by James Morrow
“Now you’re talking about Jesus Christ,” said Zook, his hand fluttering about like a drunken hummingbird.
“No,” said the priest. “I’m not talking about Jesus Christ.”
A falling sensation overcame Neil. Reaching into his jeans, he squeezed the bronze medal his grandfather had received for smuggling refugees to the nascent nation of Israel. “Wait a minute, Father, sir. Are you saying…?” Gulping, he repeated himself. “Are you saying…?”
“Yes. I am.”
Whereupon Father Thomas lifted a gleaming white ball from the billiard table, tossed it straight up, caught it, and proceeded to relate the most grotesque and disorienting story Neil had heard since learning that the Datsun containing his parents had fallen between the spans of an open drawbridge in Woods Hole, Cape Cod, and vanished beneath the mud. Among its assorted absurdities, the priest’s tale included not only a dead deity and a prescient computer, but also weeping angels, confused cardinals, mourning narwhals, and a hollowed-out iceberg jammed against the island of Kvitoya.
As soon as he was finished, Dolores Haycox jabbed her thick index finger toward Van Horne. “You told us it was asphalt,” she whined. “Asphalt, you said.”
“I lied,” the captain admitted.
From the middle of the crowd, the squat and wan chief engineer, Crock O’Connor, piped up. “I’d like to say something,” he drawled, wiping his oily hands on his Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Steam burns dappled his cheeks and arms. “I’d like to say that, in all my thirty years at sea, I never heard such a pile of pasteurized, homogenized, cold-filtered horseshit.”
The priest’s voice remained measured and calm. “You may be correct, Mr. O’Connor. But then how are we to interpret the evidence currently floating off our starboard quarter?”
“A snare set by Satan,” Zook replied instantly. “He’s testing our faith.”
“A UFO made of flesh,” said Chief Steward Sam Follingsbee.
“The Loch Ness Monster,” said Karl Jaworski.
“One of them government biology experiments,” said Ralph Mungo, “gotten way outta hand.”
“I’ll bet it’s just rubber,” said James Echohawk.
“Yeah,” said Willie Pindar. “Rubber and fiberglass and such…”
“Okay, maybe a deity,” said Bud Ramsey, the chicken-necked, weasel-faced second assistant engineer, “but certainly not God Himself.”
Silence settled over the wardroom, heavy as a kedge anchor, thick as North Sea fog.
The sailors of the Valparaíso looked at each other, slowly, with pained eyes.
God’s dead body.
Oh, yes.
“But is He really gone?” asked Horrocks in a high, gelded voice. “Totally and completely gone?”
“The OMNIVAC predicted a few surviving neurons,” said Father Thomas, “but I believe it’s working with faulty data. Still, each of us has the right to entertain his own private hopes.”
“Why doesn’t the sky turn black?” demanded Jaworski. “Why doesn’t the sea dry up and the sun blink out? Why aren’t the mountains crumbling, forests toppling over, stars falling from heaven?”
“Evidently we’re living in a noncontingent, Newtonian sort of universe,” Father Thomas replied. “The clock continues ticking even after the Clockmaker departs.”
“Okay, okay, but what’s the reason for His death?” asked O’Connor. “There’s gotta be a reason.”
“At the moment, the mystery of our Creator’s passing is as dense as the mystery of His advent. Gabriel urged me to keep thinking about the problem. He believed that, by journey’s end, the answer would become clear.”
What followed was a theological free-for-all, the only time, Neil surmised, that a supertanker’s entire crew had engaged in a marathon discussion of something other than professional sports. Dinnertime came and went. The new moon rose. The sailors grew schizoid, a company of Jekyll-and-Hydes, their bouts of Weltschmerz alternating with fresh denials (a CIA plot, a sea serpent, an inflatable dummy, a movie prop), then back to Weltschmerz, then more denials still (communism’s last gasp, the Colossus of Rhodes emerging from the seabed, a distraction concocted by the Trilateral Commission, a façade concealing something truly bizarre). Neil’s own reactions bewildered him. He was not sad—how could he be sad? Losing this particular Supreme Being was like losing some relative you barely knew, the shadowy Uncle Ezra who gave you a fifty-dollar bill at your bar mitzvah and forthwith disappeared. What Neil experienced just then was freedom. He’d never believed in the stern, bearded God of Abraham, yet in some paradoxical way he’d always felt accountable to that nonexistent deity’s laws. But now YHWH wasn’t watching. Now the rules no longer applied.
“Guess what, sailors?” Van Horne jumped from the mahogany bar to the Oriental rug. “I’m canceling all duties for the next twenty-four hours. No chipping, no painting—and you won’t lose one red cent in pay.” Never before in nautical history, Neil speculated, had such an announcement failed to provoke a single cheer. “From this moment until 2200,” said the captain, “Father Thomas and Sister Miriam will be available in their cabins for private consultations. And tomorrow—well, tomorrow we start doing what’s expected of us, right? How about it? Are we merchant mariners? Are we ready to move the goods? Can you give me an aye on that?”
About a third of the deckies, Neil among them, sang out with a choked and hesitant “Aye.”
“Are we ready to lay our Creator in a faraway Arctic tomb?” asked Van Horne. “Let me hear you. Aye!”
This time over half the room joined in. “Aye!”
A high, watery howl arose, shooting from Zook’s mouth like vomitus. The Evangelical dropped to his knees, clasping his hands in fear and supplication, shivering violently. To Neil he looked like a man enduring the monstrously conscious moment that follows hara-kiri: a man beholding his own steaming bowels.
Father Thomas sprinted over, helped the distraught AB to his feet, and guided him out of the wardroom. The priest’s compassion impressed Neil, and yet he sensed that such gestures alone would not save the Valparaíso from the terrible freedom to which she was about to hitch herself. Inevitably the climax of The Ten Commandments flashed through his brain: Moses hurling the Tablets of the Law to the ground and thus depriving the Israelites of their moral compass, leaving them uncertain where God stood on adultery, theft, and murder.
“Ship’s company—dismissed!”
Then said Jesus unto His disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me.”
Amen, thought Thomas Ockham as, wrapped in the tight rubbery privacy of his wetsuit, he made his way beneath the Gulf of Guinea. Except that the Cross in this instance was a huge kedge anchor, the Via Dolorosa an unmarked channel between the Valparaíso’s keel and the Corpus Dei. Although a PADI-certified diver, Thomas hadn’t been underwater in over fifteen years—not since joining Jacques Cousteau on his celebrated descent into the submarine crater of the volcano that destroyed the ancient Greek civilization of Thera—and he didn’t feel entirely sure of himself. But, then, who could feel entirely sure of himself while seeking to affix a thirty-foot, twenty-ton anchor to his Creator?
The dozen divers who constituted Team A had distributed themselves evenly along the kedge: Marbles Rafferty at the crown, Charlie Horrocks on the left fluke, Thomas on the right, James Echohawk and Eddie Wheatstone handling the shank, the others holding up the stock, the ring, and the first five links of the chain. Sixty yards to the south, Joe Spicer’s Team B was presumably keeping pace, bearing their own kedge, but a curtain of bubbles and murk prevented Thomas from knowing for sure.
Arms raised, palms turned upward, the twelve men worked their flippers, carrying the anchor over their heads like Iroquois portaging a gargantuan war canoe. Within twenty minutes the divine pate, slightly balding, appeared. Thomas lifted his wrist, checked his depth gauge. Fifty-four feet, just right: their buoyancy compensators were inflated sufficiently to counterweight the anch
or but were not so full as to float the divers above their target. Local inhabitants drifted by—a giant grouper, a pea-green sawfish, a school of croakers—either grieving in silence or keening below the threshold of Thomas’s hearing, for the only sounds he perceived were his own bubbly breaths and the occasional clang of an oxygen tank hitting the kedge.
Wriggling to the left, the divers swam past a great swaying carpet of hair and aligned themselves with His ear. At Rafferty’s signal, each man reached down and switched on the searchlight strapped to his utility belt. The beams played across the ear’s numerous folds and crannies, painting deep curved shadows along the feature known as Darwin’s tubercle. Thomas shuddered. In the case of Homo sapiens sapiens, at least, Darwin’s tubercle was considered a prime argument for evolutionary theory: the manifest vestige of a prick-eared ancestor. What in the world did it mean for God Himself to be sporting these cartilaginous mounds?
They finned their way through the concha and into the external auditory meatus. Queasiness spread through the priest. Should they really be doing this? Did they truly have the right? Stalactites of calcified wax hung from the roof of the ear canal. Life clung to its walls: clusters of sargasso, a bumper crop of sea cucumbers. Thomas’s left flipper brushed an echinoderm, a five-pointed Asterias rubens floating through the cavern like some forsaken Star of Bethlehem.
It had taken the priest all morning to convince Crock O’Connor and the rest of the engine-flat crew that opening God’s tympanic membranes would not be sacrilegious—heaven wanted this tow, Thomas had insisted, displaying Gabriel’s feather—and now the fruits of their efforts loomed before him. Fashioned with pickaxes, ice choppers, and waterproof chain saws, the ragged slit ran vertically for fifty feet, like the entrance to a circus tent straight from the grandest dreams of P. T. Barnum.
As the dozen men bore their burden through the violated drum, Thomas’s awe became complete. God’s own ear, the very organ through which He’d heard Himself say, “Let there be light,” the exact apparatus through which the Big Bang’s aftershock had reached His brain. Again Rafferty signaled, and the divers thrashed their flippers vigorously, stirring up tornadoes of bubbles and maelstroms of sloughed cells. Inch by inch, the anchor ascended, rising past the undulating cilia that lined the membrane’s inner surface, finally coming to rest against the huge and delicate bones of the middle ear. Malleus, incus, stapes, Thomas recited to himself as the searchlights struck the massive triad. Hammer, anvil, stirrup.
Another sign from Rafferty. Team A moved with a single mind, guiding the anchor’s right fluke over the long, firm process of the anvil, binding the Valparaíso to God.
Now: the moment of truth. Rafferty pushed off, gliding free of the kedge and gesturing for the others to do likewise. Thomas—everyone—dropped away. The anchor swung back and forth on the anvil, its great steel ring oscillating like the pendulum of some stupendous Newtonian clock, but the ligaments held, and the bone did not break. The twelve men applauded themselves, slapping their neoprene gloves together in a soundless, slow-motion ovation.
Rafferty saluted the priest. Thomas reciprocated. Flush with success, he hugged the chain and, like Theseus reeling in his thread, began following this sure and certain path back to the ship.
Christ was smirking. Cassie was certain of it. Now that she looked carefully, she saw that the face on Father Thomas’s crucifix wore an expression of utter self-satisfaction. And why not? Jesus had been right all along, hadn’t He? The world had indeed been fashioned by an anthropomorphic Father.
Father, not Mother: that was the rub. Somehow, against all odds, the patriarchs who’d penned the Bible had intuited the truth of things. Theirs was the gender the universe folly endorsed. Womankind was a mere shadow of the prototype.
Around and around Cassie paced the cabin, wearing a ragged path in the green shag carpet.
Naturally she wanted to explain the body away. Naturally she’d be delighted if any of the crew’s paranoid fantasies—CIA plot, Trilateralist conspiracy, whatever—could be proven correct. But she couldn’t deny her instincts: as soon as the priest had named the thing, she’d experienced eerie intimations of its authenticity. And even if it were a hoax, she reasoned, the world’s innumerable boobs and know-nothings, should they learn of its existence, would accept and exploit it anyway, just as they’d accepted and exploited the Shroud of Turin, the hallucinations of Saint Bernadette, and a thousand such idiocies in the face of thorough refutation. So, whether reality or fabrication, truth or illusion, Anthony Van Horne’s cargo threatened to usher in the New Dark Ages as surely as the Manhattan Project had ushered in the Epoch of the Bomb.
Cassie wrung her hands, callus grinding against callus, by-products of the hours she’d spent chipping rust off the athwart-ships catwalk.
Okay, it was dead, a step in the right direction. But that fact alone, she believed, while of undoubted relevance to people like Father Thomas and Able Seaman Zook, did not remove the danger. A corpse was far too easy a thing to rationalize. Christianity had been doing it for two thousand years. The Lord’s intangible essence, the phallocrats and misogynists would say, His infinite mind and eternal spirit, were as viable as ever.
Inevitably, she thought of her favorite moment from her irascible retelling of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: the scene in which Runkleberg’s wife, Melva, smears her hands with her own menstrual flow. “I shall guard my son’s blood with my own,” Melva vows. “Somehow, some way—no matter what it takes—I shall keep this monstrous thing from happening.”
Slowly, methodically, Cassie removed the crucifix from the bulkhead and, taking hold of the brad, worked it free.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed the tiny spike into her thumb.
“Ow…”
As she withdrew the nail, a large red pearl appeared. She entered the bathroom, stood before the mirror, and began to paint, left cheek, left jaw, chin, right jaw, right cheek, pausing periodically to squeeze out more blood. By the time clotting occurred, a thick, smeary line ran around Cassie’s face, as if she were wearing a mask of herself.
Somehow, some way—no matter what it took—she would send the God of Western Patriarchy to the bottom of the sea.
Now, only now, standing on the starboard wing with the wind howling, the sea roaring, and the great corpse bobbing behind him—only now did it occur to Anthony that the tow might not work. Their cargo was big, bigger than he’d ever imagined. Assuming the anchors held, the chains remained whole, the boilers stayed in one piece, and the windlasses didn’t rip loose and fly into the ocean—assuming all these things, the sheer drag might still prove too much for the Val to handle.
Lifting the walkie-talkie to his lips, he tweaked the channel selector and tuned in the engine flat.
“Van Horne here. We got steam on deck?”
“Enough to make a pig sweat,” said Crock O’Connor.
“We’re gonna try for eighty rpm’s, Crock. Can we do it without busting a gut?”
“Only one way to find out, sir.”
Anthony turned toward the wheelhouse, waving to the quartermaster and giving Marbles Rafferty a thumbs-up. So far the first mate had acquitted himself brilliantly at the console, keeping the carcass directly astern and two thousand yards away, perfectly pacing the Val with her cargo’s three-knot drift. (Too bad Operation Jehovah was a secret, for this was exactly the sort of venture that might earn Rafferty the coveted paper declaring him “Master of United States Steam or Motor Vessels of Any Gross Tons upon Oceans.”) The kid at the helm knew his stuff, too: Neil Weisinger, the same AB who’d performed so splendidly during Hurricane Beatrice. But even with Sinbad the Sailor manning the throttles and Horatio J. Hornblower holding the wheel, winching in this particular load would still be, Anthony knew, the trickiest maneuver of his career.
Pivoting to stern, the captain surveyed the windlasses: two gargantuan cylinders twenty feet in diameter, like bass drums built to pace the music of the spheres. A mile beyond rose God’s balding cranium, H
is white mane glinting in the morning sun, each hair as thick as a transatlantic cable.
The mourners had all left. Perhaps they’d completed their duties—“swimming shivah,” as Weisinger liked to put it—but more probably it was the ship that had driven them away. At some level, Anthony believed, they knew the whole story: the Matagorda Bay tragedy and what it had done to their brothers and sisters. They couldn’t stand to be in the same ocean with the Carpco Valparaíso.
He lifted the Bushnells and focused. The water was astonishingly clear—he could even see His submerged ears, the anchor chains spilling from their interiors like silver pus. Twenty-four hours earlier, Rafferty had taken an exploration party over in the Juan Fernández. After sailing into the placid cove bounded by the lee biceps and the corresponding bosom, they’d managed to lash an inflatable wharf in place, using armpit hairs as bollards, then rappel up the great cliff of flesh. Hiking across the chest, walking around on the sternum, the chief mate and his team had heard nothing they could honestly call heartbeats. Anthony hadn’t expected they would. And yet he remained cautiously optimistic: cardiovascular stasis wasn’t the same thing as brain death. Who could deny that a neuron or two might be perking away under that fifteen-foot-thick skull?
The captain changed channels, broadcasting to the men by the windlasses. “Ready on the afterdeck?”
The assistant engineers plucked the walkie-talkies from their belts. “Port windlass ready,” said Lou Chickering in his actor’s baritone.
“Starboard windlass ready,” said Bud Ramsey.
“Release devil’s claws,” said Anthony.
Both engineers sprang into action.
“Port claw released.”
“Starboard claw released.”
“Engage wildcats,” the captain ordered.
“Port cat in.”
“Starboard in.”
“Kill brakes.”
“Port brake gone.”