by Andrew Fox
The accent is different — the subtle Jamaican singsong has vanished — but otherwise, this man speaks with the voice of Hud Walterson.
“He showed us the way to be freed of sin. And then he ascended. But he has not left us. He will never leave us. His beauty, his example, his voice will live on forever!”
And suddenly, the voice is here. Elvis’s voice, booming from loudspeakers all around the auditorium. “Amazing Grace.” It’s like warm oil being poured in my ears. It’s too much, these two voices at once. The voice of Elvis — didn’t I close my ears to it when I sold my birthright? And it was the voice of Hud Walterson that I turned to in my grief, losing myself in building a movement that was the reification of Hud’s mania.
All through this journey, I’ve been afraid to listen to the voice of Elvis, afraid I wouldn’t be ready. But I’m hearing it now, truly hearing it. “Amazing Grace”… he’s singing it directly to me. To me. To save a wretch like ME… I was a wretch, a miserable wretch who helped start a movement that is destroying this country, that has made our women infertile, that has hollowed out our nation.
What would you have me do? Strive to tear down what I helped build? But what is the sense in that? With Metaboloft spreading through the food chain, isn’t tearing down the Good Humor movement futile?
What do you want of me?
I clench my eyes shut, but not soon enough to stop the tears from escaping. What do you want of me? I press my hands against my ears. But I can’t hold back the voice. Are you telling me that futility is no excuse? Is that it? That so long as there’s still breath in my body, I’m not allowed to despair? That giving in to the forces which eat us is not an option? Is that it?
The music ends. The vibrations of his voice fade from the air. But they don’t fade from my mind. I wipe my eyes. I was blind, but now I see. I want to see. I want so much to see. I will make your mortal remains my talisman in this struggle. My unavoidable struggle to undo the evil I’ve done, even in the face of the end of everything.
The congregants are filing up the steps onto the stage. Toward Trotmann at the podium.
“Go on,” the woman closest to me says. “It’s time for the marking.”
The marking? Maybe I should head for the exits, mumble something about needing the bathroom? No, I couldn’t duck out now without calling attention to myself.
I head for the steps. He hasn’t seen me since I was a little boy. Surely, after all these decades, I’ll be merely a stranger to him.
Trotmann reaches down and touches the young blonde woman ahead of me on the forehead, saying something to her I can’t hear. Then she walks to the opposite stairs. Just a few seconds. That’s all. Then I can hide myself until everyone is gone.
My turn comes. My heart feels like it’s beating in the center of my skull. Trotmann leers down at me like a liver-spotted gargoyle. He dips his right forefinger into the jar of fat, the fat he’s just extracted.
He reaches with that glistening finger for my forehead, but then stops, his eyes focusing on my face. “I don’t believe,” he says, “that I’ve seen you in church before.”
“No,” I say, smelling the sourness of his breath. “I’m new.”
“Who is your sponsor?”
Should I mention Oretha Denoux? Does she even know about this church? “Uh, Betty, Betty — oh, Christ, I can’t remember her last name now, and I don’t even see her here tonight —”
He squints at the line of congregants waiting for his touch, then looks back at me. “We’ll have to speak later, sir. Always good to… welcome… a new member to the church.”
He reaches down and smears the fat on my forehead. “Carry this reminder,” he says, “that the burden of sin may only be lifted through the holy cannula.”
The touch of his leathery finger, the warm, cloying weight of the drip of human fat on my forehead (the fat of Hud Walterson!) — it’s revolting. This must be what medieval Jews felt when Crusaders forced them to eat pork — a foulness, a personal desecration, a growing stain that can never be washed away.
But I force myself to murmur thanks. Then I walk away, passing Margo as she comes for her marking. I want to grab her, pull her away before Trotmann can lay his befouling finger on her. But instead I clench my fists and let her walk by.
At the back of the auditorium, a pair of women stand behind a folding table, assembling sandwiches. Peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwiches. Of course. Elvis’s favorite. Maybe the peanut butter and bacon are even real.
The loathsome fat gets smeared across my rain jacket’s sleeve as soon as I’m out the door. I find a bathroom and try to ignore the brown, stinking water that spurts from the tap as I wash my forehead. There’s a small utility closet behind the stalls. Faint ammonia fumes make my eyes water when I shut myself inside. I set my watch’s timer for ninety minutes from now. Nine-twelve. That’s when I’ll reenter the auditorium.
So close. It’s so very, very close now.
I leave my hiding place. The building is silent, apart from the skipping scratches of tiny rodent feet across cardboard boxes. The rats stay clear of my flashlight beam. The entrance to the auditorium is locked, but my pocket laser makes short work of the lock. I shine my beam on the tabernacle. Not much more than a tall wooden box, the tabernacle is sealed with two large padlocks, one at waist-level and the other a foot above my head. Their hasps are as thick around as my middle finger. Not impervious to my laser, but melting them will take longer than disabling the auditorium’s weak lock did.
Top lock first. The band of metal begins to glow. First red, then orange, then a bluish white. A droplet of molten steel falls like a tiny meteor, sizzling when it lands. After another minute, the right side of the hasp’s U is breached. I nudge the padlock with the barrel of my gun until it falls.
Stupid — the impact of it hitting the floor echoes through the auditorium like a rifle shot. Too eager —
Footsteps. Coming from the left side of the backstage. Slow, heavy, punctuated by another sort of muffled thudding; a cane? The Hud Walterson doppelganger. He won’t stop me. I quickly train the laser on the bottom padlock, using my left hand, keeping the gun in my right.
The elephantine footsteps grow closer. He’s slow; even holding the Elvis, I can easily outrun him. If he’s got a gun, bad news; he’s in the dark, and I’m lit by the laser’s glow. But if I kneel down — carefully, carefully — I can partially put the corner of the tabernacle between us. And he’s a much bigger target than I am…
“Louis, uh, Shmalzberg. Step away from the holy tabernacle.”
How does he know my name? Even the real Hud Walterson never knew my name.
“Do not defile this holy place.” He steps out of the darkness, leaning on his multi-stalked cane. He’s not carrying a gun. “You should never have come here. You gave up any claim to the sacred extractions of our blessed Exemplar the, uh, the day you sold them to the Graceland circus for profit.”
He’s different than he was before. He’s speaking so haltingly, as if he’s being fed his lines… Could his voice be electronic? Could Trotmann have sampled the real Hud Walterson’s voice from old newscasts and infomercials? But then why would the accent be different?
He takes another step closer. “I have a gun,” I say. “I’m… I’m not afraid to use it. Stay where you are.”
He stops. I take advantage of the respite to glance back at the lock. It’s beginning to glow. Another ninety seconds, maybe.
“You’ll never escape with the sacred extractions,” he says. “Your father is evil. The extractions will… if you touch them, they will burn your hands with… holy fire.”
Hearing him mention my father makes me shiver. “Who are you?” I say, keeping the gun pointed at his mountainous stomach. “Who are you really? Some glandular case wearing a hidden loudspeaker?”
“I am Hud Walterson, returned from the next world.”
He blinks quickly, his long, thick eyelashes fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird. He’s lying.
Splitting my concentration between him and aiming my laser, I fail to hear the steps behind me, until the scrape of a shoe on concrete makes me turn.
Too late — my head bursts. Glowing padlock fades… to black….
CHAPTER 14
The first thing I see, when I open my eyes, is the Elvis. It’s sitting on a wooden deck that surrounds a pit, on the opposite side from me, about fifteen feet away. An odor like sour milk rises from the dark abyss.
My head throbs. My hands — I can’t move them. I’m tied to a chair at the edge of the pit.
“So the younger Dr. Shmalzberg is with us again. I was afraid you might sleep through our festivities.”
It’s Trotmann, sitting behind me and to my right. Where am I? The auditorium? No, must be another room like it. This pit and the deck that surrounds it are up on a stage; I’m facing dozens of rows of theater chairs. I test the cords tying my hands and arms. Snug. Painfully so.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t recognize you?” Trotmann says. He walks halfway around the rim so that he’s standing next to the Elvis. “Your father’s face is indelible in my memory. Do you know how many hours I spent staring at his sanctimonious, hypocritical features while he testified against me at those detestable hearings? I memorized that face. And you resemble your father very much, young Dr. Shmalzberg.”
“My… oversight,” I manage to mutter. My mouth tastes like copper and dust.
“The wheels of justice, they turn slowly, but they turn. Your father was the golden boy, wasn’t he? Took another man’s techniques and innovations, Illouz’s, and spun them into a brilliant career. Killed the god of rock and roll but made that work for him, too. Became the biggest moneymaker among the below-the-neck men of Beverly Hills.
“And me? I was the innovator, the real prodigy. I was the one who stole fire from Prometheus so my fellow physicians could make their fortunes. And how was I repaid? By being hounded from city to city, country to despicable, flea-circus country. And the crowning indignity? That I should be stripped of my license due to the efforts of such a bounder, such an intellectual nonentity as Walter Shmalzberg.”
He pats the top of the etched vacuum jar as if it were a prize-winning show dog. “But where are we now, Walter and I?” He smiles, flashing nicotine- and coffee-stained teeth. “Your father is rotting away in a giant nursing home. The last I heard — and I do check on these things, I have my sources — his mind is mostly gone. He’s buried alive in his own body, flailing for anything that connects him to his living past. That’s why, in one of his more lucid moments, he sent you out to retrieve the Elvis remains.”
“My father didn’t send me for the Elvis.”
He ignores me. “And where am I on fortune’s map? In a much sunnier place. I still have my mobility, my mind. I have women! More women than in all my younger years combined! I’m worshiped and respected like a minor deity, young Louis. And I have a patron, a very powerful patron. A man who moves levers, who has the grasp and the will to change the world.
“But you want to know the best reward of all?” Steadying himself with his cane, he slowly bends his knees and plants a loud kiss on top of the vacuum jar. “I have your father’s TROPHY!”
That boastful, smug gesture does as much to make me hate him as his past desecration of Margo’s body.
I hear a rumbling to my left. The doppelganger emerges, pushing a multilevel cart weighed down with jars. Jars of fat, probably the ones that were stored in the other auditorium. He pushes the cart slowly up the ramp, to the edge of the pit. He takes care not to meet my eyes as he begins opening the jars. One by one, he tips their contents into the pit, shaking them to ensure that every last oily trace of lipids falls.
The flaccid splat of those fatty blobs, once part of the doppelganger and the congregants and maybe even Margo, hitting bottom makes my stomach twitch. The last strands of fogginess leave my brain, freeing me to wonder just what Trotmann intends to do with me.
“Do you know where I first met Hud?” Trotmann asks. “I met him at Graceland, six years ago.”
Graceland. Why am I not surprised? “You went to see if you could buy more parts of Elvis’s corpse?”
He smiles. “I already had the only piece of Elvis I ever wanted. I went to see their new Elvis-centered churches. Find out if any of them were interested in franchise deals. Given the asset I already owned, I figured starting my own Elvis church would be less risky and more lucrative than black-market plastic surgery.
“I wasn’t able to connect on financials with the Graceland people. But I gained something far more valuable on that trip. I found Hud. He was in terrible shape, filthy, penniless. I recognized him immediately, of course, just as you would have. He had come to Graceland because… how did he put it? Heh… because Elvis was the only fat man in America who’d achieved the loving worship of women. An American singing-Buddha,’ I believe he called him.
“Meeting Hud was a portent. I’d followed your career, just as I had your father’s. I knew all about your early involvement with the Good Humor Men, how you’d built a movement around the life of Hud Walterson. And here he was, Hud himself, returned somehow from his famous death, speaking with me in the back of an Elvis church. A miracle, wouldn’t you say? I knew I could do better than you, Louis, just as Fd bettered your father. You had the memory of Hud. I had the real thing. Why franchise an Elvis church, when I was being called to build a glorious church of my own? Hud returned to Miami with me. He’s astoundingly creative, that boy. I credit him with the bulk of our liturgy.”
“Hud” empties the last of the jars into the pit. The fat is deep enough to drown in, if one’s hands are shackled. “What are you thinking of doing with me, Trotmann?” The final globule of congealed lipids splats onto the surface of the pool. “I have money. A lot of it. And I have Elvis’s famous belt, the one he personally gave to my father, the World’s Championship Attendance Record belt. Let me go, and we can work a deal.”
He flashes those yellowed teeth again. “Why, that would be just fine, if I wanted money, or a World’s Championship Attendance belt. Oh, that belt might be nice. But it’s much, much nicer to have you. I never had the opportunity to have a son, you see. Your father’s persecution of me ensured I never got the chance to settle down.”
He hobbles over to me, squeezes my knee like a lewd elderly uncle. “I haven’t yet told you about our wonderful liturgical practices. Once a year, we have a holiday where we take all the fat I’ve extracted and do a mass expulsion of the sin trapped inside. It’s rather like Yom Kippur, but much more… bacchanal. Normally, we wouldn’t be celebrating this holiday until the anniversary of Hud’s death. But given your providential arrival, I believe I can justify a slight rearrangement in our calendar.”
He turns to the doppelganger. “Hud, if you’d be so kind as to light the pilots on the gas burners, please. And then buzz the ladies, let them know it’s showtime.”
Gas burners… my God. Trotmann doesn’t want to drown me. He intends to deep-fry me.
“You… fucking… monster!” I lunge forward, succeeding only in sawing the ropes into my wrists. “You’re… you’re worse than any horror story my father ever told about you.”
He clasps his hands together, genuinely pleased. “Ahh, young Louis, you’ve made my day. Please rest easy in the knowledge that you’ll expire in almost precisely the same way that Hud here did. Given that your Good Humor movement had its origin in that death, I’d imagine this should be a source of contentment.”
The giant hasn’t moved. “Hud,” Trotmann says, a hint of irritation in his voice. “Didn’t I tell you to light the gas burners?”
The big man rolls his cart back and forth a few inches, making the empty jars clatter. “I… I don’t want to do it, Dr. Trotmann. It doesn’t feel like a, like a right thing.”
Trotmann slams the deck with his cane. “Not a ‘right thing’? Don’t you know who this man is?” He points at me, his wrinkled finger trembling with the force of
his hatred. “He’s a bad, bad man. As bad as his father. You watched him try to steal the holy Elvis remains. The Elvis remains that you venerate. Don’t you think he deserves to burn?”
The doppelganger’s eyes — beautiful eyes — seem to plead with me before they look back to Trotmann, as if I can somehow extricate him from this terrible dilemma. “May-maybe,” he says. “But couldn’t you put him in an alone-room instead? Maybe beat him some, and then put him in an alone-room, where he can’t steal anything —”
“How DARE you question me!” Trotmann swings his cane against the giant’s meaty shoulder. The struck man doesn’t flinch from the weak blow, only closes his eyes; but when he opens them, tears roll down his ample cheeks. “After all I’ve done for you! I rescued you from filth and hunger, gave you a home, a purpose for your miserable life!”
“I’ll tell my, my brother what you did…”
His snuffled mumble makes Trotmann raise his cane again. This time, however, he strikes the deck. “You’ll do no such thing!”
Tell my brother…? The real Hud Walterson was an only child.
Trotmann takes a deep breath, struggling to control his fury. “Now, unless you want me to let sin build up in that bloated body of yours until you burst from it, you’ll heed me and start those burners. And don’t forget to call in the women.”
“Buh-but…”
“Sin, Hud. You’re bulging with it. And I’m the only man alive who can take it away.”
Head drooping, the giant backs the cart down the ramp. A moment later, I hear the hiss of released gas, then a muffled roar as it ignites beneath the pit. Trotmann smiles at the sound. “I’m going to make an example of you, young Louis. Today will become another holiday in our church’s calendar. The day we fried the son of the devil in the heat of banished sin.”
“You must be proud of yourself,” I say. “It’s quite a feat to bully the feeble-minded.”