Shag the Veep, Save the World

CAUTION: This story depicts sexual activity with former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr and his wife Tippy. Tipper. Whatever. What are you, a frickin' reporter? Anyway, it may be inappropriate for children under the age of 14. For that matter, it may be inappropriate for children of any age, as well as for adults with weak hearts or stomachs. Should you decide to read further anyway, side effects may include nausea, vomiting, uncontrollable shuddering, having your face freeze in the likeness of Edward Munch's "The Scream," dyspepsia, bad breath, chiggers, warts and in rare cases a coma leading to death. According to both law students I consulted, I cannot be held responsible for any of this. Still, they did suggest I warn you in advance.

CHAPTER ONE

Like any good girl, Jennifer had very properly declined to entertain any thoughts of a sexual nature until her eighteenth birthday. Since, then, however, two months ago this coming Tuesday, she had thought of little else. Possessing considerable advantages -- lustrous long blonde hair, an ample chest, a brilliant smile, a pair of lithe, tanned legs, and a rented cheerleading uniform -- she had managed, in the six weeks remaining before her high school graduation, to earn the nickname "Many Men Jen."

It had taken two of those men, in fact -- the chairman of the English Department and Jennifer's history teacher -- to ensure that her graduation took place at all. Fortunately, both had agreed with Claire Jackson's suggestion that it was much better that her daughter be allowed to go away to college than that her dalliances become public knowledge.

For that matter, Claire would have preferred not to have known any more herself. Other than that one intervention, Claire chose to deal with her daughter's new-found concupiscence by ignoring it. Getting Jennifer her own phone was simple enough, and failing to hear the girl's repeated late night returns to the house was just a matter of not kicking her husband when he snored, thereby silencing sound that could block out the trumpets on Judgment Day. But when Claire's sister-in-law indignantly reported finding a half-naked Jennifer in bed with her son -- who at age seventeen naturally had no idea whatsoever of the meaning of his cousin's suggestions -- Claire realized that she had to act.

"Like, oh my God, what the fuck is going on?" Jennifer exclaimed as she looked around the sparsely furnished room, lit only by candles, that served as the office of the abbess.

"Ma cherie," the graying woman behind the desk said before continuing in heavily accented English, "I must ask you to restrain your language while you are among us. At the request of your mother, you will be here for the summer. In August you will return to America to attend your college and" -- she briefly considered how to rephrase Claire's exasperated "fuck whoever the hell she wants" -- "resume your normal life."

"You mean I'm like your prisoner?" Jennifer asked with a squeak.

"I prefer to think of you as a guest," the woman said. "I am Marie-Elaine, the abbess."

"But like you don't even have air-conditioning," Jennifer whined.

"Nor any electricity," the abbess added softly. "We live a simple life here, in service of Our Lady, trusting that the Lord will provide. Deus mihi providebit."

"Without television?" Jennifer's high-pitched squeal appeared to be bordering on hysteria, and the woman at the desk smiled and touched a bell in front of her.

"Mother Marie-Elaine?" The young woman who pushed open the door enough to poke her head through had her brunette hair cut, although chopped might be a more accurate word, in a simple pageboy. As the older woman waved her in, Jennifer saw that her outfit was even simpler, a long white shift with a strand of white rope knotted about her waist.

"Marie-Renee, come in. I should like you to meet Jennifer Jackson. Marie-Renee is our youngest member, Jennifer, the closest in age to yourself and our best speaker of English. She will show you to your room and answer any questions you have."

"I am delightful," Marie-Renee said to the horrified teen. "Shall you accompany me?"

"Whatever." Jennifer blew out a long exhalation and with one final glare at the abbess left with the newcomer.

"You know that I'm outta here first chance I have, right?" she said as the two walked down the corridor outside the office side by side. Marie-Renee stopped at a window at one end and gestured outside. Rolling her eyes, Jennifer stepped to the window and looked out. And then, when that brought nothing into view, she looked down. Far below them was a village. Jennifer took a quick step backward.

"Sorry. I hate heights."

"Then you may wish to ask Mother Marie-Elaine for an interior room," Marie-Renee said with a small chuckle. "The abbey is built on a plateau high above the river. Only the front door gives access to the pathway down, and only Mother Marie-Elaine has the key."

"You mean, like, I really am a prisoner here?" Jennifer's shrieks echoed throughout the deserted stone hallway.

Marie-Renee shrugged. "You will not leave without her consent, non."

"So what, uh, village is that?" Jennifer asked with as much nonchalance as she could muster.

"I am forbidden to say," Marie-Renee said with a sad shake of her head.

"But it's France, right? You can tell me that much."

"It is," the girl smiled. "Now, shall you be shown your room?"

It was even starker than the abbess's office, with only a twin wooden bed, a dresser, and a candle.

"You will find additional clothing in the dresser," the French girl said. "I will return for you before matins."

"Say what?"

"Evening prayer," she explained.

"Wait a frickin' minute. You mean like this place is full of a bunch of nuns?

Marie-Renee laughed, a delightful giggle that echoed throughout the stone-walled room.

"I have only taken temporary vows myself," she explained. "I came here when I was sixteen, and spent two years as a novice. I intend to petition for my permanent profession this fall, on my twenty-third birthday."

"You've been here for . . .," Jennifer's face clouded as she struggled with the math, "like six years?"

Marie-Renee inclined her head, and left the room with a wave. Jennifer stomped over to the dresser and yanked open the drawer.

"You must be fucking kidding me," she said, staring at the novice's robes that filled it. "I'll just keep these on, thanks a lot. Speaking of which, though , . ."

She sat down on the bed and pulled off her tennis shoes. For the last two months, she had made a practice of keeping absolutely nothing in the pockets of her skin-tight jeans that would have interfered with the silhouette of her curvy hips and slender waist. Not that she needed anything other than a credit card, which she kept in her right shoe, and a razor-thin cell phone, which went in the left. To her relief, both were still there. To her delight, her cell phone was getting an exceptionally strong signal, and she quickly depressed the "one" key to dial her best friend forever and demand that she drop everything she was doing to get Jennifer out of this predicament.

"Where in France?" Julie Astin asked.

"How the fuck should I know?"

"Can you see the Eiffel Tower?"

"No, I can't see the freakin' Eiffel Tower, Julie."

"Well, what the hell do you want me to do? Fly to France and start asking for convents? First off, I'm grounded 'til next month because Mom caught me and Billy doing it in the den, and second off, France? Isn't that that, like, in Africa or something?"

"Julie, you had that goddamn exchange student boyfriend. Wasn't he French?"

"Jean-Claude? I guess. We didn't really talk about it. We didn't really talk much at all now that I think about it..." Julie had started to laugh.

"Julie! Just find his phone number. When I find out where I am, I'll call you, and you can call him and tell him to send the police."

For the next two weeks, Jennifer made every effort to learn the whereabouts of her prison. When Marie-Renee proved to be impervious to her wiles, she turned to the older nuns. They ignored her with practiced silence, casting disapproving glances at the clothing that she continued wearing day after day. In desperation, she donned a novice's robe. The older nuns smiled in response, and at least acknowledged her presence, but proved no more forthcoming than Marie-Renee.

The young nun continued in her role as Jennifer's guide, taking her to prayer every day, gently suggesting activities -- gardening, reading, learning -- that drove Jennifer nuts, and escorting her to meals. It was there, in the abbey's communal dining room, that Jennifer finally took an interest in something other than her escape.

It was a painting of three nuns kneeling one in front of the other. The first two, who looked nearly identical to the women with whom Jennifer was sharing the room, were clutching their prayer books and staring resolutely forward. The third, much younger, had her face turned toward the artist, a Mona Lisa-like smile playing across her mouth as she raised a suggestive eyebrow. Her robes, also unlike those of the others, hinted at quite a figure underneath. And she held her prayer book in only one hand; the other pointed downward at an odd angle, the first two fingers extended toward the bottom right-hand corner of the picture.

"What's that?" Jennifer whispered, only to be glared into silence by all of the others in the room. Marie-Renee gave her a look and a nod, and after dinner was over, sat down in Jennifer's room to explain.

"That is a Materlio," the nun said proudly. "One of only three of 'is works known to exist. It is fresco, of course, painted directly on the walls while the abbey was being built."

"Couldn't spell very well, huh?"

"Pardonnez-moi? I don't understand."

"Up above the nuns, on the banner over the picture?"

"Notre-Dame-sur-la-Durance?" Marie-Renee wore a puzzled expression. "It is the name of this convent."

"Is it?" Jennifer asked, trying to appear nonchalant. "Well, he put an extra "s" in. It says 'Nostre-Dame-sur-la-Durance.' Even I know that."

"Non!" Marie-Renee reached out and grabbed Jennifer's arm, her eyes radiating excitement. "Nostradamus?"

"No," Jennifer said slowly. She hadn't seen this side of the French girl before, and it alarmed her. "Nostre-Dame."

"But that was 'is name -- Michel de Nostredame."

"Okay," Jennifer agreed, edging a little further away. "Whose name?"

"Nostradamus," Marie-Renee answered, her hushed voice quivering with excitement. "Surely you have heard of Nostradamus."

Jennifer shook her head.

"He spent most of 'is life right 'ere in this city. 'E was my 'ero in school. Mon Dieu, do you think 'e established the abbey?"

"Sure," Jennifer said agreeably. "Why not? Look, I'm kinda tired now. So maybe we could talk about it tomorrow, huh?"

"Certainly. Oh, I am so sorry. I will see you tomorrow for lauds, non?"

"Yeah sure. Lauds. Whatever." Jennifer waved as Marie-Renee backed out the door, and then leapt for the phone.

"Fuck! Where the hell are you, Julie? It's only like . . . well, I have no idea what time it is there, but you can't possibly be asleep. Anyway, the convent is called something liked Notre-Dame-sure-la-Dance, or something like that. I'm near some town where some guy named Nostredame ended up. Some famous guy. I'll call tomorrow night, same time. Don't let me down, Jules."

But there was no answer the next night, nor the night after that. And on the following morning, Jennifer discovered that she had failed to turn the phone off the night before. The battery was completely dead. There would be no rescue.

That evening at dinner, Jennifer found that she still could not tear her eyes away from the painting. It was not the attractive girl in the back, although Jennifer's attention to the painting over the last three days had started to attract snickering from the novices, and looks of disgust from the nuns. No, it was something else about the picture, something about the unnatural angle of the younger nun's arm. With a start, Jennifer found her eyes following the arm downward, to a barely perceptible crack in the wall in one corner of the dining room.

Jennifer waited until long after the final prayer service that evening, and then quietly made her way to the dining hall. She tiptoed down the hall with practiced stealth, her flickering candle lighting the way. The room was deserted, and she eagerly brought her candle over to the corner where she had spotted the crack in the wall. She pushed at it, she tried pulling on it with her fingernails -- all to no avail. She stood up and looked at the picture again, seeking yet another clue. It had to be a passageway. It just had to be! With a frustrated stamp of her foot, she stepped back for a better look. And the hidden doorway, its machinery still intact, slowly responded.

CHAPTER TWO

Dropping to her knees, Jennifer crawled toward the opening and extended her candle through it. A set of steps led downward, and she eagerly crawled through and began to descend. She was nearing the bottom, as the stairway opened onto a dusty room, when a voice from above nearly gave her heart failure.

"Zhennifer? Are you down there? What are you doing?"

"I'm here, Marie-Renee. Down the stairs. Quiet down, huh?"

"What is this place?" the French girl asked as she came thundering down the stairs.

"I was hoping it was a way out," Jennifer answered. "But it looks like a study of some sort."

"What is this?" Marie-Renee asked, picking up the only thing in the room not covered with a thick layer of dust. It was a small U-shaped instrument constructed of wood and leather, with a leather covering on the end of arm and a hand-operated crank at the end of the other. Marie-Renee slowly turned the crank, and the leather end gyrated wildly.

"I cannot think what it could possible be for," she said.

Jennifer blushed.

It's . . . it's, um . . ."

"Do you know?"

"It's a dildo. This end rests on your belly, this end goes in your pussy. You turn the crank, and . . ."

Marie-Renee's eyes went wide.

"Who would have made it?"

"How the hell would I know?" Jennifer said. "Maybe the book on the table will help us find out. Shit, I have no idea what this says. And I had three years of French. True, I got B's and C's. Well, and a D. But still, you'd think some of it would make sense."

"It is Medieval French," Marie-Renee said, looking over Jennifer's shoulder at the book the young girl had found on the dust-covered desk. "Mon Dieu! The last notebook of Michel de Nostredame!"

"You read Medieval French?" Jennifer asked skeptically.

"Naturellement," Marie-Renee said. She eagerly began to skim through the book. There were only a few entries; evidently it had been prepared shortly before the seer's death. As her companion studied the book, Jennifer began to look around at the other items on the shelf.

"This Nostradamus was certainly a horny little toad, wasn't he?" she said, picking up one book. "He's got a whole book of dirty nun pictures here. Oh my God. These are the three nuns in the picture upstairs. The older two are kissing, and the younger one is using the dildo on herself. Do you think he built this whole thing as like, some sort of whorehouse?"

"Mon Dieu," Marie-Renee whispered, her voice filled with alarm.

"Hey, I'm sorry. I forgot he was your hero and all." Jennifer whipped around to find that Marie-Renee was paying her no attention at all.

"Look at this," she said, pointing to the last page in the notebook. "Nostradamus predicted that on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year of the next millennium, a giant asteroid will come within one thousand miles of the earth."

"So?" Jennifer was bored already.

"So that's next month!" Marie-Renee exclaimed.

"Oh, get out. For one thing, we just had a millennium. There won't be another one for like, a hundred years or something."

"Non. The millennium comes every thousand years. Nostradamus was writing in the sixteenth century. The fifteen hundreds? Anyway, the millennium he's talking about to was the last one."

"Okay," Jennifer said, once again slowed by the need for math. "But that was like, on January 1, 2000. Y2K, ya know? So we're already in the ninth year, right? So we're fine. Nothing happened."

"Non," Marie-Renee repeated. "The millennium began on January 1, 2001. This is the eighth year. August 8, 2008 is the eighth day of the eighth month. That's next month!"

"But it's not like it's gonna hit us," Jennifer pointed out. "Thank God. I mean, an asteroid. Like somebody could get really hurt if that happened. I'd hate to be standing under that bad boy."

"Yes," Marie-Renee said, "or it could lead to the extinction of all life on the planet."

"Huh?"

"An asteroid, ma cherie, is what most scientists say caused the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Era. It hit the earth and created a huge cloud of dust that reduced worldwide temperatures to such an extent that it killed all the dinosaurs."

"Yuh. Anyway, it's not going to hit."

"Nevertheless, Zhenifer, it would be an environmental catastrophe."

"How do you figure that?" Jennifer asked, getting a little tired of her friend's know-it-all attitude.

"An asteroid with any significant gravitational pull would be able to drag the earth into a lower orbit around the sun, leading to global warming that would dwarf anything we 'ave seen to date."

"I bet you're a lot of fun at parties, huh? The orbit?"

Marie-Renee drew a circle in the dust on the desk and put an inkwell in the middle. An ancient coin became the earth, and another the asteroid on the far side of the earth. With infinite patience, the nun explained to a horrified Jennifer how the asteroid could pull the earth closer to the sun, leaving it in an orbit that would turn the entire planet into a lifeless desert.

Jennifer tried one last argument. "Why are you taking this so seriously? Some creepy old perv writes down a prediction, and you're like, oh, mon dieu, we're all going to die."

Marie-Renee stared her younger companion into silence. "Because too many of his predictions have come true. Napoleon, Hitler, the 'olocaust."

"All right, all right. So what do we do? Tell the police? The army? Have them shoot a missile at it?"

"Non. Nostradamus correctly predicts that there is no technology capable of moving the asteroid. But there is a way to prevent it. 'E says the wearer of the ring must have carnal knowledge of the man who was the second most important person in the most important country in the world at the turn of the millennium."

"But you just said that was over," Jennifer protested.

"The millennium, yes. The carnal knowledge need only take place before the asteroid arrives."

"Okay. So what's a carnal knowledge?"

It was Marie-Renee's turn to blush.

"Sexual intercourse."

"So you're telling me that somebody with some ring has sex with some important guy, and the asteroid disappears?"

Marie-Renee shrugged. "It does sound quite strange, non? Apparently the ring has tantric energy in it, and once activated, it will drive the asteroid away."

"O-kay."

"It is not a chance we should take, is it?"

Jennifer rolled her eyes.

"Okay. So first off, what is this ring you're talking about?"

"According to the notebook, in the third drawer of the desk."

To her surprise, Jennifer found an elegant silver ring in the drawer.

"All right. So who's the guy? I mean, if it'll get me out of here, I'll go do it."

"Well, the most important country in the world is France, and . . . stop laughing."

"Sweetie, the most important country in the world is America. And the president back then would have been that other pervert."

"Bill Clinton?"