The Eternal Footman Read online

  The worst part of each day, worse even than the diapering and the muck removal, was the feeding. The procedure went quickly enough—so far, at least, Kevin retained the use of his jaw muscles—but each time she placed the spoon in his mouth, she couldn’t help looking at him. There was endless sadness in his eyes, and fear as well, a bone-deep fear of the sort that infected the cataleptics who populated his beloved Edgar Allan Poe movies (he’d collected every available Roger Corman video)—Monsieur Valdemar in Tales of Terror, Guy Carrell in The Premature Burial, Madelaine in House of Usher. At other times, Kevin seemed not so much a Poe protagonist as a shipwreck survivor, flung against a coral reef, trapped in the prison of his own broken bones, waiting for the sun to finish him off. But where was the reef? she wondered. What chart disclosed it?

  Each night after dinner, Nora wrestled Kevin from his wheelchair, lugged him to his bed, and performed the prescribed physical therapy, scissoring his legs in a manner that mimicked walking, swinging his arms in the pattern of brachiation. Then she would tuck him in and sit beside him on the floor, holding his hand and telling him she loved him. Gradually his room, previously off-limits to Nora by virtue of a judicious mother-son treaty, became etched in her mind. He’d been in transition when the illness struck, the accoutrements of childhood—military models, Lego tableaux, Hollywood action figures—giving ground to CDs, rock-star posters, handheld computer games, and an alabaster diorama depicting Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. In recent weeks she’d embellished the place, filling it with potpourri jars and rejected cuttings from work. Unlike most boys, Kevin loved flowers. The nectars, as he put it, “took him to other planets,” and bouquets routinely figured in Kevin the Incredible’s magic act.

  The night that Quincy Azrael first appeared began like any other. Nora put Kevin in bed, exercised his limbs, tucked him in, and lingered. His breathing soothed her. She kissed his cheek. She shuffled into the parlor, eased herself into the vinyl lounge chair, and, propping her feet on the ottoman, began reading Threading the Labyrinth, a novel that purported to retell the myth of the Minotaur in modern dress. Fixed in the cold November sky, the Cranium Dei shone through her lace curtains. It was the Chrysler Corporation’s turn to lease His brow. PLYMOUTH INVICTUS: YOUR CHARIOT TO THE STARS.

  Kevin walked into the parlor, milk white and completely unclothed, balancing his plastic model of the aircraft carrier Enterprise on his palm.

  “Darling!” Nora, gasping, clutched Threading the Labyrinth to her breast and rose. “Oh, Kevin, sweetheart…”

  “I’m not Kevin,” said Kevin.

  Legs working! Tongue healed! “Darling, you’re all better!”

  “Kevin’s in his room.” He sat on the ottoman. His chalky skin lay taut across his chest, all twenty-four ribs lumping outward. “I’m Kevin’s fetch.”

  “What?”

  “His fetch. His leveler. His pale priest. His death.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “Mutual understanding will not come easily, Mrs. Burkhart, but you must grasp one truth at the outset. I cannot be bargained with.”

  “Stop talking crazy, sweetheart. It isn’t healthy.”

  The boy lifted the aircraft carrier to his lips and blew, launching the little bombers, fighters, and torpedo planes toward the ceiling. “A plague has begun, and Kevin is its first victim.” The planes fell to the floor, caught fire, and turned into kernels of charred plastic. “Your son is riddled with nihilism. He has contracted the abyss. He has caught death awareness, with attendant vulnerability to lethal malaise and malignant despair.” The stench of burning polystyrene filled the room. “How far will the pestilence spread? No one can say. Millions of us stand waiting in the wings, and we shall flourish as long as God’s skull hangs above. Call me Quincy Azrael.”

  Nora closed her eyes. Threading the Labyrinth slipped from her grasp and thudded onto the carpet. For the first time since its advent, she doubted that the manifestation was Kevin. “I find this…very difficult.”

  “We live in difficult times. Theism is fading from the West, and with it the lie of Heaven. Look out the window. Behold His hollow eyes, His gaping nostrils, His skinless grin. A bulwark has been thrown down, Mrs. Burkhart. Death can no longer be denied. My species is leaking into the world.”

  Nora stared at the black lumps that had once been plastic airplanes. Who was this terrible boy, this Quincy Azrael who so obscenely resembled her son? Kevin’s fetch, his leveler, his…death. A wave of nausea rolled through her. She took a breath and pressed her sweating fingers against her stomach.

  “We never abandon our hosts for long,” said Quincy, rising. “It gives them delusions of remission.”

  He drifted into the hallway, Nora right behind. Not since she was a toddler had walking been for her such a conscious and deliberate act. Left foot forward. Now the right. The left. The fetch trailed his scent behind him, a blend of humus and rotting leaves.

  “Three months ago somebody stuck a magnifying glass in Kevin’s cereal,” she said.

  “‘The absence of God is God enough.’ Plus a caveat concerning cognitive snares and an appeal to the virtues of uncertainty.”

  “You did it.”

  “Not I, no.”

  “Of course it was you.”

  “Why should I communicate using granite tombs”—the fetch stepped into Kevin’s room—“when you and I can have such stimulating conversations face to face?”

  She crossed the threshold and saw her sleeping son. She glanced at Quincy, returned her gaze to Kevin. It was true. The boy had a private demon. Her throat constricted as if caught in a garrote. Tears blurred her vision, warming her cheeks as they fell.

  “Our first meeting went well, don’t you think?” said Quincy, crawling onto the bed. “I was afraid you’d start throwing things at me.” He pointed to the black muck bubbling from Kevin’s mouth. “Fear syrup,” he explained. With his index finger he transferred a viscous blob to his tongue. “Sartre sauce. To a fetch, it tastes like honey.”

  Poised atop Kevin’s chest, a crouching gargoyle, Quincy began his descent. The resulting image, unmatched in Nora’s experience, suggested some everyday disgorgement (yolk falling from a cracked eggshell, seared bread shooting from a toaster) made bizarre through reverse-motion photography. A mere twenty seconds, and Kevin and his fetch were fused. The boy didn’t wake up. He lay on the mattress, grimacing, trembling, his brain possessed by some primordial nightmare, his spasms turning the sheets into wild eddies of cloth.

  Nora embraced her child. Gradually his dream dissolved. She released her grip and swallowed a mouthful of sooty East Cambridge air.

  “You’re mine, Kevin,” she said. “Not his. Mine.”

  Charging into the parlor, she grabbed the telephone handset and called her closest relation.

  Kind and loving brother that he was, Douglas overcame his initial Lutheran horror of Nora’s story—his suspicion that she’d become Satan’s pawn—and listened until 2:00 A.M. He was sympathetic and supportive, and his concluding remark enabled her to shed her supposition of insanity and get some sleep that night.

  “I’m looking out my window, and I see God’s skull telling me to buy a Plymouth Invictus, and I say to myself, anything’s possible these days, absolutely anything, including an invasion of zombies.”

  I hate it when Quincy leaves. Every time he exits me, I can’t help imagining he’s gone forever. Then he comes back, and my hopes shatter like the seven mirrors in “The Devil’s Speculum”—Dad’s greatest trick, I think. At the climax, the pieces assemble themselves into a glass demon. A Globe reporter once asked him to reveal the secret, and Dad laughed and said, “It’s done with mirrors.”

  Quincy tells me Mother had trouble comprehending who the fetches are and why they’re here. When she finally got it, she cried. I feel sorry for her. Before I was born, she lost my father, and now she’s losing me. I don’t remember seeing any men around the apartment when I was little, though a few started appe
aring after I became a third-grader. Most of them were jerks, except for Ben Sawyer, who built me a plywood doghouse for my “Fangs of Cerberus” trick. He went back to Canada, I think, so maybe he was the biggest jerk of all.

  I’m sealed inside myself—“a psychic King Tut,” Quincy says, “entombed in static flesh.” My heart still beats. My bowels move, eyes blink, tear ducts drip. My brain jumps from thought to thought. Like all magicians, I don’t believe in magic (show me a ghost, and I’ll show you smoke and misdirection), but I still like to imagine that this diary of mine is getting recorded, every word etched on the inside of my skull.

  Mother tries to do right by me. She tucks me in each night and puts hyacinths in my room. I can smell them. When our eyes meet, she turns away. Quincy says I’m the plague’s first casualty. He makes it sound like I’ve won a prize.

  “Eventually you’ll slip into oblivion,” he says.

  “Will I see Dad there?”

  “It’s not a place, Brother. Nobody lives in oblivion. Not your father, your grandfather—not even God. You simply stop thinking, and then the universe dissolves, forever.”

  The journeys that constituted his life, Thomas Wickliff Ockham now realized, had always entailed an uncommonly large gap between anticipation and actuality. His wrenching ordeal aboard the Carpco Valparaíso during the first towing of the Corpus Dei had proved nothing like the monotonous voyage he’d envisioned. His trip through the divine brain, which he’d thought would unravel a dozen scientific riddles, had instead taught him that the average cosmological conundrum paled beside the raw mystery of sheer existence. And now the process of dying was also foiling Thomas’s expectations.

  He’d always believed he would cross the bar unprotesting. That was the dignified method. Who among his friends was better prepared to meet the eternal Footman? How many men could check out saying they’d danced naked in God’s navel with a Carmelite nun? Debated Manichaeism with God’s Idea of Saint Augustine? Published a half dozen influential books, including The Mechanics of Grace and Out of Many, One and (his personal favorite) Parables for a Post-Theistic Age. And how many men—if the letter he’d received from Indonesia spoke the truth—could die knowing that their theological speculations had inspired the concept behind the ultimate reliquary?

  But Thomas wasn’t ready to go. The grave, he suspected, was a black hole, unfit for human habitation—nothing at all like the amazing planet he presently regarded from his sixteenth-story window overlooking the Hudson. Eleven years earlier, he’d set sail on that historic river, bound for zero degrees latitude, zero longitude, the Corpus Dei’s splashdown point But tonight he was landlocked, bed-bound, awaiting the inevitable hour.

  His pessimism had begun on the supertanker during the long hours of inhaling His spoiled flesh, and it had continued through the Trial of the Millennium with its catalogue of divine crimes. Although Martin Candle lost his case, he’d demonstrated to Thomas’s satisfaction (if not the tribunal’s) that the Creator in His day had been a duality, author of both butterflies and Black Plague, sunsets and skin cancer. And then, finally—a week after the verdict—the Cranium Dei had gone into its conspicuous orbit, and Thomas knew that no honest man anticipated bliss beyond the tomb.

  The chest pains became relentless, a thousand microscopic jellyfish swimming through his blood, stinging his heart, invading his shoulders and arms. By one line of reasoning, he should call an ambulance now, but instead he swallowed two Aleves, removed Gerard Korty’s letter from the nightstand, and read it for a third time.

  While he admired the sculptor’s passion, he shrank from the man’s naïveté. Did Mr. Korty really believe that he could sell his patrons on knowledge, kindness, creativity, and doubt? Did he really imagine that the Church was about to cede the field to Galileo Galilei, Clara Barton, Pablo Picasso, and Desiderius Erasmus?

  In his mind’s eye Thomas saw the fabulous reliquary, its bronze brain gleaming and pulsing like the core of some embryonic planet He sat up in bed, leaned forward, and groped toward the shining hemispheres. As he touched the pituitary gland, the entire brain exploded—pop, gone, a bubble meeting a thorn—and suddenly his pain was gone too, and he felt the light leaking from his soul like oil from a fractured chrism.

  Nine months after Gerard shipped his scheme for a Cinecittà reliquary, the Calcutta packet steamed up to his private dock bearing two jars of instant coffee, a case of Hershey bars, a crate of Samuel Adams, and a manila envelope displaying the Mondrianesque logo of the Shamberg Agency. With trembling fingers Gerard tore back the flap. A cashier’s check and a one-page letter slid out and glided to the dock. Gerard retrieved them. The check bore his name. He hadn’t seen so many zeros since pondering the speedometer on the brand-new Mercedes he’d bought with his Korty Madonna profits.

  Dear Rich Man:

  Once again, the Curia Romana has taken its own sweet time getting back to me—as I recall, they sat on your Paradiso marbles seven months before rejecting them—but in this case their procrastination has a happy ending.

  Gerry, they love it. “An astonishing idea, magnìfico,” Cardinal Di Luca told me over the phone. “Actualizing Father Ockham’s theology—bravo, inspired.”

  They imagine only “minor modifications” and “small amendments.” By the time you read this, construction will be under way.

  Alas, a cloud hangs over the project. I am sorry to inform you that, two weeks ago, Thomas Ockham died of a heart attack.

  Love, Victor

  Throat swelling, Gerard reread the last sentence. As far as he could remember, this was the first time he’d mourned the loss of someone he didn’t know. He prayed that his letter to Ockham had arrived in time, the old priest slipping away fully aware that he’d seeded the reliquary of reliquaries.

  “Fiona, they love it!” he shouted, rushing into the kitchen.

  “Well, that’s a surprise.” She inhaled deeply, channeling the air along the back of her gullet as her yoga instructor had taught her to do. “Did they pay you yet?”

  “Every penny,” he said, handing Fiona the check.

  “Good Lord, they swallowed the whole tiling, didn’t they, Erasmus and all.”

  “Erasmus and all.”

  Gerard set the teakettle on the propane stove and lit the burner. “We need to talk.”

  “Right.”

  “With two million dollars,” he said, “a person could take in a Broadway show whenever she wanted.”

  “I know” she said.

  “She could shop at Saks every day.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Which of the following best describes your attitude toward returning to New York? A, infinite sadness. B, active hostility. C, intense indifference. D, fatalistic resignation.”

  She stood perfectly still, her brow knitted tightly. His wife was a statue, pensiveness in marble. “Intense indifference,” she decided.

  “I can work with that.”

  “Shading into fatalistic resignation.”

  “Let’s grab the first plane home.”

  Only after they’d touched down at Kennedy International, lived for a month at the Waldorf, opened a joint checking account, and moved into their dream apartment on the Upper East Side—a studio and gallery for Gerard, a writer’s loft and meditation space for Fiona—did he begin having doubts about the Holy See’s intentions.

  “What do they mean by minor modifications?” he asked Victor.

  “Hard to say. I’ll e-mail Di Luca.”

  “You’ll do what to him?”

  “E-mail him. You know. With my computer and modem.”

  Modems. And also, Gerard soon learned, laptops, compact discs, DVDs, and cellular phones. He and Fiona had been thrust into a revved-up, online, digitalized world. Mr. and Mrs. Rip Van Winkle. Consumer goods now came tattooed with “bar codes.” Plastic cards had supplanted cash. A single handheld device could conjure ninety channels. Unctuous strangers called during dinner offering irresistible long-distance rates.

  Maybe it
was their newfound wealth, maybe the exhilaration of being back in Manhattan—or maybe they still loved each other. Whatever the reason, they were giving it a second chance. If they both ended up preferring New York to Viatikara, they would toast their connubial bliss with Dom Perignon and set about spending their fortune. If Fiona decided she still needed Indonesia, they would let the marriage dissolve, no hard feelings, no questions asked. The experiment began auspiciously. Within a week of their return, Fiona stopped starving herself in the name of satori, abandoning her sugar-free, fat-free, food-free diet for conventional vegetarianism. As her flesh accumulated, so did the manuscript of her autobiographical novel, Lost and Found, the pages eventually coalescing into a complete first draft. Best of all, she once again had need of Gerard’s libido: precious lust, pure concupiscence, unencumbered by any procreative designs. She would corner him in the shower, attack him in the parlor, and visit him in his studio, interrupting his Purgatorio sketching sessions with poetic and life-affirming seductions.

  His agenda stretched gloriously before him, daunting as a triathlon, detailed as a Tokyo subway map. After the Purgatorio was finished, he would seize upon John Milton, carving a series of illustrations for Paradise Lost. Next he would sculpt an analogue to the Book of Job, delineating the sufferer’s ordeal with a ferocity sufficient to remind people that, even though Martin Candle had lost his case, the man had certainly been within his rights to convene the trial. And then—if Gerard could summon the creative energy—he would in the twilight of his artistic life come back to Dante, struggling to give the Inferno the tableaux it deserved.

  Once a week he telephoned the Shamberg Agency. The news was always the same. Tullio Cardinal Di Luca had not answered Victor’s e-mail, replied to his faxes, or returned his phone calls. And yet the reliquary was evidently taking shape. Although all reporters and photojournalists had been barred from the site, the Office of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs periodically issued breezy press releases proclaiming that the most significant funerary project of all time, “the Cinecittà Reliquary, sparked by the theology of the late Thomas Ockham and designed by the reclusive sculptor Gerard Korty,” was emerging on schedule and under budget.