Einstein had cast his vote: keep the shithouse.
Zack sighed and noted it.
Ovid took advantage of the bank holiday and spent the morning in his office catching up on the news. He read the Times-Picayune, the Christian Science Monitor, Time, and the Wall Street Journal and tried to make sense of the following:
Gold was $2,000 an ounce. The dollar was worth 1.4 yen. The Securities Fraud Division of the U.S. Treasury had uncovered the greatest Wall Street fraud yet: a young broker had absconded with $100 billion, amassed as a result of profits on derivatives speculation; he had left behind only a smiley face on the company computer and the not-so-cryptic message THE END IS NEAR. THE WHEEL TURNS. In Russia the leaders in hiding of the Supreme Truth cult had revealed that they had purchased three fourteen-kiloton nuclear warheads, which they had positioned in Tokyo, New York, and Hong Kong. They requested the release of all their comrades imprisoned around the world, and a world leaders’ summit in their Caucasus Mountains hideout in order to plan the orderly transition of humanity to the heavens during Armageddon. At the UFO convention in Corpus Christi, Texas, a man dressed as a nun sprayed the ballroom with a machine gun, killing ten convention goers. Outside of Texarcana, a miraculous image of Jesus, sans loincloth, hovered over an oil well and turned the sky orange. Witnesses tore off their clothes and refused to put them back on, even when the authorities turned on fire hoses. The huddled nude masses had been camping at the oil well, sure that they would be transported to heaven by the large orange Jesus. They were turning away food and water and drew close for warmth, singing hymns. A millennium party to end all millennium parties was being planned in New York with the hoped-for attendance of every major entertainment figure alive.
Ovid found the price of gold most shocking of all. He had once presented Claudia, the sixteen-year-old niece of Augustus, with a gold breastplate spun by the famed Behethomus. The splendid jewel left Claudia’s breasts free so that he might delight in kissing them. He remembered the taste of the gold where it circled the base of her divine flesh. He had written a poem proposing that Claudia’s breasts be made the new measure for the Roman wine cup because they were more perfect than Aphrodite’s. And for such sublime ideas one got in trouble!
Ovid sighed. If this had been Rome, he would have had no qualms in calling for its end. It was a shame the way the empire treated its poets! But what did all these other things mean? Nuclear weapons, the Jesus … He suspected that weaponry had become a great art, but was it really possible that it had reached the stage he had achieved in the writing of the Metamorphoses? Had weapon makers truly reduced to nothing the abyss between matter and a poet’s vision? If so, he had great respect for these artisans and would do his utmost to meet them. As for this Jesus, he guessed that he was a species of priest who went about scaring people with circus tricks. He had always disliked priests and had made a point to avoid even the Greek oracle when Augustus had once required him to travel there. He had feigned illness and spent a most pleasant time in bed with the emperor’s wife. He was then exiled for it! Unjust men! Ill times! Uncouthness!
The most satisfying item was the party of parties at the end of this time they called Christian, doubtless after some forgotten emperor born long after Ovid had died. Ovid wanted to attend this party. Here, he felt, he would at long last meet his peers, those new poets who had advanced and polished the art. He would bask in their admiration of him and receive golden laurels. Ovid leaned back in his uncomfortable banker’s settee and read some of the names who’d promised to attend: Dolly Parton, Wayne Newton, Madonna, Trent Reznor, Chef Paul Prudhomme, Angelique Risotto … Yes, he would definitely be there.
Another one says yes, sighed Zack.
At the Napoleon House, Nostradamus had just delivered an antipasto plate and a Dixie beer to a rude bald man, and considered throttling him. The man looked Greek or Albanian; an ugly purple birthmark rose over his left eye. In his visions of the future, Nostradamus had often beheld the sorry remains of the once-noble Greek race moving aimlessly among throbbing lights and cacophonous music between the ruined stones of ancient temples. This terrible vision had come to pass, but never in his lifetime of dreaming the future had he imagined becoming a servant to such men. In addition to the destruction of mighty kingdoms and the annihilation of great cities, people had suffered the corruption of the better part of their souls. There wasn’t much nobility left in them; they were worse than animals. Might as well mop up the mess.
Nostradamus slammed down his tray and wished humanity gone.
That’s a no, recorded Zack.
Napoleon had tapped for five hours straight until the beer tops glued to his left sneaker had come off. In anticipation of just such an emergency he had spent the previous evening scouring trash containers. He had over a hundred beer tops in his backpack. He sat on a stoop, took off his shoe, and started hammering new taps in place. Crowds of yuppies and wannabes had staggered by with open alcohol containers, paying no attention whatsoever to the fifteen-year-old boy practicing his craft. Fools, Napoleon thought grimly. One day I will be richer than all of you. I will own your shoes. He had been saving all the coins tourists had tossed into the cardboard box at his feet. He already had $80, which he planned to use toward the purchase of a shoeshine stand. He had already spoken to a number of boys who would be paying him a percentage of their profits in exchange for affixing taps to their shoes. In the future, he would purchase a number of shoeshine stands for them and get a percentage of those profits, too. He had studied also the pimping business and had some hopes in that direction as soon as all his pubic hair came in. But this was only the beginning.
After Napoleon was finished with his sneaker, he took a few minutes off his schedule to read his favorite strategy manual, A Primer of Management by A. T. D. Holmes. “The philosophy of management is philosophy,” he made out. “It encompasses the entire philosophical tradition because a corporation is a world.”
Napoleon had already read the introductory chapter, which described the corporate world as having the same characteristics as the natural world. It had an ecology, seasonal cycles, storms, predators, victims, and architecture. Its laws, though related to those of earth, were in fact different. A good businessman was less like a god and more like an accurate forecaster, and Napoleon knew that he had what it takes to succeed. He couldn’t wait for the future.
Another yes, sighed Zack. He did not like the way things were going. If the majority voted yes, or even if it was a tie, he would have no choice but to incarnate. There were still 329 Great Minds to poll, and most of them were still having difficulty adjusting to their new bodies. Oh, miserable democratic heavens! Zack longed again for the days when the Supreme Deity made all the decisions. This democracy stuff was for the birds.
Dante noticed two filthy pigeons pecking at a plastic bag filled with a white powder. Some junkie’d dropped his stash on the street, and now the damn pigeons would be stoned. Walking the beat, he had already remarked on the astounding resemblance of this modern city to his system of hell. His patrolman’s uniform was too tight, and his feet hurt. He no longer felt like a guest in the netherworld but rather a bona fide resident. He reviewed his days on earth. The dirty bookstores and the strip joints were crammed full of drunken sots burning in the guilty fires of their own souls. Small-time criminals addicted to chemical punishments were staggering toward mirages and hallucinations. Dante could identify the category of sin each soul was doomed to suffer for, but he was not pleased by the fulfillment of his poetic vision. No Virgil or Beatrice lived on these shores. He had been abandoned and he knew not why. He quoted, in vain, the verses that once explained both emptiness and fullness: “La gloria di colui che tutto move per l’universo penetra, e risplende in una parte più e meno altrove.” The glory of him who moves all things permeates the universe but glows in one part more and in another less.
“It glows no longer; it is extinguished,” he said out loud, but then he saw flames and hastened toward them.
A building was burning on Bourbon Street. A tall patrolman ordered him roughly to keep the rubbernecking crowd away from the yellow tape. Dante watched the tongues of flame leap out of the crackling timbers and saw his future: every day, he would be drafted in this manner to watch over disasters he could neither prevent nor understand. It would be better, reflected the glum policeman, if all future disasters were combined into a single one, a magnificent end. If there was any way to wipe the slate clean, he would compose the divine verses that would hasten such an outcome.
Dante wished for cleansing flames.
“Good,” said Zack. “There is hope yet.”
Karl Marx had volunteered for overtime on Christmas Day to get away from the frighteningly large wife that came with the package he’d been given. His fellow crew members were three mean white men, a group of ruffians who had all recently been paroled from the federal penitentiary at Angola. They seemed determined to not do a lick of work on the busted gas main they had been assigned to, which meant that Marx was doing all the digging by himself, while they drank beer and made fun of his clumsiness.
The working class had surely degenerated since 1856. The mere existence of such menial work in the late days of postcapitalism meant that something had gone woefully wrong in the logic of history. Marx wished that he was in a pub in London, discussing the matter with Engels. He would have liked, in fact, to be anywhere but in this city, grunting behind a shovel while scooping large portions of black mud in a ditch. Engels might have provided an insight to the paradox of a seemingly boundless affluence brought about by laborsaving gadgets that did not, however, lessen exploitation in any way. He had not given sufficient thought to the problem of time in Das Kapital. The alienation he had predicted had occurred, but humanity’s revolutionary impulses had been dulled along the way by unpredictable factors. A vast extortion of time was taking place in postindustrial society, a type of metaphysical exploitation that surpassed his wildest imaginings. Not that he needed to worry about post-anything in his current position, covered with sweat, racially demeaned, physically tormented, and intellectually isolated. Was there truly a progression toward a better future, or had he, as his enemies implied, been misled by the stubborn utopian messianism of his Jewish genes? Marx wished he knew.
“Undecided,” recorded Zack.
Twice, when there were no customers, Plato had examined the Voodoo Wax Museum. He had been particularly fascinated by the exhibit of Marie Laveau by the shore of Bayou Saint John, leading slaves in song. A small fire sizzled with offerings of bones. The slaves had their eyes rolled up to the heavens while the high priestess, with her mouth wide open, intoned the words. Improvised altars littered the grass, and Plato was able to make out beads, small dead birds, glasses with amber liquids in them, crudely carved crosses, and pipes. Everything, even the smoke, was perfect to the last detail. Plato had never seen such lifelike resemblances, though he had been acquainted with the work of the greatest sculptors of antiquity. He gazed long at these figures and could not make up his mind whether they were representations of things past or the archetypes themselves, frozen in eternity. He had always thought that the archetypes, in order to give birth to the world, would have had to stand still in order both to embody their ideas and to serve as models. Motion, to his understanding, was a property of representation. The stillness of the archetypes had always soothed him, and he felt something akin to such satisfaction now. On the other hand, if this scene was a reproduction of something already past, it was only a representation of a representation, and thus twice removed from the archetypes.
Last time he had contemplated the figurines, Plato had been interrupted by the front door buzzer and had been unable to continue his reflections. After the customer left, Plato’d picked up the thread of his thought, but once again was unable to conclude anything. If the figures in the glass case were archetypes, then it was necessary to wait patiently for the time when they would begin to produce representations. When the cycle of representations was at an end, the archetypes would release the pure ideas that they embodied. But if the perfect figurines were already representations, there was no need at all for this pale imitation of a world.
Plato voted maybe, pending the completion of his thought.
Not much help to Zack.
Chapter Twenty-four
Wherein Major Notz encounters a musical slave trader and practices vigilantism
Major Notz didn’t just watch the slave trade in Jackson Square from his balcony in the Pontalba Building. He photographed it with the aid of a powerful telephoto lens. After a second day had passed and Felicity was still missing, the major donned a special forces jacket and cap without insignia or rank bars. He obtained an iced coffee at La Madeleine and went to the Moonwalk to see Bamajan.
The trumpeter was a thin black man with a graying goatee, the trademark of his profession. His mouth connected with his instrument like one pipe fitted to another. Tourists loved him. They stuffed dollar bills into a battered instrument case stickered with the names of cities he’d played. Paris. Amsterdam. Tokyo. He provided his audience with everything that the jazz-musician-shaped hole in their heads required. Bamajan was loose and playful and blew visible notes into the wet, velvet-heavy air. Behind him the Mississippi River curled and rolled in perfect counterpoint. A Greek tanker was anchored in the channel and an old-fashioned riverboat glided around the bend. Algiers Point glittered, sending shafts of light over the river.
“I thought maybe the Mississippi was bigger, maybe because of Huck Finn,” a freckled German tourist with three cameras around his neck said to the major. “But,” he said, pointing at Bamajan, “he makes it big, bigger, like the Rhine.”
“Yawohl.” The Major nodded. He waited patiently for the better part of an hour until the musician finally put down his instrument. The major pushed his formidable flesh forward until he completely obscured the thin trumpeter.
“It would give me great pleasure to offer you lunch.”
Bamajan was about to refuse until he met the major’s flinty stare. “You the law?” he asked.
“More than you can imagine,” the major answered, and ushered him down the steps.
At Johnny’s the musician ordered the french fry po’boy with gravy, an original New Orleans entry in the heart-attack sweepstakes. It was a favorite of practitioners of “clogging,” so called by musicians high on heroin who ate through messes of burgers, fries, and gravy until their arteries were clogged by cholesterol.
“Five years ago,” the major began as Bamajan downed in two bites half of his sandwich, “you were detained for a week as a prime suspect in the Kashmir Birani case, but you were released for lack of evidence.”
“Hey, man. Fucking history. What’s your point?” Bamajan wiped the gravy from his goatee.
“Periodically you are visited by law-enforcement personnel and reporters. For a while, the police taped all your music. You are on nine kinds of medication to control your visions. Correct?”
“Man, you barfing up the wrong shoe. Who gives a fuck?”
“Nobody to this point. But”—the major laid a fat dolorous arm between the plates—“you’ve been selling dope and girls. Now my niece is gone. I’m going to show you her picture. You look at it long and hard and then you talk to me.”
The major held out a snapshot of Felicity.
“Yeah,” Bamajan said, without inspecting the photo, “I do recall selling a chick to some dude in a cape … Oh, yeah, he had wings, I think.”
“I am extremely sorry about your attitude, Mr. Bamajan. The nine types of medication must not be working very well. I ask you again, think.”
This time the musician looked. The heavy dude was serious. Of course he knew the girl. She’d been Miles’s chick. Sweet Miles, who got too greedy with the stuff and bought the big gig. Bamajan had been depressed ever since he’d sold Miles the stuff that killed him. He’d loved the piano player. A great talent. Fucked-up world. And this girl, whatever her name was, now
she was in trouble. He’d have to help her. A small favor for Miles. But he wouldn’t help this creep.
Three gold rings glittered on Notz’s left hand. One in particular made an impression on Bamajan. He had seen one like it before; a death-dealing Jamaican wore it. It was a snake twined around a cross.
“I never saw this chick before,” Bamajan said and started to get up from the table.
But the major laid a strong hand on his shoulder; he sat back down.
“What kind of man goes around selling people?”
“Slavery’s back.” The musician nodded gravely.
“Slavery’s back? As in, the sixties are back? Disco is back? What do you mean, it’s back?”
“Everybody does it, everybody has it, everybody’s got to do it once at least,” he sang. Lowering his voice, he said, “It’s the drug of the millennium. I sold this chick—not the one in your picture, another one—to a dude wearing wings in a church on Ramparts Street lit up by nekkid women holding candles. They had a nekkid pope, too, and the bishops were nekkid, and a bunch of nasty nekkid cops. I swear. I’ve never seen nothin’ like it. They give me a bag of gold for the chick, but it turn to shit when the cats return me to the street. I swear.”
“Bamajan, I’ve seen you selling girls right in the square.”
“Just whores, Captain. I’m talking slaves here. There is great danger in the world now slavery’s back. I admit it. Tell you something else …” He had to throw the captain a bone. “You know the SMD over on Bourbon? Church of Messiah or something? They’ve been buying and they likes ’em young, just like the fuckin’ perverts.”
Messi@ Page 29