The Eternal Footman

by James Morrow

  Yes, it was the age of abulia, Postmortem Dei with its middle-class cannibals roaming the streets of Western civilization, God’s toothy grin supplying the whole spectacle with a mute laugh track—and yet Gerard could barely begin to assimilate the abomination he’d witnessed in the wine cellar. It touched nothing. It devoured everything. Adrian Lucido, lunatic and fiend, had ushered in the end of the world.

  Gerard kept his vow. A firm whack with the sledgehammer sent Lucido’s reubenite head flying across the studio. The head struck Erasmus’s pedestal and split in two. Gerard pounded the halves repeatedly, converting Lucido’s brains to rubble, then attacked the remaining block. Two dozen blows, and the torso crumbled into incoherence.

  Rationalization worked fleetingly, affording him chimeric moments of peace. It wasn’t as if Lucido had undertaken to inflict Antidote X on healthy people, he told himself. The doctor sacrificed terminal cases only.

  “They would’ve died anyway,” he told Fiona.

  “Horse manure.”

  “This can’t be compared to murder. It’s closer to euthanasia.”

  “It’s murder.”

  “So what would you have me do?” he said. “Kill Lucido?”

  “You’re the logical choice,” she said. “No one gets suspicious when the godmaker comes to Tapílula.”

  “Circle Seven.”

  “What?”

  “Dante places murderers in Circle Seven. He submerges them in boiling blood.”

  “And where does he place cowards?”

  “Have you considered that there might be some validity to Lucido’s approach?” said Gerard. “The people he binds to the altar, maybe they do achieve immortality. These things are fundamentally mysterious.”

  “You don’t believe that,” said Fiona.

  “With any luck, Lucido’s leveler will solve the problem for us.”

  “Not likely, given the amount of hyperion in his system. You’re the man of the hour, Don Gerardo, whether you like it or not.”

  Eight days after witnessing the true nature of Antidote X, Gerard found himself leading Nora through the Hall of Artistic Passion while in the opposite hemisphere Fiona showed Kevin the Garden of Scientific Knowledge. It was an opportunity Gerard dared not squander. Nora seemed particularly impressed by the sculptor’s homage to Moby-Dick, with its alabaster whale staving in a miniature Pequod.

  “Ahab’s mission was bound to end in disaster,” he insisted. “He should’ve said to hell with the whale and gotten on with his life.”

  “People thought my mission was doomed too, but now I have my son back.”

  Gerard cleared his throat. “There’s a fact you should know, Nora. I don’t want to worry you, but occasionally, in rare instances, a cured abulic suffers a relapse.”

  She stopped, swallowed, forced a smile. “How rare is rare?”

  “Promise me something. If Kevin ever gets thected again—”

  “You think that’s a possibility?”

  “Not a strong one, no, but—”

  “How many relapses have there been?”

  “Two or three. Maybe more. Listen, Nora, if it happens to Kevin, you must flee Coatzacoalcos and take your chances with the disease.”

  “Flee? No, I’d try to arrange for a second treatment.”

  “When reinfection occurs, Lucido administers a new therapy—a dangerous therapy—against the family’s will. Last month I told you his church has taken an ugly turn. Ugly was too mild a word. Monstrous. Depraved. Antidote X is lethal.”

  “Lethal?”

  “Like a harpoon through the heart.”

  She rested her palm on Moby-Dick’s hump, stroking the snowy crown as if the whale were a household pet “Kevin’s fetch is gone,” she said in a thick whisper. “My son will never need Antidote X or any other medicine.”

  Nora’s death was punctual, striding into La Sangre de la Serpiente at midnight precisely. Evidently the leveler had just finished plundering the Queen, for she now wore the souvenir Inanna gown from Percy. A madras shoulder bag swung at Goneril’s side. Her hair was snakeless. Sucking up the last of her margarita, Nora realized that for better or worse, she indeed possessed the courage to accompany the fetch into the rain forest.

  “That’s my dress you’re wearing,” said Nora.

  “Tell me something, Sister.” Goneril caressed her silken sides. “Don’t you long to return to the stage?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Three kilometers from here lies an ancient theater. The resident troupe needs you—more than either you or they can imagine.”

  They left the cantina and headed north, walking along a narrow jungle pathway awash in natural light. The golden moon sat balanced atop God’s skull, as if He were using the satellite to improve His posture. Orchids perfumed the air. Tree frogs chirped, advertising their intention to beget a new generation.

  An hour’s hike brought Nora and Goneril to a stone pyramid rising among the trees like a pygmy volcano.

  “The finest piece of undiscovered Maya architecture in all Mexico,” said the fetch. “Nobody knows what it’s doing so far from the Yucatán.”

  A hundred steps towered before Nora. It could be worse, she thought, beginning the climb. Besides setting her bad knee to spasming, the exercise made her light-headed, though not so fuzzy that she failed to appreciate the temple at the summit, a squat building carved with writhing serpents and incomprehensible glyphs.

  They went inside, moving through the cool, cavernous air toward a stone bench. They sat down, Nora’s knee crying out for glory grease. From her bag Goneril produced three silver candlesticks holding bone-white tapers.

  “Gerard Korty told me that cured abulics don’t always stay cured,” said Nora.

  Goneril, lighting the tapers, didn’t respond.

  “Does Lucido really give relapsed abulics a lethal medicine?”

  Reaching again into her bag, Goneril drew out a bronze cup and a green ceramic jug sealed with a cork. The instant she uncapped the jug, the air filled with a fragrance unlike anything in Nora’s memory, a seeming mixture of boiling tar, decaying bananas, and tannic acid.

  “Pulque, fermented agave milk,” Goneril explained, pouring it into the bronze cup. “I’ve laced it with peyote buttons, morning-glory seeds, jimson weed, and those bitter psychedelic mushrooms the natives call teonanacatl, flesh of the gods.” She passed the cup to Nora. “This cocktail will take you to places you’ve never been before.”

  “It smells like sheep dip.”

  “It smells like the future.”

  “You’re trying to poison me.”

  “Drink deep, Sister, and learn the destiny of the West.”

  For reasons she couldn’t articulate, Nora decided to trust her leveler. She lifted the cup to her lips and sipped. The pulque tasted variously tart, sour, and bitter, and she choked it down only by calling on the same fortitude that had once enabled her to jump into Walden Pond on New Year’s Eve. She was about to remark on the cocktail’s protean flavor, when her immediate environment and the laws of physics parted company. The temple ceiling levitated, the walls flew away, and the floor vaporized, a dissolution accompanied by a clanging noise whose source she alternately located within the ambient flux and the depths of her throbbing skull.

  The clanging stopped; the world congealed. Sunlight stabbed Nora’s eyes.

  “Where are we?”

  “The City of Deus Absconditus,” said Goneril, “circa 2101 Common Era.”

  “What happened to the night?”

  “Pulque time keeps its own beat. I could detain you in Deus Absconditus an entire week and get you back to Coatzacoalcos by tomorrow morning.”

  One fact remained unaltered: they still occupied a bench—a convivial construction of molded plastic and vinyl cushions that would have probably struck the Maya as insufficiently austere. Gradually Nora absorbed her surroundings, an atrium of glass and steel, citizens bustling about in colorful cotton jumpsuits. A row of turnstiles spread before her
, behind which lay a streamlined passenger train, doors wide open, its coaches balanced atop a monorail like an acrobats unicycle hugging a tightrope.

  “Here,” said Goneril, handing Nora a metal token. “You can pay me back later.”

  Nora fingered the little disk, which bore the profile of Gerard Korty, then dropped it in the slot and pushed through the turnstile. They entered the nearest coach. The doors whooshed closed, and the train departed, gliding silently across the face of a vast city. No shining copper adorned its walls, no glowing lapis lazuli decorated its gates, but in its own way Deus Absconditus was as magnificent as Gilgamesh’s Uruk. Crystalline towers aspired to the clouds, threaded together with monorails and tramway cables. Pedestrians and skateboarders moved along paved walkways and multilevel esplanades, a network as devoid of automobiles as the heavens were empty of death’s-heads.

  “In the bygone age, nature was under relentless pressure from an unholy conjunction of free-market economics, totalitarian socialism, and the Book of Genesis,” Goneril explained. “Remember Who told the first humans, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it’? Remember Who said, ‘Have dominion over every living thing that moves upon the Earth’?”

  “So ultimately God’s death will have positive ecological consequences?”

  “For the citizens of the Third Millennium,” said Goneril, nodding, “the annihilation of His evil aspect will prove an unmixed blessing. But how, they will wonder, can we endure the loss of His benevolent side? They look around, and there’s the Stone Gospel, exhorting them to embrace Thomas Ockham’s little myths.”

  “God’s entrails instructed me to warn Gerard off the project.”

  “A jealous colon’s motives aren’t difficult to fathom. Jehovah has always hated rivals. Korty’s brain, if it survives the plague era, will help the West start believing in itself again.” Goneril swept her arm across the passing scene, a gesture subsuming the entire metropolis. “Welcome to the land of the grown-ups, Nora, where philosophy ranks higher than folding money, and every politician is a poet.”

  A river flowed through Deus Absconditus from north to south, its waters as clear and bubbly as cream soda, its course shaped like a gigantic cursive W. “I gather we’re in North America,” said Nora, “so that’s not the Uspanapa.”

  “North America, possibly Scandinavia, the British Isles, or Mediterranean Europe,” said Goneril. “It’s called the Erasmus, the purest river this side of the Jordan.”

  They got off at a station called Commissure Gardens, a plastic ziggurat perched on concrete stilts, descended to street level, and headed west across a scruffy urban terrain. Flanked by a branch library and a pizza parlor, an arresting edifice rose before them, a Gothic monstrosity with soaring belfries and garish stained-glass windows. The sign on the dirt lawn confirmed Nora’s guess that the building was a church, as did the hundreds of anxious celebrants swarming through the arched doorway.

  ASSEMBLY OF THE TURNED CHEEK

  Dolores M. Feick, Shepherd

  Today’s Sermon:

  “Can Francis’s Bacon Be Saved?”

  Goneril pulled a laptop computer from her bag, popped the screen, and called up a file. “Twenty-eight percent of the city’s churches spring from the Sermon on the Mount—the Assembly of the Gift Cloak, the Assembly of the Beloved Enemy, and so on—while the rest boast Judaic and Buddhist roots.” Closing the laptop, Goneril led Nora inside. “The first time I read the Gospel According to Saint Matthew” the fetch continued, “I said to myself, ‘This is great stuff. Somebody should base a religion on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.’ Here in Deus Absconditus, my wish has come to pass.”

  The instant Nora and Goneril found their seats, Dolores Feick—a hefty but energetic middle-aged woman wearing a silk muumuu adorned with newly harvested gloxinia—began speaking in a voice suggesting a sexually active viola. As the sermon progressed, Nora learned that (among their other missions) the city’s churches aimed “to keep the intellectuals from doing more damage than absolutely necessary.” If the God of Genesis was no environmentalist, Feick noted, then neither were many of history’s most venerated thinkers. “Nature,” Aristotle had evidently once argued, “has made all animals for the sake of Man.” In Descartes’s view, philosophy and science existed primarily “to make us masters and possessors of Nature.” Francis Bacon, to whose ponderous opinions Nora had already been exposed in a college course on Renaissance philosophy, wanted scientists to bend Nature toward “the service of Man.” The universe must be placed on “the rack” of empirical investigation, Bacon insisted, and forced to reveal its secrets.

  After the service, Goneril guided Nora across the street to a Chinese restaurant, where they dined with Soaragidan gusto on vegetable lo mein and tofu family style. The waiter delivered a pair of fortune cookies.

  “I’m starting to make the connections,” said Nora. “The magnifying glass, the Lobos’ tomb, the quote from Ling Po Fat, and now an actual fortune cookie.” She cracked the shell and glanced at the slip. I am indeed imprisoned in a Chinese fortune-cookie factory, but have you pondered the subtle cognitive snares in which you yourself may be trapped?—Ling Po Fat.

  Goneril nodded. “The magnifying glass was a hook.” She retrieved two fortunes from her cookie. “By introducing it into Kevin’s cereal, I tethered this journey to your old life, reality as you remember it, lest you imagine that you’re simply dreaming.” She displayed both messages. In her left hand: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.—Oliver Cromwell. In her right: The absence of God is God enough.—Saint Clair Cemin. “This isn’t a charade, Nora. It’s not a hallucination. Assuming the Stone Gospel pulls through, Deus Absconditus will become as real as your bad knee.”

  Goneril paid the bill by passing her signet ring across a sensor embedded in the table, then guided Nora back to Commissure Gardens. They climbed the stairs to the monorail station, hopped aboard the local, and rode downtown to Medulla Junction. Detraining, Nora followed her fetch into a district even seedier than Feick’s parish (broken windows, fractured sidewalks, drainage culverts dammed with wet paper), though she’d certainly seen worse neighborhoods in Boston.

  “So we’re not in Utopia after all,” said Nora.

  “Utopia?” said Goneril, sounding genuinely perplexed. “No, not that, thank God.” She guided Nora into a crumbling brick schoolhouse. “Show me a Utopia, and I’ll show you the back door to Perdition.”

  Slipping silently into wooden desks set against the far wall of an eighth-grade classroom, the time travelers observed fifteen adolescents grappling with a twenty-second-century curricular offering called Elementary Adulthood. The teacher, Bonnie Canzoneri, whose girlish freckles and swaying pigtails made her seem little older than her students, led a discussion that managed to be simultaneously spirited and focused.

  “Okay, here’s another one. You run a corporation that nets six hundred million a year selling chlorofluorocarbons. Two scientists come to you with evidence that your product is damaging Earth’s ozone shield. This crisis threatens to increase the skin-cancer rate, double the incidence of cataracts, and destroy the phytoplankton anchoring your planet’s food chains. As an adult, how do you respond?”

  A stocky African-American boy wearing granny glasses raised his hand. “Assuming the scientists have their facts straight, I guess I start phasing out production.”

  “You simply phase it out? Nothing more?”

  “I also try to reemploy all the people who used to make chlorofluorocarbons.”

  “A truly grown-up reaction, Farley. Did the scientists in question—Rowland and Molina—have their facts straight?” The teacher pointed to a willowy Caucasian girl waving her arms like a castaway signaling a rescue plane. “Phoebe?”

  “In 1995, Rowland and Molina received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for warning the world about increased ultraviolet-light levels.”

  “Who can describe DuPont Corporation’s reaction to the
UV menace? Hyuk-Jun?”

  “DuPont launched a massive campaign to convince legislators that no real danger existed,” said a lanky Korean boy with dimpled cheeks.

  “How do we account for this bizarre behavior? Didn’t DuPont’s board of directors care whether their grandchildren got skin cancer or their great-grandchildren inherited a sterile planet?”

  Without waiting to be called on, a sallow young woman with hazel eyes said, “According to Thomas Ockham, many people in the theistic era regarded Earthly existence as a mere rehearsal for immortality. The environment didn’t matter, because everyone was ultimately going to Heaven or, in certain cases, Hell.”

  “Okay, but was that necessarily the attitude of the DuPont executives?”

  “I’ll tell you my mother’s theory,” piped up Phoebe. “People who draw gigantic salaries for running large corporations have trouble thinking straight.”

  Bonnie Canzoneri now changed the subject, inviting her students to consider the topic of “affirmative fornication.” Much to her disappointment, Nora didn’t get to hear the subsequent discussion.

  “The pulque has run its course,” Goneril said as the classroom began to dissolve.

  “But I don’t want to leave.” Even as Nora grabbed hold of her desk, it transformed into the familiar stone bench. “Damn.”

  Dawn’s anemic light permeated the Maya temple. “We’ll take another trip tonight,” promised Goneril. “Your education is far from complete.”

  Woozily, uncertainly, Nora rose from the bench. Her head ached. Her tongue and eyeballs throbbed.

  “Impressive,” she said.

  Goneril returned the pulque jug to her bag. “Homo sapiens is an amazing animal, Sister. Get God and Aristotle off its back, and miracles start becoming the norm.”

  As Gerard steered the pony cart through Coatzacoalcos, a rubber gas mask and Malvina Fergus’s cross in his lap, two questions consumed him. Should he tell Anna Fergus that the grave marker had failed to move Lucido? And should he terminate the psychoanalyst’s reign of terror by killing him?