Messi@

by Andrei Codrescu

  “Do you not believe it possible that Christ could be, this time around, a woman?” Father Hernio teased the old nun.

  “Christ is Christ, the Son of God,” Mother Superior said curtly, indicating that the discussion was at an end.

  But it wasn’t. There were still two pies left and a full carafe of Mount Hebron wine.

  “What if Vanna White is the avatar? What is Gala Keria, then? Or Kashmir Birani?” Mr. Rabindranath fired these questions directly at the remains of the roasted ducks.

  “Then each one of them is the avatar also. They are emanations of the Divine One,” said Lama Cohen. “And if Andrea took the job, then she too would become the avatar. Perhaps it is Andrea that everyone’s been waiting for all along!”

  Andrea felt again that cattle-prod-skull-of-Adam-Unction-Stone tingle. Everyone stared at her as if they had just seen her for the first time.

  “What’s the matter?” she said in English. “Were you expecting someone else?”

  No one laughed at her little joke. For an uncomfortably long time, during which the thought sank in, Andrea felt as if she stood naked before a bunch of portrait painters. Their eyes weighed her features, trying to fit them to those of the Messiahs in their minds. Andrea rose from the table, bowed her head, and asked to be excused. Mother Superior gave her leave. Andrea went up the stairs to look for Sister Rodica.

  “See what you’ve done? You upset the child!” said Mother Superior, ending the awkward silence. She hated to admit it, but for a moment, she had actually entertained the idea herself. How foolish we are, dear Lord.

  “Let us pray!”

  The company fell to prayer, each in the silence of his or her own self. It didn’t take a sleuth to know what each was praying for. Written in luminous letters over their heads like banners inscribed with light were requests for the end of each of their weary quests. Most of those present actually hoped that the young Bosnian orphan was the Messiah. Or an emanation of her, anyway.

  Lama Cohen, who didn’t pray (and didn’t feel like meditating) remembered a visit to the Marcel Janco Museum near Tel Aviv, the first time she came to Israel with her family. Her father was a great fan of the Dadaists, and of Marcel Janco, who had been the second or third original Dadaist. The first was Tristan Tzara, a Romanian Jew whose original name had been Sami Rosenstock. According to her father, one day this Tzara took a pair of scissors to the world’s best literature, including the Bible, and cut everything up and then mixed words from the newspapers right in with the holy words.

  It’s a wonder that the world didn’t end right then and there, thought Lama Cohen. There are many ways to piss off the God of the Hebrews, but messing with his Word is the surest! Which is why the hostess of Gal Gal Hamazal couldn’t very well be the Messiah, even if she restores the order. She still messes with his words and letters, scrambling and mixing them and hiding them. Her father had said that there was another Jew, named Isidore Isou, who was twice as bad as this man Tzara. He had gone to war against every letter, God forgive him! He actually claimed he was looking for God in the alphabet. Lama Cohen grinned to herself. For his sake, I hope he didn’t find him!

  Ultimately, the explanation for Gala’s disappearance was an anticlimax to the days of morbid speculation. In the most God-crazy place on earth, Gala had joined a religious cult. It seemed to Israelis terribly pedestrian, not at all what they had imagined while Gala was missing.

  In a videotape delivered to the six o’clock news, Gala herself informed the nation that she had joined a sect known as the Invisibles. The beautiful ex-hostess of Gal Gal Hamazal, looking pale and already slightly transparent, implored the world to forget her.

  “I am no longer Gala Keria. I am no one. I walk now the path of the anonymous righteous. It is our purpose to seek unfettered communion with God. I am dedicated to erasing every trace of my existence in the corrupt world.”

  Hostage experts testified that the statement did not seem coerced, and Gala didn’t appear to have been brainwashed, though her die-hard fans insisted that she would never have left Gal Gal Hamazal of her own free will.

  Andrea, for one, admired Gala’s decision to give up being Gala. To give up fame and applause, choosing to be no one, struck her as both very brave and quite inconceivable. Andrea had become no one the day she was herded into the Serbian camp. It had not been a choice. Perhaps that was why she was so excited by the idea of becoming a someone, as Gala had been. Andrea had learned in the camp that she could be anyone.

  “Maybe I am the True One,” she’d shouted at the Serb soldier loading her and her neighbors into the truck. Maybe I am the one, she thought now, dreaming of Gala’s job.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wherein we witness the wholly surprising outcome of Felicity’s transaction with the televangelist

  By the time Felicity arrived, Jackson Square was experiencing the magic hour of twilight. The fortune-tellers were all busy, reading the sweaty palms of tourists, casting bones and dice for the lovelorn, slapping worn tarot cards down before wide-eyed Yankee matrons. The portrait painters were at their charcoals and paint, fixing on paper and canvas the solemn miens of suburbanites. Flame swallowers, jugglers, and mimes danced on the cobblestones. Competing musicians poured their hearts out for dollar bills.

  A tourist stood, looking bewildered, on the round marker in front of Saint Louis Cathedral commemorating the place where John Paul II had said Mass when he visited the city more than a decade before. Felicity always made sure to step on it before entering the holy place. It charged her with a bit of light blue energy she called “pope light,” though she was not particularly fond of this pope or any other.

  “Excuse me,” said the tourist. “Can you tell me what I am looking at?”

  “At a huge flaw,” said Felicity, “a red thread that runs sadly through all your perceptions. After your fortune is told, your portrait painted, your aura polished, your past lives established, your money spent, and your nostalgia affirmed, there is still a great flaw in your tapestry.”

  “Whoa!” the man said, shifting his video-camera bag from one shoulder to another. “Lady, you some kind of poet?”

  “I wish,” sighed Felicity. “Would you mind stepping off the pope? I need his energy.”

  “Anything you say.” The tourist took her in, a vibrating wisp of a girl, with rings on every finger, spiky hair, fuchsia jeans, boots, maybe not human at all. New Orleans, he thought. Landing pad for the weird. Maybe none of my pictures will come out.

  When Felicity stood on the pope she saw the throngs of tourists with crystalline clarity. They had escaped from America for a few hours. In their shorts and T-shirts with the names of bowling leagues, community colleges, and rock bands, rolls of Burger King fat spilling over painful elastic, they wandered clueless through the waning days of the twentieth century. They were nomads of late capitalism, here to retrieve for a moment some of the youthful passion that had been extinguished by their jobs, mortgages, atomized families, and television. The cheap magic of New Orleans transported them a few inches off the ground. Some of them were actually hovering.

  Imperceptibly, the crowd grew. At first, the tattooed Shades looked like part of the landscape they traversed every day, but as more and more of them appeared, the crowd took on a hue of sadness and dejection. It was as if a leper colony were slowly emptying itself into an American Legion parade. The tourists tried to take no notice, but they drew in by degrees, moving closer to their fortune-tellers and portrait painters. The Shades smelled young and dirty.

  The candlelit chiaroscuro inside the cathedral held few worshipers, but the Shades began kneeling behind pews, filling it up. Felicity was pleased to notice that their tans and tattooed skin did not look out of place here, among haloed, purple-robed saints. Shades were saints, too, perhaps the first saints of that new, nonconsuming humanity her uncle called for. Certainly they didn’t eat Whoppers. Felicity took her place before the Holy Mother, where she had prayed not long ago, though it seemed that year
s had passed.

  “Dear Mother,” she entreated, “please make this go smoothly, and I will be sure to do good things with the money. I will lessen suffering and I will only have a little, very little, fun myself.”

  The Holy Mother clutched her Infant tighter and looked upon Felicity doubtfully, as if she had seen her type before, a regular Magdalene in contrite clothing.

  At precisely eight o’clock, Reverend Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin entered the church. Alone. Felicity watched him stride assuredly down the center aisle and head directly for her. He was carrying the burgundy briefcase. It surprised her. She had been sure that he would be accompanied by a hundred Bamajans and a whole flock of jailbirds.

  He sat on the pew next to her and looked disdainfully at the Virgin. “These cats sure pour the gilt on their holies,” he said, loud enough to startle the pew of Shades behind them.

  “Did you bring the dough?” whispered Felicity.

  “You need to audition for it,” he said.

  Felicity was angry. But she felt in control. That is, she would have felt in control if the choir had not at that very moment begun practicing in the loft above them. There was a burst of clear voices, then a pure soaring solo soprano, then two baritones greeted each other, followed by a blast of brass. It was like the heavens waking up hungover in the morning. It distressed Felicity.

  Out of the depths I cry to you; O Lord now hear me calling.

  Incline your ear to my distress.

  In spite of my rebelling do not regard my sinful deeds.

  Send me the grace my spirit needs.

  Without it I am nothing …

  The words of the psalm entered her heart like thin golden arrows.

  Ave Maria, gratia plena … Her attempt to pray felt hollow. The choir’s fumbling and the verses from on high had a most curious effect. They are softening my bones, noted Felicity. Indeed, she felt molten, like a metal being poured into a mold.

  The preacher’s cologne was overpowering, nauseating, yet somehow part of the angelic cacophony in the gallery. She was unsettled by Mullin’s heat, like that of an animal in a cave. Scent, music, and heat, I will overcome you, vowed the once-steely girl dick, and then she did something unexpected. She touched Mullin. The gesture was intended to push him away, to increase the distance between them. At the same time, she raised her other hand as if to silence the choir practice.

  Her touch was lighter than she intended; it landed on Mullin’s arm like a butterfly. And then he did something even more startling: he slipped his arm around her waist. Her mind, caught by surprise, shouted a warning, but it was too late. Every bit of sense seeped out of her. Her spine was on fire and the top of her head felt as if it was coming undone, unscrewed like a bottle cap by an invisible hand.

  “Audition for me,” Mullin breathed hotly in her ear.

  Felicity felt an urge to cry and to sing, simultaneously. The choir had somehow gotten itself together, and the first bars of “Out of the depths I cry to you” soared to the vaults of the cathedral. Felicity looked helplessly at the Holy Mother, but she had turned away and was looking down at her Infant. Felicity’s whole being strained to remember the phrase she had so triumphantly hurled at the preacher on the night of Grandmère’s death, but she could not. There was a hook, a musical note, really, stuck in her throat.

  She followed Mullin out of the church with her head bowed, without looking at the Shades, who were surprised to see her walking so humbly behind the man in black. She had arranged with them before the meeting to stay with her no matter what happened, so they filed out after the couple. Outside the door they were met by more Shades. Felicity barely saw them. All she wanted to do was cry and sing.

  Inside her, a voice warned: the devil has overcome you; recite the Our Father. But she couldn’t remember the familiar words. Another nearly extinguished voice advised: Cuff the beast. Call the major. Ask Mullin about the money. This is business. The money.

  Felicity looked at the polished black column that was Reverend Mullin and whispered, “Our business …”

  “After the audition,” said Mullin gently, guiding her with fingers lightly touching the small of her back. Blue electric snakes issued from his fingertips and bathed her spine in warm light.

  Across the square, a small procession was marching to a familiar tune.

  Oh when the saints go marching in.

  Oh when the saints go marching in …

  Oh, I want to be in that number, Felicity’s anesthetized mind sang back, struggling to resist its Mullin-induced paralysis. As the procession drew nearer, she could see that the marchers were led not by a jazz trumpeter but by an elderly, Semitic-looking man blowing his heart out on a corkscrewed shofar. He was followed by a man carrying an ornate Torah scroll aloft, and they were followed by a group of sober-looking, dark-suited men.

  Even in her stupor, Felicity recognized the man blowing the shofar—Cantor Redman! Papa Redman, Ben’s father. As the parade passed she wanted to run to greet him, to ask about Ben, to seek sanctuary in his arms. But she felt underwater, her voice buried in an undertow.

  She did not even wonder what a Jewish group carrying the Torah was doing marching to a Christian hymn, even if it was also the city’s theme song, a football fight song. Questions had fled from her, leaving her empty. Felicity saw a flock of her questions take off like swallows over the roofs of the Quarter. I am a woman without questions now, her mind told her, I am no one.

  Mullin led her to the gold Cadillac parked near the Napoleon House, and she meekly got in. I am being pushed underwater by a strong hand. I am being baptized by a monster. She expected the reverend to boom out, “I baptize you … in the name of Jesus Christ …,” but he was not even moving his lips, and the water was entirely within her. I am drowning in the waters of myself. Help me.

  But the voice that said those words could not be heard. Farther and farther down she went.

  The Shades milled about, unsure what to do next. One of them called out, “Hey, man, where you going, man?” Felicity gave them no clue; she merely waved as the Caddy rolled out. She saw their bewildered, innocent, affectionate faces stare after her. Then water covered everything.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wherein Andrea meets the young rabbi Yehuda ben Yehuda

  Before he came to Israel, Yehuda ben Yehuda had never been on a bus. Now he knew every bus route in Jerusalem and every transfer point. He knew which lines had been targeted by terrorist bombers, and times of day when it was safer to walk.

  Before he came to Israel, Yehuda ben Yehuda had been ordinary Ben Redman, an affluent white American boy. Growing up in New Orleans, he’d been driven by his father to and from a private, expensive elementary school. In high school he’d driven himself in his grandmother’s hand-me-down Mercedes. The only public transportation he’d ever used was the old electric car on Saint Charles Avenue.

  Ben Redman had been a privileged boy, it’s true, but he was also Jewish. So, though he never experienced even one moment of anti-Semitism growing up in New Orleans, he had suffered. He felt guilty about being white and affluent and privileged. But then, he’d grown up in a place where the experience of prejudice and injustice was reserved exclusively for black people, and whites were the oppressors.

  There is a lot of white guilt in the South, and Ben had somehow absorbed a disproportionate share of it. Sensitive people inherit it like original sin, and Ben was three times as sensitive as the average Southerner. He could not forget that white people enslaved and killed other human beings. He was tormented by his daily contact with the victims’ great-great-great-grandchildren, who constituted over 50 percent of the population of his city and were still suffering.

  Ben Redman tried to escape his guilt by becoming black. In his second year of high school, he convinced his parents to let him transfer to public school, where he made black friends, talked hip-hop, and continued to feel guilty. He had been freed from his massive guilt only by a sudden and equally massive religious conversion.
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  But perhaps his conversion had not been so sudden. The conviction had been growing in him that books, which he loved, were being threatened by an evil force in the world. His father had once told him that in medieval synagogues there used to be a chamber where all the bad books were deposited and incinerated. These were desecrated Torahs, violated prayer books, and probably, books banned by the rabbis. Ben was sorry for all the books. When he was seven years old, he overheard one of his father’s friends say in a dramatic voice:

  “The library at Alexandria burnt …”

  Ben hadn’t heard the rest. He had been gripped by panic. He burst out of his hiding place under the table and cried, “When? When did it burn down?” He had thought that his library, the Milton Latter Library on Saint Charles, had just burned down. He had not even wondered why the man called the Latter Library the library of Alexandria. All libraries were the Latter Library to him. He didn’t know any other.

  It had taken Dr. Redman an hour before he could impress on his distraught son that what was being discussed was an ancient tragedy. And he hadn’t quite believed it. Consequently, every tragedy seemed to Ben to be current. He suspected that people attached ancient dates to occurring tragedies in order to calm children. But he knew better. History was a sham. His conversion had had something to do with his desire to save books, to be the white knight who rescued the written word from the flames.

  During his first month of study in Jerusalem, he’d felt high-strung, overwrought, and insecure. One day, while in this state, he passed by the window of a store where a television was beaming Gal Gal Hamazal at passersby. Gala Keria struck him with a lightening bolt and began to inhabit the very essence of his mind, imparting a golden rose hue to the Sefirot of the kabbalistic tree that was his object of study. She sat inside each and every one of these divine spheres, smiling moist fire, her hand extended to either turn a letter or beckon to him. He had tried to ignore her, fight her, blur her image, stamp away her body with the very letters of the holy alphabet she commanded so sinuously. The harder he tried, the sharper she came into focus, her form deepened and enriched by his struggle. He confessed this demonic possession to the rebbe.