The Eternal Footman Read online

  Two hours later, a zaftig woman in a flowing saffron robe appeared and identified herself as Vonda August, avatar of the world gland. “On your feet, Mrs. Burkhart—Dr. Lucido has approved your donation.”

  The joy that surged through Nora was tempered by her fear that this new functionary might be messing with her head, but her suspicions dissipated as, effortlessly lifting Kevin, Vonda August guided her out of room zero, up a marble staircase, and into a chamber featuring a pair of canopied beds covered with silk sheets.

  “Tomorrow morning, you’ll fill out his blue certificate,” said Vonda, laying Kevin on the nearer bed, “and then he goes to Arcadia Lodge for his hyperion drip. We’ll drive the Devil out of your fine young son. You have my solemn word.”

  The goose down certainly helped, but Nora would have slept peacefully that night on carpet tacks and broken glass.

  The nightmare takes hold of me again. I am shucked, severed, pulled apart…and then suddenly I’m coming together. My bones reconnect, my muscles return, my flesh grows back.

  I wake up…I mean, I really wake up. Somehow I’ve broken free of Quincy. After months in a tomb, I’m now in the outside world, resting on feathers and wearing a bathing suit A hefty red-faced woman stands over me. She calls herself Vonda August, high priestess of Idorasag, goddess of suckling. She says it’s Monday morning, and for the rest of the week I’ll be staying here in Arcadia Lodge along with twenty-three other acolytes.

  I tell the high priestess I’m hungry. She tells me a meal is coming.

  I’m connected to an IV rig, the bottle filled with something blue and glowing. As an acolyte, Vonda August explains, I’m privileged to receive a drug called hyperion-15. It has blasted the fetch right out of me. By converting to Somatocism, I can guarantee he’ll never return.

  I glance around the dormitory. The other acolytes range from a little kid of Cub Scout age to an old woman with skin like a prune. After removing our IV needles, Vonda and three of her sister priestesses lead us to their deity’s temple in the basement. Six statues of Idorasag—a big female monkey with an enormous smile and boobs like punching bags—guard the entrance. The statues are sitting. On the knee of each is a bronze bowl the size of a hubcap.

  We explore the temple, which turns out to be a maze of narrow corridors and blind alleys. By midmorning we reach the center, where a surprise is waiting. Imagine a mountain of fur twice the size of that haystack Mother stuck me in when the Anglo-Saxons were after us. Eyeballs polka-dot the fur, and the mountain also has dozens of swaying arms—think of tree branches covered with Spanish moss—plus puffy lumps that remind me of Idorasag’s boobs, each with a nipple like a baby bottle’s. We dive in, and it’s the best sensation I’ve ever had—that furry creature feels so warm and spongy against my bare skin. I can hear her heart beating, a peaceful thump-thump-thump. The priestesses tell us to suck on the nipples, and soon we’re drawing this incredible stuff into our mouths. It’s like a vanilla milkshake, and it takes my hunger away. We’d probably fall asleep right there if the priestesses didn’t drag us to our feet so we could begin our devotions.

  Our first duty is to praise Idorasag with a song. “Your fur is soft as soft can be,” we chant. “Your milk is sweet and thick and free,” and so on. Next we’re required to “pour out libations.” This isn’t easy. The acolyte must fill his mouth with milk from one of the mountain’s nipples and then find his way back to the maze entrance. He spits the milk into one of the bronze bowls, goes back for another libation, and then he does the whole routine over again. He’s forbidden to swallow any mouthful meant for the goddess. It takes us all afternoon to fill the bowls. By the time the ritual is over, we know Idorasag’s maze as if we’d always lived in Arcadia Lodge. Back in the dormitory, we collapse on the mattresses without bothering to remove our bathing suits.

  A few hours later, there’s a horrible scratching noise, as if a monster with huge claws is trapped under my bed, and I scream. The monster growls and roars. Jumping up, I realize that the other acolytes are screaming too (they’ve got monsters under their beds!), and soon we’re tearing out of the dormitory like it’s on fire. As we charge down staircase after staircase, a terrible storm starts raging, wind and rain, plus thunder booming like an artillery barrage. The lightning flashes phosphorescent white. We pour through the temple entrance. Luckily we’re all maze experts, so it doesn’t take us more than ten minutes to find the center. As the thunder rumbles, twenty-four frightened acolytes go piling into the fur mountain.

  The mountain strokes me, hugs me, sings me a lullaby. She lifts me to her nearest breast, and I suckle. In a few minutes I calm down, and after an hour or so of drinking her milk and hearing her heart, I feel totally safe, not only from monsters and storms but from every danger in the world. I spend the night in the fur mountain’s arms.

  Was it rigged? As I wake up, the thought occurs to me. The priestesses could’ve piped in the monster’s noises using a tape recorder; they could’ve made the storm from trick fuses and sound effects. Fake or real, I don’t care, because Idorasag is the most wonderful deity ever, and I plan on worshiping her for the rest of my life.

  By the time Nora arrived for the mandatory orientation session, the Carl Jung Auditorium stood at capacity: plague families mixed with clinic personnel. Searching for a seat, she realized that the room was funnel-shaped, the crowd swirling around the rostrum like flotsam caught in Charybdis. A hulking man with a goatee shuffled toward the lectern, raised the cobra-necked microphone to the level of his jaw, and introduced himself as Dr. Adrian Lucido.

  “The measure of any religion,” he began, “is the quality of its gods.” Lucido paused to shoot Nora a disapproving frown as, spotting a vacancy in the second row, she maneuvered through an obstacle course of feet, knees, and umbrellas. “Here at the Church of Earthly Affirmation,” he continued, “we are proud of our pantheon.” He snapped his fingers, and a wheeled dais rolled across the stage, bearing plaster images of the Somatocist deities. “As their education progresses, your stricken loved ones will open their hearts to the queen of passion, embrace the master of the revels, glorify the lord of the jest, and suckle the mistress of milk.”

  The rest of Lucido’s lecture explicated the theory behind the clinic. Flood the patient with pharmaceutical euphoria, thus kicking his melancholia into remission, then teach him to tap his inner energies, his wellsprings of joy, so that he becomes immune to further nihilistic infections. In the end a new self emerges, a soul over whom El Cráneo holds no more power than would a Halloween skeleton decorating a drugstore window.

  Nora wanted to love Dr. Adrian Lucido, but she simply couldn’t manage it Despite a demeanor that broadcast competence and an aura that advertised devotion, he did not inspire her trust. He reminded her of the oncologists who’d treated her father during his final year. With the exception of the inspiringly modest Dr. Irving Frankel, they seemed to fancy themselves a race apart—a different species, in fact, supernatural in heritage, stranded on Earth through a ideological error that God would soon correct.

  The afternoon belonged to two articulate, hot-eyed, intermittently messianic speakers. Dr. Derek Scarron, a cultural anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania, displayed sixty-three idols that he’d collected during his world travels, then delineated the compelling similarities and the equally compelling differences between the Somatocist pantheon and its predecessors. Dr. Constance Vogel, a chemist once employed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, recounted how she’d discovered the antifetch drug, hyperion-15. Her story was a biomedical thriller replete with cul-de-sacs and surprising turns, its climax occurring when Vogel injected her thected father-in-law with an auspicious formula and saw the impacted leveler leap from his flesh like a hooked marlin breaching the surface of the sea.

  Returning to La Sangre de la Serpiente that afternoon, Nora summarized the day’s developments for Crock, then proposed that they take the Queen upriver the following morning in search of Gerard Korty. Crock, indignant, pointed ou
t that appropriating a man’s thirty-ton steamboat wasn’t exactly like borrowing his car. But Nora had arguments ready. Anthony, she noted, held no legal tide to the Queen, and, moreover, the reason for this mission was not some whim of hers but a direct order from Jehovah’s entrails.

  The journey began shortly after sunrise. While Crock drank tequila in the engine room, Nora settled into the lofty pilothouse, one hand on the helm, the other clutching a map of the Rio Uspanapa supplied by Esperanza. Like the God of the imperiled Catholic faith, Nora was trifurcated, a third of her attention devoted to keeping the Queen off the sandbars, a third to hoping that Kevin was faring well in the Temple of Risogada, a third to wondering whether she’d come to Mexico only to place her son in the hands of a mountebank.

  Deities were serious commodities. You couldn’t simply legislate them into being. It wasn’t a question of empiricism: the Norse, Greek, Hindu, and Sumerian pantheons were no more factual than Lucido’s. The gods who commanded your respect, however, the ones who could claim spiritual reality, enjoyed the weight of tradition. If Kevin walked away cured, she would forgive the new religion its excesses, but at present she doubted that Somatocism’s ministers, with their confected cults and psychoactive drugs, had their patients’ best interests at heart.

  The Mexican sun flared and pulsed, turning the pilothouse into a stewpot. On both sides of the river, sugarcane fields and cacao plantations alternated with dazzling bursts of jungle. The rain forest proper evidently lay many kilometers to the south, but for Nora the immediate terrain—the broadleaf trees garlanded with morning-glory vines and magenta-blossomed bougainvillea—boasted a lushness no true flower woman could fail to adore.

  After two hours on the river, she noticed a sandstone bluff rising to a rambling hacienda shielded from the jungle by a stockade fence, the side yard cluttered with scaffolding, hoisting gear, and massive stone blocks. A pair of carved giants dominated the outdoor studio, the nearer one indecipherable, the other depicting her brother’s psychic mentor, Martin Luther. She committed the Queen to Crock’s care, lowered the skiff, and poled her way to the beach. Swatting mosquitoes, she disembarked. Baked by the sun, the mud exuded a complex scent, fecundity leavened with decay. She ascended the bluff and marched across the studio grounds until she reached the sculpted Luther, who appeared to be battling an episode of constipation.

  A door squealed opened. Nora turned. A slender, dark-haired beauty, with European features and tanned skin, stepped onto the veranda.

  “This is obviously Martin Luther,” said Nora, “but who’s that fellow over there?”

  “Erasmus of Rotterdam. My husband carved it.”

  “And now he’s working on a giant brain.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Long story. Call me Nora.”

  “Fiona.”

  They retreated to the shade of the veranda, whereupon Nora narrated the pertinent events in her life, most especially her conversation with the divine bowels. Each successive revelation caused Fiona Korty’s jaw to fall a notch.

  The women walked into the jungle, Fiona finding the path, Nora reveling in the orchids: clumps of delicate pink and mauve odontoglossum punctuated by flashes of purple cattleya. Hummingbirds sought out the blossoms, airborne syringes extracting the precious nectars. Bees flitted from flower to flower. Higher up, toucans and budgerigars darted amid the branches.

  Beholding the reubenite brain, Nora gasped, perhaps even louder than when she first saw Eric convert a silk scarf into a live dove. The thing was huge—as huge, complex, and beautiful as the Queen. It lay atop a grassy hummock, looking somewhat like a golf ball on a tee, an impression reinforced by its stippled surface. Naked to the waist, Gerard Korty sat between the frontal lobes, eating garnachas and reading a book, the sort of civilized lunch break Nora had known only after losing her teaching job.

  “Gerard, a visitor!” shouted Fiona. “With a message from God’s bowels!”

  Muscles in men had never done much for Nora, but she had to admit that Korty’s physique was striking, if at odds with his sagging cheeks and drooping eyes. Monumental sculpting was evidently at once a passionate vocation, a spiritual ordeal, and an athletic event He rose and descended a makeshift wooden ladder.

  Absorbing Nora’s autobiography, from her college days all the way through her various adventures reaching Mexico, Korty seemed more intrigued to learn that she’d once taught English than that she’d recently been deputized by Jehovah’s colon to warn him against finishing the sculpture. When she incidentally professed an affection for The Divine Comedy—she’d entered the epic seeking the medieval perspective on antiquity, stayed around for the sheer beauty of it all—his fascination intensified.

  “Dante and I have a lot in common,” he said. “Catholicism, misanthropy, an intellectual hero named Thomas—Aquinas in Dante’s case, a quirky Jesuit priest in mine.” He pressed his book into Nora’s hands: Parables for a Post-Theistic Age, by Thomas Ockham, S.J. “Borrow it. Read it. Come back and tell me whether I have a prayer of doing it justice.”

  “Aren’t you troubled by the entrails’ prediction?”

  “Troubled, Mrs. Burkhart? I’m exhilarated. The God who whipped up this plague is obviously a criminal: of course He wants me to abandon my project. It threatens to help the world.”

  “The bowels have a dark side, no question—they even admitted it,” said Nora. “But their arguments still sounded plausible.”

  “What does it profit a man if he retains his sanity but loses his reubenite brain?”

  Korty, she decided, was like his project—formidable, overbearing, slightly deranged. For all his refined manner and verbal facility, he seemed to have difficulty inhabiting himself. He was the sort of man about whom Eric would have said, “He doesn’t have both oars in the water,” though Korty’s problem appeared to be more a superfluity of oars, propelling his psyche in a hundred directions at once. Nora liked him.

  “This brain of mine will help make the Third Millennium civilized, perhaps even enlightened, perhaps even wise.” Korty placed his palm against the left cerebral hemisphere, running his splayed fingers along a bulging vein.

  “How can a mere piece of sculpture have such power?” Nora asked.

  “The Philadelphia Liberty Bell had such power. So did the French Republic’s Marianne and Picasso’s Guernica.”

  “But only because people invested them with meaning.”

  “Indeed.” He massaged the medulla. “Fiona is my Beatrice, but you, Mrs. Burkhart—you are my Virgil. You’ve come to guide me through whatever Hell I must endure in completing my magnum opus.” Extending his arms, he embraced both women and escorted them toward a doorway cut into the pituitary gland. “As you wade through his Parables, you’ll see that Ockham imagines us moving beyond the ‘terrible transcendent truths’ of myth and religion. Ah, but what replaces them? you ask. Walk with me down the corpus callosum and into the cerebellum—my Gallery of Decency.”

  The instant Nora entered the cerebellum, a scintillating space lit by a dozen incandescent-mantle lanterns, her mood grew inexplicably buoyant. Carved from reubenite and inlaid with semiprecious stones, the decency dioramas glowed like braziers jammed with burning coals. The air seemed electrically charged, as if some Promethean science experiment had just been conducted here, leaving behind a whiff of ozone and an intimation of hot clay. The opening of the Paradiso sprang into her mind: Dante in Eden, imitating his Beatrice by daring to look directly at Apollo, the sun.

  I suffered him not long, yet not so little

  But that I saw him glowing all around

  Like molten iron pouring from the forge.

  And suddenly it seemed that day on day

  Was superadded, as though God had sought

  To with a second sun embellish Heaven.

  Each tableau commemorated a great moment in the history of ethical obligation. In one niche, the Good Samaritan aided the beaten and abandoned traveler. In another, a congregation of Quaker abolitionists
clothed a fugitive American slave during his escape along the Underground Railway. A third tableau depicted Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his helicopter crew rescuing Vietnamese villagers from the My Lai massacre.

  “Wow, Gerry, it keeps getting better,” said Fiona.

  “You do beautiful work,” said Nora.

  “It’s a book, Mrs. Burkhart.” Korty’s eyes flashed as brightly as the mantles on his lanterns. “A stone poem, a reubenite Paradiso, a bible for the Third Millennium.” He led Nora and Fiona out of the cerebellum, through the rear portal, and into the muggy jungle air. “No wonder God can’t stomach it.”

  “But why will people believe this bible?” asked Nora. “What makes it more convincing than the Book of Mormon or Mary Baker Eddy?”

  “Maybe they won’t believe it,” said Korty. “All I know is, I have to finish the damn thing.”

  Bidding Korty farewell, Nora again expressed her enthusiasm for the Gallery of Decency—never before, she said, had she found morality so moving—then thanked him for his crucial artistic contribution to the Church of Earthly Affirmation.

  “The clinic works,” he said. “I’ve seen proof.”

  “Terrible things happened to me at El Agujero.”

  “It’s a terrible place. Ahead of you lies a cured child.”

  “I believe that. A cured child. Yes.”

  That afternoon, sitting on the forecastle deck, the sternwheeler moored to Esperanza’s wharf, Nora read chapter one of Parables for a Post-Theistic Age. She was especially impressed by Ockham’s concept of “little myths,” those unadorned ideals of kindness and creativity that Korty was currently reifying in stone. The words that most haunted her, however, were not Ockham’s own but a passage he’d quoted from the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

  “So our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation vis-à-vis God,” Bonhoeffer had written in Letters and Papers from Prison. “God is teaching us that we must live as men”—and as women too, she thought—“who can get along very well without Him. The God Who makes us live in this world without using Him as a working hypothesis is the God before Whom we are ever standing. Before God and with Him we live without God.”