The Eternal Footman Read online

  He entered the despicable detention center, got out his tape measure, and obtained the needed dimensions. He fled. Dusk found him at Oswald’s Rock, scanning the asteroid in search of a suitable protuberance to harvest for the statue. Lucido’s vanity appalled but did not surprise him. From the very first, Gerard had sensed the analyst’s ambition to promote himself to the same ontological status enjoyed by his contrived pantheon.

  As his fingers skittered along the asteroid’s surface, he felt as if he were somehow journeying through this great fragment from space, touring it layer by layer. He imagined that its core was molten, seething with melted reubenite and the liquid screams of its Late Cretaceous victims. Like a conch replaying the pounding surf, Oswald’s Rock poured out the anguished cries of the ankylosaurs…the hadrosaurs’ moans, the gallimimuses’ laments, the iguanadons’ death rattles.

  At last he discovered the required lump—and something far more compelling. Could it be? Had all the random amputations to which they’d subjected Oswald’s Rock ultimately wrought a representational image? He stepped back ten paces, studied the asteroid. Yes. Another ten paces. Yes! Once he’d extracted the Lucido material, the remainder would precisely resemble, in all its convoluted beauty, a ten-meter-high human brain.

  I agree with you on one point, Lucido had said when Gerard came to him arguing for a more evangelical form of Somatocism. We must have a vision for the future.

  The sculptor shuddered. He sweated. His body felt like a musical instrument, a wonder of jeweled keys and golden strings, and now some ineffable presence was starting to tune him. The plague, Lucido believed, was destined to pass. The skull would disintegrate. And then…the grand experiment, act two. Son of Western civilization. But what should it look like? What sort of world ought to emerge in abulia’s wake?

  For Gerard there could be only one answer. The future that made sense was a certain dead Jesuit’s vision of short eternities and little myths: Father Ockham’s republic of warm reason, free of the old order’s “terrible transcendent truths,” a democracy consecrated to the lobes and hemispheres (wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, counterbalancing the cosmos pound for pound) of the human brain.

  The Hebrew tribes had received unending inspiration from their Ark of the Covenant. The American abolitionists had drawn boundless energy from the Philadelphia Liberty Bell. Throughout the history of Islam, the pilgrims’ rough road to Mecca had been smoothed by the shining promise of the Kacba, that inscrutable black cube, forty feet high, housing a sacred meteorite.

  Confront the human animal with a sufficiently numinous artifact, and he will astound you every time.

  The presence began to play Gerard, wringing a concerto from his ligaments. Laughing like the giddiest disciple of Risogada, he spun away from Oswald’s Rock and rushed down the hill into the jungle’s sultry embrace. He didn’t stop running until he’d reached El Dorado, where he sought out his C9 cleaving chisel and his heaviest soft-iron hammer, just the right tools for molding brains, whittling dreams, and carving a portal to the future.

  As Anthony Van Horne ascended the back stairway of the Jean Lafitte Arms, he thoughtfully reviewed the two offers he’d rejected that evening, one from a whore hoping to swap her body for a bottle of rye, the other from a mother seeking a passage to Mexico. In both cases he’d made the right decision, but it behooved him to tell Cassie about the second solicitation. On the day Stevie became thected, Anthony and his wife had made a pact: regardless of where it lay or how fraudulent it sounded, they would reject no therapy out of hand.

  He reached the top landing, inserted the key, and entered the apartment, its shabbiness subdued by the anemic light of dawn. Cassie sat dozing at the kitchenette table, head on the checkered oilcloth, fist squeezing a wooden pencil angling upward like the joystick component of Fetchkiller, a video game from the pestilence’s early months. Pages tom from a yellow legal pad lay on the floor, each covered with dialogue from Cassie’s newest play, The Martyrs of Circumstance, a project she was hoping might intrigue Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré—what was left of it, anyway, the plague having decimated the local arts scene.

  As envisioned by Cassie, The Martyrs of Circumstance would tell of Hezrai, a cataleptic Jewish dissident living in first-century Judea. Arrested during Passover for tearing Roman medallions from the Temple in Jerusalem, Hezrai is crucified alongside a rabble-rouser named Jesus. Most of the drama would consist in a convoluted conversation between Hezrai and Jesus, who manifest a striking physical similarity to each other. In the end, misreading Hezrai’s catalepsy, the Romans remove him prematurely from his cross. Entombed, the medallion thief regains consciousness beside the corpse of his doppelgänger. Stumbling out of the sepulcher, Hezrai creates quite a stir among the assembled mourners.

  A migraine aura hovered at the edge of Anthony’s vision. Pulling the Zomig bottle from his windbreaker, he shook two pills into his palm, then swallowed them dry. He kissed his wife gently on the head, pressing his lips into her silky gray hair. She awoke.

  “Profitable night, Captain?”

  “Six pounds rice, two pounds crayfish. Soon we’ll be the fattest couple in town. You didn’t have to wait up.”

  “I was on a roll.” Cassie took a gulp of cold tea and gestured toward the strewn manuscript. “Somewhere in that mess is the first draft of act one.”

  Drifting toward the cot, Anthony removed the wool comforter from his son and began the physical therapy. Gently he flexed Stevie’s arms and legs. The stage-four abulic breathed in fitful gusts, as if his lungs were bellows operated by an epileptic smith.

  “A theater troupe just hit town,” said Anthony. “The lead actress visited me tonight.”

  “Would she like to play Mary Magdalene in a dazzling new drama about the birth of Christianity?” said Cassie.

  “Her kid’s been thected. She wanted me to run her across the Gulf. There’s a new treatment in Coatzacoalcos, the Lucido method.”

  Anthony pulled back the French doors and shuffled onto the balcony. Six A.M. and yet the streets were wild as always, the shouts, songs, jazz, and party horns blending in festive cacophony. Dominic, naked, stood in the far comer, a stubby cigarette perched on his upper lip, one hand resting on the scrollwork balustrade, the other holding a bathtub-gin fizz.

  “Care for a Marlboro, Dad?”

  “Shut up,” said Anthony.

  He looked Dominic in the eye. How strange that a creature could replicate Stevie down to the smallest detail and yet bear no resemblance to him.

  “Want to hear a bedtime allegory?” asked the fetch.

  “No.”

  “I call it ‘The Parable of the Petri Dish.’ A brilliant scientist has long dreaded his approaching death, and his fear spurs him to great heights of biotechnical achievement. Eventually he succeeds in cloning himself. Several months later, entering the elderly genius’s lab for the first time, the Grim Reaper finds ten identical scientists facing him. The startled Reaper contemplates each scientist in turn, but he cannot tell which is the prototype…”

  Anthony’s impulse was to hurl Dominic off the balcony, but he knew from experience that the leveler would simply exempt himself from gravity, hovering in the air like a Day of the Dead helium balloon blown over from Tampico.

  Dominic finished his gin fizz. “At last a gambit occurs to the Reaper. ‘Excellent work, Doctor,’ he says. ‘In fact, you made only one mistake.’ ‘Mistake? What mistake?’ the original scientist demands to know. The Reaper points a skeletal finger at the one who has spoken and says, ‘That was your mistake!’”

  Hawking a gob of phlegm from his lungs, Anthony transferred it to his tongue and spat it into Dominic’s face. The fetch sneered and wiped away the sputum.

  “Wait till my therapist hears about this, Dad.”

  Anthony stepped back into the apartment. Cassie sat on the floor beside Stevie, rubbing a salve into the boy’s pocks and grooves.

  Glancing up, she asked, “Is there really a new treatment in Mexico
?”

  “So she claims,” said Anthony.

  “The Lucido method?”

  “Flat-bottom boats can’t handle the Gulf.”

  “I know.”

  “The first serious roller would swamp us.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lucido is probably a charlatan,” said Anthony.

  “Probably,” said Cassie.

  He looked directly at his wife. Cassie stared back. Their eyes were wide, the veins in their necks engorged.

  “We need to bring a donation,” he said. “The woman thinks binoculars might do it.”

  “When do we leave?”

  “Monday morning, on the tide.”

  Outside the hospital, famine rules the land. I’m imprisoned in the operating room. The mouths in my body have healed, but that hardly matters. In a nightmare by Quincy Azrael, you never win.

  A starving family fidgets in the far comer. Their eyes are sunken, cheeks hollow. The nurse gives me a spinal. I go numb from the neck down. The doctors take up their saws. They remove my left arm and present it to the little girl, who eats it. The surgery continues. The little boy gets my right arm. The parents get my legs. It’s all very slow, like church.

  My eaters are grateful. They pat my forehead and kiss my cheek. I cough so hard that I fall off the table and start flopping around on the floor like a fish, begging Quincy to wake me up.

  “We have control over this thing,” said Nora, strolling hand-in-hand with Percy along the Riverwalk levee. Pier followed pier; the paddle-wheel steamers rocked in their berths. “It doesn’t have to end badly.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to end at all,” he said.

  “You know it does.”

  Spontaneously they stopped walking and fell into each other’s arms. They kissed. Even in the age of abulia, she decided, people were able to arrange romantic moments. No, more, they were obligated to arrange them. It was everyone’s duty these days to etch sonnets on moldering bones, dance atop dung heaps, and embrace beside poisoned seas.

  “But is it me you love,” she asked, their hug dilating, “or merely your image of me?”

  “And what is my image of you?”

  “Heroine of an unwritten myth,” she said. “Inanna with a heart of gold.”

  They separated.

  “An accurate list,” he said.

  “I’m none of those people.”

  “I love the real Nora too,” he insisted. And then he added, with surely more scorn than he intended, “The stubborn, mule-headed English teacher who thinks she’s going to find the Flower of Youth in Mexico.”

  “Let’s not start on that.”

  They continued past the Black Magic, the Becky Thatcher, and Cajun Witch, this last steamer now a corpse barge. Dead abulics clogged the cargo deck, each body blanketed in quicklime, the whole grisly shipment probably destined for the river bottom. As Nora and Percy hurried through the stench, a tall woman in a green decontamination suit maneuvered a wheelbarrow onto the vessel and tipped it sideways, adding a fresh victim to the pile.

  “So what about you, my dear?” he said. “Do you love both the Percy Bells, the real and the fabulous?”

  “Both, yes.”

  He massaged his black Sumerian beard. “The anguished playwright, the daring bull slayer—he’s easy to love. But what about the neurotic second-rate actor who thinks he can bring a dash of arete to a despondent world?”

  “I love him too.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s honest.”

  They reached pier 24 and the Natchez Queen. The pilothouse window offered occasional glimpses of Van Home pacing fretfully, no doubt pondering his folly in agreeing to challenge the Gulf. The mighty paddle wheel hung from the stem like a rotating drum built to exercise the Giant Rat of Sumatra. In an effort to minimize flooding on the cargo deck, the captain and Crock O’Connor had nailed a palisade of wooden planks to the bulwarks, so that the once aristocratic Queen now evoked a working-class neighborhood whose inhabitants defined their properties with scrap-lumber fences. Kevin and Stevie were already on board, pursuing their hellish stage-four lives in adjoining staterooms.

  “After Gilgamesh, we’re doing The Lyre of Fate,” said Percy. “You’d make a great Eurydice.”

  She stepped onto the narrow catwalk, gingerly following it down to the wharf. “You, of course, will play the hero.”

  “Orpheus is my alter ego. I’m always looking back.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know. I envy you. Me, I have nothing but regrets.” Percy joined her on the wharf. “I’m going to try the Lotz twins as Inanna, though I don’t expect any miracles. For a while I considered making it a drag role for Bruno, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.”

  “Valerie might surprise you. That child has an edge. I can imagine her doing Medea someday.”

  Unhitching his backpack, Percy set it down and reached inside. He pulled out the white silk gown that Inanna wore for the seduction scene.

  “Thanks for everything, Nora.” He pressed the gown into her hands.

  “Severance pay?” she asked, her throat growing hard as a stone.

  “Souvenir.”

  “Someday I’ll be too fat to wear it.” The silk absorbed her tears. “But I’ll never, ever throw it away.” She draped the gown over her arm and made an abrupt about-face, stepping onto the gangway.

  “Track me down, okay?” Percy called after her. “I’ll cast you as Eurydice.”

  A steam-powered shriek issued from the Natchez Queen as Nora brushed the tears from her face, crossed the gangway, and marched into the sternwheeler without looking back.

  Plutocrat Preserves

  THE CRANIUM DEI SMILED fiercely, carrion clotted the Mississippi, and yet Nora felt oddly alive. For six months she’d been buffeted about by the death throes of the West, but now she’d made her break, reveling in the peculiar sense of freedom that only open water can provide. Although Kevin’s symptoms were more dramatic than ever—his pocks growing wider by the day, the fissures deeper—the proximity of Coatzacoalcos buoyed her spirits and bathed her soul in hope.

  They were a skeleton crew, four adults running a boat that normally needed seven, a feet Nora rarely forgot as she chopped firewood on the cargo deck, carried water down to Crock O’Connor in the boiler pit, or cleared away the detritus from the sternwheeler’s previous career as a whorehouse. The Natchez Queen was disheveled beyond belief. Empty liquor bottles littered the companionways, exuding the saccharine fragrance of stale rum and cheap bourbon. Used condoms drooped over the rails like Dali watches. Diaphragms lay beside the sinks like amputee jellyfish. Nora spent the better part of the afternoon attempting to turn the observation and saloon decks into livable spaces, a project she abandoned upon realizing its futility. Even Hercules, who’d scoured the Augean stables in a trice, would have balked at this mess.

  The trip down the river took an entire day, their progress impeded by floating trash and waterborne bodies. It seemed that the Queen was not so much a sternwheeler as an icebreaker, her massive prow pushing through floes of flesh and bergs of pale putrescence. The boilers groaned; the engine grunted; the drive shafts squealed. As the boat steamed forward, the great carousel of paddles—eternally churning, forever dripping—became in Nora’s mind an immense spinning wheel, as if some enterprising river god were transmuting the Mississippi into a single shining thread, long enough to weave a winding-sheet for all humanity.

  At dusk, posted in the bow on orders from Van Home, she stood and watched the Mississippi delta draw into view, portal to the tempestuous Gulf. As the sun descended to starboard, the captain’s wife, Cassie Fowler, a regal woman with a strong-boned face, joined Nora on the foredeck. They contemplated the approaching sea and talked. Autobiography, reminiscence, confession. By the time Venus appeared in the sky, sparkling above the Cranium Dei like a bright idea, the two of them knew all about each other.

  Cassie had met her future husband on the Carpco Valparaíso, their love affair pe
riodically interrupted by Anthony’s efforts to haul God’s body to a tomb at the North Pole, a destination demanded by a pair of terminally ill angels. Eventually Anthony succeeded, but not before Cassie, communicating secretly with her atheist boyfriend in New York, had arranged for a bombing raid on the Valparaíso’s consecrated cargo.

  “Our plan was doomed from the start,” she told Nora. “We barely put a dent in the thing.”

  “Too much meat?”

  “Too much meaning. The Corpus Dei was never supposed to end up in the Mohns Trench, or in an Arctic tomb either. Thomas Ockham was probably the first to figure that out. Have you read his book? ‘By orphaning the human species, God has cleared its path to maturity.’ Chapter two, last sentence.”

  “And by unleashing abulia, He has cleared our path to extinction,” said Nora.

  “I subscribe to Martin Candle’s theory. The Almighty in His day was a duality.” Cassie pointed toward the orbiting skull. A full moon had risen behind God’s dome, making Him appear mildly hydrocephalic. “Abulia obviously comes from His demonic half, but I like to believe there’s a benevolent side too, and it’ll have the final say. I have to believe that.”

  “Stevie’s an amazing kid, I can tell.”

  Cassie pretended to smile. “You should hear him play the clarinet.”

  “Kevin’s into magic. His father, may he rest in peace, was a professional.”

  “Plague?”

  “Heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Nora’s throat constricted. “Kevin used to have a live rabbit Penelope Cottontail. In one trick she would eat a bunch of silk and leather, and then Kevin would reach into her mouth and—”

  “Pull a hat out of a rabbit?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I never found out the secret.”

  “Magicians never tell, do they?”

  The crossing began after dark. Waves pounded the Queen’s gunwales, but the scrap-lumber palisade kept her from shipping more water than her crew could bail away. Winds rattled her beams and blew foam as high as the observation deck, yet the superstructure held firm. Her smokestacks vibrated like a tuning fork. Staring out to sea, watching the moonlit rollers, Nora mused to Crock O’Connor that at least the Gulf wasn’t acid like the Waters of Death.