“There they go again, the Israeli jets!” someone said, pointing to the streaking lights of hundreds of Israeli fighter jets taking off for parts unknown.
Andrea felt as if the clanging of all the bells and the popping of champagne corks marking the passing of the second millennium all over the world had lodged in her body. She was experiencing a planetary hangover, though she hadn’t had a drop to drink. The fighter planes seemed to go right through her.
After the jets roared away, BookAir finally received permission to depart, and the Promised Land faded behind them.
Chapter Twenty-one
Wherein Joe leans on the Shades. Angel Zack considers the unfairness of his duties. The Council of Great Minds. Nikola Tesla.
Joe knew what he had to do. Lean on some Shades. Not that it gave him any pleasure. Shades were so passive, hitting one was like punching a pillow. He had cleared some of them from a park last year, and they’d gone limp as overcooked spaghetti. It had taken hours to load a dozen of them into the van. All the way to the station they’d chanted, “The True One comes! The True One comes!” and when Joe’s partner told them to shut the fuck up or he’d stuff the True One up their asses, they’d started taking off their clothes. And then they returned to the park anyway. Which is where they were now, doing their lizard thing, though some were quite actively holding out their begging bowls.
It was only ten in the morning and the French Quarter wasn’t yet awake, but the Shades kept business hours. Joe strolled into the middle of the group. One girl jingled and flashed quite obscenely in his path. Joe held his hands palms out in a gesture of peace. He was wearing civvies.
“I’m here to help a friend of yours. Some of you met a girl called Felicity … she danced with you and you showed her your body writing.”
He had their attention, though they tried to show no interest. The Shades had all the toughness of flowers. If a bee buzzed them, they trembled. They didn’t know truth from lie, and when they tried to lie, as they had when Joe arrested them, they were pathetic. Still, they were hard to pin down because none of them kept any identification. They’d burnt all society’s markers and renamed themselves after flowers and animals, dedicating themselves to communal anonymity, begging, tripping, and waiting for their True One.
After jingling their metals in what they hoped was a scary way, two girls, Poppy and Jasmine, told Joe that they had accompanied Felicity to Saint Louis Cathedral because she had promised them ten Hohner harmonicas if they stayed by her side while she met someone. Pressed to describe this someone, they said that he was “yucky,” that he was “tall,” that he had a “hump, maybe,” that he had a “silver cross on his chest.” Joe figured it out before they were finished: Reverend Mullin.
“She is in trouble, we help,” said a boy with studs in his eyebrows and a black T-shirt that said in big white letters, FEAR GOD.
“Just keep your eyes open,” said Joe.
“Don’t need to,” the Shade said. “We’ll close our eyes and find her. We will find her inside. She’s wandering in the desert.”
If Felicity was wandering anywhere, it was because she had a gun at her head. Tough kid. Hold fast, honey. I’m coming for you. Joe’s heart tightened as he realized that for him there was no life without Felicity.
Efforts to locate the good reverend took most of the day. Joe visited every church listed in the ministries directory but found that he had just missed Mullin each time. The United Ministries of Love in Plaquemines Parish, ostensibly the reverend’s home, turned out to be a mansion staffed by Lithuanian converts. They spoke no English and were the latest crop of souls drawn from Mullin’s missions in that part of the world. Mullin’s soul fishermen were bringing masses of these hapless foreigners with shiny eyes to Louisiana. The United Ministries of Love was believed to own dozens of buildings and businesses in the New Orleans area, but these holdings were, for some reason, impossible to find. The police computer displayed an astonishing blankness in regard to the televangelical empire.
At the end of his search, discouraged and seized by a sinking feeling, Joe went home to see his mother. He was going to be on duty next day, Christmas Eve, and this was going to be the first time he’d miss dinner at her house. They had talked on the phone, and he was worried. The old woman had been having visions and premonitions. She had been telling her neighbors that her son was in love with the Mother of God and that he would soon trade his police uniform for a brotherly cassock.
When he arrived at his mother’s house, a white-painted double on Colisseum Street, he found her playing bourré with her sister, Carla. The old ladies were drinking beer and eating coconut macaroons from a MacKenzie’s Bakery box. A small Christmas tree sat on a window box, decorated with the same trinkets as last year.
Carla was one of Joe’s favorite people. She had entered the Ursuline convent when she was sixteen and had spent her life in the service of the church. After he kissed her soft cheek, he asked her teasingly if she had discovered any remarkable saints lately. Aunt Carla’s tales of strange saints had been one of the highlights of his childhood.
“No, Giuseppe,” Aunt Carla, who also had the gift of foresight, said, “but I had a dream that you have a girlfriend. Her patron saint is Saint Helena—who was the mother of Constantine and, some say, the daughter of King Cole—who was sent into exile before being welcomed back as empress. God bless mother Helena; she went to the Holy Land in her eighty-fifth year and discovered the True Cross and the tomb of our Lord. She’s a good girl you’ve found, Giuseppe.”
Aunt Carla was eighty-five years old herself, and Joe bent down dutifully as she made the sign of the cross over him.
“Is there a Saint Felicity, Aunt Carla?”
“There is, darling. Patroness of mothers. She is invoked against infertility. She converted to the true faith and later was thrown with Saint Perpetua to the gladiators and killed by a wild cow. Saint Augustine of Hippo says she kept her skirt down the whole time. Bless you, Giuseppe.”
That sure didn’t sound like Felicity Le Jeune. Aunt Carla’s age must have been muddying up the channels.
“Something eating you, Joe?” His mother started walking toward the kitchen. “Sit down and have some macaroni.”
Joe sat down at the table but barely touched the bowl of steaming pasta with homemade tomato sauce that his mama made magically appear before him. The women continued their game of cards.
“What does Father Tommasino say, Aunt Carla? All this talk about the End.”
Aunt Carla crossed herself and leaned close over the box of macaroons. “They unsealed the third revelation of Fatima. The End is coming. The Antichrist is born in the world now, and some say … he’s in New Orleans. Father Tommasino says the archdiocese knows who he is.”
Joe’s mother was beside herself. “Do tell, Carla.”
“You gotta swear you won’t tell a soul,” said the nun. They leaned in real close.
“The Baptist preacher Mullin.”
“The one on TV?” Joe’s mother was incredulous.
“Not a word, child, not a word.”
Joe would have liked to laugh but couldn’t. It was right, somehow.
Zack floated above a bench on the Moonwalk by the Mississippi River. The wide water barely moved, mirroring the towers of the business district. A tug pushed a long train of barges so slowly it made him sleepy, and the Hilton Belle casino boat let out a sigh of white smoke. Once intended for cruising, it now festered in the same pool of still water like a familiar infection. Zack smelled coffee, bananas, vanilla, salted fish, powdered sugar, sweat, almonds, mothballs, Japanese magnolia, figs, jasmine, stale beer, and salty sleeping girls. The impression of a sickle moon stuck just over the roof of the Kern warehouse at Algiers Point. Inside slumbered the giant heads of Dionysus, Isis, Pan, and Aphrodite that decked New Orleans Mardi Gras floats. Zack could see through the walls and felt in the immense cardboard silence their papier-mâché loneliness. He empathized with the giant heads. His greatest trial w
as yet to come. It had been decided, despite his protests, that embodiment was necessary. He had to choose a human being to occupy in order to carry out his mission. He looked about him warily, considering the sad prospects loitering nearby. Sometimes he wished the heavens weren’t so ironic.
In vain had Zack pointed out to his superiors the many disembodied missions that had gone without a hitch during his training mok. But this one, a matter of form, wasn’t going to be one of them. The world of spirits may have been possessed of humorous and occasionally anarchistic inclinations, and democracy may have been proclaimed, but form was still taken very seriously. And the word of any angel superior to Zack was law. The law in this case said, This is important business. Embodiment required. Which meant, Zack knew, that he would be supervising a massive transfer of souls to human bodies and then seeing to it that the befuddled souls maneuver their new bodies well enough to draw incarnate wisdom from them for a purpose that was still beyond him. And that wasn’t even the worst part. At a certain point, he had to take on a body himself, a prospect so loathsome his wings shriveled slightly. The choreography of this grossly inelegant business was entirely his responsibility.
“I’ll be like a traffic cop!” lamented Zack. It’s well known that only the lowest spirits incarnate.
But no matter how loudly Zack complained, he found no sympathetic ears. The most he could get was a concession to get out of the body he incarnated into, now and then, in order to take a break from the absurd functions of the flesh. Incarnation was not reincarnation; it was nothing fancy. It was indeed the lowest spirit job. Rookies dead three days did it.
Even as Zack lamented to his superiors, he could see, directly below him, an incarnation in progress. A wino, crumpled on the steps leading to the wide river, had suddenly opened his eyes. A look of wonder and fear was in them. His rheumy lids shot up into his eyebrows. He reached for the paper bag beside him and wrapped an unsteady and dirty hand around the neck of the bottle inside, but the bag swooshed out of his hands and rolled down the steps, breaking on the hunks of cement that lined the water’s edge. Zack could see a determined little white poltergeist, shaped like a thin funnel, forcing its way into the top of the wino’s head.
“Oh, my God!” The angel Zack was not given to invoking the Supreme Deity in vain. But he repeated it: “Oh, my God!”
He recognized the spirit. Even in a democratized heaven, the famous were still royalty. The spirit screwing itself into the wino’s head was the visionary scientist Nikola Tesla. He was one of the Minds. Zack’s mission had begun.
Angels are specialized libraries. Zack happened to contain the history of science, and in his vast store of information, Nikola Tesla was a superstar. Zack could recite without trying every moment of the great inventor’s life. Nikola Tesla, Serbian, born in Croatia in 1856, sailed to America in 1884 with four cents in his pocket, a few of his poems, and calculations for a flying machine. Tesla had invented alternating current, which had won out over Thomas Edison’s advocacy of direct current. He had invented shadowgraphs, later called X rays. His Tesla coil made television and radio possible. He’d discovered terrestrial stationary waves, which nearly blew the cover off the dimension where Zack dwelt. He used the earth as a conductor responsive to certain frequencies and opened the angelic dimension. Tesla had received communications never intended for humans, which he interpreted as signals from other planets. He figured out a way to split the earth in half like an apple. He had even discovered a means of worldwide communication for sending pictures and messages, something humans now called the Internet. Tesla’d filled his notebooks with so many ideas that the decision to terminate his earthly existence was taken at the highest levels in 1943, during World War II, before they could be put into practice. Heaven feared that some of these ideas might prematurely end the world. Zack had been in his first mok then but could still recall that important decision. After Tesla reached heaven, he spent all his time playing cards with his old friend Mark Twain, and showed no interest in the physics of the angelic dimension. Apparently a decision had now been taken to return him to earth to participate in the Council of the Great Minds. Zack tipped his invisible hat to the clumsy poltergeist half screwed inside the bum’s head.
Tesla finally disappeared entirely into the bum’s skull like a genie into a bottle. The wino staggered to his feet and stood straight up, sober for the first time in years. It was an unaccustomed and heady sensation. He took the steps up from the river with an ease that surprised him and filled his heart with hope. He had no idea that what he was experiencing was the result of a spirit who had taken over his body, shoving his pitiful, dark, and sour wino soul into a corner of his being, where it would sleep until his use by the heavens was complete.
The transformation was fascinating. Zack had not been informed as to exactly by what means the Great Minds were going to arrive in New Orleans—another egregious bureaucratic oversight!—but he was still surprised that the heavens had chosen this crude, common way. For a long time incarnation had been practiced only by monitors. The job of the monitor spirits was to insure the orderly traffic of souls into the spirit world after their mass dispatch from the planet, should a conventional apocalypse occur. Originally, incarnation had proceeded in a respectful fashion.
Alas! That had been the modus operandi of gentler days. The millennial urgency that gripped earth and heaven had dispensed with such niceties. Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of people in America alone were unceremoniously taken over as if they were empty trash containers. There was no ceremony. Even a momentary depression could allow one to be taken over. A moment of melancholy, even. Zack was disgusted; it bothered him that humans were being violated in this manner. Might as well bring on the End.
And now, horror of horrors, the Minds were being brought in the same way! Zack shuddered. Such clumsiness! He scanned the city quickly and found that he was right. Perched on a stoop on Bourbon Street, in front of an adult video store, was Albert Einstein in the muscled body of a male prostitute. The great Roman poet Ovid was frozen with bewilderment inside a banker sitting behind a desk in the Whitney Bank building on Poydras Street. The seer Nostradamus, with a towel around his arm, was taking a drink order at the Napoleon House. Napoleon himself was tapping for tourists on Royal Street, uncomfortably situated in the body of a fifteen-year-old black boy. Dante was inside a policeman. Plato stood behind the desk at the Voodoo Wax Museum. Karl Marx, sweating, with a yellow bandanna around his neck and a hard hat on his head, was digging a hole in the street while his white coworkers watched. It was shameful. The heavens hadn’t even matched the Minds to compatible bodies.
Zack watched Tesla as he stood on the Moonwalk, looking at the Mississippi River with wonder. His unshaved wino face took on the countenance of a child. He had been informed, rather tersely, that he was going to New Orleans, but had had no time to imagine the place. He had seen this river once at Saint Louis, but it was wider and muddier here. This was the “mighty Mississippi” of his friend Twain’s tales. Zack couldn’t suppress a twinge of envy in the face of such joyous astonishment. Humans were really something. He hoped he wasn’t catching their emotions, which was really the closest to a disease his kind ever contracted.
“What am I?” Nikola Tesla asked himself after his first glimpse of the Mississippi River. He looked down at his rags, sniffed himself in disgust, and put his hands in his trouser pockets, where he discovered only some wadded tissue. “I have even less now than when I came to America for the first time,” he mused.
For the rest of the day, Tesla wandered the city on unsteady legs. At the end of the day he discovered an empty warehouse. Inside, a few people dressed in rags similar to his sat around a campfire, eating from cans. They seemed to know him because they made friendly noises and beckoned him over.
“Who am I?” asked Tesla after he had sat down on the ground and been given a can full of warm beans.
“That’s funny,” laughed the toothless fellow on his right. “You’re the ur
ban anchorite. You’re a shining example to all of us.”
The crowd guffawed, but Tesla was pleased. An urban anchorite. A father of the desert in the city. He liked that. He liked also the warehouse, a big space, perfect for some kind of experiment. All of a sudden, Tesla was seized with the need for a great project. He was back on earth.
For the next few days, Nikola Tesla roamed an area of the French Quarter bounded by Chartres and Dumaine on one side and Ursulines and Pirate’s Alley on the other. He pushed a contraption that resembled a shopping cart but was, in actuality, a living unit complete with bed, shower, and compartments for carting found materials. He’d designed and built fifty of them for his new friends, who were now scattered throughout the city, gathering what he needed for his new experiment.
Tesla’s rounds were so regular the inhabitants of the neighborhood could set their watches by him. He appeared at noon and vanished at sunset. The word on the street was that he was very rich, that he had a photographic memory and was secretly working on a doomsday machine. Tesla’s companions had deduced all this on their own and had already started making him legendary. Tesla liked that. He had always been a legend, even to himself.
In the course of his wanderings he had made several important observations about the world at this time, and about the city of New Orleans in particular. For the most part, he was not surprised at the widespread use of his discoveries. He watched the launching of a space rocket on a television set in a Laundromat.
“Is earth attacking a hostile planet?” Tesla asked a bearded street person in a motorized wheelchair with bulging plastic bags attached to the armrests, who used this Laundromat for his daytime quarters.
“It’s the space shuttle, man. Where you been?” The street person was huffy. “Most of what you see is fuel tanks. After it leaves the atmosphere, the space capsule takes the astronauts to the moon. Where did you go to kindergarten?”
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