The pilot announced that year 2000 had just arrived somewhere over the Atlantic. It was already year 2000 in Israel. Over the course of the next eight hours, the captain greeted New Year’s several times, underscoring time’s slippery dimension and, Andrea supposed, the roundness of the earth.
Dinner came.
Carroty orange baby penises surrounded a round burnt beef medallion. Wrinkled green peas swam toward shreds of wilted lettuce and fragments of cucumber. A blue-veined sauce in a plastic cup sat on the tray. A hard roll and a square of soggy cake leered up.
Andrea had always eaten whatever she’d been given or managed to scrounge. Black bread with a bit of butter or a dollop of sour cream was her favorite. She also loved raw carrots and scallions, wedges of tomato and cucumbers with salt, and apples, cherries, and peaches. She admired oranges and ate them very slowly, sucking each slice and holding the rest in her hand like a small sun. In truth, she was in awe of oranges. During the siege of Sarajevo she had carried a small orange in the pocket of her peacoat wherever she went. When she was deported she took it out and shared it with the other people on the truck. The orange hadn’t decayed at all, and there were enough slices for lots of people. She was not particularly fond of rice, but she ate it with a bit of gravy all the same. She liked cornmeal mush and cakes with salt and onions and cheese, if there was any. Goat cheese was her favorite, particularly goat cheese from Montenegro, where the fiercest and saltiest goats lived. She’d had marinated fish in tin cans and once or twice freshly caught fish from the sea. She’d also enjoyed baked chicken with rosemary, and goat shish kebab, beef stew with new potatoes, fried cow’s liver with salt and paprika, pork sausages, lamb brains, and chicken gizzards. After she saw the dog eating brains in Sarajevo, she thought she’d never eat meat again. But she did. She’d do whatever it took to sustain life.
But the airline meal presented a challenge. For the first time in her memory she felt repelled by the idea of meat. The medallion looked to her as if it were taken from a cow with an ice cream scoop. She could plainly see the animal, grazing in a pasture pockmarked by bomb craters. It looked up at her, its round eyes placid but insistent. The animal’s sides had scoops taken from them, resembling the cratered pasture. Go away, Andrea said. Obediently, the cow lifted up into the air, a clumsy dirigible, and vanished from her sight. But the burnt meat remained on her tray, solid, congealed, dark. Humanity, it said, is so much bleak meat. She felt sorrow within her own meat, as if the dead matter had triggered death in her body. Waves of compassion, disgust, and fear washed through her. She picked up her knife and fork to cut into the slab, but she put them down. She couldn’t.
The fat man, who had been watching her struggle with some interest, pointed to his own special Hindu vegetarian curry dinner, and said: “You can order vegetarian if you call ahead. Would you like to share my humble rice?”
Andrea thanked him and added: “I am not a vegetarian. I’m not sure what it is.”
“You should be vegetarian, my friend. When meat eaters die they go to a special hell where they are surrounded by animals with missing parts … chickens without breasts … cows without rumps … pigs without bellies. The animals scream for eternity for their missing parts, and the sinner must listen for many thousands and thousands of years.”
Ugh. Andrea shuddered and pushed away her tray.
Yehuda ben Yehuda hadn’t touched his food, because he was afraid that it might not be kosher, though the stewardess assured him that it was. He was in love; he didn’t have any appetite. He and Andrea looked at each other, then back at the food, and burst out laughing.
“I will eat your butt,” he whispered in her ear.
“My butt is a very expensive restaurant,” she whispered back.
Tee-hee. Tee-hee. The young people couldn’t stop laughing. They laughed so hard their trays jiggled and the solemn meat shook. The orange baby penises rolled helplessly about.
I will never eat the meat of dead animals again, Andrea promised herself. From this moment on, the flesh of animals will never pass my lips again.
Strangely, the entire plane seemed to share her revulsion. The stewardess ended up taking back over forty untouched scoops of cow. Not even the hungry evangelical boys ate any. It was hard to say whether this collective reaction was connected to Andrea or to the airplane’s having just flown into some kind of heavenly vegetarian belt inhabited by fruitarian angels. Nonetheless, Andrea felt some satisfaction and took a bit of credit for it.
Chapter Twenty-six
Wherein Felicity learns about the Language Crystal. Andrea and Ben’s flight is seized by eros.
Felicity would have wandered all the way to Canal Street if she hadn’t been stopped by a startling shopwindow. Displayed there was an African fetish—a woman with several pairs of breasts and a polished pregnant belly, pierced by thousands of rusty nails everywhere except the eyes. Next to it a whip with small bells along the strands was draped over a carved wooden phallus.
New Orleans had adopted the vampire as its mascot, despite protests from the Catholic Church. The undead were good business. Manteaux was a ritual art shop that specialized in looted African fetishes, local voodoo objects, and contemporary creep art. Rich vampirophiles roamed the Quarter seeking artifacts of this kind. But the stuff sold at Manteaux went beyond boosterism. An entire shelf held reliquaries containing pieces of saints—a tooth, an ear, a piece of bone. Saint Hildegard’s knuckle rested at the bottom of an open velvet box; or so the brass plate captioned it. A two-headed fetus floated in yellow liquid inside a plastic jar.
Felicity walked in the door, setting off a sinister little tin clapper.
She asked the bald man behind the counter about the figure pierced with nails. He put a half-smoked cigar into a heart-shaped bronze ashtray and licked the bottom of a luxuriant Stalinesque mustache before answering in a thick accent.
“That African fetish is one of my very best. It’s like the witch hurt every part of her except the eyes, the better to make her suffer. My accent is Albanian, in case you are wondering.”
“I was, but I don’t know Albanians. And the whip with the bells?”
“Interested? Australian. They call that a bull-roarer. It’s an Aborigine telephone. They talk to their gods on it. But if you wanted to use it for something else”—the man winked—“you could.”
The bald Albanian’s eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose like two angry caterpillars.
“Sit, sit.” He knocked a beaded fetish off a tall three-legged stool and invited her to perch. Behind her crouched a South Asian demon with gold smoke pouring out of his ornamental nostrils. A Tibetan prayer wheel hung over her head. The walls and ceiling teemed with shrunken heads, human bones, blood-caked fetishes, stuffed snakes, giant eggs, and primitive lethal weapons. Some of the dusty display cases were too dark to allow the disquieting shapes within to be identified.
Felicity flipped open the lid of an oblong wooden box on the counter. Nestled in moth-eaten black velvet were some curled lacquer spirals that looked like pig tails.
“Ah, those,” exclaimed the shopkeeper, “are the preserved penises of infidels taken in Jerusalem by the Knights of Saint John in the very first Crusade, seven hundred anno Domini.”
Felicity hastily closed the box, pinching her finger.
“This is a mad Kunstkammer, no?” The Albanian relit his stogie. The squashed butt ends of his cigars splayed obscenely in dolomite ashtrays and floated in brown liquid in bronze cuspidors all around the shop.
“What’s that?” Felicity asked, thinking the word sounded vaguely obscene.
“Oh, you know. Like a curio cabinet. The Kunstkammer. Every bourgeois European household had one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sometimes they devoted a whole room to oddities.”
“What was the purpose of it?” Felicity was rather enjoying the hairy man’s lecture.
“The world was much more mysterious then. Doubtless, the purpose was to examine the hidden order that under
lies the physical world. People were fascinated by the similarity of patterns between, let’s say, a seashell and a mountain plant. It must have seemed to them that nature was pursuing a plan, or many plans; that they were living with all sorts of mysteries … plots. This was before Linnaeus, mind you. Classification was a matter of texture, of taste … not physical laws.”
On a small shelf was a little book handwritten in a language Felicity had never seen. She asked the shopkeeper about it.
“Goatskin. Written in Coptic. A treatise translated as The Language Crystal.”
She touched it. The texture was coarse and the black letters were inscribed deeply into the leather. An illustration in the middle of the book depicted a naked couple standing under a sort of disco ball filled with letters. The letters were funneling from the ball into their open mouths.
“Everything is explicable through the Language Crystal. There are a small number of sounds that, in combination, contain the entire universe. The actual Language Crystal exists … but this is just a book about it. Everybody has a Language Crystal in their brain, which can be plugged into the Great Crystal.”
“I don’t understand.” Felicity frowned.
“Look at Africa, for instance. Europeans, who are rationalists, claim that AIDS came from Africa, but Africans, who use the Language Crystal, claim that AIDS was brought to Africa by AIDS, the Agency for International Development Services.”
As Andrea walked down the aisle to the rest room, she noticed that nearly everyone was holding or reading a book. She passed by two Arab men reading the Koran together, their dark heads touching. An American girl wearing shorts was staring at an open copy of The Teachings of Don Juan. She wasn’t exactly reading. It was as if she’d seen a spider and was wondering whether to shut the book on it or not. A well-dressed Frenchwoman was folding the corner of a page to mark a spot in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. A young nun in a gray habit and wimple was reading a week-old Osservatore Romano. An Orthodox Jew was bent so low over his paperback Torah his curls brushed the page. An unshaven, consumptive-looking man with burning eyes was reading something called License to Carry a Gun. Two gay men were intent on a passage in The Prophecies of Nostradamus.
Andrea had to wait for the rest room behind an elderly couple dressed in secondhand polyester pantsuits. Andrea imagined that they had waited in lines for most of their lives. She recognized her grandparents in them and the grandparents of all her friends. Their bent backs, the humble incline of their heads bespoke an infinite patience, honed by decades of poverty, in eternal wait for bread, milk, medicine, shoes, a vacant toilet stall. They wanted to take as little space as possible. Their whole bodies tried to shrink in order to communicate deference. They meant no harm to anyone; all they wanted was a little crust of bread, a corner on the park bench. Ground down by wars, these old folks shuffled on the edges of the world in felt slippers, fearful of everyone and everything.
Just then, the toilet was free and the old man gestured gallantly to his wife to go first. This was a small victory over his burning bladder. Andrea noted it and silently blessed the old man, who felt suddenly better without knowing why.
The old people took a long time in there, so Andrea went up the length of the plane to the first-class cabin. The toilet was occupied there, too, so she leaned against the back of a seat occupied by a manicured gentleman smoking a Dunhill cigarette and leafing through Variety. Her bladder was becoming a hot balloon. She imagined squatting next to the portly figure who smelled of cologne, leather, and smoke, and letting go her stream. He looked up at her just as the fantasy was becoming unbearable. His gaze was interested, but not greedy. He took the Dunhill out of his mouth and said, “Ever thought about a career in television?”
“Well, yes,” said Andrea, surprised.
The man nodded agreeably, as if this came as no surprise. “What happened?”
“I met an Italian millionaire. I’m flying to his island right now. I guess I don’t really care for television.” She became suddenly cross. “It’s evil.”
“Are you magnetic?” the man continued, disregarding her remark. “Do people come up to you for no good reason and begin talking to you?”
Andrea had to admit that they did.
“Do they think that they know you from somewhere? That they’ve seen you before?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever acted?”
“No. Biology was my best subject in high school. I took some ballet classes, but after the earthquake in Los Angeles … My parents were in the house at the time, you see. Our classes were canceled, and by the time I got home … After the funeral I moved to my uncle’s place in Tel Aviv, and I didn’t do anything much after that.”
A man came out of the bathroom. Andrea rushed into the vacated stall. When she came out she felt greatly relieved, but she was still angry.
“Television,” she spat at the Dunhill smoker, “is the devil. It’s sucking all the people in and sending their souls to a place of dots.” Ben had actually said this, and she had liked it.
“You’re absolutely right.” He smiled. “I’m Reed Sharpless, agent, producer, talent scout. You ever hear of Hollywood Squares? I did that. If life on the island proves too boring, give me a call. I definitely think you’re magnetic.” He handed her a card.
Andrea returned to her seat, thinking about this program she’d never seen, Hollywood Squares. She imagined it to be the nemesis of Wheel of Fortune. When she asked Ben, he said that Hollywood Squares was to Wheel of Fortune what the hamburger was to the pizza.
“The first fast food in America was hamburgers, which were small, individualistic portions. Now the most popular food is pizza, which is shared and communistic.”
This explanation didn’t satisfy Andrea, but she liked Ben even more.
Ben became engrossed in Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah, and a silence full of turning pages settled in the cabin. It was as if an angel of reading, finger to his lips, had taken over the jumbo jet, causing everyone to fall into a private pool of words. It’s strange, thought Andrea, listening to the leafing, but the world will go on only for as long as everyone keeps reading. When they close their books, it’s over. She didn’t know where this certainty came from, but she was sure enough of its tightness.
“Can you explain the Language Crystal?” Felicity was still touching the goatskin book and experiencing a chill, as if an ice cold pen were writing words on her body.
The Albanian relit his cigar. He looked Felicity in the eyes and she sank into their bottomless black pools. The hymns that were her comfort tried to rise from within her, but she couldn’t sing. There was a lump in her throat; she was near tears. She wanted desperately to hear about the Language Crystal.
“At the simplest level, the crystal makes us share a story. I knew a man with a pencil-thin mustache,” he said, and Felicity, too, knew a man with a pencil-thin mustache.
“He called himself a Levantine,” she continued.
“He came from the fabled potbelly of Asia Minor called the Levant because he could levitate and also because of his fabulous levity …”
Felicity saw him clearly. “He loved women of different races, different countries, different regions …”
“Mexican, Thai, Chinese, French, Russian.… And each one cooked for him some form of burrito, spring roll, egg roll, crepe, or blini …”
“His women were just like food. He was a sampler of women, a connoisseur of some kind, and then he hit on the idea of combining his girlfriends.”
“He saw his Thai woman in the morning, his Japanese girl at noon, his Russian Katia in the evening. He planned his love life like gourmet meals.”
“In fact, he quit eating altogether and fed only on the salt, musk, and juices he absorbed from his lovers. He wrote down everything about them, all the combinations, and he called his method love fusion.”
“He got very thin, and after a while he tried to combine all his lovers into a single physical person …”
&n
bsp; “… and developed a complex explanation having to do with the end of the individual …”
“… the advent of the collective person!”
“Right! He claimed that people were going to become very thin and insubstantial in the future, and that they would have to band together to make whole units …”
“The amazing thing was,” continued Felicity, “that these women believed him. They considered his theory sound and overcame, by sheer intellectual will, the age-old difficulties of jealousy, possessiveness, territoriality … They became one.”
Felicity stopped. The thread of the story snapped and receded from her like smoke. The story had floated up like an island in the middle of a gray sea and had exhausted her. She looked down and saw that she was still touching the goatskin book.
“It never fails!” The Albanian looked away and Felicity surfaced like a cork to the surface of herself. She felt that now she could sing, but had no desire to do so.
The shopkeeper explained: “The Language Crystal made it possible for both of us to weave a story. It is odd, though, how perfectly you shared, how little of you there was in it.… You are utterly clear, like a windowpane. People usually add something of their own, some detail of their personalities, but you … It’s most unusual.”
“What’s my story?” Felicity asked anxiously. She felt keenly the absence of her memories.
The lights in the main cabin were dimmed, but most of the reading lights were still on. Andrea imagined the string of lights floating below the stars, above the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean. She was a mere dot of pulsing life, and then she became aware of an insistent and pleasurable sensation. She streamed back into her body. Ben was kissing her neck.
Messi@ Page 31
