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Mullin flung the phone against the wall, where it broke into pieces and rained plastic all over the Bukhara carpet on the bedroom floor. No girl bathed in the psalms and filled with the light had ever left training before. Nonetheless, Felicity had, and she was loose now, a pierced demon with a camera looking to stab him in the heart again. The devil had the reverend under his hooves and kept on pounding.

That day, his best-trained Bamajans fanned out into the city looking for Felicity.

Mullin experienced an onslaught of contradictory emotions. The little northern Louisiana boy in him raised a gun to his lips and blew his brains out. A lusty farmer thought of the girlish pubis that was his downfall and became unaccountably erect. What a time for such a thing! The boy and the farmer were then dwarfed by the rise of the angry preacher, who declared in a foundation-shattering voice: “
I
am Mullin! And
I
will have my revenge! The Lord forgives not!”

His anger notwithstanding, the reverend felt unaccountably sentimental and foolish. He decided that there were still parts in himself that had not been subjected to the cleansing flames of the Lord, parts still mired in the past. He dismissed his chauffeur and ignored his staff. He would revisit once more, he decided, the human parts of himself that he would soon leave behind.

The oleander bushes alongside the freeway squatted under a blue sky pierced by plumes of white smoke. To Mullin they always looked as if they signaled the election of a new pope. In reality, they were the innocuously colored toxic emissions of chemical plants, and they signaled sickness and death.

The girl held out her palm, her wet finger still shiny with both their juices. It was a new girl, on a stretch of Airline Highway strewn with cheap motels advertising adult videos, a stretch he had never frequented before, but where he was still taking a chance. For all he knew, the filthy beds in the by-the-hour rooms had pages of
Our Mirror
strewn all over them. The reverend quickly laid two bills on the seat between them, and the girl, who looked like she could neither read nor write, snatched the money and vanished quickly. But the fear didn't leave him. He looked around. The dusty palm trees of the motor court were motionless. The few parked cars were deserted. And yet his fear issued from something or someone specific. His heart began to race. Though it is said that bombs do not fall twice on the same spot, they were known to have done just that. But even if Felicity's photo lens were to happen again upon the very same scene, the impact would be null. Still, the disgraced preacher was afraid because he had done the unthinkable, which was to practically return to the scene of the crime. To experience pedestrian fear on the day of his grand party was so incongruous, Mullin nearly laughed.

The reverend sped down Airline, checking the rearview mirror, but no one was following him. And still the feeling intensified. He recalled Felicity just as she had stood by that hospital bed hissing at him, “Not on your life, motherfucker!” and he knew that it was indeed a matter of her life. He had offered her salvation, she had rejected it, and now she had to die. Her vulnerable, slightly hurt, undeniably pretty face filled him with dread. She was no mere instrument of Satan; she was of his very flesh. She had to be found. God was testing him. There was a purpose in his downfall and martyrdom. Even the first child prostitute had been sent to him as a sign. Since being given the gift of turning them to the light through music, he had converted many fallen children. Their conversion was never incomplete, as appeared to be the case with Felicity. Still, he had to test all of them again, to make sure that in their newborn innocence they were truly serving Jesus. Because if they weren't, they had to be destroyed, no matter how pretty their singing.

Mullin remembered the day greatness was born in him. He had been a part-time preacher in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and a part-time insurance salesman, and a part-time piano player in country honky-tonks, and a part-time husband, and, mostly, a drifter. There had been no anchor to his life, and no voice had yet told him who he was and what he was meant to do. And then one day, at a Motel Six on I-10, somewhere between Shreveport and Texarcana, a young girl showed up at the side of the empty swimming pool, looking into it as if wondering where all the water went. He walked behind her and put both his hands on her shoulders. Showing no surprise, the girl turned around, her face streaked with tears, and said: “Baptize me, Preacher. Sink me deep into the water of life!”

Mullin could never wholly put into words what seized him then. The skies opened for him and a power as strong as electrical current shot from his arms into the girl. He found himself singing “Amazing Grace” in a voice so powerful each word drove a stake through every wickedness in that girl's body. She sang with him as sparks of black light flew about them like hell's snow. Finally, she went limp and empty. He carried her to his room and watched as sadness drained from her soul all night. At dawn she slept like a baby in the arms of her newly found faith. And it had been his doing. He had restored her. When she woke up, innocent and naked (he had removed her clothes in the night) he united his body with hers but in an oddly chaste manner because he remained soft the whole time and no coaxing enabled him to enter her. The experience hadn't been about sex. He had always despised the simple mechanism of lust. It was too easy and it left behind pitted craters of guilt. No, this was not about sex. It was about power. Power was good, but only if the powerful had something to offer the powerless. Most people were broken and couldn't fix themselves. They needed the ministration of the powerful to renew their acquaintance with the live wondrousness of the universe. That's the gift he had received by the swimming pool through the medium of that perfect angel.

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!”