The Eternal Footman Read online

  Inhaling, he caught a nascent strangeness in the air. Expectancy hummed through his exhausted flesh. He raised the binoculars and pivoted aft, fixing on the towlines leading from the stem windlasses to the waterborne bier—an amazing construction, as ponderous and impressive as Noah’s ark. Gulls circled above the Corpus Dei, periodically landing atop the glass coffin and pecking on its panes.

  At first the rumblings were low and rhythmic, like the passage of some Brobdingnagian subway train. Soon they grew louder and more random, thunderclaps announcing an imminent storm, then louder still. Anthony’s pulse quickened. His mouth grew dry. And then, in a single astounding instant, the coffin disintegrated, its steel girders toppling into the strait and sending up plumes of foam, its panes shattering like china plates encountering a psychotic ox.

  Leland Appleblatt, Anthony’s first mate, rushed out of the wheelhouse shouting, “What the hell was that?”

  “Did we hit something?” yelled Cherry Baldwin, the radio officer, following right behind.

  “No,” Anthony replied evenly. “If I’m not mistaken, something hit our cargo.”

  “What?” said Cherry.

  “A barge?” said Leland.

  “Mortality,” said Anthony.

  Instinctively the captain focused the binoculars on God’s bosom. A bloodless fissure opened, then another, then a third, until His torso came to resemble the fractured face of a salt flat. The crevassed chest began to move, and soon a full-blown fleshquake had seized the pectoral muscles. With a stupefying roar the tissues parted, exposing the bones below.

  “Christ Almighty!” cried Leland, his habitual flippancy deserting him as—crack, crack, crack—the ribs detached themselves from His sternum. “He’s coming apart!”

  Never before, Anthony thought, had death throes been so violent or dramatic. God’s last gasps were characteristically off the scales and beyond the charts.

  First the sacred heart appeared, pulsing and booming as it rose from the cavity, its moist, gluey nakedness suggesting the birth of some raging mythological beast. Reaching an elevation of two hundred feet, the heart suddenly shot away, arcing across the frightened sky like a comet. Within seconds of attaining the stratosphere the organ exploded, releasing fifty million gallons. The air thickened with the iron odor of blood. A shiny crimson rain fell on the bewildered Brighton mourners, who, ever prepared for nasty weather, instinctively opened their umbrellas.

  “What the Red Cross could’ve done with that stuff,” moaned Leland.

  Next the holy lungs emerged, flapping and fluttering as they climbed heavenward like a stupendous black butterfly. Anthony thought of his son’s favorite Japanese sci-fi movie, Mothra. The lungs passed smoothly over Brighton, hauling their shadow behind them, and then they too exploded, scattering their cells up and down the beach.

  “They’re so dark,” observed Cherry.

  “Every once in a while,” said Leland, “when nobody was looking, He would smoke a volcano.”

  Word of the bizarre phenomenon spread quickly throughout the ship. The afterdeck swarmed with food handlers, engine wipers, and able-bodied seamen gesticulating wildly as they described for one another the divine dissolution.

  Next to exit was the bladder, manifesting itself like an immense plum pudding created to feed every actor who’d ever played Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol. As the huge balloon burst, the Brightonians again took refuge beneath their umbrellas.

  And now came the intestines’ moment of fame, all eleven and a half miles of them. Laden with blessed excrement, the vast and massive coils emerged from His broken abdomen, snaked across His legs, and slithered into the dark, oily waters of the Channel. Before sounding, the bowel beast swam for over a hundred meters toward the Isle of Wight, sinuating through the currents while gulls tore bits of tissue from its sides.

  Thus it went, organ after organ, muscle upon muscle, sinew following sinew. Before vaporizing, the divine kidneys hovered briefly above the English coast, as tall and ominous as mushroom clouds. Prior to its deconstruction, the divine stomach darkened the morning sky like some preternatural dirigible. When the divine eyes finally surrendered to entropy, they were zooming toward London in an image suggesting two croquet balls launched by an elephantine Queen of Hearts.

  For Anthony Van Horne, this lurid catastrophe was both depressing and gratifying. To all appearances the Supreme Being was truly dead this time—a sad situation, but never again would Anthony be assigned the enervating task of dragging His carcass across the sea. At last he could go home, kiss his wife, stroke his cat, and spend Saturday afternoons shooting hoops with his son.

  “He blew up?” said Gerard, baffled by the fact that, while he did not believe his agent’s tale, he did not completely disbelieve it either.

  God had died. Died and come apart. Jesus Christ.

  “After all His organs and muscles vanished,” said Victor, nodding, “the remaining flesh disintegrated as well, and Van Horne’s fleet ended up towing nothing but a load of bones.”

  “You’re not making this up, are you?”

  Victor stopped walking long enough to light a Galoise. “The next morning, the Baptists radioed Captain Van Home that they’d arranged to sell God’s remains, damaged goods, back to Rome. They feared the bones alone wouldn’t lure many customers. Van Home was to tow the bier through the Strait of Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean, then dock it at the mouth of the Tiber.”

  Gerard couldn’t decide which event intrigued him more: his agent’s news flash, or the catastrophe’s failure to crush him. For the first time ever, he saw the loss of his faith as an asset, a protection against the desolation he might otherwise be feeling.

  They continued through the jungle in silence, moving past velvet hibiscus and helical vines. A clearing appeared, the vast open-air studio where Gerard practiced his art. His magnum opus shone in the moonlight, Dante’s Paradiso, each epiphany accorded its own fifteen-foot sculpture. Considered collectively, these mammoth pieces transformed Viatikara from a little chip of Indonesia into the Christian equivalent of Rapa Nui: Easter Island with its huge, droop-eared, vaguely comical heads carved from volcanic ash.

  Gerard had never faulted his agent for the Paradiso’s unsaleability. Victor had questioned the project from the start But Gerard was on fire in those days. Saleability be damned. For six whole years he’d inhabited Dante’s rhapsodic vision of Heaven, translating epic poetry into carved marble. The College of Cardinals will love my Paradiso, he told himself each time he brought his hammer down, driving his chisel into the block. They’ll hock the Vatican jewels to acquire these pieces.

  The College of Cardinals had hated Gerard’s Paradiso. Christendom’s greatest poem, they asserted, must remain on the printed page. It was blasphemous to convert The Divine Comedy into graven images. And besides, in Canto XXVII Dante had Adam calling the medieval popes “rapacious wolves in shepherd’s clothes” who’d turned their dominion into “a sewer of blood and filth,” and wasn’t that a bit much?

  “I’m worried about Fiona,” said Victor.

  “So am I,” said Gerard.

  “I think she’s losing her grip.”

  “That’s one way to put it. Last month she discovered how in a past life Viatikara was her home—her habitat, actually, since she was a tigress then, so it’s cosmically correct we ended up here. I need this job, Victor. I want Fiona and me back in America before we go insane.”

  Four statues dominated the atelier, each representing a hundred days of toil. As with all his sculptural endeavors since the move to Viatikara, the raw stone had come from the quarries at Makrana in Raj-putana—source, it was said, of the very marble that constituted the Taj Mahal. Straight ahead lay The Cross of Mars, complete with a dozen crusaders kneeling at Christ’s bleeding feet. Behind it towered Jacob’s Ladder, its twenty tiers swarming with the luminous elect To Gerard’s left, The Eagle of Jupiter, his feathers formed of interwoven souls. To his right, The Mystic Rose, a maelstrom of the blessed dead.r />
  Victor took a meditative drag on his Galoise. The ember glowed red in the Indonesian night. “I’ll tell Di Luca you said yes.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

  “Fiona says you haven’t touched a chisel in five years.”

  “I’ve been working in sand lately.”

  Victor rubbed the eagle’s claw and sighed. “She says you aren’t a believer anymore.”

  “Nobody’s a believer anymore. God is dead, remember?”

  “Have you really lost your faith?”

  “I can fake it.”

  “You must understand—in Rome’s view, He’s as spiritually alive as ever. This Corpus Dei business is simply number two in a theoretically endless series of incarnations. The Holy Father envisions the reliquary as a place of pilgrimage. It will breathe new life into the Church.”

  “But won’t it also be a sad place? Gethsemane is sad. The Via Dolorosa is sad. Let me take my grief over losing my faith and transform it into—how can I say this?—into a marble lament for the physical death of the eternal Creator.”

  “A marble lament—I like that,” said Victor. “And if you ever find your sadness fading, just return to the West, and it will be renewed. There’s a fact I haven’t told you yet. Its about God’s skull.”

  “His skull, Captain!” cried Cherry.

  “Look at His goddamn skull!” screamed Leland.

  Anthony faced the bier and once again focused his binoculars. While the majority of the bones lay still, spread across the raft like an elaborate collection of dinosaur fossils—ribs, femurs, vertebrae—the skull itself was disquiet Slowly, inexorably, with the sound of a ten-ton gate pivoting on rusty hinges, the mandibles began to move. The divine mouth grew wider, then wider still, until with a roaring fit the jaw flew open and, in a scene Anthony instantly ranked as the most disturbing he’d ever beheld, the Creator of the universe vomited out His own brain.

  A collective shout of dismay arose from the sailors gathered on the afterdeck. Throbbing with ideas, pulsing with perspicacity, the cerebral mound ascended more than a hundred meters and then paused, hovering, above the Channel.

  “Oh, please, God, don’t let Your brain explode,” wailed Cherry. “Everything we need to know is in there!”

  “A cure for cancer!” moaned Leland.

  Jackknifing, the brain now flew southwest toward Cherbourg, gliding over the Galveston like a gargantuan sea sponge capable of soaking up Lake Champlain or wiping away the world’s worst oil spill. The organ did not prosper. Even this most central of God’s anatomical possessions could not survive His death throes. No sooner had the brain cleared the tanker’s bows than it decomposed into its constituent cells, each sailing a hundred yards into the air before falling toward France like a flaming meteorite.

  “Damn, it almost hit us,” gasped Cherry.

  “I thought we’d be chipping neurons off the fo’c’sle from now till Christmas,” said Leland.

  The air behind Anthony vibrated with a short, sharp, cracking noise. He turned in time to behold God’s grinning, slack-jawed skull break free of His uppermost cervical vertebra. The great white mass ascended, expanding all the while like a gigantic Mylar balloon sucking on a million-liter bottle of helium.

  “Any minute now, it’ll explode,” predicted Leland.

  But the skull merely continued to rise and grow, smiling malevolently on Europe as it vanished behind a puff of cumulus cloud.

  As Gerard and Victor drew within view of the cottage, dawn broke over Viatikara, silencing the tree frogs and cueing the cockatoos to begin their daily squabbles.

  “The skull came back the moment the millennium turned—on the night of December 31, 2000,” said Victor. “In the interim it had grown as big as Delaware. The thing went into geosynchronous orbit directly above Times Square.”

  “A New Year’s Eve to remember,” said Gerard.

  “Its movement meshes with the Earth’s. Night or day, whatever the season, anybody in the Western world can walk out on his lawn and see it. The Vatican leases the forehead for laser ads.”

  Fiona lay on the porch hammock, eyes closed, her lips curled in a dream-induced smile. She was absurdly thin; an unobservant intruder might have taken her for a corpse. Gerard tiptoed past his unconscious wife, his gaze locked on the front door. He disliked even looking at her these days, so troubling did he find her draconian diet…her draconian diet, her nonnegotiable primitivism, her gimcrack vision quests. Perhaps it was this passion for purity, perhaps she no longer found him attractive, perhaps something else: whatever the reason, their erotic life had dried up. Over three years had passed since she’d remarked on his resemblance to Yul Brynner—a comparison she always intended as flattering, though Gerard perceived himself as being neither quite that handsome nor quite that stolid.

  How far they’d fallen since their days of bohemian bliss in SoHo. At first the relationship had been strictly professional: the famous sculptor, trying to become more famous, and his young model, working her way through NYU. She would pose in the nude for hours at a time, shifting her weight sensuously from foot to foot as he translated her oval face and supple contours into a clay study for a forthcoming bronze, Lilith Embracing the Tree of Life. One steamy August night she looked at him intently, smiled, and said, “There’s a much simpler way, you know. Sympathetic magic. Mold me directly, and—presto—your mound of clay over there will turn into Lilith.” After catching his breath, he confessed to a fondness for unorthodox techniques, and soon they were up in his loft, the nice Catholic boy and the nicer Catholic girl, experimenting with sympathetic magic. They were married within a month, so profoundly had they scandalized their consciences and jeopardized their souls.

  Gerard guided Victor through the front door and into the kitchen, the cottage’s only substantial room.

  “Want some breakfast?” asked Gerard.

  “Just coffee,” said Victor, removing his backpack from the table.

  “Help yourself.”

  Victor lit the left burner of the propane stove, warmed the pot, and poured coffee into a blue-glazed ceramic mug, the latest artifact to issue from Gerard’s backyard kiln.

  “So our planet now has a second sun?” said Gerard.

  “Second sun, second moon.”

  Rooting through the pantry, Gerard retrieved a box of generic com flakes. He filled a bowl, added milk powder and a cup of water, and sat down to consume the insipid mixture.

  “I brought you a book,” said Victor. From his backpack he obtained a fat, doorstop-caliber volume called Parables for a Post-Theistic Age. “The author was the Vatican’s liaison during the Corpus Dei’s first voyage. Thomas Ockham, a real Renaissance man—cosmologist, physicist, writer, priest. He might give you some useful ideas. He might even convince you that I haven’t been lying.”

  “If you don’t want to read it, Gerry”—Fiona drifted ethereally into the kitchen—“pass it on to me.”

  “Ah, the Maid of the Mangos awakens.” Gerard swallowed a spoonful of cereal. “I hope you slept peacefully, dear. Did you dream of your past life as a vestal virgin?”

  Fiona tapped the cover of Parables for a Post-Theistic Age. “Every book contains a piece of the truth.”

  “You can’t have a profound insight like that unless you travel all the way to Indonesia,” said Gerard to Victor.

  “So—are we going to design God’s reliquary?” Fiona poured coffee into a Korty original: a ceramic ape head with an empty brainpan.

  “We could use the money,” said Gerard.

  “Take the job,” said Fiona. “Take it with my blessing. But be honest with yourself. Don’t pretend it’s for the money, and don’t pretend it’s for the creative satisfaction either.”

  “So why am I taking it?”

  She pressed the mug to her lips and sipped. “Because you’ve got an ego, dearest husband. You’ve got the disease of the West, and I believe your case is terminal.”

  As the morning sun ascended, the sculptor stum
bled out of the cottage, settled into the hammock, and began browsing through Parables for a Post-Theistic Age, fully expecting Ockham’s ruminations to convert his present prostration into deep sleep.

  Five hours later, he read the last sentence and snapped the volume shut, forcefully, as if to crush a beetle between adjacent pages. He pressed the Parables to his heart.

  God, what a book.

  A terrible choice lay before Gerard Korty, as awesome and intimidating as Dante’s glimpses of the afterlife. He could create the reliquary the Vatican wanted, or he could create the reliquary God wanted. For if Thomas Wickliff Ockham, S.J., was even partly right, the same design could never serve both masters.

  Memento Mori

  THREE MONTHS AFTER Nora Burkhart discovered the triad of peculiar inscriptions adorning the Lobo mausoleum, her son awoke shivering, his lips and fingertips as blue as the oceans on his Rand McNally globe. Oddly, his temperature was normal—slightly below normal, in feet, 97.8° Fahrenheit. Was it possible to be battling an infection without running a fever? Nora didn’t know.

  “I don’t like leaving you home alone,” she told him.

  “If a robber breaks in,” said Kevin, “I’ll shoot him with the derringer on my Swiss Army knife.”

  “It’s probably one of those twenty-four-hour viruses. If you’re feeling better, you can study for your algebra test.”

  “Bad idea, Mother. Algebra causes relapses. This is a known fact.”

  “Don’t spend the day watching MTV. Television causes brain cancer. This is a known fact.”

  Descending to street level, she approached the delivery truck—Phaëthon, she called it, after the reckless young demigod who’d nearly incinerated the Earth while joyriding in the sun’s chariot—its panels emblazoned with the motto RAY FELDSTEIN’S TOWER OF FLOWERS: WHATEVER THE DAY, WE HAVE THE BOUQUET. She pulled out her Lucite scraper and shaved the frost off the windshield, then climbed behind the wheel and checked her smile in the side-view mirror. Although Eric had never appreciated street makeup (“Illusions belong on the stage”), she liked the artistic challenge—Nora the portraitist, painting her fleshly canvas—and this morning, as always, she took pleasure in her subtly underscored features.