by James Morrow
Wild in his soul, free in his heart, noble Enkidu roamed the Sumerian plains and woodlands. He romped with the gazelles; he talked to the wolves; he ate grass. And still the citizens of Uruk endured their king’s daemonic energies, until one day a palace courtesan named Shamhat went in search of the promised champion. Spotting Enkidu swimming in the Euphrates, she anointed her breasts, shed her garments, and enticed him into her arms. For two days and nights the mortals coupled atop the very clay from which the gods had fashioned Enkidu. At dawn on the third day, Shamhat rose abruptly and returned to the city.
Enkidu, lovestruck, pursued her. Passing through a series of mighty gates guarded by stone lions, he wandered the city streets, eventually encountering not his beloved but his king. Still in thrall to his loins, Gilgamesh stood poised to enter a marriage house and claim the bride in advance of the groom. Enkidu blocked the doorway. Encouraged by the thronging courtiers, the two men wrestled, until at length Gilgamesh prevailed, leaving Enkidu lying breathless in the street. The king’s fury abated. Here, Gilgamesh realized, was someone equal to himself. Here was a brother and friend.
The following night, Enkidu had a frightening dream. In his vision, an enormous black bird swooped down from Heaven, sank its talons into Enkidu and Gilgamesh, and bore them to the world below.
“Shuffling among the dead, who lay everywhere in great heaps, we reached the House of Dust. We entered the banquet hall and beheld the princes of long ago seated at a table, their crowns set aside for all eternity. The princes’ food was mud. Bitumen was their drink. Peering through the gloom, we saw Belit-Sheri, keeper of the Book of Death, who pointed to us and cried, ‘Who has brought these ones here?!’”
Enkidu’s nightmare shook Gilgamesh to the marrow. The gods, he believed, were exhorting the two friends to fill their lives with glorious adventures, for death would claim them soon.
Now it so happened that the royal architects were planning many new temples and civic buildings for Uruk, projects requiring vast quantities of timber, a resource that grew abundantly on the Cedar Mountain to the east. When Enkidu reminded Gilgamesh that a giant guarded this forest—the fire-breathing Watchman, Khumbaba—the delighted king decreed they must depart immediately.
The friends buckled on their weapons and struck out for the rising sun. After a journey of many days, they reached the eastern forest with its timber stockade, lair of Khumbaba. Gilgamesh shouted over the stockade walls, commanding the monster to meet them in open combat. Suddenly Khumbaba appeared, releasing ferocious roars that bowed the cedar trees and blew the heroes to the ground. Regaining his feet, Gilgamesh stabbed the giant with his dagger while Enkidu beheaded him with a sword.
The triumphant adventurers made sacrifices to the gods. Taking up their axes, they stripped the Cedar Mountain and set the trees afloat on the Euphrates, knowing that the current would bear the booty to Uruk. Covered with sweat, dirt, and Khumbaba’s blood, they dove into the river and washed.
One month later, as Gilgamesh walked alone through Uruk’s burgeoning temple complex, the evening breeze brought him sweet whisperings from Inanna, Queen of Heaven, the rollicking goddess of love. Following her call, Gilgamesh came to the largest of Uruk’s sacred gardens, where Inanna was pruning a huluppa tree that she intended to carve into a throne for herself. But a sickness had infected the tree, turning its branches as bare as bone. The cause was obvious. A vicious viper was wound around the huluppa’s roots, the vampire Lilith inhabited the trunk, and the sinister Imdugud bird had nested in the crown.
Acting on Inanna’s orders, Gilgamesh killed the viper, evicted Lilith, and frightened off the bird. Moved no less by his beauty than by his bravery, the goddess made advances to the king. He spurned them: his days of profligacy were over—and besides, everyone knew that Inanna’s lovers came to grotesque ends.
The rebuffed goddess swore vengeance. She convinced her father—Enlil, king of the gods—to curse Uruk with seven years of drought. The disaster climaxed with the arrival of the Bull of Heaven, a terrible behemoth that raged through the city’s streets, leveling the marketplace and trampling thousands under its hooves.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu charged into combat. Closing on the Bull of Heaven, Enkidu grabbed its tail and hurled it against a masonry wall. As the beast recovered its balance, the king drove his sword deep into its brain. Victory seemed certain. But then, unexpectedly, thrashing about in its death agonies, the Bull of Heaven gored Enkidu with a sharp, serrated horn.
Shocked and horrified, Gilgamesh directed that his friend be carried to the palace, laid on the royal bed, and attended by the wisest physicians in Sumer. Their medicine proved futile. Enkidu’s wound festered, and he died in Gilgamesh’s arms.
Day after day, night after night, the desolate king brooded beside the corpse, refusing to let the embalmers do their work. Only after the worms claimed Enkidu’s flesh did Gilgamesh give his brother up for burial.
Insane with grief, the king fled Uruk and rushed into the burning desert. For an entire month he wandered beneath the fiery sun and slept under the remorseless moon. He cried out to all the gods.
“When I die, shall I be like unto Enkidu? Shall I descend to the House of Dust and dwell among shadows? Will mud be my food, bitumen my drink?”
Gilgamesh conceived a plan. If the legends were true, there lived in fabled Dilmun two humans who had achieved immortality: King Ziusudra and his wife, favorites of Enki, god of wisdom. The hero of Uruk vowed to cross the sea of Ocean, find Ziusudra, and learn his secret.
Thus did Gilgamesh begin his second journey, to the west this time, domain of the sun god, Utu. After many days of wandering a scarred and barren wilderness, he reached twin-peaked Mount Mashu, portal to the Ocean Sea.
A Man-Scorpion guarded Mashu, armed with a venom-tipped sword. The ensuing fight was arduous, but at length Gilgamesh slew the Man-Scorpion and passed into the mountain’s dark heart. For an entire day and night he stumbled through the tunnel, until finally, directly ahead, a shaft of dazzling light appeared. Inspired, he dashed outside, strode along the shore, and entered the golden garden of Siduri, the divine wine maker, who many people believed was Inanna in another form.
Learning of her visitor’s ambition, Siduri laughed. The idea of a mortal eluding death was both sacrilegious and ridiculous.
“O Gilgamesh, to where do you run? When the gods created man, they allotted to him death, but immortality they retained for themselves. Come, Gilgamesh. Drink my wine. Enjoy my body. And after you return to Uruk, let your days be filled with feasting, your nights with merriment. Take a wife, sleep with her, and cherish each little child who holds your hand. For this, too, is the lot of man.”
Gilgamesh did as Siduri bade, imbibing her wine and visiting her bed. Awakening the next morning in the goddess’s embrace, Gilgamesh again declared his intention to reach Dilmun. Before they parted, Siduri unfurled her hair and rubbed the paint from her cheeks. Now Gilgamesh saw the truth: Siduri was indeed Inanna.
He raced down to the beach, soon encountering Urshanabi, King Ziusudra’s faithful boatman. Urshanabi agreed to unmoor his skiff and bear Gilgamesh beyond the pellucid sea and over the Waters of Death, but only if the king would first equip their expedition with 120 staves harvested from twin-peaked Mashu. Acceding to this odd condition, Gilgamesh returned to the mountain, felled six score trees, and smoothed them into poles. Not until he and the boatman had sailed beyond Ocean did Gilgamesh appreciate their peculiar cargo. Every time Urshanabi dipped a stave into the Waters of Death, thereby moving them closer to their destination, the corrosive currents ate the wood.
Finally Gilgamesh reached paradisiacal Dilmun, where he found the immortal king and queen seated on their thrones. Hearing about the hero’s mission, Ziusudra revealed that the path by which he’d attained everlasting life was now closed.
“Enlil granted us immortality only because I acted with courage and resolve during the Great Flood he sent to punish humankind for its impieties. Following orders from our
divine benefactor, Enki, I built a boat and stocked it with a breeding pair of every species. Never again will one man be given the opportunity to save an entire world.”
Gilgamesh wept. Taking pity, Ziusudra’s wife told the hero a closely guarded secret. Beneath the River of Immortality grew the sharp-thorned Flower of Youth, a miraculous plant that restored vitality to anyone who ate its petals, leaves, or roots.
Pledged now to Gilgamesh’s service, Urshanabi piloted him far up the River of Immortality. Gilgamesh lashed boulders to his feet and plunged into the waters. Descending to the river bottom, he entered a grotto and found the Flower of Youth, protected by the Crab of Hell. A furious struggle followed, but Gilgamesh eventually killed the monster with a sword thrust, then used the same weapon to uproot the plant. The thorns pierced his arms and chest as, cutting the boulders from his ankles, he shot to the surface.
Urshanabi poled Gilgamesh back across the Ocean Sea. The sun pounded on the western desert as the two men set out for Uruk. Fearing death by thirst, Urshanabi wanted to partake of the magic flower then and there. Gilgamesh answered that it would be ignoble to do so before his subjects received their portions.
Late one afternoon, the travelers reached an oasis boasting huge palms and deep wells. Gilgamesh and Urshanabi hid the plant behind a rock and stretched out in the shade. While the travelers slept, disaster struck. Attracted by the plant’s fragrance, a Woman-Serpent appeared and clamped her jaws around the Flower of Youth. As the sun set, Gilgamesh awoke to behold the serpent and her treasure vanishing down a well.
Overcome by despair, Gilgamesh and Urshanabi attempted to console each other. The king grew pensive. Perhaps Siduri was right. The wise man feasts, dances, and makes love while he can.
“Now let us sleep, Urshanabi, for tomorrow we reach fair Uruk! Do you know my city? Its walls shine like polished copper, its gates glow with lapis lazuli, and its foundations are of burnt brick!”
Before bringing Gilgamesh the King to the McIntyre Park bandstand, the Great Sumerian Traveling Circus and Repertory Company had been touring for nearly five months, systematically bypassing big cities in favor of towns and villages. Their motive was simple. Any settlement larger than Charlottesville still lay under the tyrannical administration of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Brotherhood, whose devastating defeat at Paramus had yet to impact its southern brigades. Rare was the Anglo-Saxon who did not regard itinerant acting troupes as havens of satanism and sexual deviancy. Thus did Nora find herself inhabiting a series of Virginia hamlets and farming communities, innocuous backwaters with vaguely sinister names like Bent Creek, Rustburg, Lynch Station, Motley, and Dry Fork.
Her duties were many. If hooligans had ripped down the placards posted by the advance man—Fritz Wexler, a former puppeteer who’d designed the play’s various masks, trick props, and mechanical effects—it was her job to replace them. If the venue of the moment was dirty, be it a bandstand, hatch shell, high school auditorium, or abandoned movie theater, she must arrive two hours early with bucket and mop. Whenever a baby wailed during a performance, Nora was expected to escort both parent and child out of the audience’s hearing. She had, additionally, a small but crucial role in the production itself. By yanking on a fishing pole threaded to an Imdugud-bird marionette, she made the insidious creature flee the huluppa tree in act two, a bit of technical wizardry whose execution the overworked Fritz was happy to place in the newcomer’s hands.
In a matter of days Nora learned to despise unconditionally what Percy Bell called “life on the road.” The Gypsy wagon’s incessant bumping, lurching, and rolling jangled her nerves and unsettled her stomach. Unlike Phaëthon, the conveyance lacked air-conditioning, and she spent the transit between successive gigs at the mercy of the year’s final heat wave. As a roommate, Elizabeth Darby was the near-total disaster Percy had predicted: a stern, stately, Nietzsche-positive Marxist who, when not keeping Nora awake with her snoring, accomplished the same result by laboriously recounting her pre-plague career as a writer and director of “progressive radical feminist pornography videos,” products of her belief that women, too, had the right to indulge their raunchiest fantasies.
What really annoyed Nora about Percy was not his vanity or his bossiness but his views concerning the Lucido Clinic. His skepticism ranged from denials that the place even existed to diatribes against its presumptuousness.
“I don’t see how a made-up religion can begin to defeat the levelers.”
“Somatocism is polytheistic,” Nora explained. “If Jehovah is merely one god among many, His orbiting skull becomes fundamentally innocuous.”
“But the new gods don’t exist.”
“It’s a matter of faith.”
“I have none,” he said. “Do you?”
“I have faith in faith,” she said firmly.
“The skull never would’ve bothered my Sumerians,” he conceded. “Enlil is dead? How sad. But we can still turn to Ninhursag—can’t we?—and Enki and Utu and Inanna.”
“There, you see? Quod erat demonstrandum.”
“Quod erat baloney.”
Whenever the troupe hit a new town, Nora looked around for a better situation—ideally, a Coatzacoalcos-bound plague family with a gassed-up minivan and room for herself and Kevin. No such miracle occurred. But then one day a startling though evidently accurate piece of gossip spread through the Great Sumerian Circus. Instead of veering north when they reached Greensboro, they would continue south, all the way to New Orleans, a city that in its proverbial quirkiness and perennial Catholicism had long ago kicked out the Anglo-Saxons. In the Big Easy, Nora reasoned, she’d have a good shot at finding a ship captain willing to ferry her across the Gulf of Mexico. And so she renewed her commitment to the Gilgamesh circuit: a tortuous but apparently trustworthy route to her goal.
“You’re stuck with me,” she told Percy. “‘The straight course is hacked out in wounds, against the will of the world.’ D. H. Lawrence.”
“There’s wisdom in that,” he said.
“Especially now, when the will of the world is all we have.”
Living night and day with Gilgamesh’s adventures did nothing to lift Nora’s spirits. The drama’s central theme, the inescapability of death, was an idea of which she’d already grown heartily sick. By offering up this particular story, which he’d adapted himself from various translations of the Akkadian clay tablets, Percy was hoping to help humankind face its fetches with dignity. As the epic unfolded, people would come to perceive an ennobling universality in their plight—though for most audiences, Nora sensed, the production merely added angst to anguish. Even Percy admitted that Gilgamesh’s popularity had less to do with its message than with its being one of the few theatrical diversions available in the abulic age.
Beyond the enervating subtext, the play troubled Nora for its lack of fidelity to the seminal tablets. Percy had made cuts, imposed elisions, and pillaged other Sumerian myths.
“In the original poem, the Bull of Heaven doesn’t gore Enkidu,” she informed him. “Inanna causes him to fall sick.”
“Who wants to see a play about somebody catching an awful wasting disease?” he replied. “My treatment preserves the basic concept, Inanna’s cruel vengeance.”
“In every surviving version,” she persisted, “Gilgamesh talks the Man-Scorpion into letting him enter Mount Mashu. He doesn’t battle the guard to the death.”
“The audience has been sitting on its ass for over two hours. The fight wakes them up.”
“I’ve never read any rendition in which Siduri seduces Gilgamesh.”
“It’s romantic.”
“It’s distracting.”
“Dramatic license.”
“Dramatic licentiousness.”
Nora decided that, up to a point, Percy was enjoying her unsolicited critique. At least she was taking his play seriously, which distinguished her from almost everyone else in the company. “Near the end you give us a totally fabricated—”
“A totally fa
bricated Crab of Hell. I know.”
Among Kevin’s favorite bad movies, she remembered, was Roger Corman’s 1957 Attack of the Crab Monsters. “Three monsters weren’t enough? You had to have four?”
“Gilgamesh’s Flower of Youth foreshadows a hundred subsequent legends in which a hero steals a dragon’s treasure.”
“Giant crabs are hokey.”
“So are giant skulls. We live in hokey times.”
Shortly after they crossed into North Carolina, Nora realized that her attitude toward the Great Sumerian Circus had changed. Whatever else one might think of these eccentrics, they were not—Elizabeth Darby excepted—boring. Not since her days of hanging out with Eric’s magician friends had Nora run with such an energizing crowd. Bruno Spangler, cast as the drama’s quartet of supernatural monsters, was a retired Indiana University football coach who also functioned as the company’s bouncer, deftly extracting drunks and hecklers from the audience. Harold Ratcliffe, who acquitted himself brilliantly as the neurotic boatman, Urshanabi, had once been a carnival barker, convincing country bumpkins to patronize an armless man who threw daggers with his feet. Cyril Avalon, the handsome black actor who each night played both Enkidu and Ziusudra, was a former stage magician who’d known Nora’s husband back when both men were doing the Lions Club and bar mitzvah circuit. Then there were the twins, Vicky and Valerie Lotz, who between them essayed four roles: the harlot Shamhat, the vampire Lilith, Ziusudra’s queen, and the Woman-Serpent who devours the Flower of Youth. Whenever the company collected around the campfire, these versatile young actresses would tell tales of pressing their twinness into the service of revenge scenarios, such as the time they convinced Valerie’s mean-spirited boss at Pompeii Pizza that he was losing his mind.
