Messi@ Read online

  “That’s true. It’s up to you to discover it. However”—the major raised a very fat and very long forefinger above the knife—“you have to begin training intellectually and emotionally.”

  Felicity gave a skeptical snort. “Right now I feel like shit. I used to think that one third of me was gone; now I’m sure there is only half.” She clicked her tongue stud against her teeth.

  The major disliked vulgarity. “Dirty words are potent. If you trivialize them by casual usage, you deprive yourself of a weapon. In your line of work you need every weapon you can get.”

  “Jesus Christ! Grandmère just died. My boyfriend overdosed a year ago almost to the day. My so-called profession has so far earned me about three hundred bucks a month. I took pictures of six guys getting … well, committing adultery in their ten-year-old cars, I found somebody’s dog, and I think I solved the great mystery of a twelve-year-old kid breaking into parking meters. If this is my great destiny, I think I’ll jump in the river and drown!”

  “Things always look darkest just ’fore dawn,” said the major. “As a matter of fact, there is a little job I would like you to do for me.”

  “Nepotism, Uncle?”

  “It’s the way of the world. If you look on my desk you’ll find a file. It’s an old case. I would like you to go over it again, see if anything was overlooked.”

  On the desk, a Louis XIV escritoire, she found a manila file. It contained clippings from the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

  Felicity remembered the story. Five years before, a young actress named Kashmir Birani disappeared in New Orleans. She had been the hostess of Kismet Chakkar, India’s Wheel of Fortune, and her grandfather Sajat Birani had been India’s most popular movie star in the fifties and sixties. Her distraught mother and father came to New Orleans and searched the dives their bohemian-inclined daughter had frequented. They even employed psychics to find her, to no avail. A report that she had drowned in the river turned out to be bogus. She was never found. The police had pursued leads in the French Quarter, where Kashmir had been friendly with the street musicians. She had befriended a trumpet player who called himself Bamajan.

  The name rang a bell. Felicity had known someone by that name, a friend and occasional accompanist of Miles’s. Someone from the drug side of the scene. Miles had kept quite a few of his friends from her. This one left a chill behind him. She had met him only once, leaving the apartment, though she’d listened to him play beside Miles. He was methodical, with a precise but dark style that complemented perfectly Miles’s romantic complexity. The Times-Picayune didn’t pay him much attention, beyond the brief mention. The articles described the Indian star as a voracious reader and jazz lover who periodically fled her glamorous life with a backpack full of books and her journals. She had been writing a novel at the time of her disappearance, but the manuscript had never been found. One item surprised Felicity so much she nearly dropped the clipping. The bohemian actress had apparently spent some time singing in Reverend Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin’s First Angels Choir. It was bizarre. Why would a hip girl like Kashmir attend Mullin’s tacky, self-righteous Christian tabernacle, where everything she must have enjoyed was denounced?

  The copied newspaper photo of Kashmir was bad, but one could still make out large black eyes, pronounced eyebrows, a full mouth. She must have been quite beautiful. Felicity had trouble imagining what had attracted this pampered, upper-class, glamorous girl to the scuzziest dives of New Orleans. She had known a few Indian women of Kashmir’s class in college—they were spoiled, argumentative, and witty. They dressed in expensive, fashionable clothes. Kashmir had been made of something else. Felicity could imagine the route by which the girl might have arrived at a love of jazz and Beat books; American hipsterism had circumvented the globe. There were even Samoan beatniks. But Mullin? How had she found him?

  Mullin. She’d really love to get Mullin. “Okay, I’ll take the job, but what’s your interest in this case?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you over dinner.”

  The major introduced the dishes with a flourish. He set them on the damask-covered dining room table and lifted their silver lids one by one.

  “Turtle soup with sherry,” he intoned, revealing a satiny broth signed with a squiggle of amber sherry. “Mixed wild greens with warm goat cheese. And the pièce de résistance: soft-shell crabs with wilted greens rémoulade aioli!” The major held the lid up long enough for her to see the perfectly poached soft-shell crabs steaming on their green mounds, swimming in the red rémoulade. “And, of course, bread pudding with whiskey sauce!”

  Felicity was moved—the meal was a replica of her sixteenth-birthday dinner at the Grill Room of the Fairmont Hotel. She still had the menu in a cheap frame tacked to her bedroom wall. The major’s creation was perfect in every detail. Aromas filled the air as the early winter evening fell over the rooftops of the Vieux Carré, turning the room deep purple. They ate slowly.

  “Your interest in the Vanna White of India?” Felicity reminded him between spoonfuls of velvety soup.

  “A long time ago …,” began the major.

  Damn. One of those stories. Despite her impatience, Felicity couldn’t help but be charmed. The major’s stories were hypnotic.

  “A long time ago, a small number of secret societies began to make plans for the future of the human race. And when I say a long time ago, I mean almost directly after the expulsion of the apple-chomping couple from the garden.”

  “Major,” Felicity protested weakly.

  “Be patient. I won’t drag you through the history of the occult network underlying human events. I’m just providing a context, or maybe a metaphor. In this case, Judeo-Christianity is both the context and the metaphor. Some of these secret associations pursued their aims through contacts in the spirit world.… You believe in the spirit world, don’t you, darling?”

  “No,” Felicity said flatly.

  “No matter. I’m using ‘the spirit world’ provisionally. Another metaphor. One of these societies, whose name may not mean much to you, was the Knights Templar. High initiates of that order embarked on the study of coincidence, chance, and chaos. Their techniques gave them access to what they called angelic informants.”

  “You mean angels?” interrupted Felicity.

  “Special angels. Informants. Not all angels inform. Some of them obfuscate. They are a lot like people. May I continue?”

  “Sure.” Felicity was beginning to feel grumpy.

  “The Knights Templar knew the hidden symmetry that underlies existence, just as atomic structure does matter. They knew that nothing is unrelated, that creation is a cosmic wheel, and the wheel is subject to the laws of chaos.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Darling, how do you like the soup? Too much sherry?”

  “Not at all.” The soup was divine. “These knights, what did they do? Bring sherry to Louisiana?”

  “They were warriors and scholars. They insured the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land, established the world’s first banking system, and were seemingly wiped out of existence by the pope and the French king. In reality, they retreated to secret hideouts until recently.”

  “And now they are bringing sherry to the Third World!”

  The major ignored her. “They are now waging a great battle, perhaps the final battle, against a host of enemies relaying their messages through television. One of these evil forces may be deploying the power of the Language Crystal, a sophisticated linguistic mechanism that reprograms the left-right brain. Based in Sanskrit, the Language Crystal can operate in all Indo-European languages, which is but one reason why I wanted you to study languages.”

  This mild reproach, delivered without rancor, stung Felicity. “Well, Uncle, I can find your Vanna without speaking Sanskrit. I’m sure her English is quite adequate.” She ripped a leg off her crab and bit into it. The crunchy, peppery snap was satisfying and resonant. The forces and spirits were far from such immediacy.

  �
�I don’t think I shall ever grasp a spirit as fleshy as this crab,” improvised Felicity, with her mouth full.

  The major smiled; improvising parodies was one of his mannerisms. Felicity had picked it up when she’d been about ten. But now he was attempting to teach her something extremely important, and her flippancy was inappropriate.

  “Darling, please try to concentrate. Forget about what is in front of your nose for a moment. There is a symphony going on within the din of our daily noise. We speak words that contain divine sounds, we write words within which lie hidden meanings. You can puzzle out the true nature of your life by simply hearing or seeing common words. Take your name, ‘Felicity.’ It means ‘happiness.’”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “But within it,” continued the major without hearing her, “there is also a ‘city’ and ‘fel.’ You might say that ‘a city fell’ to bring about the ‘happiness’ you embody. What city? When? You see, the simple act of breaking your name into syllables has already yielded a mystery. This is a only a bit of light from the Language Crystal. Now imagine the brilliant power of the crystal brought to bear on our sacred texts, on our officials’ speeches, as well as on our daily talk. The hidden meanings will be revealed at once! The Language Crystal, which has passed through many hands in the past, may be active again.”

  “Whoa,” exclaimed Felicity. “You mean this crystal is an actual thing, like the Grail? A real gem?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Wait a minute, Uncle. What you just did with my name is in anyone’s power to do. Everybody’s got a crystal like that in their own brain. All you need is to squint a little, or mishear.”

  The major put up his immense white palms in a gesture of peace.

  “I won’t argue this. A small piece of the crystal probably does lodge in everyone. But the Language Crystal itself is a much greater force, an unparalleled object. Suffice it to say that its uses seem to have been forgotten until now. This Indian Vanna, as you call her, may have inadvertently produced sound combinations in Sanskrit that proved to be quite potent, and she activated the old sound machine.”

  “But television is a visual medium,” Felicity argued, sensibly.

  “That’s exactly it! Everyone is looking for significance in the images, but the visual is only a cover. Humming beneath it is the Language Crystal.”

  Felicity was only too familiar with the major’s contention that conspiratorial groups were working to influence events in preparation for a cataclysm that would end human history. Now he was insisting on a new element of the story, and Felicity was quite put off. Her world was in pieces, and the thought of the worldwide conspiracy did little to soothe her.

  She spoke sharply: “Which am I supposed to find? The crystal, or the girl? Is the disappearance of this unfortunate girl cosmically significant?”

  Notz said tersely: “We must do everything in our power to recover the crystal.”

  “Anything? Loosen the plagues? Nuke the metaphors?”

  “Maybe. The crystal is no metaphor.”

  A brief silence filled with sherry, crab, and poetry passed.

  “Oh, Uncle!”

  “Darling,” the major sighed, “I could trace for you, step by step, the quite reasonable chain of events that lead from Edenic hyperspace to the nuclear age to Kashmir’s disappearance, but I’m not sure—”

  “Edenic hyperspace?”

  “A description of the state prior to the one that most traditions insist is now ending. The point is, in helping me find Kashmir you will begin to fulfill the mission I’ve always imagined for you. More crab, darling?”

  Felicity was irritated—her mentor had chosen the wrong time to try to involve her in his obsessions. All she was interested in was Mullin’s connection to the disappearance of the TV star who liked jazz and Jack Kerouac. What did occult traditions, humming crystals have to do with it? And this End of the World business, she was sick of it. The newspapers were full of apocalyptic hokeyness.

  “Somehow,” she said bitterly, “the end of the world is contingent on my finding the vanished Vanna. Am I reading this correctly?”

  “In a way.” Notz was not satisfied with her grasp of matters. By this time, she should have seen more. Then again, she didn’t have a psychic adviser who could see simultaneously into the past and into the future as he did. The channeler Carbon was due later that evening for a channeling session.

  “Must be Vannageddon,” she teased.

  “Put crudely, yes.” The major was displeased. “You aren’t listening very well. This Vannageddon, as you call it, is a specific event, followed by specific aftermaths, and it concerns everyone, especially you.”

  “No, Uncle, it doesn’t concern me right now. Maybe you should be talking to that fundamentalist Bible freak, Jeremy ‘Elvis’ Mullin. He’d tell you it’s all in the Bible. The four horses and all. The Antichrist. The Second Coming. Probably even Vanna White.”

  “The Second Coming,” Notz insisted, “what do you know about it?” Oh, no, Felicity thought, now he’s going to quote that hoary old Yeats poem.

  Sure enough, the major began to recite:

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

  The Second Coming!

  I’d love to come just once, Felicity complained silently.

  Hardly are those words out

  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

  Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs—

  That, she couldn’t help noting, was pretty sexy. Her own thighs felt suddenly quite soft. How long had it been since she had slowly moved them apart, submitting to the head of a man with a lion’s body? Probably never. Miles was skinny, with the body of a scrawny cat, and Ben had been no lion either, although his head was quite leonine.

  while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The darkness drops again; but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle—

  The cradle was not to be. She had decided a long time ago that she would not bring into the world something to die. Sometimes she thought that her elusive pleasure had perhaps retreated from her after she’d made this decision. She had denied death life; and death, displeased, had taken her orgasm. Hey, Death, Felicity called, give it back, bitch!

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

  Dear Uncle. He always was, in an unpredictable way, predictable. Felicity loved his voice, rich as bread pudding with whiskey sauce.

  “And if,” Notz went on, still in the voice of the poem, “a cradle can rock the centuries, may not a wheel spin them? Why not the Wheel of Fortune watched by millions? The wheel of chance from which are born phrases and clues, things and mysteries? The gyre in a falconer’s hand? Kismet Chakkar? Could not such vulgar wheels display the signs to the multitude? Well, answer me, what could be better?”

  Felicity couldn’t argue. Grief had made her gluttonous, and she felt as stuffed as a merliton. The food, spreading its delicious warmth through her, was making her sleepy.

  “The point is,” the major was saying, reverting to the proper subject of the conversation, Felicity herself, “that I believe you when you say that there is only half of you. Love, and the loss of it, leaves huge holes in us. Christ, who reputedly loved everyone, was like a sieve by the time he died, nearly transparent. You may not understand this yet, but one of my gifts is to look at a person and be able to determine just how much of them there is. Most people, trust me, have had extraordinarily large chunks removed. Their souls are miniscule, like commas in the compact OED.”

  “So … am I going to be whole? Or what? Where is my missing half?”

  “Your other h
alf is coming,” said the major, peering into his bread pudding as if he saw someone in there.

  “I hope you don’t mean my better half. I hope it’s not this Indian babe, anyway,” Felicity said gloomily. She didn’t know if her uncle understood her sexual dilemma. In truth, she didn’t either. She had successfully seduced a girl she’d met at the Rubyfruit Jungle, but the encounter had confused her. Her pleasure had been as elusive as when she’d sought it with Ben Redman, whose uncomfortably large penis had distressed her terribly. Ben, dear Ben, her first boyfriend, was a high school jazz connoisseur, veteran of medication identical to hers, now rabbi extraordinaire. With Miles she’d felt something approaching physical satisfaction, but his junk habit had made physical intimacy a rare occurrence. It’s a good thing she wasn’t as paranoid as the major, or she’d believe she was the victim of an evil conspiracy.

  Felicity was nearly asleep as she filled her mouth with a spoon of bread pudding that exploded there with pungent sweetness.

  “Your mission, then,” concluded the major, ending off a long speech she’d barely heard, “is to wait for specifics.”

  “My dear Uncle,” Felicity said formally, “I would be very grateful to you if at this dramatic moment in my life and at this late hour, you would tell me the truth as simply as you can.”

  “Of course, darling. Everything in creation is subject to a sequence. Before anything is, there is something else, and before that something, there is something else. You are familiar, I am sure, with theological attempts to pin everything on a Prime Mover. I have no opinion about that. What I do believe, however, is that the sequence moves according to a will that wills it to go on. I have undertaken the modest task of exercising my will to take part in the sequencing of creation.”

  “Is that all?” said Felicity. “Isn’t that, I don’t know … presumptous?”

  “Doubtless. Which is why one must make sure that nothing is left to chance. We must be well informed.”

  Felicity wasn’t sure she understood. But she was too tired to investigate such loftiness. Before they called it a night, they needed to discuss the funeral.