The Eternal Footman Page 26

  My new friends have prepared a picnic: wicker basket, checkered blanket, CD player. Our holiday starts immediately. The priestesses take my hands and guide me to a patch of meadow secluded by rosebushes.

  Margo’s legs scissor magically, Melody’s tits shimmy like giant scoops of Jell-O. Melted chocolate goes rushing through my veins—that’s how it feels, anyway. The three of us spread out the blanket, and when Melody bends over, I can see everything (a girl might show cleavage galore, but unless you catch a nipple, you’re not atop Everest yet), so naturally I’m stiff as a pogo stick by the time we’re sitting down.

  “Here in the grove of Orgasiad,” says Melody, opening the picnic basket, “hidden in the shadows of your soul, you will discover the secret well of Eros.”

  “Have you ever done it before?” asks Margo, turning on the CD player.

  “Only in my dreams,” I say.

  The Doors song called “Light My Fire” spills forth as Melody takes a chicken thigh from the basket and begins munching. “Big day ahead.”

  The picnic is delicious but also painful, because the chicken, grapes, cheese, and rosé wine take so long to consume, but finally we’re ready to worship Orgasiad, who has got to be the greatest goddess of all time. Margo lays me down and starts peeling off my Bermuda shorts, and suddenly my pocket rocket is on the launch pad, and it feels like T minus thirty seconds. Melody hikes up her white gown like she’s about to wade across a brook, singing the goddess’s name, “Oorgassiiiaaad,” as she sits on me, and soon it becomes clear she doesn’t bother with underwear.

  “Quoits,” she says, and right away gets a ringer, but I’m the person who feels that he’s the winner.

  “Oorgassiiiaaad,” I sing.

  “Put your gift on the altar, Kevin,” says Melody. “Pour out your libation.”

  Over her shoulder, the skull is smiling its smile, and just then the thing looks ridiculous. Margo helps Melody pull her dress off over her head, so I can see Melody’s water balloons completely. Her nipples are like two pink thimbles. And suddenly the countdown hits zero, we have ignition, we have liftoff, it’s all jetting out of me, and I’m singing Orgasiad’s name again, because now there’s one less virgin in Mexico.

  “You’re young,” says Margo, handing me a Three Musketeers bar. “You’ll recycle in no time.”

  She’s right After I’m finished eating the candy, all Margo has to do is remove her T-shirt and climb out of her cutoffs, and I’m ready to make another sacrifice. Her nipples are totally different from Melody’s, dark and wide like antique coins, but still breathtaking. She tells me to do her from behind, and I obey, because I want to try everything while I’m here, but I can’t hold my libation back for more than a few minutes, which Margo says is normal under the circumstances.

  Hand in hand, the three of us walk down to the lagoon and stretch out along the shore, and just when I’ve decided life can’t get any better, Melody is treating my dick like a Fudgesicle, putting the whole thing in her mouth. She adds her hand to the procedure, up and down like she’s opening and closing an umbrella, and I’m a dam that’s about to break, or a volcano that’s about to erupt, which of course I do, and Melody swallows everything.

  As the afternoon goes on, we continue worshiping Orgasiad—on the sand, under the water, even in the cleft of a papaya tree. Sometimes the priestesses lick and massage each other, and at one point they rub my chest with a combination of spit and altar juices, saying, “We baptize you in the name of Orgasiad,” and I’m happy it’s official now, because Orgasiad is a goddess I’d follow into Vincent Price’s torture chamber, if necessary.

  Hours later, back in Arcadia Lodge, I ease myself onto the mattress, my dick sore and throbbing, and I decide it’s the most wonderful ache a man has ever known. Are you there, Quincy? Can you hear me? Of course not One skinny fetch against gods so powerful that each deserves his own comic-book series: it’s no contest.

  For three days Gerard managed to ignore the new gods’ failure to cure Louise Swinscoe—the chinks in Soaragid’s armor, as it were (the cavities in Risogada’s teeth, the lumps in Orgasiad’s breasts, the clay that constituted Idorasag’s feet)—and fix his attention on the great work. He finished the Sermon on the Mount tableau, returned to El Dorado, and threw himself into a sketching session, drafting his ideas for the Garden of Scientific Knowledge. It rained voluminously, the droplets hitting the tin roof with the sound of popcorn blooming in a microwave oven. He hardly noticed. The science garden obsessed him. When finally rendered in reubenite and inlaid with jade and turquoise, the fifteen dioramas would rank with his most striking achievements, eclipsing even his Paradiso marbles. He took supreme satisfaction not only in his illustrations of Galileo discovering the Jovian moons and Darwin contemplating the Galapagos finches, but also in his concept of Einstein seated beside a window in the Swiss Patent Office, staring outward past his desk, the street, the city of Berne…beyond the Milky Way, beyond Newtonian physics.

  On Thursday morning, while he was happily roughing out the penultimate diorama (Watson and Crick cobbling together their model of the DNA molecule), a haunted-looking young woman appeared at El Dorado and identified herself as Hannah Alport. She approached Gerard’s drafting table with a despairing shuffle, her poncho shedding rainwater from the sleeves and hood, though her anguished face suggested that some of the droplets might be tears. Gerard offered her tea. She took the steaming mug, heaved a long sigh, and, slumping into a wicker chair, told her story.

  Two weeks earlier, Hannah’s eight-year-old, Joshua, had broken the grip of thexis in consequence of his journey through the temples, after which mother and son decided to stay in Coatzacoalcos, assisting newly arrived pilgrims. The previous evening, a terrible setback had occurred. Joshua’s leveler returned, conquering the boy’s will, invading his brain, festooning his body with stage-three boils.

  As Hannah’s narrative reached its climax, an icy nausea spread through Gerard. Damn. Hell. Louise Swinscoe’s relapse wasn’t unique.

  Hannah said, “I thought maybe Somatocism was like chemotherapy, you need several doses, so we went back to El Agujero. The bastards kicked us out. Mr. Richter said Joshua lacked piety. Totally false. My boy made offerings every day.” She pulled her poncho hood away, releasing a cascade of sandy hair. “You’re the church’s official sculptor. You have influence with Deacon Richter.”

  “Actually, the man hates me.” Gerard turned toward his drafting table and began shading the double helix, but her pleading eyes continued to haunt him. “Lucido occasionally listens to me,” he said at last. “If you like, I’ll speak to him about Joshua’s case.”

  Before Gerard could turn again, Hannah threw her arms around his waist and fervently embraced him.

  “Gracias!”

  The afternoon found Gerard driving dispiritedly toward Mount Tapílula, his mind filled with funerary images: Claude Swinscoe burying his sister, Hannah Alport burying her son. Calle Huimanguillo had become a carpet of mud, as thick and sticky as sartre sauce. The omnipresent ooze sucked at the pony’s hoofs, seized the cart’s wheels, and delayed Gerard’s arrival by an hour.

  Wandering through the mansion, negotiating the labyrinth of corridors, he finally located Lucido in the library. The psychoanalyst sat in an easy chair, dressed in his customary black caftan, his hyperion syringe and a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino resting on the adjacent tea table as his tired eyes scanned Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion.

  All during Gerard’s tale, Lucido wore an expression as indecipherable as the Olmec calendar in his wine cellar. When at last he spoke, his tone proved likewise cryptic, somewhere between forced sincerity and oblique sarcasm.

  “Two relapses,” said Lucido.

  “I suspect there may be more,” said Gerard.

  “Correct. I know of eleven such cases personally.”

  “Eleven? God.”

  “A twelfth is probably occurring even as we speak,” said Lucido, infuriatingly placid. He closed the book
and stabbed the cover with his pointing finger. “Sorry, Herr Doktor Freud. Religion is not an illusion. The believer doesn’t see angels and demons zooming through the air. He doesn’t need to see them, not when his faith tells him they enjoy metaphysical reality.” He fixed Gerard with a gaze powered by certainty and hyperion-15. “Why does my church work so well? Because it’s built on the mountain of faith, not the bog of illusion.”

  “But it doesn’t work so well.”

  Lucido smiled darkly and filled a glass with rich crimson wine. “No treatment is totally reliable, though obviously some medicines are preferable to others.” He sipped his wine and resumed speaking, slowly now. “Which is why I’ve started attacking abulia from a completely different direction. I call it Antidote X. Religion and science, inextricably fused. Still experimental, but the preliminary results are encouraging.”

  Gerard stared at the nearest shelf, jammed with Jane Austen first editions lugged to Coatzacoalcos by some desperate plague family. He had no inkling what Antidote X might be, but he did know that the idea of a backup church failed utterly to inspire him. “Even with its weaknesses, Somatocism is an astonishing achievement. Can you really invent something that effective all over again?”

  “Through Antidote X, I intend to advance not only beyond the Church of Earthly Affirmation but beyond all churches everywhere, near and far, past and present.”

  “Okay, but meanwhile shouldn’t we send the relapsers through Tamoanchan again?”

  “What you’re proposing is grossly unfair to those patients who still need a first treatment.”

  “We could train new priests and add a night shift.”

  Approaching his bookcases, Lucido shelved The Future of an Illusion with a condescending twist of the wrist “I hate to say it, Herr Doktor Freud, but religion faces a far brighter future than depth psychology.”

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “There’s no need to keep Tamoanchan open around the clock. We’re running a church here, not a laundromat. Besides, having personally examined several relapsers, I can say with confidence that they’re in no immediate danger.”

  “Are you joking?” said Gerard. “They’ve been thected all over again.”

  “That’s how it appears from the outside, yes,” said Lucido. “Inside, a stalemate obtains between fetch and host.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Blood tests. It’s complicated. How is my statue progressing?”

  “I’ve got a concept.”

  “A concept, that’s all?”

  “You’re crouching before a sickbed. A healed child rises from the mattress, seeking to embrace her deliverer.”

  “Yes…only I’m looming over two beds,” said Lucido, “one holding a child, the other an adult.”

  “The niche is too small.”

  “My dear fellow, are you still unaware of how we do things around here? When the niche is too small, we don’t shrink the statue.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s right, Gerard. We take down the wall.”

  To reach the Temple of Soaragid, master of the revels, god of dancing, you follow granite steps deep into the ground below Tamoanchan, then walk through a bunch of little chambers connected by tunnels. Suddenly a cavern opens before you, lit by candles and torches. The smoke curls upward for fifty feet and makes the ceiling as black as the night sky.

  Smorgasbord tables line the far wall. Roasted pigs with apples in their mouths. Hams as big as fire hydrants. Bread loaves like pillows. Champagne bottles wedged into mounds of crushed ice. Seated inside a marble gazebo, a dozen musicians play fiddles, fifes, drums, and bagpipes. In the center of the cavern stands a mammoth Soaragid idol: a man with a jaguar’s face, chin thrown back, arms raised. He is dancing.

  As we acolytes come forward, two dozen priests and priestesses appear, each wearing a jaguar helmet and a cape of jaguar fur. My partner calls herself Luna, high priestess of Soaragid. Her face is almost as catlike as the god’s, with large pouty lips and golden eyes.

  Soaragid’s servants lead us to the idol. A bronze basin sits at the right foot, “waiting to receive sacrifices,” we’re told. The cultists teach us a hymn of praise, and we chant it over and over, the musicians providing the tune.

  He dances on the pounding waves

  And eats the flying foam.

  He waltzes on the whirling wind

  And makes the clouds his home.

  He pirouettes across the sun

  And slips the moon a kiss.

  He slyly tricks each dying fetch

  Into the black abyss.

  After we stop singing, the musicians keep playing, shifting into other melodies. I’ve never heard music like this before; it seems to come from another planet, yet somehow every note makes sense. “Your blood leaps up,” says Luna as we begin to dance. “Feel the pulled plasma, the tide within.” Sliding and stomping in time to the music, I can only guess at the steps, but what I do feels right. We dance mazurkas and mambos, tangos and fandangos, and then the real frenzy begins: sambas, congas, tarantellas, polkas, jigs. Our feet clatter on the stone floor; we sound like a stampede of happy buffalo. The food vanishes. The champagne flows. As the music gets faster, our revels get wilder (“every molecule alive,” says Luna, “every organelle cavorting, every cell celebrating”), until our tapping, skipping, spinning, hopping, feasting, drinking, and singing pour into each other like the meeting of a thousand rivers (“the inverse agonies of the Temple of Soaragid,” she says, “merriment’s martyrs, racked by jollity, eviscerated by felicity”), and the sweat rolls out of us like cider from squeezed apples as we tear off our clothes (“nakedness knows nothing of shame, the true disciple wears only skin”) and toss them aside, so we can move and breath better, our bodies all sleek and shiny in the torchlight.

  The sacrifices begin. An acolyte dances up to the Soaragid idol, furiously shaking his arms and head so his sweat flies into the bronze basin. He goes back to the revels, works up a fresh cup, offers it to the god, returns to the revels, creates another cup, offers it, returns. Hour by hour, the basin grows fuller. We whirl and leap. The sweat level rises. We vault and soar. The basin overflows. We surrender our last drops and collapse—dizzy, exhausted, gasping. Then the great god Soaragid, pleased and appeased, climbs off his pedestal, creeps across the cavern, and, bending low over each acolyte in turn, whispers a promise in his ear. Soaragid vows to range through all the corridors of our minds, hunt down our wraiths, and hurl them “into Hell’s most corrosive sea.” And then suddenly, lying there with the blood thumping in my ears and the sweet mossy smell of the cavern floor filling my nostrils, I realize that I’ve truly thrown off my fetch—Quincy is gone forever.

  My victory rushes through me like a double hit of hyperion, and I sleep.

  When Hannah Alport heard that Gerard’s attempt to intercede on her son’s behalf had failed, she responded with a detachment more disturbing than the anger he was expecting. “These days, a person knows better than to get her hopes up,” she said, her tone as affectless as the voice of the stone Luther. “Even after Joshua broke out of his coma, I didn’t assume he was permanently cured.”

  “I simply can’t connect with that man,” said Gerard, gesturing toward his nascent statue of Lucido. That morning, in consequence of his labors, a recognizable head and shoulders had arisen from the block, but the limbs and torso, not to mention the two healed abulics, remained sealed in reubenite. “He’s a great scientist, a genius really, but he lives inside his skull.”

  “I ask myself, if Dr. Lucido won’t listen to his idolmaker, who will he listen to?”

  “Good question.”

  Slogging across the muddy studio grounds, Hannah pulled off her Panama hat and set it on Erasmus’s pedestal. “And then I think, ‘He’ll listen to me. He’ll listen to a mother with a dying child in her arms.’”

  “You’re planning to visit Lucido?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “It won’t work.�
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  She rubbed the humanist’s calf, as if to relieve him of a charley horse. “And who is this?”

  “Erasmus, sometimes called the Voltaire of the Renaissance. I talk to him.”

  “And does the statue talk back?”

  “Yes. Lucido will rebuff you—I hope you know that.”

  Hannah indicated Erasmus’s debating partner. “And this one…?”

  “Martin Luther. Good news, Mrs. Alport—the doctor is researching an experimental treatment. Your best strategy would be to stay in the city until the new cure becomes available.”

  “Or until Joshua dies.” She wandered toward Gerard’s workbench and picked up a tooth chisel.

  Gerard said, “Lucido believes that Joshua’s present condition, disturbing as it is, doesn’t represent true thexis.”

  “Well, it sure-as-hell looks like true thexis.” She approached the stockade portal, lifted the latch, and opened the right-hand gate. “I took History of Christianity in college. Luther suffered from constipation.”

  “One of the severest cases on record.”

  “Better blocked bowels”—she stabbed the chisel into the wooden lintel but failed to anchor the blade—“than a blocked mind.”

  “Erasmus would say that Luther had both.”

  Again she stabbed, successfully this time, and slipped into the jungle. Like the gnomon on a sundial, the chisel cast a long thin shadow across the open gate.

  Gerard spent the rest of the morning completing his sketches for the Garden of Scientific Knowledge. He returned to Oswald’s Rock and labored through the night, carving the contours of the Isaac Newton diorama by the roaring glow of his mantle lanterns. Gradually the scene emerged: the polymath in his Trinity College rooms, experimenting with pendulums and fiddling with prisms.