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“Have some fried chicken, a couple of deviled eggs, a slice of watermelon, a glass of this nice claret …” The devil produced a picnic basket, a couple of wineglasses, and linen napkins.

“Cute. A picnic at the End of the World.”

“What, should the End of the World necessarily be met with parsimony and denial?”

“There must be something I can do down there,” Sylvia-Zack argued.

“There's nothing you can do. On the other hand, I can do a number of things,
after
I finish the picnic. Because I am, I would like you to know, the devil
ex machina
. I can make things go anyway I please. I can make all of this vanish, or I can enjoy the show without lifting a finger. What do you suggest?”

Sylvia-Zack couldn't think of a thing. The devil had a cute behind, and he emanated fetching shamelessness. But she knew that she had to go down, to smell the new Felicity-Andrea-Ben entity close up and report to the Namer and the boss.

Her stubbornness worried the devil. When he invented love, he hadn't counted on this sort of tenacity. He had invented love on a whim, to piss off God, who had split the human creature in two in a fit of anger, intending that the creature remain eternally unhappy searching for its mate, always divided and unfulfilled. In a fit of counterpique, the devil had created the glue of love to counteract God's punishment and give solace to the poor divided creature. But his glue had run out of control, and now it oozed from the very pores of creation.

“Okay,” said the devil, “but before you go, let me show you how it is.”

The devil took his laptop out of the case at his feet and turned it on. When text appeared on the screen, he offered the machine to Sylvia-Zack.

Sylvia-Zack said: “I can't—I never learned.”

So the devil read aloud:

“‘So be it. He was tired. Major Notz, author of the single greatest act of will in history, a big man in whose folds of flesh was written the secret history of intention, closed his eyes and pressed the red button.'”

“Now,” said the devil, “watch this.” He typed in the sentence,
And nothing happened
.

“Laughter,” the devil said, plopping an entire half of a deviled egg in his mouth. “Another one of my inventions.”

“Now, now,” said Sylvia-Zack, biting into an egg and admiring the handsome bulge in the devil's pants, “we do like to take all the credit.”

Nikola Tesla jumped up and down three times, shaking his whole flowery monster, to the delight of assembled street folk and incarnated Minds. But he was not, his audience imagined, terribly thrilled by the success of his experiment. He had taken that for granted. He was delighted, though, by his timing. At four o'clock that afternoon, he had been overcome by the desire to activate the green machine. About the same time, one of the bums who had been sleeping in the warehouse began to receive guests for a potluck supper in honor of Tesla, a kind of surprise birthday party. As the people gathered, bringing take-out food cartons from the Verte Mart, items selectively stolen from the A&P grocery on Royal Street, and even the fruits of their fishing, hunting, and foraging, Tesla had set the chlorophyll propulsion reactor on standby. The warehouse hummed marvelously, and bottles of cheap wine made the rounds.

The fat vines penetrating the river's surface began sending powerful photokinetic charges through the water. The fish in the Mississippi River experienced a salutary ruffling of their scales and were lifted several feet into the air before returning with geyser intensity to the water. The barges and tourist boats spun in place while their passengers roller-coasted briefly, losing wallets and keys. The charge stripped the murky water of its murk, leaving pure water molecules in its wake. All substances alien to water swirled together in an irridescent ball that lifted into the air and rolled out of the river, hovered over the Moonwalk, and took off, blotting out the sun, before settling with an oozing finality over New Orleans City Hall, which vanished under it. The photokinetic currents demagnetized the fiber-optic cables buried under the river, and all the computers from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico failed. Computer terminals died—from convenience-store cash registers to Mullin's keyboards to Notz's box—before reaching Felicity, who contained in her body the circuit breaker that sent the green wave around again, doubling its intensity. The old river locks in Pointe Coupée Parish opened, and the Mississippi began flowing out, cutting a channel on its way to his true love, the Atchafalaya.

In a matter of minutes, the Mississippi River turned a spectacular viridian color, then the water, cleansed of phosphates, mercury, radioactive gypsum, petroleum, and carbon gases, turned pale green.

“What do you think of that?” Tesla proudly asked his friend Mark Twain, watching events from a fat white cloud hovering over the Huey P. Long Bridge. “Now it's good enough to drink.”

“We'll see,” Twain drawled. “Have Mary Baker Eddy try it first.”

Chapter Thirty-seven

Wherein our story comes to an end on Mardi Gras of the year 2000. The New Jerusalem Café, where all levels interact, opens amid the revelry. Silence settles over the weaving of the story, and the night continues, lovingly
.

Seated on a Turkish tambour, Andrea drank in her guests like a birthday child. She could have died of pleasure right there, seeing the faces of those who'd answered her invitation to come. They had trickled in for the past three days, complete in their persons, assured in their friendship, naturally intimate, and utterly involved in the very same questions that had first awakened them to consciousness. They now sat, lounged, or reclined about the small salon that replicated to the best of her recollection the sitting room at Saint Hildegard's. But there were some additions: a rose-crystal chandelier very much like the one in the Pioneer's House in Sarajevo before the war, which had come from Major Notz's Pontalba apartment; two Venetian mirrors she had bought at an antique dealer's on Royal Street; and a long cherrywood bar behind which sparkled bottles of fine liquor selected by Joe, the security chief and master steward. The salon gave onto several arched passageways to other parts of the building.

It was very late, only hours before dawn, and the conversation was in bloom, despite the frequent interruptions of others, notably Felicity, who hurried by several times, followed by Shades carrying kitchen utensils, flowerpots, and striped futons.

Twirling her Tibetan prayer wheel, saffron-robed Lama Iris Cohen sat on a revolving bar stool, repeating the proposition that “the wheel offers the hope of return—Christianity moves toward a linear End.” She'd said it twice because, the first time, Father Tuiredh asked ironically, “Come again?”

The good father, stretched out in his cassock on the carpet, tossed some runic bones into the air like a handful of peanuts, caught only two of them, and sneered. “We crushed people on the wheel in the Middle Ages. It wasn't all linear.”

Professor Li, clad in brown suit and tie but wearing a comfortable pair of New Orleans crawfish slippers, was seated on the edge of a couch, a scroll under his arm, characteristically awkward and diffident. After his return to China, he had devoted a great deal of his time to thinking about Andrea, an orphan risen from the ruins of war, a capitalist entertainment star, and an object of curiosity to diverse scholars. These reflections began to show up in his lectures, and the Chinese authorities, seeing in his preoccupation an unhealthy religious streak, warned him to desist. When he didn't, they fired him. On the day that the grim-faced party secretary offered him several unappetizing alternatives to his teaching career, Andrea's invitation came in the mail. Posted only one week before in New Orleans, the letter had arrived in record time for foreign mail. When he applied for a travel permit, it was granted immediately—another first in his experience of Chinese bureaucracy. Nonetheless, a shadow fell over this fortuitous expediency: his wife refused to accompany him. She sided with the Chinese authorities.

Earl Smith was idly drawing a female face on a cocktail napkin and taking long sips from a blue glass straw. He was averse to flying and had taken the train from New Mexico, a bone-wearying journey that had, however, given him ample time to consider the sequence of dreams that had sent him wandering all over the world. He'd concluded that the gods were unnecessarily cruel in dispatching him such distances at his age. The gods, he thought, should take Amtrak sometime.

Ever since arriving from the airport in the painted Shade bus, Sister Rodica had done little more than gaze with love at Andrea. Her journey to New Orleans had been the strangest of all. She had stolen money from the convent to pay her way and had flown in an antiquated BookAir plane, reading a worn anthology of Japanese poetry all the way to America. In her small suitcase, the nun had brought with her the mysterious letter from Father Eustratius that first gained Andrea access to Saint Hildegard's.

Others had brought gifts as well. Father Hernio had with him an Ashkelon scroll called
The War of the Prophets
, in which it was shown that the trials of history resulted from a continual war of numbers among prophets. Prophets since the earliest days of humanity had tried to accurately predict the end of their worlds. Some prophets had even been in a position to actually bring about the End, because they were advisers to kings and could wield the power of their treasuries. Each of these visionaries could have ended the world if other prophets, proffering different End dates, had not stood in the way. Thus, the incompatibility of cyphers had preserved the world many times, but by the same token had allowed it no peace. The Ashkelon scroll, in Father Hernio's opinion, explained many of the events that had occurred over the past few days.

Dr. Carlos Luna had brought a Mayan translation of a Lubavitcher manifesto that claimed the Messiah, a recently deceased rabbi, had resurrected in New York and was operating a kosher deli on Second Avenue. Dr. Luna was unsure about the propriety of his gift. Perhaps, he thought, I ought to give it to Lama Cohen, who'd be sure to laugh.

The lama herself wasn't sure if the pouch containing a small dried herb that healed most minor illnesses was of any use to Andrea. She thought of giving it to young Sister Rodica. A sentimental memento—no great gift.

Father Tuiredh had brought a huge Bavarian chocolate cake, but it had been smashed in transit, covering everything in his suitcase with a thick black ooze. He wore a knee-length nightshirt Andrea bought him on Bourbon Street, and black knee socks. The nightshirt said,
My parents went to New Orleans
—
and all I got is this stupid shirt
.

Mr. Rabindranath was floating. He had controlled himself for a brief time after his twenty-eight-hour flight from Calcutta to New Orleans, but the joy that sparkled in his bones had been too much, and he had found himself once more at the mercy of a massive erection, and was now levitating. Only now, no one seemed to mind. Sister Rodica, when she allowed herself to lift her gaze from Andrea, saw him and smiled. Mercy, she thought, that tumescence is a bridge to our common past.

The Saint Hildegard's family was well aware that they had been brought here by a force greater than themselves, represented somehow by Andrea, but this imperative hardly felt dutiful. Whatever their approaches or beliefs, they were glad to be here to stand by Andrea's side. Their previous gifts, which Andrea had stolen from them before she understood that they were “gifts,” had been advance ritual tokens. The scholars were not divided on the meaning of these gifts.

After Andrea's hasty departure from Jerusalem, they had discussed the possibility that she was an incarnated avatar.

Lama Cohen had asked: “What does your Christian Savior save humanity from?” and answered her own question: “From yourselves. If this is the case, Andrea is not such a figure. She is more like an addition, a missing limb, let's say, that has returned long after being severed. From the cyclical Buddhist point of view, this makes perfect sense. Everything returns.”

Father Zahan had said quietly: “Does the world deserve saving?”

Professor Li: “The world is saved by those in it.”

“What does a Savior save? And from what is he saving what he saves?” Mr. Rabindranath asked.

Carlos Luna wondered, if white people were crazy enough to believe that they were going to heaven at the End of the World, what did they expect to do once they got there? Were not the great cosmic circles always turning, always employing God's creatures in unending toil? How could there be cessation of labor and movement, when everything in the world labored and moved? Even according to Christians, God himself was the only still point. The rest of the universe was becoming.

And so on. Only Father Tuiredh accepted the simple promise of his faith—that Christ's Second Coming would deliver the world from darkness. He just couldn't see how the Savior could be a female.

Now that they were gathered together again, in the presence of their speculative object, their old argument seemed silly. Andrea was so alive, fragrant, and welcoming, she canceled abstraction. And she seemed—healed.

She introduced Felicity, Ben, Joe, Sylvia-Zack, Nikola Tesla, and a few of the others as they rushed around preparing for Mardi Gras. Felicity immediately aroused their interest, but she was like quicksilver, hard to pin down.

Seeing Felicity and the rest of Andrea's new friends, it began to dawn on the travel-weary scholars that they had been altogether wrong. Andrea was not the avatar they suspected, or rather, not by herself. It was possible (Lama Cohen was the first to think) that this avatar was a collective, consisting of several people—perhaps a whole generation.

The waves of humanity arriving for Mardi Gras 2000 threatened to crush every blade of grass in the city of New Orleans. Strata of beads and crawfish shells layered the neutral ground on Saint Charles and Carrolton Avenues. Fat Tuesday 2000 began cloudy, but the rising sun bestowed brilliance and warmth on the city, and by eight o'clock in the morning, party goers in the French Quarter had stripped to the essentials, which in some cases meant nothing. A gentle breeze ruffled fringes and feathers, and snapped the purple and gold pennants above the crowd. Two naked women, painted silver, stood pensively still on a balcony on Toulouse. A distraught queen was appealing for aid from the Drag Repair Squad camped on the street below with loaded tool belts of nail polish, rouge, false eyebrows, and brassiere stuffers. Masques representing mythology, fantasy, the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms swirled, circled, and swayed. A band of Peruvian minstrels playing harps, flutes, and thumb pianos gave the matinal scene an incongruous alpine air.