“The writer?”
“Who is the writer of the secret history?”
“Those men,” Felicity remembered tentatively, “and women who exercise an active will in the course of events. But this will is always a will for the End. Oh, I see. Every time the conspiracy option is exercised, the goal is an end to history. Each instance of will in history is an end, but only a false end … because history continues.”
“Not bad. Now imagine the true End. Who among us could write it?”
“A person chosen by divine providence?”
“Well, of course,” Major Notz said impatiently. “But who will determine the authenticity of this Messiah? The world is rife with pretenders. Can you truly say that Jeremy ‘Elvis’ Mullin, who is about to bring his own end to history, is not the Chosen One? Millions of people believe he is.”
At the mention of Mullin and his plans, Felicity remembered where they were going and was rent by anxiety. They should be discussing strategy, not philosophy. She understood, nonetheless, that the major, in his parabolic way, was preparing her for battle.
“He is not the Messiah,” Felicity said, quite certain, “because he is a salesman. The Messiah doesn’t sell … she just is. She persuades simply by the good news of her presence.”
“Ah,” cried the major, “now we’re getting somewhere.” He swiveled his bulk slightly and gazed at Andrea in the rearview mirror. “Who are you?”
“Why, Andrea the Orphan, of course.” Andrea told the truth reflexively, which rarely happened. Her instinct usually made lying more natural.
The major looked disappointed. “Are you Felicity’s missing half?”
No one had ever asked her anything this important. Something in the way Felicity sat evoked helplessness before the coming answer. Andrea felt a great power, as if the world depended on what she was going to say.
“Yes, that’s what I am … and Felicity is my missing half.”
The major looked at his niece.
“I suppose, Uncle, that now you would like us to become seriously delusional and declare ourselves the Savior of the world. That way we could write the last chapter of your secret book and finish your work.”
“That would be nice.”
“Sorry,” said Felicity. “There is absolutely no inner voice guiding me. I don’t have the slightest messianic inclination. I’m not even religious. What’s worse, I’m a very bad detective. If I was any good I would have found the Indian girl and stopped Mullin by now.”
From the backseat, Andrea said, “And I’m just a sensualist. I think that the padres at Saint Hildegard’s would have rather boinked me, but they educated me instead.”
The word “boink” fell like a chunk of hail on the hood of the Humvee. The land rose steadily as they climbed over the salt domes. Felicity could feel a great activity taking place in the bowels of the earth beneath them. It was not the kind of inspired knowledge that might have heartened Notz, but it was an intuitive power nonetheless. She was sorry to have disappointed him. He looked grimly down the road, like a man trying not to cry. In the backseat, Andrea was grinning foolishly to herself, repeating “boink” in her head. Boink, boink, boink.
Chapter Thirty-six
Wherein the Great Confrontation unfolds
When the the major’s Hummer pulled up in front of the Bar & Bait Shop at Armadillo Island, the Shades’ bus was already parked there. So were many other cars, including a vintage Oldsmobile. A statue of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners and artillerymen, stood guard above the café in a cypress tree.
The women jumped out of the car, but the major did not follow.
“You go on. I’ll be right along.” He watched them head for the cabin and then took a small box from under his seat.
Felicity opened the creaky door of the cabin and gasped at the sight of Ben Redman sitting there at a wooden table with a devil.
If Ben had believed in magic before, finding Andrea and Felicity together eliminated whatever residual skepticism he harbored. The oracle that had brought him to Armadillo Island was but one of the many inexplicable ways in which he was guided. Andrea was not surprised to see him, but Felicity, who had not seen him since he left for Israel, felt the wing of an angel touch her. She had found her soul mate and now here was Ben, another missing piece of her soul. Oh, God, she prayed, let Miles come! I will be whole then!
Andrea had neglected to mention the rabbi who had brought her to America, but now some explanation was in order, and facts were proffered, though they paled in comparison to the sheer miracle of their togetherness. Felicity played with Ben’s curls and Andrea pinched him playfully on the cheek. They were like three kittens in a basket.
The devil looked on indulgently, his nostrils slightly flared.
Ben tried to impart some of what he had learned in the last few hours. “Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but everything taking place now is part of a divine opera. There are about a million angels all around us.”
Andrea laughed and feigned pulling up Felicity’s shirt.
“I know, Ben. ‘Sing, choirs of angels. Sing in exultation. Sing, all ye citizens of heav’n above.’” For the first time since she had returned from Mullin’s darkness, she could sing without fear of losing herself.
“That’s great, Felix.” Ben was touched by the beauty of Felicity’s voice. He had never heard her sing before. And he felt that this was no mere song but an instruction, somehow, conveyed to the invisible world around them. His friend was commanding the spirits. Andrea, he already knew, was mysteriously connected. Everything had become luminous and inescapably significant.
Sing, all ye citizens of heav’n above. The air grew thick with the spirits of poets, prophets, and founders of religions, who were part of the Council of Minds that had not yet incarnated. Little blue globes of electricity jumped around the room.
“What are all these entities, Felix? They seem to know you,” asked Ben. He put out his hand and touched a smooth blue roundness that gave him a slight shock.
Felicity knew at once. “My cyberlovers. They owe their postmortem sexual lives to me.”
They had flown in from the darkest recesses of cyberspace, the folds of time and the spirals of other dimensions, in answer to her call.
The devil, who had kept his counsel until now, saw them too, and said to Felicity: “Miles is not among them.”
Even the world beyond, animated by the passion of her love, could do nothing to bring Miles back to her. The truth, Felicity told herself, is that I will never be complete. Perhaps the world has already ended and I’m in some kind of intermediary heaven, where I’m being fooled into believing that I’ve found love. The entities whirled faster when she thought this, and Felicity found herself wishing for destruction. She wanted to die with her friends right here and now in a collective Götterdämmerung, a ball of fire. She wanted to join Miles.
The devil laughed. “You are so right, young lady. The tragedy is not that the whole world might end, but that the world might go on after your own personal world has ended. We will forgive each other only if we all go at the same time, but we will go on causing strife if we keep ending piecemeal. The end of the world is preferable to dying alone. Take it from me, I’m always alone, dead or alive.”
The devil’s speech saddened them all, but before they could think of a rejoinder, the door of the cabin burst open and a red-faced major shouted: “Felix, we are going below to see Mullin!”
“I wouldn’t dream of going without my friends.”
The major shrugged.
Ben looked enquiringly at the devil, who laughed. “Go on—I’m better behind the scenes anyway.”
Outside, Felicity saw that the Shades had built a fire and were holding hands, keeping a vigil.
Mullin kept his eyes on the monitor from the moment that the foursome boarded the train leading to the Dome elevator. He had discovered immediately that Felicity had not been among the strippers the Bamajans had delivered to him. But now he had the
m all, coming to him like lambs to the slaughter.
The major looked uncharacteristically glum.
“Everything okay, Uncle?” Felicity put her hand on his round shoulder.
“Oh, child.” He shook his head with evident sadness.
Felicity had never seen the major depressed before. He always had a solution to what he called “apparent misery,” and that solution was always to look for deeper causes, for the events in history that directly caused the distress. In his view, every single pang of emotion, whether of grief, nostalgia, or love, could be traced to an instance of will on someone’s part. But now Notz looked ready to cry.
“Isn’t there a clear instance of will, Uncle?”
He shook his head. “Promise to think well of me, no matter what happens in the next few hours.”
Felicity promised.
The little train came to a halt and they entered an open elevator. The shaft was as deep below the surface as the Empire State Building was tall. The elevator descended for a long time into the brightness. Andrea saw Felicity’s eyes fill with tears, and hers did too, though she tried hard to keep them back.
“It’s the salt,” Ben whispered, as he too began crying.
Where were they going? And why? Whatever the imperative driving them, it had not yet made itself clear. The farther down they descended, the saltier the air became. They could taste it on their tongues. The elevator scraped the crystalline walls and a fine powder of salt snowed on them, covering their hair and clothes.
“It’s true,” said Felicity, “down is the way. All those pathetic attempts we make at going up … getting high …”
The uneven walls of salt rock sparkled like a billion diamonds. The Dome was at least two miles in diameter and five miles deep. Millions of tons of salt had been scooped out of it to make the cave. The salt crystals acted as lenses, magnifying the lights of the elevator.
When the elevator finally stopped, they stepped out into a cave looking down on a vast technological wonder. Below them, scurrying like ants, lab-coated drones were manipulating keyboards and control panels. Seated on some kind of throne at the center of the vast cave was the tiny figure of Reverend Mullin, twisting a twenty-foot-tall image of a blue rose. Flaming words shot out of it and fell in a shower of sparks.
“It’s like the rose tattooed on my butt,” whispered Felicity.
She felt keenly the doubly tragic condition of human beings. “Like birds in a glass house … hit the walls, over and over … but down, down …” She had always thought of Web surfing as a descent. And even when she got high she was going down, to look for Miles.
The three of them embraced and tasted one another’s tears, and at that moment something came to pass. Their embrace set in motion the last act of will in history.
Or so Major Notz explained consequent events when he revealed the last chapter of the world’s secret history to an audience composed in equal parts of angels and humans.
The connection between Felicity, Andrea, and Ben took the form of a spongy emotion that jumped through their nervous system, joining them together with light threads.
We are being woven, they thought.
The brilliant, salty light of the cave grew in intensity.
“Jesus,” said Andrea, “We are a mushroom.”
Their bodies were crisscrossed with the fine gills of a spore connected to millions of living things outside the dome. A sparking green glow discharged energy around them, and they knew that together they would battle heaven on behalf of creatures like themselves, tender flesh forms filled with light and confusion. They were a joined nothing, less than nothing, but each one of them yielded a luminous distinction: Felicity felt arrowhead hard the presence of her courage; Ben, the sharp twang of his desire for justice; Andrea, the delicious languor of her power to transform. Together, they were an arrow drawn against certainties, verities, eternal truths, gospels, edicts, writs, primers, laws, stone tablets.
A phalanx of bald Bamajans escorted them to the platform where Mullin was enthroned. The preacher bade them sit on the mushroom-shaped stools around his console. A sultry, dark girl in a blue sari approached and stood behind Mullin.
“Kashmir,” Felicity gasped. “You’re alive!”
“I was dead until I found God,” replied Kashmir, looking serene.
The major fixed Mullin in a pitiless gaze. “Preacher! You have forgotten your creator!”
Mullin surveyed the instrument-laden Dome, his hand resting lightly on his control keyboard. “I am grateful, Major, grateful indeed for the wondrous mechanisms you’ve bestowed on me. But now the true work begins. In a few moments, you will witness the End. And when the End is under way, you will witness the small ends of these sinners, followed by your own end. And I promise you a worthy end, Major. I do admire you.”
Notz smiled, recalling the vast tapestry he had woven to bring this event into being. He had used his knowledge of conspiracy to provide a philosophical ground for the “End,” as the preacher called it. He had learned the methods of each and every major act of hidden will in human history and synthesized them for application to his purpose. He had used secret intelligence connections to set up an elaborate network of unwitting agents, and he had recruited Mullin. Mullin and his ill-gotten millions had done the rest. The major had ruthlessly dispatched anyone who had threatened his plans or the flower of his project, Felicity. Under the protection of the millennial fever sweeping the world, he’d launched hundreds of charlatans to provide the world with a raison d’être for its own disappearance. Technicians, both paid and converted, had done the rest. Notz had guided Mullin from the shadows and smoothed his path, and now the fool believed he was in charge.
“Preacher, could we have something, a little lunch, before you fiddle with your Armageddon stick?”
Felicity laughed. “That’s my uncle! Just because the world’s ending—”
“I feel the same way,” interrupted Andrea. “A last meal!”
Ben was astonished by the frivolous turn of events. The last thing in the world he wanted was food, and he knew that neither Andrea nor Felicity wanted any. But then he understood: it was going to be a ritual last supper, their disconnection henceforth from the eating of matter.
Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin was feeling generous. He instructed Kashmir to prepare food, and she shortly returned with a platter of pickled mushrooms, a bowl of fresh figs, and a pitcher of milk.
“How did you come to select these creatures to survive?” Notz asked, plunging two saffron-spiced ’shrooms into his mouth at once. The mushrooms were followed by a fig.
“You recognize my talent at last, Major. Deciding who would survive Armageddon was more difficult than your studies and technology. I couldn’t have done it without Jesus. I came up against the limits of human expertise. We designed the End to engulf all but the Dome, and I screened my beings as carefully as Noah choosing animals for the ark. As you instructed, I scanned the range of human types for strength of character and physical distinction, but also for their faith in the Lord and in me. Every race is carefully represented, every individual genetically screened for abnormalities. Every girl in the First Angels Choir’s has been tested, biographed, X-rayed, analyzed, and measured for faith. They’ve been chosen for libido, for hardiness, steadfastness, both left- and right-brain-specific skills, and the other characteristics that you painstakingly outlined for me.”
The major finished swallowing the mouthful of mushroom and fig and laughed.
Felicity’s stomach knotted and suddenly she knew—her mentor, her teacher, her father was the mastermind of Mullin’s insane plan. She looked at the fat man swallowing his food and saw the real monster, his shadow stretching to her very beginnings, imbedded in her life like the roots of a live oak.
With their vision magnified, the three friends could see that the demented Reverend Mullin was only half bad. The bad half sold certainty to a desperate public—but his innocent half was in love with a fantasy of love. If they had the po
wer, they would grant him a life with his slutty waif, stripped of his wealth, forced to live with the uncertainties of poverty for the rest of his miserable days.
They saw the silent drones, the bald Bamajans, and the singers in white, and they weren’t all bad, either. Their capacity for faith had been misled. They had been saved from their chaotic freedom and held captive by the serenity of song. Mullin had stolen their free will, but faith lived on in its prison. Angels had stolen bodies as well, shoving their spirits into dank cells. Even the merely dead, neither humans nor angels, ranged freely across the fields of these timid souls, taking them as they pleased.
The divine gift of faith had been perverted by preachers, priests, texts that promised closure, prophecies, bibles, commandments, depictions of the End, promises of salvation. The wielders of these false closures were guilty of cupidity and ignorance.
The three friends experienced their loving solidarity as a wave of repulsion against the purveyors of certainty, a wave soon replaced by another, of love for those who searched, who had doubts, who were tormented by their bodies and unhappy with the limits of their minds.
How arrogant, Felicity thought, to believe that she could solve crimes and find answers to the mysteries of passion and disappearance. But Notz was the most arrogant—he was responsible for her bondage to the discipline of certainties. He believed that human will could control events and minds and hearts. Dear Lord, she silently told the others, we have harmed God, who may have fattened on the praise of men like Mullin, and been delivered to the likes of Notz. The threesome was enveloped in sadness, but green pulsed through them again, and their power returned.
They saw light stream through the multicolored gossamer of millions of angels’ wings. The crystals burst with light. People were mixtures of faith and bondage, but one element was steadfastly good. Salt. The salt of their sweat and tears was infinitely amplified by the miles of salt surrounding them. The salt of their suffering was going to war with the cunning of false promises.
Messi@ Page 41
