The Eternal Footman Page 35

  And what of Nora herself? Was it not arrogant of her to imagine that, aided only by her adolescent son and a battered sternwheeler, she could haul thirty tons of world-saving reubenite from Veracruz to Texas in the teeth of erupting volcanos, stormy seas, leaking boilers, and limited fuel?

  “Steady as she goes!” she bellowed toward the engine room.

  Of course it was arrogant Hubris squared. Defiance defined. Promethean in the extreme.

  “Full speed ahead!”

  At noon Kevin appeared atop the brain wearing the sort of pained face he’d assumed after Nora had refused to buy him the jade Orgasiad. “Pipework’s clogged,” he said. “Ashes, probably, from the second storm.”

  “You’d better bank the fires.”

  “Yeah, except I’m scared to get near them. The starboard boiler’s growling like there’s a pissed-off grizzly inside.”

  “Do you think it’s going to blow?”

  As if they were embedded in a second-rate sitcom, Nora’s question was answered by the boiler blowing. A roar swept across the Natchez Queen, followed by the clatter of iron shards raining down on the afterdeck and bouncing off the paddle wheel.

  “It seems a distinct possibility, Mother.”

  When satisfied that the last piece of boilerplate had settled, they descended the ladder, traversed the corpus callosum, and made their way to the stem. Inspecting the damage, Nora experienced a disquieting episode of déjà vu: twenty-four hours earlier, she’d recognized Gerard’s wound as terminal, and now a similar fatalism possessed her. The starboard boiler was split open top to bottom, its pipes a mass of random amputations, and its portside twin sported a jagged hole in the center. You couldn’t use either tank to make a cup of tea, much less to power a steamboat.

  “Okay, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad,” she insisted. “If we hunt around, we can probably dig up a couple of cisterns, and if we kludge them together…we don’t have welding equipment, true enough, but—”

  Kevin closed his eyes and said, “Mother, it’s hopeless.”

  His voice sounded strained, otherworldly.

  “Hopeless?” she said. “Since when are you such a pessimist?”

  Kevin, silent, stomped on a burning chunk of afterdeck planking.

  He said, “I’m not talking about the boilers.”

  A sharp wind, straight from God’s gullet, sliced through Nora.

  She winced. “Quincy’s back?”

  “He’s back.”

  “No.” It seemed as if her heart had burst, flooding her chest with blood. “You just imagined it.”

  “Blind but…back.” Shivering, Kevin extended his right arm. “He climbed inside me.”

  “Some sort of heatstroke.”

  “He’s crawling through my veins.”

  Nora reached out and clasped his hand. Each finger was an icicle.

  “I need to lie down,” he said.

  “The casino,” she said.

  “Bring my gods.”

  Combing through the remains of the afterdeck, Nora located a Louisiana state flag, which she quickly converted into a sack for carrying the mahogany idols. She took Kevin’s frigid hand and led him through the cerebellum portal. They hadn’t got halfway down the corpus callosum when a convulsion seized the boy, pitching him against the Albert Einstein diorama. He clutched his stomach and retched, soon ejecting a gallon of fear syrup. The viscous tar splashed onto the first draft of “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.”

  Nora embraced her trembling child so tightly that the syrup became a kind of glue, and together they hobbled into the casino. Staggering toward the fake Persian carpet, Kevin collapsed on the woolen arabesques. She placed a foam life jacket beneath his head, then tore the felt from the craps table and slid it over him as a blanket. He shook uncontrollably, bones rattling, ligaments vibrating, teeth chattering like the windup dancing harlequin who’d so often assisted in his magic act. His breathing grew hollow and phlegmy.

  “You can beat him,” said Nora, arranging his gods in a row beside the makeshift mattress. A jet of blackness shot from Kevin’s mouth. She sopped up the puddle with the Louisiana flag. “You’re stronger than he is.”

  Slowly, blessedly, the shivering stopped. Kevin closed his eyes and yawned, drifting toward sleep. “No I’m not.”

  “You’re so much stronger.”

  As the derelict Queen bobbed about the Gulf, rudderless, aimless, prey to capricious currents, Nora sat in stupefied silence. Kevin slept fitfully, his froggish gasps alternating with staccato moans and random snatches of hymns to Soaragid and Orgasiad. In a bizarre way he sounded as if he were in labor. But what was he struggling to bring forth? A new self, fetchless and robust? Or his own corpse? For the third time since her arrival in Mexico, she prayed—to the holy skull, the divine entrails, the Somatocist pantheon, whoever might listen.

  The boy awoke. He groaned and shivered, the tremors decreasing slightly as he stretched toward his Orgasiad and caressed her coils. An unexpected smile lit his face.

  “I’ve solved it,” he said weakly. A filament of fear rolled from his lower lip. “I know how Dad got the ship in the bottle.”

  “Terrific.”

  “I’ll need two clear glass bottles.” Unhanding the idol, he fell back on the carpet. “One with a detachable bottom.”

  “Would jars do?”

  “I guess.”

  “What else?”

  “Two ship models.” He closed his eyes and moaned. “No bigger than the jars.”

  Nora left the casino and entered the shattered galley, soon locating two unbroken quart jars filled with strawberry preserves, lodged amid a dripping heap of glass bits, loose olives, and coagulated catsup. She emptied the jam into a saucepan and washed the jars in the Gulf, then picked through the piles of wreckage in search of wood scraps and cloth fragments. She gleaned a bushel. The chart room yielded a roll of cellophane tape, ideal for mending maps and making toy ships. Sobbing, she returned to the casino and, while Kevin slept, constructed the first model. The project went badly. Dry and brittle, the cellophane tape failed to keep the hull planks in place, and she resorted to an unsightly mixture of chewing gum and window putty. Tears streamed down her face, dampening the tiny sails. It took her nearly an hour to finish the replica, which looked neither functional nor handsome, unfit for ferrying a mouse across a bathtub, much less bearing Odysseus to Ithaca or Jason to Colchis.

  Odysseus. Trojan War. Among the right-hemisphere dioramas, she now remembered, was an homage to The Iliad. She tossed her shoddy model behind a slot machine and rushed toward the Stone Gospel. Inside the Hall of Artistic Passion, she approached the two beautiful l:43-scale triremes, battered only slightly by the brain’s fall. With a butter knife she fractured the seam of glue that held the ships to the Aegean Sea, which Gerard had improvised from a shaving minor.

  She returned to find Kevin conscious—pale and drawn, but no longer leaking black syrup. He looked at her, blinking rapidly, trying to focus.

  “He’s gone,” said Kevin.

  Forever, she prayed. “Forever,” she said, crouching before him.

  He saw the triremes and grinned. “Good job, Mother. Now I need to rehearse.”

  She kissed his forehead, rose, and walked into the blazing light of the midday skull, softly singing the famous paean to Idorasag.

  “Your fur is soft as soft can be. Your milk is sweet and thick and free…”

  Quincy stood on the foredeck, blind, naked, white as an egg. He leaned against the inverted Erasmus, massaging the humanist’s left foot. “Guess what, Mrs. Burkhart? I finally settled on a title for my joke book. Corn on the Macabre. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Get off my boat.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, not only was Kevin the first to contract abulia, he’ll be the last to die of it.” The leveler’s lips arced in a toothless smile. “Evidently the Almighty holds him in high regard.”

  “Comfort? Comfort?!”

  “God’s will can be
quixotic, I agree. He barred Moses from the Promised Land on a technicality. At first blush His decision to deprive your son of adulthood might appear equally capricious, but last night I came up with a theory. Want to hear it?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you’d like to hear a joke instead.”

  Kevin’s voice, raspy but intelligible, wafted out of the casino. “Mother, I’m ready.”

  “A skeleton walks into a bar,” Quincy narrated, “goes up to the bartender, and says, ‘Hey, gimme a beer and a mop.’”

  When Nora entered the casino, she found Kevin sitting up in bed, a jam jar positioned by one knee, a miniature trireme balanced on the other. She stretched out beside the blackjack table and waited to be amazed.

  In the middle of Sinbad the Sailor’s eleventh voyage—so began Kevin’s patter—a sea serpent chewed a hole in the bottom of Sinbad’s vessel, the Crescent Moon. Water rushed into her hull; she started to founder. Spotting an empty wine bottle afloat in the Arabian Sea, Sinbad got an idea. He summoned the ship’s magician, the marvelous al-Mizar, and commanded him to make the Crescent Moon as small as a pomegranate, her crew as tiny as locusts. Al-Mizar accomplished the reduction in a matter of minutes, but before he could transfer the ship into the wine bottle, he fell overboard and drowned. The situation appeared hopeless…until al-Mizar’s fourteen-year-old apprentice, Haroun, stepped forward to attempt the feat.

  “It was the boy’s first public performance,” said Kevin. He set the ship and the jam jar side by side, covering them with his T-shirt “Haroun said the magic words, ‘Azimuth bazimuth kazimuth,’ but they didn’t work.” Kevin lifted the T-shirt. The ship and the jar still lay side by side. He covered the props. “He said the words again, ‘Azimuth bazimuth kazimuth.’” Kevin lifted the T-shirt Nothing had changed. He hid the props a third time. “Finally, drawing on all his powers, Haroun spoke the incantation in his loudest voice, ‘Azimuth bazimuth kazimuth!’”

  “Azimuth bazimuth kazimuth!” cried Nora.

  Kevin yanked the shirt away. The trireme lay inside the jar, safe from ravenous dragons and menacing currents.

  “Terrific!” She applauded wildly. “Absolutely terrific!”

  “Do you know how I did it?”

  She had a pretty good idea. Shaking her head, she said, “You simply must be magical.”

  “Don’t be coy, Mother. Please. Not today.”

  “Well, I suppose you put a model ship in one of the jars ahead of time.”

  “Right. Good. Nobody’s magical, Mother.”

  She picked up the glass-enclosed trireme and caressed Kevin’s cheek. “When we get home, I’ll ask Mr. Barducci if we can turn the basement into our very own theater.”

  “You think he’d let us do that?”

  “Oh, yes. We’ll build a rostrum, rig up a curtain…”

  “And lights?”

  “Of course lights.” She couldn’t tell who was humoring whom. “We’ll get folding chairs at a flea market.”

  “There must be a dozen great tricks I never learned because I didn’t have a real theater. You know, zombie coffins suspended over the audience’s head, stuff like that. I can’t wait.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I love you, Mother.”

  “I love you, Kevin—my dearest, sweetest Kevin. You’re the best person God ever made.”

  He settled back on the carpet, holding his Idorasag tight against his breast. He closed his eyes. He slept.

  “Ready to hear my theory?” said Quincy, shuffling into the casino. He groped toward the roulette table and climbed on top.

  Nora forced herself into a sitting position, spine against a slot machine, legs crossed like the Delphic oracle perched in her tripod above the omphalos.

  “Why will this boy never get home?” Quincy continued. “In your innermost soul, you know the answer. ‘I hoarded that diesel fuel out of love for my child,’ you protest, unaware that your species’s depravity traces not to a love deficit but to a love surplus. ‘A love surplus?’ you say. ‘Of one’s own kind,’ I reply. ‘The family bonds that exclude the larger world, the community ties that shun the stranger.’” The fetch flashed her a gummy grin. “And so you see that love, Mrs. Burkhart, makes monsters of us all.”

  Defying his blindness, Quincy shot off the roulette table and landed squarely atop Kevin, chest against chest, limb pressing limb, so that they fleetingly became Siamese twins. Remorselessly the fetch continued his descent, melting irretrievably into his host.

  “No!”

  Nora rolled over and hurled herself across her son. He awoke and tried to scream, but the phoneme lodged in his throat. She could feel him petrify beneath her, the stage-two paralysis spreading outward from his sternum to claim his limbs and larynx. Prying back his jaw, she fused their lips and blew. Stage-three crimson domes erupted everywhere like a hundred miniature Catemacos. Again she exhaled into his lungs, and again, and again, until her tears slicked their mouths and broke the seal. For the second time in Kevin’s life, abulia’s penultimate phase visited him, the abscesses drying up to form craters connected by deepening grooves. She massaged him fiercely, kneading his fissured breast and abdomen, as if she might somehow squeeze out the demonio.

  The death throes, when they came, were prosaic, a few shudders accompanied by a low rattle. Kevin’s eyeballs froze in their sockets. His grooves stopped growing.

  Like steam rising from a soggy pyre, the sated fetch left his host, floated toward the ceiling, and disintegrated.

  She couldn’t let her boy go, of course. For three unbroken hours she pounded on his chest, weeping and moaning as she tried to move his blood. Her mind was a jumble, images colliding chaotically, mahogany gods, black seagulls, dying Imdugud birds, Korty Madonnas. Cretaceous comets fell on writhing maggots. Crab monsters vomited out glory grease. She collapsed on the floor and hugged Kevin’s pocked body like Gilgamesh cleaving to Enkidu. There was a kind of insanity, she realized, in refusing to give up a loved one for burial, a supreme blasphemy, a septic perversity: but on that infinitely sorrowful March afternoon, the flower woman could not do otherwise.

  Darkness settled over the Gulf of Mexico. Nora slept sporadically, dreaming that she’d caught the plague: her pores exuded fear syrup like pressed olives oozing oil. At dawn she dragged herself out of the casino, stumbled to the foredeck, and scanned the Gulf for hazards. The sky was the color of lint. Her muscles ached from long hours of weeping. Never before, not even when mourning Eric, had she understood grief’s odd athleticism, its utter physicality.

  A ship deformed the horizon, bearing down on the Queen, and by midmorning it dominated the starboard seascape. As the massive oil tanker drew within two hundred yards, near enough for Nora to read the printing on the bow, the lookout apparently spotted the danger. Siren howling, the tanker slowed dramatically and turned forty-five degrees.

  Shafts of sunlight lanced through the cloud cover. The skull emitted a dull glow, as if made of pearl. With ever increasing astonishment, Nora absorbed two unlikely facts: she’d nearly been run down by the Exxon Bangor, and Captain Marbles Rafferty himself was speeding toward her in the tanker’s motorized jolly boat.

  “Nora Burkhart?” he said, stepping onto the Queen’s foredeck. “Inanna? Is it really you?”

  “It’s me. Aren’t you supposed to be in Afghanistan or someplace?”

  “Turkey. Never made it.” Sweat glistened on Rafferty’s ebony face and arms. “Halfway across the Atlantic, I realized I was in love with one of my passengers, Naomi Singer. Eccentric, but a flagellant only by default Family, boyfriend, all dead of the plague—she had nowhere to go but Rome. We shacked up near the Piazza della Rotonda.”

  “What’re you doing on the Gulf?”

  “After Naomi got sick, I remembered how enthused you were about some clinic in Coatzacoalcos.”

  “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Damn.”

  “Buried by molten lava.”

  “Christ.”

 
“I don’t think it would’ve helped. They bought my boy a brief remission…but now he’s”—when you actually have to speak that word, she realized, when you must set the thing on your tongue and launch it into the air, the raw profane fact of it sucks you dry—“dead.”

  She slumped against the sailor. His arms swung upward and inward, clasping her not just to his chest but to his bosom. She sobbed.

  “You were a good mother, Nora Burkhart.”

  “I loved him so much.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me he isn’t gone. Tell me it’s a dream.”

  “I’m sorry, Nora.”

  “He has a birthday in five weeks. Sixteen years old.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She had no idea how long their embrace lasted. For an indeterminate interval, pulque time obtained aboard the Natchez Queen.

  “I have to ask you something,” said Marbles. “That humongous sculpture you’re hauling—is it by Gerard Korty?”

  “How did you know?”

  Marbles told how. Ever since the Vatican squelched Korty’s reliquary design, he explained, people had been expecting the sculptor to return in triumph with the piece he’d always wanted—a big bronze brain—and plunk it down in the Cinecittà quarry.

  “It’s become a cult thing,” said Marbles, “like UFO believers waiting for some great mother ship.”

  “Gerard won’t be returning in triumph. Three days ago, a petty bureaucrat shot him dead.”

  “Such awful times we live in.”

  Marbles marched through the pituitary portal, drawn by the gleaming icons beyond. Nora joined him inside the gland, then guided him down the corpus callosum and into the Gallery of Decency, where he instantly gravitated toward the Good Samaritan. The diorama was now a wreck, but its message remained coherent.