by James Morrow
We stopped outside the main entrance, an austere post-and-lintel affair surmounted by a puffy-cheeked angel blowing a trumpet. A heavy black chain presented itself, slung between the wrought-iron gates like an immense watch fob. Someone, a Valkyrie presumably, had hacksawed open the padlock. In a matter of seconds, we broke into the graveyard, a procedure rather easier than peeling the cellophane off a CD, then got back in the Volvo. As the moon brightened and Jupiter bejeweled its portion of the night, we cruised at a respectful velocity past the brooding tombstones, looming vaults, and naked winter trees.
“Cemeteries are the most philosophical of places,” I told Londa.
“Whatever you say.”
“More philosophical than cafés or beer halls or even the banks of the Nile.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“As Heidegger would have it, by fully facing the fact of death and deliberately engaging the Nothing, a person can learn to live authentically.”
“I’m afraid I don’t need a Heideggerian right now, not even one who can deconstruct cemeteries.” She reached past me and unlatched the glove compartment. “What I need is a navigator.” Two folding maps and a tube of lip balm tumbled into my lap. “Get us to the corner of Hyperion Avenue and Chancery Way.”
I spread the map across my knees, edging it into the pool of light cast by the glove compartment’s reading lamp, but before I could find the intersection on paper, Londa found it in actuality, thanks to a parked panel truck emblazoned with Lady Justice at full gallop. A half-dozen shadowy figures stood around the adjacent grave like mourners, though their picks and shovels suggested a more controversial agenda. We abandoned the Volvo and joined the leather-clad gang. Upon learning that I was the ethicist who’d supervised their leader’s legendary insular youth, the Valkyries presented me with an array of complex facial expressions conveying both their admiration of my success in giving her a moral compass and their wish that I’d made that instrument a bit less baroque.
Londa now introduced me to Major Carmen Powers, a short, perky woman with chipmunk cheeks and a pageboy haircut parted laterally by the metal strap connecting her earmuffs, “the second-highest-ranking member of the Themisopolis security force.” The Valkyries’ highest-ranking member evidently had better things to do that night than creeping around a freezing graveyard.
I fixed on the tombstone, which shimmered in the full moon like a radioactive menhir. Two bas-relief cherubs protruded from the granite, their pudgy bodies framing an inscription: IN LOVING MEMORY OF ETHAN AND AMELIA PEPPERHILL.
“Ethan Pepperhill,” I said. “The Ethan Pepperhill?”
Londa grunted in the affirmative.
Of all the congressmen who’d labored to shield the American tobacco industry from the unpatriotic lawsuits of lung-cancer victims, none had been more successful than Ethan Pepperhill of North Carolina. “What’s he doing here?”
“Naturally he wanted to be buried in his home state,” Londa explained, “but he wanted to share the sod with Mrs. Pepperhill even more, and she’d already joined her parents in this neck of the netherworld.”
A few errant snowflakes sifted down from the sparkling sky, the swirling crystals meeting the moonlight and turning bright as fireflies. I zipped up my bomber jacket. The Valkyries set to work, breaking the hard January earth with their steel tools. It took them only twenty minutes to penetrate the frost line and begin shoveling away the pliant dirt below. They excavated the glossy oblong box, lifted it free of the hole, and, like newlyweds installing their first refrigerator, set it upright on the mound of freshly turned soil. Major Carmen Powers smashed the clasps with her shovel, and the lid fell away, tumbling into the open grave. Like a gust from a blast furnace, the stench swept over us, and we all went for our scarves and handkerchiefs, pressing them against our faces like poultices. My eyes teared up. I wiped away the salt water and there it was, limned by the lunar glow, the erect remains of the Winston-Salem Corporation’s greatest benefactor, dressed in a crumbling tuxedo. Being dead, he looked understandably peaked, though still prepared to wage one more battle against the enemies of free enterprise and spiked tobacco.
A fleeting but bizarre episode followed, grisly even by the norms of this night. Carmen Powers took out her Swiss Army knife, waded through the ghastly fumes, and sawed off Senator Pepperhill’s little finger. An unexpected gesture, yet I intuitively apprehended its significance.
I turned to Londa and said, “You’ve got your own ontogenerator.”
“The next big consumer item,” she replied, accepting the detached finger from the major.
“This carnival of yours—the performers are all beaker freaks?”
Londa offered me a corroborative smirk, then slid a Baggie from her coat pocket and sealed the finger in plastic. “We’ll have Pepperhill on the playbill in a month or two. I picture him walking into a cancer ward with an ice chest containing his recently extracted lungs, offering them free of charge to whoever speaks up first.”
I gestured toward the corpse and scowled. “A reverent person—not myself, certainly, but a reverent person would call this desecration.”
“No, Socrates, this is desecration,” Londa said, drawing out a pack of her customary Dunhills. She approached the senator and inserted a cigarette between his lips.
“I thought you’d given up smoking.”
“I use these for political purposes only,” she explained, then turned to Carmen and said, “It would be fun to read about this in tomorrow’s paper. Send an anonymous tip to the night desk at the Sun.”
“Christ, Londa, aren’t you going to rebury him?” I gasped.
“Thanks to Jordan’s lobbying efforts, the American Brotherhood of Gravediggers has secured a fair wage for its members. Whoever puts him in the ground tomorrow will be whistling while he works.”
“Fuck.”
“Lighten up, sweetie.” Londa provided the senator with a second cigarette, so that he suddenly seemed to possess the elongated canine teeth of a vampire. “And now we’re off to watch the Circus troupers play their parts, the most popular way to pass a Saturday night in Themisopolis. You’re only young once, Socrates. Carpe diem.”
DEPRESSED BY RECENT EVENTS in White Marsh Cemetery and certain that I would derive no delight from the Circus of Atonement, I spent most of our return trip telling Londa, truthfully, that I was bone tired and felt a cold coming on, if not the flu, so could she please take me to the Themisopolis guesthouse or, better still, a motel, sending along my overnight bag at her earliest convenience? My vatling would hear none of it. What I needed, she insisted, was a rococonut julep followed by a Circus act or two, and within the space of an hour I found myself in her lofty office.
The canopic jar in which she kept her mumquats—authentic Eighth Dynasty, she insisted—evoked for me the most vivid shot in The Egyptian: Sinuhe performing his penance in the House of the Dead, a lowly embalmer’s apprentice, stirring a stinking vat of natron. Londa made me the promised julep, serving it in a crystal goblet. The nectar did not so much relieve my symptoms as decontextualize them. Once you’ve been abstracted from your body, the discomfort of an upper respiratory infection loses all claim on your attention.
Bathed in Proserpine’s manufactured serenity, I allowed Londa to guide me out of Caedmon Hall and across the flagstone plaza. Soon the Circus of Atonement rose before us, a squat rotunda: black, smooth, featureless—hence the ease with which the architects had represented it using a hockey puck. We passed through an unmarked entryway as inconspicuous as a stage door and entered a dimly lit foyer appointed only with a coatrack, a water fountain, and a vending machine dispensing fruit juice and granola bars. Londa flashed me a cryptic Sabacthanite smile, a sure sign of heavy weather and sizable ironies ahead, then led me past a fan-folded Chinese screen into the darkness beyond.
As we moved along the central corridor, following the curve of the hockey puck, compact prosceniums emerged on both sides, each featuring a live actor earnestly performing a minimalist dram
a. Nearly every play seemed well attended, only one or two empty seats per theater, but according to Londa the vatling thespians took no pleasure in their popularity, as their DUNCE cap programs precluded any such sensation. They were zombies to the core, beyond delight, outside despair.
Intrigued by the lurid poster, I suggested that we sample Motherhood Comes to the Holy Father. We slipped into the theater, taking care not to annoy the actor or disturb the other audience members, and assumed our seats. I quickly became absorbed in a situation of transcendent tastelessness. Through the machinations of a Wiccan sisterhood, Pope John Paul II had awoken one morning to find himself burdened with an unsolicited uterus and a concomitant unplanned pregnancy. Happily for the supreme pontiff, his silk robe billowed so broadly that his condition, like the fifteen Rosary mysteries, remained obscure. I could not imagine how Londa had obtained the tissue sample, and I did not want to know. The present scene was set in a Vatican clinic. Having dropped beseechingly to his knees, the pontiff was begging an audio-animatronic doctor to give him an abortion. A queasiness spread through me—political theater was one thing, feminist Grand Guignol starring reincarnated ecclesiastics quite another—and I politely told Londa that I wished to see no more. As we exited the theater, the Vatican physician presented the pope with a brochure touting the virtues of adoption.
“Do not begrudge us our diversions,” Londa said defensively. “The Circus is essential to our mental health.”
We continued along the corridor, patronizing each play long enough for the plot to manifest itself. Even as I recoiled at the sheer charnel pornography of it all, Londa’s deranged museum brought out the critic in me, and I began evaluating the scripts, performances, and directorial flourishes. Perhaps the mumquat nectar had lowered my standards, but I was deeply moved by The Martyrs of Modernity, CEO Warren Anderson’s abject apology for the 1984 methyl isocyanate leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India—eight thousand dead in a week, fifteen thousand by the end of the decade, countless mothers yielding toxic breast milk well into the next century—a disaster for which neither he nor his corporation had taken any responsibility at the time, instead sending each victim five hundred dollars. By contrast, I found little to admire in The Art of Atrocity, Henry Kissinger’s lachrymose lament over the lagniappes he’d added to America’s catastrophic involvement in the Vietnam War, including the secret invasion of Cambodia and the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong. Far more satisfying was Searching for My Soul, in which Ronald Reagan denounced himself not only for supporting Central American death squads but also for curtailing heating-fuel assistance to the elderly, declining to speak out against apartheid, refusing to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic until he had no choice, and appointing a secretary of the interior who believed that the imminent Second Coming rendered environmentalism irrelevant.
“Could you give us a publicity quote?” Londa asked as we slipped away. “We’re always looking for endorsements from celebrity ethicists.”
I assumed she was joking, but I replied with a blurb reflecting my genuine enthusiasm for the piece in question. “In real life Ronald Reagan neither received nor deserved an Oscar, but having seen Searching for My Soul, I’m ready to give him one.”
We moved on. Davy Crockett’s confession, a tour de force called Moon Over Bexar, took as its theme the dubious ideals of the Alamo defenders: how they were ultimately seeking to found a republic in which they could own West African slaves, the Mexican government in its wisdom having outlawed that controversial institution. While the beaker freak’s bucolic locutions seemed completely natural, he inevitably evoked those scores of post-Crockett scoundrels who’d attained elected office by affecting such folksiness, their talent for faking the common touch matched only by their aptitude for screwing the common man. After sampling the Crockett soliloquy, we dropped by Jesus Winced, in which Mary Baker Eddy sought forgiveness from the onstage ghosts of a dozen deceased children whose parents had sacrificed them on the altar of Christian Science. Londa assured me that the youthful specters were audio-animatronic simulacra: no children had been disinterred for this production. Next we joined the audience for what proved to be the evening’s most disturbing presentation, Mega Culpa, in which the brilliant physicist Edward Teller bemoaned the ebullience with which he’d fathered the hydrogen bomb. At first his anguish captivated me, but then the fusionfamilias tore off his shirt and started chewing into his mortified flesh with a flagellant’s whip, and I left in a huff, repulsed by the gratuitous violence.
“Major Powers wrote that script,” Londa muttered as we returned to the corridor. “You’re right—it’s over the top.”
Before I could elaborate on my dismay with Mega Culpa, my hostess hustled me into the vicinity of two recently deceased and copiously mourned clerics. Prior to his death in an auto accident, Percival Sarnac had been Enoch Anthem’s right-hand man, tirelessly transmitting God’s views on homosexuality via WXPF-AM in Chicago, “your station for salvation.” Before succumbing to leukemia, Leopold Ransom had hosted the talk show Countdown to Jesus on the Rapture Channel. And now here they were in the Circus, acting out a love story titled The Semen on the Mount. I had to admit I’d never witnessed a more moving courtship. The fleeting caresses, the furtive kisses, the tender embraces, the candlelit dinner, the passionate grapplings on Ransom’s waterbed—it was all impeccably programmed and poignantly performed, and by the time the men had exchanged their wedding vows, most of the attending Valkyries were weeping.
“I have a treat for you,” Londa said, ushering me toward a velvet curtain, red and heavy as a coronation robe, “the dress rehearsal of an epic set in the fifteenth century.” The adjacent poster identified the show as Clone of Arc. “Tonight our youngest malefactor runs through my latest script. We bribed about thirty functionaries and broke a dozen international laws, but at long last Saint Joan’s charred femur came into our possession.”
“A malefactor? Joan of Arc?”
“I must concede, your admiration for the Maid of Orléans is practically universal. Even the most tough-minded thinker will melt before our dear Joan. Mark Twain devoted his worst novel to her. Bernard Shaw put her at the center of an extraordinarily tedious play—a feat later duplicated by both Jean Anouilh and Maxwell Anderson. She’s waiting, Socrates. A private performance. If you liked Searching for My Soul, you’ll love Clone of Arc.”
I stepped behind the red curtain and entered a theater far smaller than the others, barely a dozen seats, all empty. Assuming the best possible vantage, front row center, I fixed on the proscenium, expecting to see the resurrected Joan wearing a prison smock and chained to the notorious stake, her brow speckled with sweat, her eyes glazed with devotion—or perhaps she would be in full armor, mounted on a charger, holding the French standard high as she urged her troops into battle. But instead she stood beside a fir tree rooted in a mound of earth carpeted in lush grass and golden buttercups. She was blindingly beautiful, her raven hair secured in a bun, her voluptuous form wrapped in a muslin shift, her hazel, feline eyes darting in all directions. A gleaming broadsword—Joan’s, no doubt—protruded from the hillock like Excalibur rising from its anvil.
“Yes, my achievement was astonishing, pas de question,” she began. “I saved a nation. Vive la France! But there is still a difficulty, un grand problème.”
In an unbroken and balletic gesture, she untied her sash and laid it along her outstretched forearm. The accessory slithered across her skin and floated to the grass, and suddenly I knew how this untried and untested commander had rallied an entire army to her side. In some lubricious sector of his soul, every French infantryman had imagined himself embracing this divine peasant.
“It’s an old story, perhaps the oldest on earth,” Joan said. “The sky rumbles, the clouds congeal, the sun spasms. Is that a saint I see on high? An angel? The Lord God Jehovah himself? Now a holy voice booms down, instructing the poor prophet to grab a sword and thrust it into a fellow human, or perhaps a hundred fellow human
s, or even a million if the cause is sufficiently sacred. The prophet never talks back. The tradition existed before me. It flourishes to this day. The sword, the blood, the freshly created corpses littering the battlefield, exuding the stink of epiphany.”
She issued a merry programmed laugh, then hiked up her shift and cast it aside. Her navel contemplated me. Her flesh elicited appreciation from all my senses. Even at this distance, I could smell her lovely pheromones, hear the whisper of her ligaments, feel the softness of her hands, taste her salty thighs.
“I wish I had it to do over again,” Joan said. “I would have tried bargaining with my voices.” She unfastened her hair. Her tresses spilled onto her bare shoulders and cascaded downward, swirling around her eminent breasts like an incoming tide. “I wish I’d said, ‘Why must so many lose their lives, dear God? Why not turn the English swords to glass and their pikes to aspic, so our enemies will capitulate without a fight? Whence cometh thine appetite for carnage, O my Father? Why this thirst for blood? Pourquoi le sang?’” She looked me in the eye. “Come hither, knave.”
I obeyed, joining the maid onstage. She made a circuit of the fir tree, then approached me in all her mind-boggling nubility. I had consumed too much rococonut milk. Deftly she removed my clothes, then guided me to the hillock and bade me lie with her. Her lovely fingers sculpted me into the rigid amoretto her appetite required. The mumquat juice saturated my neurons. She climbed on top, and soon her moist quoit found its object—no resistance from Mason the morality teacher: all that nectar. Synesthesia overcame me, everything melting together, the warmth of her skin, its fine rural fragrance, the hazel of her eyes, the eddies of her hair, the surrounding meadow.
“On the day we broke the siege,” she said, “I disemboweled twenty men, only two of whom were even remotely vile.”
In the dream that now suffused my sleeping mind, John Snow 0001 was still alive. The two of us were standing beside an Isla de Sangre swamp, tossing gobbets of raw meat to the alligators like a couple of Boston Common benchsitters feeding the pigeons.