Free Messi@ by Andrei Codrescu

little girl in a hammock, sometimes thought she could hear the monotonous plaint of a young woman going crazy behind the cypress beams. The sadness of the house seeped into her, and she kept it at bay by reading, reading, reading, endlessly reading the books the major brought her. Felicity thought about that young woman’s lament now. She found her present situation akin to that of the light-skinned girl who had been bought at an Octoroon Ball by a rich man and virtually imprisoned in the house in the bloom of her youth. True, no one had chosen Felicity in this fashion, and her leash was much longer. Still, there was something helpless in the way her life had unfolded.
    The last grave Felicity stopped for was new. She embraced the tomb drunkenly as if it were a man. It had been a man. Her man. Her love lay buried here in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 with veins full of poppy juice. HE MADE SWEET MUSIC , the chiseled epitaph said. He had indeed. She’d paid for the inscription herself, and the words had been all hers. But Felicity didn’t listen to his kind of music anymore. She had buried the tapes of Miles’s brilliant piano improvisations in a trunk locked with seven locks, buried under a house that had another house on top of it. And she had shipped the trunk and the houses all the way to China, just to make sure. Now she went to the Rubyfruit Jungle, trying to persuade herself that she was a dyke who preferred, musically speaking, the killing din of Dada technorap to the uncertainties of jazz. This was deliberate musical genocide.
    Done with her dead, Felicity drove to the Autocrat Club, where Grandmère’s kin were mourning over mountains of food provided as part of the funeral package by the Treme Social & Pleasure Society, which had also interred her. Grandmère had faithfully paid dues to the club for forty years in anticipation of this occasion. Felicity made the rounds, hugging frail old folks and shaking hands. Then she got herself a plate of pork roast and a bowl of étouffée and ate at a back table watching Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin glad-hand the crowd like a politician. When Mullin made his noisy celebrity exit, Felicity got up and followed him.
    Reverend Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin drove angry. It was already evening. He headed out of New Orleans down the river road, driving his gold Caddy west past the smoking cauldrons of Hooker Chemicals, Dow Chemical, B. F. Goodrich, E. I. Du Pont, Union Carbide, Texaco, Exxon, Uniroyal, Nalco Chemical, Freeport-McMoran, and Rubicon Chemicals, glowing in the night like a party of devils along the Mississippi. They were his rosary beads, his Mardi Gras necklace.
    He could feel the coming of the Rapture in his bones. The ascent of the faithful to the Kingdom of Heaven was imminent. They would be taken from their homes, cars, or wherever they might find themselves. The Rapture, the prelude to the End. It was so delicious he could taste it.
    The fate of those left behind after the Rapture did not concern Reverend Mullin, though he allowed himself the wicked enjoyment of imagining it. He saw the unbelievers crashing into one another on roads full of the abandoned vehicles of the risen. He saw airplanes fall to the ground after the Christian pilots ascended. He saw them burning in their houses, unattended by the firemen now in heaven. He saw them scrambling in the wake of the righteous. Let them. The Lord would sort them out, wheat from chaff.
    As he rolled past the smoking behemoths of Louisiana’s chemical corridor, he could see like Jesus right into the pitch-black hearts of the doomed and abandoned—the atheists, the agnostics, the media vultures, the Satanists, the blasphemers, the pope’s miracle seekers, the soft-slippered morticians of dying secularism. Although he couldn’t place her precisely in any of the general categories, Mullin saw clearly the face of the dykey girl who’d shamed him at her granma’s