The Eternal Footman Page 6

  Infuriated by the blackout, the American media refused to reprint Rome’s puffery without comment. “Evidently God is getting a resting place worthy of a pope,” Newsweek wryly editorialized. “Now that Soviet Communism is dead,” opined Time, “the Vatican has overtaken the Kremlin in the arena of specious secrecy.”

  “Why don’t they respond to Victor’s messages?” Gerard asked Fiona with a groan.

  “They’re probably going crazy trying to meet the deadline.”

  “Do you suppose they’re diddling with it? What if they’ve missed the point? What if they call it the Temple of Truth instead of the Temple of Knowledge?”

  “It’s out of your hands.”

  “And once you call it the Temple of Truth, then it’s deuces wild—Father Ockham saw this—because truth is, quote, whatever the king wielding his scepter or the mountebank writing his self-help book wants it to be.”

  “Relax, Gerry. Forget about Rome and return to Dante.”

  There was wisdom in her words, he felt. And so, as a gray and gritty winter descended on Manhattan, he put God’s bones behind him and threw himself into the Purgatorio, carving marble souls suspended between Heaven and Hell.

  On the day he finished sculpting The Gluttons, the New York Times reported that “the Cinecittà Reliquary, conceptualized by the genius hermit Gerard Korty and executed by sixty-seven of the world’s finest artisans,” would be unveiled within three weeks. The Vatican had planned an elaborate opening ceremony, including speeches, choirs, and dignitaries.

  “Can you believe this?” he wailed, waving the newspaper article in Fiona’s face. “They’re cutting the ribbon in less than a month, and we weren’t even invited!”

  “So? They paid you.”

  “What good is the money if they’re warping my masterpiece?”

  At noon he phoned his agent.

  “Did you see today’s Times?” he asked Victor.

  “Most upsetting.”

  “Why wasn’t I invited?”

  “Maybe the cardinals forgot you’d returned to Manhattan,” said Victor. “Maybe they think you’re still on Viatikara, saying no to civilization, and an invitation would’ve only offended you.”

  “They’re snubbing me.”

  “They’re snubbing you, Gerard. It’s outrageous. Naturally I’ll fire off a new barrage. Phone calls, faxes, e-mail.”

  Gerard had a better idea. The plan that now gripped his imagination was as vivid and substantive as a block of Makrana marble. “I’ve reached a decision. Don’t try talking me out of it.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “I’m going to Cinecittà,” said Gerard.

  “Unwise,” said Victor.

  “You’re welcome to come along.”

  “I’ve got jury duty or something.”

  “I’m going, Victor, and if I don’t like what I see, the world will soon know of my displeasure.”

  At 8:12 P.M. on Valentine’s Eve, Nora locked up the Tower of Flowers. She climbed into Phaëthon, drove home, and, after feeding and exercising Kevin, took him to Jamaica Plain (she never left her son alone at night) and placed him in Uncle Douglas’s care. Returning to the shop, she began to undo the damage.

  By virtue of their sheer numbers, the day’s customers—scores of perplexed but well-meaning males for whom the language of flowers was largely foreign—had practically destroyed the place. The displays were a jumble. Slushy footprints marred the floor. Somebody had shattered a grow-light bulb, littering the platform with glass fragments. The shoppers’ children had festooned the checkout counter with depleted wads of bubble gum and partially dissolved lollipops.

  “As you probably know,” said Quincy Azrael, “Valentine’s Day, like so many festivals on the Christian calendar, has pagan roots.”

  Nora looked up from her sweeping. Surrounded by red dahlias, the pale, terrible boy sat on the nearest display table, naked as before, exuding the odor of loam.

  “Aztec lovers,” Quincy continued, “used to exchange warm, dripping human hearts, recently tom from the chests of captive warriors. Such a romantic civilization.”

  “Kevin’s getting worse.”

  “What did you expect? Do you think this is a game? Do you doubt my powers? With a snap of my fingers I could change these dahlias into a dung heap or your broom into a cobra. Dahlias, by the way, signify instability, but you know that.”

  Quincy snapped his fingers. Nora’s broom changed, becoming not a cobra but a four-foot stalk of coagulated fear syrup.

  “You want to strangle me, don’t you?” said the fetch. “You want to spear me through the heart with that shepherd’s crook. Impossible. Death is immortal. We are compacted ectoplasm, Jehovic Jell-O, the mattress that muted the princess’s pea. Bullets only tickle us. Arsenic simply makes us sneeze.”

  She threw down the stick of fear. It hit the floor and shattered.

  “Three messages,” said Quincy. “A brief for humility, filed by Oliver Cromwell. I’ve always found politics tedious. An epigram concerning the absence of God. Theology bores me as well. A joke about being trapped in a fortune-cookie factory. Now jokes I can relate to. A woman phones a mortuary to arrange her husband’s funeral. ‘But you buried your husband two years ago!’ the undertaker protests. ‘I got married again—this is for my second husband,’ she explains. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you’d remarried,’ the undertaker replies. ‘Congratulations!’” The fetch’s lips parted in a smile as mocking as God’s. “You’re not laughing, Mrs. Burkhart.”

  “Is there any way you could—”

  “Take you instead? No. Sorry. You can’t die another person’s death for him. The metaphysics gets too complicated.” The leveler’s smile collapsed. “In less than a year the streets will be crawling with my species, a fetch for every man, woman, and child in the Western world.”

  “You’re planning to kill us all?”

  “Death awareness doesn’t kill people. Death kills people. Death awareness merely turns them into quivering blobs of ineffectuality. You’re a Grecophile. You know about Prometheus. His transgression, you may recall, lay as much in blessing people with death amnesia as in telling them the recipe for combustion.”

  True enough, she thought. Death amnesia: a fitting term. According to Aeschylus, prior to Prometheus’s intervention everyone on Earth knew the exact date and hour of his death, a situation inflicting chronic lethargy on the majority of humankind. When at last unburdened of this awful information, people gradually—inevitably—began acting as if they might live forever. They built cities, pursued sciences, practiced arts, and challenged the gods.

  “So even if we weren’t carrying a lethal disease in tow,” Quincy continued, “the postindustrial world would still be doomed. Don’t deny that death denial is central to the human enterprise. Take away the average person’s obliviousness to oblivion, and he becomes as torpid as Hamlet on Prozac. Speaking personally, I shall be sorry to see Western civilization disappear. I think it was a hoot, especially the Stanley Cup and stud poker. Want to hear another joke?”

  “No.”

  “A worried patient shares his misgivings with his doctor. ‘I’ve heard of cases where the physician has treated someone for pneumonia, and he died of typhoid fever.’ The doctor is offended. ‘Ridiculous,’ he says. ‘When I treat a patient for pneumonia, he dies of pneumonia.’” The fetch rearranged the dahlias. “And still no smile from Mrs. Burkhart. Do you know your problem, lady? You refuse to look on the lighter side of bottomless pits. Not everybody takes your high-and-mighty attitude. Follow me.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “Your education is far from complete. Follow me.”

  She stomped on the syrup fragments, then allowed Quincy to guide her out of the showroom, through the back office, and into the vacant lot behind the shop. Bathed in moonlight, the abundant trash—discarded mattresses, castaway automobile tires, 55-gallon drums—seemed almost luminous. A thousand bits of broken glass sparkled like polished gems.r />
  “Do you and Kevin talk?” she asked.

  “Of course. I’m his only companion. He, at least, laughs at my jokes.”

  “Tell Kevin I—”

  “You love him. A reasonable request. Happy to comply.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I might be irredeemably evil, but I’m not all bad.”

  Quincy gestured toward the far comer of the lot, where a brown Dumpster rose from the bare earth like a witch’s crockpot. An emaciated, rheumy-eyed man approached the steel bin, pushing a corroded grocery cart, its cage containing a shoe, a boot, a raincoat, a flashlight, and a windup alarm clock. Reaching the Dumpster, he stood on tiptoes and peered inside.

  “His name is Angus McPherson—a total nobody, just another old man without a home,” said Quincy.

  The derelict pulled out a tattered umbrella.

  “Before the epidemic peaks, medical science will realize that fetches, like malignant tumors, come in many varieties. Some, such as your son’s, act slowly. But others can fulfill their obligations in minutes.”

  As Angus McPherson dropped the umbrella in his grocery cart, his naked double limped toward him. The interloper was frailer even than McPherson himself, bony as the mannikin in Kevin’s “Forgotten Prisoner of Otranto” trick.

  “Hello, Angus,” said McPherson’s fetch.

  “We have an appointment, don’t we?” said McPherson.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you appear only in the West?” Nora asked Quincy.

  “Even if the East had an orbiting Cranium Dei of its own, the thing’s impact would be minimal,” the leveler replied. “In Asia and the Muslim nations, death denial takes forms that render my species irrelevant. For a Hindu, death is merely the necessary antecedent to reincarnation, another turn of the wheel. A divine skull could haunt the Islamic world for generations without enjoying any power to depress, since Allah was never personlike. When it comes to Buddhism, of course, the whole game is an illusion. Death, life—same thing.”

  “Sorry about this,” said McPherson’s fetch.

  “It’s all right,” said McPherson. “I’ve got no reason to go on living, except maybe…”

  “I know all about it.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. The Red Sox will never win another pennant.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Take me.”

  The fetch extended his skinny arms, gates on the portal to oblivion. Smiling, McPherson stepped over the threshold. For a full minute the two stood pressed against each other, melding inch by inch into a single entity.

  “The disease always follows the same course,” said Quincy. “First comes the chill, engulfing the patient like an Arctic tide.”

  McPherson shivered.

  “The patient attempts to expel the wraith but ejects only copious quantities of fear syrup.”

  The victim heaved, spewing out a familiar black fluid.

  “Next comes a crippling of the voice box and paralysis in all four limbs.”

  The victim let out a choked cry and stumbled, falling to the ground like a marionette whose puppeteer had been shot through the head.

  “Followed by the worst case of boils since Job.”

  Sprawled on his back, McPherson watched in mute terror as red lesions erupted all over his body. Exploding one by one, the sores released their cargos of pus, the viscid exudate dribbling down his face and chest. Sickened, Nora turned away. Kevin had already endured so much—did this torture too lie before him? Was there no mercy left, not a single mote of it, within the Cranium Dei?

  Staggering across the lot, she slumped onto a tattered mattress and buried her face in her hands.

  “The boils collapse and dry out, leaving a hundred black pocks. Look up, Mrs. Burkhart! You’re missing the pocks!”

  Nora wept.

  “The flesh splits. The fissures spread among the dried lesions, connecting pock to pock, and then at last…”

  Nora glanced toward McPherson’s corpse. It swam in her tears. Rising, she picked up a half-empty beer bottle and hurled it against the Tower of Flowers, staining the wall with Guinness stout.

  “Now let me tell you a joke,” she said.

  “Whatever his intellectual limitations,” said Quincy, “McPherson knew better than to fight the inevitable.”

  “An old woman walks up a steep mountain path with a heavy load of wood balanced on her shoulders. Finally she can stand it no longer. She throws down her burden, raises her arms toward Heaven, and cries out, ‘I want the Angel of Death to come!’ Instantly the Angel appears before her, terrible in form and visage. ‘You called?’ says the Angel. ‘Yes,’ the old woman replies quickly. ‘Will you help me get this load back on my shoulders?’”

  “Not funny,” said Quincy.

  “Maybe you don’t get it.”

  “Surrender to the Footman, Mrs. Burkhart Kiss the pale priest Embrace the abyss.”

  “Fuck you,” said Nora to her son’s death.

  Oswald’s Rock

  BEFORE GERARD KORTY BECAME a hermit, surrounded by the Indonesian jungles and cloistered in the monastery of his mind, he had unfailingly availed himself of every opportunity to visit the fecund and boisterous nation of Italy. For a man of Gerard’s enthusiasms, Florence was a kind of paradise, a continual intimation that his visual cortex, if not his other neural equipment, had attained a state of grace. Venice with its liquid streets and Turin with its sumptuous churches likewise enraptured him. But Rome rarely beckoned. Why settle for the prosaic Tiber when you could have the poetic Arno? The Eternal City, Gerard felt, far from being eternal, was imprisoned in the present, a city of industrial soot and acid rain, traffic jams and bureaucrats.

  This time around, however, for reasons he couldn’t name, Rome won him over. An hour after moving into the Abruzzi, a swank pensione beside the Pantheon on the Piazza della Rotonda, he went for a stroll on the site of the vanished Circo Massimo. The Mediterranean sun was warm and lulling. The fragrance of the ripe grass beat back the oily odors of the Maseratis and Vespas. If tourists had begun infiltrating the city, they were not yet conspicuous. Rome still belonged to the Romans—to the entwined lovers, seraphic joggers, chuffing cyclists, preadolescent soccer players, and married couples pushing baby strollers. In that hour the divine skull appeared oddly benign, its smile not so much a taunt as an exhortation. Savor life while you can, God seemed to declare, even as He explicitly urged His beholders to TREAT YOURSELF TO A TUBORG.

  Gerard slept well that night, dreaming that he was back in the Circo Massimo, driving a winning chariot across the finish line.

  In the morning he shouldered his rucksack, walked to Stazioni Termini, and, descending into the metro system, took the crushingly congested Anagnina train southeast to its penultimate stop, Cinecittà. He climbed back into the daylight and surveyed the lively crowds moving west along the Via Federico Fellini. Although the unveiling wouldn’t occur for twenty-four hours, the Ben-Hur quarry was a focus of frenzied attention. Television minivans sporting microwave antennas nosed their way toward the site, along with police trucks bearing traffic cones and sawhorse barriers. Photojournalists on motor scooters joined the procession, their saddlebags stuffed with cameras and tripods. A diverse crowd of pedestrians—nuns, housewives, vagrants, truant teenagers—likewise sought the reliquary. On both sides of the street, enterprising vendors set up food racks, soft-drink dispensers, cappuccino makers, and displays of ceramic saints, making ready to meet whatever nutritional and spiritual needs might arise among the next day’s mobs of red-carpet dignitaries and throw-rug hoi polloi.

  Like an errant leaf settling onto the surface of a stream, Gerard joined the flow, allowing the collective mind to bear him west down the Via Federico Fellini and then south across a grassy field. To his left a grid of folding chairs awaited the posteriors of the invited guests. Beyond, a team of carpenters constructed a speaker’s platform, its central dais supporting an oak lectern and a table draped in pur
ple silk. According to the New York Times, over six hundred religious leaders from around the world would attend the grand opening—bishops, priests, pastors, ministers, rabbis, patriarchs, elders—along with two hundred elected heads of state plus scores of kings, queens, politicians, executives, and movie stars. Everybody who was anybody wanted to be seen paying his last respects to God.

  A two-kilometer hike, and suddenly it appeared, the Ben-Hur quarry, cradling an edifice even more massive than its previous occupant, the Antioch Circus set. The reliquary itself was invisible, hidden behind a patchwork of tarpaulins. Slapped together from pine posts and barbed wire, a fence ringed the temple complex, giving it the ambience of a POW camp. Gerard studied the ocean of canvas, reading his various designs into the dips and swells: Temple of Knowledge…Kindness…Creativity…Doubt. It was all there, evidently, including the great bronze brain at the core. Maybe the College of Cardinals really did believe an invitation would have offended him. Maybe the portentous phrases “minor modifications” and “small amendments” portended nothing at all. If Gerard dropped by the Vatican that afternoon, Cardinal Di Luca might welcome him exuberantly and put him on the next day’s program.

  Minor modifications. What could it mean? What?

  Setting down his rucksack, Gerard removed his B5 bushing chisel. Sunlight glinted off the tempered blade. It was a tool, of course, but to Gerard, a man for whom art constituted the only magical force in the universe, it was also a kind of sword, forged to battle the armies of insipidity and slay the dragons of kitsch. Weapon in hand, he marched around the perimeter of the complex, moving past makeshift portals of wood and wire, until the object of his search appeared, an isolated gate attended by a single pike-wielding sentry—a gaunt, weary man dressed in the garish Renaissance uniform of the Vatican Swiss Guard.