They thought that, like themselves, the world was not finished. It was continually evolving in complexity. God was not in the past but in the future. Humanity was evolving God, therefore there could be no End. At least not until God was born.
Mullin was ready. “Showtime, sinners!” He pressed an orange key on the control board, and in his mind he saw the underground fires beginning to snake into oil refineries and chemical plants, turning the Mississippi River into fire and the land into molten tar.
Notz was amused. He had not been speaking in riddles when he told Felicity that in him she might read the last chapter of the world’s secret history. He held the ending in the palm of his hand—a compact black box with a single red button on it. It would relay the single command needed to set off the chemical corridor, overriding Mullin’s controls.
He had succeeded perfectly. The red button held his concentrated brilliance; it was the center of his ambitions, the concentrated form of his wide-world connections, the point of his plan. When he activated it, he would unleash Armageddon on a scale Mullin never imagined. Everything but the Dome would evaporate, bringing Rapture to the Christians, nirvana to the Hindus, Paradise to the Muslims. Destruction would be his triumph.
Then he saw Felicity’s face, and all her pain and anger invaded him. I have nurtured you to be my queen, he wanted to tell her. For you I have tested my will in that most dangerous place, my own heart. He felt a physical need to see her eyes filled with love and admiration. Great men had utterly passed from history. In this age without heroes, even the belief in the possibility of greatness had been extinguished. He had single-handedly engineered the destruction of humanity and had conceived of a new world, born of Felicity and himself. This was the something he had raised her for.
Felicity heard him and sent back her wordless reply. There was no mistaking it, and he received the full content of her disdain. So be it. He was tired. Major Notz, author of the single greatest act of will in history, a big man in whose folds of flesh was written the secret history of intention, closed his eyes and pressed the red button. The button went in like his mother’s nipple when his greedy baby mouth sucked too hard, but there was no blast, no devastation, no glory. Notz pushed the mechanism over and over, bewildered. It wasn’t possible. He had personally constructed the little beastie, connected each wire. His life’s work was a dud.
Felicity, Andrea, and Ben rose up at once and enveloped Notz and Mullin in a terrible kindness. Intense green light streamed from them like a flashbulb snapping a giant photograph. A hidden fountain of grief sprung inside Mullin, and salty tears streaked down his cheeks. He no longer wanted the world to cease existing—his only desire was go to Airline Highway, the true center of his universe, to find the child who owned his heart.
Mullin lifted a hand, and the First Angels Choir burst into the purest song that was ever sung. “Amazing grace,” they began, “how sweet the sound …” The cavern pulsed, wounds healed, evil light was released, trapped passions flew into the open. One thousand girls made of nothing but music released a blessing into the salty air.
The major clutched his chest.
Mullin covered his face with his hands.
“The figs and mushrooms were poisoned,” Kashmir whispered.
Not that it mattered. Immediately after the failure of the red button, the major had chosen the Roman way out—he’d swallowed a cyanide capsule.
Felicity tried to embrace the stillness that had been her mentor, but her arms could not reach all the way around him. She saw the major’s spirit rising to join the flocks of angels that sat watching throughout the Dome. Without missing a beat Notz began to explain himself to an audience of the heavenly host, proffering both the explanation and apology he would be doomed to repeat for eternity.
Felicity wept for her uncle and for the world. The salt that fed her tears was inexhaustible.
Sylvia and the devil sat on a patch of salty grass not far from the mouth of the mine shaft. The devil had spotted her immediately, calling out, “Hey, Sylvia girl, what is it? Who’s that inside you!”
They had known each other forever, and Sylvia was happy to see him, but explaining Zack wasn’t so easy. At first sight of the devil, Zack had started pouting, beating his wings, and making a low growl like a threatened mutt.
“Unfortunately,” Sylvia-Zack said, “we are a querulous unit, though my joie-de-vivre is bound to prevail over our bitching.”
“Well, you two sit right down here on this grassy picnic spot and relax.” The devil pointed to an inviting glen flanked by a murmuring spring.
“I want to go down,” Sylvia-Zack said. “I have to see the new creature.”
“Would you like to see from here? It’s so much more comfortable.” The devil scorched a patch of grass with his hand, clearing the ground and leaving behind a circular black mirror. Reflected in it was the scene below.
“I can barely see them,” protested Sylvia-Zack, “and I can’t hear a thing.”
“I can fix that.” The devil zoomed in on the scene and turned up the sound.
Deep inside the cave, Felicity, Andrea, and Ben held on to one another as if they were the only people left on earth, although hundreds of choir girls and Bamajans milled around, looking lost. Mullin’s followers needed direction, but Mullin lay crumpled on the control panel, sobbing with his head in his hands, and the three young people who had defeated him did not seem in a hurry to take charge. It looked to Sylvia-Zack as if the three of them could care less if anyone else was alive on earth or not. They were, Sylvia-Zack realized, simply in love with one another.
“They are in love. This is amazing,” she told the devil.
“Love,” said the devil. “One of my better inventions.”
“I don’t care,” said Sylvia-Zack, “who invented it or why. All I know is that ever since I got this body, I’ve been wanting to roll around kissing on some warm skin. I have to go down with them. So much depends on these critters. I have to help. I have a job. I’m an angel. I’m forgetting the Minds.”
“Don’t be delusional,” said the devil. “Nothing depends on anything. Nothing will happen, no matter what happens. Tell your big brains to go home—the show’s over.”
“I’m off to the underworld, ’Phisto.”
“A regular Orpheus, eh?”
“Well, what would you suggest I do?”
“Have some fried chicken, a couple of deviled eggs, a slice of watermelon, a glass of this nice claret …” The devil produced a picnic basket, a couple of wineglasses, and linen napkins.
“Cute. A picnic at the End of the World.”
“What, should the End of the World necessarily be met with parsimony and denial?”
“There must be something I can do down there,” Sylvia-Zack argued.
“There’s nothing you can do. On the other hand, I can do a number of things, after I finish the picnic. Because I am, I would like you to know, the devil ex machina. I can make things go anyway I please. I can make all of this vanish, or I can enjoy the show without lifting a finger. What do you suggest?”
Sylvia-Zack couldn’t think of a thing. The devil had a cute behind, and he emanated fetching shamelessness. But she knew that she had to go down, to smell the new Felicity-Andrea-Ben entity close up and report to the Namer and the boss.
Her stubbornness worried the devil. When he invented love, he hadn’t counted on this sort of tenacity. He had invented love on a whim, to piss off God, who had split the human creature in two in a fit of anger, intending that the creature remain eternally unhappy searching for its mate, always divided and unfulfilled. In a fit of counterpique, the devil had created the glue of love to counteract God’s punishment and give solace to the poor divided creature. But his glue had run out of control, and now it oozed from the very pores of creation.
“Okay,” said the devil, “but before you go, let me show you how it is.”
The devil took his laptop out of the case at his feet and turned it on. When text appear
ed on the screen, he offered the machine to Sylvia-Zack.
Sylvia-Zack said: “I can’t—I never learned.”
So the devil read aloud:
“‘So be it. He was tired. Major Notz, author of the single greatest act of will in history, a big man in whose folds of flesh was written the secret history of intention, closed his eyes and pressed the red button.’”
“Now,” said the devil, “watch this.” He typed in the sentence, And nothing happened.
“Laughter,” the devil said, plopping an entire half of a deviled egg in his mouth. “Another one of my inventions.”
“Now, now,” said Sylvia-Zack, biting into an egg and admiring the handsome bulge in the devil’s pants, “we do like to take all the credit.”
Nikola Tesla jumped up and down three times, shaking his whole flowery monster, to the delight of assembled street folk and incarnated Minds. But he was not, his audience imagined, terribly thrilled by the success of his experiment. He had taken that for granted. He was delighted, though, by his timing. At four o’clock that afternoon, he had been overcome by the desire to activate the green machine. About the same time, one of the bums who had been sleeping in the warehouse began to receive guests for a potluck supper in honor of Tesla, a kind of surprise birthday party. As the people gathered, bringing take-out food cartons from the Verte Mart, items selectively stolen from the A&P grocery on Royal Street, and even the fruits of their fishing, hunting, and foraging, Tesla had set the chlorophyll propulsion reactor on standby. The warehouse hummed marvelously, and bottles of cheap wine made the rounds.
The fat vines penetrating the river’s surface began sending powerful photokinetic charges through the water. The fish in the Mississippi River experienced a salutary ruffling of their scales and were lifted several feet into the air before returning with geyser intensity to the water. The barges and tourist boats spun in place while their passengers roller-coasted briefly, losing wallets and keys. The charge stripped the murky water of its murk, leaving pure water molecules in its wake. All substances alien to water swirled together in an irridescent ball that lifted into the air and rolled out of the river, hovered over the Moonwalk, and took off, blotting out the sun, before settling with an oozing finality over New Orleans City Hall, which vanished under it. The photokinetic currents demagnetized the fiber-optic cables buried under the river, and all the computers from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico failed. Computer terminals died—from convenience-store cash registers to Mullin’s keyboards to Notz’s box—before reaching Felicity, who contained in her body the circuit breaker that sent the green wave around again, doubling its intensity. The old river locks in Pointe Coupée Parish opened, and the Mississippi began flowing out, cutting a channel on its way to his true love, the Atchafalaya.
In a matter of minutes, the Mississippi River turned a spectacular viridian color, then the water, cleansed of phosphates, mercury, radioactive gypsum, petroleum, and carbon gases, turned pale green.
“What do you think of that?” Tesla proudly asked his friend Mark Twain, watching events from a fat white cloud hovering over the Huey P. Long Bridge. “Now it’s good enough to drink.”
“We’ll see,” Twain drawled. “Have Mary Baker Eddy try it first.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Wherein our story comes to an end on Mardi Gras of the year 2000. The New Jerusalem Café, where all levels interact, opens amid the revelry. Silence settles over the weaving of the story, and the night continues, lovingly.
Seated on a Turkish tambour, Andrea drank in her guests like a birthday child. She could have died of pleasure right there, seeing the faces of those who’d answered her invitation to come. They had trickled in for the past three days, complete in their persons, assured in their friendship, naturally intimate, and utterly involved in the very same questions that had first awakened them to consciousness. They now sat, lounged, or reclined about the small salon that replicated to the best of her recollection the sitting room at Saint Hildegard’s. But there were some additions: a rose-crystal chandelier very much like the one in the Pioneer’s House in Sarajevo before the war, which had come from Major Notz’s Pontalba apartment; two Venetian mirrors she had bought at an antique dealer’s on Royal Street; and a long cherrywood bar behind which sparkled bottles of fine liquor selected by Joe, the security chief and master steward. The salon gave onto several arched passageways to other parts of the building.
It was very late, only hours before dawn, and the conversation was in bloom, despite the frequent interruptions of others, notably Felicity, who hurried by several times, followed by Shades carrying kitchen utensils, flowerpots, and striped futons.
Twirling her Tibetan prayer wheel, saffron-robed Lama Iris Cohen sat on a revolving bar stool, repeating the proposition that “the wheel offers the hope of return—Christianity moves toward a linear End.” She’d said it twice because, the first time, Father Tuiredh asked ironically, “Come again?”
The good father, stretched out in his cassock on the carpet, tossed some runic bones into the air like a handful of peanuts, caught only two of them, and sneered. “We crushed people on the wheel in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t all linear.”
Professor Li, clad in brown suit and tie but wearing a comfortable pair of New Orleans crawfish slippers, was seated on the edge of a couch, a scroll under his arm, characteristically awkward and diffident. After his return to China, he had devoted a great deal of his time to thinking about Andrea, an orphan risen from the ruins of war, a capitalist entertainment star, and an object of curiosity to diverse scholars. These reflections began to show up in his lectures, and the Chinese authorities, seeing in his preoccupation an unhealthy religious streak, warned him to desist. When he didn’t, they fired him. On the day that the grim-faced party secretary offered him several unappetizing alternatives to his teaching career, Andrea’s invitation came in the mail. Posted only one week before in New Orleans, the letter had arrived in record time for foreign mail. When he applied for a travel permit, it was granted immediately—another first in his experience of Chinese bureaucracy. Nonetheless, a shadow fell over this fortuitous expediency: his wife refused to accompany him. She sided with the Chinese authorities.
Earl Smith was idly drawing a female face on a cocktail napkin and taking long sips from a blue glass straw. He was averse to flying and had taken the train from New Mexico, a bone-wearying journey that had, however, given him ample time to consider the sequence of dreams that had sent him wandering all over the world. He’d concluded that the gods were unnecessarily cruel in dispatching him such distances at his age. The gods, he thought, should take Amtrak sometime.
Ever since arriving from the airport in the painted Shade bus, Sister Rodica had done little more than gaze with love at Andrea. Her journey to New Orleans had been the strangest of all. She had stolen money from the convent to pay her way and had flown in an antiquated BookAir plane, reading a worn anthology of Japanese poetry all the way to America. In her small suitcase, the nun had brought with her the mysterious letter from Father Eustratius that first gained Andrea access to Saint Hildegard’s.
Others had brought gifts as well. Father Hernio had with him an Ashkelon scroll called The War of the Prophets, in which it was shown that the trials of history resulted from a continual war of numbers among prophets. Prophets since the earliest days of humanity had tried to accurately predict the end of their worlds. Some prophets had even been in a position to actually bring about the End, because they were advisers to kings and could wield the power of their treasuries. Each of these visionaries could have ended the world if other prophets, proffering different End dates, had not stood in the way. Thus, the incompatibility of cyphers had preserved the world many times, but by the same token had allowed it no peace. The Ashkelon scroll, in Father Hernio’s opinion, explained many of the events that had occurred over the past few days.
Dr. Carlos Luna had brought a Mayan translation of a Lubavitcher manifesto that claimed the Messiah, a recently
deceased rabbi, had resurrected in New York and was operating a kosher deli on Second Avenue. Dr. Luna was unsure about the propriety of his gift. Perhaps, he thought, I ought to give it to Lama Cohen, who’d be sure to laugh.
The lama herself wasn’t sure if the pouch containing a small dried herb that healed most minor illnesses was of any use to Andrea. She thought of giving it to young Sister Rodica. A sentimental memento—no great gift.
Father Tuiredh had brought a huge Bavarian chocolate cake, but it had been smashed in transit, covering everything in his suitcase with a thick black ooze. He wore a knee-length nightshirt Andrea bought him on Bourbon Street, and black knee socks. The nightshirt said, My parents went to New Orleans—and all I got is this stupid shirt.
Mr. Rabindranath was floating. He had controlled himself for a brief time after his twenty-eight-hour flight from Calcutta to New Orleans, but the joy that sparkled in his bones had been too much, and he had found himself once more at the mercy of a massive erection, and was now levitating. Only now, no one seemed to mind. Sister Rodica, when she allowed herself to lift her gaze from Andrea, saw him and smiled. Mercy, she thought, that tumescence is a bridge to our common past.
The Saint Hildegard’s family was well aware that they had been brought here by a force greater than themselves, represented somehow by Andrea, but this imperative hardly felt dutiful. Whatever their approaches or beliefs, they were glad to be here to stand by Andrea’s side. Their previous gifts, which Andrea had stolen from them before she understood that they were “gifts,” had been advance ritual tokens. The scholars were not divided on the meaning of these gifts.
After Andrea’s hasty departure from Jerusalem, they had discussed the possibility that she was an incarnated avatar.
Lama Cohen had asked: “What does your Christian Savior save humanity from?” and answered her own question: “From yourselves. If this is the case, Andrea is not such a figure. She is more like an addition, a missing limb, let’s say, that has returned long after being severed. From the cyclical Buddhist point of view, this makes perfect sense. Everything returns.”
Messi@ Page 42
