Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  In drafting his answer, Thomas addressed Di Luca’s concerns as forthrightly as he could. “Our captain knows his ropes, but I sometimes fear his zeal will jeopardize the mission. He’s obsessed with the OMNIVAC’s deadline. Yesterday we entered a new time zone, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that he ordered the clocks set forward…”

  Thomas typed the reply on his portable Smith-Corona—the same antique on which he’d written The Mechanics of Grace. He signed his name with an angel feather dipped in India ink, then carried the letter up to the wheelhouse.

  It was 1700, an hour into the second mate’s watch. From the very first, Big Joe Spicer had struck Thomas as the smartest officer aboard the Valparaíso, excluding Van Horne himself. Certainly he was the only officer who brought books to the bridge—real books, not collections of cat cartoons or paperback novels about telekinetic children.

  “Good afternoon, Joe.”

  “Hi there, Father.” Rotating ninety degrees in his swivel chair, the hulking navigator flashed a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. “Ever read this?”

  “I assign it in Cosmology 412,” said Thomas, glancing nervously at the AB on duty, Leo Zook. The day before, he and the Evangelical had engaged in a brief, unsatisfactory argument about Charles Darwin, Zook being against evolution, Thomas pointing out its fundamental plausibility.

  “If I understand this stuff,” said Spicer, drumming his knuckles on A Brief History of Time, “God’s out of a job.”

  “Perhaps,” said Thomas.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Zook.

  “In the Stephen Hawking universe,” said Spicer, pivoting toward the Evangelical, “there’s nothing for God to do.”

  “Then Stephen Hawking is wrong,” said Zook.

  “What would you know about it? You ever even heard of the Big Bang?”

  “In the beginning was the Word.”

  Thomas couldn’t decide whether Zook truly wished to discuss A Brief History of Time or whether he was irritating Spicer merely to relieve his boredom, the ship being on autopilot just then.

  Declining the bait, the navigator turned back to Thomas. “Celebrating Mass today?”

  “Fifteen hundred hours.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Good, the priest thought—you, Follingsbee, Sister Miriam, Karl Jaworski, and nobody else. The sparsest parish this side of the prime meridian.

  As Thomas started toward the radio shack, wondering which profited the world more—the rhapsodic atheism of a Hawking or the unshakable faith of a Zook—he nearly collided with Lianne Bliss. Eyes darting, she dashed up to the navigator, swiveling him like a barber aiming a customer at a mirror.

  “Joe, call the boss!”

  “Why?”

  “Call him! SOS!”

  Six minutes later Van Horne was on the bridge, hearing how a Hurricane Beatrice survivor named Cassie Fowler had evidently landed a rubber dinghy on Saint Paul’s Rocks.

  “Could be a trap,” said the captain to Bliss. Fresh water dripped from his hair and beard, residue of an interrupted shower. “You didn’t break radio silence, did you?”

  “No. Not that I didn’t want to. What do you mean, a trap?”

  Saying nothing, Van Horne marched to the twelve-mile radar and stared intently at the target: a flock of migrating boobies, Thomas suspected. “Get on the horn, Sparks,” ordered the captain. “Tell the world we’re the Arco Fairbanks, due south of the Canaries. Whoever reports in, give ’em Fowler’s coordinates.”

  “Is it necessary to lie?” asked Thomas.

  “Every order I give is necessary. Otherwise I wouldn’t give it.”

  “May I call the woman?” asked Bliss, starting back into the shack.

  Van Horne ran his index finger around the radar screen, encircling the birds. “Tell her help is on the way. Period.”

  At sundown Bliss returned to the bridge and offered her report. The Valparaíso was evidently the only ship within three hundred miles of Saint Paul’s Rocks. She’d contacted a dozen ports from Trinidad to Rio, and among those few Coast Guard officers and International Red Cross workers who understood her frantic mix of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, not one commanded a plane or chopper with enough fuel capacity to get halfway across the Atlantic and back.

  “What did Fowler say when you called her?” asked Thomas.

  “She wanted to know if I was an angel.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  Bliss shot an angry scowl toward Van Horne. “I told her I wasn’t authorized to answer.”

  Setting A Brief History of Time atop the Marisat terminal, Spicer strode to the helm and snapped off the autopilot. “Course two-seven-three, right?”

  “No,” said Van Horne. “We’re holding.”

  “Holding?” said Zook, grabbing the wheel.

  “You’re joking,” said Spicer.

  “I can’t throw twenty-four hours away, Joe. That’s everything we gained from Beatrice. Put us back on iron mike.”

  Thomas bit down, his molars clamping the soft flesh of his inner cheeks. Never before had he faced such a dilemma. Did the Christian course lie west, along the equator, or southeast, toward God? How many divine brain cells equaled a single human castaway? A million? A thousand? Ten? Two? His skepticism regarding the OMNIVAC’s prediction did little to relieve his anxiety. Even one salvaged neuron might eventually prove so scientifically and spiritually valuable it would start to seem worth a dozen castaways—two dozen castaways—three dozen—four—the lives of all the castaways since Jonah.

  Except that Jonah had been delivered, hadn’t he?

  The whale had vomited him out.

  “Captain, you must bring us about,” said Thomas.

  Snatching up the bridge binoculars, Van Horne issued an angry snort. “What?”

  “I’m telling you to bring us about. Turn the Val around and point her toward Saint Paul’s Rocks.”

  “You seem to have forgotten who’s commanding this operation.”

  “And you seem to have forgotten who’s paying for it. Don’t imagine you can’t be replaced, sir. If the cardinals hear you neglected an obvious Christian duty, they won’t hesitate to airlift in a new skipper.”

  “I think we should talk in my cabin.”

  “I think we should bring the ship about.”

  Van Horne raised the binoculars and, inverting them, looked at Thomas through the wrong ends, as if by diminishing the priest’s size he could also diminish his authority.

  “Joe.”

  “Sir?”

  “I want you to plot us a new course.”

  “Destination?”

  Mouth hardening, eyes narrowing, Van Horne slid the binoculars into their canvas bin. “That guano farm in the middle of the Atlantic.”

  “Good,” said Thomas. “Very good,” he added, wondering how, exactly, he would justify this detour to Di Luca, Orselli, and Pope Innocent XIV. “Believe me, Anthony, acts of compassion are the only epitaph He wants.”

  Dirge

  WHEN CASSIE FOWLER awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?

  It was, of course, a pious place. A small ceramic Christ with blue eyes and cherry red lips hung bleeding on the far wall. A gaunt, rawboned priest hovered by her pillow. At the foot of her bed a large man loomed, his gray beard and broken nose evoking every Old Testament prophet she’d ever taught herself to mistrust.

  “You’re looking much better.” The priest rested his palm against her blistered cheek. “I’m afraid there’s no physician on board, but our chief mate believes you’re suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion combined with dehydration and a bad sunb
urn. We’ve been buttering you with Noxzema.”

  Gradually, like cotton candy dissolving in a child’s mouth, the fog evaporated from Cassie’s mind. On board, he’d said. Chief mate, he’d said.

  “I’m on a ship?”

  The priest gestured toward the prophet. “The SS Valparaíso, under the command of Captain Anthony Van Horne. Call me Father Thomas.”

  Memories came. Maritime Adventures…Beagle II…Hurricane Beatrice…Saint Paul’s Rocks. “The famous Valparaíso? The oil-spill Valparaíso?”

  “The Carpco Valparaíso,” said the captain frostily.

  As Cassie sat up, the medicinal stench of camphor filled her nostrils. Pain shot through her shoulders and thighs: the terrible bite of the equatorial sun, her red skin screaming beneath its coating of Noxzema. Good God, she was alive, a winner, a golden girl, a beater of the odds. “How come I’m not thirsty?”

  “When you weren’t babbling your brains out,” said the priest, “you consumed nearly a gallon of fresh water.”

  The captain stepped into the light, holding out a tangerine. He was better looking than she’d initially supposed, with a Byronesque forehead and the sort of sorrowful, vulnerable virility commonly found in male soap-opera stars on their way down.

  “Hungry?”

  “Famished.” Receiving the tangerine, Cassie worked her thumb into its north pole, then began peeling it. “Did I really babble?”

  “Quite a bit,” said Van Horne.

  “About what?”

  “Norway rats. Your father died of emphysema. In your youth you wrote plays. Oliver—your boyfriend, we presume—fancies himself a painter.”

  Cassie grunted, half from astonishment, half from annoyance. “Fancies himself a painter,” she corroborated.

  “You’re not sure you want to marry him.”

  “Well, who’s ever sure?”

  The captain shrugged.

  She broke off a quadrisphere of tangerine and chewed. The pulp tasted sweet, wet, crisp—alive. She savored the word, the holy vocable. Alive, alive.

  “Alive,” she said aloud, and even before the second syllable passed her lips, she felt her exhilaration slipping away. “Thirty-three passengers,” she muttered, her voice at once mournful and bitter. “Ten sailors…”

  Father Thomas nodded empathically. His eyebrows, she noticed, extended onto the bridge of his nose, meshing like two gray caterpillars in the act of kissing. “It’s tragic,” he said.

  “God killed them with His hurricane,” she said.

  “God had nothing to do with it.”

  “Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” said the priest cryptically.

  Cassie finished her tangerine. In her irreverent sequel to Job, the hero’s mistress kept repeating a line from the original, over and over. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  “This your cabin?” she asked, pointing to the ceramic Christ.

  “Was. I’ve moved.”

  “You forgot your crucifix.”

  “I left it here on purpose,” said Father Thomas without elaboration.

  “Excuse my ignorance,” said Cassie, “but do oil tankers normally carry clergy?”

  “This isn’t a normal voyage, Dr. Fowler.” The priest’s eyes grew wide and wild, darting every which way like bees who’d lost track of their hive. “Abnormal, in fact.”

  “Once our mission’s accomplished,” said the captain, “we’ll ferry you back to the States.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “For the next nine weeks,” said Van Horne, “you’ll be our guest.”

  Cassie scowled, her broiled body hardening with confusion and anger. “Nine weeks? Nine weeks? No, folks, I start teaching at the end of August.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Send for a helicopter, okay?” Slowly, like some heroic, evolution-minded fish hauling itself onto dry land, she rose from the berth, and only after her feet touched the green shag carpet did she bother to wonder whether she was clothed. “Do you understand?” Looking down, she saw that someone had swapped her bikini for a kimono printed with zodiac signs. Glued by Noxzema, the silk stuck to her skin in large amorphous patches. “I want you to charter me an International Red Cross helicopter, the sooner the better.”

  “I’m not authorized to report our position to the International Red Cross,” said Van Horne.

  “Please—my mother, she’ll go nuts,” Cassie protested, not knowing whether to sound desperate or furious. “Oliver, too. Please…”

  “We’ll allow you one brief message home.”

  An old scenario, and Cassie hated it, the patriarchy wielding its power. Yeah, lady, I think we might eventually get around to fixing your reduction gear, as if you knew what the hell a reduction gear is. “Where’s the phone?”

  Blue veins bulged from Van Horne’s brow. “We’re not offering you a phone, Dr. Fowler. The Valparaíso isn’t some farmhouse you stumbled into after getting a flat tire.”

  “So what are you offering me?”

  “All communication goes through our radio shack up on the bridge.”

  A spasm of sunburn pain tore through Cassie’s neck and back as she followed Father Thomas down a gleaming mahogany corridor and into the sudden claustrophobia of an elevator car. She closed her eyes and grimaced.

  “Who’s Runkleberg?” the priest asked as they ascended.

  “I babbled about Runkleberg? I haven’t thought of him in years.”

  “Another boyfriend?”

  “A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg’s my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he’s out watering his roses, and he hears God’s voice telling him to sacrifice his son.”

  “Does he obey?”

  “His wife intervenes.”

  “How?”

  “She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.”

  The priest gulped audibly. The elevator halted on the seventh floor.

  “Biology and theater”—he guided them down another glossy corridor—“the two disciplines aren’t normally pursued by the same person.”

  “Father, I simply can’t stay on this boat.”

  “But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the biologist and the dramatist have much in common.”

  “Not for nine weeks. I have to clean up my office, prepare my lectures…”

  “Explorers, right? The biologist seeks to discover Nature’s laws, the dramatist her truths.”

  “Nine weeks is out of the question. I’ll die of boredom.”

  The Valparaíso’s radio shack was a congestion of transceivers, keyboards, fax machines, and telex terminals threaded together by coaxial cables. In the middle of the mess lounged a slender young woman with carrot-colored hair and skin the complexion of provolone. Cassie smiled, grateful for the two metal buttons pinned to the radio officer’s red camisole: a clenched fist sprouting from the medical symbol for Woman, and the motto MEN HAVE UTERUS ENVY. Only the officer’s pendant, a quartz crystal housed in silver, gave Cassie pause, but she had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds—crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca—her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.

  “I like your buttons.”

  “You look good in my kimono,” said the radio officer in a voice so deep it might have come from someone twice her size.

  “She gets one telegram, Sparks,” said Father Thomas, backing out of the shack. “Twenty-five words to her mother—period. Nothing about a ship called the Valparaíso.”

  “Roger.” The woman stretched out her bare arm, its biceps decorated with a tattoo of a svelte sea goddess riding the waves like a surfboard passenger. “Lianne Bliss, Sagittarius. I’m the one who picked up your SOS.”

  The biologist shook Lianne Bliss’s hand, slick with equatorial sweat. “I’m Cassie Fowler.”

  “I know
. You’ve had quite an adventure, Cassie Fowler. You drew the Death card, then Fate reversed it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tarot talk.”

  “’Fraid I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “You don’t believe in Oliver either.”

  “Jesus.”

  “There are no private lives on a supertanker, Cassie. The sooner you learn that, the better. Okay, so the boy’s got a bankroll, but I still think you should drop him. He sounds like a popinjay.”

  “Oliver sends back the wine,” Cassie admitted, frowning.

  “I gather he plans to be the next Van Gogh.”

  “Much too sane. A Sunday painter at best…I’m alive, aren’t I, Lianne? Incredible.”

  “You’re alive, sweetie.”

  And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  Extending her index finger, Cassie fiddled with a disembodied telegraph key, absently tapping out gibberish. “Now that all my secrets have been revealed, what about yours? Do you hate your job?”

  “I love my job. I get to eavesdrop on the whole damn planet. On a clear night I might tune in a Tokyo businessman and his mistress having cellular-phone sex, a couple of ham-radio drug dealers planning an opium drop in Hong Kong, some neo-Nazis ranting to each other on their CBs in Berlin. I can pipe everything through to the deckies’ quarters, and you know what they really want? Baseball from the States! What a waste. If I ever hear another Yankees game, I’ll puke.” She lifted a blue Carpco pencil to her mouth and licked the point. “So—what do we tell Mom?”

  The radio shack, Cassie decided, would make a great set for a play. She imagined a one-act satire laid entirely in heaven’s central communications complex, God working the dials, bypassing the screams of pain and the cries for help as He attempts to pick up Yankee Stadium.

  Closing her eyes, she brought her mother into focus: Rebecca Fowler of Hollis, New Hampshire, a cheerful and energetic Unitarian minister whose iconoclasm ran so deep it shocked even her own congregation. BEAGLE II SUNK BY HURRICANE…I’M SOLE SURVIVOR…PLEASE TELL OLIVER…

  Her thoughts drifted. Mission, Anthony Van Horne had said, a ship with a mission—and from the peculiar countenance Father Thomas had assumed back in his cabin, it was the most portentous mission since Saul of Tarsus had suffered an epileptic seizure and called it Christianity.