Messi@

by Andrei Codrescu

  “What do they do with them?”

  “That’s it, man. Nobody fucks them. They make ’em sing.”

  “Who’s the boss over there?”

  “The devil, I think. But word is that TV preacher Elvis owns it. They say he owns strip joints too. One twisted motherfucker.”

  Mullin was becoming careless, and his vices were beginning to get on the major’s nerves. He had too many businesses, indulged too many private fantasies. But Mullin certainly wouldn’t risk holding Felicity in the heart of the Quarter with a bunch of brainwashed chorus girls. Even he wouldn’t be that stupid.

  “You got any letters, man?” asked Bamajan.

  The major tried not to reveal his confusion. What letters? A new kind of drug? He doubted if Bamajan was asking him about his schooling. Then he remembered that lately he’d seen people with letters tattooed on them. Not just Shades. Men in suits, housewives. They were everywhere. The bartender at Molly’s had an O on his forehead and an M on his chest.

  “Not really,” he said cautiously.

  “That’s good.” Bamajan whispered. “The letter peoples is multiplying. They waitin’ for the day when they gonna line up and make up a sentence dictated by the devil. I seen the devil … He’s fixin’ to speak! The slaves are food.”

  Notz was growing impatient with the man’s raving.

  “We’re going to take a little trip to your place. I think you need your medication.”

  Conflicting impulses tugged at the musician. He needed to get away to do some looking for Felicity on his own. He wanted to know what this soldier knew about him. He also felt the need for a little fix.

  The flophouse on Saint Charles had seen better days. Dark molding and the grand staircase remained from its former life as the residence of a rubber baron. The rooms had rickety doors with big black numbers painted on them. On the second floor, No. 17 was unlocked. Inside was a white iron bed, a small desk, and an overstuffed chair piled high with clothes and shoes. The floor and the bed were buried under newspapers, more clothes, parts of musical instruments, and pictures cut out of magazines. A stench of half-eaten cans of cat food was mixed with the odor of rotting oranges.

  “I feed the hotel cat His name’s Aspirin,” apologized Bamajan. “That’s his stuff.” He pointed under the desk, where a scratch post shared space with a kitty tray. On cue, Aspirin came in through the open window. He was a large, ragged, one-eyed striped tomcat with a no-nonsense manner. He leapt up on the desk over his stuff.

  “You two talk,” said Bamajan. “I’ll be back.”

  Leaving the door open, he headed for what the major suspected was the hallway bathroom.

  When he tried to pat Aspirin, the cat bristled.

  “You sinister demon! How’s this grab you?” The major picked up a high-heeled shoe from the floor. Aspirin flew to the windowsill, arched his back, and hissed. Notz inspected the mess on the desk: a dirty black T-shirt, a torn paperback of The Prophecies of Nostradamus, a cardboard pizza box with a petrified slice still in it, sheet music, a pile of photographs. Standing in front of Café Istambul with their arms around each other, two musicians grinned at the world. Miles and Bamajan. The major sighed. So that’s how it was.

  Bamajan came back high. His eyes shone as he headed for the bed. He had taken off his pants, and a pair of skinny legs stuck out of a pair of striped shorts, open in front. There was something white in his hand. “My teeth,” he mumbled.

  The major looked at the pathetic figure on the bed. “You killed your best friend, didn’t you?”

  “No, man,” said Bamajan. “He got greedy. He lost his freedom, Soldier.” He closed his eyes.

  The major nodded sadly to the musician’s unconscious form. He sighed and removed a small gold-plated automatic from his side pocket and fitted on the silencer. He put the barrel against the musician’s temple and squeezed the trigger. A black-edged red rose opened in Bamajan’s head. A rose for Miles. Major Notz put the gun back in his pocket and lit a cigar.

  Grotten’s stank of beer and vomit—two stages of the same stink, really—and the connoisseur might easily discern the brand: Blackened Voodoo Apocalypse beer, the latest in a series. The pings and sighs of the poker machines tended to by hollow-eyed video-crack junkies made the air as holey as the noses, lips, and tongues of the studded clientele. The slashed leather stools had been re-covered many times. Trapped sweat and urine squished between the layers at every lurch.

  Under the excrescences of mucus, viscera, blood, and the traces of delirium tremens, there was wood. Grotten’s was the terminus for preinternable creatures, a screening room for the Hummingbird Hotel and Charity Hospital. Criminals, cops, retailers of every flavor, and underaged drinkers all used it for headquarters. On any given night, several novels’ worth of secondary characters slid or crawled through. For a quarter you could get a video-poker tan. For ten bucks, somebody’s mother. It was also the clearinghouse for everything that went down in the street.

  The late afternoon sun looked cautiously in and turned the scene, briefly, to gold. The television, always on, was blaring a special news bulletin. Special bulletins were as frequent nowadays as commercials. Earthquakes. Fires. Sieges. Self-immolation. Suicide bombings. Hostage taking. The clientele of Grotten’s paid no attention.

  Joe sat gingerly on the last stool at the end of the bar. Joe motioned to the bartender, Spike, who greeted the policeman with an ebullient “What the hell’s going on, Joe? I never heard anything like it.”

  Eight dope dealers had been killed in New Orleans over the holiday. Even in a city as blasé as the Big Easy, this was a bit much. They had each been shot at close range with a small-caliber gun. They had all been high when they were killed.

  Joe watched the television for a minute.

  Spike ground his half-smoked Optimo into the epidermal floor and explained that Grotten’s, in his opinion, would survive the End of the World for the simple reason that nobody inside the place would even know that the End had occurred.

  The special bulletin had to do with a young girl en route to the United States from Tel Aviv who had single-handedly defused a bomb carried on board the jetliner by an Iranian terrorist. The plane was expected to land at any moment at the Atlanta airport, where hundreds of reporters milled about waiting to interview the amazing young heroine.

  “Welcome to the New World,” said Spike. “They’ll freak the poor thing so bad she’ll shit. She might join an outfit like SMD just to get away from the fucking media!”

  “People.” Joe shook his head. “SMD. Haven’t heard of that one.”

  Spike explained: “Happiest place on earth. Girls only. They go in tone deaf and nymphomaniacal, start singing and acting modest. After a while they disappear. Word is they get distributed to harems in the Persian Gulf emirates. They get fucked while singing. Anything for oil. SMD is run by Exxon.”

  “Whoa!” said Joe. “I know this chain of thought. Give it up. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

  But SMD was news to him. It was amazing how much faster than the police the street telegraph was.

  “Tell you what, though,” said Spike. “Girl like that, wouldn’t mind dating her. Motherfucker comes up, she’d take him just like that. Defuse his bomb, har, har.”

  Like Felicity, Joe thought. Where the hell was she? He hadn’t come into Grotten’s to investigate the murders of drug-dealing slavers, as Spike had assumed. He was still looking for Felicity. Hopefully there was no connection between the killings and the girl. One of the murdered dealers was the musician Bamajan, who had been connected to Felicity through Miles. Joe found himself secretly cheering the vigilantes. After all, the dealers were scum. He only hoped that Felicity wasn’t caught in the middle of this underground war.

  The gate to the SMD quarters on Bourbon was wide open. Joe unsnapped the holster of his service revolver and climbed the staircase to the second story, where it became evident that the place had been vacated in a hurry. The floors were littered with papers and c
lothes. One large room stared at him with the empty eyes of computer screens. The cords had been ripped out of the wall and lay coiled all over the place like dead snakes. It looked like a school raided by a gang. Joe had seen a school like that once, in the projects. Scorched maps, broken desks. But this place gave him the creeps. This was no innocent place of learning.

  There was an odd smell of burnt leaves in the air, which Joe, a non-smoker, took a second to identify. The wake of an expensive cigar. Whoever the smoker was, he was already gone. He must have been there shortly before Joe and walked through the abandoned school slowly, long enough to leave this bitter smell behind. The smell waned as he followed it down a corridor bearing the inscription, THE LORD’S HANDS APARTMENTS. At the end of this hall was an iron staircase. Joe climbed it, opened the door there, and the cigar smell hit him as hard as if someone had blown it directly in his face. The smell was compounded by something sickening, like burning hair and frying grease. Joe took his gun out of the holster.

  The room was void of living presence, but lying facedown on the parquet floor in front of a school desk were the nude bodies of two men. One of them was covered with tattooed swastikas. The other was brown and had a round ass. Joe kneeled to examine the corpses and saw that the backs of the men’s necks bore fresh burns made with a cigar. But the cause of death in each case was the small-caliber bullet holes in the temple.

  “Jeezus Christ!” Joe exclaimed, recognizing the two nude prowlers he had busted at Felicity’s behest the night he had met her. “You two just can’t keep your clothes on.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Wherein we follow the passage of Andrea from the Old World to the New, while Felicity wanders in the desert of her own city

  The middle seat in the middle row was the worst seat on the old airbus. Andrea felt pinned there like a butterfly. On her left sat a huge man, a tower of flesh that spilled into her over the armrest between them. He wore a thick purple turban on his massive head. Andrea guessed that he was a merchant, a human abacus. He smelled like an old crocodile-skin wallet. The flesh of his thigh touched her like the sticky underside of a huge snail. She drew as far away from him as she could.

  Happily, Ben sat at her right hand, and he smelled like parsnips and iron. I am a spider, not a butterfly. Andrea put out a long sticky thread and wrapped Ben in her cocoon. Unaware that he’d just been cocooned, Ben got up and strolled forward toward the rest rooms. Andrea was left alone with the merchant, whom she imagined enthroned in a rattan chair, his rolls of fat quivering while veiled concubines massaged his obese toes. She had seen this in the old film Star Wars. She resolved to turn into a Gorgon, with a headful of hissing snakes, so that if he looked at her, he’d turn to stone.

  “Are you going home, young lady?” The man spoke in English.

  “Oh, no, kind sir. I am hoping that a distant relative will care for me in America. I am from Russia, from Saint Petersburg. Since our country broke up, things have gotten worse and worse. I was a member of the Komsomol, you understand.” Andrea invented breathlessly, not looking at the man.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “They went to Finland to work in an oil refinery. There was an explosion. After that …” Andrea hung her head and felt the fleshy monster’s humid orbs alight on her neck like two slugs on a cabbage leaf. The flesh of his thigh burned. Droplets of sweat burst from under his turban. In his pocket his hand clutched a fat roll of banknotes. Andrea saw through him as through a shop window. A chill crept through her. The man was a soul buyer. Souls, she knew, were for sale now by the ton; it was a buyer’s market. They were no longer sold by the gram or the ounce with pacts writ in flame as in the time of the hapless Dr. Faust. Today, Fausts by the thousands waited hat in hand for a man like this. When he finally spoke she had already guessed what he was going to say.

  “For the first few days, before you are settled, perhaps you would accept my hospitality. In Detroit, I own several buildings …”

  The fleshy monster opened his briefcase to extract a roll of mints, and Andrea saw stacks of banknotes from different countries, including Russian rubles.

  “You have so much strange money!” Andrea was sure now.

  “I own buildings in Detroit, Moscow, Kiev, and Tashkent. I take the rent money and fly to more cities to buy more buildings. I know it’s hard to believe, but I don’t have a place of my own. I am always flying.”

  He didn’t buy only buildings. He had just offered to buy her.

  “Oh, here is my fiancé,” she said as Ben returned to his seat. “He is very, very rich. But thank you, anyway.”

  Andrea craned her neck to see who was sitting to the left of the turbaned Satan. It was a veiled woman who snored. She exuded Calvin Klein Obsession and sweat, and her veil billowed with each snore like a sail. At her feet yawned a Gucci carry-on that Andrea imagined was full of cosmetics and romance novels.

  Next to the veiled woman sat a large, clean-cut American boy, reading a well-worn Bible. Andrea squeezed out of her seat toward the aisle. As she maneuvered past the American boy she pushed her lower lip forward and said with a pout, “God, I wish I’d brought my Bible! There is nothing to do for the next eleven million hours!” Her knee touched the pointy bone of the boy’s knee.

  Surprised, he lifted his cornflower blue gaze directly at her nipples, poking through her T-shirt hard as organ stops.

  “Well, this is it … the Bible. I mean, I read it. Since I seen the birthplace of our Lord it’s got new meanings. I’m in the United Ministries of Love.” He gestured toward the rest of the group, which was scattered throughout the plane. His earnest face showed concern for every penny sacrificed by those who’d saved to send him to the Holy Land.

  Andrea got a book called Insatiability from the bin labeled Novels, and returned to her seat. On the way back, she looked at the boy, leaving him the full promissory charge of her deep green eyes.

  The turbaned man, who’d watched the exchange with interest, said in a whisper: “Do not be deceived by their guileless faces. Their young bodies are strong and muscular, but it’s survivalist training. Their eyes are trained to spot fire, flood, annihilation signs. They are superalert to what they see as the devil’s agents—Jews, foreigners, liberals, commies, Negroes, Islamic people, atheists, multiculturalists, the FBI, the ATF, bankers, feminists. They live only for salvation, the Second Coming, the reward of Rapture. They believe in Jesus, UFOs, decency, honest banking, and their right to buy assault weapons.”

  Andrea looked astonished.

  “I was trained as a sociologist,” he explained modestly.

  Without waiting for any further reaction from her, he took a thick black book from his briefcase marked ACCOUNTS. He uncapped a Mont Blanc pen and set its gold nib to work on a new page.

  Andrea had a creepy feeling that he was entering a report on her into his book. It wasn’t a new feeling. It was partly the reason why she changed her story as often as possible. The world was peppered with file starters who could speak eloquently on any subject, who had university degrees in every field, who worked in every industry. No matter how seemingly benign, they were all police, which was to say, surveillance, arrest, camps, snapping dogs, cattle prods. Her parents were probably not dead at all; they had simply been shut inside a file inside a huge computer controlled by learned men who employed Orthodox priests, Iranian mullahs, and Christian missionaries to further their studies. Oh, stop, she told herself. You’re hungry and you have to pee. She felt a little-girl tantrum coming on. Ben had fallen asleep.

  Felicity stayed seven days at Tesla’s warehouse, helping him water, weed, trim, and pollinate. Sometimes she followed him to bars, where he emptied the video-poker machines using a system he had devised. One day she watched him play blackjack at the casino and win thousands of dollars. He bought exotic blooms with the money, and Felicity helped him load his shopping cart. At night she listened to the boats on the river and stretched like a cat, feeling green power flowing through her and bonding to
her cells.

  On New Year’s Eve 1999, Felicity strolled through the French Quarter in full view of tourists, freaks, shades, cops, barkers, hustlers. She was no longer wearing her white gown, but a man’s shirt and pants that Tesla had rummaged for her on the street. It was drizzling, and lights glowed from every window. The clip-clop of the mules pulling tourist carriages over the cobblestones was muted, as if someone had wrapped their hooves in cotton. Old men walked home in the mist with baguettes sticking out of their brown bags like phalluses. Black generals of a nonexistent African kingdom, resplendent in gold epaulets, brass buttons, silver braid, and chef’s hats, stood outlined in the doorways of restaurants, distributing menus to tourists. Mimes, tappers, and hustlers were at work in their customary spots on the sidewalks. And of course, the blue notes of a horn spilled from a recessed doorway.

  The shrimp Creole at Coop’s had been Felicity’s favorite. The peppers, tomatoes, and shrimp weren’t overcooked; you could taste the bay leaf; and they didn’t overdo the cayenne. Felicity knew this, but it was unconnected knowledge, like a piece of paper picked up by wind. She didn’t know what it had to do with her.

  Her senses were keen. She could smell fresh beignets and chicory coffee from Café du Monde; rosemary baked chicken from Irene’s; wet dog leading blind (and blind-drunk) beggar; crawfish and crab bisque out of Tujague’s; sweaty tourist; dry cumin, bay leaf, pepper, and prosciutto plus olive salad at the Progresso grocery; cigars and newsprint from Sidney’s Newsstand; mule shit; roasting coffee at Kaldi’s; vanilla-scented hooker, spent firecrackers, beer, rotting crawfish. By the time she walked the length of Decatur, she had worked up an appetite.

  In front of Dead Star Books, a crowd of cadaverous youth dressed in black crinoline waited sullenly for Angelique Risotto, the queen of gothic. Her novels of bloodsucking had a huge following of pale, listless death lovers. She owned lots of real estate, including numerous churches, behind which she garaged the hearses that took her to book signings. The release of a new book was typically celebrated by an appearance in a coffin carried by pallbearers, from which she would leap in a red wedding dress. Angelique was as huge as a whale, and many of her starved followers looked as if they’d been half eaten by Angelique. Felicity crossed the street to give them a wide berth.