by James Morrow
Dressed in his felt hat and ragged serape, Julius lit his clay pipe, puffed three times, and faced Gerard. “Protectors are on the way,” said the fetch, a promise he’d been voicing in one form or another ever since Gerard’s return from Mount Tapílula. “Once you finish your magnum opus, the means to preserve it will become apparent.”
“And what if Catemaco tosses her cookies before help arrives?” asked Gerard.
The fetch winced and sucked silently on his pipe.
Gerard’s remorse tormented him even more than his seismic anxieties. Until the moment of Lucido’s death, he hadn’t realized just how deep within him the hooks of Holy Mother Church resided. He’d committed a mortal sin. His soul was suppurating. Condemned to Circle VII, he would be eternally scalded by hot blood while Dante, Virgil, and the Centaur looked on.
So with our faithful escort we set off
Along the shore that flanked the scarlet stream,
The boiling wretches moaning in our ears.
Some saw I all blood-covered to the brow,
Of whom the Centaur said, “Vile tyrants, these,
Grown fat on booty bought with murderous hands…”
Gerard’s mentor, the renowned portrait sculptor Louis Endicott Frye, had once theorized that urgency aided the creative process, preventing the artist from sacrificing essences to details, but a volcanic eruption was hardly the sort of deadline the old man had been imagining. And yet somehow Gerard kept on working, despite the pressure (or because of it), despite his guilt (or because of it), and on Friday morning he declared the project finished. As he gave Fiona a Cook’s tour, he couldn’t help feeling intimations of posthumous glory. People would remember Gerard Korty. His name would live in the annals of passion. Entering the right hemisphere, Fiona took immediate joy in the Romeo and Juliet diorama: Juliet standing on the balcony above her father’s walled orchard, unaware of Romeo concealed in the shadows below, her famous speech suspended on a nearby plaque. (“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title.”) Fiona was equally moved by the Sermon on the Mount featured in the cerebellum, each beatitude emblazoned on a separate cloud.
They returned to daylight, the air laden with noxious vapors, and started into the jungle, reaching El Dorado by noon. While Fiona lingered on the studio grounds, trying to comfort their pony—evidently the animal could sense imminent eruptions—Gerard stumbled into the kitchen, weary but exhilarated. He removed the last bottle of Monte Albán from the liquor cabinet, slumped into a chair, and poured himself a generous amount of mescal. He’d done it, by damn. He’d translated Parables for a Post-Theistic Age into jade, turquoise, gold foil, and reubenite. Little myths would illumine the human future.
He was about to reward himself with a second mescal when Hubbard Richter scuttled scorpionlike into the kitchen gripping a Colt .45 and wearing a leather cartridge belt stuffed with dozens of rounds.
“Thanks to our association,” said Richter, “I’ve become adept at recognizing chisel marks. In marble, reubenite, and Adrian Lucido.”
Gerard’s intestines tightened; his bladder autonomously emptied itself. He considered screaming for Julius to appear and save him (according to Nora, fetches readily intimidated Richter), but instead he simply said, with a nonchalance that astonished him, “Would you care for a mescal?”
“You used a tooth chisel, a bushing chisel, and—”
Before Richter could say “frosting chisel,” the kitchen began to vibrate…the kitchen, the house, the grounds, the forest. The volcano’s fury had seemingly seized the entire state of Veracruz. Frying pans rocketed off their hooks; wine bottles vacated the pantry; crockery shot from the shelves and broke. As Richter’s gun hit the floor, Gerard shouted his gratitude toward Heaven, though he suspected that El Cráneo had spared him not from benevolence but merely to inflict a subsequent punishment far worse than bullets.
Catemaco’s wrath increased, ejecting Gerard from his chair as the floor pitched upward like the lid of a jack-in-the-box. Airborne, he hit the window, which promptly shattered, flecking him with broken glass. He tumbled into the yard, gained his feet, and started across the studio grounds, glancing back in time to see Richter, gun in hand, climb through the jagged frame.
An apocalyptic thunder shook the air, like the rumble of an immense bowling ball hurled by God’s own hand. Gerard ran for the stockade gate. Richter fired. Pain blossomed in Gerard’s side. He stumbled and hit the dirt, pressing his hand against the screaming hole. Warm blood seeped between his fingers.
“You have no talent, Korty!”
The volcanic tremors continued, booming in counterpoint to the mysterious thunder, Assuring El Dorado, crack breeding crack until the studio grounds resembled the face of a shattered mirror. Gerard looked up. Richter charged toward him, bobbing his head and laughing insanely as he struggled to negotiate the shifting terrain. The deacon drew within twenty feet, aimed his pistol. Gerard steeled himself for Circle VII. Already he could feel the scarlet stream encircling his neck and trickling hotly down his throat.
“Your crocodiles look like chameleons!”
It was Martin Luther, of all people, who rescued Gerard. A particularly ferocious vibration possessed the statue. Uprooted, the Great Reformer struck Richter squarely and slammed him into the dirt. The statue followed him down but retained its momentum, a full metric ton of sculpted reubenite rolling across the deacon’s legs with a noise suggestive of a bear dancing on dead twigs.
“I’ll kill him!” wailed Fiona, snugging her fists into Gerard’s armpits. “Where’s my fucking knife? I’ll kill him!”
She dragged the sculptor out of range, behind an Idorasag that Richter had refused to export to Tamoanchan. Gerard’s wound was excruciating, a preview of the inferno to come.
The incessant thunder drew Gerard’s attention to the south stockade wall. Seeing the source of the noise, he released an astonished cry, louder even than his howls of pain. It was the Stone Gospel, his magnum opus, shaken from its perch atop the grassy hummock and launched on a course toward El Dorado. Relentlessly the massive rock rolled through the jungle, severing vines and mowing down trees. Within seconds it breached the stockade wall, the pales tendering no more resistance than a house of cards would offer a hurricane, and now it was in the yard, heading straight for Richter.
God knows what the deacon thought as, flailing around in the dirt, he flopped over and beheld a gigantic human brain bearing down on him like a runaway locomotive. His features contracted into quintessential bewilderment A high-pitched whimper broke from his throat, he got off a final, impotent shot—and then it was over, Richter gone, pulped, demoted to a condition somewhere between roadkill and creamed corn. The juggernaut rolled on, smashing through the south wall.
“Holy Mother of God,” gasped Fiona.
Smeared with Richter’s blood, the Stone Gospel reached the bluff and, behaving as would any thirty-ton object under the circumstances, fell. A terrible spasm pierced Gerard, as if the Lucifer of Canto XXXIV had inserted a frozen finger in his wound, and yet his perplexity absorbed him no less than his pain. Had Julius lied about the brain having protectors? Where were they? How could a sculpture change the world from the bottom of a minor Mexican river?
He feinted, overcome by blood loss and the limits of human reason.
Even if she lived to be a hundred—a real possibility now that Goneril had left for parts unknown—Nora knew she would always retain a searing mental picture of the reubenite brain, curiously bloodstained, as it sailed off the bluff and plunged toward the Uspanapa, inevitably making noisy and destructive contact with the Queen.
Shackled by gravity, the sculpture descended. It snapped both smokestacks, pulverized the pilothouse, and sent the helm spinning away like a discus. It hit the texas deck…the observation deck…the saloon deck, crushing the cabins and staterooms like an elephant sitting on a wicker
commode. Planks and rails pinwheeled away, littering the river with flotsam. Eventually the thing came to rest on the cargo deck, medulla socketed into the hull, hemispheres extending over the water on both sides, an image that to Nora suggested an egg of infinite significance occupying an immense waterborne nest.
Miraculously, the steamboat stayed afloat, her hull evidently intact. Whether the whole impossible event traced to God, chance, the Fates, or some equally quixotic force, Nora suddenly understood how Gerard’s magnum opus would escape the volcano. True, the vital connection between helm and rudder had probably been severed, but jerry-rigging an alternative surely lay within their collective competence.
“Jesus!” gasped Kevin, clutching his Idorasag as he might a teddy bear. “Bull’s-eye!”
“Bull’s-eye,” echoed Nora, wonderstruck.
“My Soaragid!” wailed Kevin.
“We’ll dig her out.”
“My Orgasiad! My Risogada!”
Almost as astonishing as the Stone Gospel’s flight was the fate that now claimed the reubenite Erasmus. Tom from his pedestal, in thrall to the ceaseless tremors, the humanist theologian somersaulted over the bluff and hit the steamboat’s stem, his scholar’s cap acting as a spearpoint. He punctured the foredeck, met the hull, and stopped. Nora blinked in bewilderment. Yes, it was true. The Queen had just acquired a figurehead, positioned unconventionally with feet in the air: Erasmus as yogi, humanism tempered by Hinduism, West meets East.
As the midday skull pounded down, Nora and her son sat huddled together on the shore, transfixed by the odd sight of a steamboat that had not only a brain for a superstructure but a theologian for a bowsprit. Nora was about to suggest that they paddle over and inspect the damage when a shadow crept across the beach. She looked up. Gerard stood amid the reeds, eyes glassy, leaning on a distraught Fiona. His breathing was shallow and fitful. Blood marred his blue denim shirt.
“Richter shot him,” said Fiona, easing her semiconscious husband onto the soft sand. She pointed toward the Queen and its peculiar cargo. “At least the bastard got punished. That’s part of him on the cerebrum.”
Nora, rising, moved toward Gerard, knelt down, and lifted his shirt The hole in his side was deep and purple, ringed by petals of tom flesh. There was no exit wound.
“Is he dying?” asked Fiona.
“I don’t know,” said Nora.
Operating on some felicitous combination of instinct and reason, as if her mind had been molded by long sojourns in both Uruk and Deus Absconditus, Nora took up her stave and ferried Kevin over to the Queen. He must raise the anchors, she told him, then light the boilers and hunt up medical supplies. She returned to the beach. Gerard was as white as coconut meat. His brow burned with fever. Working in silent accord, the women loaded him onto the skiff. Briefly he awoke, mumbled something incomprehensible—Nora caught “buckets” and “syllable”—and returned to darkness.
They bore him over the Uspanapa, Fiona cradling her husband’s head between her knees while cooling his brow with handfuls of river water. As Nora worked her stave, she gave her companion a short breathless account of her visions: the Assembly of the Turned Cheek, the Deontology Bowl, Holistica, all of it.
“Gerard’s brain must be protected at all costs,” Nora concluded.
“Obviously,” said Fiona.
“Unless, of course, it was a dream.”
“No, friend. The brain must be protected especially if it was a dream.”
Boarding the steamboat near her prow, they removed a dozen shattered planks blocking the pituitary portal, then carried Gerard into the Hall of Artistic Passion—his favorite part of the sculpture, Fiona said. The exhibits were in disarray, though surprisingly coherent given the fury of the Stone Gospel’s fall. They deposited Gerard alongside the Van Gogh tableau.
Fifteen minutes later, Kevin entered the right hemisphere, proudly displaying a first-aid kit he’d salvaged from the wreckage, as well as his Soaragid and his Risogada. The engine, he was happy to report, had survived the Queen’s encounter with the reubenite mass. The paddle wheel seemed functional. The burners were lit, and soon they’d have two hundred pounds of steam pressure. He’d even restored steering to the boat by transforming a dislocated ceiling beam into a tiller, lashing it at right angles to the rudder post.
“When you pull the throttle, will the paddles move?” Nora asked him.
“Idorasag willing.”
Dropping to her knees, she opened the first-aid kit—the brain’s descent had scrambled the contents, but nothing appeared cracked or broken—and examined her unconscious patient The bleeding had stopped, but the wound still looked dreadful. Carefully she disinfected the tom tissues, swabbing them with a cotton ball soaked in iodine, then bandaged the hole with linen.
The kit included a large glass-and-steel syringe plus a dozen vials of penicillin and seven hits of morphine. When Fiona insisted that they administer the antibiotic right away, Nora ran her index finger along the barrel of the hypodermic needle and shuddered.
“You can accidentally kill a person with one of these,” she said. “Force too many air bubbles into the bloodstream, and…”
“I can do it,” said Kevin evenly.
Automatically Nora asked a question that, in over a decade of mother-son interactions, had never once produced a negative answer. “Are you sure?”
He reminded her of how Kevin the Incredible had periodically employed a large syringe to inject a dead, defoliated rosebush with “the elixir of life,” thereby making it sprout a dozen blossoms. He filled the glass barrel with penicillin, expelled a single drop, rubbed alcohol on the thick blue vein traversing Gerard’s forearm, and inserted the needle. Retracting the rubber stopper, he sucked a drop of blood into the barrel. He winced and pushed the plunger.
“Teach me how to do that,” said Fiona to Kevin.
“Later,” said Nora. “We have a volcano to conquer.”
The instant the three fugitives stepped through the pituitary portal and into the daylight, the long anticipated explosion occurred, so loud it seemed to shatter the air itself, tearing each oxygen atom from its twin. Boulders flew in all directions; they bounced off papaya trees, mashed banana plants, and slammed against the Stone Gospel, lodging in the cerebral convolutions. No sooner had the rocks landed than the ashes came, a mass of dark particles spiraling outward from Mount Catemaco like a tornado made of hornets. The sun vanished. El Cráneo went into eclipse.
Gradually the ashes settled, sifting into the jungle like negative snow and turning the Uspanapa black. The Queen became as grimy as a coal barge, her crew as sooty as chimney sweeps. Cinders filled their mouths and clogged their ears.
As radiant red lava streamed down Catemaco’s slopes, Nora got to work. Spitting out ashes, she ordered Kevin to the engine room, then scanned the ruins of the forward galley. She spotted a fire ax and pulled it from the rubble. Tightening her grip on the handle, she raised the ax high. Bits of flaming rock attacked her like kamikaze cicadas. One spark struck her neck, eating into the skin. A second branded her brow. A third seared her cheek.
Nora brought the ax down hard, severing the nearest bow rope.
The lava advanced relentlessly, Gaia’s own menstrual flow, the viscous mass burbling and glowing as the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental channeled it toward the river basin. Nora hadn’t been so terrified since the Anglo-Saxons tried to gun her down with their Patton tank. Reaching the bluff behind the Queen, the lava continued to roll, dribbling onto the beach like incandescent oatmeal boiling over the sides of an immense cauldron. Nora severed another bow rope. The viscous earth started coming in long serpentine waves, each comber sending up plumes of steam as it fell sizzling into the Uspanapa. She cut another rope. A lava wave shot off the bluff, arced over the beach, and splashed down within ten meters of the Queen’s stem. Nora cut the last bow rope, expelled a mouthful of ashes, and, passing the ax to Fiona, commanded her to run through the brain and stand ready by the aft lines.
&nbs
p; Nora needed height—perspective. The debris yielded a wooden ladder. She leaned it against the left frontal lobe and ascended. Ashes covered the crown of the brain, gusting along the cerebral commissure like dead New England leaves, but otherwise the Stone Gospel made a reasonable pilothouse. Smoke poured from the jagged metal stumps that had once been the Queen’s stacks: a hopeful sign—the boilers were functioning. To the north lay the open river. Nora’s bums ached and her bad knee throbbed as she hobbled down the commissure, ashes padding her footfalls, and glanced toward the stem.
The recent barrage of ejecta had ripped away the remainder of the cargo deck and its superstructure, exposing the engine, boilers, burners, and pipework to the gritty air. Ax in hand, Fiona leaned against the transom. Kevin crouched above the boiler pit, his right arm feeding wood scraps to the flames, his left wrapped around the improvised tiller. Covered in ash, the four mahogany idols sat atop the gunwale like starlings on a power line. As far as Nora could tell, the only serious damage caused by the flying boulders were the two holes in the starboard boiler, one large, the other small, both releasing trickles of water into the hull.
A lava wave descended, missing the Queen by barely five meters.
“Steam?” she called down to Kevin.