Messi@

by Andrei Codrescu

  Scheherazade and Beatrice stepped with distaste among the corpses, some of which were still bleeding through holes in their armor.

  “You have scared the world for far too long, Nostradamus. You are tired. Sleep now.” Scheherazade was angry. She felt no affection for the old bird of doom whose prophecies had come true one by one, and were still unfolding. What evil dream had seized the poor man to give him such detailed visions of war, pestilence, famine, and death? Even now, so many years after his own historical death, Nostradamus prattled on, omen after omen, nightmare after nightmare. Sleep, you old coot. Scheherazade granted him rest across time.

  Felicity typed Dante again, but there was no answer. She typed Amelia Earhart then, and Joan of Arc, and no one appeared. An abandoned city showed on the screen, but nothing moved within.

  Then a message came onto the screen, a banner floating above the silent houses: Greetings, Scheherazade. Your cyberlovers from the distant past are saying good-bye. They are all disconnecting, withdrawing to their niches of time in anticipation of a great event.

  Andrea was disappointed and Felicity was angry. She scrolled through her list of electronic addresses. There they all were, people from all ages: Alexander, Archimedes, Hoffman, Homer, Jefferson, Joan of Arc, Laotzu, Marx, Plato, Saint Teresa … Even if they lived just around the corner, they still had the strength of imagination on their side. Felicity wrote the following message:

  Scheherazade, who has given closure to your restlessness and made your nights bearable, now asks something of you. This is the most important request she has ever made in her life. Listen, all. Come now out of cyberspace and be with her and her new friend, Beatrice. Come from your hideouts in ages past, from countries far away, from your offices. Come out from behind your pseudonyms, leave your shells at once. Get in your cars, strap on your wings, teleport if you must. For this time only, you must come and join us! While every person in New Orleans will soon mask for Carnival in order to become someone else, you are invited to come here and be yourselves!

  Then she selected SEND ALL.

  Felicity typed her real name and address. She had no way of knowing, and perhaps neither did her cyberlovers, that the actual entities whose identities they had so carefully claimed were already in New Orleans, engaged in a grave activity. Others, of course, were mere humans whose online service had mysteriously failed.

  “Your cyberfriends make me think of my friends in Jerusalem.” Andrea told Felicity about the scholars and the nuns at Saint Hildegard’s, and how she had left without saying good-bye.

  “They must miss you.”

  “They must hate me.” Andrea felt sad for a moment.

  The evening of Andrea’s departure from Jerusalem, still ignorant of the fact that she was gone, Professor Li wrote to his wife in Beijing.

  My Blossom:

  I have been wasting time waiting for permission to translate the manuscript. But not entirely. The distinguished guests of this hospice have provided me with much food for thought. They are all emissaries of certain religious currents who appear intent on a mission I have not been able to fathom. They have gathered in Jerusalem to receive instructions about some momentous event that is supposed to conclude the Christian millennium. I have not been trained to understand the core of their religion, which is supposed to be a mystery, in any case. I do have the sense, nonetheless, that a sort of monstrous, unbalanced occurrence is palpable here in Jerusalem, a city unlike any other. I would not be surprised if an entirely unknown element, something that might be called mysterium, were one day to be discovered leaking from the stones. A sort of radiation. Forgive me, blossom. I digress. This is also a consequence of this city, which considers itself the center of the world, making everything else a digression. There is also a girl here, a Bosnian refugee, whose presence has somehow captivated all of us. She was raised under the Yugoslav communist regime for the early part of her life. Because of this I feel a certain empathy for her that I doubt my religious-trained friends would understand. If the tragic mistakes with which we are all familiar had not occurred in the former Soviet sphere, this girl could have been a leading comrade of the first rank. She has a genuine revolutionary sensibility. As it is, she is a refugee, tossed about by the winds of circumstance …

  Having allowed himself the luxury of sentiment, Professor Li pushed his laptop away and looked out the window. A raindrop hung there from the tip of a bare olive branch. Ah, poetry. It wasn’t something he thought about very often nowadays. In his youth, he had written poetry. But then, so had Mao. And Stalin. It didn’t prove anything. The time had come to return to China. His search for the manuscript had been unsuccessful, but he had gained something else, a mission that was yet unclear. Dr. Li had an unsettling vision of himself a few months hence, after returning to China. He saw himself in a large, cold auditorium, standing before thousands of blue-clad Chinese from the highest ranks of society, talking … about Andrea. He tried in vain to modify this ludicrous picture by willing himself to speak of other, important things: the future of Confucian scholarship, the direction of education in the twenty-first century. It wasn’t working. Every time he opened his mouth, unbidden words came to him: Comrades, I must speak to you about Andrea the Orphan. Andrea, the mistress of the wheel. Andrea, the one who has astonished and seduced me.

  Just about the time Professor Li finished his letter, Lama Cohen, panicked by her inability to locate her prayer wheel, began searching the closet where she kept her few things. She remembered last using it the evening before, prior to her meditation. She had fallen into a deep dreamless sleep, interrupted only by the passage of a white bird through the room. The bird had been tall and smelled strongly of tobacco. The lama had woken up smiling at the bird in her dream, but now she wondered if the bird had been a dream. Lama Cohen shivered. White birds were a bad omen. Was she going to die soon? There would be no doubt about it if the bird had indeed taken her prayer wheel. But while the white bird was a likely suspect, Lama Cohen rather knew who’d taken it. She had early on discerned in Andrea an impishness that reminded her of her own self. Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, naughty Iris had shoplifted from every interesting store in the better ski resorts of the Rockies and found enough time to seduce considerable numbers of men her father’s age. Still, her sympathy went only so far. Her wheel was her professional tool, like a doctor’s stethoscope. She had to retrieve it. She had already opened the door of her room to go out and look for Andrea when she heard a series of low moans at the window. She left the door half open and pried open the wooden shutters. Standing on the windowsill, looking straight at her with round eyes, was a white owl. The bird moaned again and Lama Cohen laughed. How could she have suspected Andrea? Here was the culprit.

  “Where is my prayer wheel?” she asked of the bird, who looked apologetic on top of being terminally sad.

  “You must return to your congregation in New Mexico. Bring them the good news of the coming of Andrea the Orphan.” The bird enunciated the words like an ancient teacher of the dharma.

  Father Hernio noticed that the box containing the ashes of his parents was gone. Curiously, he felt neither panic nor anger, but relief. He understood that the loss of this object signaled the end of his journey in the weary city of miracles. He saw stretched before him the city of Mindanao and the ocean beyond it. The city and the ocean teemed with millions of people gathered to hear his message. “I have brought good news from Jerusalem,” he said. Standing next to him, enveloped in green shimmer, was Andrea, holding a dazzling emerald wheel. The priest began to pack.

  The disappearance of his bull-roarer was particularly grave, because Father Zahan was at an impasse. He needed to request instructions about the next stage of his mission. He had received his first set of instructions in a dream exactly one year before. Darumulun, the supreme Yuin deity, had ordered him to go to Jerusalem to meet other holy men in advance of a great meeting that would decide the fate of the visible world. Father Zahan had been surprised. The Yuin
had no apocalyptic theology like the Christians. For them, the End had come a long time ago, close to their beginnings in dream time. The Yuin had angered Darumulun then, and they had had to remove an incisor and scar themselves during initiation ever since, in penance. After that, the Yuin distinguished no longer between the visible and the invisible worlds. But Father Zahan had not questioned his dream. Such dreams came only three times in the life of any man. These were his guide dreams, proceeding from dream time: they had to be obeyed. Even Darumulun had to acknowledge other gods. Even heaven, it seemed, was subject to change in these troubled days.

  Father Zahan had last employed his communicator in the Garden of Gethsemane on a day when there were no tourists. He had asked the gods to guide him and had concluded with a plea for peace among them. He hated to admit it, but he had become quite distressed by the way heaven mimicked discord among men. Or was it the other way around? In any case, he had received no answer but for the burst of rain that broke unexpectedly over his head.

  Dr. Carlos Luna shivered. He couldn’t find his Aztec-wheel sweater. This sweater, knit for him by the seven brujas of his native village, near Palenque, from the finest hair of a young llama, was his protector both against cold and against the world. When he was wrapped in it, neither cold nor indifference bothered Dr. Luna. This sweater was indeed warm, as Andrea had already ascertained. She had pulled it over her head and stretched it down just past her naked butt, noticing how soft it was. Together with Professor Li’s shawl, she was dressed quite comfily. The mirror on the door had given her back an image of disheveled but stylish loveliness.

  Dr. Luna was certain that his sweater had been stolen by one of the many idle neotribals who loitered at a café he liked to frequent. Their looks of admiration for the sweater’s intricately woven calendar hadn’t escaped him. Doubtless they were interested in reproducing its intricacy on whatever unadorned skin they still possessed. It had been exceedingly hot in the café, and he seemed to remember removing his sweater.

  Dr. Luna tucked a rarely smoked pipe in the pocket of his black trench coat and went out to investigate. He tipped an imaginary hat when he passed the open door of the chapel where Mother Surperior and Father Tuiredh were absorbed in the study of what appeared to be a large dark shape floating above their heads. These Christians are very strange, he said to himself.

  The Fig, a vegetarian restaurant on Haik Efraim Street, was a popular neotribal hangout. The sign read: THE FIG, Just the Garden, No Internet. He hoped to find his sweater. If not, he would pin a notice on the bulletin board, offering a reward for its return. The waitresses had hair painted in various colors, earrings and rings in various parts of their bodies—more parts than were visible, he suspected—and spoke six languages (without saying much in any of them, he thought meanly, then regretted it). Father Luna was not mean, but he found the fashion of body piercing and scarification for no good ritual reason distasteful. Mayan people scarred themselves when they became adults, in order to signify their separation from childhood. But these young people seemed to do it for the opposite reason, in order to remain children. Punctured and scarred like this, they incurred only ridicule in the adult world and were always shunned and given only the least responsible tasks. He was horrified by this waste of strong young people in the Christian world. Just when they should be called to serve their people, these youths became most adrift. Everything had been set on its head and was exactly the opposite of what it should have been. The young were more idle than the old, men served machines, women were barren, little screens had replaced meetings between the people, the wondrous senses were in decline, nature or what remained of it was being defoliated and erased. Most wild animals were dead or dying.

  While Dr. Luna had these uneasy thoughts, a young woman stood before him with a pad, ready to take his order. She had barely any hair on her head but what there was struggled between several colors. Each strand was a different hue. In her lips, three gold studs gave her a funny triangular mustache. When she spoke, he saw that her tongue was lined with some kind of metal.

  “I will have this.” The Mayan father pointed absently to an item on the menu labeled Tofu Nightingale Nest. “And I have a question … I was here the other day. Did anyone find a sweater?”

  The metallic girl took his order, then said, “You look sad. I will go ask at the back. We will find your sweater.”

  Dr. Luna was touched by her compassion. She put her pad in her back pocket, then said: “Didn’t you come in here once with the girl from Gal Gal Hamazal?”

  “Yes. Andrea.” He had once had lunch with Andrea here.

  The entire staff and all the customers in the restaurant heard this and began to comment.

  “I never watch TV,” a boy said, “but I saw her once when I was waiting for a bus. She’s a very unhappy girl, I think.”

  “There is a rabbi in the Knesset who wants the show stopped because the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are sacred. This girl could bring about the End of Creation,” remarked a rail-thin youth with tiny gold glasses sewn right into his skin.

  “Gal Gal Hamazal is a gate for the disappearance of people,” the waitress said. “I had three roommates who disappeared because they watched too much television.”

  “True.” The thin youth nodded gravely. “Television is a portal through which people pass into the afterlife, while still alive. Already, people are nothing but heads and fingers connected to the evil neural World Web. Their bodies are gone.” He spoke with so much bitterness Dr. Luna felt the need to comfort him.

  “You are still young.” He didn’t know what else to say. The boy was a philosopher, but so was everyone in Jerusalem. The whole city was in need of comfort.

  Dr. Luna was pleased that his acquaintance with Andrea had awakened such interest among the usually sullen young. He agreed that the rabbi’s fears were well founded.

  “The rabbinical objections have parallels in Mayan beliefs,” he explained. “The priestly language is forbidden to the uninitiated. I can’t say much about the disappearance of people now … Our people have disappeared for centuries.”

  The multicolored metallic waitress, who had gone to the back to ask about his sweater, came back with disappointing news. No one had seen it. The other patrons’ sympathy was immediate and energetic. They understood the importance of vestments and symbols.

  “Whoever took it is going to bring it back!” vowed a bald-headed giant dressed in an African skirt and a leather jacket.

  Everyone concurred. Dr. Luna ate his Tofu Nightingale Nest, a round-bottomed concoction with bright pimento slivers in the saffron-tinted tofu curds. These young people were not at all bad. During the course of his dinner he was astounded to hear them express beliefs very similar to his. They too lamented the destruction of the natural world. Some of them had never seen a wild animal except on a television screen. After they renounced the virtual world, they saw none. They spoke lovingly and nostalgically of birds. One small Australian youth with what appeared to be antennae grafted to his skull remembered every bird he had ever seen. He recited their names with eyes half closed in rapture and cried after the name of the last one, the snow ygdrin. He had seen the last ygdrin at the Sidney zoo.

  Dr. Luna returned to the convent, content with his outing. He had also changed his mind about the young. The boy who had cried over the ygdrin looked a little like an ygdrin himself. Perhaps the birds were not gone after all, but had become these armies of painted young people with their plumagelike tattoos. It was not unheard of. The world had begun with bird people. He thought affectionately of Andrea, who, though unscarred and unfeathered, was yet a member of this generation. It distressed him to think that they were inheriting a world on the brink of annihilation. There would, of course, be another world, but these children would be sacrificed before they could even register a complaint. The cosmic forces, he well knew, had their intricate harmonies, but for an earth-ling all of it brought sorrow. He forgot all about his sweater, though he had been assured by
the denizens of the Fig that no stone would be left unturned in search of it. He smiled at the quaint expression. This was Jerusalem—there were a lot of stones. He imagined them in their bird guises, led by the whiteness of Andrea, searching for his brightly colored sweater among the stones of Jerusalem. He knew also that he would never see this, because it was time to return to Indian America to report to the elders what he had found.

  What have I found? I found the spirit of the young, he answered himself.

  Next day, the scholars found all their cherished objects. They had been shoved under the cot in Andrea’s room. Retrieving them one by one, Sister Rodica wept, and when she returned them one by one, the scholars looked ready to weep as well.

  Lama Cohen expressed all their feelings when she spun her prayer wheel and said, “She played with it.”

  Indeed, as each of them put away their things, they were glad that their orphan had taken and perhaps played with them. Her touch had added an imponderable substance to their possessions and in a mysterious way facilitated their leave-taking. Then the scholars began to pack, this part of their mission having come to an end.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Wherein the necessity for action seizes our heroines. Dinner with Major Notz. Ben’s oracle.

  Andrea leaned over and kissed Felicity’s mouth. In that instant, Felicity’s body spoke to her with all the voices locked within it. Fear! Fear what? God! one voice said, louder than all the others. God what? She heard others—Miles, Grandmère, Notz, garbled, speaking fast, questioning—and each voice died in the kiss. She understood now: every kiss she had been given or offered had been in quest of something. Felicity drew away and asked Andrea: “Who are you?”

  Andrea opened her eyes, and her face came back from so far away it took a fluid eternity to regain its features. “I’ve been so many people, I’m too tired to remember them all.”