Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “Who quit?”

  “The crew.”

  “What?”

  “It happened around midnight. They sprang Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Weisinger from the brig, then rigged up a gantry and unloaded a lot of stuff over the side—galley gear, video projectors, some heavy machinery, most of our food…”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Plus maybe a dozen crates of smuggled liquor and about two hundred six-packs.”

  “And then?”

  “They took off. They’re gone, Anthony.”

  “Gone?” In the warm, bloody folds of the captain’s cerebrum, a migraine began taking root. “Gone where?”

  “I last saw them heading north across the dunes.”

  “Officers too? Engineers?”

  “Spicer, Haycox, Ramsey.”

  “Who stayed?”

  “Miriam, of course, plus Rafferty, O’Connor, our castaway, our radio officer—”

  “Cassie stayed? Good.”

  “Her way of repaying us, I suppose.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Chickering. Follingsbee. Counting me, you’ve got eight people on your side.”

  “Mutiny,” said Anthony, the word turning to dung in his mouth.

  “Desertion, more like.”

  “No, mutiny.” Gripping the empty mescal bottle by the neck, he smashed it against the glutton’s left knee, launching the pickled worm into the air. Bastards. He’d show them. It was one thing to break every law known on land and quite another to violate the first commandment of the sea. Turn against your captain? You might as well eat lye, fire a laser at a mirror, write the Devil a bad check. “What do they think they can accomplish with this shit?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “We’re gonna hunt ’em down, Thomas.”

  “Spicer mentioned one goal.”

  “Hunt ’em down and hang ’em from the kingposts! Every last mutineer! What goal?”

  “He said they’d be giving their prisoners—quote—‘the punishment they deserve’.”

  When Cassie learned that Big Joe Spicer, Dolores Haycox, Bud Ramsey, and most of the crew had gone berserk, looting the tanker and fleeing across the sands, a rage rushed through her such as she’d not known since the Village Voice had called her Jephthah play “the sort of theatrical evening that gives sophomoric humor a bad name.” Without a crew, there was no way to free the ship; without a ship, no way to catch the carcass and resume the tow; without a tow, no way for Oliver’s mercenaries to locate and sink their target. Meanwhile, the damn thing was bobbing around in the Gibraltar Sea, where any fool could stumble on it. Perhaps any fool had stumbled on it. For all Cassie knew, a bunch of Texas fundamentalists were busy hauling the Corpus Dei toward Galveston Bay, intending to make it the centerpiece of a Christian theme park.

  What most frustrated her was the feebleness of the deserters’ reasoning, the way they were exploiting God’s body to justify their spurious embrace of anarchy. “They’re using it as an excuse,” she complained to Father Thomas and Sister Miriam. “Why can’t they see that?”

  “I suspect they can see it,” said the priest. “But they love their newfound freedom, right? They need to keep on following it, all the way to the edge.”

  “It’s the logic of Ivan Karamazov, isn’t it?” said Miriam. “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.”

  The priest knitted his brow. “One also thinks of Schopenhauer. Without a Supreme Being, life becomes sterile and meaningless. I hope Kant had it right—I hope people possess some sort of inborn ethical sense. I seem to recall him rhapsodizing somewhere about ‘the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.’”

  “Critique of Practical Reason,” said Miriam. “I agree, Tom. The deserters, all of us, we’ve got to make Kant’s leap of faith—his leap out of faith, I should say. We must get in touch with our congenital consciences. Otherwise we’re lost.”

  Thomas and Miriam, Cassie decided, enjoyed a rapport and an affection—indeed, a passion—many married couples would have envied. “I made that leap years ago,” she said. “Take a hard-nosed look at Part Two of The Ten Commandments, and you’ll see that God knows nothing of goodness.”

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t go that far,” said Miriam.

  “I would,” said Cassie.

  “I know you would,” said Father Thomas dryly.

  “It’s not like Kant was an atheist,” added the nun, setting her exquisite teeth in a grim smile.

  As the day wore on, Cassie inevitably found herself thinking of God Without Tears, her one-act deconstruction of The Ten Commandments. God knew nothing of goodness, goodness knew nothing of God—it was all so wrenchingly obvious, yet over three-quarters of the ship’s company had succumbed to the Idea of the Corpse. Maddening.

  Her dream that night carried her off the island, over the Atlantic, and back to New York City, where she found herself sitting front row center at Playwrights Horizons, attending the premiere of God Without Tears. Up on the stage, the glow of a spotlight caught the prophet Moses crouching at the base of a Dead Sea sand dune, fielding questions from an unseen interviewer who wanted to know all about “the legendary unexpurgated version of DeMille’s motion picture masterpiece.”

  The audience consisted entirely of the Valparaíso’s officers and crew. To Cassie’s left sat Joe Spicer, petting a creature that alternated between being a Norway rat and a horseshoe crab. To her right: Dolores Haycox, methodically tying knots in a Liberian sea snake. Behind her: Bud Ramsey, smoking a Dacron mooring line.

  Moses hikes up the dune and caresses the Tablets of the Law, which out of the sand like the ears on a Mickey Mouse cap.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Is it true DeMille’s original cut was over seven hours long?

  MOSES:

  Uh-huh. The exhibitors insisted he trim it back to four, (holds up fistful of motion picture film). During the last decade, I’ve managed to collect bits and pieces from nearly every lost scene.

  INTERVIEWER:

  For example?

  MOSES:

  The Plagues of Egypt. The release prints included blood, darkness, and hail, but they were missing all the really interesting ones.

  The spotlight shifts to two elderly, wording-class Egyptian women, Baketamon and Nellifer, potters by trade, pulling clay from the banks of the Nile.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Tell me about the frogs.

  BAKETAMON:

  It was hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

  NELLIFER:

  You’d open your unmentionables drawer and—pop—one of them little fuckers would jump in your face.

  BAKETAMON:

  Don’t let anyone tell you God hasn’t got a sense of humor.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Which plague was the worst?

  BAKETAMON:

  The boils, I’d say.

  NELLIFER:

  The boils, are you kidding? The locusts were far worse than the boils.

  BAKETAMON:

  The mosquitoes were pretty bad, too.

  NELLIFER:

  And the flies.

  BAKETAMON:

  And the cattle getting murrain.

  NELLIFER:

  And the death of the firstborn. A lot of people hated that one.

  BAKETAMON:

  Of course, it didn’t touch Nelli and me.

  NELLIFER:

  We were lucky. Our firstborns were already dead.

  BAKETAMON:

  Mine died in the hail.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Frozen?

  BAKETAMON:

  Beaned.

  NELLIFER:

  Mine had been suffering from chronic diarrhea since he was a month old, so when the waters became blood—zap, kid got dehydrated.

  BAKETAMON:

  Nelli, your mind’s going. It was your secondborn who died when the waters became blood. Your firstborn died in the darkness, when he accidentally drank that turpentine.

>   NELLIFER:

  No, my secondborn died much later, drowned when the Red Sea rolled back into its bed. My thirdborn drank the turpentine. A mother remembers these things.

  INTERVIEWER:

  I was certain you’d be more bitter about your ordeals.

  NELLIFER:

  Initially we thought the plagues were unjust. Then we came to understand our innate depravity and intrinsic wickedness.

  BAKETAMON:

  There’s only one good Person in the whole universe, and that’s the Lord God Jehovah.

  INTERVIEWER:

  You’ve converted to monotheism?

  BAKETAMON:

  (nodding) We love the Lord our God with all our heart.

  NELLIFER:

  All our soul.

  BAKETAMON:

  All our strength.

  NELLIFER:

  Besides, there’s no telling what He might do to us next.

  BAKETAMON:

  Fire ants, possibly.

  NELLIFER:

  Killer bees.

  BAKETAMON:

  Meningitis.

  NELLIFER:

  I’ve got two sons left.

  BAKETAMON:

  I’m still up a daughter.

  NELLIFER:

  The Lord giveth.

  BAKETAMON:

  And the Lord taketh away.

  NELLIFER:

  Blessed be the name of the Lord.

  Cassie scanned the audience. Shimmering halos of pure reason hovered above Joe Spicer, Dolores Haycox, and Bud Ramsey, igniting their faces with skepticism’s holy glow. The Enlightenment, she sensed, was about to prevail. As God Without Tears progressed, the Valparaíso deserters would inevitably come to apprehend and reject the fatal fallacy on which they were predicating their rebellion.

  The spotlight swings back to Moses atop the sand dune.

  INTERVIEWER:

  When you went up on Mount Sinai, Jehovah offered you a lot more than the Decalogue.

  MOSES:

  DeMille shot everything, Marty, all six hundred and twelve laws, each one destined for the cutting-room floor.

  A rear-projection screen descends, displaying an excerpt from The Ten Commandments. God’s animated forefinger is busily etching the Decalogue on the face of Sinai. As the last rule is carved—THOU SHALT NOT COVET—the frame suddenly freezes.

  GOD:

  (voice-over) Now for the details, (beat) When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, if you see a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable, you may make her your wife.

  INTERVIEWER:

  I have to admire DeMille for using something like that. Deuteronomy 21:10, right?

  MOSES:

  You got it, Marty. He was a much gutsier filmmaker than his detractors imagine.

  GOD:

  (voice-over) When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut off her hand and show no pity.

  INTERVIEWER:

  “Private parts”? DeMille used that?

  MOSES:

  Deuteronomy 25:11.

  GOD:

  (voice-over) If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, his father and mother shall bring him out to the elders of the town, and all his fellow citizens shall stone the son to death.

  MOSES:

  Deuteronomy 21:21.

  INTERVIEWER:

  And here I’d always thought DeMille was afraid of controversy.

  MOSES:

  One ballsy mogul, Marty.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Damn theater chains.

  MOSES:

  (nodding) They think they own the world.

  Joe Spicer jumped to his feet, hurled down his horseshoe crab, and said, “Mates, we’ve been committing a serious epistemological error!”

  “Schopenhauer was cracking walnuts in his ass!” agreed Dolores Haycox, tossing aside her Liberian sea snake. “Life’s meaning doesn’t come from God! Life’s meaning comes from life!”

  “Captain, you gotta forgive us!” pleaded Bud Ramsey.

  At which point Cassie woke up.

  August 6.

  Ockham wasn’t kidding. The bastards cleaned us out. Until we can get a fishing party together, we’ll be eating whatever stuff they dropped or didn’t want in the first place.

  I’m burning up, Popeye. I’m ablaze with migraine auras and shimmering visions of what I’ll do to the mutineers once I catch them. I see myself keelhauling Ramsey, the Val’s barnacled bottom scraping off his skin like a galley grunt peeling a potato. I see myself cutting Haycox into neat little cubes and tossing them into the Gibraltar Sea, snacks for sharks. And Joe Spicer? Spicer I’ll tie to a Butterworth plate, whipping him till the sun glints off his backbone.

  Welcome to Anno Postdomini One, Joe.

  At 1320 Sam Follingsbee handed me an inventory: 1 bunch of bananas, 2 dozen hot dogs, 3 pounds of Cheerios, 5 loaves of bread, 4 slices of Kraft American cheese…I can’t go on, Popeye, it’s too depressing. I told the steward to work out a rationing system, something that will keep us functioning for the rest of the month.

  “And after that?” he asked.

  “We pray,” I replied.

  Although the mutineers broke into the fo’c’sle hold and made off with all the antipredator weapons, they didn’t think to loot the deckhouse locker, so they’re without shells for the bazookas and harpoons for the WP-17s. When it comes to serious firepower, we have effectively disarmed each other. Unfortunately, they also ripped off two decorative cutlasses from the wardroom, six or seven flare pistols, and a handful of blasting caps. Given this arsenal and their superior numbers, I see no way to attack their camp and win.

  So we sit. And wait. And stew.

  Sparks keeps trying to raise the outside world. No luck. I can deal with a grounding, a food shortage, maybe even a mutiny, but this endless fog is making me nuts.

  At 1430 Ockham and Sister Miriam filled their knapsacks and set off north across the dunes, looking for the bastards. “We’re assuming Immanuel Kant had it right,” the padre explained. “There’s a natural moral law—a categorical imperative—latent within every person’s soul.”

  “If we can make the deserters understand that,” said Miriam, “they may very well recover.”

  Know what I think, Popeye? I think they’re about to get themselves killed.

  They found the deserters by their laughter: whoops of primitive delight and cries of post-theistic joy blowing across the wet sands. Thomas’s heart beat faster, rattling the miniature crucifix sandwiched between his chest and sweatshirt.

  Straight ahead, a range of high, damp dunes sizzled in the sun. Side by side, Jesuit and Carmelite ascended, pausing halfway up to drink from their canteens and mop the perspiration from their brows.

  “No matter how far they’ve sunk, we must offer them love,” Sister Miriam insisted.

  “We’ve been there ourselves, haven’t we?” said Thomas. “We know what havoc the Idea of the Corpse can wreak.” Reaching the summit, he lifted Van Horne’s binoculars to his eyes. He blanched, transfixed by a sight so astonishing it rivaled Miriam’s recent Dance of the Seven Veils. “Lord…”

  A marble amphitheater sprawled across the valley floor, its façade broken by arched niches in which resided eight-foot-high statues of nude men wearing the heads of bulls, vultures, and crocodiles, its main gate guarded by a sculpted hermaphrodite happily engaged in a singularly dexterous act of self-pleasuring. Built to accommodate several thousand spectators, the arena now held a mere thirty-two, each deserter stuffing his face with food while watching the gaudy entertainment frantically unfolding below.

  In the center of the rocky field, the Val’s Toyota forklift truck careened in wild circles, its steel prongs menacing a terrified mariner dressed only in tennis shoes and black bathing trunks. Inevitably Thomas thought of the last time he’d seen the forklift in action,
the night he and Van Horne had watched Miriam transport a paddock of fresh eggs across the galley. It seemed now as if this very truck had, like the crew, fallen into depravity, seized by some technological analogue of sin.

  He twisted the focusing drive. The threatened sailor was Eddie Wheatstone, the alcoholic bos’n Van Horne had jailed for destroying the rec-room pinball machine. Sweat glazed the bos’n’s face. His eyes looked ready to burst. Thomas panned, focused. Joe Spicer sat behind the steering wheel, dressed in a Michael Jackson T-shirt and khaki shorts, holding a can of Coors: sensitive Joe Spicer, the Merchant Marine’s most civilized officer, the man who brought books to the bridge, now mesmerized by the Idea of the Corpse. Pan, focus. Near the portcullis cowered blubber-bellied Karl Jaworski, the ship’s notorious lecher, in cotton briefs and Indian moccasins. Neil Weisinger, clad in nothing but a jockstrap, lay curled up beside the north wall like a catatonic.

  The mismatch between Wheatstone and Spicer was outrageous. True, the bos’n was armed—in his right hand he grasped a stockless anchor from the Juan Fernández—but no matter which way he dodged, the forklift kept pace with him, its prongs slashing the foggy air like the tusks of a charging elephant. Wheatstone grew wearier by the minute; the priest could practically see the lactic acid fouling the poor man’s blood, byproduct of his muscles’ hopeless attempt to burn up all their sugar.

  “It’s even worse than we imagined,” said Thomas, passing the binoculars to his friend. “They’ve gone over to the gods.”

  Miriam focused on the field and shuddered. “Is this the future, Tom—vigilante vengeance, public executions? Is this the shape of the post-theistic age?”

  “We’ve got to have faith,” he said, taking back the binoculars.

  Miraculously, Wheatstone now seized the initiative. As a bestial cry broke from his lips—a howl such as Thomas had last heard at an exorcism—the bos’n set the anchor twirling above his head, apparently aiming to puncture a tire. He released the rope. The anchor flew, hit the forklift’s right prong, and flipped into the mud. Applause erupted from the pagans, appreciation for a futile gesture well done.

  Seconds later, they were urging Spicer to retaliate.

  “Get him, Joe!”

  “Run the bastard down!”

  “Go!”

  “Go!”

  “Go!”

  Laughing maniacally, Spicer pulled a cargo net from the forklift’s rear compartment and neatly dropped it over the terrified bos’n. Wheatstone tripped, falling face down. The more he fought, the more entangled he became, but it was only after he began sliding forward—body bouncing across the sharp rocks, forehead cutting through the mud like a plow making a furrow—that Thomas noticed the Dacron mooring line running from the cargo net to the rear bumper.