Messi@

by Andrei Codrescu

  And then they gave themselves to the kiss.

  There have been many kisses in the world, Andrea thought, but this kiss is different. There’s been a lot of kissing this girl done, but this is different, thought Felicity. They kissed for so long they remembered, if that is the word, every kiss they ever kissed. All the incomplete kisses of their young lives rushed to be completed.

  “Damn!” Felicity drew her breath. “This is the fucking kiss.”

  “Light chocolate!” Andrea licked Felicity’s lips.

  “Balkan swarthy candy with long white legs.”

  They laughed and played and were lighter than air, and then kissed some more, and each rime the kiss overwhelmed them. They lay there with their hearts beating hard.

  “I have a feeling that every time we kiss we make something.” Felicity saw a marble sculpture of their lips on a green lawn.

  Andrea heard something that sounded like many human voices speaking at once. She thought about Rodica and how she’d wept when pointing out a painting of Judas betraying Christ with a kiss. “That man,” Rodica had said, “made kissing evil.” That’s it, Andrea thought. Judas had made kissing evil, but when she and Felicity kissed, kissing was made good again. Their kisses were snaking like seismic fissures through the psyches of the citizenry, causing them regret, pain, humility, and a dolorous need to emerge from hiding. People jolted to awareness by the return of their forgotten pasts were burning the phone lines trying to make amends to those they’d hurt a long time before.

  “Do you suppose we ought to try this in public?”

  Andrea was all for it. They were going to take the kiss for a walk.

  The phone rang as they were about to go out the door. It was Major Notz.

  “Finally. How are you, darling?”

  “I tried to call you all day, Uncle. I had a nasty experience, and you’ll have to help me with the terrible revenge I am planning on someone. And I want you to meet a friend, Andrea.”

  He invited them to that evening’s dinner at Commander’s Palace.

  “You’ll like my uncle; he’s a first-class eccentric. Every Tuesday he eats dinner at this restaurant.”

  Andrea liked whatever Felicity said she’d like.

  It was evening already and the city pulsed with an energy unusual even by its elevated standards. The fog-shrouded neon above the hotels on Canal Street sent plumes of soft light drifting over the street.

  “New Orleans is an old whore,” explained Felicity. “She takes a long time to get ready and a long time to wind down. No party ever really ends here; it just keeps smoldering till the next one.”

  Felicity waved to the Shades massed on her street. They cheered when they saw her.

  “Man, you’re back.” The girl with the sixteen rings in her cheeks was glad.

  “Don’t go anywhere without me,” laughed Felicity and handed her a twenty. “Wine all around. Happy New Year.”

  They let out a cry of thanks, sounding like birds. For a moment, Andrea saw a flock of many different kinds of birds glistening with rain under the streetlights. She was beginning to enjoy her ability to see metaphors become literal. Was this a kind of power, or just craziness? She didn’t care. The world had been literal for too long.

  Felicity and Andrea walked with their arms around each other, kissing now and then. At the streetcar stop they collided with a gang of drunk rednecks.

  “Fucking dykes!” slobbered one of them.

  Andrea gave him the finger.

  “Why, it’s bigger than his dick!” exclaimed Felicity.

  Something crude might have taken place if Andrea hadn’t spotted a slender young boy on the neutral ground, looking lost.

  “Look, it’s Michael, the boy from the Bama … the Jamaican potato dish.” She dragged Felicity by the arm toward the boy. Inexplicably, the rednecks parted to let them pass.

  “They were weird,” the bellicose one told his companions, but he couldn’t explain the mortal fear that had seized him when Andrea gave him the finger. He didn’t have to explain; the same claw of impending mortality had seized all of them.

  The women overtook the boy, who had started to walk faster when he saw them. Felicity touched him on the shoulder. The boy’s hair stood on his head like a fright wig.

  “Easy, lad. I am one of the angels of the First Angels Choir.” Felicity hummed “Rock of Ages,” and the boy looked trustingly back and inclined his head lamblike. Felicity patted it, smoothing down some of the quills.

  “Do you know anything about the Dome?”

  “Well, you’re an angel, shouldn’t you be there now?” Michael Bamajan trembled.

  “She fell, she’s a fallen angel …” Andrea smiled, but seeing his quills return to vertical, she added quickly, “But she’s still an angel. Look at her.”

  Indeed, beatific green light streamed through Felicity and joined a strong rose aura around Andrea. Together they made a kind of window that seemed to the boy more beautiful than the rose window of Notre Dame. He rubbed his eyes.

  “I overheard two Bamajans talking …” He hesitated, but another look at the women nearly blinded him. He spoke quickly. “They said that some of the evangelists were taking little packages to different places in Louisiana. And there was some science talk I didn’t get.”

  “What places?” Felicity had a pretty good idea what these packages contained.

  “Lots of places—the Exxon plant in Baton Rouge, a gypsum processing plant, the Akzo salt mine at Armadillo Island. I don’t know …”

  “Armadillo Island!” exclaimed Felicity. “Isn’t the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve stored near there in salt domes?”

  “Are the packages bombs?” inquired Andrea, suddenly remembering the smell of the book-bomb on the airplane.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Felicity. “I believe that Armageddon isn’t entirely up to God.”

  The Dome was the salt dome called Armadillo Island. Now Felicity knew both where Mullin’s paradise was and where the nerve center of his operation was located.

  They let Michael Bamajan go, but he remained rooted to the spot, following them with his eyes until they turned the corner.

  Commander’s Palace had pulled out all the culinary stops to welcome the millennium and was now serving the leftovers at a discount. The foyer was jammed with starched locals waiting for their tables and discussing the menu. Ella Brennan had announced on television that every dish for the next month would be an exact replica of one cooked in 1901 by her great-grandfather. There was something immensely soothing in this, a guarantee perhaps that tradition was not to be upset by the mere passing of time. Enormous vases filled with lilies, orchids, and roses stood between the tables. A five-piece ensemble was already performing staunch classic jazz compositions. The light of flambeaux reflected splendidly off the crystal chandeliers and the warm red velvet of the curtains.

  Felicity, holding Andrea’s arm, shoved her through the waiting crowd past the operatic kitchen, where a gastronomic performance was unfolding in spicy clouds of smoke and steam. The cooks wore leaves and frolicked in a sylvan landscape under the kindly gaze of an aging Pan with furry white eyebrows. Andrea shook her head and they became cooks again.

  Major Notz was seated at his usual table, with Boppy Beauregard standing by, still as a bronze statue. A magnum of champagne with a white towel around its neck stood in a silver bucket by the table. When he spotted his niece, Notz swung his bulk with a groan halfway out of the chair. To Andrea the scene looked like a painting by Frans Hals she had seen in Sarajevo. It was a picture of infinite bourgeois opulence, whose reality had been as remote from her war-torn world as the planet Mars. Now here it was, out of its frame, in vivid color. The triumph of the flesh, she thought, and she let her hand disappear in the major’s paw as Felicity made the introduction.

  “Duck,” the major said, by way of greeting. “It’s the duck of the century. And the gumbo roux is uncompromisingly dark. Where have you been, darling?”

  “I was impri
soned by Mullin, Major.” Felicity took the chair to Notz’s left. Andrea sat demurely on the edge of the velveteen chair to his right.

  Without preamble, Felicity described her confinement, her loss of memory, the strange powers of the hymns that had filled her mind, the appearance of Nikola Tesla, who had helped her escape, and her wandering through the city she barely recognized. But she had the odd feeling that her words slid over the sparkling silverware without reaching her uncle. He sat unmoved during her confession, as if she were part of the music.

  “I am going to put Mullin out of his misery,” she concluded grimly, “and I could use your help. He has not just harmed me, but he is planning a catastrophe for the entire world.”

  “Perhaps,” the major said. “But first we must dine, to celebrate the end of the Christian era.” He studied Andrea from under his heavy lids as if she were an item on the menu. “Your friend is shocked by our ways.”

  “This is true,” Andrea agreed graciously. “I grew up communist. But I want to learn.”

  Felicity was exasperated. “Something horrible is about to happen, Uncle.” She felt like the scared little girl who, years ago, had depended on him to explain the big, bad world.

  “Nothing could be as horrible as interrupting this magnificent dinner.”

  “You have to call your friends in the CIA, Interpol, the secret services … Someone is planning to turn Louisiana into a bomb. I think that it’s a planned Armageddon … the oil reserves … a chain reaction of some kind. If the Gulf of Mexico catches fire, all the underground oil could be involved … and our nuclear submarines …”

  “Felicity, darling. Please. You’re breaking my concentration. This menu may be the most important document produced in New Orleans in this wretched century.”

  Boppy, who had not moved, now spoke: “Shall we begin?”

  Tears in her eyes, Felicity tried again. “Don’t you understand?”

  “All right. Hold on another moment, Boppy.” The major put down the menu, visibly annoyed, and removed a Cuban cigar from his vest pocket. He clipped the tip with tiny gold scissors. “Who is the somebody planning all this?”

  “Why, Mullin, of course.”

  “Suppose that he is indeed, my all-seeing private eye. Don’t you think that people monitoring catastrophe are cognizant of his intentions? Can anyone enter the strategic petroleum reserve without authorization?”

  “An evangelist could. Someone wearing only one shoe, preaching the word of God, could plant a trigger …” Something else occurred to Felicity. “Besides, you gave me a job. I believe that Kashmir Birani, the Indian television star you charged me with finding, is Mullin’s prisoner at the Dome. I must rescue her.”

  Finally Major Notz seemed to take in what she was saying. “This Tesla, the anchorite who helped you—what sort of contraption is he building?”

  Felicity was exasperated. Major Notz had never been this obtuse.

  “What does it matter? He’s a good guy. The main point is that we stop Mullin.”

  “Fine. Now, Boppy, let us begin.”

  Felicity could hardly believe her ears. As Boppy uncorked the champagne and poured its gold bubbles into their glasses, Felicity leaned toward Notz and said calmly, “Uncle, are you with me, or not? I am going to go directly to Armadillo Island to the strategic reserve. You can come with me, or you can get your gumbo and wait here for the End of the World …”

  The major put his napkin back on the table. Tonight he was sporting the olive uniform of an Israeli tank commander. “My child, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but in your company for the End of the World. Shall we eat now?”

  Boppy Beauregard covered his eyes with the back of his left hand. It was the second time in two weeks that an immovable routine was being upset. The world was surely on its last legs.

  “I promise to bring great force to bear on this rogue preacher.” The major laid his palm over Felicity’s clenched fist. “But let us first show your young friend the deeply civilized ways of our city.” He withdrew his hand and raised his champagne glass. “To the end of sorrow,” he toasted.

  Felicity had no choice but to raise her own glass. Andrea did, too.

  “To the end of sorrow.”

  It seemed for a moment that their toast reverberated throughout the restaurant and then beyond it, as if these words and no others had found a way into the hardened hearts of the city’s doubt-wracked citizens. Who knows, thought Andrea, these words may now be circumnavigating the globe. To the end of sorrow.

  Trying to conquer her impatience, Felicity drank her glass of champagne, and then another and another, and ate the marvelous dinner. Andrea glowed in the shimmer of the torches and looked like she’d been born among the exquisite flowers. Felicity saw her reflected in the mirrors and loved her. Andrea marveled at Felicity’s compact and graceful presence and felt that they had always been together. The major nearly faded into the shimmer and the velveteen, a discreet producer of marvels who directed the ceremony without intrusion.

  At midnight they toasted again to the end of sorrow.

  The city outside exploded with fireworks, as it had every night of the New Year. Andrea came out of her chair and kissed Felicity on the lips, and then, without warning, planted a kiss on the major’s blubbery cheek. The cold flesh quivered like a Jell-O mold, but he smiled.

  “Dance,” he urged them.

  Felicity took Andrea’s hand and swept her onto the dance floor, and there, feeling boundless liberty, the two friends danced their first dance of the new millennium.

  When they returned to the table, Notz was gone. He had left untouched his favorite desert, the bread pudding in whiskey sauce. Boppy, who had been gone but a minute, stood by wringing his hands. He hadn’t seen the major leave.

  An hour before midnight, Officer Joe arrived at Desire, Ltd. Joe had spent the day tracing again the intricate web of connections between Mullin’s legal and phony businesses, and had struck gold. He owned a small software design company called Heaven’s Works, which produced religious virtual reality games. The company tested its products at a nature preserve near Armadillo Island. The nature preserve had struck Joe as incongruous. Sooner will a pig escape a Sunday barbecue than a Baptist save a pelican. Or something like that. Joe wasn’t too good at aphorisms, but he didn’t take Mullin for a nature lover. The place was probably a survivalist enclave of some sort, and the religious games were for training militants. Joe had nearly driven there to look for Felicity when a street informant came up with information that she’d been seen at Desire, Ltd. The place was right under his nose, and Joe felt stupid as he jingled through the beaded curtain into the dark club.

  He heard the jukebox carrying on about blue velvet and then felt the cold barrel of a gun against his neck. A deft hand unsnapped his holster and withdrew his service revolver. He was ordered to lie facedown on the floor, and he complied. When he reached out his hand on the floor he encountered a warm buttock.

  “Hey,” a woman said. “This may be unusual, but no pay, no touch.”

  When Joe’s eyes became accustomed to the dark, he sneaked a look and saw a sea of buttocks, most of them bare. He was lying on the floor with a bunch of strippers. Towering above them were men with weapons. Presently someone fastened his wrists beyond his back with plastic handcuffs. Another hand pulled his head back, slipped a blindfold over his eyes, and inserted a gag in his mouth. The girls also were being cuffed, blindfolded, and gagged over protests that were soon reduced to muffled moans.

  The captives were ordered to stand and then herded out the door and up the stairs of a vehicle that Joe thought was either a camper or a bus. As they rolled out, a voice trilled merrily: “Happy New Year! You are all going to a party!”

  Sylvia-Zack, in a state of uneasy symbiosis, was returning from the Verte Mart with a pack of Vantage Ultra Lights. Sylvia wanted to rush forward, cursing, to stop the kidnapping, but Zack stopped her. There is a purpose to this, he declared, and we must find out what it is. Sylvia ang
rily tore the top off the smokes and lit one. Damn. Zack hated smoking. They got in Sylvia’s car, across the street from the club, and followed.

  Ben Redman arrived at Desire, Ltd., shortly after the abductors’ bus had left. He parted the beaded curtain and walked in. He called out Andrea’s name, then shouted, “Is anybody here?” Receiving no answer, he sat in one of the booths and proceeded to wait. The jukebox, stuffed full of quarters, played one song after another. Ben wasn’t sure where everyone had gone, and being myopic, he missed the signs of struggle visible on the floor. It was dark anyway, and the bits of tassel and scattered beads weren’t very obvious.

  He pulled a book from his knapsack. It was The Nag Hammadi Library, a fourth-century-Gnostic anthology he thought might shed some light on events. He had used this book for divination before. His rabbi would have frowned at this non-Jewish text, but his rabbi was far away. It contained, among other texts, the Gospel of Thomas, which bore this promise: “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.” These writings had long been thought to contain secret keys and had been used to divine everything from particular fortunes to the course of history.

  Ben essayed two experiments. He opened the book at random, an oracular method he had been taught by Rebbe Zvetai. His teacher had said that sacred texts, by their very nature, were equal in their parts to the whole. Each part reflected the whole: every letter contained the book just as every book contained the universe. This is what the Nag Hammadi text had to say:

  “The Savior said to his disciples: ‘Already the time has come, brothers, for us to abandon our labor and stand at rest. For whoever stands at rest will rest forever. When I came I opened the path and I taught them about the passage which they will traverse, the elect and solitary.’”

  Ben understood this to mean that he ought to let go now of his plans and ambitions. A path was opening before him, now that he had come full circle. The journey was going to unfold without his conscious participation.