by James Morrow
She backed out of the Meadowbrook Manor parking lot and rattled through her scruffy East Cambridge neighborhood past stale heaps of February snow, each mound topped with oil and grime, a polluted sundae. Reaching the Longfellow Bridge, she piloted Phaëthon over the half-frozen Charles River. The Arlington Street traffic knot was less tangled than usual, and she attained the Newbury intersection five minutes ahead of schedule. She parked at a meter, inserted a quarter, and glanced skyward. Cirrus clouds rimmed God’s skull. He appeared to be wearing a white toupee. At least there weren’t any ads today. Why the Vatican permitted the multinationals to aim their lasers at His brow was a mystery she couldn’t fathom. Contemplating the Cranium Dei was depressing enough. You shouldn’t have to read COKE IS IT in the bargain.
Eight years in Ray Feldstein’s employ…and still Nora loved entering the Tower of Flowers on a winter’s day: that wondrous jump from biting wind to tropical warmth. She slammed the door behind her and paused, inhaling the layered fragrances. Her favorite coworker, Ruthie Dart, a moody Lesley College dropout who sprayed her hair so liberally that the results suggested a crash helmet, greeted her with an affectionate grunt.
On the counter lay Nora’s clipboard. She perused the crib sheet Four deliveries by 11:00 A.M. Busy morning.
She loaded the bouquets into Phaëthon and sped off toward the first stop, a funeral home in South Boston. Swathed in black, Cynthia Beckwith took the basket of lilies in her arms. With deepest condolences, ran the greeting card. Yours truly, Louis Thorpe. “I’m so sorry,” said Nora. “To tell you the truth, Bill and I didn’t get along,” the widow replied. “I’m marrying Louis next month.” Nora’s second destination was the Fairview Nursing Home in Brighton: a pot of ivy for a birdlike Irishwoman with trembling hands. Kathleen O’Leary was celebrating her eighty-fourth birthday. The ivy was from her estranged sister in Belfast. “You don’t know what this means to me” said Kathleen, squeezing Nora’s shoulder. Recipient number three was Nick Ambrose, a used-car dealer in Medford whose wife sought to make amends for the morning’s altercation. “Some guys are so insecure, they can’t stand getting flowers, but I think it’s terrific,” he said, taking the hyacinths from Nora. “You’re a credit to your gender,” she replied, tossing him a grin. Next came the Fresh Pond Leisure Club, site of an impending luncheon. As Nora entered the banquet hall, the organization’s president, a stout woman with excessively rouged cheeks, seized the vase of roses and set them on the speaker’s table. “A retired psychologist is addressing us today. ‘Celestial Skull Anxiety: Nine Surefire Coping Strategies.’ I can’t wait.”
At 11:15 A.M. Nora returned to Phaëthon and studied the crib sheet. The afternoon’s duties were light—a private home in Everett, a hospice in Chelsea, a church in Revere, period. She had plenty of time to call Kevin before grabbing a sandwich and reloading the truck.
A telephone booth stood on the corner of Western Avenue and Harvard Street. Kevin answered on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” she said. “How’re you feeling?”
“Mom, could you come home?”
Nora shuddered. He never called her Mom, only Mother. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m frightened.”
“Frightened?” She tightened her grip on the segmented cable. “Your cold’s worse?”
“A boy came to see me today. I’m scared.”
“I’ll be right there.”
When Nora reached the apartment, Kevin was in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet bowl, clutching the slick porcelain. He gasped and shivered. She knelt beside him and cupped her hand around his forehead. His brow was a block of ice. At last a foul blackness came up, shooting from his throat in a stringy mass. It was heavy and viscous, like liquid mercury, and redolent of turpentine.
She flushed the toilet. The vomitus became a thick, stinking whirlpool, spiraling clockwise as it descended beneath the streets of East Cambridge.
“Can you talk?”
Instead of answering, Kevin heaved once more, spewing a quart of black fluid into the bowl.
“There, there, darling. There, there.”
At last he spoke, wheezingly, raggedly, the words splitting along their syllabic joints. “A boy visited…”
“Visited you, yes.”
“Came into…my room…stood over…my bed.” He leaned back on his heels, wiping his lips. “Here’s the…weird part. The boy was…he was me.”
“You had a nightmare.”
“He wore my face…his skin was white…glossy…like this toilet.”
“We’ve got to stop these chills. I’ll call Dr. Furtado.”
“He kept on saying, ‘I’m going to climb inside you,’ and the fourth time he said it—”
“‘I’m going to climb inside you’?”
“—he dragged me out of bed, pushed hard against me…and then he…did it, he climbed inside me…and I’m scared he’ll never leave.”
“O! for a Muse of fire,” cried the Chorus in Henry V, but Gerard would have settled for any sort of muse that month. A muse of marble would do nicely—or bronze, or limestone, or even volcanic ash. Day in, day out, sacrificing sleep and food—no more Bombay gin, no more mistresses of sand—he sat at the kitchen table, drinking cold coffee as he chased after a premise worthy of his Creator’s bones. He scribbled down notions, tossed off sketches, realized raw ideas with bits of cardboard and balsa wood. Nothing. Zero. Drainpipe. For all his aesthetic huffing and puffing, a unified vision for the reliquary of reliquaries eluded his imagination.
“I’ve read Ockham’s book three times now,” he told Fiona, “and I still can’t get an angle on it.”
“Empty yourself of intent, and let the cosmos take over.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Shed the self. Drop the ego.”
“I just need to push a little harder.”
Though subtle in its allusions and poetic in its language, Parables for a Post-Theistic Age had a straightforward thesis. Despite the understandable protests of His angels and the justifiable fears of certain archbishops, God had wanted His corpse to be discovered. After fully apprehending His death, humankind would move beyond its traditional dependence on Him. Homo sapiens would achieve maturity.
“I shall not presume to imagine the exact words of His suicide note,” Ockham wrote in chapter two, “but I am confident of its gist To wit: although His first experiment with embodiment failed (‘The Kingdom of God is within you,’ Jesus had insisted, but his audience went and founded a Church instead), eventually He decided to give it a second shot Perhaps the world would take Him seriously this time.”
Before leaving on the Calcutta packet, Victor had carefully explained the parameters within which Gerard’s genius could operate. The Curia Romana had been explicit The reliquary must cost no more than 530 billion lire, about 300 million dollars, and must take less than a year to complete. A longer schedule would smack of irreverence. For a building site the Vatican had selected an abandoned movie set, the great Antioch Circus constructed for the chariot race in the 1959 Ben-Hur, its eighteen acres hewn from a rock quarry bordering Cinecittà Studios on the outskirts of Rome. The Curia Romana had commissioned legions of stone cutters, mural painters, mosaic workers, bronze casters, carpenters, electricians, and gardeners, all prepared to commence their efforts the instant the blueprints arrived.
Gerard tried everything. Prayer, fasting, even self-flagellation with a jungle vine. Locked in solitude, he walked Viatikara’s deserted shores, screaming to the skies, demanding that the heavens provide him with a concept.
And then one sultry morning, the heavens obliged him. Staring upward, he saw looming over the island a bulbous cloud in the shape of a human brain. Each particular was in place: stem, cerebellum, pituitary gland, cortical hemispheres. It took but a minute for the cumulus brain to evoke a memorable passage from Parables for a Post-Theistic Age:
As the new millennium dawns, may we finally rid ourselves of
those grand absolutes, those terrible transcendent truths, in whose name human beings have routinely menaced one another. If the coming era must have a religion, then let it be a religion of everyday miracles and quotidian epiphanies, of short eternities and little myths. In the post-theistic age, let Christianity become merely kindness, salvation transmute into art, truth defer to knowledge, and faith embrace a vibrant doubt.
Knowledge, not truth…knowledge, mere knowledge, a church streaming not from the sky but from the mind: a church of the human brain! Gerard saw a great plaza spreading across the Ben-Hur arena. Along each edge rose a building devoted to one of Ockham’s little myths: the Temple of Knowledge, featuring busts of Galileo, Newton, and their brethren…the Temple of Kindness, a gallery of history’s most conspicuous saints, from the Good Samaritan to Mother Teresa…the Temple of Creativity, a museum bursting not only with art treasures but also with exhibits commemorating the spiritual insights of which Homo sapiens was occasionally capable (a Sermon on the Mount diorama, an audio-animatronic Koran, a tableau depicting Siddhartha’s collision with infinity)…and, finally, the Temple of Doubt—doubt, “the miraculous faculty,” as Ockham put it, that constituted “the West’s great gift to the world”—hung with portraits of Hume, Voltaire, Ingersoll, and other master skeptics encircling a ten-foot-high statue of Desiderius Erasmus, the admirable Catholic humanist who, in Ockham’s words, “emerged as one of the few dissenting voices in an age when the keepers of both the Roman Church and the new Protestantism were out for blood.”
In the center of the plaza lay an immense bronze brain, thirty meters high, its hemispheres cast separately and welded together on the Cinecittà site. As the visiting pilgrim approached, he would subliminally perceive that the Ben-Hur quarry shielded this convoluted mass of metal the way a cranium protects an organic brain. Entering through a portal in the pituitary gland, the pilgrim would face a choice. He could proceed to the left hemisphere—the reliquary proper, filled with fifty representative bone fragments, each accorded its own glass-walled niche—or he could tour the right hemisphere, its rotating exhibits celebrating whatever scientific, artistic, or religious breakthroughs had recently enthralled the species.
As Gerard charged into the kitchen and snatched up his drawing pad, Fiona said, “You’ve solved it.”
“I’ve hooked Behemoth,” he replied, sketching furiously.
His muse possessed him, a goddess of boiling bronze and flying sparks, of molten steel and burning marble. He labored around the clock, succumbing (but never acquiescing) to sleep as he gradually brought forth five preliminary 24" × 36" watercolors plus a l:43-scale model fashioned from hardened wax, fired clay, painted plaster, and carved wood. At noon on Tuesday a blood vessel burst in his right eye, but he kept on working; on Wednesday morning his hands cramped up, and he had to sit still for an hour, his fingers immersed in warm water; on Thursday evening he gulped down his eightieth successive cup of coffee and began experiencing accelerated heartbeats. And yet somehow by week’s end the paintings and the model existed. Gerard was especially pleased with the central brain, which he’d created by sculpting a sea sponge with garden shears and nail scissors.
“It’s all there,” he told Fiona, sweeping his hand across the diorama like a god conjuring a breeze. “Temple of Knowledge, Temple of Kindness”—he pointed to the hub—“and this is a human brain.”
“I can tell.”
“So…what do you think?”
Somewhat to his surprise, Fiona did not respond with oblique sarcasm, faint praise, or neopagan cant. She gave him a firm hug and a lingering kiss on the lips.
“Utterly marvelous.”
“Really?”
“Victor will be ecstatic.” Her face glowed with the same admiration she’d displayed when the first Korty Madonna materialized in Gerard’s studio. “Father Ockham will shout hallelujah. Emily, if she were still around, would be enchanted.”
“Emily?”
She smiled, cleared her throat, and recited:
The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain
With ease, and you beside.
“I like that,” he said.
“There’s more. It’s no accident you made the brain from a sponge.”
The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb
As sponges, buckets do.
“I’m shipping the model to Rome on the next packet,” he said.
“I’ll help you crate it up,” she said.
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, heft them pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
“She got it exactly right,” he said, removing the roof from the Temple of Doubt. He reached inside, grasped Erasmus, and lifted the humanist into the light. “You really like my concept?”
“Dear, you’ve created a world.” She caressed the sponge as she might a lover’s thigh. “It will confuse the hell out of the cardinals, but it’s terrific.”
“I didn’t design it for them.”
“They’ll probably toss it in the Vatican Dumpster,” she said.
“Too prosaic,” he said. “They’ll crush it in the Vatican winepress.”
“Feed it to the Vatican alligator.”
“Hoist it by the Vatican petard.”
Fiona laughed and said, “Jeez, Gerry, what if they think it’s totally wonderful and send us the two million dollars?”
“We’ll cope,” he said, smiling.
“Except…”
“Except?”
“Except I don’t want two million dollars,” she said.
“Yes you do,” he said.
“I want jungle nights and Indonesian gods and the Minangkabau Lagoon.”
“The Bethesda Fountain is just as wet.”
“But it doesn’t have a tiger.”
Nothing worked. No matter what antinausea drugs Dr. Furtado prescribed—no matter how high the doses of vitamins or mood elevators—Kevin’s symptoms persisted. By day he shivered. Each evening he ejected the same black muck from his stomach. He continued to insist that he’d absorbed “a boy,” but whenever the pediatrician questioned him about it, Kevin grew hysterical, screaming, “He’s inside me! He’s inside me!”
His condition worsened. The mildest perturbation—an inaccurate weather forecast in the Boston Globe, the preemption of Galaxy Squad by a presidential press conference—made him weep. His skin grew pale, his weight fell. On hearing that the school principal had granted him sick leave, Kevin promptly retired to his room, crawled under the blankets, and stayed there.
“Got any new tricks to show me?” asked Uncle Douglas.
“He doesn’t like tricks,” Kevin replied.
Douglas Shafron was a maddeningly uncomplicated man who professed the sort of hardball Lutheranism whereby only a small percentage of humankind could expect salvation, every individual being earmarked for either Heaven or Hell at the moment of conception. His beliefs outraged Nora, whose atheism had intensified during the Corpus Dei’s trial (better a godless universe than one ruled by the inscrutable superthug the Job Society had unmasked in The Hague). Their father had been Jewish, their mother a lapsed Catholic, and for Nora her brother’s embrace of predestination theology was a postmortem insult to both parents.
“I hear you’re making a vampire bat pop back and forth between two birdcages,” Douglas persisted.
“Leave me alone,” rasped Kevin, muck seeping from the corner of his mouth.
“Tell you what,” said his uncle. “After you’re better, we’ll fly to California and visit the Magic Castle.”
“I’ve been there.”
“I’ll bet you’d like to go again.”
“He says I’m not allowed out of bed.”
Abandoning his initial diagnosis of viral pneumonia compounded by cli
nical depression, Dr. Furtado resorted to specialists—to hematologists, neurologists, and endocrinologists. They drew Kevin’s blood. They tapped his spine. They cultured his saliva, scanned his brain, biopsied his bone marrow, analyzed his urine. Lacking comprehensive health insurance, Nora charged the crisis on her Visa card. The hardest part was the waiting, those cruelly protracted periods between the infliction of some costly new diagnostic procedure and a nurse calling to say, “All results negative.” The first time Nora heard this phrase, relief surged through her. The seventh time, it made her furious. All results negative, and yet she was living with a thirteen-year-old invalid.
She hated abandoning him during the day, but she couldn’t afford caregivers, and her job was essential to whatever dismal future lay before them. While keeping up the minimum Visa payments was easy, one more expensive test would rupture her $6,500 credit limit, and she’d be forced to borrow from a relative—Douglas’s sister-in-law, most likely, who owned a chain of beauty salons.
Returning to her marooned son at day’s end, she usually found him sicker than when she’d left. He continued to leak, his every orifice now an outlet for the muck. Words deserted him. His speech descended to a prelinguistic plane. Two successive snorts signaled that he was going to throw up. A prolonged moan meant that his diaper needed changing. From his tongue the paralysis spread to other muscles. As the school year ended, his feet became as inert as stones, his hands as useless as flippers. His ball-and-socket joints stopped working, frozen by some physiological equivalent of rust.
For several weeks Nora resisted getting him a wheelchair, as if the presence of such a device would augur permanent quadriplegia. But then one stifling August afternoon, browsing through a Somerville thrift shop, she spotted a wheelchair for only twenty dollars. The first time he saw his new conveyance, Kevin smiled, though she couldn’t tell whether this reaction traced to the promise of greater mobility or to the memory of his routine called “Them Dry Bones,” in which a wheelchair manufacturer evaluated his product using a crash-test skeleton that magically reconstituted itself after every wreck.
