The Eternal Footman Page 34

  “Steam!”

  She lifted her eyes just in time to behold the flaming deluge destroy El Dorado. The lava swallowed the stockade wall, flooded the hacienda, and engulfed the studio grounds, toppling the winches and hoists as it rushed toward the river.

  “Half ahead!” she shouted.

  “Half ahead!” Kevin answered.

  Offering Nora a brisk salute, he opened the throttle. The paddle wheel squealed like a tortured automaton. It groaned and grunted. It moved. Forty-five degrees…ninety…one hundred eighty…a complete revolution, then a second revolution, a third.

  “Now!” screamed Nora. “Cut them now!”

  Fiona severed both port-side ropes, dashed across the afterdeck, and hacked apart the two remaining lines. The Queen cruised forward.

  “Steady as she goes!” cried Nora. Kevin tightened his grip on the tiller. “A bit to the left! That’s it! Now to the right!”

  A lava wave curled toward the Queen’s roiling wake, spattering the afterdeck with fiery mud as it hit the water. Clouds of hissing steam arose, obscuring the churning paddle wheel.

  “Full ahead!” cried Nora toward the mass of hot vapor, and her boat lurched desperately away, bound for Coatzacoalcos Harbor and the Gulf beyond, racing the satanic red flood.

  Gerard awoke with the exalted taste of mescal in his mouth. He was supine, he realized, his shoulders and hips pressed against the Stone Gospel’s reubenite floor. The chamber was bright with lantern globes. Sulfur fumes thickened the air. Crouching in the shadows, Fiona held a bottle of Monte Albán to his lips. Sipping slowly, he focused on the Vincent Van Gogh diorama. The thing was disheveled—hardly a shock, given the brain’s recent roll through the jungle—and yet its essence shone through: the painter poised above Saint-Rémy, absorbing inspiration for Starry Night.

  “Do you feel the bullet?” asked Fiona.

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “I gave you morphine.” She flashed a glass syringe. “You’re allowed another dose in four hours.”

  He blinked, his eyes adjusting to the blazing light of the mantle lanterns. Three meters away, Romeo skulked beneath Juliet’s balcony. “The brain sank. Are we underwater?”

  “It landed on the Queen. We’re cruising down the Uspanapa.”

  “What astonishing luck. ‘The brain is just the weight of God…’”

  “Luck is only half the story.”

  “For, heft them pound for pound…”

  Fiona said, “The other half is fetchian intervention—Nora’s leveler told her where to park the boat. ‘And they will differ, if they do, as syllable from sound.’”

  He removed the Monte Albán from her grasp and took a substantial swallow. “The displays, I guess they’re pretty banged up.”

  “But not beyond repair.” She dipped a scrap of cloth in an aluminum bowl filled with a cloudy, pungent pint of the Uspanapa. “Not all the news is good. Catemaco blew. We’re barely keeping ahead of the lava.”

  “Also, I’m dying.”

  “Not a chance of it.” She wrung the cloth and laid it across his forehead. “Listen, darling, Nora’s fetch showed her a city of the future, Deus Absconditus. It was all there, the kingdom of decency, Ockham’s little myths. Do you understand?”

  “My brain works?”

  “It works, Gerry.” Two tears, one from each eye, glided down Fiona’s cheeks. “We can’t stop in Coatzacoalcos, too much poison gas, but Nora swears she can get us to Texas—Corpus Christi or Galveston, maybe Port Lavaca.” She flicked the tears away. “We’ll find you a surgeon, and then it’s on to Saint Peter’s Square!”

  Her enthusiasm didn’t fool him. He was dying, pure and simple, a feet he greeted with ambivalence. The imminence of eternal nothingness stupefied him—and yet he’d always believed it behooved artists to check out at the height of their powers, lest their final gestures merely augment the collective crap heap.

  He smiled, an exhausting exercise. His soul surged with inner peace and processed opium. The little myths were coming! Deus Absconditus! A gray mist obscured his thoughts, as if he’d been projected into his tableau celebrating the invention of anesthesia. He was T. S. Eliot’s patient, etherized upon a table.

  Ten minutes later—ten hours, ten days, impossible to say—he broke free of his dream (a courtroom melodrama in which he stood trial on charges of having plagiarized the Korty Madonna) and returned to the far stranger reality of sailing down the Uspanapa inside a reubenite brain, his stomach aflame with a polyp of lead. The sulfur stank. The paddle wheel churned. Fiona lay beneath the Bach exhibit, submerged in uneasy sleep. Julius Azrael, naked as a newborn, stood over her, winding up the tiny harpsichord.

  “How’s the wound?” asked Julius.

  “It burns.”

  “I’ve lost my vocation, Brother. Richter’s bullet has thrown me onto the job market. When I accosted you in Rome, I thought you were mine to keep.” Julius became muzzy, fragmented, like a reflection in a polluted pond. “Not everybody gets to bid his death adieu. Relish the moment.”

  “Go away.”

  “Is that all you can say? ‘Go away’? How about thanking me for letting you live long enough to build this brain?”

  “Thank you,” said Gerard, tonelessly. “Is it true that Nora traveled into the future?”

  “Is it true? Do hippos fart in the Nile?”

  “A future that won’t exist unless…?”

  “Relax, Brother. If anybody can get your magnum opus to Rome, it’s that stubborn English teacher from Boston.” The fetch continued to fade, until nothing remained but his raspy voice. “Au revoir, Homo sapiens. We leave the planet to you.”

  The miniature harpsichord began to play. It was out of tune, Gerard decided, but that could be corrected. He stared at the Starry Night miniature. The great spiral nebula rolled through the sky like the river of divine grace that Dante beheld in the tenth and final Heaven.

  A flowing radiance like a river shaped

  I saw all golden glowing between banks

  Arrayed in spring’s most bright and wondrous bloom.

  And from this river living sparks came forth

  Which, falling toward the flowers on every side,

  Became like precious rubies set in gold.

  As the last notes of the Prelude and Fugue XXIV in B Minor dissolved in the humid air, Gerard grew vaguely aware of his wife bending beside him.

  “Fiona?”

  “Right here, Gerry.”

  “Where’s Nora?”

  “On the bridge.”

  “If I die before she visits me, give her a message.”

  “You aren’t dying. What message?”

  “When she goes to site the brain in Saint Peter’s Square, she must tilt it upward. Just slightly. A few degrees.”

  “Tilt it?”

  “Toward the stars, and mystery—toward the God beyond God.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  A liquid darkness seeped through Gerard Korty’s brain, bathing each neuron, sheathing each synapse, and then came the cold, and then the silence.

  Engine chugging, paddle wheel turning, fractured stacks gushing, the Natchez Queen steamed down the river, one step ahead of the lava. Nora thought of Gilgamesh and Urshanabi crossing the Waters of Death, grimly observing the acid waves consume one wooden pole after another. Minutes after they cruised past La Sangre de la Serpiente—a deserted place, Esperanza and her regulars presumably camped on the high ground—Catemaco once again hurled fiery pieces of itself into the air. Cleaving to their respective posts on the reubenite bridge and beside the makeshift tiller, Nora and Kevin dodged the flying stones. Sulfur poured down, clawing at their eyes, scourging their throats, scorching their lungs.

  “Damage report!” screamed Nora.

  “Another hole in the starboard boiler!” cried Kevin.

  Surveying the western shore, she saw that the volcano was relentlessly destroying Lucido’s empire. Piece by piece the Church of Earthly Affirmation came apart, seasonin
g the molten stew with trellises from Orgasiad’s grove, balconies from Risogada’s palace, and cul-de-sacs from Idorasag’s labyrinth. Priests and priestesses met Dantesque fates. Acolytes burned in droves. Reubenite idols rose from the lava like condemned athletes playing water polo in Hell.

  As the Queen steamed through the Uspanapa delta and into the harbor beyond, Coatzacoalcos shook with a million mingled screams. Protected by a network of arroyos and ravines, the city would evidently be spared the lava, but the hot ashes and deadly gases had inspired an entirely understandable panic. Wailing and howling, the plague families sought sanctuary in the bay. Some swam. Others launched boats: dinghies, skiffs, rafts, cockleshells, tree trunks. Briefly Nora entertained a fantasy of bearing Gerard into Coatzacoalcos and searching among the fleeing survivors for a doctor, but the vapors and the crazies argued overwhelmingly against it. The only sane plan was to quit this toxic place forever, running due north until they bumped into Texas. With any luck they’d make their way to Galveston, find some semblance of a hospital, and get the staff to remove Gerard’s bullet.

  “Steady as she goes!”

  They navigated the bay, gaining the Gulf after forty minutes, and then Catemaco spewed out another blanketing cloud of cinders and dust.

  “Quarter speed! Steady!”

  Kevin pulled back on the throttle. The Queen slowed, sailing through the blizzard of ash while Nora strode up and down the convoluted bridge, as enraged as Oedipus and almost as blind.

  They had steamed perhaps fifty kilometers into the Gulf when dusk descended, its gloom multiplied by the omnipresent charcoal. Nora peered into the murk, alert for the lights of oncoming vessels. After all the trouble she’d taken to save Gerard’s magnum opus from the volcano, she was determined not to lose the sculpture to anything so mundane as a shipwreck.

  For three hours they cruised across the broad, choppy, invisible sea. Gradually the air grew cleaner, the heavens clearer, until at last Nora saw stars. They dazzled her. Here on the open water, far from smog and city lights, the constellations displayed a vibrancy no suburban skyscape or metropolitan planetarium could offer. Her Greeks, she realized, had routinely enjoyed such unfiltered vistas. Standing beneath the twinkling canopy, she pictured herself as a kind of celestial archaeologist, rapturously recovering an ancient sky.

  Where was the Big Dipper? There? Quite so. She fixed on the bowl, then followed an imaginary line through Draco the Dragon to the Little Dipper. At the tip of the handle…yes, there it was, the mariner’s best friend, the constant polestar. In principle, at least, staying a northerly course should be no more difficult than getting from Coolidge Corner to Harvard Square. She saluted the star and blew it a kiss.

  “Half ahead!”

  Throughout the night, while Fiona kept watch over Gerard, Nora and Kevin spelled each other at the tiller, using their breaks to catch some sleep in the cerebellum. The view from the stem suggested a case of macular degeneration: good peripheral vision, a void at the center. Nora didn’t like the arrangement—the lack of a forward lookout increased their chances of a head-on collision—but it was the best they could manage, given Fiona’s refusal to leave her husband’s side. Not surprisingly, Nora had trouble sleeping, her insomnia punctuated by images of the divine skull mashing the steamboat in its bony jaws.

  Shortly after dawn, the Queen consumed her last stick of firewood. The dual burners sputtered out; the engine died. With a pathetic croaking sound, the great paddle wheel stopped, leaving them adrift on a sea that appeared to stretch endlessly toward every point of the compass. After a brief consultation, they decided that Kevin should try repairing the starboard boiler, whereupon they would cannibalize the boat for fuel.

  Nora scanned the sky. The death’s-head flashed its impacted pessimism. She heard it speak—a hallucination, no doubt, spawned by her exhaustion—and yet the skull’s words seemed as real as any other event of the last twenty-four hours.

  Korty’s dead.

  “I don’t believe You.”

  Blood poisoning.

  She lifted her right arm and pointed to the North Star. “Somewhere along the Texas coast there’ll be a town with a competent surgeon.”

  Bury him at sea. He’d like that. It’s poetic.

  Nora glowered at El Cráneo. “You should’ve knocked that damn gun from Richter’s hand.”

  Intervention is not our style.

  “You never intervene?”

  Never.

  “Not even to protect the innocent?”

  Not even to protect the innocent.

  “Then how do You live with Yourself?”

  Good question, English teacher. We wrestled with it for many centuries, until at last the answer became manifest. How does God live with Himself? Simple. He doesn’t.

  Barry’s Pageant

  GOD WAS RIGHT, as usual—although you didn’t have to be God, a computer scientist, or even a high school graduate to predict that Gerard Korty wouldn’t make it to Texas. Entering the right hemisphere for the first time since their flight from the volcano, Nora found exactly what she’d expected, his lifeless body, rigid and pale, as if the artist’s parting flourish had been to carve a marble statue of himself. His eyes were open. His lips curved upward; apparently he’d expired peacefully. Had Fiona told him about Deus Absconditus shortly before he left for the House of Dust? Or do the dying simply, in their final moments, get the joke?

  What shocked her was the second corpse. It lay beneath the Romeo and Juliet diorama, adrift in fear syrup and dead white cells, riddled with stage-four pocks. On Fiona’s chest sat an object that Nora instantly recognized as the plaque containing the lovers’ speeches, turned upside down. Somehow Fiona had fended off her fetch long enough to write an iodine message on the blank surface.

  HE SAYS TO TILT

  IT TOWARD MYSTERY

  AND THE GOD BEYOND GOD

  Nora flipped the plaque over and read her favorite moment from the balcony scene. ROMEO: What shall I swear? JULIET: Do not swear at all; or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, which is the god of my idolatry. And I’ll believe thee.

  Determined to keep Kevin from coming upon the bodies unprepared, she left the Hall of Artistic Passion, exited the brain through the cerebellum portal, and started aft. She found him in the ruins of the engine room, black with ash, chopping apart two wooden chairs and feeding the pieces to the burners.

  “We’ll have steam before you know it.” Pausing, he mopped his brow and propped the ax against the gunwale.

  “How’s our starboard boiler?”

  “I sealed the leaks using the blowtorch on my Swiss Army knife.” Kevin grinned and patted the head of his Orgasiad. “Actually, I plugged them with hunks of rope.”

  She studied Kevin’s wide, mischievous countenance. He would retain his boyish looks and guileless charm long into adulthood. The girls would go nuts. “Kevin, I have something sad to tell you. Gerard died last night.”

  Her son frowned, took up the ax again, and began converting the poop-deck fragments into fuel. “That bullet hole looked pretty awful.”

  “And I have more bad news. Fiona.”

  “Plague?”

  “Plague.”

  “Give me half an hour, Mother”—he gestured toward the stern-wheel—“and I’ll get these paddles turning.”

  While Kevin chopped wood, Nora performed a burial rite. It was a typical plague-era funeral, abbreviated to the point of irreverence. Searching through the casino, the cargo deck’s one relatively intact room, she came upon a large segment of fake Persian carpet, a ragged swatch suggesting a low-budget Cormanesque remake of The Thief of Bagdad. She carried the segment outside and, working in Erasmus’s shadow, rolled up the bodies as if making an immense burrito, then secured the package top and bottom with mooring line. A coarse arrangement, redeemed somewhat by her decision to pose the bodies with arms intertwined. Gerard and Fiona might be destined for oblivion, but at least they would arrive embracing.

  Drawn by the smell of
death, a dozen seagulls appeared and hovered above the bodies, their feathers dusted with volcanic ash: a flock of aquatic ravens. The largest gull perched on Erasmus’s upended heel. It squawked and spread its wings, feathers rustling. With her good leg Nora nudged the wool coffin, sliding it along the deck until at last it tumbled over the side. The melancholy bundle splashed into the Gulf and floated west, borne by a fast current. Screeching and circling, the black flock pursued the bodies as they crossed the Tropic of Cancer.

  Kevin was as good as his word. Ten minutes after Gerard and Fiona had drifted from view, he appeared at his mother’s side and said that he was ready to open the throttle.

  “I think I chopped enough fuel to get us all the way to Boston.”

  “Galveston will do, dear.”

  As her son returned to the stern, Nora ascended the ladder to the pilothouse, shuffled through the ashes toward the cerebellum, and stared down at the naked engine room.

  “Sun on your right! Half ahead!”

  “Aye-aye, Captain!”

  She took up her position on the crown. Above the glassy horizon, the skull gloated. Nora glanced to port, searching for the carpet coffin and its entourage of gulls so that she might offer her friends a final salute, though by now only the skull could see the procession, negligible specks on a wine-dark sea.

  As the hot dreary morning progressed, Kevin did an exemplary job of keeping the Queen on course, bisecting the arc of the sun. If their fuel held out, in three days they would reach Texas, making landfall somewhere on the shores of Matagorda Bay, locus of Anthony’s eternal shame. Nora wondered how the captain and his companions were faring. It would be great to track him down one day, partly to chide him about declaring the Queen unfit for another Gulf crossing, but mostly because he was such a mensch.

  Staring at the endless breakers, she pondered the vast amount of Promethean behavior the Corpus Dei had occasioned since its advent. By secluding the thing in the Arctic on no authority beyond papal paranoia and the ravings of two disintegrating angels, Anthony had surely been guilty of hubris. Then there was Thomas Ockham, who’d presumed to intuit the reasons for God’s demise, subsequently outlining his brave new philosophy in Parables for a Post-Theistic Age. Bolder still was Martin Candle, drafting a legal brief against the Almighty, taking Him to court for His sins. In Nora’s view the Stone Gospel was equally defiant, purporting as it did to replace theism with a religion of little myths. If Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humankind, then Gerard had contrived to steal the gods from humankind and give them to a consuming fire.