by James Morrow
“Explain to her that the Manhattan she knows and loves is about to be dismantled by demons.”
Unsettling images paraded through Gerard’s brain, visions of Lucido handing over the reubenite to another godmaker, and suddenly the sculptor wanted to seal the bargain. Even if this man was a thoroughgoing charlatan, he would probably prove a more reliable and respectful patron than the Curia Romana.
Gerard said, “I’ll need two assistants.”
“Done.”
“State-of-the-art facilities.”
“Naturally.”
“Flexible deadlines.”
“Of course.”
“One further condition, Adrian. No matter what, I must have an audience. If the deities I create displease your priests or offend your sensibilities, you must exhibit them anyway.”
In a devotion seemingly directed toward Orgasiad, Lucido touched thumb to forefinger and eased a breadstick into the orifice. Smiling subtly, he twisted the stick and spoke.
“You have my word.”
Not by Bread Alone
AS THE MALICIOUS MONTH of September ran its course, succeeded by an equally cruel October and a sadistic November, Nora took qualified comfort in the fact that Kevin now had company in his suffering. The existential pestilence had arrived in force, sweeping across the industrialized world like a thousand Mongol hordes, thrusting Western civilization into nihilism’s icy grip.
It had a name now, plus a symptomatology, a prognosis, and a diagnostic procedure. Dr. Cyrus Armbruster of Johns Hopkins University, the first physician to describe the disease in the professional literature, coined the term “abulic plague”—from abulia, meaning “loss of will.” The label prospered beyond its initial appearance in Epidemiology Review, entering common parlance in a matter of weeks. Dr. Gertrude Luckenbach of the Salk Institute discovered a heretofore unknown antigen in the bloodstreams of abulia-infected individuals, a protein she dubbed “Nietzsche-A” in the Proceedings of the Mayo Clinic. Thanks to Luckenbach’s insight and a concomitant fluorescent antibody test, doctors could now identify “true abulics,” as opposed to the terrified multitudes who merely imagined they’d seen their deaths. Dr. Nalin Chatterjee of the National Centers for Disease Control, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, argued for distinguishing Nietzsche-positive patients from those who’d progressed to “thanocathexis,” the phase during which a fetch periodically took up residence in its host. Thanocathexis itself comprised four stages, the initial chills and vomiting leading to a near-comatose state of aphasic quadriplegia, after which came abscesses, then a web of pocks and fistulas. The Nietzsche-positive, thanocathected abulia victim was regarded as terminal, though a small percentage of these patients, Kevin Burkhart among them, clung to life.
For those thousands of Americans and Europeans in the crepuscular condition of having met their fetches without experiencing thexis, such encounters across the death barrier became prime topics of conversation. This sociological phenomenon impressed itself on Nora during the dinner party that her bachelor employer, the endlessly amiable Ray Feldstein, threw for himself in honor of his decision to sell the Tower of Flowers and retire.
It was a swank affair, lit by candles and facilitated by caterers, though like many swank affairs of late, it occurred in the valley of the shadow of death. Released by the various wines—Spanish, French, German, and Italian vintages in vertiginous rotation—the fetch stories poured forth, increasing in length and complexity after Nora announced that none need sanitize their narratives for her sake.
“I met mine during the Superbowl,” said Dick Aronson, the mechanic who kept Phaëthon on the road. “I’m watching the game—right?—and suddenly there’s this shriveled old guy beside me on the sofa, wearing my face. The Newsweek story’s just appeared, so I know who it is. I try acting calm. ‘I’m rooting for Dallas,’ I tell him. ‘How about you?’ Constantine, that’s his name, he looks at me, and he says, ‘Sometimes with a song, but always with a smile, the bottomless pit beckons.’ I figure he’s a Steelers fan. The game continues, and I keep hoping to start a conversation, like at halftime, when I say, ‘Them cheerleaders sure are built,’ but all I get back is ‘The pit implodes, sucking us to oblivion’s core.’ Finally things get hot, twenty-one seconds left, fourth and goal from the six. Cowboys score, they win. The huddle breaks. I-formation with two split ends. Long count The snap. And suddenly my TV goes kablooey. I say, ‘Hey, dammit, did you do that?’ Constantine says, ‘Taking football seriously is pathological.’”
“You think you’ve got a mean one,” said Karen Whitcomb, Ray’s thin and ethereal married sister. “Two months ago I’m in the Star Market, produce section, squeezing the cantaloupes. Suddenly there’s a woman standing alongside me. Naturally I assume she’s choosing a melon, but then I notice she’s got no head on her shoulders. She’s holding it in her hands, and it’s my head, and the thing’s talking to me. ‘Kafka put it well,’ says the head. ‘The meaning of life is that it ends.’ I got so scared, I bolted and kept on running and running. I had to send Lloyd back for the car.”
“Mine’s even worse,” said Ruthie Dart, Nora’s coworker. “It’s late at night, and I’m at the automatic teller, making a withdrawal, four twenties and a ten. A voice behind me says, ‘I’ll take that,’ so I turn around, holding the cash, and of course it’s my Sophie. ‘What do you want with money?’ I ask. ‘The abyss needs aluminum siding,’ she says, and then the whole ninety bucks goes flying out of my hands and bursts into flames.”
“They aren’t always nasty,” said Milton Stritch, the brawny director of the West Somerville Funeral Home and undeniably the shop’s best customer. “Mine recommended a therapist to me, Lionel Ginsberg in Newton, and I couldn’t be more pleased. I’ve been through a lot of personal growth lately.”
“Mine told me where to get my hair done,” said Joyce Chumly, Ray’s next-door neighbor.
“Mine added a deck to the house,” said Harold Feldstein, Ray’s brother as well as Nora’s gynecologist.
“You’ve got to be careful,” said Avery Bloch, the FTD sales rep. “Last Thursday, mine offered to mow the lawn. He mowed it, all right—straight down to the dirt, and then he kept on going. My yard looks like Flanders field after World War I.”
Nora, angry, took three quick swallows of Chardonnay. She liked her present companions, but she found their banter outrageous. It was obscene to be spinning after-dinner anecdotes from humankind’s incipient extinction, as if the levelers were no more than a bunch of annoying relatives—dithery Aunt Agatha who knitted during your wedding, forgetful Uncle Willie who gave you a crystal punch bowl every Christmas.
“I have a confession,” said Derrick Lane, the lantern-jawed, garrulous accountant who did Ray’s taxes each year. An open homophile, Derrick had always impressed Nora as having assimilated his proclivities with a dignity far surpassing the average heterosexual’s accommodation to conventional desire. “Last week, my boss told me to go fuck myself, and I thought, ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing.’”
“You’re not the only one in that situation,” said Ray’s unmarried sister, Selena. All around the table, eyebrows lifted. Ray spat a Swedish meatball onto his plate. Selena asked Derrick, “What’s it like for you?”
“Ambiguous,” the accountant replied. “We understand each other’s physical desires, but Roderick is cold to the touch, and he never wants to talk afterward.”
“I’ve got the same problem with Veronica,” said Selena.
“Selena—,” muttered Ray.
“Later,” said Selena.
“These stories are all fascinating, but I have a question,” said Milton Stritch. “Are the fetches merely here to torment us, or do we have something they need?”
“What could a fetch possibly need?” asked Avery Todd.
“Acceptance, perhaps,” said Hubert Whitcomb, Ray’s diffident brother-in-law. “Have any of us really tried befriending our levelers?”
“Don’t even think about it!”
screamed Christine Onsa, a crisp woman in her early seventies who each spring grew day lilies and Siberian irises in her backyard for sale to the Tower of Flowers. “They’re not our friends!” The source of Christine’s distress was common knowledge. Her granddaughter, a beautiful young concert pianist of Carnegie Hall caliber, had lain in a state of stage-three thexis for nearly a year. “They’ll never be our friends!”
“I’m sorry,” said Hubert, chagrined.
Christine had it exactly right, Nora felt. But because the levelers were evil, did it follow that they were invincible? Like Thetis dipping Achilles into the Styx and neglecting to inoculate his heel, had the Angel of Death unintentionally cursed his minions with some secret vulnerability?
When she picked up Kevin later that night, she asked her brother, “Do you believe they’re invincible?”
The boy lay slumped in his wheelchair, boils oozing.
She knew what Douglas’s answer would be. In his view, abulia was simply the most recent visitation from the repertoire of plagues that God (the true, invisible God, not the Cinecittà bone pile or the skyborne death’s-head) stood ready to inflict on sinners, a series that in biblical times had ranged from the hemorrhoids that punished the Philistines for appropriating the Ark, to the pestilence deployed against David for numbering the people, to the contagion that destroyed Sennacherib’s army before it could capture Jerusalem.
“Fight them?” he said. “Bad idea. We must submit to the fetches or risk an even greater wrath. What about you, Nora? Do you think they’re invincible?”
“My rational side says we’re licked,” she replied, wheeling Kevin toward Phaëthon. “And I beseech myself, in the bowels of Christ, to think it possible I may be mistaken.”
It was inevitable, Nora realized in retrospect, that the United States government would attempt a technological solution to nihilism. For over half a century, Americans had reflexively deployed mechanical ingenuity against the fact of death. Better respirators. Superior pacemakers. If all else failed: cryonic suspension. As the appalling year 2005 unfolded, the Pentagon set its sights on a new enemy, abulia, and the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t rest until they’d blown the Cranium Dei to bits.
Although Nora was doubtful that they could bring God down, she decided to watch the TV coverage anyway. Ruthie Dart came over for the broadcast, toting a bag of pretzels and a six-pack of Saranac. The women sat on the couch, feet on the coffee table, Kevin dozing beside them in his wheelchair. CNN, PBS, and (he entertainment networks all carried the historic event live. The women ultimately chose ABC, reasoning that any organization so adept at presenting professional sports would also do right by Armageddon.
According to the commentator, the eternally chipper Ronald Glass, the strategists had never seriously considered atomic weapons. The thermonuclear option had prospered in the Pentagon for only two days. A sky clogged with radioactive waste, the particles sifting down to Earth and poisoning the biosphere, was not demonstrably preferable to a sky dominated by a Cranium Dei.
The attack would consist of a dozen guided missiles, each bearing ten independently targetable warheads, the salvos to occur at seven-minute intervals from a Polaris submarine cruising off Cape Cod. An uncommon patriotic thrill overcame Nora as the first missile arced heavenward, ejected its booster, shed its second stage, and spewed out its warheads. Forty-five seconds later, the bombs struck the sacred skull just below the WINDOWS 2005 advertisement (Microsoft being His present tenant) and exploded in perfect synchronization—a direct hit, according to ABC’s array of orbiting cameras. A huge red fireball blossomed on God’s bony brow like a physician’s headband mirror catching the sun.
“Touchdown!” shouted Ronald Glass.
“Hooray!” screamed Ruthie.
“Way to go, Navy!” cried an elated Nora.
But God was a mighty fortress. Whatever the components of His forehead, they would not succumb to TNT. When the smoke cleared and the debris dissipated, the cameras disclosed, in Ronald’s words, “not a scratch.”
The rest of the strike proved equally impotent. Ten more payloads hit home; ten more ineffectual explosions filled Nora’s TV screen. Skewed by a minor navigation error, the twelfth and final salvo made for the divine jaws. The warhead cluster struck His mouth squarely, lodging between His left canine and the corresponding bicuspid, as if the US Navy were currently running a dental practice, but the subsequent blasts failed to dislodge either tooth.
“Shit,” said Nora.
“Let’s have another beer,” said Ruthie.
As it turned out, the Navy’s unsuccessful assault marked the end of systematic human resistance to the plague. After that fateful April night, the levelers’ toll increased logarithmically. Each day fifty thousand new victims tested Nietzsche-positive, while another fifty thousand suffered penetration by their fetches. Stunned by death awareness, paralyzed by stage-two thexis, Western civilization stopped functioning. Laborers, clerks, technicians, bureaucrats, politicians, executives—no level of society enjoyed a respite from the wraiths.
With Sophoclean inexorability, the American infrastructure unraveled. The first losses were subtle. Here and there, a radio station went off the air. Advertisements ceased appearing on God’s brow. Supermarkets stopped offering frozen vegetables. Service stations no longer stocked spark plugs or motor oil. Drugstore inventories declined, with laxatives, tampons, suntan lotion, dandruff shampoo, and mouthwash vanishing altogether. Worse followed. Public transportation became a thing of the past, from the fanciest jetliner to the humblest crosstown bus. Shoes became as rare as four-leaf clovers, toilet paper as scarce as Mark McGwire’s rookie card. Gasoline disappeared. Credit cards yielded to currency. The Internet died in gibberish, the Web in abstract expressionism. So many professional athletes had been thected that the NBA Championships and the World Series were both canceled. Power plants, telephone companies, and fuel-oil distributors suspended their services. Huddled amid flickering candles in naked kitchens, New Englanders cast a worried eye on the calendar, toward a winter bearing down on them like a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, a rider with Freon in his arteries and an icicle hanging from each nostril.
Then the deaths began. Throughout the West, Homo sapiens staggered beneath the twin burdens of bereavement and interment Whenever Nora stepped outside, she saw that the Sanitation Department’s newly formed Pallbearers Corps had resorted to yet another disposal method. Fresh Pond was now a mass grave, its macabre contents dissolving beneath a frosting of quicklime. Dead abulics clogged the Charles River like an immense beaver dam. Decaying corpses so totally obscured Cambridge Common that a film director in possession of a gantry, a 35mm camera, and Vivien Leigh would have had no difficulty replicating the famous railroad-yard crane shot from Gone with the Wind.
In every affected city, from Honolulu to Kiev, Saskatoon to Buenos Aires, mere animal survival became the rule. Neither time nor energy existed for burying the dead, reviling the fetches, or rebuilding the world. Starvation ruled like a psychotic king, its toll enhanced by the cruel fact that anyone foolish enough to devour an abulic’s remains invariably succumbed to the plague in a matter of days. The needle of humanity’s moral compass spun crazily and then fell off the dial. Altruism went the way of trilobites. Compassion imploded. On a bad day, you lay abed, vibrating with hunger and despair. On a good day, you looted your neighbor’s vegetable patch, plundered his pantry, and shot his dog, consuming the feast that followed with an ambivalence unworthy to be called guilt.
Rumors buzzed about the dying civilization like the flies who stood to inherit it. Researchers in Paris had discovered a cure. No, the Paris team could merely forestall stage four, while the cure lay in Rotterdam. London held the antidote. San Diego. For whatever reasons, Portugal had proven immune to the plague. Let us flee to Lisbon. No, Portugal had an unusually high death rate, but Switzerland was exempt. Somehow we must get to Geneva. Throughout the Balkan peninsula, Dionysian anarchy had taken hold (eat, drink, and make merry, for tomorrow
our levelers claim us). These tales of sybaritic rites were true, but the bacchanals were limited to Albania. Greece, actually.
For Nora Burkhart, one piece of hearsay towered above the others, a shining possibility into which she poured the shredded remnants of her faith. She wasn’t sure why she’d elected to pin her hopes on this particular story. It was more complex than the competing rumors, but that hardly made it more plausible.
Somewhere in the jungles rimming the Gulf coast of Mexico, beyond the harbor town of Coatzacoalcos, a unique scientific-religious institution had arisen. At the Lucido Clinic, thected abulics learned a mental discipline called Somatocism, subsequently cleansing their psyches of death awareness. A plague family could get its stricken loved one into the Somatocist temples only if they arrived bearing a valuable donation, something that would please the clinic’s medical director, Dr. Adrian Lucido. Diesel fuel almost always gained a victim admittance. So did vintage wines, exotic foods, precious gems, priceless art, and fancy clothes.
“I’m going to Mexico,” she told Douglas, “and I’m taking Kevin with me.”
“Coatzacoalcos is three thousand miles away,” he said. “How will you get there? Skateboard?”
“Phaëthon.”
“There’s no gasoline.”
“I’ll steal some.”
“What’ll you eat?”
“I’ve been stockpiling groceries.”
“You’ll run out.”
“Then I’ll drive on an empty stomach.”
“Brigands will attack you.”
“I’ll fight them off.”
“You need to bring Lucido a gift.”
“I’ll find one along the way.”
Nora realized that in her Lutheran brother’s eyes, her obsession with the Lucido Clinic bordered on blasphemy. But wasn’t blasphemy—raw, bleeding, irredeemable blasphemy—the precise attitude she owed her son?
“No argument I might make will convince you to change your mind,” said Douglas.
