Chapter 27
Green Mansions
And he did not say goodbye. He left New York immediately and flitted back to New Orleans. He sat on the moonwalk and held his head that would never hurt a hare’s foot anymore, and he stared deep into the river.
Children dying of cancer as entertainment. Churches calling themselves Christian using sickness to raise funds, rather than teaching the faith that could eliminate sickness, as Christ said. Women being goofy enough to swallow that crap, to think that liberation means being as goofy as men. What was this world coming to?
Lev thought Frank was right about the deterioration of morality since the seventies, since strife like what he was promoting now had produced a renaissance of art and social conscience. But he thought Frank was wrong in calling the economic segments of the problem basic, fundamental, essential.
He prayed to God that Freud was not right about penis-envy. Wandering the French Quarter on his way to this pondering, he ran across a gay parade. Men were dressed in women’s clothing with balloons in their blouses. Lev prayed to God that males not suffer from mammary-envy.
Lev prayed to God that we all could appreciate ourselves and each other for whatever we are, as long as we are honest and fair. Lev prayed to God that we all could just get along. Lev, on the levee, prayed to God.
I found him there, the morning of my departure from this trip to Earth. That afternoon, I would meet Theresa for beignets at the Café du Monde for a little conversation before we lifted off for our employee review with Bob. I sat beside Lev, as I had lo those relatively few years ago, as he looked up from the river.
“Earth is a mess,” said Lev, “and I don’t see it getting any better. Things are happening here that I couldn’t have imagined when I was writing War and Peace. Things are becoming more complicated, and people are using the complication as excuses for ignoring both the complication and the basics. It’s crazy.
“Look at the stock market. The safest bet isn’t in the electronics that could sort out the complexity, but in pharmaceuticals, in drugs. Some people use illicit drugs to escape their doubt in their understanding or their value, and others use prescription or over-the-counter drugs for about the same reason, basically self-destruction.
“Look at the television advertisements for painkillers. They preach improvement in physical performance by numbing the pain rather than by getting rid of the cause of the pain, the same attitude that makes people cokeys in Hollywood and on Wall Street and in the slums from New York to L.A. It’s leading everyone into a ditch deliberately.
“And women, who are generally the most faithful, fall into it also. The woman with the issue touched Jesus’s garment and cured herself, with her faith. Women with issues now put their faith in pharmaceuticals to cure their issues, which they complicate by believing in the soap-operas through which the pharmaceutical companies advertise.
“And, as always, its worst for the already poor. Young black kids see a chance to escape the drug-death in the gang-death of the ghettos by becoming professional athletes. Then, when they succeed, they find that their success involves using another set of drugs to compete in another kind of gang, with umpires to alienate instead of police.
“I lived through most of a century in Russia, and now I’ve been dead through most of a century in the United States of America, and so I’ve seen people of both east and west traveling down the primrose path to self-deception through artificial complication, people ignoring what they could see through tiny attention to history.
“Here, in this so-called land of the free, I’ve seen the party of Lincoln become the party of Strom Thurmond in the face of the hypocrisy of Fits Jr. and your friends Linden and Tricky Dicky. So I think I’ve figured out what my problem is.
“1400 pages. I wrote 1400 pages saying most fundamentally nothing, except that people don’t know what they’re talking about, implying that they can’t. Well, they can, if they simply stop the self-denial and artificial complication. Jesus said that the kingdom of God is within us. The devil is denial of our hearts. We can look, and see.
“We can, if we try, each of us, honestly. One thing I did right in War and Peace was to define the mystery of the loneliness of ugly, sickness and fatness being a matter of faith far smaller than a mustard seed, although I didn’t understand it at the time. I called some of my characters plain and had them marry gallant dashing people.
“People many might call ugly do marry people many might call beautiful and remain married happily ever after, while other people use their notion of their own ugliness as an excuse to become uglier and hateful and therefore hated. They try to think of themselves as self-righteous martyrs and so die silly and miserable deaths.
“Some of them manage to think of themselves as spiritual, seeing themselves as Christ-figures by wholly missing the point that Christ was able to die on the cross because he had more faith than a mustard seed and so suffered not through the nails but through compassion for hateful resentful people such as those people, princes or paupers.
“Anyway, I need to tell you about someone I’ve not met in all my life and death, but someone I’ve heard and seen nonetheless. She is a child of light, a young woman who sings for all, that she walked before she crawled.
“Her given name is Melissa, which means the sweetest, the best of honey. Her family name is a grand ancestral name as old as Stuart in the highland home of Mary queen of Scots. She is, in deed, a child of light.
“She’s a lesbian rock star. ‘Lesbian’, from the Isle of Lesbos, is more mythical and true than ‘gay’, as that latter word refers to homosexuals in general. And Melissa, strutting her stuff on the stage seems to me to be more mythical and true than any other person I’ve met, before or after I ran from my wife into death.
“To begin, at least this time of hers on Earth, she was born on a river. She was born on the Missouri river, which dumps its misery and happiness into this river that carries dust from many rivers. Another of those rivers is the Ohio, where some unnamed miserable has had people for more than a century singing of the walk he took with his love before he murdered her because she would not be his wife.
“Melissa sings similarly. She was born in Leavenworth, Kansas. One of the songs she sings tells of all that means to most raised there and born away, and to many who only look that place up in a book. What she sings is what America, the land of freedom from responsibility and duty, means to this old Russian: ‘Past the Walmart and the prison, down by old V.A. Just my jeans and my T-shirt, and my blue Chevrolet.’
“Walmart claims to sell goods made only in America, but most of the products that company sells were made in oriental sweatshops under conditions illegal in the United States of America, but managed by Americans to support the claim. That prison in Leavenworth is one of the oldest and least civil of United States federal penitentiaries, and that old V.A. there is one of the oldest and least civil of United States Veterans Administration hospitals. Jeans and T-shirts need no further definition from me, to anyone born in the U.S.A. Nor do Chevrolets, blue or not.
“I heard a street-musician here in New Orleans singing that song but replacing ‘Walmart and the prison’ with ‘women in the prison’, and I think his editing might be truer to Melissa’s myth than she was. When I saw and heard her in the Fleet Center in Boston, I thought she might be a reincarnation of Joan of Arc. But maybe Saint Joan didn’t strut like that, and so maybe Melissa is more like Achilles.
“Anyway, I feel Melissa’s present life on Earth is not her first, and I feel she’s always been a warrior. She closed that concert in the cradle of liberty with a song asking that her shield might be lifted from her, so she could go home and fight here no more. And all her singing strikes me as coming from Valhalla.
“Her themes, like the themes of all great poets, range from war to requited love. And she sings of religion, and she is the only poet who has made me feel any sympathy for the crusades, but all her songs say to me Valhalla, and more the Elysian Fields, home from war, at last. She cries for peace.
“A homeless person I met in Florida called her the screaming bitch from Hell, and male homosexuals I’ve met have called her the big dike. But she’s a tiny woman, and she herself has cried in a song that Hell isn’t hers.
“Another of her songs tells of Christian repentance. She proclaims her love of the ideal and bewails her inability to live up to it. She bewails that betrayal such as Peter’s that caused Christ more suffering than nails ever could, which is none at all to a believer, a person of faith: ‘The spear in your side is me,’ she wails.
“’Please,’ she begs. ‘Let it rain down on me.’
“Maybe it’s only me, but her lyrics make me think I’ve heard them before, somewhere, sometime. But I have no memory of where, and so I can attribute that feeling only to the power of myth, facts beyond knowledge.
“And now she lives in the city of angels, trying to raise children fathered in a woman with whom she no longer lives, by a product and producer of the sensuality of the seventies. Once only having done whatever it takes to raise a song to the top of the pop-charts, her fame now comes mostly from interviews in which she answers questions mostly about her domestic life, as thought it were unusual. And, worse, she does the interviews with makeup filling the scars of her nails on her face.
“Most stockbrokers’ domestic lives are far freakier, if they have any domestic life beyond powdering their noses to hide the cocaine redness, or paying ‘marriage-counselors’. But they’re not great poets, and so nobody pays any attention to them, except some money-mongers. But that’s aside from my sensibility.
“My sensibility is that this child of light, prancing on stages like Achilles before the walls of Troy, in the manner we now attribute to the family-person Hector, sings the best I understand on Earth, the most truth that I know:
“’All the way to heaven is heaven,’ she sings, ‘caught between the spirit and the dust. All the way to heaven is heaven, deep inside of us.’
“And yet behind her singing wail the pipes.”
“I first heard of her,” Lev went on, “from a French Quarter barfly. I don’t have a car with a car radio or an apartment with a stereo system, and jukeboxes don’t tell names as they play. So I have to learn names from people, face-to-face.
“The barfly was a retired hotel-accountant, and he told me he’d first heard of her from a young woman he’d seen walking up Royal Street as he was returning from the bars early one morning. He said the young woman was walking across the street from his apartment, her head bowed above the weight of a large duffle. He said he asked her whether she had a place to sleep that night.
“’No,’ he said she’d simply said.
“’You can stay at my place,’ he said he’d answered.
“’Where,’ he said she’d asked.
“’Right there,’ he said he’d answered, pointing at his balcony above where he stood by his gate.
“’Okay,’ he said she’d said as simply, and he opened the gate and followed her through it, and directed her up to his door.
“Inside, she carried her duffle into his living room and looked at his books on his shelves before setting down the bag. I’ve seen his books, and they are the most reputable ever written. Two of them were mine and in Russian, I’m pleased to say.
“’Nice collection,’ she said, and she set down her bag beside his desk.
“Drunk, so late, he hardly looked at her. He told her he was going to bed and that she could sleep with him or wherever she liked. She said she’d sleep on the sofa.
“’I don’t like to cuddle,’ she said. ‘Do you have an extra blanket?’
“He was too drunk to think of or bother with folding out that sleeper sofa, but he gave her a blanket and a pillow he kept for the possibility of doing that. She thanked him and sat on the sofa, and he undressed and fell asleep in his big empty bed.
“Late in the morning, he awoke to sunshine through the French windows to his balcony, and she still slept on the sofa. In the sunlight, he saw her face, which he found quite pretty, and a foot extended bare beyond the blanket. He opened a can of beer for breakfast and did not awaken her or watch her sleep. He did as he usually did.
“After drinking a few more cans of beer, he went for a walk and drank a few more beers at Molly’s. He spoke with some of his fellow barflies there, but he said nothing about the young woman sleeping on his sofa. He returned late in the afternoon and found her still sleeping. But she awoke and sat up as he entered the room.
“’That was good,’ she said, rubbing her eyes. ‘I hadn’t slept for three days.’
“’Want a beer?’ asked the barfly.
“’Sure,’ she said, and she thanked him.
“’What’s your name?’ he asked her, after handing her the beer.
“’Raenise,’ she answered, but he thought she’d said ‘Renee’.
“They talked awhile, and he didn’t ask her much, but she told him a little that he found vague, about her mother living in Slidell and her father living in Colorado, and about her having a daughter her mother took care of. She didn’t say why she hadn’t slept for three days, and he didn’t ask her. She just said she had no place to go.
“‘We should eat something,’ she said, after drinking several beers.
“He told her his place wasn’t well-stocked for entertaining, and she suggested walking to the little old A&P store a few blocks up Royal toward Canal. She said she’d cook if he’d buy, and he accepted the proposal, although he wasn’t hungry.
“Before they left, she looked through his cupboards and into his refrigerator, and at the store she bought some staples but also some bacon and chicken-livers. The cashier rang some of the prices too high, and Raenise noticed and demanded correction. Back at the apartment, she cooked the bacon and chicken-livers in some manner the barfly didn’t watch. She wrapped the livers in the bacon and called what she’d made remaki.
“Whatever it was, the barfly enjoyed it. And, after their eating from his coffee table, Raenise washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. She took a can of beer for each of them to the living room, and she sat on the floor and leaned back against the sofa. She sang then and there, quietly a long song about happily living family life on a farm.
“She showed no sign of leaving, and the barfly had no problem with that, although his sisters had scheduled to visit from Michigan next day, on his recommendation to them to enjoy French Quarter Fest, the best time there in the Quarter’s best weather, the early spring with relatively little rain. His sisters arrived in the evening, in a taxi from the motel they’d booked in Metairie against the barfly’s recommendation. Raenise was sleeping again on the sofa but arose as they entered the room, as she had for the barfly yesterday. Seeing her, the sisters stopped and stared.
“’This is Renee,’ said the barfly to his sisters, and Raenise did not correct him.
“The sisters watched her sit up and said Hi, but they did not offer to shake hands.
“’Nice to meet you,’ said Raenise.
“’We’re hungry,’ said one of the sisters. ‘Where should we go?’
“’Coop’s has good food,’ said Raenise.
“The sisters looked at her again without a word or a smile, but the three of them and Raenise and the barfly went to Coop’s anyway and ate a very nice spicey Cajun fish-dish Raenise recommended, and Raenise broke a tooth, a front one.
“’Oh,’ said Raenise. ‘Maybe I can sue them. You’re witnesses. You saw it.’
“She put the broken-off piece of the tooth into a pocket of her jeans, and none of them said another word about it. They were all out for a good time.
“’Where did you meet Mickey Rourke?’ asked one of the sisters.
“So they walked past Molly’s to the Déjà Vu, in the opposite corner of the Quarter. There, the barfly introduced the sisters to some other barflies.
“’This is Ed,’ said the barfly. ‘He flies model airplanes and bakes bread.’
“The five of them sat at a table, not at the bar. And the sisters drank cocktails, while Raenise and the barfly drank beer. Raenise arose and returned to the bar, where she spoke a few minutes with Ed, and returned to the table.
“’He’s going to bake you a loaf of bread as a souvenir,’ she said to the sisters, as she again sat. ‘He said he’ll bring it here tomorrow night.’
"One of the sisters complained about the color of her cocktail, and the bartender fixed it. He was a chemistry major at the University of New Orleans.
“Next evening, as the sisters went to the casino, leaving Raenise and the barfly at home alone because neither of them cared for gambling or for glitter, the loaf of bread showed the barfly exactly what Raenise was.
“But, first, she corrected him about her name, telling the barfly it was Raenise and not Renee, and she seemed to him a little angry.
“’How about if I call you Rainy?’ he asked.
“’That’s nice,’ she said. ‘I like nicknames.’
“And the anger disappeared in a broken-toothed grin.
“’Oh!’ she said. ‘The bread. I’ll go get it. Do you want to go?’
"He declined, and she went alone, and she did not return until late in the night, after the barfly had gone to sleep in his big bed. She awakened him, stumbling in with the key he had already given her, and slamming the door and turning on lights. The barfly found her sitting on the sofa, an arm bruised and a knee cut and bleeding. She was cleaning a crack-pipe with a paperclip. She looked up at him
“’Why did you let me go alone?’ she asked.
“’Oh, Rainy,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I am sorry.’
“’It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
“She said nothing about the crack, but she said she’d fallen down crossing a street, as she touched her cut knee below her rolled up pant-leg. She rubbed the bruise on her arm with the palm of her other hand. But then she looked up again.
“’But look,’ she said, grinning. ‘I got it.’
“She arose from the sofa, stumbled to the kitchen and returned, with the loaf of bread wrapped in tinfoil in a brown-paper bag.
“’We have to put it in the refrigerator,’ she said.
“The sisters accepted the loaf of bread, but they did their tourist-shopping without the barfly or Rainy. They checked in with them from time to time, but declined to leave their souvenirs in the apartment, as they did their other tourist deeds.
“I’m not leaving this stuff here,” one said, looking at Rainy.
“But soon they were gone, and Rainy was still there. While despairing of her crack trouble, the barfly found her full of delight, delighting him and others. She introduced him to some of her crack connections and took him once to buy some of the stuff. Everyone the barfly met with her seemed to love her, and they all told him to take care of her. They said they were glad he could see what she was.
“From time to time, over the next few weeks, Rainy took all of her clothing off, and joined the barfly in his big bed. They made love, but she never slept there, and she said again that she didn’t like to cuddle. She slept only alone on the sofa, and she never folded it out. The barfly found that sad but pushed for nothing.
“One night, a rainy night, Rainy told him she had to go out for awhile. He reminded her of her having admonished him for letting her do that alone before, but she said it wasn’t what he thought. She said she’d be alright. What could he do?
“Less than two hours later, she returned. She was soaking wet and smiling, and looking not the least for wear. She grabbed a beer and sat on the sofa.
“’I heard her,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t see her, but I heard her.’
“’Who?’ asked the barfly. ‘Whom did you hear?’
“’Melissa,’ she answered. ‘I heard Melissa Etheridge sing.’
“Not having money for admission and not asking the barfly for it, she had stood in the pouring down rain, in the street outside the House of Blues, and listened to Melissa sing inside. And so I had to look her up and see what charm was there.
“But,” said Lev, “this story has no happy end, as far as I can see. Soon, the crack-head Rainy began stealing money from the barfly’s wallet, and the barfly felt he had to let her go. One night, he picked her key up from the coffee table and told her so. Without a word, she took a shower and put on clean clothes.
“She put on a T-shirt of his. She loaded her duffle and went away, and he never saw here again. Nor did he ever seek her, but neither could or would he ever forget her, as he slept alone in his king-size empty bed.
“As he heard the Quarter’s music through his windows, as he heard the calliope on the Natchez mornings, on this muddy river.”
“And yet,” said Lev, “such stories are a dime a dozen, here on Earth. Here’s another one I heard from that homeless-shelter finance-administrator. But not to wear my welcome out, I’ll try to say this one succinctly. Better, I’ll let you have it exactly in the finance-administrator’s words. He composed it into a lyric waltz, and he sang it to me. He sang it a capella, in that vault beneath the bar.
A flower she was, sitting alone
In a hole where somebody puts crazies.
Alone she was, while she should have been
With her kind in a field full of daisies.
Ramona, a flower, smiles sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
Ramona, a flower, smiles sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
One of the crazies took her out of there
To the wider wide world of a carnie.
Now she sat alone in the cab of a truck,
While he robbed kids with his blarney.
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
Children were born. After years she had friends.
She moved through the weakness around.
She gave herself up to the crazy things,
To the sad silly loss they had found.
Ramona, a flower, smiled crazily now, not seeing the beauty she is.
Ramona, a flower, smiled crazily now, not seeing the beauty she is.
Carnies, not seeing her wide blue eyes,
Took what they wanted from her.
Her children ran wild and learned the same things.
They were born too long at the fair.
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
One day a man saw the beauty she is
And offered to take her away.
But she said, “I don’t know anymore what I want,
But you’re not what I’m wanting today.”
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly at me, not seeing the beauty she is.
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly at me, not seeing the beauty she is.
Who knows what she saw from her sad sweet smile,
Before learning those carnival ways,
Or what will become of her children and her,
If they take her sweet beauty away.
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
Ramona, a flower, smiled sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
Her blue eyes and small hands as she stands in the light
Are something she may never learn.
They’re the dance that the rest of us can’t even want
In the blindness that keeps us from her.
Ramona, a flower, smiles sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
Ramona, a flower, smiles sadly still, not seeing the beauty she is.
“The finance-administrator told me that one night the crazy who had fathered Mona’s children caught her adulterating in a common shower the carnival company hauled along with them. He said it reminded him of a Rod Stewart song.
“’You’ve been screwing him all along,’ wailed the crazy. ‘Haven’t you.’
“’No,’ said Mona, now wrapped in a towel, outside the shower-trailer.
“’If I listened long enough to you,’ sings Rod Stewart, “I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true. Knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried, still I’d look to find a reason to believe.’
“The crazy wept then and there, but surely he did not find a reason to believe in himself, or much in the young and flowering Ramona, whom he called Dummy.
“But, at least, he did not leave her, desperate as he was.”
“’You know, Lev,’ said the finance-administrator, ‘that the word “carnival” comes from Roman for farewell to flesh. You know that the word now means a festival of debauchery before fasting for Lent, Mardi Gras in New Orleans being maybe the most famous example. But few carnival workers know that, and fewer of them fare well for flesh, their flesh or others. And hardly any of them take a break for Lent.
“’Jamie,’ he’d said before he took me barhopping in Southy, ‘is a Rod Stewart impersonator who lies to himself that he doesn’t read because he’s a sex maniac. Truth is that he doesn’t read because he’s burnt his brain out with drugs, although he holds more goodness near his surface than do most people I know, most any person on Earth.
“’Mona’s husband didn’t use drugs, although most carnival workers do and rob children mainly to pay for that. Mona’s husband was addicted only to money and Mona, and a drug-addict carnie one evening beat him and dragged him through gravel in a driveway because of that, because he didn’t do drugs and was addicted to Mona.
“’That druggy carnie may have been an effective warrior, and he may have been an effective money-monger or politician, had he intelligence beyond his resentment. So, Lev, it seems to me, that the trouble with humanity is that we don’t know what we want, top to bottom, rich or poor. We wish to feel we’re better than our neighbors.’”
“I’ve learned for myself,” said Lev, “that many carnival workers can’t or won’t use social security numbers, but their main difference from most of us is that they work more hours for less money, because they can’t compete with most of us in claiming worthiness. But, worse, we wish to feel better than our lovers.
“Yet, at most, as far as I know, Mona never left her husband, either. And I personally hope they grow old together, learning. I hope they grow old together flowering to peace. I hope we all somehow do that.”
“It’s so simple,” said Lev to me. “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, all things shall be possible to you. But, instead, people haven’t enough faith to look into their own hearts to see the seed of goodness there ready to sprout and flower and fly. So they spread their dishonesty beyond themselves and receive what they expect, the same in return. The desperate excuses eat them alive.
“Peter sank like a stone in the Sea of Galilee, for lack of faith. For lack of faith, he denied Christ three times before the dawn of the day of Christ’s crucifixion. Yet people say that he not only is but should be the rock on which the churches calling themselves Christian are built, with their lack of faith.
“I asked a person calling herself an evangelist how she reconciled that, and she said that nobody’s perfect. She said that we must love each other for our failings, and that only by such forgiveness could there be a church at all. She said that was the message of Jesus Christ, and I quoted Fits Jr. against that notion.
“’It may not happen in a day,’ said Fits Jr., “It may not happen in a week, and it may not happen in a month. It may not happen in a thousand years. But let us begin.’
“She was a Wellesley graduate living in South Carolina. So I figured she was more in line with Fit’s junior’s more famous demand in that speech: that we give more to government than we get from it, contradicting Lincoln’s notion that government of and by and for the people should not perish from Earth, supporting a return to feudalist monarchy contrary even to the ideals of Arthur, of Camelot.
“’In other words,’ I settled on saying to that person for then, feeling unsuccessfully parabolic: “Whether or not anyone is perfect, it seems to me we all can try to be. As far as I can see, using imperfection as an excuse for more imperfection is the ultimate in faithlessness and not Christian at all.’
“’You’re unforgiving,’ said that person, ‘and so you’re unforgiven.’
“That I don’t see that forgiving must be forgetting, I could not answer. Quietly I did not see myself getting anywhere for that person, and I was sure that shrilling and shrieking my argument would be no better. So I chose to keep her in mind while I moved on to further thought for different media. I forgave that trespass while remembering my debt to alleviate it. Funny my name is near the front of that word:
“Lev, leave, levitate, lift lightly.
“Well, that’s it. I’m sure that’s it. I know that’s it, and I dearly miss the feeling of the presence of Sophia and our children. They loved me, and I treated them so badly, and I’m sick of this wandering, but still I don’t know how to get to heaven.”
“You just have to feel that,” I said, as Lev again took his bearded face in his blooded hands and bowed his head again to gaze into the river. “And you have to feel that eventually sense will sink into all the hypocrites, on Earth and elsewhere.”
“I feel it,” Lev answered, “as Russia and all Earth has suffered and are suffering for such. Lenin agreed with my naiveté and tried to carry Marx’s irrationality into Russia, and instead stepped us from our feudalism into imperialism, as England and France had stepped centuries before. Now the nations that learned the futility of imperialism are carrying Russia to capitalism. But, I know, it’s only history.
“I feel, and I know, that communism would not have a name, if people always shared. At the bottom of all Marx’s and Lenin’s rationalization was the simple and perfect ideal that we must love our neighbors as ourselves, to be happily at peace. But few men even love their wives, now after all those lessons.”
So, the sun lowered on our lesson, settled in one soul. Rosie-fingered, old Sol was also setting below the river, trying rising to touch more. And we wouldn’t see her again this trip, or the touch of this trying for all your eternity. But, at least, we had levitated Lev, and that was something.
Maybe not forever, but for someone, for now.
“Theresa and I are leaving tonight,” I said to our new old friend. “I’m going from here to meet her at the Café du Monde for beignets, and you might want to bid farewell to some of your friends at Molly’s. You can ride with us to Bob’s conference center for our mission-review with Slavey and Oliver, and Norma Jean will be there, too. If you meet us in front of the Cathedral at nine, we’ll give you a ride that far, and you can sit in. You can ride the rest of the way with Norma Jean.
“By the way, Barbarella worked for us for awhile, before we had to send her oblivious to a mystery-life galaxy after little Jack Horner suckered her with his sailing-ships. No, I mean his yachts, boat-racing for pride. She blew her mission.
“Anyway, we’ll welcome you to ride with us, if you feel you’re ready. I have a hunch Sophia will be glad to see you again, maybe even your children.
“Thank God,” said Lev. “I’ll see you then and there.”