The Eternal Footman Read online

  Nora’s gaze drifted toward the bus windows. She groaned. Whatever their individual differences in personality and socioeconomic background, everyone in Harvey Sheridan’s charge shared the conspicuous condition of being dead.

  “You…killed them?”

  “I immortalized them.” The spiritualist cracked the breech of his shotgun, fed a red shell into each chamber, and elevated the twin muzzles to the height of Nora’s chest. “I dispatched them to the Higher Realm.”

  As her heart crashed against her ribcage, Nora pulled the Sun-Maid box from her jacket. “Would you like some raisins? I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

  “The world we see around us is but an elementary school, preparing us for the Angelic Plane beyond. In a few seconds—ten, to be exact—you’ll hop aboard the Bus of Providence and travel to an infinitely wider and impossibly glorious reality. Raise your arms, please. One! Raise them, dear lady. Two!”

  Nora reached skyward. A pool of bile welled up in her stomach. I’m about to die, she thought. A lunatic with a worldview is going to murder me.

  “Three! Four!”

  “Please! Please! I’d love to enter your terrific afterlife, but not now!”

  “Five! It’s beautiful on the Other Side. Six! Peace past human ken. Seven!”

  “No, Mr. Sheridan!”

  “Eight! Nine!”

  Shots rang out, and there was red blood. But the blood came not from her, it came from Harvey Sheridan. He spouted and spurted. He leaked like a perforated wineskin. Smoke curled away from his shattered chest as, spinning around, he collapsed on the gravel, dead.

  Nora, gasping, turned toward Phaëthon. Rachel stood by the rear doors, her Uzi cooling in the afternoon air. Her face looked like cheese, white and mottled. She licked her finger and rubbed it along the barrel. The spittle sizzled.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “I never killed anybody before. I’ll be thinking about this all week.”

  “Of course.”

  “It hasn’t even begun to sink in.”

  “He deserved to die.”

  “It was so damn easy. I feel sick.”

  Nora stepped toward her friend, and they embraced. A minute passed. As the odor of Sheridan’s blood filled her nostrils, Nora tried unsuccessfully to imagine circumstances under which two people might need to hug each other more fiercely.

  “We’ve got work to do,” she said.

  “You want to bury him?” said Rachel.

  “No, I want to raid his gas tank. Diesel fuel guarantees admittance to the Lucido Clinic. I have a Siemens siphon and thirteen empty jugs.”

  “After that, will you drive me to the war zone?”

  “I’ll drive you to the goddamn moon.”

  “Just get me to Paramus by sundown.”

  Up north the season was autumn, a vacuous concept in tropical Mexico, and yet the world somehow felt different to Gerard. The air smelled of change. If the rumors were true, Lucido was finally satisfied with Somatocism’s manifold components—its temples, idols, clerics, and rites—and he would soon open Tamoanchan to the plague families thronging Coatzacoalcos.

  Although Gerard had given them forms and faces (perhaps even psyches), he felt no affection for the Somatocist deities. They were a severe and forbidding race, conceived in lava, gestated in dreams, and born from chisel strokes that partook more of desperation than of art. These gods were not his friends.

  Fiona was his friend—his beacon, his Beatrice, his bulwark against the despair inherent in his Nietzsche-positive status. Pelayo, too, was his friend, as was Fulgencio. And yet Gerard ached with a need that none of them could satisfy. He longed for philosophical discourse; he required a cerebral massage. Thus did his off-hours find him devising intellectual peers. He sculpted a basalt Karl Marx, gleefully informing the statue that history had been unkind to his theories of class warfare. He fashioned his own private Sigmund Freud, subjecting the ingenious neurologist to a feminist critique of depth psychology. With a nod to his old Cinecittà scheme, he carved a fifteen-foot reubenite statue of Desiderius Erasmus, then gave the Dutchman a German sparring partner, the chronically constipated, colonically obsessed Martin Luther. In the night’s deepest hour, Gerard would pour a glass of mescal, sit at the theologians’ feet, and listen.

  LUTHER:

  Is that you, Satan? Begone, Evil One. Begone, or I unleash the most withering anal blast a man can summon.

  ERASMUS:

  Hold your fire.

  LUTHER:

  Desiderius? In the flesh?

  ERASMUS:

  In the stone.

  LUTHER:

  Logic’s trollop! The whore of Aristotle! Splendid! Where are we, anyway?

  ERASMUS:

  Some sort of afterlife, I believe. I’d call it Purgatory, but you’d start ranting about unscriptural Catholic fabrications.

  Luther tries without success to discharge a gas bubble.

  LUTHER:

  I hate being a statue.

  ERASMUS:

  On what topic shall we disagree today? Free will? Salvation? Jews?

  LUTHER:

  Let the Jews improve their opinion of our Savior, and I shall improve my opinion of the Jews. I don’t want them murdered, mind you. Banished, yes…

  ERASMUS:

  Once, in Palos, I saw thousands of them perish. They were trying to cross the Mediterranean after Isabella’s General Edict of Expulsion.

  LUTHER:

  …disenfranchised, enslaved…

  ERASMUS:

  Not all the drownings were accidental.

  LUTHER:

  …but I can find no scriptural warrant for extermination.

  ERASMUS:

  Instead of behaving in a Christian fashion, the hired captains tossed their charges overboard.

  LUTHER:

  I feel one coming.

  ERASMUS:

  A scriptural warrant?

  LUTHER:

  A blast. Beware, Satan! Get thee behind me!

  An intestinal tornado reverberates through Purgatory.

  LUTHER:

  Take that!

  ERASMUS:

  Did you catch him?

  LUTHER:

  Listen carefully. He sprints away on cloven hoofs. I haven’t dealt him such a blow since my ninety-five theses.

  ERASMUS:

  Feces?

  LUTHER:

  Against indulgences. A person cannot buy his way into Heaven, Desiderius. God decided each man’s fate before the beginning of time.

  ERASMUS:

  Whenever you tell me how salvation works, I grow weary in the soul. In the misty distance I see a glass of wine and a copy of the Ethics. They call to me like the beguiling sirens of old.

  LUTHER:

  Be honest. It’s my flatus, not my philosophy, that sends you away.

  ERASMUS:

  Not so. Give me the stink of your bowels over the stench of predestination any day of the week. Fare thee well, monk. I am off to commune with the divine Aristotle.

  On the last day of September, Gerard drove his pony cart along Calle Huimanguillo and up the slopes of Mount Tapílula for his regular Sunday-afternoon meeting with Lucido, an event he anticipated with all the jollity of a cancer victim beginning radiation therapy. The last three such sessions had been utterly unproductive and not a little embarrassing, with Lucido getting wired on hyperion-15 and loudly defying abulia to appear before him in humanoid form so the two of them could wrestle like Jacob and the angel.

  Lucido’s private apartments—his conservatory, gymnasium, bedchamber, study, and library—reminded Gerard of a child’s set of plastic nesting blocks, rooms within rooms within rooms, a configuration culminating in a sanctum sanctorum known only to the psychoanalyst, his immediate staff, and the ghosts of various Veracruz governors. Today, for the first time, Chief Deacon Hubbard Richter guided Gerard all the way to the center. The space was hexagonal, each wall featuring an arched portal and a gigantic television screen surrounded by red velour drapes. In the c
enter: a sunken hot tub, steam rising from the swirling waters. Powered, presumably, by Tamoanchan’s underground generators, a hidden array of VCRs flooded the hexagon with six separate transmissions. Lucido’s present tastes ran to vintage black-and-white horror movies, so Gerard now confronted a kaleidoscope of mad scientists and resuscitated corpses.

  “Your last Risogada was unsatisfactory,” said Hubbard Richter, sidling out of the hexagon. Predatory, humorless, and deficient in affect, with bony limbs and bad skin, the chief deacon was the sort of man whose sculpted portrait would be most fittingly rendered in dirty ice. “His grin was menacing when it should be jocular.”

  “What the fuck do you know about jocular?” snapped Gerard.

  “I’m rejecting it,” said Richter, and he vanished.

  A plush gold divan overshadowed the hot tub. Dressed in his customary black caftan, Lucido lounged on a pile of satin pillows, puffing on a panatela. As Gerard approached, the psychoanalyst opened a drawer beneath the divan and retrieved the Moroccan leather case in which he kept his syringe and his phials of hyperion.

  “Horror movies are like sex,” said Lucido, injecting himself with two cubic centimeters. “It’s a terrible experience, but you know you have to keep on going because there’s this astonishing thrill waiting at the end.”

  “I would like to make a complaint,” said Gerard.

  “Throughout my early youth I could imagine no pleasure more supreme than seeing a classic horror film revived on late-night television” Lucido, rising, blew a smoke ring shaped like a Möbius strip. “In becoming a therapist, I sought to tame the dark side of the psyche as thoroughly as Universal Studios had domesticated the denizens of Transylvania and Vasaria.” He pressed his palm against the nearest screen, which currently displayed a deranged descendant of Victor Frankenstein working furiously in his laboratory, mimicking God. “It was all so simple. Wooden stakes for vampires, silver bullets for werewolves, torches for ambulatory mummies.”

  “Mr. Richter’s credentials as an art critic are unfamiliar to me. I want him to stop editorializing on my sculptures.”

  “Then I treated my first pedophile, next a necrophile, and I realized that the sociopathic mind is a thousand times more miasmic than anything in the Universal vaults.” Lucido slid his palm from the scientist’s lab toward the Creature from the Black Lagoon. “The Gill Man touched me deeply. He had an aptitude for abducting women but no genitals, so what did his talent avail him?” Placing his index finger against the screen, he momentarily endowed the Creature with a penis. “Meanwhile, I had genitals but no aptitude for abducting women.” He sucked on his cigar. “The priciest panatela in the world. Each puff costs me two dollars. I shall instruct Mr. Richter to keep his opinions to himself.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  Taking Gerard’s sleeve, Lucido led him across the hexagon and into the vicinity of a green velvet curtain embroidered with a snarling Soaragid. Lucido lifted the veil, disclosing a dim alcove dominated by a hospital gurney. A comatose adolescent in a blue smock lay on the pad, her pasty skin marred by the pocks and grooves of stage-four thexis. Her mother sat on a footstool, keeping watch, a small, hunched woman in her fifties, head bowed, fingers interlaced in prayer. The woman inhaled and exhaled in time with her daughter, as if the young abulic might otherwise neglect to breathe.

  “Meet Anna Fergus, mother of Malvina Fergus,” said Lucido. “Mrs. Fergus, meet Gerard Korty, the man who makes the gods.”

  “We came all the way from Victoria, Texas”—Anna Fergus stood up and lifted her outstretched arm to the height of her heart—“seven hundred and fifty miles. I carried Malvina in a hay wagon, plus eleven gallons of diesel fuel.”

  Gerard supposed that Anna Fergus meant to shake his hand, but then he perceived a more intimate intention. The desolate woman hugged him, mutely but passionately, swinging both arms around his trunk like Orgasiad trapping a monkey in her coils.

  “The great war has begun,” said Lucido, locking his emerald irises on Gerard, “and the first battle will be fought within Malvina Fergus’s soul. She spends tomorrow on a hyperion drip, and then she goes to the temples.”

  As Anna relaxed her embrace, tears of gratitude coursed down her cheeks. “Right now we see only our Creator’s skull,” she told Gerard in a thick whisper, “but He’s mostly good, I know it. With God’s grace, your art will deliver my daughter.”

  “With God’s grace,” Gerard echoed feebly.

  “With Soaragid’s grace,” corrected Lucido, releasing a two-dollar smoke ring, “and Risogada’s—and the others.”

  Throughout the next week, Gerard submerged himself in his work, harvesting three reubenite chunks from Oswald’s Rock and turning them into serpent gods, but he couldn’t shake Anna Fergus and her dying daughter from his mind. He knew that if Malvina failed to recover, he would convene a mental tribunal and ruthlessly interrogate himself. Why didn’t you create a more soothing mistress of milk? the judges would ask. Why not a funnier lord of the jest, a merrier master of the revels, a hotter queen of passion?

  Saturday afternoon found him perched atop a tower of scaffolding, stripped to the waist, detailing the fangs on a thirty-foot Soaragid. Crimson dust coated his fingers; sweat speckled his brow. In the studio below, Fiona worked on the sequel to her unpublished novel, while the Ruíz brothers collaborated on a 5' × 10' oil of an erupting volcano spewing out choirs of angels.

  A young woman with the complexion of a Dresden shepherdess walked into the jaguar-god’s shadow, singing the Beatles song called “Octopus’s Garden.” Her porcelain skin held faint traces of stage-four lesions. Her awkward gait suggested an eleven-month-old taking her first steps. To her breast she clutched four crude mahogany renditions of the Somatocist pantheon, each the size of a Barbie doll.

  Gerard clamped his frosting chisel between his teeth and scrambled down the ladder. “Dear child, how are you?”

  “No longer a child, Mr. Korty,” said Malvina Fergus in a mellifluous voice. “On Wednesday, I entered Orgasiad’s grove and left my innocence behind. Thanks to your gods, I have experienced the raptures of reality.”

  “No more fetch? You’ve thrown her off?”

  “The last time I saw Gwendolyn, she was wandering around a coffee plantation, blind as God, totally confused.”

  “Maravilloso!” said Pelayo.

  “Fabuloso!” said Fulgencio.

  Glory be to the wereserpent, thought Gerard. Hosannas to the jaguar-god. All hail Idorasag and Risogada.

  “I’d like to become your apprentice,” said Malvina.

  “It’s not much fun,” said Gerard. “Sharpening chisels, hauling rocks…”

  “I need to serve you.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Gracias.” Malvina’s eyes expanded like bubbles of lava rising from Catemaco’s flow. “I carved these myself,” she said, setting her inept idols on the ground. Her face acquired a luminosity that Gerard did not find entirely benign. “In every human psyche, four mythic energies flow like rivers. At Tamoanchan, the affirmation gods took my hand and led me to the waters’ sacred source. The world gland suckled me. I kissed the serpent, laughed with the crocodile, danced in the jaguar’s arms.”

  Fulgencio set down his brush and cried, “Mamó y chingó!”

  “Rió y bailó!” shouted his brother.

  “Sí, sí, sí, sí!” sang the acolyte.

  A queasiness spread through Gerard. What had Lucido wrought, exactly? A pagan fundamentalist? A fool for Soaragid? He prayed that Malvina’s faith was spongy at the core—adolescent enthusiasm, not full-bore fanaticism.

  “I hope Gwendolyn stays away forever,” said Fiona.

  “How could it be otherwise?” asked Malvina.

  Because every god has a dark side, thought Gerard. Even the king of the risible. Even the mistress of milk.

  A treacherous fog enshrouded the Eastern seaboard as Nora drove over the New York state border and north along the Cross Westchester Expressway toward the
Tappan Zee Bridge. She firmed her grip on the wheel and brooded. Given their volatile cargo—the Gansevoort premium plus the thirteen gallons of diesel fuel they’d pilfered from Harvey Sheridan’s bus—prudence demanded that she stop until the mist lifted. Screw prudence, she thought. Every minute she spent between here and Coatzacoalcos was sixty seconds ceded to Kevin’s fetch.

  “You awake?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Rachel, slouching in the passenger seat, her white scarf draped across her face.

  “It’s foggy, but I want to keep going.”

  “No argument from me.”

  “You still thinking about…?”

  “The man I murdered? Of course.”

  “That wasn’t murder,” said Nora. “It was fumigation.”

  As they approached the Hutchinson River Parkway, a deserted Texaco station appeared, and Rachel asked Nora to stop. Swathed in fog, two defunct service islands rose above a sea of fractured concrete, each pump as useless as the udder on a dead cow. After grabbing one of Kevin’s diapers—to clean the seats, she explained—Rachel marched up to the ladies’ room, opened the rusty door, and, braving whatever vermin resided within, entered.