by James Morrow
“Quite true,” she said.
“No amount of begging.”
“None.”
“Godspeed, Sister.”
“God’s speed is nine hundred miles per hour, same as the Earth’s. Now help me score some gasoline, okay?”
If Gerard Korty had foreseen the psychic risks intrinsic to his new life in Mexico, the addictive and unholy rush of godmaking, he would have pledged himself to Lucido’s service with for less alacrity. It was mind-bending and soul-warping, this business of providing Somatocism with a pantheon. It could make a sculptor oblivious to his mortality—make him forget that his veins flowed not with ichor but with simple blood.
While Gerard knew that he himself lacked divinity, he wondered whether his patron was likewise prepared to abjure godhood. Perched on the side of Mount Tapílula, Lucido’s headquarters—a many-towered mansion from which the Veracruz governor, now dead of the plague, had once issued his fiats—placed the psychoanalyst in the same relation to Coatzacoalcos that the Cranium Dei enjoyed to planet Earth. Brooding in his private apartments day after day, the surrounding chambers jammed with sycophantic functionaries laying the groundwork of the new religion and dispossessed clerics seeking to administer it, Lucido courted solipsism at best and monomania at worst. He confined his interactions with Gerard to one hour on Sunday afternoons, each meeting typically consumed by Lucido taking up a loaded syringe, injecting himself with a “subtherapeutic” dose of hyperion-15, and then railing against the mechanistic monster that American psychiatrists, with their transfixion by science and unjustified hostility toward metaphysics, had allowed depth psychology to become.
At first Fiona had resisted the idea of moving to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. She’d finally found a publisher for her novel, Lost and Found, a small Arizona firm specializing in “cookbooks for incorporeal nourishment,” and felt reluctant to leave the country when she could be doing readings at New Age emporia. While the advance was only $1,500, the company’s president had argued persuasively that it was better to reign at Synergy Press than to serve at Random House. But then, three months after Gerard’s return from Rome, while buying tofu at a bodega on 82nd Street, Fiona met her second self. In the leveler’s informed opinion, Synergy Press was as doomed as the rest of Western civilization; Lost and Found would probably never see print The longer her fetch prophesied, the more discouraged Fiona became, until eventually she saw that her best course lay in helping her husband launch the Church of Earthly Affirmation.
The privileges of Gerard’s rank were many. His cup ran over with coffee from Chiapas, mescal from Oaxaca, and Carta Blanca beer from the town. True to his word, Lucido had secured ideal sculpting facilities, an outdoor studio surrounded by a stockade fence and equipped with scaffolding, derrick, winch, workbench, and grindstone, plus a convertible vinyl roof that Gerard and Fiona could roll into place at the first intimation of rain. The promised assistants also materialized, two sturdy brothers named Pelayo and Fulgencio Ruíz, baptized but nonbelieving Catholics into whose brains the nuns of Veracruz had poured European educations. Unspeakably honored to be serving the Korty Madonna’s creator, Pelayo and Fulgencio pursued their duties (cleaning the studio, sharpening the chisels, preparing the blocks, chauffeuring Gerard in his pony cart) with a devotion bordering on adulation. They were artists in their own right—“post-surrealists” who gloried in the fact that their “spiritual mentor,” the great Diego Rivera, had once lived on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—and Gerard quickly realized that their powerful paintings of burning jaguars and psychedelic macaws, while freighted with superfluities and crude in technique, had forever blurred for him the distinction between the primitive and the primal.
Adjacent to the studio lay Gerard and Fiona’s domicile, an abandoned trading post set on a bluff above the Rio Uspanapa, which flowed all the way from Presa Netzahualcóyotl, past the temple complex of Tamoanchan, and on through Coatzacoalcos before emptying into the Bahía de Campeche. The front yard offered a spectacular view of Mount Catemaco, an active but unambitious volcano marking the southern tip of the pine-covered Siena Madre Oriental. Enchanted by the golden-fruited banana plants dotting the grounds, Fiona had named their home El Dorado, and it was a hacienda so spacious that they ended up dedicating half the rooms to impractical pursuits—to watching sunsets, making love, and reading Emily Dickinson.
A one-hour hike through the jungle west of El Dorado brought Gerard to the brick-red extraterrestrial mass called Oswald’s Rock. Reubenite was everything Lucido had promised, the greatest medium since Makrana marble: sufficiently fine-grained to permit detailed modeling yet durable enough to withstand lashing rains and scouring winds. The mineral possessed another quality as well, a quality that he and Fiona unabashedly called numinous. Standing before a newborn reubenite god, they felt themselves in the presence of something that partook equally of stone and spirit, matter and magic. If he’d made his Paradiso statues from reubenite, Gerard decided, the Vatican would have bought them without debate, regardless of the price.
For the newly arrived Americans, the plague’s impact was thus far minimal. The local shops no longer offered cigarettes, but Gerard and Fiona had both quit smoking years ago. Ballpoint pens and writing paper had disappeared, and so Fiona was obliged to compose her second novel in pencil on business envelopes. Condoms, razor blades, toothpaste, aspirin—all gone.
But the most crucial of the scarce commodities was fossil fuel. While a handful of the generators powering the temple complex ran on energy from the omnipresent Mexican sun, the majority consumed gasoline, a substance in fearsomely short supply now that abulia had stolen the wills of 780,490 refinery workers throughout the Western world. Unless the expected waves of pilgrims arrived bearing large quantities of diesel oil, Lucido would have to start rationing electricity, that precious force by which he and his staff enjoyed refrigerated food, incandescent lighting, and home video.
One could hardly imagine a more impressive field on which to fight eschatological battles than Tamoanchan. Through systematic research Lucido had determined that the ancient Aztecs had borrowed the strange word from an archaic form of the Maya language. For the Aztecs, Tamoanchan evidently indicated a fabulous, golden, vanished civilization to the east—quite possibly the mysterious Olmec empire. And yet, despite their beauty and grandeur, the labyrinth of Idorasag, the palace of Risogada, the grove of Orgasiad, and the cave of Soaragid had all failed to provide Gerard with the inspiration he required. Not since the terrible years of artistic impotence that drove him finally to Indonesia had he found himself so completely blocked.
He was on the point of declaring himself the wrong man to actualize the Somatocist pantheon, when the Ruíz brothers came to him with an idea. Like Moses, they argued, the sculptor might best connect with the cosmos by entering a wilderness. To Gerard this theory sounded plausible, and so the next day the three men ventured out under the midday skull—El Cráneo, the locals called it—first driving Gerard’s pony cart to the barren, blasted foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, then hiking through the ash fields, and finally starting up the southern slope of the Volcán de Catemaco. Experienced hikers, Pelayo and Fulgencio whistled merrily throughout the ascent. Gerard wished they would speak instead, encouraging him the way Virgil had encouraged Dante during the difficult climb from Ante-Purgatory’s first terrace, abode of the excommunicated, to its second terrace, repository of the late repentant.
His words so spurred me that I forced myself
To follow him with desperate scrambling feet
And crawl and strain until I’d gained the ledge.
Both he and I then sat upon the rim
And faced the east, the way from which we’d come,
For looking back will give a traveler joy.
It took them three hours to get from the base of Catemaco to the inner crater, where an immense lake of lava seethed and steamed like metals mingling in an alchemist’s retort. After strapping on their war-surplus gas masks—a necessity, giv
en Catemaco’s noxious vapors—the three men stared into the bubbling broth, trolling for enlightenment.
Fulgencio found the cat-god first.
“There! Do you see it?”
“No,” said Gerard.
“Half man, half jaguar!”
“Where?”
“There! There!”
At last Gerard saw the shape-shifter, a smiling feline head surmounting a humanoid trunk that rippled with muscles.
During the glory days of the Olmec civilization, Fulgencio explained, every community harbored its own divine werejaguar. A shape-shifter’s identity, however, was unknown to the villagers themselves, so that the average native lived his whole life in reference to a mystery: Who is it? My uncle? My neighbor? My best friend? Eventually the werejaguar would disclose himself to the most beautiful wife in the village, and one night woman and beast would go off together and couple beneath the full moon. A conception always occurred. His destiny fulfilled, the werejaguar soon transmuted, his feral half claiming him as he disappeared forever into the rain forest. The god-touched woman would meanwhile return to her hut, wake her husband, and arouse him, her true intentions readable only in the faint trace of a smile on her lips.
Gerard beheld the god and gasped. He shivered with epiphany. This was Soaragid, master of the revels, avatar of celebration. Taking out his sketch pad, he set about capturing the manifestation before it returned to geologic chaos. By sundown he was back in his studio, sweating profusely and singing “Amazing Grace” as he drove his C3 cleaving chisel into the ten-ton reubenite block where the deity lay imprisoned.
“I couldn’t be more delighted,” said Lucido at the start of their regular Sunday-afternoon encounter.
“I’m rather pleased myself,” said Gerard.
Lucido had insisted on their meeting in the private aviary adjoining his Mount Tapílula mansion: a thoroughly unpleasant place, in Gerard’s view—hot, stifling, and reeking of parrot droppings. Twice the height of a human being, the werejaguar stood midway between their fan-back wicker chairs, Pelayo and Fulgencio having trucked it up Calle Huimanguillo to the aviary that morning. El Cráneo imparted a buttery sheen to Soaragid’s coral flesh. Rising, Lucido ran his fingers along the biceps and massaged the firm stomach.
“Listen, all you demonios.” He lifted his eyes skyward and spoke in a gritty whisper. “Your reign is ending. The Somatocist pantheon has come to Earth!”
Gerard contemplated the idol. The eyes weren’t right: the next time, he would provide a predatory gleam. “And did you frighten the demonios, Adrian?” he asked in a mildly chiding tone.
“I hear skepticism. Good.” Lucido settled into his chair and removed a panatela from a teakwood humidor. “What you must understand, Gerard, is that in metaphysics a phenomenon needn’t be empirical to be true. By believing in the new gods, our acolytes will bring them into nonrational reality. You’re not convinced.”
A rainbow-hued parrot sailed across the aviary and landed atop Soaragid’s head. “When people believed in the Judeo-Christian monogod,” said Gerard, “that didn’t keep them from getting sick. Faith is therapeutic, no question, but only up to a point.”
“You’re forgetting that abulia is not, at base, a physical illness. Its locus is the soul, the domain to which our pantheon is so finely attuned. You’re still not convinced.”
“I’m still not convinced.”
Lucido flicked his butane lighter and ignited his cigar. He blew a smoke ring, the carbon halo drifting toward his brow and disintegrating above his head. “Don’t get stuck in obsolete categories, Gerard. Live in your own time. It’s the only era you can truly occupy.”
Over the next three months the remaining deities arrived, first in molten lava, then in solid reubenite, each conjoining the beautiful with the bizarre. Orgasiad, queen of passion, adapted from an Olmec serpent-goddess, featured a sensual reptilian face—smiling mouth, double eyelids, crescent pupils—set atop a female torso that in turn surmounted a spiral of scaly coils. Risogada, lord of the jest, a variation on an aboriginal crocodile-god, was playfully but not inaccurately described by Fiona as “an ambulatory grin.” Idorasag, mistress of milk, derived from an indigenous ape-goddess, suggested what might have resulted if King Kong had somehow consummated his lust for Fay Wray.
Among Lucido’s many entrenched opinions was his view that Somatocism would succeed only if its temples “positively dripped with deities.” Thus did the spring of 2005 become the most productive period of Gerard’s entire career. Each time his workshop yielded another affirmation god, he sent word to Hubbard Richter, Somatocism’s chief deacon, whereupon the sour and unimaginative bureaucrat would arrive with several assistants and haul the idol away. For reasons that defied Gerard’s comprehension, Richter fancied himself an art critic, and the chief deacon rarely took an idol into his keeping without commentary. “A god of laughter should smile, yes, but this is the grin of a psychotic,” he remarked after receiving the third Risogada. “You were too generous with her breasts,” he said while packing up the newest Orgasiad. “She lives in a grove, not a bordello.”
Lured by rumors, impelled by desperation, plague victims began filtering into Coatzacoalcos during the last week of June, each family offering horrific testimony to the collapse of those manifold enterprises—colleges, museums, churches, laboratories, factories, shopping malls—that had once constituted Western culture. Prior to this mass immigration, the Coatzacoalcos natives had greeted Lucido’s project enthusiastically, the skilled laborers receiving fair wages for building Tamoanchan, the artistically inclined enjoying ample rewards for fashioning robes, ciboria, and other temple accoutrements. In a matter of days the city became a refugee camp—plague families from the American Southwest swarmed everywhere, draining the food supplies and straining the sanitation facilities—and suddenly the locals wanted no part of Somatocism. Many fled to Chiapas and Campeche, seeking to live off the rain forest’s dwindling game and the bay’s remaining bounty rather than risk the typhus and cholera that were certain to arrive as Coatzacoalcos turned into a necropolis.
“Our sisters just took off for Ciudad del Carmen,” Pelayo informed Gerard and Fiona. He strode across the outdoor studio, put on his protective goggles, and pressed a cleaving chisel against the spinning grindstone. A spray of sparks arced away like the trail of a skyrocket.
“If the fish don’t bite, they’ll try Isla de Aguada, then Champotón,” said Fulgencio, daubing ochre pigment on an Idorasag’s comforting eyes.
Fiona slapped an Orgasiad’s coils with her paintbrush, giving the deity golden scales. “You’re not leaving, are you?” she asked Fulgencio.
“A clash is coming, un encuentro estupendo, abulia versus the new gods. What true artist would miss an event like that?”
Grasping his carving hammer, Gerard ascended the scaffolding, pulled a bushing chisel from his safari jacket, and began bestowing a snout on a Risogada. “I want your honest opinion. Do you think we’re going to win?”
“Hard to say,” said Fiona.
“Difficult question,” said Fulgencio.
“One thing I do know, Señor Gerardo.” Pelayo slowed the grindstone and removed his goggles. “The Olmec gods are as jealous as Jehovah—and every bit as fierce.”
“They don’t like rivals?” said Gerard.
“Rivals make them furious,” said Pelayo.
Fiona set down her brush and smiled. “Especially, I should imagine, when those rivals wear stolen faces.”
On first hearing Nora’s plan to plunder Arborway Cemetery, her brother rejected it as sacrilegious and illegal, but when the night of the foray arrived—a sweltering July evening alive with cicadas and crickets—he went along anyway. The main gate was padlocked, so they had to heave their wheelbarrow and tools over the wrought-iron fence, then scale it using the scrollwork for footholds. Reaching the top, Nora apprehensively surveyed the metal pickets, reminiscent of the arrows that Eric had used in “The Martyrdom of Sebastian,” his grisliest trick
. She steeled herself, thinking of her left knee, which had knitted improperly after a tenth-grade lacrosse accident. At last she jumped—and was fortunate to fall, along with Douglas, into the embrace of a barberry bush.
Scrambling to their feet, they collected their tools, dropped them into the barrow, and started across the graveyard.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Douglas whispered.
“Who’s watching us?” she replied, countering the pain in her knee by tightening her grip on the barrow handles. “Santa Claus? The Tooth Fairy? God?”
“God is watching us, yes.”
“In school I learned that eyeballs are among the minimum requirements for vision.”
“When you look at the Cranium Dei, Nora, you see God’s face. When I behold it, I see Satan’s mask.”
With abulia’s ascent, the art of gravedigging had fallen into amateur hands, and Arborway Cemetery was now an unsightly mass of pits and heaps, like a prairie-dog town built by insane prairie dogs. Wandering amid the maze, Nora noticed that many of the plague victims were only partially buried, their black and rigid limbs jutting grotesquely into the air. Finally she reached Dexter Gansevoort’s resting place, with its exquisite Korty Madonna cradling a sickly marble Jesus. A bouquet of gardenias leaned against the elaborate monument—nothing like the floral cornucopia Nora had delivered almost three years earlier, but impressive by plague-era standards.
They set to work. Nora dug furiously, undaunted by her exhaustion, hunger, and knee pains. Douglas, too, threw himself into the task, and by 11:00 P.M. a third of the buried Cadillac Catera lay exposed to the foul summer air. Through brute luck they’d chosen the gas-cap side. Their good fortune got Douglas humming. Nora giggled like a teenager. Collapsing against the cool dirt wall, they put down their spades, gathered their strength, and listened to the low, hoarse sound of poplar branches scraping granite mausoleums.
“I thought he’d smell,” said Douglas.