Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  Looking over his right shoulder, for no sound reason, he noticed that the one catacomb chamber that had been permanently sealed now gaped at its seams. The earthquake had squeezed its foreboding face until it smiled like a manic encyclopedia salesman. In imitation not of Nijinsky but of Ben Hur the flea, Purcell hopped directly into the smile. One last probe in the orifices of the Church, as it were. And, of course, that is how he met the Corpse. With bounds that are not within everyone's power, particularly if their pockets are packed with gold, Plucky—pushed by curiosity or intuition or “peculiar travel suggestions"—bounded right into the mysterious compartment, and through the billowing dust observed the mummified body of the Messiah as it rested atop a jewel-encrusted sarcophagus, wrapped about with dry-rotted linens, as if the Messiah were an immense overcooked weenie in a tattered bun; just lying there touched by nothing but time—and gently by it—as if the Messiah had been calmly awaiting Plucky Purcell for these two thousand years.

  The question the critical reader must raise at this juncture is: How did Purcell recognize the mummy as Jesus? It is not an easy question. I, myself, being a skeptical man of science, did not hesitate in scraping off a sample of the wood fragments and dirt that clung to the Corpse (beneath its more recent coating of plaster) and airmailing it to the radiocarbon laboratory at Johns Hopkins for dating. My friend at the lab found the specimen unsuitable for really exact carbon-14 dating, but was able to approximate its age as from fifteen hundred to three thousand years. Probably, that finding helped support my conviction of the body's identity, but to tell the truth, I was convinced without it. In fact, from the moment I focused vision upon the Corpse I knew that it was who it was. Plucky must have known instantly, too. It looked, to be sure, nothing like the milky portraits we had been shown in Sunday school, looked hardly at all like the handsome gentleman with the Aryan profile and the five-hundred-watt glow who effulged at us from calendars in Protestant parlors all over Dixie. It was short, as swarthy and oily as a Greek olive, and its face was overshadowed by a nose that arched and hooked like the beak of an enlarged buzzard. Yet it was inexplicably familiar. Although dead and withered, the Corpse was animated by the absolute. When one stared at it, one's pupils jangled like alarm clocks that had been set long ago to go off at this moment. Logic was not necessarily suspended nor common sense ignored. This simply, positively was not the body of an ordinary man. In its befouled stupor, it incited awe and marvel. Those of us who spent time with it experienced at least some of the tremendous power it must have held when it walked Galilee. Doubt collapsed in a racket of revelation, and we, most of us, paid homage to the pitiful Hebrew mummy as if it were a living saint.

  The chamber in which the Christ was hidden was small and dirty and apparently had not been opened in several centuries. However, the gems embedded in the tomb and the golden candelabra that bristled in the corners suggested that it had once been a shrine of highest (if secret) rank. Perhaps medieval popes had awakened after midnight to traipse in purple splendor down to that deepest catacomb where they conducted clandestine masses for none but the most privileged princes of the Church. Then, one year long ago, it had been decided that the secret was just too hot and the risk too great, so the Holy Office sealed off the remains of its precious figurehead, sealed them off even from itself. Maybe one curious prelate or another had looked in on them, had paid respects, but it seems doubtful if even a pope had peeked at the illustrious body in recent times. Of course, they knew it was there. Or did they? And if they knew, who knew? Those are telling questions which we will deal with a little later. For the moment, let us appreciate the discovery: Purcell had chanced (danced) upon the Lamb of God, dead and helpless in Vatican concealment, and he had realized, furthermore, who it was whom he had found; and as stunned as he may have been, and as temporarily ignorant of the full apocalyptic implications of stealing the body as he may have been, he did not tarry, faint or fret but immediately scooped up the mummy tenderly in his arms and prepared to bear it into man's modern world.

  No sooner did Plucky spring from the tomb than he became aware of an influx into the catacombs. Up until then, the voices and footsteps had all been moving in the other direction, as the bleeding and confused and the scared made their way to ground level. Now, in the quake's buzzing aftermath, investigating squads and files of guards were cautiously exploring the tunnels. They were still well above Purcell, but there was no way he might avoid meeting them in his ascent. What's this? A person coming? Damn the luck! He hadn't gotten twenty feet with his prize before somebody had spotted him. It was like being tackled at the line of scrimmage, a frustrating failure anytime, but especially when Jesus is one's football. The figure, however, approached without seeing. Well, what do you know? It was one of the blind nuns who stand watch over the forbidden library. The tremor had played havoc with her collection of scrolls and left her in a daze all the more confusing because she was sightless.

  “Forgive me, sister.”

  Plucky administered to her the most painless knockout in his karate repertoire. Like a rag penguin, she folded at his feet.

  Have you ever tried to undress a nun when you were in a hurry? It was maddening—all the tiny black buttons, the stubborn hooks—but he at last disrobed her and clothed the Corpse in her habit. The nun he wrapped in the Corpse's rotten linens and deposited upon the sarcophagus. There he left her, but in case it has crossed your mind to wonder, as some of the purest people have wondered before you, what the good sister wore beneath her habit, let me remind you that Plucky Purcell is a Southern gentleman and while the air he exudes may by some moral standards be excessively sulphurous, he would never ever be guilty of embarrassing or insulting a lady. What, if anything, the knocked-out nun wore closest to her private parts is a secret Purcell is prepared to protect to his grave.

  Crashing like a moose calf through the cranberry bogs of its first winter, Plucky crashed through catacomb earthquake debris, his natural running grace blunted by the Corpse in his arms and the heavy gold doodads in the inner pockets of his robe. He made it to the first staircase with no opposition save his excess baggage and the rubble underfoot, but at the head of the stairs, on the second level, he ran into a party of soldiers.

  If I have given the impression that the Vatican was a bit casual in its concern for the treasures in its catacombs, you must keep in mind that while the combined contents of those few rooms of gold and silver and gems and art might be worth say, oh, a hundred million dollars, it is but a bubble in the Church's bucket of wealth. The Vatican owns stocks and bonds valued at about seven billion dollars. It is the largest single stockholder in the world. The Vatican also owns property—secular as well as churchly—valued at many billions. It is the largest single real-estate owner in the world. The baubles hidden in the catacombs are artifacts left over from an age when such hardware was the trappings of power. In these times, they are clumsily anachronistic, almost embarrassing. Sooner or later, they will be converted into more efficient tender. Meanwhile, however, they may be slighted but they have not been forgotten. As soon as the quake had subsided, the Pope or one of his senior aides ordered the Swiss Guard into the catacombs to secure the valuables and restore order.

  The Swiss Guard filed into the dusty depths, armed not with quaint halberds but with the latest automatic weapons supplied free by the Catholic munitions makers of America and Germany. Thus armed, it met Purcell as he lurched up the stone staircase from his rendezvous with Christ.

  Plucky was breathing hard. His breaths rolled through the squad of soldiers like the waves of a second quake. The ocean of his breathing collapsed around the showy soldiers the way the ocean of fame collapsed around the gums of Judy Garland.

  “I've got a sister here,” gasped Purcell, trusting that the well-educated captain of the guards understood English. “Must get her to a doctor.”

  “Let me see her,” ordered the haughty officer, his English as perfect as a snowflake. “Perhaps she needs first aid.”

  “
No, no,” stammered Plucky. “She isn't seriously hurt. I think she's just fainted. Got to get her up in the fresh air.”

  The captain recognized upon Purcell the black robe of Felicitate. Uninformed as he was about the exact nature of the Society of the Felicitator, he knew that it occupied a special place of favor with the Holy Father, perhaps a more special place than his own command. He hesitated, and as is written in Poor Richard's, “He who hesitates will never stop Plucky Purcell.” Our hero danced around the soldiers and plunged toward the next stairwell as if it were the Georgia Tech goal line. He was not pursued.

  St. Peter's Square was a chaos of searchlights, police cars, fire engines, ambulances, utility trucks, Church officials of high and low standing and emergency personnel of all sorts. At that time, the rumor that His Holiness had suffered grave injury had not yet been denied officially, and the fate of their Pope concerned the policemen to the point where they were emotionally unable to bring any kind of order to the scene in the square. Nobody detained Purcell as he rushed through the milling throngs, though many were the great Italian clucks of pity as bystanders witnessed the limp “nun” in his arms. Plucky hurried to an ambulance parked at the edge of the square and pulled open its rear doors.

  “Spitale!” he shouted, having somehow during his Roman stay learned the Italian for “hospital.”

  “Devo trovare un dottore,” explained the driver.

  “Io sono un dottore,” Purcell lied. “Spitale! Presto!”

  On the way to the hospital, the ambulance was frequently detained by traffic jams as thousands of Italians, their eyes wide for spiritual experience, poured into Vatican City from throughout Rome. When finally he screeched up to the emergency door of the hospital, the driver found his ambulance empty. Mamma mia. The monk, the poor sister! Where? The driver fell to his knees and crossed himself.

  After bailing out of the ambulance, Plucky had bailed out of his robe (he wore jeans and sweat shirt beneath it). He wrapped the Corpse in it so that the Corpse no longer looked like a nun. Several pieces of gold fell out on the sidewalk. Plucky left them for the whores and hurried on. He made his way to the studio of George O. Supper, the American pop artist famed for his plaster-of-paris sculptures of anonymous men.

  “Now, George O., buddy, what I've got here is an unusual request. I've had the good fortune to get my meat hooks on an Egyptian mummy. A king, I think it was, a great pharaoh. Rather valuable. It's all perfectly legal, George O., it's legally mine—”

  “Bullshit,” said Supper.

  “. . . excepting that I'm not allowed to take it out of Italy. Now what I'm asking you to do is—”

  “I know what you're asking. Let me think about it for a few days.”

  “George! Tonight. Remember when you came to me with that little Long Island deb? I didn't ask to think it over. She could've had triplets by the time I thought it over.”

  Sighing, Supper helped Plucky carry the Corpse into his plastercasting room. “Purcell, if this mummy is full of drugs . . .”

  “Word of honor, George O. You can examine it if you wish.”

  “Okay. Okay. I'm sleepy.”

  “I've got to ship this out on an early morning flight. I'll build a crate while you plaster. Do you have any of those shipping tags that say 'Work of Art'?”

  Goaded by his old friend, Supper worked feverishly. Beginning at the feet, the Corpse turned slowly into a ghostly bland every-man or non-man or anti-man, depending upon one's frame of reference: a white blob of a figure, so empty of humanity that the viewers of the figure would have thrust upon them the startling option to fill in the vacancy, to draw in character, to color the blandness from the palette of their own experience. It would be a typical Supper poker-faced marshmallow monolith; not so much a man as a hole in the air where a man had stood seconds before being vaporized. Man disappearing, man reduced to a silent white shadow of his species. As Supper built this latest testimony to the existential impermanence and insignificance of John Doe, he felt queerly moved. No living model had ever affected him that way. Some strange kind of peaceful power seemed to surge from the mummy. By the time he began to plaster the face, Supper's hands were trembling. He felt himself in touch with what he imagined were the ancient forces of Egypt.

  “Funny,” he said with little amusement. “It looks Jewish.”

  It is midmorning. A few minutes ago I took my coffee break. I am speaking figuratively, of course. There's not a drop of coffee in this place and there never has been. As a matter of fact, we are also out of juice. On my coffee break (ha ha) I had a hot dog and a glass of tap water. There are plenty of damn hot dogs, all right. And water, too. Last night, the rains started.

  Amanda, as pale as the raindrops but in good spirits, joined me on my coffee break. She sipped her water from an Apache bowl. No hot dog. You know, her vegetarianism no longer annoys me. If she doesn't want her belly to be a graveyard for dead animals, I can appreciate her view. Her belly is for the living, not the dead.

  But this weenie business I could never understand. I enjoy a good hot dog, myself, but let's face it, it is not an elite cut of meat. They grind up hog hearts in weenies, and cow muscles and chicken fat and the diaphragms of sheep and the esophagi of goats. Of all the meats with which a vegetarian might be reluctantly associated, surely the sausage is among the least respectable. Yet, Amanda had chosen John Paul as her husband and John Paul had chosen the sausage as his trade. Strange bedfellows.

  “It's not as strange as all that,” said Amanda. She sipped her water from a clay bowl with mythological designs. The rain stormed against the former roadside zoo (I say “former” because the place has been stripped of its serpents and its fleas) like trolls splashing swamp water on a sight-seeing bus. “The hot dog is not so much a food as it is an institution. President Roosevelt fed hot dogs to the king and queen of England when they visited here in 1939. Babe Ruth ate nothing but hot dogs and soda pop for twenty years. Hot dogs are found wherever Boy Scouts get together. It is hot dogs the packers have in mind when they boast that they use everything but the squeal. It's not what hot dogs are made of but what they symbolize. The hot dog is the pillar of democracy, the pride of the Yankees, the boneless eagle of free enterprise.”

  Well, I couldn't refute that. Come to think of it, it is typical of John Paul Ziller that he would choose to work his African magic through the medium of one of America's most beloved institutions. Ziller has turned the weenie into a wand.

  It was most agreeable sitting with Amanda. In the mustard pot, I traced the legend of her beauty. Amanda smiled and touched my hand. Life lifted its heavy wheels. I forgot about the task at the typewriter upstairs. I forgot about the rain. But just then two of the agents burst in, shielding their weapons from the wet. They gave us greedy patriotic looks. “Hey,” they yelled. “Fix us a bunch of them dogs.”

  Ben Franklin to the contrary, one cannot take a stitch in time. No, not even to save nine. If only it were possible to stitch time, to pull it up tight, to hold it back. You see, I have reason to believe that today is my last at the typewriter. The agents are supremely confident that Ziller and friends will be apprehended at any hour. Suppose they are right? I do not know what that will mean in terms of my fate or Amanda's. But I strongly suspect that have I not concluded this report by tomorrow morning, it will be involuntarily curtailed. Doom rides my typewriter carriage like a fat lady on a rubber horse.

  I pine for time because had I more of it I could more successfully metamorphose my vigil with the roadside zoo's quaint realities so that other men might appreciate as well as I the setting and circumstance across which Christ's body continued its silent journey.

  If I write no further of Amanda's attempts to train butterflies to unfold dinner napkins (two insects to a napkin, of course), or of the maps with which Ziller traced his origins back to the sun, I'm sure I shall be forgiven. On the other hand, there are facts of daily life at the zoo to which the reader is entitled.

  I should like, for example, to tel
l more of Baby Thor. Forgive me, Thor, if you are grown, a schoolboy, reading this document either on assignment or out of natural curiosity concerning the historic event to which you, a yard-child of less than four, were privy much as little Anastasia was privy to the annihilation of Russian royalty; forgive me if I have neglected you in my chronicles. You were a joy to us always. Ah, the flash upon your eyes. Your eyes summed up for me my studies in science. Your eyes reminded me of experiments in wave physics, of exercises in galactic mechanics. Your eyes reminded me of a dozen different chemical reactions, particularly those which, if not carefully controlled, threaten to blow up the laboratory.

  Thor, your stepfather had (perhaps I should use the present tense, for Ziller has extraordinary resources and he may well have survived his present pickle) a special feeling for light. He felt that since energy was the only permanent “thing” in the universe, it was the most (if not only) significant “thing.” And although he had great respect for sound, he believed that the highest form of energy is light. He seldom used color in his art because he had a theory that color was a disease that afflicted light, a parasite that lived off of light and destroyed its purity. He was disturbed by the fact that 400 trillion waves of deep red light enter the human eye every second. What happens to light after it has been absorbed by the eye is a question that has intrigued many scientists. Ziller's attitude was, “To hell with what happens to the light. What happens to the color?” In an effort to control “color pollution,” he had trained his pupils to remain stationary for long periods of time. Ziller spoke of light as if it were applicable to living tissue—and since, ultimately, living tissue is a product of solar radiation, he was not entirely mistaken. “But, John Paul,” I cautioned him once, “the temperature of living tissue is much too low to produce the kind of energy that is necessary for radiation. We speak metaphorically of girls having glowing complexions, but flesh is never an actual source of light.” And Amanda said, “How about fireflies?” Your mommy certainly knew her bugs. “Well,” I blushed, “that's true, fireflies make light and some worms glimmer and some toadstools, but living tissue is never, never energetic enough to stand a chance of combining with 'activation' energies such as sunlight.” Then, Thor, your stepfather gently interrupted the game you were playing with Mon Cul baboon and led you up to me so that I could look into your eyes.