Messi@ by Andrei Codrescu

life and at this late hour, you would tell me the truth as simply as you can.”
    â€œOf 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.”
    â€œIs that all?” said Felicity. “Isn’t that, I don’t know … presumptous?”
    â€œDoubtless. 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.
    â€œThe old woman ought to lay in state at her own house,” the major said.
    â€œThere is hardly anyone left, Major. All her contemporaries are dead, and nobody in the family spoke to her after she left the church and tore up that lottery ticket.”
    â€œBe that as it may, the woman embodies the twentieth century. You can’t quickly dispatch such a person.”
    â€œShe’s not a book, Uncle. She’s a corpse. And anyway, what’s so great about the twentieth century? Stony sleep, was it? Good riddance, I say. I don’t see the point of any nostalgia. Anyone who survived it must have had either plain dumb luck or a deal with the devil.”
    The major couldn’t suppress his smile. “How you talk—and there is only half of you! I shudder to think of the complete creature.”
    â€œI would like to bury her tomorrow, Major.” Felicity was determined. “I don’t want that slimeball, Mullin, there, but I suppose I’ll have to let him officiate. Grandmère trusted him.”
    For the sake of propriety then, but also for reasons of a residual affection (Felicity’s) and grudging respect (the major’s), they had more wine and recalled the old woman in all her crazy steadfastness. She had taken uncomplaining and strict care of Felicity after her mother’s desertion. She had faced poverty with a big black purse, from which an inexhaustible supply of small change always poured forth. She had refused Notz’s money, though he managed, through Felicity, to help. Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec stood up to authorities and was feared in many lousy city offices. She had been a talented seamstress, skilled enough to copy even fancy clothes. Before the conversion to Mullinism, she had cooked meals for the nuns, taking a pot of red beans and rice every Monday to our Lady of Perpetual Succor Chapel.
    Felicity closed her eyes, swimming through the major’s words like a nymph through seaweed. A shadowy figure that was her missing half was swimming toward her from very far away. The world’s secret societies were weaving their nets above and below her, and Felicity let herself be lulled by the story just as in the old days, when she’d been a special little girl with a special great mission in a future so unimaginably wonderful only sleep could make it bearable.
    Notz carried his niece to the guest bedroom and laid her down on a baldachin bed that had belonged to Teresa de Avila before her vision. After, she lived an ascetic life and slept on the stone floor of the convent cell, where she wrote mystical love poetry. Major Notz delighted in collecting artifacts belonging to saintly converts of the upper classes who left their luxuries behind for lives of poverty. The major saw himself as a specialized bird of prey who followed behind the saints, hunting their abandoned belongings. He would have given anything to own something of Gautama’s, but his belongings, like those of Muhammad, had long ago been worn