The Eternal Footman Read online

  LUTHER:

  If freedom is the lot of man, why can’t I unblock my bowels at will?

  Luther strains, attempting to break wind.

  ERASMUS:

  Too many turnips.

  LUTHER:

  A man’s soul is like a horse. When God takes the reins, the horse goes where God chooses. When Satan takes the reins—always with the Almighty’s permission, of course—the horse goes where Satan chooses. The two riders dispute the destination between them, but the steed must obey whichever power occupies the saddle.

  ERASMUS:

  I already knew you regarded the Pope as the Devil’s deputy, but I hadn’t realized you viewed the Devil as God’s lieutenant.

  LUTHER:

  Not His lieutenant. His instrument. Like a pruning hook, or a hoe—a tool for cultivating His divine garden. There is progress, Desiderius. Even you are less a papist than when I nailed up my theses.

  ERASMUS:

  I shall die a Catholic.

  LUTHER:

  Endorsing Mariolatry, Purgatory, Transubstantiation, and a hundred other absurdities.

  ERASMUS:

  I am as opposed to Mariolatry as you, Purgatory happens to be our present venue, and Transubstantiation is by no means absurd.

  LUTHER:

  How can you imagine that the bread and wine convert completely into Christ’s body and blood, when it’s patently obvious that His body and blood combine with the substance of the bread and wine?

  ERASMUS:

  Transubstantiation enjoys the virtue of tradition.

  LUTHER:

  Consubstantiation enjoys the virtue of being true.

  ERASMUS:

  Transubstantiation is a divine mystery.

  LUTHER:

  Consubstantiation is an undeniable feet. And constipation too, poor me.

  Again Luther tries to pass the gas bubble.

  ERASMUS:

  You’d think that in Purgatory, of all places, purgation would come easily.

  LUTHER:

  And then there are fools such as Zwingli, who believes only in Christ’s spiritual presence during the Eucharist But I shall not speak of the unspeakable.

  ERASMUS:

  Unless, of course, the Devil compels you to.

  The following Monday, Gerard’s mood hit bottom when Hubbard Richter appeared in the god factory with orders from Lucido to halt all idol production, immediately and totally. To Gerard the decision made no sense. True, the temples were now jammed with deities, but what about the ancillary Tamoanchans so desperately needed throughout North America and Europe? Logically, Gerard and his apprentices should be carving idols for years to come, until nothing but a pebble remained of Oswald’s Rock. Where was the bold thinking, the grand designing, by which Lucido had conceived Somatocism in the first place?

  Gerard tracked down Lucido in the mansion’s central hexagon, where the psychoanalyst lay relaxing amid the swirling waters of his hot tub. A different martial-arts movie unspooled on each television screen (or possibly unsynchronized moments from the same martial-arts movie), so that the men’s conversation progressed amid a mélange of flailing limbs and somersaulting bodies.

  “Why are you shutting us down?” Gerard asked.

  “The temples are full,” Lucido replied. “Don’t worry. You’ll still be fed and pampered. When your fetch attempts to claim his prize, I shall supervise your cure personally.”

  Gerard stared into the hot tub, fixing on a frothy mass of bubbles. In Canto VII of the Inferno, Dante had revealed the fate of “the sullen,” mired beneath the Stygian marsh, their gurgled speeches turning to meaningless foam on the surface. “Shouldn’t we be sending out evangelists? Exporting Somatocism to every pocket of plague in the world? Oswald’s Rock is good for a thousand more idols at least. We’ll never eradicate abulia by sitting on our asses in Coatzacoalcos, complacent and visionless.”

  “My dear Gerard, do you know nothing of metaphysics? You speak of evangelists. In point of fact, our church boasts an army of evangelists, and it grows larger by the hour. I refer, of course, to the legions of parasites we have driven from their hosts. Even as I speak, they are wandering the Earth, informing their fellows that a cure exists. It won’t happen today, or tomorrow either, but in time all the world’s fetches will become demoralized to the point of dematerialization.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  Lucido rose from his hot tub, the steamy water trickling down his simian chest and hairy legs. “I agree with you on one point. We must have a vision for the future. What do we want Western civilization to look like a hundred years from now? To what absolutes should the post-abulic world pledge its heart? The Bergsonian Life Force? The Cosmic Christ?”

  “We’ve got to take Somatocism on the road.”

  “This conversation has grown boring. My insights have proven correct in days gone by, and they will prove correct in the days to come.”

  Sauntering out of the hexagon, Gerard right behind, Lucido padded through his library, a jumble of psychology books, medical texts, metaphysical treatises, sacred writings, and—a collection doubtless supplied by plague families—first editions of literary masterworks. He entered his bedchamber, approached a tall carousel outfitted with mirrors and hooks, and, spinning the wardrobe ninety degrees, drew forth his emerald kimono. Languorously, he cocooned himself in imported silk.

  “I can offer you a new commission,” said Lucido. “El Agujero’s architect, you may recall, provided the main foyer with a sculpture niche. The present statue, a Soaragid, must be replaced.”

  “With a Risogada?”

  “No.”

  “An Orgasiad?”

  “The niche, dear fellow, cries out for a statue of me.”

  Gerard chewed pensively on his lower lip. “What medium?”

  “Reubenite.” Lucido retrieved a manila envelope from his writing desk. “I have no time to pose. This package contains a dozen full-face photographs. How long from brainstorm to finished piece?”

  “Five weeks.”

  “I’ll give you three.”

  “Do you want a mere statue, Adrian, or do you want something that captures the soul beneath the skin?”

  “All right. Four weeks. No, take all five. But I expect you to go farther beneath the skin than you’ve ever gone before.”

  As the Great Sumerian Circus tramped through the ruins of Georgia, revealing to each successive village the face of arete and the shape of stoicism, Nora realized that acting had less in common with teaching, and more with sex, than she’d previously supposed. In the classroom you could never feign a competence you didn’t possess; the students would see through you, catching you in a contradiction or stumping you with an impish question. The theater, by contrast, tolerated pretense. On most nights, Nora gave herself completely to her role, becoming Inanna body and soul. But a performance, like an orgasm, could be fudged. When beset by a sore throat or knee spasms, she merely went through the motions, and nobody except Percy seemed to notice.

  What most delighted her about a trouper’s life was its encompassing sensuality. Up on the stage, everything looked brighter, felt hotter, tasted sweeter, smelled sharper, resounded more deeply. Her role enabled her to wear two enthralling costumes, the white silk gown in which Inanna propositions Gilgamesh and the red satin robe in which Siduri seduces him, and they both caressed her skin even as they clothed it. The Inanna costume in particular comprehended Nora: not so much a dress as a kind of ghostly lover. Climbing into it night after night, she came to understand the unholy desire that fetches felt toward their hosts, the raging wish to assume another entity.

  Come, Gilgamesh, and be my lover!

  Grant to me your seed,

  And I shall harness for you a chariot of lapis and gold,

  Whose wheels are brass and whose ornaments are burnished copper.

  You shall have storm-demons for your horses

  And a great serpent shall be your whip.

  Before you ki
ngs, lords, and princes shall all be humbled.

  The bounty of the hills and plains they shall bring to you as tribute!

  On a warm mid-December morning, Nora awoke in the throes of a severe menstrual flow, a deluge to challenge a homuncular Ziusudra. She had just finished replacing her homemade rag tampon and was about to start on Kevin’s bandages—his boils still leaked copiously—when Percy unexpectedly graced her doorstep, tugging agitatedly on his beard. He hadn’t looked so distressed since losing his leading lady. Fritz Wexler, he explained, had just reported that the Chattahoochee was impassable, a crisis that jeopardized the evening’s scheduled performance in Tuskegee. Apparently some “nameless idiots” had built a funeral pyre near the woods, and now an inferno was “raging uncontrollably” for miles up and down the Alabama border.

  “I’d like your help,” he said.

  “I’ve never put out a forest fire,” she said.

  “I’m hoping to find a way through. Vicky said she’d check on Kevin, change his bandages, whatever.”

  She wondered if Percy understood how erotic it was when a man arranged child care for you. “Count me in.”

  Later, as Percy swung onto his mare, she saw that the rising sun had painted the Cranium Dei a shimmering orange, as if the skull had somehow caught the light of the Chattahoochee holocaust. She settled behind her costar, the saddle forcing them into unavoidable intimacy. Sliding her arms around his waist, she leaned forward and pressed against his spine.

  They felt the fire before they saw it, each gust rushing toward them like an exhalation from the great dragon Fafnir. Coils of smoke rode the air. Sparks nicked their faces. And then the beast itself appeared, a roiling red-and-black hulk, thundering and crackling as it feasted on Lakepoint Resort State Park. The odor was pungent but tolerable, the corpses’ stench evidently neutralized by the sweet fragrance of boiling sap. In perfect synchronization Percy and Nora removed their jackets and crammed them into Dolly’s saddlebag. Nora looked toward the Chattahoochee, clogged with burning branches. God’s bony face lay reflected in the copper waters. He wore a crown of fire.

  Steering the horse south, Percy followed the course of the river. The La Grange Railroad Trestle was a tumult of smoke and flame, as were the Lake Harding Dam and the Barletts Ferry Bridge. Two miles beyond Mulberry Grove, the blaze finally dwindled. On the outskirts of Columbus, it became a feeble collection of brushfires.

  Percy pointed to the anonymous but intact bridge that bore Route 82 into Alabama. “Mission accomplished.”

  He wheeled the mare around and guided her back through Mulberry Grove, then onward to Barletts Ferry and the dam beyond. At the railroad trestle the fire still seethed at full power. Masses of smoke filled the sky like obese phantoms. Eyes smarting, the riders wept The heat was savage. Nora tightened her hold on Percy, as if she feared the Hephaestan blasts might unseat her, though her motives were more lustful than practical. They sweated profusely, continuously, like two Sumerian mariners attempting to pole their raft across the Ocean Sea in record time.

  “I’ve got to cool off.” Percy vaulted from the saddle, then placed a steadying hand on Nora’s thigh, their connection reverberating through her body as he led the mare down to the riverbank.

  He tethered Dolly to a trestle pylon, fed her a carrot stub, stepped onto the sand bar, and took off all his clothes. His self-possession did not surprise Nora. This was a theater person, after all, a free spirit He hung his clothes on a spindly hunk of driftwood. His navel was large, an alluring black vortex. She thought of a favorite myth: Zeus setting the two eagles loose at opposite ends of the Earth, knowing they would eventually meet and mark the omphalos, the center of Creation, deep within the temple at Delphi.

  Naked as a fetch, Percy entered the river and began treading water.

  The Delphic oracle itself was delivered by a priestess, the Pythia, originally a maiden but in later years a woman past fifty. After bathing in the waters of the Castalian spring, she would seat herself on a tripod over a cleft in the ground, breathing in the intoxicating vapors that poured from the heart of the Earth. Thus entranced, the Pythia prophesied, while the priests of Apollo wrote down her words and turned them into hexameter verse.

  Nora dismounted. She stripped slowly, littering the beach with jeans, blouse, underpants. The inferno licked her flesh. December became August. She removed her bra. Her nipples hardened. She stepped into the Chattahoochee, laughing as the cool currents reached first her calves, then her thighs, hips, and breasts. Firebrands splashed down everywhere. Embers sizzled as they hit the river. She’d never known a stranger environment, this sanctuary hedged with menace.

  Half walking, half floating, she approached Percy. Their lips met; their tongues performed a Dionysian dance. She reached down, found the string, removed the tampon. They kissed voraciously: two escapees from the House of Dust reveling in the liquidness of things, the outside world with its muddy rivers and wet membranes. They caught their breath and kissed again. Like a curious fish, his submerged prick probed her thigh. She tossed the tampon aside. Planting his feet on the river bottom, he encircled her waist with his arms and clasped his hands behind the small of her back. The inferno bellowed. Sparks cascaded through the air. She seized Percy’s shoulders, her legs drifting upward.

  “Sweet Inanna, I know that you destroy your lovers, but I must take my chances,” he said, ducking under the water. He suckled her immersed nipples, came up for oxygen, went under again. Surfacing, he said, “I’m yours, Inanna. Turn me into a jackal. Send me to the Seven Fierce Judges.”

  She took his cock in her hand and guided it toward her reedy delta, the Chattahoochee’s flow combining with her own to smooth the way.

  It had been well over two years. Almost three. Ben Sawyer, who’d made Kevin a plywood doghouse for his “Fangs of Cerberus” trick.

  “And I shall harness for you a chariot of lapis and gold,” she whispered, bobbing to Percy’s rhythm, “whose wheels are brass and whose ornaments are burnished copper.”

  “Lapis and gold,” he echoed, gushing inside her blood-stained temple.

  That night, strutting around on the auditorium stage in Jubal Early Junior High School in Tuskegee, Nora gave a singularly passionate performance. It was the dead of December, but everyone could feel the heat.

  Until two weeks ago, the dreams Quincy sent me were sweet: mental music videos featuring my cousin Cindy wearing nothing but a bowler hat. Now he sends me nightmares.

  I’m lying on a bed, naked, bound with leather straps like John Kerr fastened to the torture slab and being menaced by Vincent Price. (“You are about to enter Hell, Bartolomé. Hell! The netherworld, the infernal regions, the abode of the damned, the place of torment, Pandemonium, Abaddon, Tophet, Gehenna, Naraka, the Pit…and the pendulum!”) The anesthesia wears off gradually. At first I think nothing’s wrong, but then I realize the surgeons have filled me with large holes. They’re mouths, actually: forty brand-new mouths, carved into my chest, back, arms, and legs—drooling, puckering, fat-lipped mouths, complete with thirteen hundred teeth that clatter like castanets.

  A nurse arrives with a washtub of oatmeal. She slops it all over my body, like a little kid dribbling syrup on a waffle, and then my mouths start eating, and it’s the strangest sensation I’ve ever had, all these big living holes in my body, opening and closing as they gobble up the oatmeal.

  When feeding time is over, the nurse washes me with a bath towel. The instant she leaves, I feel sick to my stomach. Suddenly it all comes up, forty-one rivers of oatmeal pouring out of me as I lie on the mattress screaming through my eighty-two lips for a nurse who never comes.

  The worst part is knowing that, tomorrow night, the whole thing happens again.

  “Are we lost, dear?” Nora asked.

  Percy, seated beside her atop his Gypsy wagon, said nothing, his mind focused on guiding Dolly amid the docks of Montrose, a once prosperous fishing community spread along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. According to the two aging Nie
tzsche-positive tramps they’d met that morning at the local pyres, an abandoned movie palace, ideal for staging Gilgamesh the King, lay in the center of town. For a full hour they’d crisscrossed the heart of Montrose without spotting the promised Casper Theater, whereupon Percy had steered them, on impulse, into the labyrinthine wharf area.

  “We’re lost, aren’t we, darling?” she persisted.

  Percy maintained his silence. Nora ate a boiled potato. She stared at his heroic face and saw once again why she adored him, his unaffected bewilderment, his natural sweetness. What did it mean to love a man, and to have that love returned, when everything was dissolving around you? It was a fundamentally ludicrous situation, partaking less of grand romantic tragedy than of some dopey Roger Corman postapocalypse melodrama, The Day the World Ended, perhaps, or The Last Woman on Earth.

  “Maybe the Casper Theater burned down,” she said. “Maybe those hobos haven’t laid eyes on it since the Montrose première of The Day the World Ended.”

  Kevin’s embattled body rose in her imagination. Two days earlier, his boils had transmuted into classic stage-four symptoms: a network of pocks and grooves suggesting a connect-the-dots puzzle solved by a lunatic. The act of discarding his bandages had brought Nora no comfort, for beyond this phase of thexis, she knew, lay only death.

  An immense oil tanker loomed out of the mist, moored to a concrete quay. At first she assumed that the Exxon Bangor was a derelict, another casualty of the collapsed infrastructure—quaint as a milk wagon, obsolete as a steam locomotive—but then she noticed the lamps blazing in the wheelhouse and the sailors scurrying across the weather deck. Four tugboats approached from the south, their skippers evidently bent on towing the Bangor into the bay.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.