by James Morrow
Curious, he mused, how each predator had staked out its own culinary territory. From on high came the Cameroon vultures, swooping down like degenerate angels as they laid claim to the corneas and tear ducts. From below came the Liberian sea snakes, ruthlessly devouring the succulent meat of the buttocks. The surface belonged to the sharks—vicious makos, malicious blues, crazed hammerheads—nibbling away at the soft bearded cheeks and picking at the tender webbing between the fingers. And, indeed, the instant Neil drew a bead on the hammerhead, it turned abruptly and swam west, fully intending to bite the hand that made it.
He tracked the shark via the telescopic sight, aligning the crosshairs with the hammerhead’s cartilaginous hump as he looped his finger around the trigger. He squeezed. With a sudden throaty explosion the harpoon leapt from the muzzle. Rocketing across the sea, it struck the surprised animal in the brow and burrowed into its brain.
Neil took a large swallow of moist African air. Poor beast—it didn’t deserve this, it had committed no sin. Even as the shark spun sixty degrees and headed straight for the knee, the AB felt nothing toward it save pity.
“Throw the switch, buddy!”
“Roger, Eddie!”
“Throw it!”
Singing with pain, spouting blood, the shark hurled itself on the fleshy shore, raging so furiously that Neil half expected it to sprout legs and come crawling after him. He clasped the harpoon gun against his fishnet shirt, reached toward the transmitter on his utility belt, and threw the switch.
“Run!” cried Eddie. “Run, for Christ’s sake!”
Neil turned, sprinting across the squishy terrain. Seconds later he heard the warhead explode, the awful grunt of TNT crushing live tissue and vaporizing fresh blood. He looked back. The shock wave was wet and red, a bright sloshy blossom filling the sky with bulbous lumps of brain.
“You okay, buddy? You aren’t hurt, are you?”
As Neil mounted the kneecap, the debris came down, a glutinous rain of shark thoughts, all the hammerhead’s dead hopes and shattered dreams, spattering the AB’s jeans and shirt.
“I swear, I’m goin’ straight to Rafferty!” he wailed. “I’m gonna stick this harpoon gun right smack in his face and tell him I didn’t sign on for this shit!”
“Settle down, Neil.”
The hammerhead’s blood smelled like burning hair. “My grandfather never had to blow up sharks!”
“In thirty-five minutes we’re outta here.”
“If Rafferty won’t take me off this stupid duty, I’m gonna harpoon him! I’m not kiddin’! Bang, right between the eyes!”
“Think how good that shower’s gonna feel.”
And the truly strange thing, Neil realized, throbbing with freedom—the strange, astonishing, terrifying thing—was that he wasn’t kidding.
“There’s no more God, Eddie! Don’t you get it? No God, no rules, no eyes on us!”
“Think about Follingsbee’s Chicken McNuggets. I’ll even slip you one of my Budweisers.”
Neil propped his gun against the shaft of a particularly thick hair, leaned toward the barrel, and, wetting his sun-baked lips, kissed the hot, vibrant metal.
“No eyes on us…”
It was appropriate, Oliver Shostak felt, that the Central Park West Enlightenment League followed only a loose approximation of Robert’s Rules of Order, for neither rules nor order had anything to do with the organization’s raison d’être. People didn’t understand that. Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chuckle-head, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions—the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth, or reading the fax from the SS Carpco Valparaíso currently residing in his vest pocket.
“Let’s get started,” he said, signaling to the attractive young Juilliard student playing the harpsichord on the far side of the room. She lifted her hands from the keyboard; the music stopped in midmeasure, Mozart’s deliciously intricate Fantasia in D Minor. No gavel, of course. No table, no minutes, no agenda. The eighteen members sat in an informal circle, submerged in the splendor of soft recamier couches and lush velvet divans.
Oliver had appointed the room himself. He could afford it. He could afford anything. Thanks to the near-simultaneous ascents of feminism, fornication, and several major venereal diseases, the planet was using latex condoms in unprecedented quantities, and in the late eighties his father’s amazing invention, the Shostak Supersensitive, had emerged as the brand of choice. By the turn of the decade, astonishing quantities of cash had begun flowing into the family’s coffers, an ever-rising tide of profit. At times it seemed to Oliver that his father had somehow patented the sex act itself.
He sipped his brandy and said, “The chair recognizes Barclay.”
Deciphering Cassie’s fax had been easy. It was in Heresy, the numerical code they’d invented in tenth grade to obscure the records of the organization they’d founded, the Freethinkers Club. (Besides Cassie and Oliver, the club had boasted only two other members, the lonely, homely, and hugely unpopular Maldonado twins.) This is no joke. Come see for yourself. We are really towing…
As the League’s vice president rose, the entire membership drew to attention, not simply to hear Barclay’s report but to bathe in his celebrity. In recent years the United States of America had managed to accommodate a full-time debunker—a counterweight to its twenty thousand astrologers, five thousand past-life therapists, and scores of scoundrels routinely cranking out bestsellers about UFO encounters and the joy of runes—and that debunker was golden-haired Barclay Cabot. Barclay, handsome devil, had media presence. The camera liked him. He’d done all the major talk shows, demonstrating how charlatans appeared to bend spoons and read minds when in fact they were doing nothing of the kind.
He began by reviewing the crisis. Two weeks earlier, the Texas legislature had voted to purge all the state’s high schools of any curriculum materials that failed to accord so-called scientific creationism “equal time” with the theory of natural selection. Not that the Enlightenment League doubted the outcome of a showdown between the God hypothesis and Darwin. The fossils shouted evolution; the chromosomes screamed descent; the rocks declared their antiquity. What the League feared was that America’s textbook publishers would simply elect to duck the whole issue and, readopting their spineless expedient of the forties and fifties, omit any consideration of human origins whatsoever. Meanwhile, every Sunday, creationism would continue to be taught unchallenged.
In conspiratorial tones, Barclay outlined his committee’s plan. Under cover of night, a small subset of the League, a kind of atheist commando unit, would crawl across the luxurious lawn of the First Baptist Church of Dallas—“the Pentagon of Christianity,” as Barclay put it—and jimmy open a basement window. They would sneak into the church. Infiltrate the nave. Secure the pews. And then, unholstering their Swingline staplers, they would take up each Bible in turn and, before replacing it, neatly affix a thirty-page précis of On the Origin of Species between the table of contents and Genesis.
Equal time for Darwin.
What a bold scenario, thought Oliver, as audacious as the time they’d faked a materialization of the Virgin Mary on Boston Common, as nervy as when they’d upstaged an antiabortion rally in Salt Lake City by hiring the notorious rock group Flesh Before Breakfast to stand across the street singing “What a Drug We Have in Jesus.”
“All in favor of the proposed counterattack…”
Seventeen ayes reverberated through the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall.
“All opposed…”
Inevitably, the League’s recording secretary, cantankerous Sylvia Endicott, stood up. “Nay,” she said, not so much speaking the word as growling it. “Nay and nay again.”
Sylvia Endicott: skepticism’s oldest living warrior, the woman who in her radical youth had led a losing campaign to have IN GOD WE TRUST removed from the nation’s coins and an equally unsuccessful fight to get a plaque installed on the Kansas City street corner where Sinclair Lewis had dared the Almighty to strike him dead. “You know my views on scientific creationism—O paragon of oxymorons. You know where I stand on Dallas Baptists. But come on, people. This so-called ‘counterattack’ is really just a prank. We’re the children of François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, for Christ’s sake. We aren’t the fucking Marx Brothers.”
“The ayes have it,” said Oliver. He’d never cared for Sylvia Endicott, who said pompous things like O paragon of oxymorons whenever she got the floor.
“When will we stop being a bunch of dilettantes and start playing hardball?” Sylvia persisted. “I can remember a time when this organization would’ve sued the Texas legislature for de facto censorship.”
“You want to make a motion?”
“No, I want us to acquire some backbone.”
“Any new business?”
“Backbone, people. Backbone!”
“Any new business?” said Oliver again.
Silence, even from Sylvia. The crone of reason sank back into her chair. The fire crackled merrily in the hearth. Throughout the city, the hot July evening simmered away, but within Montesquieu Hall an ingenious deployment of insulation and air conditioners was neatly simulating a frigid February night. It was Oliver’s idea. He’d covered the costs. An extravagance? Yes, but why be wealthy if one didn’t occasionally indulge a personal foible or two?
“I have some new business,” said Oliver, reaching into his silk vest and taking out the troubling communiqué. “This fax is from Cassie Fowler, currently aboard the supertanker Carpco Valparaíso somewhere off the coast of Liberia. You can see the Carpco logo”—Oliver pointed to the famous stegosaurus—“right here on the letterhead. So the telegram her mother received last week was evidently authentic, and Cassandra is very much alive. That’s the good news.”
“And the bad?” asked comely, jewel-eyed Pamela Harcourt, the guiding light behind the League’s feisty and unprofitable periodical, The Skeptical Investigator (circulation: 1,042).
“The bad branches into two possibilities.” Oliver held up his index finger. “Either Cassandra is having a psychotic breakdown”—he added his middle finger to the illustration—“or the Valparaíso is towing the corpse of God.”
“Towing the what?” Taylor Scott, a frail young man whose affection for the Enlightenment extended to wearing greatcoats and ruffles, flipped open his silver cigarette case.
“Corpse of God. It’s evidently rather large.”
Taylor removed a Turkish cigarette and slid it between his lips. “I don’t understand.”
“Two miles long, she says here. Humanoid, nude, Caucasian, male, and dead.”
“Huh?”
“Corpus Dei. How can I be clearer?”
“Fiddlesticks,” said Taylor.
“Horse manure,” said Barclay.
“Cassandra assumed that would be our reaction,” said Oliver.
“I should hope so,” said Pamela. “Oliver, dear, what’s this all about?”
“I don’t know what it’s all about.” Brandy snifter in hand, Oliver rose and, stepping outside the ring of rationalists, slowly paced the perimeter. Under ordinary circumstances, the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall was his favorite place on earth, a soothing conjunction of mullioned windows, fabric-lined walls, eighteenth-century French redouté floral prints, and his own original oil paintings of famous freethinkers striking characteristic poses: Thomas Paine hurling a copy of The Age of Reason through a cathedral window, Baron d’Holbach offering Pope Leo XII a Bronx cheer, Bertrand Russell and David Hume playing chess with crèche figurines. (Two weeks earlier Oliver had added a self-portrait to the gallery, a gesture that might have seemed presumptuous had the painting not included a brutally truthful depiction of his faltering chin and ill-proportioned nose.) But tonight the lounge brought him no comfort. It seemed gloomy and damp, besieged by ignorant armies. “The tanker’s on some sort of burial mission,” he continued. “There’s a tomb in the Arctic. Angels have been spotted. Look, I admit this all sounds utterly crazy, but Cassandra is inviting us to inspect the evidence.”
“Evidence?” said Pamela. “How can there be evidence?”
“She proposes that we fly to Senegal, charter a helicopter, and reconnoiter the Valparaíso’s cargo.”
“Why, oh, why, are you wasting our time like this?” Winston Hawke, an intense, nervous little man for whom the collapse of Soviet communism merely heralded the True Revolution to come, sprang to his feet. “The Baptists are taking over,” cried the Marxist, “the yokels are on the march, the yahoos are at the gates, and you’re giving us a lot of shit about a supertanker!”
“Let me make a motion,” said Oliver. “I move that we dispatch a task force to Dakar before sundown tomorrow.”
“I can’t believe you’re serious,” said owlish Rainsford Fitch, a computer programmer who spent his nights hunched over his Macintosh SE-30, working out complicated mathematical disproofs of God’s existence.
“Neither can I,” said Oliver. “Would anyone like to second the motion?”
The League’s treasurer, matronly Meredith Lodge, an IRS functionary whose lifelong ambition was to deliver a tax bill to the Mormon Church, popped open her ledger book. “Is this really the sort of enterprise we should be spending our money on?”
“I’ll pay for everything.” Oliver polished off his brandy. “Plane fares, helicopter rentals…”
“Pray tell,” said Barclay, making no effort to stifle his smirk, “did the late Jehovah bequeath anything to His creatures?”
“I said, ‘Would anyone like to second the motion?’”
“Ah, but of course He did,” Barclay persisted. “We’ve all heard of God’s will!” Appreciative guffaws rippled through the lounge. “I do hope He left me something nice. The Colorado River, maybe, or perhaps a small planet in Andromeda, or else—”
“Second the motion,” interrupted Pamela, flashing a sturdy smile. “And while I’m at it, let me volunteer to head up the task force. I mean, what’s the big deal, friends? What are we afraid of? We all know the Valparaíso isn’t towing God.”
Thank goodness for off-road vehicles, thought Thomas Ockham as, dropping the Jeep Wrangler into first gear, he guided it up the wrinkled, spongy slope of the forehead. An ordinary car—his Honda Civic, for example—would have been defeated by now, hung up on a pimple or mired in a pore. It all sounded like an announcement you’d see emblazoned outside some rundown Evangelical church in Memphis. TODAY’S SERMON: IT TAKES FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE TO REALLY KNOW THE LORD.
Lifting his hand from the gearshift lever, he accidentally brushed Sister Miriam’s left thigh.
Initially she hadn’t wanted to come along. “I’m not prepared to meet Him that way,” she’d said, but then Thomas had pointed out that, if they were ever going to get beyond their grief, they would first have to confront the corpse directly, pimples, pores, moles, warts, and all. “The logic of the open casket,” as he’d put it.
Struggling against a headwind, the corpse was riding low this morning, so low that the CB radio reports arriving from the torso sentries spoke of waves breaking against the nipples and a tidal pool swirling in the navel. To wit, the Wrangler wouldn’t be making the full trip today—down the jaw, over the Adam’s apple, across the chest and belly. Just as well. Forty-eight hours earlier Thomas had traveled the entire length, pausing briefly atop the abdomen to behold the great veiny cylinder floating between the legs (a truly unnerving sight, the scrotal sac undulating like the gasbag of some unimaginable blimp), and he was loath to repeat the experience with Miriam. It wasn’t just that the sharks had wrought such terrible destruction, stripping off the foreskin like a gang of sadistic mohels. Even if in good shape, God’s penis would still rank high among those vis
tas a priest and a nun could not comfortably share.
They crested the brow and started downward, bound for the deep, windswept gorge from which the great nose grew.
Technically, of course, His gonads made no sense; they might even be marshaled to dispute the corpse’s authenticity. But such an objection, Thomas felt, smacked of hubris. If their Creator had once wanted (for whatever reasons) to reshape Himself in the image of His products, He’d have gone ahead and done so. “Let there be a penis,” and there would be a penis. Indeed, the more Thomas thought about it, the more inevitable the appendage became. A God without a penis would be a limited God, a God to whom some possibility had been closed, hence not God at all. In a way it was rather noble of Him to have endorsed this most controversial of organs. Inevitably Thomas thought of Paul’s beautiful First Letter to the Corinthians: “And those members of the body which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor…”
The Wrangler was ascending again, conquering the proboscis at five miles per hour. Miriam jammed one of her audiocassettes into the tape deck, realized she’d loaded it upside down, tried again. She pushed PLAY. Instantly the bombastic opening of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra erupted from the speakers, a fanfare popularized by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the great eschatological movie she and Thomas had seen twenty-four years earlier on what the secular world would have termed a date.
While the genitalia held an intrinsic fascination for the priest, the things the Val’s cargo lacked likewise engaged his curiosity. There was no dirt under the fingernails, for example, no clay of Creation—more evidence for calling the corpse counterfeit, although the scouring action of the sea offered an equally likely explanation. The wrists exhibited no crucifixion marks: an instance of divine self-healing, Thomas surmised, although a Unitarian might legitimately seize upon this circumstance to rail against conventional Christianity’s obsession with the Trinity. The flesh displayed none of the scorching that would normally result from a plunge through the earth’s atmosphere; it was as if the carcass hadn’t “fallen” in the literal sense but had materialized instead—or maybe He’d been alive during His descent, willfully exempting Himself from friction and allowing Himself to perish only upon hitting the Gulf of Guinea.