Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  Ten months later, a grand jury exonerated Anthony of all the charges the state of Texas had leveled against him: negligence, incompetence, abandoning the bridge. An unfortunate verdict. For if the captain wasn’t guilty, then somebody else had to be, somebody named Caribbean Petroleum—Carpco, with its understaffed ships, overworked crews, steadfast refusal to build double-hulled tankers, and gimcrack oil-spill contingency plan (a scheme Judge Lucius Percy quickly dubbed “the greatest work of maritime fiction since Moby-Dick”). Even as the legal system was vindicating Anthony, his bosses were arranging their revenge. They told him he would never command a supertanker again, a prophecy they proceeded to fulfill by persuading the Coast Guard to rescind his license. Within one year Anthony went from the six-figure salary of a ship’s master to the paltry income of those human marginalia who haunt the New York docks taking whatever work they can get. He unloaded cargo until his hands became mottled with calluses. He tied up bulk carriers and Ro-Ros. He repaired rigging, spliced mooring lines, painted bollards, and cleaned out ballast tanks.

  And he took showers. Hundreds of them. The morning after the spill, Anthony checked into Port Lavaca’s only Holiday Inn and stood beneath the steaming water for nearly an hour. The oil wouldn’t come off. After dinner he tried again. The oil remained. Before bed, another shower. Useless. Endless oil, eleven million gallons, a petroleum tumor spreading into the depths of his flesh. Before the year ended, Anthony Van Horne was showering four times a day, seven days a week. “You left the bridge,” a voice would rasp in his ear as the water drummed against his chest.

  Two officers must be on the bridge at all times…

  “You left the bridge…”

  “You left the bridge,” said the angel Raphael, wiping his silver tears with the hem of his silken sleeve.

  “I left the bridge,” Anthony agreed.

  “I don’t weep because you left the bridge. Beaches and egrets mean nothing to me these days.”

  “You weep because”—he gulped—“God is dead.” The words felt impossibly odd on Anthony’s tongue, as if he were suddenly speaking Senegalese. “How can God be dead? How can God have a body?”

  “How can He not?”

  “Isn’t He…immaterial?”

  “Bodies are immaterial, essentially. Any physicist will tell you as much.”

  Groaning softly, Raphael aimed his left wing toward the Late Gothic Hall and took off, flying in the halting, stumbling manner of a damaged moth. As Anthony followed, he noticed that the angel was disintegrating. Feathers drifted through the air like the residue of a pillow fight.

  “Insubstantial stuff, matter,” Raphael continued, hovering. “Quirky. Quarky. It’s barely there. Ask Father Ockham.”

  Alighting amid the medieval treasures, the creature took Anthony’s hand—those cold fingers again, like mooring lines dipped in the Weddell Sea—and led him to an anonymous Italian Renaissance altarpiece in the southeast corner.

  “Religion’s become too abstract of late. God as spirit, light, love—forget that neo-Platonic twaddle. God’s a Person, Anthony. He made you in His own image, Genesis 1:26. He has a nose, Genesis 8:20. Buttocks, Exodus 33:23. He gets excrement on His feet, Deuteronomy 23:14.”

  “But aren’t those just…?”

  “What?”

  “You know. Metaphors.”

  “Everything’s a metaphor. Meanwhile, His toenails are growing, an inevitable phenomenon with corpses.” Raphael pointed to the altarpiece, which according to its caption depicted Christ and the Virgin Mary kneeling before God, interceding on behalf of a prominent Florentine family. “Your artists have always known what they were doing. Michelangelo Buonarroti goes to paint the Creation of Adam, and a year later there’s God Himself on the Sistine Chapel—an old man with a beard, perfect. Or take William Blake, diligently illustrating Job, getting everything right—God the Father, ancient of days. Or consider the evidence before you…” And indeed, Anthony realized, here was God, peering out of the altarpiece: a bearded patriarch, at once serene and severe, loving and fierce.

  But no. This was madness. Raphael Azarias was a fraud, a con man, a certifiable paranoid.

  “You’re molting.”

  “I’m dying,” the angel corrected Anthony. Indeed. His halo, previously as red as the Texaco logo, now flickered an anemic pink. His once-bright feathers emitted a sallow, sickly aura, as if infested with aging fireflies. Tiny scarlet veins entwined his eyeballs. “The entire heavenly host is dying. Such is the depth of our sorrow.”

  “You spoke of my ship.”

  “The corpse must be salvaged. Salvaged, towed, and entombed. Of all vessels on earth, only the Carpco Valparaíso is equal to the task.”

  “The Val’s a cripple.”

  “They refloated her last week. She’s in Connecticut at the moment, taking up most of the National Steel Shipyard, awaiting whatever new fittings you believe the job will require.”

  Anthony stared at his forearm, flexing and unflexing the muscle, making his tattooed mermaid do a series of bumps and grinds.

  “God’s body…”

  “Precisely,” said Raphael.

  “I would imagine it’s large.”

  “Two miles fore to aft.”

  “Face up?”

  “Yes. He’s smiling, oddly enough. Rigor mortis, we suspect, or perhaps He elected to assume the expression before passing away.”

  The captain fixed on the altarpiece, noting the life-giving milk streaming from the Virgin’s right breast. Two miles? Two goddamn miles? “Then I guess we’ll be reading about it in tomorrow’s Times, huh?”

  “Unlikely. He’s too dense to catch the attention of weather satellites, and He’s giving off so much heat He registers on long-range radar as nothing but a queer-looking patch of fog.” As the angel guided Anthony into the foyer, his tears started up again. “We can’t let Him rot. We can’t leave Him to the predators and worms.”

  “God doesn’t have a body. God doesn’t die.”

  “God has a body—and for reasons wholly obscure to us, that body has expired.” Raphael’s tears kept coming, as if connected to a source as fecund as the Trans-Texas Pipeline. “Bear Him north. Let the Arctic freeze Him. Bury His remains.” From the counter he snatched up a brochure promoting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its cover emblazoned with Piero della Francesca’s Discovery and Proving of the True Cross. “A gigantic iceberg lies above Svalbard, permanently pinned against the upper shores of Kvitoya. Nobody goes there. We’ve hollowed it out: portal, passageways, crypt. You merely have to haul Him inside.” The angel plucked a feather from his left wing, eased it toward his eye, and wet the nib with a silver tear. Flipping over the brochure, he began writing on the back in luminous salt water. “Latitude: eighty degrees, six minutes, north. Longitude: thirty-four degrees…”

  “You’re talking to the wrong man, Mr. Azarias. You want a tugboat skipper, not a tanker captain.”

  “We want a tanker captain. We want you.” Raphael’s feather continued moving, spewing out characters so bright and fiery they made Anthony squint. “Your new license is in the mail. It’s from the Brazilian Coast Guard.” As if posting a letter, the angel slid the brochure under the captain’s left arm. “The minute the Valparaíso’s been fitted for a tow, Carpco will send her on a shakedown cruise to New York.”

  “Carpco? Oh, no, not those bastards again, not them.”

  “Of course not them. Your ship’s been chartered by an outside agent.”

  “Honest captains don’t sail unregistered vessels.”

  “Oh, you’ll get a flag all right: a Vatican banner, God’s own colors.” A coughing fit possessed the angel, sending tears and feathers into the sultry air. “He hit the Atlantic at zero by zero degrees, where the equator meets the prime meridian. Begin your search there. Quite likely He’s drifted—east, I’d guess, caught in the Guinea Current—so you might find Him near the island of São Tomé, but then again, with God, who knows?” Shedding feathers all the way, Raphael hobble
d out of the foyer and toward the Cuxa Cloister, Anthony right behind. “You’ll receive a generous salary. Father Ockham is well funded.”

  “Otto Merrick might be right for a job like this. I think he’s still with Atlantic-Richfield.”

  “You’ll be getting your ship back,” the angel snapped, steadying himself on the fountain. He breathed raggedly, wheezingly, as if through shredded lungs. “Your ship—and something more…”

  Halo sputtering, tears flowing, the angel tossed his quill pen into the pool. A tableau appeared, painted in saturated reds and muddy greens reminiscent of early color television: six immobile figures seated around a dining-room table.

  “Recognize it?”

  “Hmmm…”

  Thanksgiving Day, 1990, four months after the spill. They’d all gathered at his father’s apartment in Paterson. Christopher Van Horne presided at the far end of the table, overbearing and elegant, dressed in a white woolen suit. To his left: wife number three, a loud, skinny, self-pitying woman named Tiffany. To his right: the old man’s best friend from the Sea Scouts, Frank Kolby, an unimaginative and sycophantic Bostonian. Anthony sat opposite his father, bracketed on one side by his hefty sister, Susan, a New Orleans catfish farmer, and on the other by his then-current girlfriend, Lucy McDade, a short, attractive steward from the Exxon Bangor. Every detail was right: the cheroot in Dad’s mouth, the Ronson cigarette lighter in his hand, the blue ceramic gravy boat resting beside his plate of mashed potatoes and dark meat.

  The figures twitched, breathed, began to eat. Peering into the Cuxa pool, Anthony realized, to his considerable horror, what was coming next.

  “Hey, look,” said the old man, dropping the Ronson lighter into the gravy, “it’s the Valparaíso.” The lighter oriented itself vertically—striker wheel down, butane well up—but stayed afloat.

  “Froggy, take it easy,” said Tiffany.

  “Dad, don’t do this,” said Susan.

  Anthony’s father lifted the cigarette lighter from the boat. As the greasy brown gravy ran down his fingers, he took out his Swiss Army knife and cut through the lighter’s plastic casing. Oily butane dripped onto the linen tablecloth. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, the Val’s sprung a leak!” He plopped the lighter back into the boat, laughing as the butane oozed into the gravy. “Somebody must’ve run her into a reef! Those poor seabirds!”

  “Froggy, please,” wailed Tiffany.

  “Them pilot whales ain’t got a chance,” said Frank Kolby, releasing a boorish guffaw.

  “Do you suppose the captain could’ve left the bridge?” asked Dad with mock puzzlement.

  “I think you’ve made your point,” said Susan.

  The old man leaned toward Lucy McDade as if about to deal her a playing card. “This sailor lad of yours left the bridge. I’ll bet he got one of those headaches of his and, pfftt, he took off, and now all the egrets and herons are dying. You know what your boyfriend’s problem is, pretty Lucy? He thinks the oily bird catches the worm!”

  Tiffany burst into giggles.

  Lucy turned red.

  Kolby sniggered.

  Susan got up to leave.

  “Bastard,” said Anthony’s alter ego.

  “Bastard,” echoed the observer Anthony.

  “Gravy, anyone?” said Christopher Van Horne, lifting the boat from its saucer. “What’s the matter, folks—are you afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid.” Kolby seized the boat, pouring polluted gravy onto his mashed potatoes.

  “I’ll never forgive you for this,” seethed Susan, stalking out of the room.

  Kolby shoveled a glop of potato into his mouth. “Tastes like—”

  The scene froze.

  The figures dissolved.

  Only the waterborne feather remained.

  “That was the worst part of Matagorda Bay, wasn’t it?” said Raphael. “Worse than the hate mail from the environmentalists and the death threats from the shrimpers—the worst part was what your father did to you that night.”

  “The humiliation…”

  “No,” said the angel pointedly. “Not the humiliation. The brute candor of it all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Four months after the wreck of the Val, somebody was finally telling you a truth the state of Texas had denied.”

  “What truth?”

  “You’re guilty, Anthony Van Horne.”

  “I’ve never claimed otherwise.”

  “Guilty,” Raphael repeated, slamming his fist into his palm like a judge wielding a gavel. “But beyond guilt lies redemption, or so the story goes.” The angel slipped his fingers beneath the feathers of his left wing and relieved himself of an itch. “After completing the mission, you will seek out your father.”

  “Dad?”

  The angel nodded. “Your aloof, capricious, unhappy father. You will tell him you got the job done. And then—this I promise—then you will receive the absolution you deserve.”

  “I don’t want his absolution.”

  “His absolution,” said Raphael, “is the only one that counts. Blood is thicker than oil, Captain. The man’s hooks are in you.”

  “I can absolve myself,” Anthony insisted.

  “You’ve tried that. Showers don’t do it. The Cuxa fountain doesn’t do it. You’ll never be free of Matagorda Bay, the oil will never leave you, until Christopher Van Horne looks you in the eye and says, ‘Son, I’m proud of you. You bore Him to His tomb.’”

  A sudden coldness swept through the Cuxa Cloister. Goose bumps grew on Anthony’s naked skin like barnacles colonizing a tanker’s hull. Crouching over the pool, he fished out the drifting feather. What did he know of God? Maybe God did have blood, bile, and the rest of it; maybe He could die. Anthony’s Sunday school teachers, promoters of a faith so vague and generic it was impossible to imagine anyone rebelling against it (there are no lapsed Wilmington Presbyterians), had never even raised such possibilities. Who could say whether God had a body?

  “Dad and I haven’t spoken since Christmas.” Anthony drew the soft, wet feather across his lips. “Last I heard, he and Tiffany were in Spain.”

  “Then that’s where you’ll find him.”

  Raphael staggered forward, extended his chilly palms, and collapsed into the captain’s arms. The angel was surprisingly heavy, oddly meaty. How strange was the universe. Stranger than Anthony had ever imagined.

  “Bury Him…”

  The captain studied the spangled sky. He thought of his favorite sextant, the one his sister had given him upon his graduation from New York Maritime College, a flawless facsimile of the wondrous instrument with which, nearly two centuries earlier, Nathaniel Bowditch had corrected and emended all the world’s maps. And the thing worked, too, picking out Polaris in an instant, filtering the brilliance of Venus, sifting banded Jupiter from the clouds. Anthony never sailed without it.

  “I own a precise and beautiful sextant,” Anthony told Raphael. “You never know when your computer’ll break down,” the captain added. “You never know when you’ll have to steer by the stars,” said the master of the Valparaíso, whereupon the angel smiled softly and drew his last breath.

  The moon assumed an uncanny whiteness, riding the sky like God’s own skull, as, shortly before dawn, Anthony hauled Raphael Azarias’s stiffening body west across Fort Tryon Park, lowered it over the embankment, and flung it facedown into the cool, polluted waters of the Hudson River.

  Priest

  THOMAS WICKLIFF OCKHAM, a good man, a man who loved God, ideas, vintage movies, and his brothers in the Society of Jesus, wove through the crowded Seventh Avenue local, carefully maneuvering his attaché case amid the congestion of pelvises and rumps. On the far wall a map beckoned, an intricate network of multicolored lines, like the veined and bleeding palm of some cubistic Christ. Reaching it, he began to plot his course. He would get off at Forty-second Street. Take the N-train south to Union Square. Walk east on Fourteenth. Find Captain Anthony Van Horne of the Brazilian Merchant Marine, sail away
on the SS Carpco Valparaíso, and lay an impossible corpse to rest.

  He sat down between a wrinkled Korean man holding a potted cactus on his lap and an attractive black woman in a ballooning maternity dress. To Thomas Ockham, S.J., the New York subway system offered a foretaste of the Kingdom: Asians rubbing shoulders with Africans, Hispanics with Arabs, Gentiles with Jews, all boundaries gone, all demarcations erased, all men appended to the Universal and Invisible Church, the Mystical Body of Christ—though if the half-dozen glossy photographs in Thomas’s attaché case told the truth, of course, there was no Kingdom, no Mystical Body, God and His various dimensions being dead.

  Italy had been different. In Italy everyone had looked the same. They had all looked Italian…

  The Church faces a grave crisis: thus began the Holy See’s cryptic plea, an official Vatican missive sliding from the fax machine in the mailroom of Fordham University’s physics department. But what sort of crisis? Spiritual? Political? Financial? The missive didn’t say. Severe, obviously—severe enough for the See to insist that Thomas cancel his classes for the week and catch the midnight flight to Rome.

  Hiring a cab at the aeroporto, he’d told the driver to take him straight to the Gesu. To be a Jesuit in Rome and not receive communion at the Society’s mother church was like being a physicist in Bern and not visiting the patent office. And, indeed, during his last trip to Geneva’s Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, Thomas had taken a day off and made the appropriate pilgrimage north, eventually kneeling before the very rosewood desk at which Albert Einstein had penned the great paper of 1903, The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, that divinely inspired wedding of light to matter, matter to space, space to time.