The girl by the empty pool had vanished later that afternoon. He had looked for her through all the subsequent trials of his ministry and his rise to glory but had found only coarse copies. But she was never far from his mind. He conducted a daily dialogue with her, even as he perfected the singing that had such power over lost souls. She spoke with him from the front seat of his Caddy. Seated there with her legs forever crossed under her, her school skirt riding to just about the dimples of her ass, she regarded him with eagerness. She absorbed his wisdom, savoring his plans, shifting only now and then to give him a thrill of girlish revelation. She answered his questions, too, like a schoolgirl who hasn’t studied but wants to please. Now and then she teased him with a question that was much too innocent to be truthful, so that he had to upbraid her. He slapped her firm butt with his open palm hard enough for the imprint to glow there like a neon sign. Pursuing the quiet where he could mentally converse with her, he had not, however, given up trying to find the flesh-and-blood child. He followed leads and pursued signs.
But now that image of obedient original purity was mixed up in his mind with Felicity’s angry face.
From his phone car, the reverend called his captains, one by one, and received reports about the preparations at the Dome. He instructed them also to put the techies on double shifts the very next day. The day of reckoning was not far. He looked at the oil refineries and chemical factories flashing past his window, and blessed their molten innards. He could taste the salt of the Dome, which had long ago impregnated his pores. Those whom Jesus had called the salt of the earth would be the first to go, lambs to the slaughter. But they would also be the first to be resurrected. He found neither regret nor fear in his heart, only a burning desire to see the End.
The car phone rang and the call Mullin had been waiting for came. But it wasn’t what he expected. His Bamajans hadn’t yet captured the girl. Felicity had hired out as a stripper at a French Quarter club. The place was packed every hour of the day and night. The operation was risky.
Mullin shouted into the receiver: “It’s the Lord’s work, you worthless piece of shit!”
The voice on the other end made another objection but didn’t finish before the reverend thundered: “Bring every fucking one of them! All the fucking johns and strippers! We’re sure to put them to some use! Move the fucking building if you have to!”
He threw the cellular down and leaned back to watch the ribbon of asphalt that was suddenly sparkling with good tidings. It was going to be one hell of a party, forgive me, Jesus.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Wherein Felicity and Andrea are brought together in the city of New Orleans
The Columns Hotel was a magnolia-scented, bourbon-soaked flop house on Saint Charles Avenue, filled to the rafters with Ben Redman’s past. A magnificent great oak spread its branches over the white columns in front of the terrace, where night after night, young and profligate New Orleanians drank the night away. The ornate front door gave onto a foyer guarded by statues of Edwardian Moors with flower vases atop their heads. In the grand ballroom, to the left of the entrance, standing solemnly in front of a piano and before an open window facing Saint Charles Avenue, high school boy Ben was lovingly sucked off by a debutante and distant relative named Susan, whose silvery gown split its sides when he came. Best of all, once upon a time Ben Redman had hid here in the Columns in illicit bliss with his girlfriend Felicity, who escaped from the dorm for days at a time.
The grand staircase curved upward past two plaster satyrs bathed by the colors of a pre-Raphaelite stained glass window. Ben pointed it out to Andrea even as he greeted his old friend Rita, the desk clerk, who had seen everything and was shocked by nothing, most of the time. This time, however, her practiced cool crumbled and she opened her mouth wide in surprise. A nun and a rabbi going up for a quickie! She didn’t recognize Ben under his curls.
When she did, she lit a cigarette, “Why, Mr. Ben!”
Every room but one housed revelers from the passing-of-the-millennium party that, Rita explained, “had to be the Columns’ personal highest.” The still-vacant room had been reserved by the proprietor’s son, but it seemed that his trysting had taken him elsewhere. She gave them the key.
Above the four-poster bed in Room 14 hung an English hunting scene in which the hunted were actually disheveled damsels. The mini chandelier cast a rose light over the bed.
Andrea flung her shoes to the far ends of the room, and then she removed the nun’s gray habit. She wore nothing underneath, and Ben was shocked by the long whiteness of her girlish body, with the soft stamp of pubic hair sketched lightly below her navel. Andrea laughed and held the upturned pears of her breasts to Ben in both hands like offerings. He kissed her nipples, and the taste of her warmth lingered on his lips for a long, liquid minute.
Andrea grabbed the square of Ivory soap and the tiny threadbare towel hanging above the sink, and went to the communal bathroom in the hall to take a shower.
On the nightstand next to the bed, Ben aligned his prayer book and his notebook. He lay his fountain pen on top of them. From his wallet he removed a pink condom that probably dated back to the last time he’d been at the Columns with Felicity. He put it under the pillow. He then proceeded to undress, socks off first, until he stood in his underpants. He studied himself in the mirror and raked his fingers through his curly hair. He then lay on his back on the bed with his arms under his head. He thought of Andrea walking in, smelling fresh and humid from the shower, and got dressed, put away the pen, the notebook, the prayer book, and the condom, trying to formulate an explanation for his fear.
Rabbi Joseph (thirteenth century) visualized the very shapes of the letters inscribed in the Torah scrolls as a sexual embrace between God and Shekinah, the female principle. In this blessed system, the Hebrew letter yod, sign of circumcision, became the phallus of the king; the letter zayin, an extended yod, the phallus as it was about to be received by the letter chet—which Rabbi Joseph urged his disciples to visualize as “the Matrona whose legs are spread to receive the zayin.” Since all human activity has its divine counterpart, he argued, the kabbalist’s selfless “reunification” efforts on earth would restore wholeness to the universe. This meditation failed to explain away Ben’s fear.
Andrea returned from the shower pink and new, wrapped only in her skimpy towel. She took one look at his lugubrious figure lying on the bed and guessed immediately that her boy was being tormented by religion.
“Hand me a shirt, will you?”
Ben didn’t budge, so Andrea reached over him and grabbed his duffel bag. She rummaged in there until she found a blue work shirt. After she put it on, Ben took her wrist.
“Try to understand.”
“Okay,” she said. “I do. I’m not upset.”
“It’s religion. It takes it away from you.”
“I know. It’s religion, it’s the town of your birth. I like them all, I like everything.”
“It’s all religion,” Ben said stubbornly.
“I’m starved.” Andrea sat cross-legged on the bed and shook her damp head, spraying the despondent rabbi.
Ben went downstairs to the bar, returned with two bourbons and a plate of étouffée, left over from the New Year’s party. They drank and ate quietly, and then lay side by side like corpses on the lumpy bed that Ben had imagined was meant for love. But Andrea was perfectly and happily indifferent. They spiraled down into sleep.
Ben dreamed that he was floating down into a well full of solemn birds that stared at him as as he sank farther and farther down. At the bottom of the well was a flat plain crossed by the straight line of an infinite railroad track. Men in monks’ robes and Puritans’ capes stood on a hill above the track with arms full of books they had decided must be destroyed. They dropped them into the open cars of a passing train. When one of the wagons filled up, the books burst into flames. Running alongside the train was Felicity, grabbing as many books as she could. Suddenly, she wasn’t running alongside
the train but in front of it. She looked in imminent danger of being run over. Ben saw clearly the cover of one of the books she was holding: it was Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah. The title was written in gold on the black leather binding. He shouted to warn her: “Felicity! Look out!”
They were waked on the second day of the year 2000 by riotous birds in the azalea bushes below the window. A mockingbird that had lived at the Columns a long time sang the sounds of lovemaking—and of creaking doors, smokers’ coughs, and flushing toilets.
Andrea turned to Ben, still sleepy, then turned away to sleep some more. She slept for another hour, which Ben spent thinking about Felicity, whose presence he sensed close by but out of focus somehow. It filled him with anxiety. He had to call her as soon as possible. He had her grandmother’s and her uncle’s telephone numbers. And then, of course, he had to, sometime, call his own family, which was by now doubtless tearing out its collective hair. Ben had called only once, one day before leaving Jerusalem.
They had coffee and chicory for breakfast.
“Today we are going to meet my parents,” announced Ben.
“I want to explore the city,” announced Andrea. “I want to walk everywhere by myself. I can meet your parents later.” She put on Ben’s blue work shirt and wiggled into a pair of his jeans.
Ben argued against this, but Andrea had made up her mind. He gave her instructions in the use of the streetcar, and a few dollars, and pointed her in the direction of the French Quarter, with stern instructions to return by lunchtime, when they would go to meet his parents.
Lunchtime came and went. Andrea had not returned.
I will not panic, he told himself. He called his parents, assured them that they were safe, and told them that Andrea’s notoriety made it necessary to remain in hiding for a time.
“Why should she hide?” exclaimed his mother. “She stopped a bomb. She should be on TV, like everybody else this heroic.”
“It’s a Basque thing, Mother. You wouldn’t understand.”
After this nerve-wracking call, Ben set down to wait. His efforts at reading were in vain. Everything seemed vague except for a small flame that contained Andrea’s face like an old-fashioned miniature. She was the only focused image inside him. His parents and his city were large, amorphous shapes that floated aimlessly around.
At three, when there was still no Andrea, he decided to look for her.
Where do you begin looking in the city that care forgot but whose patron saint is Joan of Arc? In the city of aboveground tombs and countless dives? Ben groaned thinking about just what kind of impression the vulnerable orphan might make in the smoky hells of nighttime New Orleans. Only he knew how innocent Andrea really was. She might be introduced to heroin, cocaine, and the jazzy variety of oral sex favored by trumpet players, before being sold to a pimp who’d put her to work on a street corner before selling her again.
On the streetcar going downtown, Ben studied the familiar faces of New Orleanians. His landsmen, black and white, looked worried. Their faces and foreheads were lined, there were circles under their eyes, and their hands tightly clutched their belongings. They stared out the open windows, looking alone in the universe. These millennial humans appeared vampirized.
Andrea got off the streetcar where it turned onto Canal Street, and immediately sensations assaulted her, making her skin tingle as if she had been lowered in a bath of salts. A group of black women dressed in white stood on the neutral ground singing so powerfully that leaves and dust swirled about them. A cart with balloons and wind chimes gave off an intense chocolate smell. Two men clad in long leather coats held hands watching a policeman on a black horse. A bus stopped abruptly halfway through the intersection—its destination was written in lights and alternated, flickering Desire, then Cemeteries, then Desire, then Cemeteries again. Above her head, the high-rise hotels and the stores sported billboards greeting year 2000.
A street preacher accosted Felicity. He had gold teeth and wore a white hat. He addressed her loudly through a microphone attached to a speaker he carried on his back.
“Look,” he proclaimed, “Louisiana is gone! and Florida and Texas, too! Three things I now know. Armageddon has begun. The United Nations invaded the United States of America. At Saucier, Mississippi, Gulfport, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana, there are battalions of foreign troops waiting for word from the assassin of President Kennedy, who lives in New Orleans and who is, let me tell you, an acquaintance of mine! For such is the world now, black and white all mixed up, devils riding on the backs of angels! Massing for invasion! They will cause a great ball of fire that will ignite the Gulf Coast and the lower Mississippi! But fear not, girl! You will be taken under my wing, and with Jesus in your heart, God willing, you will bypass the End. Our chambers are being furnished for the return of Christ. But first we must kill the Antichrist! The UFO that’s crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, has been repaired. The Antichrist is on board! Thousands of alien babies brought forth by human mothers are gathering in the French Quarter to welcome the repaired vessel, which is on its way even as we speak.”
The preacher took a step forward and exhaled painfully bad breath, ready to pounce on her. But just as he was about to lay his sweaty palm on her shoulder, another hand took her arm and drew her gently away. It was a tall boy with glasses, who looked no older than sixteen.
Andrea was quite willing to be led. “Who are you?”
“Bamajan Michael.” He explained that he was a recruiter for the School for Messiah Development, an institute dedicated to finding people with Messiah-attendance potential. He had been instructed to find souls, and he’d been at it for a week. So far he had been wholly unsuccessful.
“Messiah attendance? Like holding a towel for God?”
The boy smiled. “There is so much you don’t know. For instance, I might have a Ph.D. in molecular physics.”
“So? I might have a degree in psychology, and I might say you are nuts.”
“Well, I would say that I am a priest in training of the Division of the Cosmic Egg of the Apocalypse. My supreme teacher has studied all the religions of the world and synthesized them. He has said that the cracking of the Cosmic Egg is imminent. The Messiah comes soon!”
“Who is your teacher?” Andrea asked. “And why is he cracking eggs?”
The boy explained that the supreme teacher had told his followers: “From the holy city of Jerusalem to the fleshpots of New Orleans is a long, jagged line. Few trod it without perishing. It is said, by those who know, that only one made of equal parts flesh and spirit might one day walk the jagged line. The One has come.”
“That’s interesting,” said Andrea. “I just came from … Australia. My parents were killed by Aborigines several years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” said the boy urgently, not quite hearing her. “We have to go to SMD right away. I haven’t been there in so long I might have been stricken from the recruiters’ ranks!”
As they walked, he told her that thousands of trainees had been working to welcome the Messiah. The trainees were instructed by highly skilled Bamajans. The most privileged were females, chosen to be in the First Angels Choir, who would welcome the Messiah and assist in the birth of a new world.
Andrea wanted to believe him—it all sounded quite beautiful.
“Bamajan … sounds like a Jamaican potato dish,” she said.
The boy tilted back his head, gazing heavenward, as if asking Jesus to help him with this irreverent candidate.
He looks like he wants to be kissed, thought Andrea.
Bamajan Michael led on, and on Bourbon Street they stopped in front of a building that was cordoned off by police. Yellow tape that said CRIME SCENE was stretched across the sidewalk. An angry policeman paced back and forth. He looked to Andrea like a statue of Dante she had once seen in a museum.
“Oh, my God,” said the boy. “What happened?”
A street person seated on a stoop spit in the general direction of the building. “The freaks fled
the coop. Cops found a couple of fresh stiffs inside. Reading only a bit of Anton Chekhov’s stories might have saved them all the embarrassment—are you familiar with the manner of Anton Chekhov’s death?”
The boy let go of Andrea’s arm and walked away.
Andrea wandered, looking in shop windows. She was hungry. People shouted and whistled, and firecrackers exploded at her feet. From the open door of a smoky bar, a bare-breasted girl wearing a feather mask called out to her:
“Hey, skinny. You look like you need a Whopper with fries. Come on in—make a decent wage. Put some tits on you.”
“Okay,” said Andrea. She went in.
“Good move,” said Sylvia. “Welcome to Desire, Limited. And ‘Limited,’ which means ‘limited,’ ain’t no joke!”
The dark interior was lit by Christmas lights strung around the mirrored stage. Andrea stepped carefully to a booth and lowered herself onto the slashed vinyl seat.
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