by James Morrow
“Death.”
Neil crouched beside the suffocated man, drank the delicious oxygen, and listened to the slow, steady thunder of the retreating horsemen.
Plague
FOR OLIVER SHOSTAK, learning that the illusory deity of Judeo-Christianity had once actually inhabited the heavens and the earth, running reality and dictating the Bible, was hands-down the worst experience of his life. On the scale of disillusionment, it far outranked his deduction at age five that Santa Claus was a mountebank, his discovery at seventeen that his father was routinely screwing the woman who boarded the family’s Weimaraners, and the judgment he’d suffered on his thirty-second birthday when he’d asked the curator of the Castelli Gallery in SoHo to exhibit the highlights of his abstract-expressionist period. (“The great drawback of these paintings,” the stiff-necked old lady had replied, “is that they aren’t any good.”) But the fruits of Pamela Harcourt’s recent expedition could not be denied: a dozen full-color photographs, each showing a large, male, grinning, supine body being towed by its ears northward through the Atlantic Ocean. The 30 × 40 blowups hung in the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall like ancestral portraits—which, in a manner of speaking, they were.
“Our labors of late have been, if I may speak mythologically, Herculean,” Barclay Cabot began, his haggard face breaking into a yawn. “Our itinerary included stops in Asia, Europe, the Middle East…”
Oliver fixed on the blowups. He loathed them. No feminist forced to sit through a Linda Lovelace film festival had ever felt more offended. Yet he refused to admit defeat. Indeed, on receiving Pamela’s dire bulletin from Dakar he’d swung into action immediately, deputizing Barclay to form an ad hoc committee and lead it on a frantic journey around the world.
Winston Hawke finished off a petit four, wiping his hands on his Trotsky sweatshirt. “After eighty-four hours of unbroken effort, our team has reached a sobering conclusion.”
Rising, Barclay slipped a sheet of legal paper out of his waistcoat pocket. “By presenting yourself as the agent of a foreign government eager to prevent its financial resources from falling into the wrong hands…”
“Its own people, for example,” said Winston.
“…you can, these days, obtain almost any tool of mass destruction that catches your fancy. To be specific”—Barclay perused the legal paper—“the French Ministry of Defense was prepared to rent us a Robespierre-class attack submarine equipped with eighteen forward-launched torpedoes. The Iranian State Department proposed to sell us the nine million gallons of Vietnam-surplus napalm it acquired from the American CIA in 1976, plus ten F-15 Eagle fighter jets with which to dispense it. The Argentine Navy offered us a two-month lease on the battleship Eva Perón, and if we’d closed the deal on the spot, they’d have thrown in six thousand rounds of ammunition for free. Finally, as long as we agreed to keep the source a secret, the People’s Republic of China would’ve given us what they called a ‘package deal’ on a tactical nuclear weapon and the delivery system of our choice.”
“Every one of these offers fell through the minute the merchants learned we did not in fact represent a sovereign state.” Winston selected a second petit four. “It’s immoral and destabilizing, they said, for private citizens to possess such technologies.”
“The sole dissenter from this policy was itself a private institution, the American National Rifle Association,” said Barclay. “But the things they wanted to sell us—four M110 howitzers and seven wire-guided TOW missiles—are useless for our purposes.”
Oliver groaned softly. He’d been hoping for a more encouraging report: not simply because he wished to impress Cassandra, whose fax had clearly contained a subtext—prove yourself, she was saying between the lines, show me you’re a man of substance—but also because he truly wanted to spare his species a millennium of theistic ignorance and mindless superstition.
“So we’re licked?” asked Pamela.
“There is one ray of hope,” said Winston, devouring the tiny cake. “This afternoon we spoke with—”
The Marxist stopped in midsentence, stunned by the ascent of Sylvia Endicott, a surge so abrupt it was as if the springs of her Empire chair had suddenly popped free. “Have I missed something?” the old woman demanded in a low, liquid hiss. “Did I fail to attend a crucial meeting? Was I out of town during an emergency session? When, exactly, did we agree on this sabotage business?”
“We never put it to a formal vote,” Oliver replied, “but clearly that’s the consensus in the room.”
“Not in this part of the room.”
“What are you saying, Sylvia?” snarled Pamela. “‘Sit back and do nothing’?”
“The Svalbard tomb can hardly be a secure place,” Meredith Lodge hastened to add. “Hell, I suspect it’s vulnerable as Cheops’s pyramid.”
“Obliteration’s the only answer,” said Rainsford Fitch.
Scowling profoundly, Sylvia shuffled to the bust of Charles Darwin stationed by the fireplace.
“Assuming for a moment the Valparaíso is really towing what Cassie Fowler says it’s towing,” she began, “shouldn’t we have the collective courage, if not the simple decency, to admit we’ve been wrong all these years?”
“Wrong?” said Rainsford.
“Yes. Wrong.”
“That’s a rather extreme word,” said Barclay.
“It’s probably time to amend our charter,” said Taylor Scott, puffing on a Turkish cigarette, “but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The theistic world was a nightmare, Sylvia. Have you forgotten the Renaissance witch hunts?”
“But we’re not being honest.”
“The trial of Galileo? The massacre of the Incas?”
“I haven’t forgotten those things, nor have I forgotten the scientific curiosity that is the sine qua non of this organization.” Sylvia tightened her woolen shawl, her primary protection against the ersatz winter raging through Montesquieu Hall. “We should be studying this corpse, not sweeping it under the rug.”
“Let’s look at it from another angle,” said Winston. “Yes, some sort of large entity is currently being hauled toward the Arctic, and for all we know this entity hung the stars, spun the earth, and molded Adam out of clay. But does that mean it’s God? The unmoved mover? The first and final cause? The be-all and end-all? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake. What kind of Supreme Being goes belly up like that?”
“A fake Supreme Being,” said Rainsford.
“Exactly,” said Winston. “A fake, a fraud, a phony. The problem, of course, is that such logic will never impress the credulous masses. A relic like this becomes yet another confirmation of their faith. Ergo, for the good of all, in the name of reason, this God-who-isn’t-God must be removed.”
“Winston, you appall me.” Arms akimbo, Sylvia aimed her blighted corneas directly at the Marxist. “Reason, you said? ‘The name of reason’? This isn’t reason you’re doling out—it’s atheist fundamentalism!”
“Let’s not play with words.”
Sylvia tore off the shawl, hobbled into the foyer, and yanked open the front door. “Ladies and gentlemen, you leave me no other choice!” she foamed as the July heat wafted into the frigid lounge. “Honor dictates but one course for me—I must resign from the Central Park West Enlightenment League!”
“Lighten up, Sylvia,” said Pamela.
The old woman stepped into the steamy night. “Got that, you intellectual pharisees?” she called over her shoulder. “I’m quitting—forever!”
Oliver’s innards contracted. His throat grew dry. Sylvia, goddamn it, had a point.
“The sack of Jerusalem!” wailed Winston as the door slammed shut.
“The siege of Belfast!” howled Rainsford.
“The slaughter of the Huguenots!” screamed Meredith.
A point—but that was all Sylvia had, Oliver decided, a mere rational argument, and meanwhile the woods were burning.
“Let’s hear about that ray of hope,” said Pamela.
Barclay strode
to the hearth, warming his hands over the roiling flames. “You’ve probably never heard of Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society, but it’s pretty much what the name implies—a couple of ambitious young impresarios who buy up mothballed B-17s and battleships and such. They hire hungry actors, unemployed merchant sailors, and discharged Navy fliers, then travel around simulating the major encounters between the Axis and the Allies.”
“Last summer, Pembroke and Flume put on their version of Rommel’s Africa campaign, substituting the Arizona desert for Tunisia,” said Winston, joining Barclay by the fire. “The winter before, they did the Ardennes counteroffensive in the Catskills. This year, as it happens, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, so they’ve got a Hollywood crew working up on Martha’s Vineyard, reconstructing the entire base out of Styrofoam and plywood. On August first, dozens of classic Japanese warplanes will take off from three-quarter-scale fiberglass facsimiles of the carriers Akagi, Soryu, Hiryu, and Kaga, then bomb the base to smithereens. The next day, all four Jap flattops will be sunk by a squadron of dive bombers from the vintage American carrier Enterprise—the pride of Pembroke and Flume’s collection.”
“Which is actually something of a cheat,” said Barclay. “The Yorktown and the Hornet also sent planes, but Pembroke and Flume are operating on a budget. On the other hand, they do use live bombs. The audience gets its money’s worth.”
“Bread and circuses,” said Winston, sneering. “Only in late-capitalist America, eh?”
“The relevant fact is this: once they’re done with Midway, Pembroke and Flume have no immediate prospects,” said Barclay. “They’ll be eager to let us hire ’em.”
“Hire ’em to do what?” asked Meredith.
“Restage the battle all over again—with fresh ammunition. Between their dive bombers and their torpedo planes, we’re pretty sure they can deliver enough TNT to scuttle Van Horne’s cargo.”
A quick, delicious thrill shot through Oliver as, rising from his méridienne daybed, he marched across the Aubusson carpet to the bust of Darwin. He liked this Midway business. He liked it very much. “What’ll they charge us?”
“They quoted a few rough figures at lunch,” said Winston, scanning a ragged 3 × 5 card. “Salaries, food, gasoline, bombs, lawyers, insurance riders…”
“And the bottom line?”
“Gimme a minute.” Winston’s index finger danced along the keyboard of his pocket calculator. “Sixteen million, two hundred and twenty thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Think we can get ’em down to fifteen?” asked Oliver, sliding his thumb across the marble furrows of Darwin’s frown. Not that it mattered. If his sister could squander her trust fund collecting Abraham Lincoln memorabilia and his brother could piss away his making cornball biographical movies about major-league baseball stars, Oliver was not about to balk at financing so worthy a project as this.
“Damn good chance of it,” Winston replied. “I mean, these clowns really need us. They practically lost their shirts on Pearl Harbor.”
July 28.
Midnight. Latitude: 30°6'N. Longitude: 22°12'W. Course: 015. Speed: 6 knots. Wind: 4 on the Beaufort. Heading north across the Cape Verde Abyssal Plain, the Canaries to starboard, the Azores dead ahead, Ursa Minor directly above.
This afternoon, in preparation for the blood transfer, we tried piercing His right carotid artery with a series of interconnected chicksans—“the world’s biggest hypodermic needle,” as Crock O’Connor put it. A disaster. Ten feet below the epidermis, He becomes hard as iron. Easier to rupture a football with a banana.
Assuming there’s no mutiny in the meantime, we’ll try again tomorrow.
You think I’m kidding about a mutiny, Popeye? I’m not.
Something strange is happening aboard the Carpco Valparaíso. Every time Bud Ramsey organizes a poker game, one of the players cheats and the whole affair turns into a bloody brawl. Graffiti’s been appearing on the bulkheads faster than I can order it sandblasted away: JESUS IS COMING IN HIS PANTS, and worse. (I’m not a religious man, but I won’t have that kind of crap on my ship.) The deckies are constantly smoking near the cargo bays, thus breaking the first rule of oil-tanker safety.
Marbles Rafferty informs me that not an hour goes by without somebody pounding on his door to report a theft. Wallets, cameras, radios, knives.
I told our bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, he’d either learn to hold his liquor or I’d clap him in irons. So this morning, what does the idiot do? Gets roaring drunk and smashes up the rec-room pinball machine, thereby obliging me to jam his ass in the brig.
Able Seaman Karl Jaworski insisted he gave Isabel Bostwick “nothing but a friendly good-night kiss.” Then I talked to the woman, a wiper, and she showed me her cuts and bruises, and after that two others came forward, An-mei Jong and Juanita Torres, with similar marks and similar complaints about Jaworski. I stuck him in the cell next to Wheatstone.
Until 48 hours ago, nobody had ever died on a vessel under my command.
Leo Zook. An AB. Poor bastard caught a lethal dose of hydrocarbon gas while cleaning out number 2 center tank. Now here’s the really troubling part. The hose of his Dragen rig was cut to pieces, and when Rafferty arrived on the scene, Zook’s mucking partner—Neil Weisinger, that nervy kid who manned the helm during Beatrice—was crouching beside the body holding a Swiss Army knife.
Whenever I stand outside Weisinger’s cell and ask him to tell what happened, he just laughs.
“The corpse is taking hold,” is how Ockham explains our situation. “Not the corpse per se, the idea of the corpse—that’s our great enemy, that’s the source of this disorder. In the old days,” says the padre, “whether you were a believer, a nonbeliever, or a confused agnostic, at some level, conscious or unconscious, you felt God was watching you, and the intuition kept you in check. Now a whole new era is upon us.”
“New era?” I say.
“Anno Postdomini One,” he says.
The Idea of the Corpse. Anno Postdomini One. Sometimes I think Ockham’s losing it, sometimes I think he’s dead right. I hate locking up my own crew, especially with His carotid artery still unbreached and the sharks running so thick, but what other choice do I have? I fear that we’re a plague ship, Popeye. Our cargo’s gotten inside us, sporing and spawning, and I’m no longer certain who’s towing whom.
A profound sense of regret fell upon Thomas Ockham as, dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Levi Strauss jeans, he descended the narrow ladder to the Valparaíso’s makeshift brig. This, he decided, is how he should have spent his life—collar off, moving among the rejected and the jailed, siding with the world’s outcasts. Jesus hadn’t wasted His time worrying about superstrings or some eternally elusive TOE. The Master had gone where needed.
Lower than the pump room, lower even than the engine flat, the cells were strung along an obscure starboard passageway crowded with shielded cables and perspiring pipes. Thomas advanced at a crouch. The three prisoners were invisible, locked behind riveted steel doors improvised from boiler plates. Slowly, haltingly, the priest moved down the row, past the vandal Wheatstone and the lecher Jaworski, pausing before the case he found most disturbing, Able Seaman Neil Weisinger.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Thomas had contacted Rome. “In your opinion, does our current ethical disarray trace to some palpable force generated by the process of divine decay,” ran his fax’s final sentence, “or to some subjective psychological effect spawned by theothanatopsis, that is, to the Idea of the Corpse?”
To which Tullio Di Luca had replied, “How much travel time do you estimate will be lost to this development?”
Outside the cell, Big Joe Spicer sat on an aluminum folding chair, a flare pistol strapped menacingly to his shoulder and a Playboy centerfold lying open on his lap.
“Hello, Joe. I’m here to see Weisinger.”
Spicer scowled. “Why?”
“A troubled soul.”
“Nah, he’s
happy as a clam at high tide.” The second mate jabbed a dull brass skeleton key into the lock, twisting it suddenly like a race-car driver starting his engine. “Listen. The kid makes any threatening gestures”—he patted the flare pistol—“you let out a holler, and I’ll come set his face on fire.”
“I don’t see you at Mass anymore.”
“It’s like fucking, Father. You gotta be up for it.”
Stepping inside the cell, Thomas nearly gagged on the smell, a noxious brew of sweat, urine, and chemically treated feces. Naked to the waist, Weisinger lay atop his bunk, staring upward like a victim of premature burial contemplating the lid of his coffin.
“Hello, Neil.”
The kid rolled over. His eyes were the dull matted gray of expired light bulbs. “Whaddya want?”
“To talk.”
“About what?”
“About what happened in number two center tank.”
“You got any cigarettes?” asked Weisinger.
“Didn’t know you were a smoker,” said Thomas.
“I’m not. You got any?”
“No.”
“Sure could use a cigarette. A Jew-hater died.”
“Zook hated Jews?”
“He thinks we murdered Jesus. God. One of those people. What day is this, anyway? You lose all sense of time down here.”
“Wednesday, July twenty-ninth, noon. Did you kill him?”
“God. Nope. Zook? Wanted to.” Weisinger climbed off his bunk and, staggering to the bulkhead, knelt beside his cistern, a battered copper kettle filled with water the color of Abbaye de Scourmont ale. “Ever known a moment of pure, white-hot clarity, Father Tom? Ever stood over a suffocating man with a Swiss Army knife clutched in your fist? It clears all the cobwebs out of your brain.”
“You cut Zook’s hose?”
“Of course I cut his hose.” The kid splashed his doughy chest with handfuls of dirty water. “But maybe he was already dead, ever think of that?”
“Was he?” asked Thomas.
“What difference would it make?”