by James Morrow
“Whirlpool?” asked Miriam.
“Possibly.”
“Waterspout?”
“Could be.”
Gunning the engine, Thomas guided the Wrangler to the surface of the belly and, heedless of the blinding fog, started along the midriff. Veering east, he stopped. The Juan Fernández, thank heaven, was where they’d left her, tied to the rubber wharf Rafferty had moored to the starboard armpit shortly before the tow began. Abandoning the Wrangler, they climbed down the Jacob’s ladder, crawled on hands and knees across the rolling pier, and vaulted into the launch.
“How do you feel?” Thomas asked, settling behind the steering wheel.
“Guilty.” Miriam cast off. “We sinned, didn’t we? We gazed upon each other’s nakedness.”
“We sinned,” he agreed, twisting the ignition key. The engine turned over and held. “You’re beautiful, Miriam.”
“So are you.”
He brought the Juan Fernández about and, opening the throttle all the way, piloted her across the submerged elbow. The passage along the cheek was choppy and treacherous, and it took them nearly fifteen minutes to gain open water. Dead ahead lay the supertanker, deckhouse shrouded in fog, hull pitching and rocking as if making passionate love to the sea.
“And how does guilt feel?” asked Thomas, steering the launch along a course defined by the starboard tow chain.
“Bad,” she replied.
“Bad,” he agreed.
“Guilt does not feel as bad,” she added, after some thought, “as dancing feels good.”
At which juncture—defying logic, denying gravity, snubbing Newtonian physics—the Valparaíso began to rise. Locking the steering wheel with his elbows, Thomas tore off his bifocals and wiped the condensation with his sleeve. He repositioned them. Yes, it was truly happening, an entire ULCC moving toward heaven, great sheets of seawater spilling from her hull and keel. He groaned. In the new, normless universe, what arcane force was struggling to be born? What had God’s death wrought?
Now came the answer. An island: a six-mile sprawl of ragged coves and crimson cliffs pushing free of the Gibraltar Sea like a breaching whale, carrying the tanker with it. Huge waves poured from the ascending mass, spewing foam and flotsam as, flowing south, they broke against the divine cranium.
“Oh, hell,” said Miriam. “Oh, bloody, bloody hell.”
A sudden crack echoed across the Portugal Current, like the hatching of some gigantic egg: God’s earbones snapping, Thomas realized, a sound no human being had ever heard before.
When at last the newborn island halted—leaving the Valparaíso beached, the corpse adrift, and every chart of the Gibraltar Sea obsolete—Miriam took the priest’s knobby, trembling hand. “Jesus, Tom, we lost Him.”
“We lost Him,” he agreed.
“We found Him, and now we’ve lost Him. What does it mean? Is it our fault?”
“Our fault? I hardly think so.”
“But we sinned,” said the nun.
“Not on this scale,” he said, pointing toward the errant land mass.
Whereupon Thomas Wickliff Ockham, S.J., his God gone, his self-respect shattered, threw himself against the steering wheel and wept.
Island
ANTHONY COULDN’T STOP laughing. Ever since they’d steamed out of New York Harbor, he realized, the universe had been casting about for some particularly cruel and elaborate joke to play on him, and now it had finally found one. Thrust an absurd little island out of the Gibraltar Sea. Beach Van Horne’s ship. Steal his cargo.
Hilarious.
The bridge was buzzing. Upon deducing that the Val was aground, nearly everyone above the rank of AB had instinctively gone looking for his captain, demanding that he explain this bizarre upwelling, though the tanker’s master was as mystified as his crew. Now they all stood amid the control consoles and radar scopes—officers, engineers, chief steward, pumpman—fidgeting like a congregation of millennialists awaiting the end of the world. Anthony could feel their hostility. He sensed their disgust. He knew what they were thinking. Never again, each mariner was promising himself. Never again shall I sail with Anthony Van Horne.
“I’m assumin’ I should kill the engines,” said Dolores Haycox, the mate on duty, leaning toward the joysticks.
Until that moment, Anthony hadn’t realized the propellers were still moving, spinning ineffectually in space. “Kill ’em,” he said, snickering.
“No need to hold the wheel, right?” asked James Echohawk, the AB at the helm.
“Right,” said the captain, giggling.
“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” asked Bud Ramsey.
“You wouldn’t get it.”
“Try me.”
“The universe.”
“Huh?”
Choking down his laughter, Anthony grabbed the PA mike. “Now hear this! Now hear this! As you can see, sailors, we’re in quite a jam!” His amplified words boomed across the weather deck and vanished into the mist-shrouded dunes beyond. “It’ll take at least three days, maybe four, to dig ourselves out of here, after which we’ll find the body, reconnect”—he struggled to believe himself—“and get this show on the road again!”
The immediate problem, he realized, was not freeing the Val but simply climbing down and inspecting the damage. They were imprisoned in their own ship, cut off like the plastic Constitution his father had sealed up in the water-cooler bottle. On all sides, the tanker’s stranded hull plunged toward the wet sands, a drop no mere gangway or Jacob’s ladder could begin to plumb.
“Hey, any of you guys ever hear of such a thing?” moaned Charlie Horrocks. “An island comin’ outta nowhere like this, any of you ever even hear of it?”
“Not me,” said Bud Ramsey.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Big Joe Spicer. “Even on a weird-ass voyage like this, it’s totally unprecedented.”
“Maybe Father Thomas could give us an explanation,” said Lianne Bliss. “He’s a genius, right? Where’s Father Thomas?”
“Any more shit happens on this trip,” said Sam Follingsbee, “I’m gonna go outta my mind.”
“You really think we’ll be able to dig ourselves free?” asked Crock O’Connor, rubbing the ancient steam burn that covered his brow.
Good question, Anthony decided. “Of course I do.” The captain ran his index finger along the apex of his broken nose. “Faith can move mountains, and so can the United States Merchant Marine.”
“Want my opinion?” asked Marbles Rafferty. “Our only hope is for this damn thing to go sliding back down where it came from, suddenly, in a great big whoosh, exactly the way it arrived.”
“Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t count on that,” said Dolores Haycox. “If you ask me, it’s here to stay, and we are too, stuck on our own private paradise.”
“Private paradise,” Anthony repeated. “Then we’ve got the right to name it.” He curled his palm around Echohawk’s beefy arm. “The next entry in the quartermaster’s log goes like this: ‘At 1645 hours, the Valparaíso ran aground on Van Horne Island.’”
“How modest of you,” said Rafferty.
“I’m not naming it after me. My father spent his entire life trying to find an uncharted island. A major asshole, dear old Dad, but he deserves this.”
Anthony lifted his angel feather from the breast pocket of his pea jacket and scratched his itching forehead with the quill. Chains, he thought. Yes. Chains. The tow chains were impossibly fat, but an anchor lead would make a perfect ladder. Flipping on the intercom, he raised the engine flat and instructed Lou Chickering to send somebody forward with instructions to drop the port kedge.
“Crock told me we’re high and dry,” Chickering protested. “Fetched up on an atoll, right?”
“Something like that.”
“’Fraid we’ll drift?”
“Just lower the goddamn anchor, Lou.”
Rafferty inserted a Pall Mall between his lips. “If you like, Captain, I’d be happy to head up an exploration party.”
“Maintain present course?” asked the chief mate, deadpan.
“Maintain present course,” said Anthony without batting an eye.
He rode the elevator to level three, visiting first his cabin and then the main galley as he provisioned himself for the conquest of Van Horne Island: food, water, compass, flashlight, bottle of Monte Alban mescal complete with pickled Oaxacan worm. Descending to the weather deck, he pedaled O’Connor’s trail bike along the catwalk, entered the fo’c’sle, and crawled into the damp, sewery reaches of the hawsepipe.
The climb down the anchor chain was treacherous and painful—the links were slippery, the coarse metal scraped his palms—but within fifteen minutes Anthony stood on the island’s spongy surface.
Scaly and gritty, red as claret, the stuff composing the surrounding dunes looked more like flecks of rust than like the brown-sugar sands one normally encountered along the 35th parallel. The deadness of the place unnerved him. It seemed not so much an island in the Gibraltar Sea as a meteor hewn from the crust of some singularly inert and sterile planet.
The Val’s wounds were ugly and deep. The lower half of her rudder was bent about ten degrees. Her keel was serrated like a carving knife. Her port shaft had sprung loose, and the propeller itself stood upright in a dune like the blades of a sinking windmill. Heavy damage, no question, but not so heavy that a smart skipper couldn’t compensate through some astute maneuvers and a few tricks of the trade. It all came down to the hull, the ship’s one truly vital organ. Anthony stared at the barnacle-encrusted plates; he rubbed them with his fingers, brushed them with his feather. A ragged seam ran for sixty yards along the starboard side like a surgical scar, evidence of her fateful encounter with Bolivar Reef, but the weld looked unscathed—indeed, the entire hull looked whole. Assuming they could in fact manage to dig the tanker loose, she would almost certainly float.
He stepped back. Like the Ark come to rest on Ararat, the tanker sat atop a mountain of sand, mud, coral, stones, and shells. The Vatican flag hung limply on its halyard. The tow chains drooped impotently off the stern, hit the dunes, and trailed away into the sea. Slipping on his mirrorshades, Anthony scanned the cove, hoping their cargo had miraculously drifted into the shallows, but he saw nothing except jagged rocks and clots of fibrous fog.
He drew the compass from his canvas knapsack, oriented himself, and marched north.
The farther Anthony went, the more obvious it became that Van Horne Island had lain beneath a major deep-sea dump site. Ascending from the ocean floor, the island had brought with it the trash of half a continent. This was Italy’s garbage can, England’s dustbin, Germany’s cesspool, France’s chamber pot.
Cupping a palm over his mouth and nose, he rushed past a huge mound of chemical waste, hundreds of 55-gallon drums stacked up in a kind of post-industrial Aztec pyramid. A mile beyond lay the remains of over a thousand automobiles, their gutted chassis piled side by side like skeletons flanking the promenade of a charnel house. Next came the appliances: blenders, toasters, refrigerators, ranges, microwaves, dishwashers—all randomly discarded yet collectively forming an oddly coherent setting, a backdrop for some post-theistic sitcom featuring an aging and demented Donna Reed brooding alone in her kitchen, plotting to poison her family.
Dusk descended, stealing the island’s warmth and turning its red sands black. Anthony zipped up his jacket, drew the bottle of Monte Alban from his knapsack, and, taking a long, hot swallow, pressed on.
An hour later, he found himself among the gods.
Four, to be exact: four granite idols over fifteen feet high, each commanding a different corner of a muddy flagstone plaza. Anthony gasped. Strange enough that Van Horne Island even existed, much less that the place had once hosted a human community—the Atlantic’s answer, perhaps, to that cheerless tribe that had made its home on Easter Island. To the north rose the graven image of a plump imbiber, lifting a goatskin container high above his parted lips and releasing a torrent of wine. To the east a fat-cheeked glutton, his belly the size of a wrecking ball, attempted to ingest an entire live boar in one grand gulp. To the south a goggle-eyed opium eater wolfed down a bouquet of poppies. To the west a sodomy aficionado, possessed of an erection so enormous he appeared to be riding a seesaw, made ready to copulate with a female manatee. Wandering among the idols, Anthony felt as if he’d been transported into the past, back to a time when the major sins were celebrated—no, not celebrated, exactly: it was more as if sin hadn’t been invented yet, and people simply did as their drives demanded, not worrying too much about any hypothetical Supreme Being’s opinion of such behaviors. The gods of Van Horne Island made no laws, passed no sentences, asked for no sympathy.
As night settled over the pantheon, Anthony switched on his flashlight. In the center of the plaza a ponderous marble slab rested atop the disembodied forepaws of a stone lion. The captain sprayed his flashlight beam across the altar’s surface. Mud. Crushed oyster shells. A grouper skeleton. Blood gutters.
Beyond, a high free-standing wall displayed a series of lurid instructional friezes. It was, Anthony realized, a kind of user’s guide to the altar, including the best way to position the victim, the proper angle at which to insert the knife, and the correct method for scooping out the contents of a human abdomen.
According to the friezes, the island’s gods were connoisseurs of entrails. Once lifted from their sloshy abodes, the duodena, jejuna, and ilea had evidently been transferred to clay tureens and set before the idols like steaming bowls of linguine. A jagged, star-shaped fragment from one such tureen lay at Anthony’s feet. He stomped on it with a mixture of fear and disgust, as if squashing a roach. Thus far on the voyage he’d failed to work up much affection for their cargo, that sour old smiler, that grinning judge, but Judeo-Christian monotheism suddenly seemed to him a major step forward.
Weariness crept through the captain’s bones. Drawing out his Monte Alban, he took a big gulp, then swept the trash from the slab and climbed on top. Another gulp. He stretched out, lay down. Another. In Anno Postdomini One, a man could drink as much as he pleased.
Anthony yawned. His eyelids drooped. Lemuria, Pan, Mu, Dis, Atlantis: to be a merchant sailor was to have heard of a dozen lost worlds. Going by the Val’s position alone—north of the Madeiras, east of the Azores, just beyond the Pillars of Hercules—Atlantis was the most likely candidate, but he knew it would take more than mere geography to make him rename his father’s island.
He awoke to the sound of a shout—a booming cry of “Anthony!”—and for an instant he thought the drunkard, glutton, opium eater, or sodomite had come to life and was calling to him. Sunlight suffused the temple, its hot rays slashing through the fog. He unbuttoned his pea jacket.
“Anthony! Anthony!”
Rising from the slab, he realized he was hearing Ockham’s professorial voice. “Padre!”
Dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Panama hat, the priest stood panting in the sodomite’s shadow. He looked dazed, shell-shocked, as might any man of his vocation beholding the gritty particulars of bestiality.
“We were on the corpse when the earbones snapped,” said Ockham. “Most terrible noise I ever heard, the crack of doom. Somehow we made our way to the Juan Fernández.”
“Thomas, I’m happy to see you,” said Anthony, touching the priest’s arm with the empty Monte Alban bottle. With decadence rampant among the crew and stone gods rising from the seabed, it was good to be with someone who’d heard of the Sermon on the Mount. “Everything’s falling apart, and there you are, a port in a storm.”
“Yesterday I danced naked in God’s navel.”
Anthony shuddered and gulped. “Oh?”
“With Sister Miriam.” The priest seized the neck of his sw
eatshirt and peeled the sticky cotton from his chest. “A slip. The Idea of the Corpse. I’m in control now. Really.”
“Father, what’s going on? This island makes no sense.”
“Miriam and I discussed the problem over dinner.”
“Come up with anything?”
“Yeah, but it’s pretty wild. Ready? I don’t suppose you keep up with so-called chaos theory…”
“I don’t.”
“…but one of its key concepts is the ‘strange attractor,’ the phenomenon that evidently underlies turbulence and other seemingly random events. As the Val and her cargo traveled north, they may have generated a unique variety of turbulence, and the body—this is just a guess—the body became a strange attractor. Now, here’s the crux. The old, pagan order would be particularly energized by an attractor of this sort. Understand? As the Corpus Dei passed overhead, this world was naturally drawn to it, eager to assert itself once again. You follow me?”
“You’re saying His body acted like a magnet?”
“Exactly. A metaphysical magnet, pulling down preternatural mists from heaven even as it sucked up a pagan civilization from the ocean floor.”
“Why didn’t something like this happen way back in the Gulf of Guinea?”
“Presumably no pagan civilizations lie at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea.”
“I’ve heard Atlantis used to be somewhere around here.”
“Plato to the contrary, I’m quite certain Atlantis never existed.”
“Then we’ll keep calling it Van Horne Island.”
Marching up to the glutton, Anthony pondered the peculiar combination of terror and rhapsody sculpted onto the doomed boar’s face. Chaos theory…strange attractors…metaphysical magnets. Jesus.
“We won’t let this place defeat us, right?” said the captain. “Maybe our ship’s beached and our cargo’s lost, but we’ll still put up a fight. We’ll get the deckies to dig us a canal.”
“No,” said Ockham. “Not possible.” His tone was leaden and portentous. “They quit, Anthony.”