The Eternal Footman Read online

  Would’ve cut Jewish casualties in half.

  She lifted her weeping eyes toward Jehovah’s grin, intent on begging Him aloud for whatever forgiveness her soul deserved and His dwindling powers permitted, but her strength deserted her, and the words lodged unspoken in her throat.

  The Catemaco Miracle, Gerard called it. The Mexican Resurrection. The Tehuantepec Apocalypse. In the sculptor’s view, recent events around the smoldering volcano partook no less of the supernatural than did the malignant wraiths who’d started it all. Malvina Fergus was the first of her kind, a thected abulic in seemingly permanent remission, but she was not the last. By the time Columbus Day rolled around (try as he might, Gerard couldn’t shake off the U.S. calendar), the Church of Earthly Affirmation was curing fifteen plague victims per week.

  Initially it seemed that the dispossessed fetches might be a problem, not because they consumed too many resources—a leveler knew no appetites beyond its lust for someone else’s life—but simply because they took up space. Throughout that amazing autumn, it was difficult to find a fetchless plaza or park in Coatzacoalcos. But then, as if following the example of Malvina Fergus’s doppelgänger, the parasites simply removed themselves, stumbling blindly into the jungle and vanishing amid the vines and ferns. When he heard that the plague was in retreat, a wave of self-satisfaction rolled through Gerard’s breast. He hadn’t felt so pleased with himself since receiving the Order of Saint Matthew Medal for his Madonna. Pride was a sin, of course—Dante disciplined its practitioners by consigning them to ledge one of Purgatory and placing heavy rocks on their necks—but it was probably too late for him to mend his ways.

  Have you not learned that we are lowly worms,

  Born to become angelic butterflies,

  Destined to sail to Judgment all unveiled?

  Say wherefore does your puffed pride soar so high,

  Since you are naught but insects incomplete,

  Like to the grub of unperfected form?

  “Adrian, my hat goes off to you,” Gerard told Lucido.

  They were sitting in the psychoanalyst’s aviary, descending cup by cup through a punchbowl of sangria, and for once the stench didn’t bother Gerard. Birdshit, he decided, was simply the price you paid for birdsong.

  “I’m not sure which affords me greater delight,” said Lucido, his brain afloat on red wine and hyperion-15. “Defeating the levelers or humiliating those hidebound eggheads who have for so long monopolized the Western philosophical tradition.”

  “The former, I should imagine.”

  “Quite possibly the latter.” A cockatoo landed atop Lucido’s outstretched forearm. The bird hopped onto the tea table, dipped its beak into the punchbowl, and imbibed half an ounce of sangria. “From Pascal to Kierkegaard, it has been axiomatic among intellectual reactionaries that a Deosuicide would be a bad thing. For all His failings—His evil aspect, if you buy Judge Candle’s theology—the idea of an interventionist God is so powerful, so inspiring, that any effort to replace it must ipso facto fail. And, indeed, until this moment, all attempts at such a swap have proven catastrophic.” He removed a panatela from his humidor, ignited his butane lighter, and touched flame to tobacco. “The whole pathetic story begins with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, a feeble ideal at best, no more capable of sustaining the transcendent than my cockatoo is capable of sustaining a conversation. After Kant, of course, we get the vapid Deist vision of a scientific utopia and the French philosophes’ oxymoronic Church of Reason. Then come Hegel’s specious dreams of high culture fused to modern industry, Comte’s pathetic positivism, Nietzsche’s inhumane humanism, the calamity of totalitarian Communism, and the vile nationalistic occultism of the Third Reich. Finally, there’s America’s special contribution, the worship of mass-produced material goods. But here on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, we have accomplished the impossible. We have superseded God, Gerard. God Almighty. Jehovah Himself. Does that sound absurdly Promethean and impossibly vain?”

  “Yes, Adrian, it does.”

  “The traditionalists say, ‘If God wanted man to fly, He would have given him wings.’ To which I reply, ‘If God didn’t want man to fly, he would have strangled the Wright brothers in their cribs.’”

  “The Jehovah to whom I once subscribed didn’t strangle people. I hope the same can be said for Soaragid and Idorasag and—”

  “Rest assured, Gerard.” Lucido took a drag, blew a figure 8, and smiled. “The Somatocist pantheon is as benign as your lame-duck Trinity.”

  Gerard would have regarded his patron’s high opinion of Somatocism and its gods skeptically but for the fact that Lucido’s views were evidently correct. Besides exhibiting no symptoms whatsoever, the recovered abulics were proving to be an astonishingly charitable population. Almost without exception, they used their new leases on life to promote the common good. True, their devotion to the affirmation deities partook of zealotry, but it was at base a thinking zealotry and, just as important, a loving zealotry. A third of the acolytes and their families set out for Tamulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, and the continent beyond, determined to locate as many thected abulics as possible and lead them south to treatment. Of those pilgrims who stayed behind, about half dedicated themselves to helping recently arrived plague families find donations acceptable to the Church of Earthly Affirmation. Chief Deacon Hubbard Richter took charge of the other half, directing them to augment the gods’ terrestrial domains: more cul-de-sacs in Idorasag’s labyrinth, additional alcoves in Soaragid’s cave, a second palace for Risogada, an expanded Orgasiadian grove—projects made essential by the religion’s astonishing success.

  From this pool of industrious pilgrims, Gerard was permitted to draw a dozen additional assistants, so that (counting Fiona, Malvina, the Ruíz brothers, and himself) the number of El Dorado godmakers now stood at seventeen. He could have employed twice that many. The larger Tamoanchan grew, the greater the number of niches there were to fill, and before long the studio was producing twelve graven images a week. Slowly but surely, El Dorado changed from a workshop into a factory, even as Gerard’s role evolved from master sculptor to plant manager.

  Although he despised his administrative duties, Gerard couldn’t deny that humankind’s future depended on the mass production of Somatocist idols. The time was not far off, he suspected, when Lucido would be anointing missionaries, arming them with the pantheon, and exhorting them to spread the faith. Beset by earthly affirmation, the fetches would eventually become as extinct as the dinosaurs whose extraterrestrial nemesis had brought Lucido and his collaborators to Mexico in the first place.

  “I’ll admit it—at first I was a doubter, but now I’m convinced Lucido’s some sort of genius,” he told the Ruíz brothers as the three of them rolled a huge hunk of Oswald’s Rock onto the sledge. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Up to a point,” said Fulgencio.

  “Yes, the man has his appalling side, I won’t deny it,” said Gerard. “And yet I can’t help admiring him.”

  “Appalling,” echoed Pelayo approvingly as he hooked the sledge to the donkey’s harness. “We talked to Lucido just once in our lives, when he interviewed us for this job.”

  Fulgencio urged the animal down the hill. “We remember a disturbing remark he made. He said, ‘Give me a long enough prick and a place to stand, and I’ll fuck the world.’”

  “Perhaps you missed the allusion,” said Gerard.

  “Archimedes,” said Fulgencio. “Our nuns were classicists to the bone.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem, Señor Gerardo,” said Pelayo, “is that he wasn’t joking.”

  Every time Quincy describes the scene, I get tears in my eyes. Here’s Mother, all hunched over from the two gallons of diesel fuel on her back, sometimes carrying and sometimes dragging her son down Route 64. She’s hungry. Her bad knee is killing her. She has to stop every five minutes to catch her breath. But she keeps on going, mile after mile.

  The worst part is t
he heat: the sun’s rays combined with the funeral pyres burning on both sides of the highway. The logs crackle. The dead abulics pop and sizzle.

  Night brings creepy sounds and spooky shadows, but at least Mother gets some relief from the sun. She finds a dry culvert, then makes us a bed out of fallen leaves and uses clumps of kudzu for pillows. A coyote would be proud to own this den. Mother is so hungry and tired, she doesn’t bother with my physical therapy. Beyond the culvert, the pyres keep blazing. Even though I’m locked inside my head, helpless as Vincent Price chained to the basement wall in Tales of Terror while Peter Lorre bricks him up, I can still smell the roasting meat.

  In the shank of the hot October afternoon, Nora stumbled into Charlottesville—the corpse of Charlottesville, she decided, for there wasn’t another human in sight. She started up Fifth Street, searching for a good Samaritan, or even an amoral Samaritan—anyone who might part with a crust of bread, a bit of cheese, a gulp of potable water. Where was everybody? Dead? Thected? Had the plague hit Virginia especially hard?

  A rangy, unshaven man sat in a bus-stop hut at the comer of Fifth and Main, hunting rifle on his lap, pulling apart a skinned rabbit. He greeted Nora’s approach with an inhospitable glance, sidled silently to the far end of the bench, and began eating. Once she was beside him, however, Kevin draped across her knees, the rabbit hunter softened for some reason and made her the object of his chivalry. After proudly explaining that he’d shot flayed, and boiled the animal himself, he offered her half the breast plus the remaining swallows in his can of Diet Coke.

  The rabbit meat tasted like ambrosia. No lactating angel had ever produced milk to equal the hunter’s aspartame elixir.

  “God bless you,” she said.

  “We’re better off than most towns. Lots of game up and down the Rivanna River. Rabbits, porcupines, pheasants, a few deer. Lord knows what we’ll do if the animals get the plague.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “McIntyre Park, watching the matinee. Me, I’m not much for theater. Football, that’s a different matter. I used to be the world’s greatest Falcons fan, back when there were Falcons. I’m sorry about your boy.”

  “I’m taking him to the Lucido Clinic.”

  “Is that in Virginia?”

  “Mexico.”

  “Hell, lady, you’ve got a long walk ahead of you.”

  It took the revived Nora only twenty minutes to bear her son the length of Main Street. McIntyre Park was an agreeable conjunction of groves, fields, and picnic pavilions surrounding a bandstand that currently functioned as an arena theater. Roaring and bellowing, a brawny actor stomped across the stage wearing a huge papier-mâché mask, eyes burning, nostrils flaring, tongues of flame darting from the mouth hole. Two bare-chested heroes dressed in leather aprons and copper greaves bounded into view, the first one stabbing the monster with a dagger, the second decapitating it with a sword. Hollywood blood spurted everywhere.

  Nora shed her backpack and laid Kevin along the last row of seats, right beside an elderly woman who greeted each Grand Guignol effect with applause. Settling down to absorb the show, Nora soon realized that the drama derived from the world’s oldest epic poem, Gilgamesh. She had just witnessed the celebrated slaying of the giant Khumbaba by the hero and his stalwart friend, Enkidu.

  Act one came to a visceral conclusion with Gilgamesh and Enkidu washing Khumbaba’s dried blood from their limbs. During the intermission, four troupers moved up and down the aisles carrying Rubbermaid garbage cans and asking for donations. The audience paid generously for its amusement, offering up everything from Hershey bars to smoked trout, raw broccoli to trussed rabbits, crab apples to a box of Wizard of Oats.

  “Who are these people?” Nora asked her neighbor.

  “The Great Sumerian Traveling Circus,” answered the old woman.

  “You mean they…move around?”

  “In the morning they break camp and head south.”

  “How far south?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  Act two commenced, developed, and reached a climax—the king’s famous lament over Enkidu’s corpse, culminating in his vow to find the secret of immortality—but the details were lost on Nora, whose brain now buzzed with a plan. A second intermission-cum-solicitation occurred, and then came act three: Gilgamesh walking a hundred miles through a fiery desert, killing a Man-Scorpion, and making love to the divine wine maker, Siduri. For Nora it was all a blur. As the hero sailed across the Waters of Death, she shouldered her diesel fuel, picked up her son, and headed for the park’s outdoor lavatory.

  In the ladies’ room, a putrid cinder-block bunker that, oddly enough, still had running water, she steeled herself and stared at the mirror. Dirt freckled her brow and jaw. Her hair looked like the Gordian knot. Her cheeks and eyes were baggy, as if she’d recently removed her face and slept with it under her pillow.

  Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, she washed herself head to foot. She straightened her hair, pinched her cheeks, and cleaned her teeth with a fingernail.

  The performance was over, the sun setting, by the time she emerged into the warm Charlottesville air. She carried Kevin past the bandstand, through a cluster of cottonwoods, and entered the troupe’s encampment, a circle of five weather-beaten and decrepit Gypsy wagons, hillbilly shacks on wheels, each paired with an equally weatherbeaten and decrepit horse. Spotting the actor who’d played Enkidu, she inquired whether the Great Sumerian Circus was indeed heading south, and, receiving an answer (“at least as far as Greensboro”), asked him where she might find the troupe’s manager. Enkidu pointed to the jewel of the caravan, its windows hung with lace curtains, its chassis decorated with gilded scrollwork.

  “Ask for Percy Bell,” he said.

  “Do you think he’ll let me hitch a ride?”

  “No, but what the hell do I know? I never thought he’d give me a decent part, but I ended up with almost as many lines as him.”

  Nora mounted the stepladder to Percy Bell’s wagon and rapped her knuckles on the window. The door opened, and there stood Gilgamesh—not surprisingly, the Sumerian Circus’s beefy and handsome leading man was also its manager—saying, “I gave at the office” in an accent that wonderfully combined South Carolina and Sean Connery. His only unattractive feature was his beard, a mass of black whiskers that he wore in overwrought Mesopotamian ringlets.

  She introduced herself and explained why she wanted to reach the Isthmus of Tehuantepec as soon as possible.

  “Your troupe needs me,” she said.

  “I rather doubt that,” said Percy Bell.

  Reluctantly he ushered Nora into his quarters, then lifted Kevin from her arms and laid him on the couch. Theatrical posters papered the walls, each displaying Percy Bell’s name above the title of a play. Before the plague, he’d evidently divided his time between children’s productions and off-Broadway Shakespeare, so that one month might find him portraying the Reluctant Dragon, the next month the reluctant Dane, one month the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the next month the crookbacked Duke of Gloucester.

  “I’ll mend your costumes,” she said. “I’ll make your posters and collect your donations.”

  “Those jobs are taken,” said Bell, smearing lard on his face.

  She scanned the actor’s dresser, soon spotting an untitled script—an adaptation of the Orpheus myth, she concluded after leafing through several pages, skewed to the realities of the abulic age. “If you could just take us to Greensboro…”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Burkhart.” He continued to apply the lard, soon becoming as pale as a fetch. “I already have too many mouths to feed.” Nora flourished the script “Your next production?”

  “If I can talk the troupe into doing it The title is The Lyre of Fate, or maybe Orpheus Underground would be better.”

  “In college I wrote a parody for my drama teacher. Waiting on Godot. Beckett’s hobos are working in a restaurant. The menu is blank. There’s no furniture. One afternoon Godot appears and orders an empty glass of absin
the.”

  Percy cracked a smile. “I can’t hire you. I simply can’t.”

  “Nobody understood the sadness of it all like the Greeks. They got it better than the Sumerians, better than the French absurdists.”

  “Tragedy without self-pity,” he said, nodding. “Defeat with dignity. The instant Orpheus learns he mustn’t look back on his lover, you know he’ll never get her to the surface.”

  “The woman who played Inanna tonight…”

  “Elizabeth Darby.”

  “She’d make a good Eurydice.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But isn’t the outcome too upbeat for you?” asked Nora. “Orpheus and Eurydice together again, frolicking through subterranean meadows?”

  Percy rubbed away the dissolved makeup with a swap of fabric. “It’s obviously a fake, like the framing story in the Book of Job. My version will climax with the nightingales singing over Orpheus’s grave.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “All right, you and Kevin can ride in Elizabeth’s wagon. She talks too much, but she has extra room.”

  “You won’t regret this, Mr. Bell.”

  “Yes I will, but that’s the story of my life.” He reached out and squeezed her arm. “We break camp at dawn. Welcome to life on the road, Mrs. Burkhart. It has nothing to recommend it.”

  The Flagellants of Montrose

  FIVE MILLENNIA AGO, when the world was new and the gods were young, there ruled in high-towered Uruk a courageous king, two-thirds divine, one-third mortal. His name was Gilgamesh, and his subjects did not love him. Gilgamesh exhausted the men of Uruk, exhorting them to gird the city with jewel-studded walls. The women he abused as well: maids and matrons, daughters and dowagers—all were prey to his royal ardor. At length the gods took pity on the people, creating for them a physically cruder but spiritually superior version of their king, a warrior with strong muscles, hooves for feet, and untamed flowing hair.