The Eternal Footman

by James Morrow

  Vatican City

  11:30 A.M.

  Opening Address: “Meeting the Millennium”

  delivered by His Holiness, Pope Innocent XIV

  Bishop of Rome

  11:45 A.M.

  Medley of African-American Spirituals

  performed by the Jumpin’ for Jesus Gospel Chorus

  Nashville

  12:00 NOON

  Panel Discussion: “Designing and Building the Cinecittà Reliquary”

  led by His Grace, Archbishop Jacques Renault

  Notre Dame Cathedral

  Paris

  12:45 P.M.

  “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”

  by Martin Luther

  performed by the American Baptist Chorale

  Orlando

  1:00 P.M.

  Closing Prayer

  delivered by David Bergmann

  Rabbi, Beth Shalom Synagogue

  Philadelphia

  After lunch, guided tours of the shrines, gardens, and reliquary will convene every hour on the hour, beginning at 2:00 P.M.

  With his Rapidograph Gerard circled the fifth event. High noon. Good. That’s when he would make his move, exposing to the entire CNN-viewing public the betrayal of a learned priest’s insights and a talented sculptor’s epiphany. Which particular fools, he wondered, had the College of Cardinals recruited to grapple with the topic “Designing and Building the Cinecittà Reliquary”?

  Gerard sipped his cappuccino and touched his wounded cheek. A contagion was coming, the so-called fetch had said. Universal death awareness. If that was true, would art then cease to matter?

  The program book also featured photos of the popes holding their bones, plus an “Inspirational Message” from Innocent XIV, a wildly inaccurate précis of Parables for a Post-Theistic Age, and a biography of Gerard presumptuously titled “Portrait of the Artist as an Eccentric Recluse.” Oddly enough, this last piece stayed largely within the domain of fact. They got his birthplace, early schooling, and advanced degrees right, as well as his various prizes. Most of the article concerned Gerard’s Virgin Mary breakthrough, but there was also a long paragraph on his Dante project, “a series of brilliant Paradiso statues slated for acquisition by the Vatican.” As for the reliquary, the anonymous author averred that “the Holy See could scarcely believe its good fortune in securing the services of this latter-day Michelangelo, who continues to seclude himself in the Indonesian rain forest, carving Makrana marble.” The final sentence, while bullshit, had a certain plausibility: “He is rumored to be working on a series of sculptures derived from the Revelation to Saint John.” Not a bad idea, actually.

  The ceremony started promptly. Innocent XIV’s address was a masterpiece of obfuscation, its keynote derived from Robert Browning: “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.” Given the tepidness of the Pope’s lament, a naive bystander never would have inferred that the Church had lost its principal Deity, but merely, say, its real estate holdings in Tuscany or its collection of high Baroque sugar bowls. The Holy Father finished up by requesting a moment of silence for “our dear departed brother, Father Thomas Ockham, whose speculations inform the theological heart of this beautiful reliquary.”

  The Jumpin’ for Jesus Gospel Chorus performed its spirituals, the “Designing and Building” panel members assumed their places at the silk-swathed table…and Gerard sprang into action. Watercolors in hand, he scrambled under a dozen sawhorse barriers, sprinted down the aisle, and leaped onto the stage just as Archbishop Jacques Renault, a vigorous man with pink cheeks and snowy white hair, finished introducing his copanelists: an Italian architect, a Dutch landscape painter, a German philosopher, and—the sole woman—a Belgian art critic. Charging up to the lectern, Gerard located the CNN camera, faced the lens, and unfurled his watercolors.

  “I am Gerard Korty,” he screamed into the microphone, “and the thing behind you is a fraud!” His amplified words resounded across Cinecittà, all the way to the reliquary. The quarry walls replayed each syllable with a fearsome resonance. “I didn’t design it!” Entering the mike, his shouts triggered a feedback loop; a metallic howl assailed the audience. He twisted the volume knob on the control panel. “Here’s what Ockham wanted!” Like a matador antagonizing a bull, Gerard flourished the topmost watercolor. “A bronze brain!” Dropping the brain painting, he frantically displayed the next one. “A Temple of Creativity!”

  Pikes in hand, two soldiers from the Vatican Swiss Guard lurched toward the lectern. The shorter one appropriated the control panel, throwing a toggle switch and killing the mike, then turned to Archbishop Renault and exclaimed his apologies in Italian.

  “Temple of Knowledge!” screamed Gerard. Stripped of electronic augmentation, his voice sounded thin and pathetic, a barnyard squawk.

  The second soldier, bearded and muscular, grabbed Gerard and wrestled him to the podium floor.

  “Doubt!”

  The Swiss Guard dragged him off the stage and hustled him toward the Via Federico Fellini.

  He was about to scream “Kindness!” when the first guard struck him with the shaft of his pike. Darkness seeped through Gerard’s neurons. His final thought, before blacking out, was that he would not sell the Vatican his Paradiso marbles even if they offered him all the kingdoms of this world.

  As he came into consciousness, nausea beset him, rising up his esophagus and spreading downward through his bowels. Compounding his queasiness was the vibration of the metro car. He rubbed his eyes. To his right sat a weary businessman in a silk suit, to his left the burly soldier who’d tackled him. Before him stood the other soldier, leaning on the steel pike with which he’d whacked Gerard’s skull. Between their outlandish helmets and their absurd pantaloons, the guards looked like two movie extras leaving Cinecittà after a hard day’s shoot on a slapstick comedy lampooning the Renaissance.

  “Come si sente?” asked the standing soldier.

  “Lo stomaco.” Gerard pressed one hand against his belly, the other against his cranium. A bump the size of a walnut grew from his right temple.

  “It’s six o’clock,” said the guard. “We’ve been riding under the city all afternoon.”

  “Where’re my watercolors?”

  “Monsignor Di Luca will return them upon receipt of your written pledge never again to criticize the Cinecittà shrines. Speaking personally, I think a bronze brain is a third-rate idea, and the cardinals were right to reject it. Which hotel?”

  “The Abruzzi.”

  “We shall leave you at Termini, two stops away. When is your flight?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Be on it.”

  The sickness lifted, replaced by a thundering headache and a creeping despair, as Gerard staggered across the Piazza della Rotonda and entered the hotel lobby. So the Vatican would get the reliquary it wanted—the reliquary it deserved. What had he expected, really? Justice? Hadn’t Martin Candle’s audacious presentation of God’s rap sheet proved that justice happened only by accident in this world, if at all?

  As he crossed the lobby, the thick Kurdistan carpet absorbing his footfalls, an imposing, bearish, but peculiarly graceful man dressed in a black caftan rose from a Barcelona chair and came forward. He held a brown leather attaché case to his chest, clutching it like a terrorist more worried about his bomb being stolen away than about a premature detonation.

  “Excuse me,” said the man. His eyes were a bright, luminous green, like polished jade, and his chin tapered to a goatee. “You are Mr. Gerard Korty?”

  The sculptor nodded.

  “Dr. Adrian Lucido, psychoanalyst, Freudian by training, Jungian by temperament. Like you, I live in New York City, and, like you, I came for the grand opening. Your performance on the platform today ranks among the most impressive displays of outrage I’ve ever seen.”

  “The cardinals weren’t impressed.”

  “I beg to differ. They clearly felt threatened.”

  “My head hurts.”

  “
Wine is not the worst analgesic. L’Antico Carbonaro is two blocks away. Their cellar is well stocked, and their pasta is the closest you’ll ever get to ambrosia in this life. May I buy your dinner?”

  Dr. Adrian Lucido had spoken the truth. The meal Gerard devoured at L’Antico Carbonaro that evening, fettucine with artichokes, was the second finest in his experience, outclassed only by the roast lamb he’d enjoyed at the Paris banquet honoring the debut of his Madonna. Even more memorable than the food was Lucido’s capacity for wine. The psychoanalyst drank five brimming glasses of Brunello di Montalcino to Gerard’s half-filled two, yet he showed no sign of inebriation.

  The conversation, like the imbibing, was asymmetrical. While Gerard absently pried wax nuggets from the quartet of white candles decorating their table, his host related his life’s story in long, looping, byzantine sentences. For the past two decades Lucido had been plying his trade on the Upper West Side, ministering to the neuroses of the Manhattan aristocracy. His recent celebrity derived from his unorthodox approach to “theothanatopsis syndrome,” a disorder marked by a preoccupation with God’s death. Lucido had enjoyed remarkable success in treating this illness, but it was his methods, not his results, that had earned him Vatican approbation. Believing that Freud had been disastrously misguided in ignoring religion’s therapeutic value, Lucido encouraged theothanatopsis victims to cultivate their spirituality, a regimen that often involved converting (or reconverting) to Catholicism. His triumphs became the stuff of case studies and cover stories. When the Holy See began identifying potential invitees for the Cinecittà opening, Lucido had made the A-list.

  Only after uncorking the third Brunello di Montalcino did the psychoanalyst reveal his purpose in tracking down Gerard.

  “I require a sculptor. Not just any sculptor—an artist of unbridled passions and iron convictions.”

  “You picked the wrong man,” said Gerard. “Since yesterday my convictions have been for sale to the highest bidder.”

  “This project, I promise you, will restore your idealism. It will reward you with something of incomparable value.”

  Gerard plucked a white bead from the south candle. “What would that be?”

  “Professional satisfaction. The knowledge that your art helped conquer a transcendent evil.” Lucido poured himself a sixth glass of dark red wine. “The divine skull has barely begun its reign. A satanic plague crouches at the gates of the West The world is about to change, forever.”

  Rubbing the nascent scab on his cheek, Gerard said, “My fetch told me.”

  Lucido’s lips assumed the contours of a crescent moon, “Ah, you’ve been visited, good. Then my motives will be clear to you.” His bared teeth grew golden in the candlelight. “I’ve encountered my own death a dozen times so far. We have a complicated relationship. I listen to his troubles, and he permits me to keep on breathing. Therapy in exchange for ontological status—a fair trade, wouldn’t you say?” He wet his fingertips and, reaching toward the east candle, pinched out the flame. “We live in extraordinary times, Gerard. The dawning millennium glitters with opportunity. Tell me something. Do you believe it’s possible for a man to create a religion from scratch?”

  “It sounds…presumptuous.”

  “My theothanatopsis patients have convinced me that religion, and only religion, can cure skull-induced despondency. Do you know what Jung said? ‘Among my patients of middle age or older, there is not one whose cure did not involve finding a religious outlook on life.’ Unfortunately, if my fetch speaks the truth, the coming pestilence will make theothanatopsis syndrome seem like the sniffles. What existing religion can stand against an all-consuming nihilism? Judaism? Catholicism? Not while those eyeless sockets stare at us twenty-four hours a day. If we want to heal the abyss, Gerard, we must fashion a faith unlike anything the West has ever known. The old outlook was monotheistic. Our religion will boast a pantheon. The priests of the passing order appealed to an invisible reality. Our religion will be corporeal: Somatocism, I call it, from the Greek soma, body. In short, I propose a Church of Earthly Affirmation—a joy religion, a sacramental shout, a hooray so reverberant, it will shake God’s teeth right out of His jaw.”

  Gerard picked up a breadstick, dipped it in olive oil, and bit off the end. He chewed. What manner of man was this self-appointed prophet? He seemed some odd amalgam of mystic, egomaniac, genius, and nutcase. There was an otherworldly quality about him, the aura of one privy to secret communiqués in forgotten languages. If the universe was a machine, Lucido knew where to oil it If it was a Chinese puzzle box, Lucido possessed the solution. If a joke, he got it.

  “You’ve given this matter a lot of thought,” said Gerard.

  “The instant my fetch showed himself, I began plotting the down-fell of his kind.” Opening his attaché case, Lucido drew out a phial containing a translucent, icy-blue fluid and plunked it on the table like a grand master making a consummate chess move. “A scientist of my acquaintance has invented a drug, hyperion-15. At the moment there are only four ounces in the world, but by next winter we’ll have buckets of the stuff.”

  “It cures the plague?”

  “It affords a remission of several days’ duration, long enough for the victim to discover the four affirming energies that lie deep within his psyche. Do these energies have names? Indeed—a simple matter of anagramming atheism’s ancient father, Diagoras the Unbeliever, fifth century B.C., to bring forth Idorasag, Risogada, Orgasiad, and Soaragid. Thus do I restore Diagoras to the universe of faith.” Lucido wet his fingers, tilted the west candle toward him, and exterminated the flame. “A human soul is thrown from the womb. What does it need? It needs, first of all, to imbibe nourishment from its mother.” Puckering his lips, he drew wine into his mouth as if from a breast. “Ergo, our patients worship Idorasag, the world gland, goddess of suckling. Soon afterward, the soul seeks the pleasures of mirth. And so our patients serve Risogada, king of the risible, lord of the jest. Next, reaching sexual maturity, the soul requires erotic fulfillment.” He kissed the bowl of his wineglass. “And so our patients make sacrifices to Orgasiad, queen of passion, avatar of copulation. Finally, the soul needs to celebrate itself.” Rising from his chair, he broke into an amalgam of polka and jig—for a man of his proportions, he was quite athletic—a display that elicited approving smiles from some restaurant patrons and perplexed frowns from others. “And so our patients pledge their hearts to Soaragid, master of the revels, god of dancing.”

  Gerard, too, frowned, unable to decide whether Somatocism represented a breakthrough commensurate with the Sermon on the Mount, or a setback comparable to the Cranium Dei.

  Caftan flying, Lucido circled the table, then dropped back into his chair. From his attaché case he took a fanfolded map, opening it panel by panel until the Mexican states of Veracruz, Tabasco, and Oaxaca lay before Gerard’s eyes.

  “Even as we speak, a temple complex is rising along the Bahía de Campeche,” said Lucido. “The labyrinth of Idorasag, the hall of Risogada, the grove of Orgasiad, the cave of Soaragid. At the moment each deity lacks both form and visage, which is where you come in, Gerard. You must follow me to the Mexican jungle and give the new gods their faces.”

  Gerard finished his wine. “Wouldn’t it be simpler to do all this in, say, the woods of Connecticut?”

  “I knew from the outset that the Lucido Clinic must occupy sacred ground. Eventually I decided on the presumed locus of the imperially mysterious Olmec civilization.” The psychoanalyst’s extended finger glided through the Bahía de Campeche like an enormous sea serpent, then beached itself near the port city of Coatzacoalcos. “A thousand years before the birth of Christ, this forgotten empire flourished along the Gulf coast, ultimately spreading to the foothills of the Siena Madre Oriental. But Coatzacoalcos attracted me for another reason as well. Do you know how the Cretaceous dinosaurs died?”

  Absorbing this supreme non sequitur, Gerard scowled and said, “Something about a comet.”

  “An asteroid, actu
ally. Sixty-five million years ago, a body the size of Mount Everest arrived from outer space and crashed into the Yucatán peninsula, kicking up so much debris that the Cretaceous climate was altered beyond the dinosaurs’ capacity to survive the change. Now. Here’s the exciting part. As the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere, the trailing edge broke off and fell burning toward the hill country south of Coatzacoalcos. In 1999 a maverick geologist, Dr. Isabel Oswald of Penn State University, discovered the remainder of this gigantic fragment. The essence of Oswald’s Rock is iridium compounded with a mineral unlike anything previously found on the planet. Dr. Oswald named the stuff reubenite, in honor of her late husband, Reuben Margolis. As it turns out, reubenite is an ideal medium for fashioning graven images, resilient as marble yet immune to fractures, supple under the chisel yet obdurate once the piece is finished.”

  “Sounds supernatural.”

  “Merely extraterrestrial.” Lucido produced a half-dozen 5" × 7" photographs, laying them out like a fortune-teller dealing Tarot cards. Each shot showed an anomalous mass that, judging from the six humans standing on top, was the size of a football stadium. “The dinosaurs’ tombstone, you might call it.”

  “On this rock you will build your church?”

  “Precisely. There’s enough reubenite here to furnish each temple with a hundred idols at least. Are you game, Gerard? Will you join me on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and let the new gods reveal themselves to you?”

  Gerard licked his left palm and, reaching out, quenched the remaining candle. “Isn’t this scheme…well…a bit grand, Adrian?”

  “Oh, it’s more than grand—it’s grandiose, it’s arrogant, it’s hubris beyond measure. But in willing Himself out of existence, did not God, too, engage in hubris? He has abandoned the field to His inferiors, and I, for one, stand prepared to fill the void.”

  “My wife won’t like the idea of moving to a jungle again. She’s grown rather fond of Manhattan.”