The Eternal Footman Page 17
But it was the Sumerian Circus’s treatment of Kevin that ultimately won Nora over. Not a day went by without a cast member volunteering to feed the sick boy his lunch or dinner. Whenever Nora was about to massage Kevin’s muscles or dress his boils, a trouper invariably stepped in and offered to help. They even found Kevin a minor part in the show itself: the corpse that Khumbaba displays on his stockade as a deterrent to trespassers. To Nora the child seemed quite pleased every time the monster carried him on stage.
Crammed together in the Greensboro First Baptist Church, the opening-night audience gave Gilgamesh the King a standing ovation, and Percy easily convinced the city fathers—father, actually, his colleagues having all died of the plague—to approve an extended run. As it turned out, this particular residency marked a new chapter (a fresh clay tablet, as it were) in Nora’s personal epic. During the first three Greensboro performances, she realized that whenever Percy was on stage, a phenomenon comprising 178 of the play’s 192 minutes, her gaze never left him. After the fourth performance, she understood why.
God had died; Kevin had been thected; the future belonged to the fetches. And yet here she was sitting in the back pew of a ramshackle church in North Carolina, eating peanuts, sipping sassafras tea, and counting the curls on Percy Bell’s beard.
Nobody liked to discuss the subject, but during the early days of the company’s tour the plague had taken a severe toll on the Great Sumerian Circus. It was by disease, not design, that half the troupe had ended up playing multiple roles. Only in the night’s deepest hours, as Percy and Nora lingered around the campfire tossing dry twigs into the flames, was he willing to talk about his losses to the Cranium Dei.
Among the victims was Percy’s old drama coach from Duke, Terence Sterling, who’d joined the cast shortly after the fetches succeeded in making higher education as uncommon as costume balls.
“What part?” asked Nora.
“Khumbaba the Watchman.” Percy poked the fire with a birch stick. “The weird thing is, in real life Terry was the sweetest man you ever met.”
“Our dark sides always find outlets, don’t they?” she said. “Your teacher played Khumbaba. My father drank. His father hunted African lions.”
“God unleashed epidemics.”
Nora laughed. “The school psychologist thought Kevin’s magic was cathartic. He actually used that word. Cathartic.”
Jabbing the fire again, Percy raised the glowing ember to his lips and blew away the ash. His acting that evening had been particularly forceful, their final Greensboro performance. Nora hadn’t been so impressed since Eric, crouching over her on their wedding night, had drawn a blooming red rose out from between her thighs.
“I wish you’d seen Mason Yates, an absolutely amazing Ziusudra,” said Percy. “The minute he walked on stage, you knew exactly why Enki appointed him to save the human race.” The flames bestowed an amber glaze on his rugged face and shaggy arms. She thought of Talos, the bronze giant who menaced the Argonauts during their return to Greece. “Then Mason got thected and died, and I had to put Cyril in the role. He’s good, but he’s not a natural like Mason.”
“Your concept of Ziusudra is delicious, the way he keeps thinking Enki didn’t mean to pick him to build the ark, it was all a dreadful mistake.”
“I thought you hated my play.”
“Yes, but when it came to Ziusudra, you were really on your game. Reluctant leaders make the best heroes.”
Despite her carping, he clearly valued her companionship. Of all the people in the troupe, she alone shared his passion for myth. Once they got started, the two of them would discuss Orpheus’s descent, Icarus’s fall, Leda’s parturition, and Medea’s murder spree as excitedly as if these bizarre events had occurred in their own families.
“I hope Dr. Lucido isn’t like Ziusudra, tom by feelings of unworthiness,” she said. “I want him to believe he’s a wonder-worker.”
“Monomaniacs who set up self-aggrandizing empires in Third World countries,” said Percy, “do not generally suffer from low self-esteem.”
Yawning in tandem, they rose, kicked out the fire, and started toward the wagons, clustered on the grounds of the Greensboro Rotary Club. Sycamore trees lined their path; the shed leaves crunched and crackled underfoot. A crescent moon hung behind the Cranium Dei, giving Jehovah a pair of goatish horns.
Percy’s wagon loomed out of the darkness. Despite November’s chill, sweat formed in Nora’s palms. What if he invited her inside? Would she assume the usual risks—learning that he coveted only her flesh, admitting some pathogenic spirochete into her body—merely for a passing thrill? She knew one thing for certain: it was a problem she wanted to face.
“May I walk you home?”
“All right,” she replied evenly.
“Something’s bothering you?”
“No, no.”
“I thought it went well this evening,” he said, “especially the seduction.”
“You seemed to have your heart in it, among other components.”
Arriving at her wagon, they hugged each other good night—a nuanced hug, and they both knew it, as carnal as anything they might accomplish without fusing their mouths or removing their clothes. Percy walked away whistling. Nora departed humming. She climbed the stepladder, opened the rear door, and tiptoed inside. Kevin wheezed musically. Caught by the skull, its silvery rays streaming through the windows, the Imdugud-bird marionette glowed with a beauty she’d not noticed before. I’m in love with a Sumerian king, she thought.
A disquieting and familiar fragrance reached her nostrils: the stink of fresh sartre sauce. She turned toward Elizabeth Darby. The dead woman’s stage-four symptoms were vivid, the pocks like bullet holes, the grooves like saber cuts. Eyes open and vacant, she lay in a pool of fear syrup mixed with pus. Nora laid her palm against the corpse’s cheek. What she felt was not an external chill, imposed by the autumn air; this chill traced to a gratified fetch. It was the frost that starts from within.
Nora bolted from the wagon and started across the encampment, alternatively praying she was mistaken about the actress’s condition and wishing she’d been more appreciative of her paeans to feminist pornography. Just then she could recall only one of Elizabeth’s plotlines, about a Wiccan priestess who traded her witch’s broom for an elongated windup dildo.
Percy was in the corral, feeding his mare, a skittish roan named Dolly.
For forty-five minutes they performed CPR on the actress, Percy pressing her sternum, Nora inflating her lungs. When it was obvious that her leveler had won, they wrapped Elizabeth in a tarpaulin and laid her beneath a sycamore tree, gnarled as an arthritic’s hand, bare as Inanna’s huluppa. Percy enshrouded her speckled face with his white linen handkerchief.
“She became Nietzsche-positive in Manassas, saw her fetch again in Culpepper,” he said. “She told me they’d made a deal.”
“Fetches don’t make deals,” said Nora.
“They make them, and then they break them. Elizabeth was supposed to reach New Orleans.”
“Have you met yours, Percy?”
“Only once. Horatio. He came to our world première, front row, gasped in all the right places. An unnerving experience, seeing my double like that. I suddenly knew how Gilgamesh felt when he first laid eyes on Enkidu.” He exhaled, his condensed breath forming a spectral cloud over the blanketed corpse. “What I’m about to say might sound unfeeling, with Elizabeth not even in the ground yet, but on Tuesday we open in Asheboro, and…”
“And you want me to play Inanna? You’re right, Percy. It sounds unfeeling.”
“I’m sorry. Will you play Inanna?”
“I’m not much of an actress.”
“We’re not much of a troupe.”
“I’d probably get stage fright.”
“It’s milder than reality fright, the condition we all endure these days.”
At first the idea of acting opposite Percy appealed to Nora almost as much as the idea of becoming his lover. Me
morizing her lines would be a snap: she’d seen the show twenty-four times. But then she considered the nature of the part. Night after night, Gilgamesh spurned Inanna in act two. Inanna subsequently bedded him in act three, but only by virtue of wine and shapeshifting, not because he found her irresistible. What subliminal effect, Nora wondered, would Inanna and Gilgamesh’s dysfunctional relationship have on Percy’s feelings toward his costar?
“Let me think it over.”
“Of course.”
At dawn, Bruno and Fritz dug a shallow grave with the small spade Inanna used for transplanting huluppas in Uruk’s sacred gardens. Elizabeth’s coffin was a Magic Chef refrigerator box that Vicky and Valerie had salvaged from a Dumpster behind the Rotary Club.
Later that morning, Percy called his troupe together and led them in a succinct but dignified burial rite. For a eulogy, he quoted the lament that Gilgamesh delivered over Enkidu: the world’s oldest funeral oration, Nora realized. “The path we followed through the dark forest weeps for you,” he intoned, staring at the coffin. Bruno had covered the Magic Chef logo with Elizabeth’s prize possession, a scrapbook containing favorable reviews of her feminist pornography. “The mountain we climbed where we slew the Watchman weeps for you. Your companions, the ibexes, shed tears. The wolves grieve. The deer mourn. The gazelles leap no more.”
He concluded on a bitter note, chastising Elizabeth’s fetch for terminating her career as Inanna and also for depriving her of Eurydice, the role she was slated to assume in The Lyre of Fate.
“All right, sign me up,” Nora told Percy after the funeral. “I’ll play that shifty bitch, and I’ll do a good job of it, too.”
Nora had never believed the theatrical truism whereby a disastrous dress rehearsal augurs a successful opening night, but in the case of her debut, aphorism and actuality proved identical. While the run-through in the Uwharrie National Forest was a debacle, with Nora forgetting a quarter of her lines and garbling many of those she remembered, the following evening’s performance in Asheboro contained only one minor fluff—“I shall harness for you a chariot of lapis” emerged from her mouth as “I shall harness for you a chariot of apples”—and when the show was over, Percy presented her with “a token of his regard,” the silk-and-wire immortality plant that Gilgamesh retrieves from the river bottom.
Midnight found Nora drifting into the sort of deep and gratifying sleep she hadn’t known since the skull’s advent. In her dream, she became Leda, the Spartan whom Zeus, assuming the form of a swan, seduced one night—a human-avian union destined to produce Helen of Troy and the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. Nora’s subconscious provided a memorable denouement: when she went to give birth, an enormous egg emerged from her womb. The shell cracked, and out popped a particularly obstreperous Imdugud bird, noisily demanding a bigger part in Gilgamesh.
She awoke feeling vaguely immortal and oddly content—attitudes certain to pass, she knew, but she succeeded in savoring the moment That evening Percy Bell would spurn her Inanna half, after which her Siduri persona would seduce him though guile and grape, and the following evening in Samarcand the same events would unfold, as they would the next night in Ellerbe and the next night in Rockingham. It could be worse. Better a drunken hero in your bed than no hero at all. And besides, a Queen of Heaven should not squander her energies dallying with demigods when there were plagues to conquer and destinies to undo. Beware, abulia. Take heed, contagion. Here comes Inanna, who is also Ishtar—and Astarte—and Aphrodite—and in a weird Jungian way the Virgin Mary too. Here comes Nora Burkhart, deliverer of flowers, before whom all fetches tremble.
In Gerard’s view, the one truly troubling facet of the Catemaco Miracle was El Agujero, “the Hole,” a concrete fortress erected outside Tamoanchan’s main gate as a detention center for those seeking admittance to the temples. Architecturally the building was a crime, its walls so featureless and sterile that they made the Bauhaus seem heir to the Baroque, but he reserved his deepest disgust for the behavior that the detention center contained. He’d explored the place only once—it had piqued his curiosity, luring him into its depths much as Hell had both captured and captivated Dante—but that single visit was sufficient to outrage him. Touring a succession of stifling, windowless rooms jammed with petitioners, he quickly realized that El Agujero served a purpose far more sinister than the mere screening of true abulics from those occasional pilgrims whose symptoms traced to either depression or schizophrenia. The detention center was a world unto itself, a fiefdom ruled over by Chief Deacon Hubbard Richter and his drones, all of them apparently committed to placing as many bureaucratic barriers as possible between plague families and the Church of Earthly Affirmation.
Although they varied in detail, the pilgrims’ stories cleaved to a single theme: the impossibility of finding justice within El Agujero’s walls. An Iowa pig farmer and his thected sister had so far spent two weeks in the center, sleeping on the floor and subsisting on quesadillas. Each morning a supercilious assistant deacon would appear and promise a noon interview with Richter, but at the appointed hour the deacon simply moved them to a different holding area. A famous New York trial lawyer, keeper of her dying son, had managed to lug eleven gallons of diesel fuel all the way from Milwaukee. Upon the lawyer’s arrival in El Agujero, Richter confiscated the donation, subsequently claiming that she’d never brought it. A best-selling children’s author, his life now dedicated to curing his young bride, had actually received and filled out a coveted “blue certificate” (the patient’s passport to Tamoanchan), but the guards sent the abulic back to the center on a technicality: because of a defective printer ribbon, the serial number was illegible.
Conscience throbbing, indignation burning, Gerard raced the pony cart up Mount Tapílula to Lucido’s mansion. In the vestibule, he encountered the psychoanalyst’s private chauffeur, the annoyingly ingratiating Leopold Dansk, who revealed that Lucido was presently in the basement, cataloguing the Chardonnays and burgundies through which various plague families had purchased their loved ones’ salvation.
Entering the wine cellar for the first time, Gerard noticed dozens of archaeological treasures emerging from the musty darkness: earthenware pottery, obsidian idols, gigantic baby-faced stone heads crowned with gear suggesting rugby helmets. A basalt disk the size of a tractor wheel leaned against the doorjamb, its facets swarming with arcane numerals and cryptic icons. In the far comer rested a four-legged granite altar that had evidently commended itself to Lucido as a bar, its surface littered with goblets, split limes, and wine corks.
Dressed in a green silk kimono, Lucido acknowledged Gerard’s arrival by setting out two champagne flutes and filling them with Moët et Chandon. “An unexpected visit, how flattering.” His brittle enunciation of unexpected implied that further such surprises would be unwelcome.
Gerard rested his hand on the basalt disk and looked at Lucido quizzically.
“An Olmec calendar,” Lucido explained. “Impressively accurate, though difficult to nail to a kitchen wall. This cellar abuts the ruins of an Olmec temple, locus of rituals whose precise nature continues to defy scholarly speculation. Care for some wine?”
Instead of answering, Gerard explained why he’d come to Tapílula.
Lucido drank the first flute of Moët et Chandon in a single breath, then began sipping the second. “Are you aware,” he said, “that I am perhaps the last man on Earth who enjoys access to le vrai champagne?”
“I don’t want to talk about champagne. I want to talk about Hubbard Richter.”
“My patients treat me well. There are rare vintages in my cellar, porterhouse steaks in my freezer, Italian suits in my closet…” Lucido finished the second flute of champagne. “You must understand—we’re seeing thirty new cases of abulia a day around here. Richter is our man at the floodgates. His stringent standards forestall chaos.”
“Not stringent. Sadistic.”
Lucido offered a smile of begrudging assent. “My lieutenant has his enthusiasms.”
“To what? Quit? Go ahead, Gerard. I dare you. Walk away from the only full-time job a sculptor can get these days.”
“What do you see in a man like Richter?”
“Opportunism, officiousness, and an appalling lack of imagination. I shall accept your resignation whenever you wish to tender it.”
Gerard did not resign that day, or the next day, or the next He did not resign at all, in fact: a shameful matter, no question—so shameful that he confessed it to his reubenite companion, Erasmus. Not surprisingly, the principled humanist refused to let Gerard off the hook. In their own way, Erasmus argued, the excesses of El Agujero were as evil as the sixteenth-century religious violence against which he’d so vociferously dissented. When Gerard suggested that this analogy was extreme, Erasmus left in a huff and started chatting with Martin Luther.
ERASMUS:
I still believe that people possess freedom of thought and action. Even now, postmortem, I believe it.
LUTHER:
Once again you hope to convince me that free will exists?
ERASMUS:
I do.
LUTHER:
Your compulsion to persuade me is irresistible? In fact, you have no choice about it?
ERASMUS:
Very funny. If there’s no freedom, monk—if no man picks a fight, a mistress, or his nose independently of the divine will—then doesn’t God become responsible for every act of savagery on the planet?
LUTHER:
Our Creator’s wrath cuts deep. His mercy, deeper.
ERASMUS:
I wrote De Libero Arbitrio to discourage Protestant fanatics from purchasing God’s omnipotence at the price of His goodness.
LUTHER:
And I wrote De Servo Arbitrio to discourage papist Grecophiles from elevating Scholasticism above Scripture.
ERASMUS:
This is between you and me, Martin. Let’s leave Aristotle out of it.