’t tell me. She had decided not to pursue the likely purveyors of Miles’s bad heroin—she was afraid that a lot of good musicians might be implicated. What was the use? They made beautiful music, but they had sad hearts and made mistakes as large as their lives.
“You worked Vice undercover? Then how come you’re a patrolman, Joe? Did you fuck up?”
Joe didn’t smile. He had been assigned to undercover on a trial basis and had done an excellent job. Then he’d found out that in Vice he was expected to keep his mouth shut and protect some very bad people. But he couldn’t do it. If he did, he could never look at his mother again, or face his parish priest. So he’d gone back to patrol. It meant that he probably couldn’t afford someone like Felicity. So be it.
“Do you know a guy named Bamajan?” Felicity asked, hoping to change the subject back to Kashmir.
“Dealer to musicians. A trumpet player. Did your boyfriend know him?”
“They were buddies.”
“Maybe that’s your man. He sold him a hot shot.”
Now I have another fucking job. Thanks a lot, Felicity thought unhappily. Was Miles’s pal the same Bamajan involved in the disappearance of the Indian TV star? If Bamajan really meant “announcer of God,” she suspected that it was a generic name for adepts of yet another weird cult. New Orleans was full of them. Some cults were just covers for drug dealing. She knew that Miles’s Bamajan was now a street musician, playing for tourists on the riverfront. This Bamajan was just a junky, one of a million pulsing veins in the night.
“I don’t think I want to know,” she said softly. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Joe patted her hand. “I think I understand. If it was me, though, the motherfucker would be dog food. The city is full of scum like that.”
“And you’d like to clean it up, right? Remember the law, Joe?”
Joe grinned. Asking a New Orleans cop to remember the law was like asking a nun
to give head. Joe wasn’t dirty himself, but he knew his colleagues were less than clean. New Orleans cops had been busted for murder, rape, drug dealing, battery, insurance scams, shakedowns, and myriad smaller offenses. The department was a sea of lawlessness.
Felicity got even more depressed thinking that this nice guy, this regular Joe, might be dirtier than the floor at the Acme Oyster House, where they threw the shells at their feet.
“Do you ever read them their rights before you blow them away, Joe?”
“I’m a religious man, sister. I read them the last rites in every case.”
It was a joke, but she wasn’t amused. She suspected that if she had to choose, she’d feel safer with the Bamajans than the NOPD. It was a screwy city in a screwy country in a screwy time, and dangerous as shit. Felicity had once counted up her dead or dysfunctional friends. Seventeen dead, six of those gunshot victims, eight suicides, and three had crashed drunk in their cars. That left out those who’d tried starving themselves to death, had killed one or both their parents, or who were permanently addicted to one thing or another.
“What’s the matter? Did I offend you?”
“I don’t know, Joe. Let me ask you a silly question. You ever think about America? I don’t mean, like, do you vote, or do we have the best of everything, or any of that. I mean, honestly, up from the street. What do you think goes on?”
Even as she said these things, Felicity blushed for their banality. But Joe was not put off. Quite the contrary. He often thought about things like that.
“It’s Rome,” he said, “in the last days. Our society is falling apart from the inside because we’ve lost our faith in God. It’s a battle between good and evil, and all the prophecies are going to come true.”
“Jeezus, Joe. You don’t really believe that crap.”
“Crap?” Joe was offended. “You some kind of secular humanist?”
“You could say so. One time in college I went to hear a lecture about America’s great destiny, or some such. The speaker was this racist from something called the Identity Church. ‘America,’ he screamed, ‘is waiting for the white Jesus!’ Then he raised one arm in a Hitler salute and crossed himself with the other. Ever since, whenever anyone says that they are waiting for Jesus or the End Times or something, I see this weasely motherfucker with the ‘Sieg heil’ and the cross. In fact, whenever someone says, ‘I’m waiting for someone,’ even if it’s just the plumber, I picture this ‘someone’ as a fucking Nazi. You follow me, Joe?”
Messi@ Page 11
