by James Morrow
Half by entreaty, half by coercion, he leads his disgruntled family up the gangplank and onto the quarterdeck, where a squat man in an orange raincoat and a maroon watch cap demands to see their ticket.
“Happy Saint Patrick’s Day,” says Stephen, flourishing the preserved blossom.
“We’re putting you people on the fo’c’sle deck,” the man yells above the growl of the idling engines. “You can hide behind the pianos. At ten o’clock you get a bran muffin and a cup of coffee.”
As Stephen guides his stepchildren in a single file up the forward ladder, the crew of the Mayflower reels in the mooring lines and ravels up the anchor chains, setting her adrift. The engines kick in. Smoke pours from the freighter’s twin stacks. Sunlight seeps across the bay, tinting the eastern sky hot pink and making the island’s many-windowed towers glitter like Christmas trees.
A sleek Immortality Corps cutter glides by, headed for the wharfs, evidently unaware that enemies of the unconceived lie close at hand.
Slowly, cautiously, Stephen negotiates the maze of wooden crates—it seems as if every piano on Boston Isle is being exported today—until he reaches the starboard bulwark. As he curls his palm around the rail, the Mayflower cruises past the Mystic Shoals, maneuvering amid the rocks like a skier following a slalom course.
“Hello, Stephen.” A large woman lurches into view, abruptly kissing his cheek.
He gulps, blinking like a man emerging into sunlight from the darkness of a copulatorium. Valerie Gallogher’s presence on the Mayflower doesn’t surprise him, but he’s taken aback by her companions. Angela Dunfey, suckling little Merribell. Her cousin, Lorna, still spectacularly pregnant. And, most shocking of all, Father Monaghan, leaning his frail frame against his baptismal font.
Stephen says, “Did we…? Are you…?”
“My blood has spoken,” Valerie Gallogher replies, her red hair flying like a pennant. “In nine months I give birth to our child.”
Whereupon the sky above Stephen’s head begins swarming with tiny black birds. No, not birds, he realizes: devices. Ovulation gauges sail through the air, a dozen at first, then scores, then hundreds, immediately pursued by equal numbers of sperm counters. As the little machines splash down and sink, darkening the harbor like the contraband tea from an earlier moment in the history of Boston insurgency, a muffled but impassioned cheer arises among the stowaways.
“Hello, Father Monaghan.” Stephen unstraps his sperm counter. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”
The priest smiles feebly, drumming his fingers on the lip of the font. “Valerie informs me you’re about to become a father again. Congratulations.”
“My instincts tell me it’s a boy,” says Stephen, leaning over the rail. “He’s going to get a second candy cane at Christmas,” asserts the bewildered pilgrim as, with a wan smile and a sudden flick of his wrist, he breaks his bondage to the future.
If I don’t act now, thinks Connie as he pivots toward Valerie Gallogher, I’ll never find the courage again.
“Do we have a destination?” he asks. Like a bear preparing to ascend a tree, he hugs the font, pulling it against his chest.
“Only a purpose,” Valerie replies, sweeping her hand across the horizon. “We won’t find any Edens out there, Father. The entire Baltimore Reef has become a wriggling mass of flesh, newborns stretching shore to shore.” She removes her ovulation gauge and throws it over the side. “In the Minneapolis Keys, the Corps routinely casts homosexual men and menopausal women into the sea. On the California Archipelago, male parishioners receive periodic potency tests and—”
“The Atlanta Insularity?”
“A nightmare.”
“Miami Isle?”
“Forget it.”
Connie lays the font on the bulwark then clambers onto the rail, straddling it like a child riding a seesaw. A loop of heavy-duty chain encircles the font, the steel links flashing in the rising sun. “Then what’s our course?”
“East,” says Valerie. “Toward Europe. What are you doing?”
“East,” Connie echoes, tipping the font seaward. “Europe.”
A muffled, liquid crash reverberates across the harbor. The font disappears, dragging the chain behind it.
“Father!”
Drawing in a deep breath, Connie studies the chain. The spiral of links unwinds quickly and smoothly, like a coiled rattlesnake striking its prey. The slack vanishes. Connie feels the iron shackle seize his ankle. He flips over. He falls.
“Bless these waters, O Lord, that they might grant this sinner the gift of life everlasting…”
“Father!”
He plunges into the harbor, penetrating its cold hard surface: an experience, he decides, not unlike throwing oneself through a plate glass window. The waters envelop him, filling his ears and stinging his eyes.
We welcome this sinner into the mystical body of Christ, and do mark him with the Sign of the Cross, Connie recites in his mind, reaching up and drawing the sacred plus sign on his forehead.
He exhales, bubble following bubble.
Cornelius Dennis Monaghan, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, he concludes, and as the black wind sweeps through his brain, sucking him toward immortality, he knows that he’s never been happier.
APOLOGUE
THE INSTANT THEY HEARD the news, the three of them knew they had to do something, and so, joints complaining, ligaments protesting, they limped out of the retirement home, went down to the river, swam across, and climbed onto the wounded island.
They’d always looked out for each other in times gone by, and this day was no different. The ape placed a gentle paw on the rhedosaur’s neck, keeping the half-blind prehistoric beast from stepping on cars and bumping into skyscrapers. The mutant lizard helped the incontinent ape remove his disposable undergarments and replace them with a dry pair. The rhedosaur reminded the mutant lizard to take her Prozac.
Before them lay the maimed and smoking city. It was a nightmare, a war zone, a surrealistic obscenity. It was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Maybe they won’t understand,” said the rhedosaur. “They’ll look at me, and all they’ll see is a berserk reptile munching on the Coney Island roller coaster.” He fixed his clouded gaze on the ape. “And you’ll always be the one who shimmied up the Empire State Building and swatted at the biplanes.”
“And then, of course, there was the time I rampaged through the Fulton Fish Market and laid my eggs in Madison Square Garden,” said the mutant lizard.
“People are smarter than that,” said the ape. “They know the difference between fantasy and reality.”
“Some people do, yes,” said the rhedosaur. “Some do.”
The Italian mayor approached them at full stride, exhausted but resolute, his body swathed in an epidermis of ash. At his side walked a dazed Latino firefighter and a bewildered police officer of African descent.
“We’ve been expecting you,” said the mayor, giving the mutant lizard an affectionate pat on the shin.
“You have every right to feel ambivalent toward us,” said the rhedosaur.
“The past is not important,” said the mayor.
“You came in good faith,” said the police officer, attempting without success to smile.
“Actions speak louder than special effects,” said the firefighter, staring upward at the gargantuan visitors.
Tears of remorse rolled from the ape’s immense brown eyes. The stench filling his nostrils was irreducible, but he knew that it included many varieties of plastic and also human flesh. “Still, we can’t help feeling ashamed.”
“Today there is neither furred nor smooth in New York,” said the mayor. “There is neither scaled nor pored, black nor white, Asian nor Occidental, Jew nor Muslim. Today there are only victims and helpers.”
“Amen,” said the police officer.
“I think it’s clear what needs doing,” said the firefighter.
“Perfectly clear.” The mutant
lizard sucked a mass of rubble into her lantern-jawed mouth.
“Clear as glass.” Despite his failing vision, the rhedosaur could see that the East River Savings Bank was in trouble. He set his back against the structure, shoring it up with his mighty spine.
The ape said nothing but instead rested his paw in the middle of Cortlandt Street, allowing a crowd of the bereaved to climb onto his palm. Their shoes and boots tickled his skin. He curled his fingers into a protective matrix then shuffled south, soon entering Battery Park. He sat on the grass, stared toward Liberty Island, raised his arm, and, drawing the humans to his chest, held them against the warmth of his massive heart.
FUCKING JUSTICE
HIS BODY WAS NOW a sacred place, a sentient temple of Solomonic wisdom, a flesh-and-bone altar at which the innocent would always find relief from persecution and the guilty be evermore called to account. His spinal column had acquired the precise arc of the rainbow with which God had sealed his covenant with Noah. His brain’s two hemispheres bulged with the twin tablets of the Mosaic Law. The Code of Hammurabi gave ballast to the vessel of his heart.
Four days earlier, with the full enthusiasm of Andrew Jackson and the qualified endorsement of the Congress, Roger Brooke Taney had been sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. After the ceremony had come a roundelay of dinners, balls, soirées, and, truth be told, visits to the Washington bordellos. Chief Justice Roger Taney had imbibed considerable quantities of wine from crystalline goblets and impressed large amounts of truth on callow journalists, all of them eager to hear what philosophical constructs he would bring to bear in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. An amazing interval—and yet as he stood on the dark chilly banks of the Potomac, the fog enshrouding the trees and the night wind gnawing his innards, he apprehended that the week’s most memorable event was still to come.
The stranger had approached Roger at the bar of the Bellefleur Hotel, quite the most grotesque person he’d ever seen, a stumpish crookback whose sallow smile suggested a wooden fence from which every second picket had been removed. He identified himself as Knock the Dwarf. Although Roger’s commitment to Aristotelian prudence had obliged him to give the wretch a portion of his time, his sense of propriety had deterred him from granting a full-blown interview. Their conversation was consequently pointed and brief.
“Our republic is young,” Knock had said, “and yet already certain ancient and secret societies have established a presence on these shores—though of course such organizations are by definition hidden from view, which is why my employers assume that you are unacquainted with the Brotherhood of the Scales.”
“Brotherhood of the Scales?” Roger said. “A musicians’ league perhaps? A guild of fishermen?”
“Neither musicians nor fishermen.”
Fishermen. Once again the familiar knot formed in Roger’s throat, the tumor no surgeon’s knife could ever ablate. The late Mrs. Taney was certainly no Catholic, and yet she’d insisted that their cook spend every Friday evening frying or baking or broiling some aquatic delicacy. It was surely Satan himself who’d spawned the fatal trout, arranging for one of its vertebrae to lodge in Mrs. Taney’s gullet.
“Scales as in ‘scales of justice,’” Knock explained, handing Roger a sheet of parchment, twice-folded and secured with a dollop of white tallow.
“Your employers are correct,” Roger said. “I have not heard of the society in question. And now, if you will leave me to my privacy…”
Knock tipped his ratty felt hat, bowed in a manner that seemed to Roger more insouciant than deferential, and scurried back to whatever moist and gloomy grotto served as this troglodyte’s abode.
The message was succinct: a set of directions guiding the recipient to a particular willow tree on the Potomac’s eastern shore, followed by four sentences.
A choice lies before you, Roger Taney, as momentous as any you will make whilst heading up the highest court in the land. You can either become the greatest Supreme Court Justice of this century, or you can add your name to that fat catalogue of judges orphaned by mediocrity and adopted by obscurity. We shall expect you at the stroke of midnight.
The wind rushing off the black river put Roger in mind of his young nephew, Thomas, on whom he had recently lavished a wondrous toy frigate driven by flaxen sails and armed with four miniature brass cannons that, charged with a pinch of gunpowder, hurled glass marbles a distance of twenty feet. On Independence Day, Roger and Thomas had together enacted the Battle of Fort McHenry in a duck pond. As the frigate pounded the little mud-and-wicker garrison, man and boy had given voice to the stirring anthem recently composed by Roger’s brother-in-law.
“And the rockets’ red glare,” they’d sung, “the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there…”
The ship now cruising up the river was nothing at all like Thomas’s toy frigate. It was a thirty-foot shallop, the Caveat by name, as dismayed and forsaken as anything in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” her sails like moldering winding-sheets, her planks like worm-eaten wine casks, her rigging like the curtain-ropes in some unsavory theatre catering to sots and sensualists. The shallop sidled toward the bank. A gangway appeared, bridging the gap between rail and shore. Such a ship, Roger speculated, could only be crewed by pirates, and yet the instant he crossed over—for even a Chief Justice may act against his better judgment—it became obvious that, far from being a privateer, the Caveat was a kind of floating academy or waterborne monastery.
Her company, over twenty in number, all wore woolen robes, revealed by the full moon to be of varying hues, each beaky cowl offering Roger only the vaguest glimpse of the face beneath, rather the way his favorite sort of woman’s gown provided an occasional flash of bosom. Perhaps these friars were the spiritual descendents of Saint Brendan, the seagoing cleric of Catholic legend. Or maybe their order had gone maritime in homage to Les Trois Maries—Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, Mary Jacob—those pious women who, following the crucifixion, had traversed the Mediterranean and landed in Gaul.
No sooner had Roger stepped onto the weather deck than the tallest monk, swathed in red and radiating an agreeable floral fragrance, clasped his shoulder in a manner he found overly familiar but nevertheless ingratiating.
“You have made a wise decision, Judge Taney,” the red monk said.
“How heartening to meet a man who will endure both apprehension and perplexity to increase the quantity of justice in the universe,” the white monk said.
“I am indeed perplexed,” Roger said, “and truly apprehensive.”
“In matters metaphysical,” the blue monk said, “confusion and fear walk hand-in-hand with enlightenment and grace.”
“The ritual takes but an hour,” the yellow monk said. “We shall have you back at the Bellefleur in time for breakfast.”
“If you good friars were to lower your hoods,” Roger asked, “would I perhaps recognize amongst you a familiar face or two?”
The red monk dipped his head and said, “You would be astonished to learn who belongs to the Brotherhood of the Scales.”
The voyage was short and uneventful. For an hour or so the Caveat flew southward from the city, then dropped anchor near a feature that the red monk identified as Janus Island, a gloomy forested mass rising from the bay like the shell of an immense sea turtle. Torches were lit. Lanterns glowed to life. A longboat was lowered, hitting the water with a sound like a beaver’s tail slapping a mud bank.
Six monks clustered around Roger. Their sweet aroma and polyphonic humming gratified his senses. They directed him down a swaying rope-ladder to the longboat and positioned him in the stern, all the while chanting a song so beautiful he found himself wondering whether humankind might have done better to remain in the Middle Ages. The monks seized the oaks and rowed for Janus Island, the synchronous strokes providing their polyphony with a supplemental rhythm.
Attaining the beach, Roger’s sponsors again took him in hand, their skin exu
ding olfactory choruses of rose and lavender. As the party advanced inland, the terrain became preternaturally dense, the trees packed so tightly together as to make the forest seem a collection of concentric stockades. Chirps and peals and whirrs of every sort poured from the darkness, an insect symphony as pleasing as the monks’ sonorous voices.
The moon shone down more brightly still, its shimmering beams spilling through the trees like molten silver from a crucible. Roger shuddered with an amalgam of dread and fascination. His every instinct told him to break free of his sponsors, dive into the bay, and swim to the safety of the Maryland shore, and yet his curiosity kept him on the path, fixed on a destination whose nature he could not divine.
They had marched barely a mile when Roger realized that he and the monks were not alone. A female figure in a flowing gossamer gown darted here and there amongst the trees. She suggested nothing so much as a pagan dryad—though a true dryad, he decided, would enjoy greater freedom than this thrice-hobbled creature, who was freighted not only with a broadsword but also a pair of brass balance-scales and, as if she were about to be executed by a firing squad, a blindfold.
The red monk had evidently noticed the visitor as well, for he now turned to Roger and said, “No, Judge Taney, you are not going mad.”
“Nor are you seeing a ghost,” the white monk said.
The dryad awakened in Roger’s soul a timeless and unfathomable yearning. Her hair was a miracle. The long undulating tresses emitted a light of their own, a golden glow that mingled with the moonbeams to form a halo about her head.
“This island is surely of the Chesapeake Bay variety,” he said, “and yet it would seem we’ve landed in the Cyclades.”
“You are most prescient, sir, for the creature in question is in fact the Greek deity Themis,” the green monk said.
Even as Roger apprehended the visitor in all her splendor, radiant locks and ample hips and full bosom, she melted into the shadows. Themis? Truly? Themis herself, given flesh and essence through a power that only God and his monks could control?