The Eternal Footman Read online

  Lying in her bunk that night, she dreamed herself back to ancient Greece. She was sitting at Aesop’s feet, listening enthralled as he spun a tale populated by the Somatocist pantheon. At the climax, attacking in concert, Soaragid, Orgasiad, Risogada, and Idorasag shredded Jehovah’s large intestine, hungrily devouring the morsels of holy flesh. Suddenly the bowel beast retaliated, fatally crushing each god in its coils.

  “The moral lies beyond my grasp,” said Aesop to Nora. “Perhaps this fable foreshadows the coming worldview, a monotheism destined to stretch from the frontiers of India to the farthest shore of an undiscovered continent. Some people may prosper by this new God, others may deplore His advent, but one thing is certain. He won’t die an easy death.”

  Approaching the palace of Risogada, god of laughter, I immediately see that this isn’t your normal sacred temple. It looks more like a Las Vegas casino imitating a wizard’s castle. The inside suggests one of those gaudy old-time movie theaters where they use red velvet ropes for crowd control. A dozen priests of Risogada lead us through the lobby, past the snack bar, and down a hall lined with funhouse mirrors. I see that my pocks are smaller, my grooves thinner.

  We enter the main auditorium, its walls covered with murals of clowns throwing pies at each other. The stage holds a big Risogada: a fifteen-foot marble man wearing diamond-pattern tights and an enormous crocodile head, his jaws open in a gigantic laugh. As we settle into our seats, a fat hobo wearing baggy pants and a tattered coat appears before the idol and introduces himself as “Algernon Bembo, high priest of hijinks.” He says that we’ll be spending the next twenty-four hours “sniggering, snickering, chuckling, yukking, guffawing, and hee-hawing.” Strutting off the stage, Mr. Bembo slips on a banana peel and falls. We laugh.

  “Let the service begin!” cries the clown, picking himself up. “Time to worship Risogada with the sacred sound of laughter!”

  For the rest of the day we’re treated to a vaudeville show. The sketches range from knock-knock jokes, to sex gags I don’t quite get, to stuff so rowdy it makes the Three Stooges seem like guidance counselors.

  My favorite routine has an explorer getting lost in the Amazon jungle and ending up captured by bloodthirsty natives. “Oh, God, I’m screwed,” he mutters to himself. Suddenly there’s a ray of light from Heaven, and a voice booms out: “No, you are not screwed. Pick up that rock at your feet and crush the head of the chief.” So the explorer picks up the rock and bashes out the chiefs brains. As he stands panting above the dead body, surrounded by hundreds of natives wearing shocked expressions, God’s voice booms out again: “Okay…now you’re screwed.”

  Every hour or so, I visit the snack bar and load up on popcorn, soda, nachos, and candy bars. Risogada’s priests pipe in the jokes using the PA system, so I don’t miss anything. During my third trip to the snack bar, I see Quincy standing naked by the drinking fountain. He’s eating a Hershey bar and gulping down a Dr. Pepper.

  “Tomorrow I’ll have you back in the hospital,” he tells me.

  “No way,” I say.

  My fetch coughs, ill with a bad case of hyperion-15. I’m reminded of a joke.

  “Jack the Ripper goes to Heaven,” I tell Quincy. “‘How did you get here?’ asks Saint Peter. Jack sneezes and says, ‘Flu…’”

  Quincy keeps on coughing. I tell him another joke.

  “William Shakespeare once saw Ben Jonson sitting on the toilet reading a book. ‘Poor old Ben,’ said Shakespeare. ‘His memory is so poor, he needs directions to shit.’”

  Before I can tell him the one about the Amazon explorer, my fetch runs out the door.

  During the dinner hour, the priests bring us trays of food (right to our seats, like we’re passengers on a jetliner flying across the Atlantic), and then Mr. Bembo leads everyone in a hymn of praise to Risogada.

  With a kick in the pants

  And a pie in the face,

  We end the skull’s reign,

  We break its embrace.

  The high priest announces that it’s time to make “offerings to the lord of the jest.” This means walking up to the crocodile-man, climbing a stepladder, and whispering a funny story in his ear. I figure the idol must be hollow and there’s a priest inside, because whenever Risogada hears a punch line, laughter rolls out of his mouth.

  At last it’s my turn. Leaning against the god’s head, I tell him Quincy’s story about the death-row prisoner who learns he can have anything he wants for his last meal. (“I’d like some mushrooms,” he says. “I’ve always been afraid to eat them.”) My joke gets an especially loud laugh from Risogada.

  The sacrifice session ends, and we settle in for the final part of the service, a festival of Monty Python movies. All during Life of Brian, I giggle uncontrollably, even though I’ve seen it before. The Holy Grail has us in stitches. The Meaning of Life almost makes us wet our pants.

  At midnight we stumble out of Risogada’s palace and head for Arcadia Lodge, our sides aching. Suddenly I see Quincy, slumped against a marble fountain decorated with Idorasag statues. The spouting milk glows magically in the moonlight. My fetch coughs twice and staggers away. This church is going to cure me. I’m absolutely sure of it.

  Not since he’d won first prize in the New Jersey Parochial Schools Arts Festival, wowing the judges with his ceramic interpretation of Saint Francis Embracing a Fawn, had an evaluation of his work thrilled Gerard as much as Nora Burkhart’s message from the divine entrails. His Stone Gospel had earned the reprobation of the defunct Judeo-Christian God. What better proof that in transmogrifying Oswald’s Rock he was creating an object of cosmic significance?

  His mood remained high even after, later that day, Hubbard Richter delivered a petulant letter from Lucido, who wanted to know how his statue was progressing. At first Gerard chose to ignore the inquiry, but then Fiona reminded him that the deadline had passed eight days earlier. Through prodigious deployments of willpower, he returned to El Dorado, pulled out his set of Lucido photographs, and sat down to await his muse. After a long evening spent hunched over the drafting table, he teased out a concept that he suspected would please his patron: Lucido standing in contrapposto beside a healed abulic, the grateful adolescent rising from her sickbed to embrace her deliverer.

  Much to his frustration, Gerard couldn’t locate the scrap of paper on which he’d recorded the dimensions of the El Agujero niche. He inverted his pockets, scoured his studio, searched the Stone Gospel. Nothing. At last he resigned himself to the inevitable. Instead of finishing the Gallery of Decency (the final tableau, the Sermon on the Mount, still required at least six hours of effort), he would have to waste the day taking measurements at the detention center. He hitched up the pony and drove along Calle Huimanguillo through a warm steady rain, reaching El Agujero at 3:00 P.M. and setting to work amid the usual grim hubbub of pilgrims arriving with their thected loved ones. By 3:30 P.M. he’d secured the numbers. Although the niche was high enough to accommodate a piece even taller than the resident Soaragid, it measured only two meters across. Gerard winced: he would have to revise his vision, making the resurrected adolescent a little girl instead. Perhaps it was all for the best. Art always sprang from some ineffable mixture of epiphany and stricture, didn’t it? Dante had needed the shackles of terza rima; one couldn’t imagine The Divine Comedy without that iron scheme.

  As he slipped the tape measure into his pocket, a commotion reached Gerard’s ears—stomping feet, angry voices. Moved by a mixture of curiosity and unease, he hid behind the reubenite jaguar, crouched down, and peered into the foyer. A fiftyish, muscular African-American stood before Roland Jackendorf’s desk, arms positioned like the prongs of a forklift, cradling a middle-aged woman, also black, her skin scored by stage-four pocks and grooves. It was a common El Agujero tableau—pilgrim petitioning assistant deacon—except for one grim fact: this particular plague victim, Louise Swinscoe of San Diego, had already been through Tamoanchan. She’d cheerfully and energetically apprenticed herself to Gerard two days a
fter completing her therapy.

  “You have to let her in!” screamed Louise’s brother, Claude Swinscoe, an unemployed investment counselor who’d also worked briefly at El Dorado. Claude’s fellow pilgrims observed his tirade with intermingled admiration and horror. “She needs a second treatment!”

  Jackendorf’s stare was blank, unreadable. “Her piety is incomplete, now and forever.”

  “She loves the gods! She made sacrifices every day!”

  The assistant deacon grabbed a mallet and slammed it into a Frisbee-size gong. A dozen minions materialized, surrounding the Swinscoes like the devils besieging Virgil and Dante in Circle VIII.

  “Remove this gentleman from the premises,” said Jackendorf. “His sister lacks faith.”

  “That’s not true!” wailed Claude as the minions escorted him and Louise past the queues of plague families.

  The bulkiest functionary thrust open the riveted door—“The gods are not deceived!”—and banished the pair, forcing them out of El Agujero and into the steamy drizzle. Claude roared like a werejaguar caught in a steel trap. The celestial skull snickered. A groan shot from Gerard’s throat, fortunately muffled by the crash of the closing door.

  Later, back in El Dorado, he approached his open-air workbench and stared unhappily at the clay lump from which he’d planned to fashion a maquette of Lucido’s statue. A rhythmic ticking permeated the studio, drippings from the recent storm. The clay pulsated in the skullglow. He steeled himself and got busy, and by 11:00 P.M. a miniature Lucido had emerged, along with the angelic preschool girl whose salvation the psychoanalyst had just accomplished.

  “Come to bed,” said Fiona, ambling into the studio.

  Gerard wrenched the cap off a warm bottle of Cerveza Moctezuma. “I’m not tired.”

  “Sleep isn’t exactly what I had in mind.” She leaned provocatively against Erasmus’s pedestal.

  “Today a man brought his thected sister to the Hole.” He took a swallow, passed the bottle to Fiona. “She’d already been through the temples.”

  Fiona filled her mouth with beer, the foam clinging to her lips. “Shit.”

  Facing the maquette, Gerard cupped his hands around the analyst’s cranium. “Maybe it’s an unusual case, but it froze my blood.”

  He rotated his wrist, snapping the neck in two, and tossed Lucido’s head to Fiona. She nabbed the thing with her free hand, laughed, and threw it back.

  “I do not love thee, Dr. Lucido,” Gerard told the head, closing his fingers into a tight ball. Clay oozed between his knuckles.

  For the next fifteen minutes husband and wife drank beer and played catch in the atelier. The violence energized Gerard; it pricked his id and heated his libido. Taking Fiona in his arms, he led her across the floor in a tarantella choreographed by Soaragid, then carried her to their bedroom. They performed like gods. Their orgasms came from the Volcán de Catemaco. As they drifted off to sleep, Fiona mumbled, half joking, half serious, that from now on they must always preface their lovemaking with a pagan dance, a symbolic decapitation, and a six-pack of Cerveza Moctezuma.

  The Olmec Innovation

  MIXED MOTIVES AND CONFUSED ambitions lay behind Nora’s decision to volunteer at La Sangre de la Serpiente, sweeping and scrubbing and whatnot. It would make Esperanza’s life easier. It would help pay for their docking privileges. But mostly Nora wanted to escape from herself. The acolytes’ release still lay ninety-six long hours—over five thousand excruciating minutes—in the future. Cantina keeping might prove boring, but it should also take her mind, however fleetingly, off Kevin’s pocks and grooves.

  While mopping tables and washing dishes failed to soothe, soup making proved therapeutic, its fragrances a mental balm, its rhythms inimical to plague anxiety. But the best diversion lay in serving Esperanza’s customers: not the newly arrived pilgrims, who rarely stayed more than twenty minutes after receiving directions to Tamoanchan, but the indigenous clientele. With the exception of two prostitutes and a half-wit seamstress, Esperanza’s regulars were male: rough-hewn fishermen and subsistence farmers who took Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off to indulge their fondness for dice, drink, tobacco, and brawling. Throughout Nora’s first day on the job, her high school Spanish came creeping back, and while she rarely caught the nuances of the customers’ conversations, she could often follow the drift. The men never spoke of the pestilence. Fishing was a major topic: who’d caught what, where, how many. Pigs and chickens made the cut. So did the weather, women’s breasts, and the merits of Carta Blanca beer versus Cerveza Moctezuma.

  But mostly the regulars talked about Catemaco. Some believed the mountain would blow any day now, a thought occasioning a kind of perverse joy in its adherents. The doomsayers’ pleasure made sense. In contrast to abulia, a volcanic eruption had everything going for it: deafening explosions, spewing lava, flying debris, walls of flame. The bang was always better than the whimper.

  At midnight, Esperanza shooed the last of the barflies into the jungle, closed the door, and asked Nora whether she wanted to be paid in beer or tequila.

  “Make me the best margarita in Coatzacoalcos.”

  “I’ll make you the best margarita in Mexico. Where does your son worship tomorrow? The temple of Risogada?”

  “Orgasiad, actually. The priestesses are holy whores.”

  “Better he should lose his virginity in church than behind the corncrib, like happened to me. I shall pray for him.”

  Later, as Esperanza trod the stairs, heading for her room above the bar, Nora saw that the hotelier had an escort, a tall mustachioed man who’d been among the more vociferous prophets of volcanic doom. A sad smile curled Nora’s lips. She took a substantial sip, wondering if she would ever see Percy again. The coarse salt rimming the glass burned her lips and stoked her thirst. She took another sip. The best margarita in Mexico: Esperanza was absolutely right.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Burkhart,” said a young male voice.

  The speaker stood in the doorway, exuding the odor of humus.

  “You’ll be happy to hear I finished writing my joke book,” Quincy continued, stumbling into the cantina. “I call it Howlers from Hell.” He wore black chinos and a hemp shirt. His left eye resembled a sphere of rubber cement, his right a charred Ping-Pong ball, both evidently ruined by hyperion-15. “I need a drink.”

  Nora’s blood began to sing. Her bones laughed in delight “Quincy, you’ve been dispossessed.”

  “Temporarily,” he said, coughing.

  Permanently, she prayed. Please, Soaragid. I beg you, Idorasag. “And blinded as well.”

  “A Cuba libre would do nicely.”

  She poured the fetch a tall glass of Bacardi, then mixed in several ounces of Pepsi-Cola. God, what a prodigy that man Lucido was! What a wizard! What a giant!

  Quincy’s searching fingers scuttled across the bar to the Cuba libre. He brought the glass to his lips, tipped it, guzzled. “What makes you so sure,” he said, “that Kevin wants to come back?”

  “Of course he wants to come back.”

  “I’ll tell you something.” Again the leveler coughed. “Long before my host contracted the plague, a severe melancholia had seized his soul.”

  “Liar.”

  “Adolescents are as vulnerable to clinical depression as adults—did you know that? Kevin hid it well.” He slammed his Cuba libre on the counter. “Etiology? Hard to say. An undesirable gene? His absent father? Or maybe the problem was his overprotective mother. Speaking of depressing situations, I’m thinking of beginning Howlers from Hell with this one. George goes to his doctor for a routine physical. The doctor checks him out thoroughly and delivers the worst possible news: George is going to die. George asks, ‘When?’ The doctor says, ‘Ten…’ George cries, ‘Ten? That’s terrible. Ten what? Ten years? Months? Days?’ The doctor replies, ‘Nine…’” Backing away from the bar, the fetch floated across the room like a windblown shroud. “You simply refuse to laugh at these, don’t you, Mrs. Burkhart? Why am I wasting my tim
e? Good-bye.”

  Stretching out his arms, Quincy groped his way to the door.

  Nora gulped the rest of her drink, finished off the fetch’s. Kevin melancholic? No. Wrong. Morbid, perhaps, all those grisly tricks—“The Gourmet Ghoul,” “The Giggling Mortician”—but the school psychologist thought them salutary, a way for the boy to confront his shadow side.

  She left La Sangre de la Serpiente and walked into the steamy night. Quincy was gone, swallowed by the wet gloom. A hundred tree frogs chirped. A thousand cicadas trilled. She turned toward Tamoanchan, waiting patiently until a full-face portrait of Kevin consumed her inner vision.

  “You want to come back,” she told him. A plea, an admonishment, a question, a command.

  Picture a rolling woodland meadow covered with soft green grass where hundreds of onyx-and-gold Monarch butterflies flutter among orange azaleas and blood-red hibiscus. Picture a stone idol atop each hill—a busty woman with the eyes and snout of a snake, her lower body winding around itself like a twist of soft ice cream. Picture willow glades, laurel glens, olive gardens, and a lagoon, its waters colored turquoise like a Holiday Inn swimming pool. You’re seeing the Temple of Orgasiad—goddess of copulation, queen of passion—open to all acolytes over the age of fourteen.

  The instant you step through the gateway, a rainbow trellis wrapped in grapevines, a high priest named Zachary Apple asks whether you prefer male, female, or both. He looks you up and down, then enters a kind of greenhouse and comes out a few minutes later with two people who could’ve easily gotten work as movie stars back when Hollywood existed. It’s like being fitted for a suit, only more exciting.

  I’m assigned to a priestess named Margo, a slender prom-queen type in a tight Friends of Fellatio T-shirt and cutoff jeans that give you ninety percent of her legs, and also to a priestess named Melody, who’s a little heavier but has tits the size of softballs, which I figure out because her white gown is translucent like the wax paper inside a cereal box. Too bad I’m wearing the Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirt they gave me in Arcadia Lodge—I feel like a buffoon from the Temple of Risogada. At least my skin looks better. The pocks and grooves have faded into acne.