Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  As they reached the summit, Miriam said, “It’s a paradox, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How the fact of God steals away our faith in God.”

  Thomas killed the engine, then rotated the ignition key forward a notch so the cassette would keep playing. “The literalness of all this is most depressing, I’ll grant you. But it’s important to sense the mystery behind the meat. What is flesh, really? What is matter? Do we know? We don’t. In its own way, carrion is as numinous as the Host.”

  “Maybe,” said Miriam evenly. “Could be,” she added without emotion. “Sure. Right. I want my belief back, Tom. I want to feel that old-time religion again.”

  Yanking the emergency brake with one hand, Thomas gave his friend’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze with the other. “I suppose we could try believing in a God synonymous with something beyond this corpse—a God outside God. But Gabriel didn’t allow us that option. He was a good Catholic, my angel. He understood the ultimate indivisibility of body and spirit.”

  The priest climbed out of the cab, laying his palm on the hot steel hood. A Wrangler’s engine, a Homo sapiens sapiens, a Supreme Being—in each case, the soul of the thing could not be abstracted from the thing itself. Just as Einstein had demonstrated the fundamental equivalence of matter and energy, so did Thomas’s church teach the fundamental equivalence of existence and essence. There was no ghost in the machine.

  Pulling his Handicam from the rear compartment, the priest pivoted toward the great glassy lake of their cargo’s left eye. Both irises were a vibrant cyan, the luxurious hue of unoxygenated blood. (And God said, “Let me have Scandinavian eyes.”) He put the camera on STANDBY. Gradually the scene painted itself across the viewfinder screen: a frightened deckie on predator patrol, bazooka at the ready, standing by the shore of the watery cornea as he scanned the sky for Cameroon vultures. Beyond lay His great frozen smile, each visible tooth sparkling like a sun-struck glacier.

  Teeth, eyes, hands, gonads—so much to contemplate, and yet Thomas also found himself pondering those parts presently hidden from view. Did the hair swirl clockwise, like a human’s? Were the palms callused? Were the molars configured in a manner suggesting a particular diet? (Given the popularity of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, it was unlikely He’d been a vegetarian.) Anything remarkable about the buttocks evoked so enigmatically in Exodus 33:23?

  “Then, of course,” called Miriam above Also Sprach Zarathustra, “there’s the question of why. Any theories, Tom?”

  He pulled the Handicam’s trigger, preserving God’s sightless gaze and grinning rictus on half-inch videotape. “I plan to organize my thoughts tonight and send them to Rome. In my gut I feel it was an empathic death. He died from a bad case of the twentieth century.”

  Miriam offered a nod of assent. “We’ve killed Him a hundred million times in recent memory, haven’t we? And we never even bothered to hide the bodies.”

  What a supple, sensuous mind, he thought. “‘Hide the bodies,’” he echoed. “Would it be all right if I quoted you in my fax to Cardinal Di Luca?”

  “I’d be flattered,” the nun said, smiling spectacularly. Like God, she had perfect teeth: no surprise, really, the poverty of Carmelites being strictly genteel, poverty with a dental plan.

  Scrambling out of the passenger seat, Miriam circumvented the tarry surface of a blackhead and ambled confidently to his side. Her getup, he admitted—pith helmet, dungarees, safari jacket sealed tightly with bone buttons—aroused in him a certain prurience. All during his youth, Thomas had harbored a vague notion that, lifting the edge of a nun’s habit, you’d find nothing there. How wrong he’d been. The denim clung to her hips, thighs, and calves, outlining her like the drifting snow into which the dying Claude Rains had fallen at the climax of The Invisible Man.

  “‘The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances,’” she said, reciting a famous passage from Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. “‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you; We have killed Him—you and I. We are all His murderers.’”

  “‘But how was this done?’” said Thomas, continuing the passage. They couldn’t get away from Nietzsche today: Zarathustra on the tape deck, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft on their tongues. “‘How were we able to drink up the sea?’” He shut off the Handicam. “‘Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’”

  They returned to the Wrangler, drove down the western nasal slope, and improvised a path through the whiskers of the left cheek. On its fringes, the beard had become a kind of fishing net, a vast natural web the seafaring apostles might have envied, jammed with entangled groupers, porpoises, and marlin. The Wrangler bucked and lurched but stayed on course, looping steadily eastward into the mustache.

  Twin caverns rose before them, the great yawning tunnels through which their cargo had once breathed and sneezed.

  “To be honest”—Miriam stared into the moist depths—“I’m learning more than I care to.”

  “Quite so,” said Thomas, grimacing. Marshes of mucus, boulders of dried snot, nose hairs the size of obelisks: this was not the Lord God of Hosts they’d grown up with. “But we can’t leave yet.” He swung the steering wheel hard over and, putting the Wrangler in reverse, eased the rear bumper against the high escarpment running between upper lip and right nostril. Leaning out the window, he wiped the sea spray from the rearview mirror, a saucer-sized disk jutting into space on rusted aluminum struts. “A test,” he explained.

  “I suppose there’s always hope.”

  “Always,” Thomas muttered without conviction.

  Together they studied the glass, watching it with the same rapt intensity of the prophet Daniel beholding MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN materialize upon the wall. The merest cloud would have satisfied them—the slightest smudge, the feeblest hint of fog.

  Nothing. The surface remained mockingly clear, obscenely pristine. God, the mirror said, was dead.

  Miriam took Thomas’s hand, pressing it so firmly between her palms that the blood crowded into his fingertips. “Then, of course, there’s the toughest question of all.”

  Yes?

  “Now that we know He’s gone, really gone, making no judgments, preparing no punishments, now that we truly know these things”—the nun offered a diffident little grin—“why should we fear to sin?”

  July 26.

  Latitude: 25°8'N. Longitude: 20°30'E. Course: 358. Speed: 6 lousy knots. We’re rounding the great bulge of northwest Africa, tracing in reverse those audacious voyages of exploration Prince Henry the Navigator dispatched from Portugal beginning in 1455. If dear old Dad was Christopher Columbus in a previous life, perhaps I used to be Prince Henry. When the benighted monarch died, his friends stripped him down and found he was wearing a hair shirt.

  My plan is amazingly clever. Ready, Popeye? I’m going to blow the ballast. All of it: the 60,000 tons we picked up in New York Harbor, the 15,000 (so far) with which we’ve been compensating for spent bunker fuel. And then—here’s the brilliant part—we’re going to trim the Val with His blood.

  Think of it. One simple, standard pumping operation, no longer than 5 hours, and we’ll have reduced our towing load by 15 percent. According to Crock O’Connor, we can run both engines at a steady 85 rpm’s after that, maybe even 90.

  Count on Father Ockham to object.

  “After we blow the ballast, we’ll be at the corpse’s mercy,” he asserted, ever the physics professor. “A strong wind, and the thing could drag us a hundred miles off course.”

  “It’ll be like a transfusion,” I explained. “As the water goes shooting out of the ballast tanks, the blood’ll come pouring into the cargo tanks. We’ll remain in trim the whole time.”

  “You mean you’re going to drain our Creator’s liquid essence into those filthy cargo tanks?”

  I figured I should tell him the truth, even though I could see where he was heading. “Yes, Thomas, that’s one way to put it.”
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br />   “We’ll have to clear it with Rome.”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “Yes, we will.”

  The Vatican got back to us in less than an hour.

  “The synod has reached a consensus,” said somebody named Tullio Cardinal Di Luca. “Under no circumstances may His blood be defiled with secular oil. Before the transfusion, you must scrub the cargo tanks thoroughly.”

  “Scrub them?” I moaned. “That’ll take two days!”

  “Then we’d better start right now,” said the padre, simultaneously smiling and frowning.

  Eat more yogurt, Neil Weisinger’s physician had advised him upon appraising the cramps, diarrhea, and general misery that had settled in his gut shortly after his twentieth birthday. Yogurt, Dr. Cinsavich had explained, would increase his acidophilus count and aid his digestion. Until that moment, Neil hadn’t even realized that his intestines housed bacteria, much less that the bugs performed a welfare function. And so he tried the yogurt cure, and while it didn’t work (he was in fact suffering from lactose intolerance, a condition he eventually conquered by abstaining from dairy products), he nevertheless came away with an intense respect for his internal ecosystem.

  Four years after his visit to Dr. Cinsavich, as Neil climbed into number two center tank aboard the SS Carpco Valparaíso, he found himself identifying fiercely with the microbial proletariat teeming inside him. It was germs’ work, this thankless and malodorous business of scouring the ship’s innards, preparing them to receive God’s blood. Although the washing machine had done a good job, pulverizing the largest tarballs and flushing them away, there was still a considerable residue to harvest, gluey blobs of asphalt clinging to the ladders and catwalks like immense wads of discarded chewing gum. Gradually he descended—hand under hand, Leo Zook by his side—below the hawsepipes and the Plimsoll line, past the churning surface of the sea, deeper, ever deeper, into the hull. They scrubbed as they went, scooping up the gunk with their ladles and plopping it into a huge steel mucking bucket dangling beside them on a chain. Whenever the bucket became full, they broadcast the news via walkie-talkie to Eddie Wheatstone on the weather deck, and he winched the load aloft.

  Grandfather Moshe, no doubt, would have found redemption in this drudgery. The old man actually liked crude oil. “Oil’s a fluid fossil,” he’d once lectured his ten-year-old grandson as they stood on the Baltimore docks watching a supertanker glide across the horizon. “Memories of the Permian, messages from the Cretaceous, crushed and cooked and turned to jam. That ship’s a pail of history, Neil. That ship carries liquid dinosaurs.”

  Having Zook along only made things worse. In recent days the Evangelical’s piety had taken a truly ugly turn, degenerating into full-blown anti-Semitism. True, his mind was in upheaval, his soul in torment, his worldview in flames. But that was no excuse.

  “Please understand, I don’t think you’re in any way responsible for this terrible thing that’s happened,” said Zook, sweat leaking from beneath his hard hat and trickling down his freckled face.

  “That’s mighty gracious of you,” said Neil with a sneer. His voice reverberated madly in the great chamber, echoes of echoes of echoes.

  “But if I had to point a finger, which is not my style, but if I had to point, all I could say is, ‘Your people killed God once before, so maybe they did it this time too.’”

  “I don’t want to hear this shit, Leo.”

  “I’m not talking about you personally.”

  “Oh, yes, you are.”

  “I’m talking about Jews in general.”

  During their first hour in the tank, the midday sun lit their path, the bright golden shafts slanting through the open hatchway, but fifty feet down they had to switch on the electric lamps bolted atop their hard hats. The beams shot forward a dozen feet and vanished, swallowed by the darkness. Neil hacked a wad of mucus into his throat. He spit. A goddamn underwater coal miner, that’s what he was. How had this happened to him? Why had his life come to so little?

  At last they reached the bottom—a grid of high steel walls flung outward from the keelson, dividing the tank into twenty gloomy bays, each the size of a two-car garage. Neil unhooked the bucket and took a deep breath. So far, so good: no hydrocarbon stink. Groping toward his utility belt, he snapped up the walkie-talkie.

  “You with us, bos’n?” he radioed Eddie.

  “Roger. How’s the weather down there?”

  “Swell, I think, but be ready to bail us out, okay?”

  “Gotcha.”

  Mucking bucket at the ready, Neil began the inspection, crawling from compartment to compartment via the two-foot-long culverts cut into the bulkheads, Zook right behind. Bay one proved clean. Bay two held not a smudge. You could eat your lunch off the floor of three and blithely lick the walls of four. Five was the purest space yet, home to the washing machine itself, a conical mountain of pipes and nozzles rising over twenty feet. In six they finally found something worth removing, a glop of paraffin cleaving to a handgrip. They ladled it into the bucket and pressed on.

  It happened the instant Neil stepped into bay seven. At first there was just the odor—the ghastly aroma of a ruptured gas bubble, drilling into his nose. Then came the tingling in his fingertips and the patterns in his head: silvery pinwheels, red mandalas, shooting stars. His stomach unhooked itself, plunging downward.

  “Gas!” he screamed into the walkie-talkie. No doubt the malignant sphere had been waiting there for months, crouching in the prison of its own surface, and now the beast was out, popped free by Neil’s footfalls. “Gas!”

  “Jesus!” wailed Zook.

  “Gas!” Neil screamed again. “Eddie, we got gas down here!” He looked skyward. The hatchway drifted two hundred feet above his head, shimmering in the corrupted air like a harvest moon. “Drop the Dragens, Eddie! Bay seven!”

  “Jesus Lord God!”

  “Gas! Bay seven! Gas!”

  “God!”

  “Stay put, guys!” came Eddie’s voice, crackling out of the walkie-talkie. “The Dragens are coming!”

  Both sailors were weeping now, tear ducts spasming, cheeks running with salt water. Neil’s flesh grew bumpy and numb. His tongue itched.

  “Hurry!”

  Zook tucked his thumb against his palm and uncurled his fingers. One…two…three…four.

  Four. It was something you learned during seamanship training. A man gassed at the bottom of a cargo tank has four minutes to live.

  “They’re coming,” said the Evangelical, choking on the words.

  “The Dragens,” Neil agreed, reaching uncertainly into the side pocket of his overalls. His hands had taken on lives of their own, trembling like epileptic crabs.

  “No, the horsemen,” Zook gasped, still holding up his fingers.

  “Horsemen?”

  “The four horsemen. Plague, famine, war, death.”

  As Neil tore the Ben-Gurion medal free, a hot stream of half-digested Chicken McNuggets coursed up his windpipe. He vomited into the mucking bucket. What ship was this? The Carpco Valparaíso? No. The Argo Lykes? No. The rogue freighter on which Chief Mate Moshe Weisinger had borne fifteen hundred Jews to Palestine? No, not a merchant vessel of any sort. Something else. A floating concentration camp. Birkenau with a rudder. And here was Neil, trapped in a subsurface gas chamber as the Kommandant flooded it with Zyklon-B.

  “Death,” he echoed, dropping the Ben-Gurion medal. The bronze disc bounced off the rim of the bucket and clanked against the steel floor. “Death by Zyklon-B.”

  “Huh?” said Kommandant Zook.

  Neil’s brain was airborne, hovering outside his skull, bobbing around on the end of his spinal cord like a meat balloon. “I know your game, Kommandant. ‘Lock those prisoners in the showers! Turn on the Zyklon-B!’”

  Like spiders descending on silvery threads, a pair of Dragen rigs floated down from the weather deck. Caught in the beam of Neil’s hard-hat lamp, the oxygen tanks glowed a brilliant orange. The black masks and blue ho
ses spun wildly, intertwining. Lunging forward, he flexed his unfeeling fingers and began loosening the rubbery knot.

  “Zyklon what?” said Zook.

  Neil freed up a pear-shaped mask. Frantically he strapped it in place. He reached out, arched his fingers around the valve, rotated his wrist. Stuck. He tried again. Stuck. Again. It moved! Half an inch. An inch. Two. Air! Closing his eyes, he inhaled, sucking the sweetness through his mouth—nose—pores. Air, glorious oxygen, an invisible poultice drawing the poison from his brain.

  He opened his eyes. Kommandant Zook sat on the floor, skin pale as a mushroom, lips fluted in a moan. One hand held his mask in place. The other rested atop the tank, curled over the valve like a gigantic tick in the act of siphoning blood.

  “Help me.”

  It took Neil several seconds to grasp Zook’s predicament. The Nazi was completely immobile, frozen by some dreadful combination of brain damage and fear.

  “Plague,” said Neil. Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, he hobbled to Zook’s side.

  “P-please.”

  Freedom rushed through Neil like a hit of cocaine. YHWH wasn’t watching. No eyes on Neil. He could do whatever he felt like. Open the Kommandant’s valve—or cut his hose in two. Give him a shot of oxygen from the functioning rig—or spit in his face. Anything. Nothing.

  “Famine,” said Neil.

  The Kommandant stopped moaning. His jaw went slack. His eyes turned dull and milky, as if made of quartz.

  “War,” Neil whispered to Leo Zook’s corpse.

  From his breast pocket he drew out his Swiss Army knife. He pinched the spear blade, rotated it outward. He clenched the red handle; he stabbed; the blade pierced the rubber as easily as if it were soap. Laughing, reveling in his freedom, he carved a long, ragged incision along the axis of the Nazi’s hose.