The Eternal Footman Read online

  Dawn seeped into the left hemisphere. A voice said, “May I offer a bit of advice?”

  Gerard looked up. A smiling man stood in the shadows, wearing a black felt hat and a tattered serape, an unlit clay pipe clamped in his jaws. At first Gerard didn’t recognize the intruder, but then the man stopped smiling, and the sculptor realized he was looking at himself. A terrible apprehension clutched Gerard’s soul. Was he about to die? Was the great work doomed? Personal obliteration he could abide, but the thought of losing his project was intolerable.

  “Have you come to—”

  “To foreclose?” said Julius Azrael. “At the moment I’m merely here to kibitz.”

  Gerard, grateful, laughed with Risogadan gusto. “Go ahead, Julius. Kibitz away.”

  “Use a real prism. Shine a light behind it. Flood Newton’s rooms with a rainbow.”

  Gerard had to admit that he found the leveler’s idea appealing. “There are no prisms in Coatzacoalcos.”

  “Use the bottom of a tequila bottle.”

  “That might work.”

  “I must say, you’ve been a productive fellow since I cut your cheek in the Forum. Me, I’ve accomplished almost nothing. Got my Christmas shopping done, opened a Mexican restaurant, read some Ayn Rand, that’s about it.” In a burst of fetchian playfulness, Julius caused a dozen steel pins to shoot from his hatband and fly into Newton’s ceramic flesh, so that the figurine became a kind of Restoration voodoo doll. “This Stone Gospel is simply terrific. I’m proud to wear your face.”

  Despite Gerard’s instinctive resistance, the wraith’s praise truly touched him. “What I can’t decide, Julius, is whether you are my enemy or my friend.”

  “It depends on your attitude toward death.”

  “I hate it.”

  “A stumbling block in our relationship, I’d say.” The fetch lit his clay pipe. “When you’re finished with Newton, what next?”

  “Edward Jenner inoculating his children against smallpox.”

  “Jenner had the right idea. Prevention is always better than therapy. Lucido doesn’t understand that. Night after night he slaves away in his wine cellar, struggling with Antidote X, when he should be developing a vaccine. Might I offer another suggestion? If you want Lucido to keep the temples open dawn to dusk, you must prove to him that the relapsers are in mortal danger. I can provide you with the evidence.”

  “Why would a fetch want to see Somatocism grow?”

  “Death has many dimensions, Brother. We never met a paradox we didn’t like.”

  Later that day, riding north in the pony cart along Calle Puesta del Sol, Julius holding the reins, Gerard absorbed the sorry fact that Coatzacoalcos, like so many cities before it had suffered a dramatic reversal in the normal ratio between buried and unburied corpses. It was a city of the living, a city of the dying, but mainly it was a city of the dead. The corpses were everywhere: straight corpses, pretzel corpses, short, tall, thin, bloated, festering in the sunlight decaying in the skullglow, the whole lot reeking like the shit-covered flatterers of Circle VIII. Flies moved across the death city in vast skittering clouds, their incessant drone suggesting a tone-deaf choir singing “Joy to the World” backwards. The air rang with the sound of grave digging, a carillon of steel shovels striking exposed rock.

  “Eighty-five percent died of the plague before they could become acolytes,” noted Julius, driving through an arched gateway and onto an expanse of vine-covered hills enclosed by a white adobe wall. “Their donations proved unacceptable to Richter.” A public park in happier days—PARQUE CREPÚSCULO, the sign said—the space was now an improvised cemetery dotted with dead bodies, mounded earth, wooden crosses, and gaping excavations. “Ten percent died of natural causes while trying to get infected loved ones into treatment,” the fetch continued. “Heart disease, cancer, diabetes—most especially the diarrhea endemic to cities with overburdened sanitation facilities.”

  “That leaves five percent.”

  “Five percent. Right.” Julius reined up alongside an Indian laurel tree, jumped down, and tethered the pony to the handiest branch. “I’d like you to meet someone.”

  Behind a stand of acacias, beneath the noonday death’s-head, a minimalist funeral—one corpse, one survivor—had just started. Gerard and Julius maintained a respectful distance. As the ceremony progressed, its solitary enactor, a bent woman with a narrow face and large bloodshot eyes, performed all the necessary functions: pallbearer, cleric, sexton, mourner. After depositing the corpse in the fresh grave, the woman marked it with a shabby cross assembled from two fence pickets. Gerard studied the cross, immediately noticing an epitaph burned into the transverse piece.

  MALVINA FERGUS

  1991–2006

  SHE SANG LIKE AN ANGEL

  He chewed his lip and moaned. This had to be the same Malvina Fergus who’d told him, “Thanks to your gods, I have experienced the raptures of reality.”

  The mother’s grief peaked; tears flooded the creases in her cheeks. At length she approached the open grave, and for an instant Gerard imagined that Anna Fergus intended to throw herself atop her daughter’s corpse. Instead, she took up the spade again and began shoveling back the dirt.

  “Let me help you,” said Julius, stepping out of hiding.

  Anna Fergus looked the wraith squarely in the eye, then handed him the spade like a runner relaying an Olympic torch. “Malvina always liked you,” she said.

  “That isn’t me,” said Gerard, drawing abreast of Julius.

  The woman’s gaze alternated between parasite and host. “When the levelers come after someone of your status,” she said at last, “what chance do the rest of us have?”

  Striding up to the hole, Julius obtained a spadeful of dirt and solemnly continued the interment. The fetches, mused Gerard, had one point in their favor: they never shrank from menial labor. All during his trip to Mexico, he’d seen levelers weeding their hosts’ gardens and walking their dogs.

  “I’m sorry about Malvina,” said Gerard, approaching the grave.

  “Your gods aren’t good enough, Mr. Korty.”

  He glanced at the body, largely obscured by pebbles, rocks, and hunks of dirt Anna had dressed her child in a shroud improvised from a potato sack, interpenetrating the loose weave with freshly cut wildflowers. Lumps of crimson clay stained Malvina’s brow and rouged her cheeks.

  “Some people believe that in cases like your daughter’s”—Julius dropped a spadeful of soil on Malvina’s face—“a second treatment could spark a permanent remission.”

  “Since when are you bloodsuckers interested in remissions?” asked Anna.

  Instead of answering, Julius set down the spade and uprooted Malvina’s grave marker. “The proof I promised you,” he explained, passing the cross to Gerard. He turned toward Anna and laid his frigid fingers on her shoulder. “Our godmaker has a problem. He wishes to persuade Dr. Lucido that relapsers are in mortal danger. Mr. Korty hopes you will permit him to thrust your daughter’s cross in Lucido’s face.”

  With an index finger Gerard traced the S in FERGUS. “How did you do the letters?”

  “Screwdriver,” said Anna, “heated over a Sterno stove. I burned myself four times—once on purpose, to honor Malvina.”

  “If you really want to honor Malvina,” said Julius, “let Mr. Korty carry this cross to Mount Tapílula.”

  Anna made no reply. She picked up the spade and sealed the grave, silently sculpting the mound until it achieved a fitting symmetry.

  “One condition,” she said. “Her favorite song was ‘Octopus’s Garden.’”

  “I know,” said Gerard.

  “I like it too,” said Julius.

  For the next five minutes they held hands beside the knoll, man, woman, and wraith, singing about a horticulturally talented cephalopod who delighted in welcoming children into his cave. He listened to their stories, taught them how to dance, and comforted them during storms. A paragon of his species, Gerard decided, a candidate for the Gallery of Dec
ency.

  The lobby of Arcadia Lodge was as featureless as a shoe box—no plants, mirrors, fountains, vases, or chandeliers—but filtered through Nora’s heightened senses and jangled nerves, it quickly acquired a psychedelic vibrancy. A festive web of electric wires glowed behind the walls, pulsing blood-red as the volts ebbed and flowed. Copper pipes danced beneath the floorboards, channeling iridescent water throughout the hotel.

  Clustered in the comers, hovering around the pillars, twenty-three plague families stood and waited, their hearts keeping the same anxious beat, their stomachs twitching synchronously. Nora observed a full range of coping strategies. Some pilgrims paced in fretful circles. Others consumed coffee and cigarettes. Many forced their fingers into Laocoönian tangles.

  At 9:00 A.M., right on schedule, the acolytes appeared, singing a hymn to Idorasag as they paraded down the wide central staircase like debutantes entering high society. “Your fur is soft as soft can be. Your milk is sweet and thick and free.” A succession of exultant thoughts rushed through Nora’s brain—through every brain in the lobby. Lucido’s patients could sing, could walk, almost certainly run…the demonios had been conquered! Each acolyte advanced gracefully, hobbled only slightly by the bulging canvas satchel that he carried at his side. The stage-four pocks were now tiny specks; the collateral grooves had become mere wrinkles. No acolyte was fancily dressed. Blouses, T-shirts, jeans—the very street clothes, Nora guessed, in which they’d entered Tamoanchan.

  The singing stopped. Nora scanned the faces, her blood burning. The lead patient was a comely young Asian woman, and no sooner had she reached the middle stair than an elderly Asian man rushed forward, tore the satchel from her grasp, and swept her into his arms. An ecstatic mêlée followed, acolytes descending, family members charging upward. The air resounded with cries of happiness and whoops of joy as the two groups became one.

  “Mother! Mother!”

  It was he, no question. Mother, pick a card, any card. Mother, watch this clock turn into a cake. Mother, Danny Jacobowski has an extra guinea pig.

  “Kevin!”

  Canvas satchel swinging, he jumped over the seventh step and landed beside an easy chair.

  “Mother!”

  “Kevin!”

  He dropped the satchel, and they connected, their embrace transcending clothing and skin, bones melding, lungs meshing, arteries entwining, hearts colliding. Nora was ready to extend the hug until one of them fainted from hunger.

  “You look terrific,” she whispered.

  “I’ve got a million things to tell you.”

  The throng moved onto the hotel lawn, where the healed abulics, gesticulating like ringmasters and jabbering like Pentecostals, triumphantly opened their satchels and displayed their treasures: mahogany replicas of the four deities, carved in a style most generously described as unpretentious. Before bedding down in Arcadia Lodge for the last time, Kevin explained, they had all participated in an arts-and-crafts night. Note the tenderness in Idorasag’s eyes. Look how smoothly Soaragid pirouettes.

  The fact that these graven images were of the acolytes’ own making did nothing to allay Nora’s misgivings. How much, exactly, did Kevin owe his idols? What price would they ultimately extract?

  Gods in hand, the reunited plague families boarded the Coatzacoalcos shuttle bus. Kevin followed Nora to the donkey cart, where he eagerly made Felipe’s acquaintance, patting the animal on the nose. Nora climbed into the driver’s seat and took the reins. Kevin scrambled up beside her. For a full minute mother and son sat together in the ferocious heat, waving good-bye as the rattly old bus turned around and disappeared into the morning haze.

  “If Felipe ever gets stubborn,” said Kevin, “you can borrow the riding crop on my Swiss Army knife.”

  As the day progressed—a day more glorious than any in Nora’s memory—her doubts gradually fell away. Kevin seemed not simply fetch-free but worry-free, not just rehabilitated but reborn. Everything enchanted him. The cart with its comical donkey, the cantina with its seedy clientele, the sternwheeler with its echoes of Life on the Mississippi (a book he’d enjoyed no less than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). Crock and Esperanza instantly succumbed to his charms, the engineer showing Kevin the steamboat’s innermost secrets, the hotelier supplying props for Kevin’s tricks. Esperanza burst into unaffected applause upon seeing the sand in her egg timer turn from brown to blue, then laughed uproariously as Kevin split open a fresh mango and removed a live tree frog.

  On four separate occasions that afternoon he excused himself from the cantina for purposes of worshiping a god—a pattern that recurred throughout the subsequent weeks.

  Depending on the deity, the ritual took between five and fifteen minutes. After securing the necessary offering, Kevin would head for the embarcadero, where his idols rose from the railing like the alabaster Marx Brothers on his bookcase back home in Cambridge. He honored Risogada by laying a millipede at the god’s feet and bisecting it with Crock’s screwdriver. Idorasag demanded a cockroach. Orgasiad received an ounce of semen. To praise Soaragid he pricked his index finger and smeared the idol’s brow with blood. While the viscerality of these devotions disturbed Nora, she had to admit that Kevin performed them with a joie de vivre that bore no obvious relation to zealotry. For this acolyte, at least, sacrificing to the new gods was less a compulsion than a hobby, like collecting baseball cards or keeping tropical fish.

  “I haven’t become weird,” he assured her. “It’s just something I do.”

  “You have become weird,” she said, “and that’s perfectly okay.”

  Cured? Really? So it appeared. True, he was now a committed pagan, but what mother wouldn’t prefer that to drug addiction or sexual promiscuity—not to mention the plague? Yes, he was exhausted much of the time, a condition that dictated both midmorning and late-afternoon naps, but this seemed reasonable in someone who’d recently ejected a fetch.

  At the end of Kevin’s third week as a cured abulic, Nora’s lingering uncertainty vanished. Mother and son were returning to the cantina in the donkey cart after a long day of negotiating with Coatzacoalcos’s cutthroat merchants and black marketeers, trading Esperanza’s livestock for beer, tequila, and other necessities. Kevin was sullen. At one stall he’d come upon a jade Orgasiad, and his desire for the idol soon proved as ardent as the goddess’s own libido. The vendor wanted an entire pig. Nora offered a chicken instead. The vendor laughed in her face.

  “One lousy pig.” Kevin took Felipe’s reins from Nora. “Aren’t I worth one lousy goddamn pig to you?”

  “The pigs weren’t mine,” she said.

  “Esperanza wouldn’t care.”

  “Of course she would care.”

  “She’s got lots of pigs.”

  “You have a perfectly good mahogany Orgasiad.”

  “It stinks.”

  “How about a little gratitude, Kevin? Got any gratitude in there? You think it was a picnic hauling your butt all the way here from Boston?”

  “Quincy said you had wonderful adventures. You played a goddess and screwed an actor.”

  “A spiritualist almost shot me. The Anglo-Saxons blew up my truck.”

  “Am I going to spend the rest of my life hearing how heroic you were?”

  “Am I going to spend the rest of my life hearing about some ridiculous jade statue?”

  “Orgasiad isn’t ridiculous!”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “You did!”

  “I didn’t!”

  For fifteen long seconds, silence descended. At last he said, “We’re having a fight, aren’t we, Mother?”

  Smiling, she retrieved the reins. “We’re having a fight,” she echoed. The cart passed beneath a canopy of trees arrayed in flaming bougainvillea. “I rather like it.”

  “Me too.”

  “Maybe we can get the statue on our next trip.”

  “It’ll be gone by then,” he said.

  “Pessimism is a
cheap attitude,” she said.

  “Stop lecturing me.”

  “Stop badgering me.”

  “I’m not badgering you.” He offered her his most beguiling grin. “I’m needling you, but I’m not badgering you.”

  She laughed—a sustained, symphonic, jubilant laugh of the sort she hadn’t produced since her students threw her a surprise thirtieth birthday party. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

  “Really me. The kid who likes Roger Corman movies. Kevin the Incredible. Let’s go back for the idol.”

  “Incredible’s the word, my son. Forget it.”

  “Poor child,” said Adrian Lucido, cradling Malvina Fergus’s cross as if it were a puppy he’d just decided to adopt. “Poor, sweet child.”

  The psychoanalyst’s sympathy startled Gerard. It seemed too good to be true, which probably meant it was. “If you think it’s a fake, I can show you her grave in the city.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Gerard stared at the hot tub, its motor dormant, its waters calm. “Will you open the temples to relapsers?”

  Still holding the cross, which even now exuded the carrion fragrance of Coatzacoalcos, Lucido ambled around the hexagon, successively obscuring each television screen, his caftan rippling behind him. At the moment his affection for cinematic kitsch was flooding the room with biblical spectacles, the sort of approach-avoidance exposés of idolatry that Gerard had frequently consumed on late-night television shortly before fleeing to Indonesia. On each monitor a different woman of dubious redeemability officiated at a sybaritic rite, and to Gerard’s surprise he easily identified all the actresses and most of their vehicles—Lana Turner in The Prodigal, Gina Lollobrigida in Solomon and Sheba, Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross, Rita Hayworth in Salome, Hedy Lamar in Samson and Delilah—his memory failing only in the case of Anouk Aimée in something that looked vaguely Italian.