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Well, the irruption had no name in the midst of its irruptive glory, but moments later, when Felicity-Scheherazade floated back from the spume of the wave, she recognized it as that elusive thing, and she began to weep. She lay her head on Andrea's shoulder.

All of Andrea's repressed sorrow for her parents seemed to bubble to the surface as well. She clutched Felicity's hands, lay her cheek on the small butterfly tattooed on her shoulder, and began to sob. Felicity patted her head and was so moved by the bristly softness of the girl's hair that she began to tremble again, and was carried off by wave after wave of pleasure.

The two women stayed like that, weeping on each other's shoulders, to the astonishment of the other strippers. The air filled with gold specks like a rain of sequins, and quite a few of them heard a sound like the beating of wings.

On the wake of this encounter came another gift: Felicity remembered who she was and what she had been doing. So sudden was the return of her memory that it seemed to be part of the sexual quake, rather than an aftershock. She moved away from Andrea and looked around as if seeing the place for the first time.

“Shit, I'm a fucking stripper!” she exclaimed in her long-unused girl-dick voice.

“Ah!
Chingush
.” Andrea understood. She knew also that now she could end her own long
chingush
.

“What's
ching
…?” Felicity tasted the word she couldn't finish, as if her hearing had also been restored.

Andrea explained that it was a period of time ruled by a forgetting drug, and that those who experienced a long
chingush
were like children learning to walk again when their memory returned.

Felicity performed the equivalent of a strip search on herself. Place of birth: New Orleans. Living relatives: Major Notz. Significant boyfriends: Ben, Miles. Profession: private detective. Education: B.A. in psychology, University of New Orleans. Graduate of New Orleans Police Academy. Hobbies: surfing the World Wide Web, questioning self. Felicity patted herself down as if she were a suspect. Her memories kept coming, but as the weight of herself flooded back, she was not sure if she really wanted to be her old self. And then she remembered what had given her a sense of purpose. She had work to do. Mullin. The motherfucker was in for it.

Andrea also allowed herself to remember. She remembered her release from the camp at Utla. She remembered that in Ankara, Marseilles, Barcelona, Cairo, and Bangkok, she had sexually serviced Chinese businessmen, English masochists, steatopygiphile Egyptians, Thai drug lords, and a German steel tycoon. She had stolen, been arrested, spent time in a Turkish jail, and finally stowed away on a boat bound for Israel, nearly dying of hunger during the ten-day journey. She had eaten spiders, flies, and a small mouse … and then, when the boat reached Haifa, she seduced a dockworker in exchange for transportation to Jerusalem.

Andrea's recollections were vivid, but there was something almost too fantastic about them. Maybe I'm fooling myself, she thought. Maybe I lay in a coma for four years in a Swedish hospital. She saw herself lying still on a bed near a window half covered by a snowy branch. But she remembered with equal intensity the spring of her arm as she lowered the whip on the steel magnate's fat behind. Which life was true? And might there be other lives, hidden like dreams in her long
chingush?
I will choose the most vivid, Andrea thought. I am young, I can always call on other lives in the future. She chose the life of crime and adventure that first occurred to her, and felt immediately stronger, cunning, resourceful.

A curious mood settled over Desire, Ltd. One by one, the dancers sat down and looked into their own pasts. Forgotten days and months, even whole years came back to them, pouring in like rain. Their memories cast a pall of sadness over the club. Even Sylvia, who made a point of looking life straight in the eyes, was overcome by an awareness of a past she had thought all but buried.

What the women of Desire, Ltd., did not know was that at that very same moment, all the people on all the streets of New Orleans were experiencing convulsive waves of remembrance. People sat on their stoops or stopped on street corners or leaned against walls, crying. Others drove faster, trying to escape the memories that pursued them like rabid bats. Everyone thought that they were alone in this irruption, but it soon became evident that the phenomenon was ubiquitous. Small groups formed, strangers spontaneously holding hands in order to steady themselves. These were the lucky ones, able to understand that while the details were unique, the sadness was common. The winds of memory literally knocked others off their feet. The churches filled with sobbing people.

Only the Shades and the Great Minds were unaffected. They regarded the spectacle of suddenly stilled citizens with curiosity and empathy but did not grasp what they were experiencing.

The lifting of the collective
chingush
lasted only one hour, but that hour at the crossroads of millennia was as long as a lifetime.

Back in the club, Felicity was the first to break the spell.

“I've got to find that motherfucking Mullin!” She was determined now to find the man who had brainwashed her, and to prevent him from doing more harm.

The major had to be contacted immediately. He must be worried sick by her absence. The pay phone was out of order and the one under the cash register was broken. Felicity laughed. She remembered her uncle's belief that all things proceeded from will, but how do you will a broken phone to life? And this, dear Uncle, she addressed his portly seriousness, is yet another proof of the tenuousness of will. Magic is stronger. The future is subject to miracles, not the flexing of the overeducated will. “Jesus came to tell the news, but every phone was broken,” Felicity sang.

Felicity was about to run into the street in her G-string, but Andrea stopped her. Felicity told her that she had to act right away, but the Bosnian orphan looked at her so tenderly she lost her desire to explain. It was better to kiss her, so Felicity did, and Andrea gave herself to the kiss as if she'd been born within it. And then they cried some more.

The emotional storm embarrassed everyone. Some of the girls disappeared into the dressing rooms to cry for themselves; others went to the bathrooms for a quick pick-me-up line of cocaine.

“Girls are leaky this way,” Sylvia said. “Blood, milk, tears. The moon overfills us.” She knew instinctively that both women were running from something. They were in the right place. New Orleans had always been a good place to disappear. The disappeared kept one another's secrets.

“When I was a missionary in Thailand,” said Sylvia, “I got caught up in a demonstration where the police were shooting into the crowd. I put my arms around this Thai girl and I prayed. I didn't care about my own life because I believed in heaven then, but I prayed and prayed for this girl. She was cryin' and everybody else around us was cryin'. And then we were all arrested, but they let me go because I was an American. Next day, I took a pedicab through all the slums, looking for her. I didn't have any money, but seein' how I was cute and demure, the driver said no problem. I looked everywhere, but I couldn't find her. I thought about her for years. Yesterday, before my shift, I go to see a friend of mine who works at the Thai Garden … I like to practice speaking Thai with him … and there is this new waitress there, and it turns out to be Sun Ki, my friend. I'm tellin' you. New Orleans is the center of the world, right here. ‘Sylvia,' she told me, ‘I knew you prayed for me back in Bangkok, and now Buddha's brought us back together.'”

Andrea and Felicity were struck by this instance of yet another miraculous encounter, and they were filled with a sense of purpose they had never known before. Together, they were a new being.

Chapter Thirty

Wherein angel Zack incarnates

The angel Zack, watching all this with an interest bordering on the unseemly, hovered solicitously over the girls, dipped his fingers of light into their tears, and then put them to his mouth and winced. Humans were made out of salt.

Zack felt something tug at his wing, and the entity known as Hermes appeared before him.

Hermes had been without a channel since Major Notz had rebuffed Carbon and the medium had gotten out of the psychic business altogether. He'd taken a liking to the mushy darkness of the channel linking his world to that of humans and was now at loose ends. Spotting an angel, he thought of asking for advice.

“I can't do anything for you, entity. I have a job.” Zack tried to shoo him away, but Hermes persisted:

“Just let me give you my rendition of the scene you are watching, and maybe some answers to your questions. You'll see how important I am. And then, maybe you can find me a channel.”

Zack flapped his wings in a gesture of sheer exasperation. Why me? Why me, O President of the Heavens?

Hermes took this as a yes, and proceeded thus: “It is said: More than adoration of the flesh is involved in the five-foot-six-inch frames of the mortal entities known as Felicity and Andrea. She who uncovered letters in the puzzles of the Hebrew language is the perfection of the other, who is searching for the mystery of Disappearance itself. Even before these two were chosen, it was decided that deliberations on the fate of the world would take place in New Orleans. It is thus doubly significant that the girls should meet here, at the site of future events. The chief archangels are all watching; I can see their luminous threads.”

“What's the point of the slightly archaic flavor?” Zack took issue with the style.

“It's professional!” Hermes was hurt. “Besides, this is New Orleans. Everyone talks funny!”

“Why New Orleans?” lamented Zack. “Why me?”

Hermes took these to be questions.

“It is said: New Orleans has the advantage of being the wettest place on this continent, which lubricates the passage of the disembodied into the embodied. It has more people on the street than any other American city, and as you surely know, entities cannot incarnate in people sitting indoors watching television. New Orleans is concentrated so that the Minds can take in the situation of earth at a single glance and judge it accordingly. Everything is in New Orleans, good and bad, and heaven knows it. By comparison, Jerusalem and Mecca are only full of quarrels. Do not fear your assignment, Zack. Fear neither the intoxication of the jasmine flower nor the sweet-olive blossom with its scent like that of almost rotten peaches. It is not true that an angel perched too long on the folded petal of a gardenia could be pulled in by his light-thread and imprisoned until a virgin earthling kisses him on the behind. Do not be superstitious, Zack, and do not bother your Namer with small questions. Your Namer is busy.”

That was enough. The impertinence of this entity knew no bounds.

“I know all this,” Zack growled. “You're only mirroring my own thought. You have no message. Pshhhst!” Zack flapped his wings threateningly, and Hermes, chastened but undaunted, flew a safe distance away from the irate angel.

Of course, thought Zack, I cannot ask my Namer anything. He's too busy fulminating at the conservatism of the younger generation! It's not my fault that I sprung out of my pupa eons after the revolution that democratized heaven! I can only see what I can see, and what I see is what I hear: a lot of noise. This is a lunatics' planet. If this is what a democratic heaven has to look forward to, I'm giving up my room in my Father's mansion right now! What's next for heaven? Tourists?

Below him, Zack could see a multitude of creatures with cameras around their necks and stupid hats on their heads. Tourists had to be the lowest form of life, unconsciousness incarnate, impediments to learning, carriers of infectious superficiality. Tourists had been strictly forbidden in heaven since its inception. That was the true reason for Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise: gee-goshing when they should have been studying. But these days, who knows? Anything was possible. Tourists in heaven! Lord President Somewhat Mighty!

Hermes lisped: “Try me! Try me!”

“For Chrissakes! You're a mosquito! Okay, tell me this: what's the point of embodiment?”

“It is said: You are embodying because Christ did. But one Christ is no longer enough. To redeem this prison planet now, a multitude of Christs are needed. Therefore, heaven is dispatching multiple Messiahs! Your job is to keep track, angel Zack, to see to it that not one Christ is misplaced. And for that reason, you're going to be encased in flesh, angel!”

Zack flew right over him so he wouldn't have to feel his smug draft. Maybe he knew all the answers, but so what. He lisped! And anyway, couldn't Zack keep better track of the heavenly messengers without being encased in flesh! Ugh. It really was the end.

His only option was either to embody now and do his job from the ground or to embody after the Minds' vote was taken. Perhaps the best thing was to get used to a human body as soon as possible. But the dark, the organs, the blood … ugh! And why make such a momentous decision now, on only the second day of the new millennium? What was the hurry? Nothing had been done earlier, despite numerous opportunities. The myriad of spirits inhabiting the innumerable levels of heaven had made such outlandish calculations and promises to the embodied of the earth that it had become something of a scandal even in the scandal-free upper no-incarnation zones. That is, of course, why anyone in heaven worked at all: they wanted to end up in those uppers. Zack's Namer was right: heaven was a growing bureaucracy. From within the diamonds of layering infinity, the Catholic Church, by comparison, looked like a single-cell organism.

Still, if figuring out such things had been his job, Zack would have long ago gotten his service star and gone home to strum a harp. But it was not his job. His job, in addition to polling the Minds, was to instruct Felicity and Andrea, humans heaven had designated to spin the Wheel of Fortuna. On that spin depended something he couldn't quite understand. No matter what the Minds decided in the end, apocalypse or remission, the girls had to spin the wheel. And even then, the final word belonged neither to the Minds nor to Fortuna but, most likely, to the mood of the Creator President. Why even bother with these rituals?