The Eternal Footman Read online

  Nine weeks after the magnifying glass arrived, Nora was assigned to deliver a thousand orchids to Brookline’s Arborway Cemetery in advance of a 4:00 P.M. interment—her last stop of the day. Striding toward lot 49A, she watched as three grimy workers used cranes and winches to lower an intact 1999 Cadillac Catera into the hole. A battered backhoe rose from a nearby knoll like a mutant steam shovel. Having just scooped out the oversized grave, the backhoe operator, a rangy man with a gold tooth and a bad shave, was enjoying a cigarette.

  She approached the Catera and looked through the windshield. Behind the wheel sat the embalmed remains of an elderly gentleman dressed in Bermuda shorts and a splashy Hawaiian shirt. His teeth were bared in a grin of astonished joy, as if he’d just won the car in a raffle. Nora wasn’t surprised. She’d expected some such burial since noticing that the crib sheet specified a scion of the fabulously wealthy and extravagantly nutty Gansevoort family. In April of 1993, Estella Gansevoort had roared into Heaven astride her beloved Harley Davidson. Two years later, Horace Gansevoort had gone to glory in his speedboat. The previous summer, Roger Gansevoort had piloted a Cessna through the Pearly Gates.

  Climbing out of the backhoe cab, the operator volunteered to help Nora unload the panel truck. He looked her in the eye, flirtatiously. What her face had going for it, she felt, was not beauty but rather a certain drama: black irises, full lips, ambitious cheekbones—features that had proved particularly useful in staring down unruly students.

  “Offer accepted,” she said. There were times, such as today, when she missed sex so much that doing it with a semiskilled laborer in the cab of a backhoe would seem, on balance, more earthy than degrading.

  “First time I heard about these wackos and their crazy coffins, I thought it was pretty funny,” said the operator, wrapping his long arms around a cluster of orchids. “Now I think, what a waste.”

  “It’s always a thin line between panache and decadence,” said Nora, wondering whether the man knew how blatantly he was staring at her breasts.

  “Whatever. Personally, I don’t get why people bother with funerals anymore.” Approaching the hole, he set down the flowers and nodded toward the celestial skull. God shone brightly in the clear autumn sky. “If you want my opinion, Heaven’s been locked up tight for a long time now. These days, even a billionaire can’t get in.”

  Later, leaving the scene of the impending funeral, Nora steered the panel truck along the labyrinthine roads of Arborway Cemetery. A colossal granite vault loomed before her, more lavish than any residence she was likely to occupy in either life or death. Whoever these aristocrats might be, their mausoleum could easily accommodate a dozen generations.

  The Cranium Dei’s rays poured down, streaming through a stand of poplar trees and throwing patches of divine light on the tomb portal. Above the greenish black steel door, chiseled deep into the lintel, the name LOBO glinted amid the shifting shadows.

  Pulse pounding, Nora pulled over. She grabbed her handbag, quit the truck, and rushed toward the mausoleum. Framed by leaf shadows, a brilliant spot of skullshine danced atop the first O in LOBO. Tiny printing, inaccessible to the unaided eye, filled the oval like an engraved motto on a gold watch.

  She took out the magnifying glass and positioned it over the minuscule words, easing them into focus. Three distinct inscriptions hovered before her gaze. She blinked. The top quotation, deadly serious, was the most commendable sentiment she’d ever seen attributed to the central figure of the English Civil War.

  I BESEECH YOU, IN THE BOWELS OF CHRIST,

  THINK IT POSSIBLE YOU MAY BE MISTAKEN.

  —OLIVER CROMWELL

  The bottom quotation, more playful than its counterpart, was ascribed to a Manhattan sculptor whose work Nora had grown to admire over the years.

  THE ABSENCE OF GOD IS GOD ENOUGH.

  —SAINT CLAIR CEMIN

  The central quotation seemed to Nora little more than a joke.

  I AM INDEED IMPRISONED IN A CHINESE

  FORTUNE-COOKIE FACTORY, BUT HAVE YOU

  PONDERED THE SUBTLE COGNITIVE SNARES

  IN WHICH YOU YOURSELF MAY BE TRAPPED?

  —LING PO FAT

  Driving home that evening, palms locked tightly around the steering wheel, Nora experienced a profound and relentless unease. Whatever fulfillment she’d felt in solving the magnifying-glass mystery, it was evaporating before her fear that she’d been appointed a kind of messenger. In the days ahead, she sensed, the Cranium Dei would be expecting her to function as a postmillennial Moses, revealing to the world the arcane connections among Cromwell’s skepticism, God’s absence, and the fate of Ling Po Fat.

  She intended to turn the job down. The universe had kicked her around enough of late. She’d assumed her fair share of obligations. Having endured the death of a husband, the loss of a career, the ordeal of single motherhood, and the banalities of driving a delivery truck, Nora Burkhart was not about to become, under any circumstances, God’s little errand girl.

  On Saturday afternoon she returned to Arborway Cemetery and, magnifying glass in hand, approached the Lobo mausoleum. Much to her relief, the three inscriptions still lay etched inside the first O. She hadn’t imagined them. She wasn’t losing her mind.

  For half an hour she studied the arcane graffiti, seeking a common theme. According to her research, Oliver Cromwell had indeed once made a plea on behalf of self-doubt, Saint Clair Cemin’s remark was recorded accurately, and Ling Po Fat was probably fictitious. But what, exactly, were these specific quotations doing on this particular tomb? Did they tell a kind of story? A man named Ling Po Fat finds himself trapped in a fortune-cookie factory, but then he considers, in Christ’s bowels, the possibility that he isn’t, after which he decides that those bowels, though absent, might help him learn the truth of his situation?

  Not likely.

  She abandoned the tomb and drove across the cemetery.

  Blanketed with orchids, Dexter Gansevoort’s mound disclosed no hint that an entire luxury sedan lay only ten feet down. The monument was surprisingly tasteful, an exquisite Pietà featuring a frail Jesus and a Korty Madonna. Nora had always liked Korty Madonnas. Here was an intercessor you could respect, as far from the insipid Blessed Virgins who graced working-class Catholic lawns as Malcolm X was from Uncle Remus. The Korty Madonna was at once loving and wise, sensual and virtuous: Jesus’ mentor, not his incubator.

  With God dead, of course, both Christ and his mother had suffered severe blows to their prestige. Still, it was bracing to imagine that, somewhere beyond the damaged and skullridden planet called Earth, a better world obtained, a place where cereal boxes always delivered the right prizes, teachers got to keep their jobs, and every decent husband lived to see grandchildren.

  As rain spattered out of the grimacing sky, supplementing the Korty Madonna’s tears, the flower woman climbed back into her truck, started the engine, and headed homeward.

  A Crisis in the West

  ON NIGHTS LIKE THIS, when gin and self-pity coursed through his veins in equal measure, Gerard Korty would walk out of the jungle and, crossing the beach, stagger barefoot along the foamy shore as he lifted his eyes toward the star-flecked Indonesian sky.

  A full moon was the only incitement he required. Dropping to his knees, he would feverishly mold the moist silver sand, never knowing for sure what image might emerge. Sometimes a Gospel event took shape: Lazarus’s rude awakening, Judas’s fatal kiss. Often he would sculpt a scene from the Pentateuch: Noah supervising his lions, Moses wielding his laws. And occasionally, with a nod to his former benefactors in the Vatican, Gerard would fashion a nonbiblical moment: a martyr writhing in agony or a saint experiencing spasms of rapture.

  He stood back to behold what he had wrought. A life-size, buxom woman, a kind of bas-relief centerfold. Eve herself, perhaps, poised for a postlapsarian debauch. A fine job, he decided as his eyes traced her gritty hips and grainy thighs. A triumph of his art, in fact, pornography fit for a chancel niche.

&
nbsp; Eagerly he disrobed and embraced his creature, kneading her crumbling breasts as he pushed himself deeper and deeper into the mounded sand. She disintegrated beneath him. He continued his ancient dance, grinding her down, erasing all evidence of his sin, until at last he climaxed, consumingly, vigorously, as if he’d drilled through the island’s bedrock to tap some subterranean fountain of youth.

  Rising, he strode into the waves and massaged away the sand. His testicles sought the warmth of his groin. Bobbing gently, he cast his gaze across the Andaman Sea and fixed on the impenetrable horizon.

  A vital world lay beyond the tiny, deserted, geographically insignificant mass known as Viatikara Island. Three hundred kilometers to the west, Great Nicobar pointed toward the Bay of Bengal and the Indian subcontinent. One hundred kilometers to the southeast, the Strait of Malacca broke against the upper shores of Sumatra. But tonight, as on most nights, the isle on which Gerard Korty pursued his monkish existence seemed the loneliest place in the universe: a disowned planet, abandoned by its parent sun.

  Technically, of course, Gerard was not a monk, for he and Fiona inhabited the same cottage and occasionally even the same bed. But in recent years his wife had gone native: beyond native, actually, straight to Viatikara’s wild core, turning herself into a kind of female John the Baptist, a connoisseur of salted ants and raw fish, someone who related only to Komodo dragons and God. The irony was not lost on Gerard. Fiona had joined him on the island under protest, and yet it was she who’d ultimately taken the place to heart, transforming her affection into an ever-expanding mass of autobiographical fiction about an art student who travels to Indonesia, befriends the local deities, and founds a new religion back home in Manhattan.

  Gerard’s spare and spartan life on Viatikara had in fact given him the inspiration he’d required. His retreat had roused his dormant muse. After ten excruciatingly unproductive years, he’d started working again, and even though the resulting sculptures—his epic Paradiso marbles—had failed to find buyers, he nevertheless ranked them among his greatest achievements. But now the siren call of civilization beckoned. Gerard craved indoor plumbing. The artist required air-conditioning and Pop Tarts.

  For twenty soothing minutes he lay on his back, rode the waves, and listened to the sea soughing against the beach.

  “Don’t do it!” cried a familiar but wholly unexpected voice. “Don’t! No! Don’t!”

  Gerard lifted his head and surveyed the gloomy beach.

  “No!” screamed Victor Shamberg. “Don’t! No!”

  “Don’t what?” called Gerard, crashing through the surf toward his apoplectic manager, his ambassador to reality.

  “Don’t!”

  Gerard waded onto the shore. A slight man by any criterion, Victor Shamberg looked especially tenuous in the moonlight: a phantom agent, specializing in posthumous careers.

  They clasped hands. “No surprise visits, Victor,” said Gerard testily. “You’re breaking the rules.”

  “So are you. ‘Thou shalt not kill thyself.’”

  “The jungle was hot, that’s all—I needed to cool off.”

  “Jesus, Gerard, you terrified me.”

  As a man who styled himself a “practicing lapsed Catholic,” a man who no longer believed in God yet remained in awe of Holy Mother Church, Gerard had never considered suicide a serious personal option. Indeed, when he got around to sculpting the Inferno, he hoped to render with particular passion the Christian self-slaughterers, whom Dante had envisioned as transmuted into trees and tormented by Harpies.

  “What brings you to Asia?” asked Gerard. “Scouting for new clients? There’s a spider monkey on Mount Camorta who does marvelous things with driftwood and bananas.”

  “I believe I’ve landed you a commission,” said Victor.

  “I won’t sign for less than fifty thousand.” Gerard climbed into his pants.

  “You won’t believe what I’m about to say, but I brought along plenty of evidence—newspapers, magazines, even a videotape, though Fiona says you don’t have a VCR.” Victor extracted a crisp white handkerchief from his windbreaker and mopped his sweaty brow. “There’s a crisis in the West.”

  “The rise of soulless technocracy. Ask Fiona about it.”

  “No—something else, utterly dismaying.”

  “Nuclear war? Ecological collapse?”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  “Agents are supposed to bring good news.”

  “This is good news, after a fashion. Of all the world’s artists, you topped the Vatican’s list. Tullio Di Luca himself phoned me. ‘We must have Gerard Korty,’ he said. ‘Only Korty can design the ultimate reliquary.’”

  Indulging in an immodesty that embarrassed him only slightly, the sculptor thought: They made the right choice. He was Gerard Korty, after all, the man who’d given Christendom a wholly new image of the Blessed Virgin, a Korty Madonna admired by feminists, adored by priests, and celebrated by art critics. “Ultimate reliquary? I don’t get it What’re they putting in there, the bones of God?”

  “The bones of God.”

  “What?”

  “God’s bones.”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know. Nietzsche told me.”

  “This isn’t philosophy, Gerard. It’s life. God died. Only the bones remain.”

  Gerard slid into his John Lennon T-shirt, the highlight of the most recent crate from Calcutta, then guided his agent across the beach and into the jungle beyond. “You flew halfway around the world to tell me a joke?”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “To begin with, God isn’t mortal.”

  “Mortality has become an ambiguous concept of late. Our deepest thinkers are stumped. I realize this all sounds crazy.”

  Ever alert for predators, Gerard stared at the moon-glazed path ahead. Tigers inhabited Viatikara—one tiger, at least, a solitary male who’d probably swum over from Great Nicobar in search of crippled macaques. Fiona sometimes spotted the animal during her daily ablutions in the Minangkabau Lagoon, prowling the shore, but it never took any interest in her.

  “Oh, now I understand, early sixties death-of-God theology, of course,” said Gerard. “I hardly imagined Holy Mother Church embracing it—but, hey, if she wants a reliquary, I’ll give her one. You discussed a figure?”

  “Two million dollars for a scale model plus supplementary watercolors.”

  Owing to either his imminent wealth or the gin residues in his brain, a profound well-being spread through Gerard. “Now tell me whose bones the cardinals are planning to entomb.”

  “God’s.”

  “No, I mean really.”

  “Ten years ago, a gigantic, male, comatose form, two miles long and humanoid, appeared off the coast of Africa. The Vatican hired a supertanker to haul God’s body north and preserve it in an iceberg. Six years went by, and then an earthquake knocked the body loose, and so the Pope was forced to go public, after which the American Baptist Confederation bought the Corpus Dei for eighty million dollars and made it the centerpiece of their Orlando theme park.”

  “So how have the Yankees been doing lately?”

  “Once it became clear that God wasn’t brain-dead, a Pennsylvania judge named Martin Candle convinced the World Court to impound the body and try it for crimes against humanity.”

  “I don’t suppose you packed along any Hershey bars?”

  “Candle lost his case, went berserk, and destroyed the body’s life-support system. So now God was completely dead, but the Baptists wanted Him back anyway—He would probably still draw crowds—which meant another towing operation, west across the North Sea, through the English Channel, and over the Atlantic.”

  “Or maybe you brought some beer? The Calcutta packet won’t be here for a week.”

  “The mission ended abruptly. No sooner had the flotilla passed through the Strait of Dover than something extraordinary occurred.”

  Gerard cocked an ear toward the rain forest The reg
ular nightly concerto had begun: screeching apes, squawking cockatoos, fiddling cicadas. “Something extraordinary? You mean, as opposed to God getting buried by a supertanker crew and murdered by a judge?”

  “Define extraordinary any way you wish. Nothing like it has ever happened before.”

  Captain Anthony Van Home took a hearty swallow of coffee, popped a constellation of migraine pills—two Zomigs, three Maxalts—and stepped onto the starboard bridge wing of the SS Exxon Galveston, flagship of the fleet charged with taking the Corpus Dei on its fifth and, God willing, final voyage. Straining under the weight of their cargo, the Galveston’s sister ships, the SS Arco Fairbanks and the SS Chevron Valdez, barely managed to maintain their positions along the Corpus Dei’s flanks. If they continued this sluggish and disreputable performance, Anthony decided, he would have to radio the engine room and order Bateson to drop the Galveston’s speed two full knots.

  To his left the entire population of Brighton, England (or so it seemed), thronged the docks, observing the aquatic procession with sad eyes and long faces. Many onlookers wept. Several dozen knelt in prayer. Through his binoculars Anthony saw two little girls, sisters probably, giggling in private delight, their merriment merely intensifying the poignancy of the moment. In a decade or so, their parents would tell them, “You were there when the Corpse of Corpses steamed past our town,” but that would be a lie, for the girls occupied this occasion only in the literal, physical sense, just as God occupied it only in the literal, physical sense—or so Anthony hoped. Surely a dimension or two of his Creator had survived. The Pythagorean theorem, the Heisenberg relation, the Golden Rule—something.