Messi@ (37 page)

Another student snatched the pamphlet and read out loud, but without drowning Felicity's singing: “‘The Rapture is the immediate departure from this earth of over four million people in less than a fifth of a second. It is going to disrupt communications and transportation like no major war has done in the last hundred years.'”

“That's right!” shouted the one-shoed woman. “Everyone else is going to hell, you and all the babies born before Jesus came.”

“I guess I'm going to hell,” the drunk said doubtfully. “It says here, ‘Whatever you do, DON'T MAKE ANY MARKS OR PRINTS ON YOUR FOREHEAD OR ON YOUR HANDS. This will not only give you leprosy eventually but will also guarantee you an eternity in the Lake of Fire for participating in Satan worship. A number connected with the number six-six-six will be attached to your Social Security number and to all your credit card numbers, and eventually you will have to show by electronic devices this number imprinted on your hand or on your forehead.'”

“Huh? What the hell does that mean?” wondered his friend.

“Don't get tattooed, I guess. Well, it's too late!”

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining.

It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth!

Long lay the world, in sin and error pining,

Till he appear'd, and the soul felt its worth.

“‘Your only chance of being saved after the Rapture,'” read the student to his fellows, “‘is to either starve to death or to get your HEAD CUT OFF'? Shit, that'll be tomorrow. I always feel like that in the morning.”

The one-shoed evangelist was ecstatic. “Yeah, yeah. Sing, angel, sing.” White bubbles appeared at the corners of her mouth.

“What's wrong with being fucked to death?” another student wanted to know.

Such scenes have a life of their own. A nest of Shades appeared, led by a Rasta man who preached to them as they fanned over the street: “The store of love, mon, the store of love is open, mon. The stocks are low in the store of love, mon. Them no selling love in the store of love, mon. Gotta put something on the shelves of the store of love, mon!”

One of the Shades shouted at a gawking tourist, “What you starin' at, man? These is the mysteries of New Orleans! Invest in the future! We need a po'boy!”

A big crowd had gathered around the preachers, and Tesla was growing desperate. That cop would be along any minute now, and he would never have Felicity to himself for even an hour. Desperate measures were called for. Tesla reached for his radio tool. A high pitch, like the agony of a dying animal, rose from his hand and broke into Felicity's song, “We've a story to tell to the nations …” But the word “nations” was never heard. The agonized pitch filled the air instead, and the revelers fell back, clutching their ears in terror.

Felicity looked about to faint. Tesla scooped her up by her waist, set her atop his shopping cart, and pushed her through the swaying crowd. He began to run as soon as they reached the corner of Dumaine, but as fewer and fewer people were to be seen, he slowed down. Atop the mound of his possessions, Felicity looked blank. She felt neither happy nor sad, but she was empty of song and felt indifferent.

When they passed the Ursuline convent, a crowd was dancing in the courtyard to the sounds of an R&B band. Tesla had heard on the street what the occasion was, and he explained it to Felicity:

“Bill Gates, the software tycoon, rented the convent for a Christmas Eve party to showcase his version of the afterlife, www.afterlife.com. The people dancing in there are actually attending funerals at virtual cemeteries all over the world. The real mourners see these people's avatars looking somber and subdued, but as you can see, they are far from it. On the other hand, the dead, whose funerals are taking place, have been virtually revived and are present at this party. Their avatars are dancing while their bodies are being buried. They say that this Gates sets up demonstrations like this at many holy places around the world.”

Tesla did not tell her that his informant had also told him that “the people who formerly worshiped in those holy places shake with anger at this technocratic assault on their beliefs, and their shaking goes into cats, which then attack people while they sleep. These cats must be strangled with bare hands when they approach, or else they kill one, body and soul.” Tesla found this sort of thing reassuring but he didn't know if Felicity could understand.

In any case, only part of this explanation reached Felicity.

Watching her perched like a queen atop his cart, Tesla thought that her stillness resembled a condition he had experienced in his first human life, a form of hypnotic seizure induced by flickering light. In this state, Tesla was extremely receptive but incapable of speech. He had seen his greatest inventions fully developed during such trances. After an episode he would sometimes remain mute for several days. Tesla thought he recognized his disease in Felicity, and this endeared her to him even more. She is my sister, he decided. Definitely the magnet's missing piece.

He pushed his cart furiously at the edge of the Quarter, to the warehouse by the river. The crumbling building looked abandoned, but inside was a different story. The vast space that had once held bales of cotton bound for the East Coast and Europe now housed a complex greenhouse. Flowering tubs, pots, and trees, captured by Tesla's shopping-cart army, sprouted on every square inch. Vines intertwined in complex patterns from ceiling to floor, running the length of the building. The jungle flowed toward an opening in the wall, where Felicity could see shafts of light through the foliage. Felicity inhaled the rich and richly perfumed air and felt suddenly as if the vast floral interior started reaching in to take root in her.

Tesla led Felicity to a hammock inside the maze and pointed to the fuchsia clusters hanging above. He explained, “Those are vanilla flowers; they aid sleep.”

Responding to the questioning plea in her eyes, Tesla continued: “You are inside a chlorophyll propulsion reactor. This greenhouse produces chlorophyll propulsion, a force I will shortly be testing. The plants are arranged in patterns that combine their various energies to produce the active chlorophyll stored in the node over there.” He pointed to the opening. “The warehouse is a multipurpose object. Its primary objective is to clean up that marvelous river before they send Twain down. He'd never get over it.”

“What river?” asked Felicity.

“Why, the Mississippi, of course.” Tesla was astonished. What had they done to her? In his haste to impress her by his chivalry and skill, he had neglected to ask her some elementary questions.

“What is your name?”

“Scheherazade,” Felicity said immediately. She liked this man. Cleaning up a river was work pleasing to God. But where was Tara? She missed her sisters and her singing.

“Are you an incarnate Mind?” Tesla's favorite book in his earthly life had been the
Thousand and One Nights
. In heaven he'd missed reading, even though he could meet any writer he wished, from any era of history. Information was also bountiful in heaven because angels were libraries. All one had to do is stop one of the myriad of these creatures and find out anything instantly. The abundance of riches had so bored him, he had dedicated his eternity to playing cards. He didn't think Felicity was an incarnate Mind, but her name had the ring of one.

“When do we go to Tara? I want to sing. Where is Joan? Amelia? When do they arrive?”

Whoever the creature was, she had been set on a narrow track. Tesla decided to finish explaining the purpose of the green machine, hoping to surprise her with the grandeur of his conception. Perhaps she was bored.

“The second mission of the chlorophyll propulsion reactor is to change the earth's magnetic field and to set it spinning the other way.”

He waited for her to ask why, but when she didn't he went on.

“When the magnetic field is disturbed, all our ideas will change. What now appears urgent will seem quite unnecessary, and vice versa. A certain balance should be restored.”

“The river,” said Felicity, showing a spark of interest. “How can you clean the river?”

“The process requires stopping the chemical industry along the lower Mississippi,” Tesla explained. “I will be using the river to conduct chlorophyll waves, which are similar to electricity. The river will become a live wire that will neutralize anything connected to it by metals. Using a similar machine, propelled by magnetic waves, I once produced lightning flashes measuring one hundred and thirty-five feet, from a distance of twenty-five miles. The chlorophyll currents will produce photokinetic ionization that will purify the water. The photosynthesis component …”

Felicity lay back on a canvas cot and closed her eyes. Everyone, it seemed, had a plan. She had none. She only wanted to sing the Lord's songs. She was tired. Tomorrow was the birthday of her Savior, Jesus Christ. Tomorrow, he was going to be born again in a stable to renew humanity's hope. The huge warehouse hummed around her with the breath of a million vegetal mouths. Behind her eyelids was a weary emptiness, a desert in which flowers were sinking sharp claws. It wasn't sleep, but it looked like sleep to Nikola Tesla, so he discontinued his explanation and let her rest.

The thick vines led the energy of the greenhouse into the ground-level hole in the wall and continued down to the Mississippi River. Tesla looked through it and admired again the wide-bodied stream that told the story of America. Felicity was a crucial part of his living monster. Her sleeping form was adjusting to a symbiotic relation with the vegetation, in order to eventually become the main circuit breaker. It occurred to Tesla to take a shadowgraph to see if she was human or an incarnate Mind, but then he banished the naughty thought. She was clearly human, as her humidity index, with its attending emotional weather, clearly showed. Tesla put away the humidity index tester and went about watering, fertilizing, talking to leaves and flowers, whistling, and rubbing sweet-olive into his hair, until he fell asleep.

Christmas 1999, a milky day, dawned. Felicity could hear barges making their way upriver. A foghorn sounded. She opened her eyes and beheld the anchorite asleep upright in a chair, with his left hand on a length of humming wisteria vine. She got up cautiously, feeling light as a feather. She floated out the warehouse door and looked around. The air off the river was rich, wet, muddy, streaked with smells of fish and gasoline. She was alone, sad, uprooted, without memory, and no longer free in song, yet she felt joy. Today in Bethelehem the Christ Child brought light to the world, and that light hadn't died. She did not notice the flow of green molecules stretching behind her like a dazzling viridian train.

Chapter Twenty-three

Wherein angel Zack takes a poll

Angel Zack sat on a plume of smoke above Brennan's Restaurant and surveyed the Great Minds he had been given in keeping, for the purpose of assessing their opinions of the world. The reflections of the Minds were to be taken as yes and no votes for an eventual decision on the disposition of the planet. “All this ‘assessing' and ‘eventual'!” snarled Zack. “Nothing but bureaucracy and more bureaucracy! Ah, for a taste of old God the Father, swift decision maker, scourger of worlds, incinerator of lip givers! Democracy, my putti popo!”

Einstein flexed his tattooed biceps, zipped up his tight black jeans, and tucked them into scuffed Tony Lamas. He had just finished offering his new body to a customer inside a peep-show booth at Adult Videos on Bourbon Street and was $20 richer. He surveyed the tawdry surroundings the ironic heavens had cast him in and concluded: Humanity's continuing need for psychological degradation is a revolt against the demands of machinery, and it makes art necessary. Therefore the planet is still a very interesting place, and it ought to be preserved until the last hustler on Bourbon Street and the last showgirl on Place Pigalle die of boredom.

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!