Messi@ (42 page)

It was dark inside Manteaux and Felicity didn't know how much time had passed. A streetlight swayed by the wind threw fantastic shadows into the shop. She had asked what her story was, and now, after darkness had fallen, the Albanian answered:

“A person without a story is a slave.”

Felicity tasted the bitter truth of his reply.

“I must be a slave, then. My name is Scheherazade, a slave.” She looked about the crowded shop, and it seemed to her that the African fetishes, the Indonesian temple doors, the Haitian voodoo flags, the reliquaria, the racks of priestly vestments, and the crude religious carvings were all the work of people with thousands of stories.

“Your name is … Scheherazade?” The fierce man was astonished. “Then you have a thousand and one stories!”

“That may be, but none of them are mine. So I am a slave. Are there other slaves here?”

“Our employees are not slaves. They are artists. Technically, they are relatives of the owner and work here voluntarily. Would you like to meet them?”

She didn't know if she did, but followed meekly when the Albanian guided her to the back of the shop. He pushed open a small door dwarfed by two impassive stone heads. It led into a dark cobblestoned courtyard lined with cubicles lit by oil lamps. Inside the cubicles, people were hunched over tables, working intently. Some were making collages with beads, wires, and broken bits of glass. Others painted gnarled crosses or nailed figures to them. Two young boys were lining a coffin with red silk. Very few tools were in evidence. Most of the work was being done by hand. The workers, even the adults, were small, and some had humps or misshapen limbs. No one looked up when Felicity peered into their cubicles.

“They look scared,” she whispered.

“They are. They believe that vampires will consume them if they don't work all the time making protective talismans.”

“They
are
slaves, then!”

“Perhaps.”

Felicity stood in the dim doorway of one cubicle and watched a little girl polish a small silver cross. She had soft, blond curls and sat on a stool in the form of a devil. The devil's red tongue stuck out of the seat between the girl's legs. A bare lightbulb hung over her head.

“What are you doing, child?” she asked.

In a flat voice the girl said, “This cross was found around the neck of a girl who jumped in the river and died. Her soul is locked in this cross. I'm making it ready for sale.”

Felicity turned to face her guide. “Child labor laws,” she said. “You are violating—”

She never finished. The Albanian took her by the shoulders and guided her into the cubicle. The child ran out. Felicity sat on the devil stool. It was wet, as if the girl had peed on it. A leaden weakness spiraled from her toes to her head. She picked up the silver cross. Light shot out of it, blinding her for a moment. When she could see again, she felt grateful to the man, as if he had restored her sight.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“That's right,” the Albanian said. “You will finish polishing it, and then I will bring you more work.”

After she polished the silver cross to perfection, Felicity was given a great number of crosses, with instructions on what to do with them. Some were black and had to be polished with lemon juice until they shone. They came from around the necks of corpses in graveyards. Other crosses were wooden and artistically carved. Felicity's job was to nail animal figurines to them. She nailed a frog to an ornate painted cross. She had little feeling as she worked. She was indifferent to anything but the repetitious movement of her hands. And she sang. She remembered many hymns, and as they filled her, she was no longer anxious.

When she finished nailing the frog, she picked up an old book sitting on a dusty shelf. It was called
The Proper Management of Subhumans
. It was a voodoo manual on how to manage zombies, what kind of labors they were suited to, how to present their work—even how to remove the slight whiff of the grave that inevitably attached itself to all they produced. Felicity knew that she wasn't a zombie. She wanted only to get to Tara and then, oh God, to the Dome. Her mind filled with the crystal wonder of that place. She heard the murmur of a spring, and the sweet singing filled the mild air. Dear God, please help me to the Dome. She saw the illuminated vaults of that place and the elevated stage on which the First Angels Choir stood. Arrayed before them in a dark amphitheater were loving people who had come from very far away to hear them sing. Among them were all her loved ones, whose faces and names she couldn't yet remember but who would reveal themselves fully when the sweetness of song awoke her mind. At that moment Jesus himself, enveloped in a robe of loving light, would descend from the heavens and enfold them all in love.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Wherein Andrea becomes a hero and Felicity finds employment

The BookAir jet crossed the dawn of the year 2000 for the sixth time, and only a few reading lights remained on. Even Ben, who had kissed her for three time zones and had soared with her through as many millennial crossroads, looked sleepy now,
Kabbalah
fallen at his feet. Andrea's senses were keen, though, as if everyone's sleep were tonic and she had somehow been appointed to keep watch over the flight. She looked around at her fellow creatures made defenseless by sleep, and felt their fragility. But at that moment, a bolt of sheer panic tightened her chest.

Something distressing was about to unfold on the plane. She reviewed all that had happened since boarding. Except for the moment of mass orgasm, there had been only a pronounced uneventfulness, but this was it, precisely. In Sarajevo, the advent of severe bombardment began with just such deep uneventfulness. She knew this quiet well.

Andrea turned on the reading light above her seat and looked at herself in her compact mirror. A very worried Andrea looked back at her. “What's the matter?” she asked. In response, her mirror face seemed to change: her eyebrows became thicker, her lips became more red, her chin sharpened, and her hair turned very black and shiny. She looked like someone she had never met, though still familiar.

A barely perceptible scent of perfume mixed with frightened sweat wafted her way, and Andrea had an irresistible urge to see the face of the veiled woman two seats away. She squeezed past the fat man, who woke up and took the opportunity to touch her bottom with three fat fingers. Andrea could have caused his fingers to fall off but she didn't want to break her concentration.

The woman was caressing a very thick book, which lay flat on her lap. It bore the gold-lettered Arabic for
Quran
on the cover, had an opening at the top, and was filled with what looked like wet clay. The woman was not reading. The woman's fingers were busy inside the opening. A yellow wire came out of the book and went up under her veil. Andrea reached out suddenly and pulled down the black veil. Her face was the face Andrea had seen in the mirror. The woman looked up, startled, and let go of the wire she had been holding between her teeth.

Andrea stood stock-still as the Iranian's gaze changed from surprise to fury. Andrea took hold of the yellow wire and pulled it slowly out from the doughy interior of the book. An expression of horror covered the woman's face. Andrea knew then that the book was a bomb and the woman was expecting it to explode. But nothing happened.

The fat man and the Bible boy became aware now of the unfolding drama. They watched Andrea's hand pull out the endless wire as if the whole world depended on it. And in fact, it did—their world, anyway.

When the wire came out of the bomb completely, everyone, even the terrorist, let their breath out. After that, pandemonium broke out. The fat man took hold of the terrorist's arms—and began bellowing at her in Farsi. The young missionary took the book from her lap and held it at arm's length as if it were the snake of original sin. Ben shielded Andrea by cradling her head to his chest. A stewardess tied the terrorist's arms behind her back with a scarf. The captain came out and personally placed the woman under arrest. The black bomb-book was carefully removed to the tail of the plane and shut in the food freezer.

As soon as the terrorist was locked in the first-class toilet, Andrea was mobbed. The elderly couple kissed her hands until she wrenched them away. The fat man took a wad of currency out of his briefcase and insisted that she put it in her bag. The captain shook her hand, then hugged her. The second officer hugged her, too. The captain tried to write down the correct spelling of her name, and asked her nationality. This was sticky—she was known to at least three other passengers as Basque or Ukrainian or American.

“Call me Andrea, from Jerusalem,” she said coyly.

The captain radioed air control in Atlanta that an angel named Andrea had saved BookAir flight 459 from destruction, and the news was picked up at the same instant by a weather helicopter, which relayed it to ABC News, which interrupted programming immediately. Less than five minutes after Andrea had disarmed the bomb, all the major networks and the Internet were instantaneously broadcasting what they were already calling the “millennial miracle.” Within ten minutes, the president of the United States broke away from New Year revelry to congratulate the Israeli girl hero. The Israeli prime minister and the heads of state of Great Britain, Japan, and Russia called within minutes.

Reed Sharpless, the producer, wrote so many different contracts that he used up all the napkins on the plane. Andrea refused to sign any of them.

“The movie!” he begged her. “The movie of your life!”

Which life? “No movie, Mr. Reed.”

Ben held her hand tightly, sending long arrows of love up her arms. He didn't speak at all.

It took a long time for the excitement to die down. They left her alone only when she pretended to sleep. She shut her eyes and felt the uncomfortable squirming of a shapeless creature inside her. It was a kind of baby, only it wasn't. She was beginning to give birth to herself.

America appeared from behind a cloud.

Shielding the flame of a taper, the Albanian led Felicity to a vaulted room behind the building. Her fellow “artists” sat on three-legged stools at a long table. Felicity sat and slurped a bowl of thick seafood gumbo, brought in a large aluminum pot by two deliverymen.

The Albanian lectured as they ate. “It is important to let words flow out of you while you work. When you feel them coming on, write them on your work. Let the entities speak through you, let the Language Crystal illuminate your labors.”

He held up as a good example of this technique a collage of Aztec heads on a map of a provincial Roman capital, across which the artist had inscribed in a jerky hand a string of blasphemies. The author of this work, a toothless wretch in yellow pajamas seated next to Felicity, beamed with pride and let out a hiss of foul breath.

Bare mattresses were propped against the walls. After the meal, two girls with dirty, matted hair pulled down the mattresses. Obediently, everyone lay down. Felicity curled up on one and watched the darkness in the dormitory. Her fellow slaves made small, sad noises, timid coughs and sighs, and settled quickly into sleep. Felicity was as empty as air.

She fell quickly asleep and woke up inside a dream more vivid than her waking life. Tesla's giant planetarium surrounded her, and though she knew that it had a beginning and an end, its dimensions were so far beyond her comprehension it might as well have been infinite. Within a circle of azure blossoms there was a section that was behaving very oddly. Felicity was herself part of the misbehaving section; every time she lifted her arm a web of connexions vibrated throughout the section and through the green machine itself. She was free to move, but each step she took initiated vibrations in the vegetation. She dove headfirst from a clay cliff into a blue lake and was able to set the green machine in motion both in the air and in the water. At the bottom of the lake a blindfolded man was playing the piano. Colored musical fish were swimming around his head. A rabbi sat on the piano singing a song. She swam to join them, but an octopus gripped her with all his arms and began to pull her back to the surface. Felicity struggled to no avail. She realized that the lake was itself a being, a blue and loving being that she would eventually return to.

When she surfaced, a fat man dressed in a military uniform, wearing her father's face, handed her a fluffy black towel and said:

“Our sector is malfunctioning. The chlorophyll reactor is considering neutralizing us in order to keep functioning. There is only one solution to saving the sector, and it appears that, because of some biochemical combination, you contain it. There isn't much time left, so I beseech you to dream this solution pronto.”

“Daddy!” Felicity was overjoyed. She lifted her still-damp arms in the air to show him her lithe young body and her dark-haloed breasts. “What's wrong with the big machine, Daddy? I don't think that there is anything wrong with it!” She stepped forward and threw her arms around him.

Her arms met only air as the man with the daddy face took a step backward. He was displeased.

“You must dream the solution right away! The entire sector, present and past, is watching you.”

Now Felicity felt self-conscious about her nakedness. She crossed her arms in front of her breasts and insisted sullenly: “What's wrong with the big machine, Daddy?”

“Our sector is moving either too fast or in the opposite direction from the chlorophyll wave. We must recover the right speed.”

Felicity could hear the footsteps of the man with the daddy face moving away from her. She was alone. She lay on her back on the water of the lake and looked at the stars. Of course she had the solution. She would give them their solution, she thought sadly. They can fix their stupid flower engine, but as for herself she would try to get outside of it somehow.

Felicity put her hand through her chest and took out her heart. It was pulsing red, and a rose light emanated from it. She handed it to whoever was ready to receive it, but at that moment she felt a large palm over her mouth. Her heart leapt back into her chest, and Felicity woke up to stare into the black eyes of the Albanian.