by James Morrow
A woman shrieked, “No!”
Her sister shouted, “Stop!”
“Shut up, both of you! By employing the serrated part of the blade like so”—a sawing noise—“I gain access…to the cardiac cavity.”
“Please! Please!”
“Silence!”
Anthony and Cassie exchanged horrified looks.
As the daughters’ screaming reached a crescendo, Lucido ordered their cage covered. The functionaries did as instructed—footsteps, a grunt, the rustle of the tarpaulin, each sound punctuated by the women’s cries.
A stench stung Anthony’s nostrils, the same ferrous fragrance he’d experienced many months earlier when the divine heart disintegrated over the English Channel.
“Finally, we use the tip of the blade to sever the blood vessels, and, voilà, the heart is free. But it appears that once again a plague family has failed to grasp the theory behind Antidote X. Mr. Dansk, Mr. Richter, will you kindly…?”
Footsteps, six gunshots, silence.
“My God,” wailed Cassie.
“Jesus,” rasped Anthony.
“Well done,” said Lucido. “Mr. Jackendorf, will you deposit the heart in the proper receptacle?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Perhaps you gentlemen have questions?”
“How long before the fetch exits his host?” asked Dansk.
“Usually the phenomenon occurs instantly, though sometimes—ah, look, there he goes!”
Fifteen seconds of quiet followed, during which Anthony pictured the old man’s leveler ascending like a puff of smoke.
Dansk said, “So the patient has now achieved immortality?”
“That’s what our best evidence suggests,” said Lucido.
“Does this mean we’re shutting down the temples?” asked Jackendorf, apparently concerned about his job security.
“Somatocism still has certain advantages over its successor,” said Lucido. “Whereas Somatocist acolytes remain in this particular world, with its predictable pleasures and satisfactions, Antidote X affords entrance only to the terra incognita of the Olmec paradise. As our knowledge expands, we’ll be able to determine which cases would benefit more from Tamoanchan and which should go directly to the altar. And now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I must write up this latest experiment.”
“There’s something I should tell you about the other family,” said Jackendorf. “They know Korty. Or at least they know somebody who knows him—Nora Burkhart, always pestering me about the Van Home boy. She makes me nervous. I think we should get it over with.”
“No,” whispered Cassie.
“No,” echoed Anthony.
“Tomorrow’s sun, Mr. Jackendorf” said Lucido, “will rise soon enough.”
When Goneril casually announced that the third and final pulque cocktail wouldn’t be taking them to Deus Absconditus, Nora made no effort to hide her disappointment. After two trips to the enchanting metropolis, she’d come to feel like an honorary citizen. She longed for Deus Absconditus as if it were her one true home.
“Tonight,” said the fetch, “I shall show you a rather different sort of world. Its inhabitants call it Holistica.”
Nora stepped into the Maya temple, sat on the stone bench, and apprehensively accepted a cup of pulque from the fetch’s cold hands. Jungle sounds filled the room, an amalgam of overlapping chirps, caws, screeches, and drones. She drank.
“Is Holistica another city?” asked Nora as the hallucinogens took charge of her brain.
“More like a village,” said Goneril. “A relentlessly pleasant place. The people have no meanness in them.”
Once again the temple dissolved, a phenomenon that deposited Nora in the cleft of a mammoth cedar tree, Goneril beside her. The surrounding hills quivered with wild grasses and mulberry bushes. A solitary sun warmed Nora’s lace. In the valley below, the Erasmus River (she recognized its cursive W shape) gamboled toward an unseen delta. Larks and thrushes glided through an orange grove, singing on the wing. Cottony masses of cloud rode the sky, a wide blue vault as free of God’s skull as were the heavens above Deus Absconditus.
As Nora and her fetch descended from the cedar tree and proceeded into the valley, it occurred to Nora that a trek like this would ordinarily start her bad knee vibrating. Among their many impressive properties, pulque cocktails were evidently potent analgesics.
In the misty distance rose Holistica, a clutch of mud huts suggesting immense bran muffins. Reaching the river, the time travelers started along a dirt road rutted by the traffic of countless carts and wagons. As the sun reached its zenith, they passed through a wooden portal bearing an inscription written with a length of vine, MODERNITY-FREE ZONE, below which hung a sign quoting the American naturalist John Muir.
LET THE CHILDREN WALK WITH NATURE, LET THEM SEE THE BEAUTIFUL BLENDINGS AND COMMUNIONS OF DEATH AND LIFE, AND THEY WILL LEARN THAT DEATH IS STINGLESS INDEED, AND AS BEAUTIFUL AS LIFE.
“If Korty’s brain perishes,” said Goneril, “we can expect a world dedicated to neither Old-Time Theism nor Elementary Adulthood, but to something else entirely…”
A slender and attractive woman emerged from the nearest hut and introduced herself as Theodora Shaman, first assistant matriarch of Holistica and chair of the Welcoming Committee. Not since meeting Kevin for the first time—a warm, moist, wrinkled baby lying on her chest—had Nora found another person so immediately appealing. With her grass skirt, calico chemise, and hair arrayed in daisies, Theodora seemed as integral to the landscape as the omnipresent honeybees.
“We don’t get many time travelers,” said the matriarch after Goneril explained where they came from. “Stay with us as long as you want Our brother, the sacred river, will give you his fish. Our sister, the hallowed grove, will feed you her oranges.”
As Nora’s sojourn elapsed, each day passing in a mere Coatzacoalcos hour, she readily adapted to the pulse of Holistican life. The people devoted their mornings to prayers and hymns, including a predawn chant of gratitude to the Universal Energy Entity for delivering them from linear thought and unfeeling reason. Afternoons were given to practical pursuits: weaving, gardening, harvesting, mulching. Each evening, the villagers gathered around the campfire to share communal myths. Nora was especially impressed by Jared Shaman’s heartfelt performance of “The Little Engine That Achieved Higher Consciousness,” a parable about a steam locomotive that realizing it was a machine, did the honorable thing and disassembled itself.
On the fifth night, Nora’s hosts asked her to enliven their gatherings with what Sasha Shaman called “horror stories from the Nightmare Age.” Nora happily complied: her first opportunity since leaving the Sumerian Circus to command center stage. “Tell us the legend of the Singer sewing machine,” the Holisticans requested. “Spin us a tale of fluorescent lighting, and hold nothing back.” “Chill our blood with Web browsers—go ahead, we can take it.” At first Nora tried giving her improvisations a conventional narrative form. She reimagined Arachne as an aboriginal artisan destroyed by the Industrial Revolution, made Orpheus a symphony orchestra conductor driven mad by Western competitiveness, and turned Narcissus into a casualty of rationalistic individualism. But her audience, she soon realized, required nothing of such pointedness or complexity. She had merely to articulate a phrase like “pocket calculator,” “digital watch,” “fetal heart monitor,” or “dual carburetors” to get the villagers swooning with the thrill of the forbidden.
On the first weekend of every month, the Holisticans held their Feast of Remembrance, a joyous celebration devoted (in the words of Second Assistant Matriarch Suki Shaman) “to the creative destruction of the four false gods.” Representing these detestable deities were fifty male mannikins crafted from straw and outfitted with wooden plaques specifying their identities. One scarecrow collection bore labels reading THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS. Another bunch was captioned MECHANISTIC MEDICINE. A third, ALL TECHNOLOGIES EMPLOYING METAL OR PLASTIC. A fourth, THE 18TH-CENTURY ENLIGHTENMENT. On Sa
turday morning, the celebrants embedded large rocks in the thirteen ILLUSION OF PROGRESS scarecrows, loaded the heavy effigies onto canoes, and sent them to the bottom of the Alph River (as the locals called the Erasmus). Turning next to the eleven scarecrows captioned MECHANISTIC MEDICINE, the celebrants spent the afternoon systematically dissecting them. At dusk, the Holisticans set fire to the fourteen ALL TECHNOLOGIES EMPLOYING METAL OR PLASTIC scarecrows, using these humanoid torches to illuminate a five-hour marathon of mutual massage.
Sunday morning brought the eagerly awaited Sky Dumping contest, which Gareth Shaman called “a noncompetitive athletic event keyed to Nature’s rhythms.” The game began shortly after the referees placed the dozen 18TH-CENTURY ENLIGHTENMENT scarecrows in three piles at the bottom of a ravine. Spanning the gorge was a platform supporting three sets of seven wooden chairs with saucer-size holes in their centers, each set suspended over a scarecrow cluster. Team Alpha, Team Beta, and Team Omega strode across the platform, dropped their various trousers and underclothes, and assumed appropriate positions on the perforated chairs. Theodora Shaman blew on her elk horn, and the excited athletes proceeded to defecate, groaning and straining as the other Holisticans encouraged them with nonfavoritistic cheers. At last a winner emerged, Team Beta, which had buried the dreaded Enlightenment in under seven minutes.
“It’s not a very sophisticated argument,” commented Nora’s fetch, “but it boasts a certain piquancy.”
During the week that followed, the sympathy that Goneril had initially shown toward Holistica turned into undisguised antagonism. Each night around the campfire, aided by her laptop computer, she attempted to embarrass her listeners with selected bits of regional history. Though initially scandalized by Goneril’s rudeness, Nora soon realized that such information held no power to perturb the villagers.
With supreme aplomb, Cecily Shaman addressed the issue of the Great Typhus Outbreak of A.D. 2096. “Our ancestors taught us never to use that word, typhus. Such language, along with syphilis, polio, and scarlet fever, bespeaks a nonspiritual, mechanistic understanding of the human body. In Holistica we believe in natural healing, counting our germs and viruses as essential to the divine harmony.”
“But don’t they sometimes kill you?” asked Nora.
“As Saint Muir revealed, rationalist concepts like kill give death an undeserved authority.”
Silas Shaman smoothly fielded Goneril’s question about the Great Drought of 2115 and the famine that had followed. “Obviously you’ve never seen a person transmogrify through starvation. It’s an authentic spiritual experience.”
“Starvation, or watching it?” asked Nora.
“Both. True, the hungernaut suffers momentary discomfort, but then a flood of cosmic awareness arrives.”
On the day before their scheduled departure, Nora and her leveler went canoeing on the Alph. The entire river valley was a latter-day Eden, dotted with tranquil glades and fecund glens, each habitat hosting its own appealing combination of birds, deer, rabbits, and butterflies.
“So what do you think?” asked Goneril.
“Holistica is beautiful,” said Nora. “The skies are clear, the rivers pure, the people happy. I can’t stand it.”
“It’s settled, then? You’ll guard Korty’s brain?”
Nora nodded thoughtfully.
“When human beings aspire to the intellectual condition of woodchucks,” said Goneril, “they are no longer in touch with their potential.”
“It’s not the primitivism that bothers me, or the childishness, or the sentimentality, or any of those things.”
Using her paddle as a rudder, Goneril turned the canoe around, pointing the prow toward the village. “So what bothers you?”
“Heaven is boring,” said Nora.
“It could use a jazz band.”
“A jazz band, a chamber ensemble, a comedy troupe, a softball league, a Ferris wheel, a Charles Dickens novel, a recording of Rhapsody in Blue, a print of Casablanca. Take me back to Mexico, Goneril, before I go insane.”
Matters of Life and Death
METICULOUSLY HE TAPED the handle of his soft-iron carving hammer. Methodically he sharpened his T7 tooth chisel, B4 bushing chisel, and F9 frosting chisel. If he got the details right, Gerard believed, then his mad, impossible plan might work.
He took particular care in selecting a coign of vantage. Slipping into Lucido’s library, he positioned himself behind the Henry James first editions. He would not sully Homer, Shakespeare, or his beloved Dante by making them accessories before the fact.
The lava picture from Mount Catemaco—a muscular sculptor brandishing the tools of his trade—had never left him. But what, exactly, had the sculptor been about to carve? Entwined lovers? A smiling saint? An angry god?
“Something violent,” Fiona had insisted.
Peering outward, Gerard hefted his valise. The carving hammer clanked against the chisels. Lucido shuffled into the central hexagon. All six video screens were alive, each displaying what Gerard took to be a 1950s Hollywood science-fiction movie, the black-and-white images dramatically offsetting the blood that slicked Lucido’s fingers and the red stains that blotched his caftan.
“Violent but necessary,” Fiona had added.
“Entirely necessary?” Gerard had asked.
Lucido stripped down to the skin, filled a glass with red wine, and removed his Moroccan leather syringe case from the drawer beneath the divan. He injected himself with his usual dose of hyperion, then activated the hot tub. The waters whirled. Bubbles flew away like spindrift. Easing himself into the maelstrom, he positioned his weighty frame on the submerged seat.
“Good evening,” said Gerard as he stepped away from the bookcases, heart pounding, valise in hand. He felt bisected, a riven block of Makrana marble, so that the person thinking Gerard’s thoughts and the insensate Angel of Vengeance now entering the hexagon seemed two entirely different creatures.
Lucido scowled. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but you do.”
“What are you talking about? Is my statue finished?”
“I found a suitable chunk of reubenite. The maquette now satisfies me, but I’m planning to employ an unprecedented technique, and I want your approval.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A unique type of chisel blow,” Gerard elaborated as the Angel of Vengeance placed the valise on the hexagon floor and drew out the hammer and the tooth chisel. “A bold stroke.”
“You’re not making sense,” said Lucido.
“Whereas ripping out children’s hearts makes a lot of sense.”
Lucido’s pudgy fingers curled around the wineglass. “I admire your talent sir, but you know nothing of metaphysics. The post-theistic man has broken free of rationalist inhibitions. William Blake said it well. ‘May God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep.’”
“Joshua Alport wasn’t suffering from Newton’s sleep. He was suffering from abulia, and you murdered him.”
“You’re a despicable little spy, Gerard Korty.” Lucido raised the glass to his mouth and sipped. The wine reddened his lips. “This quarrel has turned tedious. Please leave at once.”
“Not before I show you my stroke.”
On the nearest screen a beleaguered man, his body reduced to the size of Tom Thumb, used a construction nail to battle a tarantula.
A different tarantula occupied the opposite screen, a mutant twenty feet high. Hairy, twitchy, and evidently enraged, it was industriously disassembling a large house with its front legs, much to the occupants’ distress.
“I understand your skepticism concerning Antidote X, but it has a more honorable lineage than you imagine.” Lucido set his wineglass on the tiled deck. “Every important religion is predicated on blood. Burnt offerings may fuel the engines of faith, but plasma oils the gears. A father, the Hebrew God, contrives the murder of His son, Jesus, for the sake of a greater good. Some people would say that’s an ugly story, but I, for one, am moved to t
ears. Do you know the problem with the world today? People fear the greater good. The Hebrew God didn’t fear it. He welcomed those Roman nails, chewing through His son’s wrists. He welcomed that crown of thorns, that thrusting spear.”
“You demented pig,” muttered Gerard while the avenging angel licked the tip of the tooth chisel and advanced toward the hot tub.
“I’ll tell you an unpleasant truth,” said Lucido. “Metaphysics prospers in spite of men like you.”
The angel kicked over the wineglass, shattering it, then crouched down beside his enemy. He pressed the chisel point squarely against Lucido’s left shoulder, and then he—
Eyes widening, Lucido stared at the steel blade. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“I wouldn’t, no, but he—”
—struck the chisel hard. The blade followed a true course, burrowing five inches into Lucido’s torso, lodging amid muscles and fat. The accompanying cry was so loud, it frightened both Gerard and the angel.
Lucido, screaming, stood up, bathwater streaming from his legs and abdomen. Before his enemy could remove the chisel, the angel wrapped his palm around the handle and, like young Arthur freeing sword from anvil, pulled out the blade. A ribbon of fresh red blood rolled down Lucido’s chest. It hit the whirlpool, tinting the waters the color of a jaguar’s tongue.
“O divine Agoridas,” hissed the analyst, gritting his teeth and staring heavenward. “O prince of pain.” He faced the angel, addressing him in a voice that probably owed its uncanny tranquillity to hyperion-15. “I’ve never had an experience like this,” he said, sounding strangely grateful. “Astonishing.” Swerving, he fixed on the combat between the little man and the ferocious tarantula. The hero suddenly triumphed, impaling the spider on the construction nail. “Mr. Richter, come here! There’s someone I need you to kill!”