Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  So Thomas drank the blood, consumed the flesh, and set off for the Hotel Ritz-Reggia. A half-hour later, he stood in the sumptuous lobby shaking hands with Tullio Cardinal Di Luca, the Vatican’s Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.

  Monsignor Di Luca was not forthcoming. Phlegmatic as the moon, and no less pocked and dreary, he invited Thomas to dinner in the Ritz-Reggia’s elegant ristorante, where their conversation never went beyond Thomas’s writings, most especially The Mechanics of Grace, his revolutionary reconciliation of post-Newtonian physics with the Eucharist. When Thomas looked Di Luca directly in the eye and asked him about the “grave crisis,” the cardinale replied that their audience with the Holy Father would occur at nine A.M. sharp.

  Twelve hours later, the bewildered priest strolled out of his hotel, crossed the courtyard of San Damasco, and presented himself to a plumed maestro di camera in the sun-washed antechamber of the Vatican Palace. Di Luca appeared instantly, as dour in the morning light as under the Ritz-Reggia’s chandeliers, accompanied by the spry, elfin, red-capped Eugenio Cardinal Orselli, the Vatican’s renowned Secretary of State. Side by side, the clerics marched through the double door to the papal study, Thomas pausing briefly to admire the Swiss Guard with their glistening steel pikes. Rome had it right, he decided. The Holy See was indeed at war, forever taking the field against all those who would reduce human beings to mere ambitious apes, to lucky chunks of protoplasm, to singularly clever and complex machines.

  Armed with a crozier, draped in an ermine cape, Pope Innocent XIV shuffled forward, one gloved and bejeweled hand extended, the other steadying a beehive-shaped tiara that rested on his head like an electric dryer cooking a suburban matron’s hairdo. The old man’s love of ostentation, Thomas knew, had occasioned debate both within the Vatican and without, but it was generally agreed that, as the first North American ever to assume the Chair of Peter, he had a right to all the trimmings.

  “We shall be honest,” said Innocent XIV, born Jean-Jacques LeClerc. His face was fat, round, and extraordinarily beautiful, like a jack-o’-lantern carved by Donatello. “You weren’t anyone’s first choice.”

  A Canadian pope, mused Thomas as, steadying his bifocals, he kissed the Fisherman’s Ring. And before that, the Supreme Pontiff had been Portuguese. Before that, Polish. The Northern Hemisphere was getting to be the place where any boy could grow up to be Vicar of Christ.

  “The archangels regard you as rather too intellectual,” said Monsignor Di Luca. “But when the Bishop of Prague turned us down, I convinced them you were the man for the job.”

  “The archangels?” said Thomas, surprised that a papal secretary should harbor such a medieval turn of mind. Was Di Luca a biblical literalist? A fool? How many pinheads can dance on the floor of the Vatican?

  “Raphael, Michael, Chamuel, Adabiel, Haniel, Zaphiel, and Gabriel,” the beautiful Pope elaborated.

  “Or has Fordham University done away with those particular entities?” A sneer flitted across Monsignor Di Luca’s face.

  “Those of us who labor in the subatomic netherworld,” said Thomas, “soon learn that angels are no less plausible than electrons.” Tremors of chagrin passed through him. Not two days in Rome, and already he was telling them what they wanted to hear.

  The Holy Father smiled broadly, dimpling his plump cheeks. “Very good, Professor Ockham. It was in fact your scientific speculations that inspired us to send for you. We have read not only The Mechanics of Grace but also Superstrings and Salvation.”

  “You possess a tough mind,” said Cardinal Orselli. “You have proven you can hold your own against Modernism.”

  “Let us ascend,” said the Pope.

  They rode the elevator five floors to the Vatican Screening Room, a sepulchral facility complete with digital sound, velvet seats, and hardware capable of projecting everything from laserdiscs to magic-lantern slides but most commonly used, Orselli explained, for Cecil B. DeMille retrospectives and midnight revivals of The Bells of St. Mary’s. As the clerics sank into the lush upholstery, a short and tormented-looking young man entered, a stethoscope swaying from his neck, the surname CARMINATI stitched in red to his white vestment. Accompanying the physician was a sickly, shivering, gray-haired creature who, beyond his other unsettling accouterments (halo, harp, phosphorescent robe), sported a magnificent pair of feathered wings growing from his shoulder blades. Something nontrivial was in the air, Thomas sensed. Something that couldn’t be further from Cecil B. DeMille and Bing Crosby.

  “Every time he makes his presentation”—Cardinal Orselli gestured toward the haloed man and released an elaborate sigh—“we become more convinced.”

  “Glad you’re here, Ockham,” said the creature in the sort of thin, scratchy voice Thomas associated with early-thirties gangster movies. His skin was astonishingly white, beyond Caucasian genes, beyond albinism even; he seemed molded from snow. “I’m told you are at once devout”—he stood on his toes—“and smart.” Whereupon, to Thomas’s utter amazement, the haloed man flapped his wings, rose six feet in the air, and stayed there. “Time is of the essence,” he said, circling the screening room with an awkwardness reminiscent of Orville Wright puddle-jumping across Kitty Hawk.

  “Good Lord,” said Thomas.

  The haloed man landed before the red proscenium curtains. Steadying himself on the young physician, he set his harp on the lectern and twiddled a pair of console knobs. The curtains parted; the room darkened; a cone of bright light spread outward from the projection booth, striking the beaded screen.

  “The Corpus Dei,” said the creature matter-of-factly as a 35mm color slide flashed before the priest’s eyes. “God’s dead body.”

  Thomas squinted, but the image—a large, humanoid object adrift on a bile-dark sea—remained blurry. “What did you say?”

  The next slide clicked into place: same subject, a closer but equally fuzzy view. “God’s dead body,” the haloed man insisted.

  “Can you focus it any better?”

  “No.” The man ran through three more unsatisfactory shots of the enigmatic mass. “I took them myself, with a Leica.”

  “He has corroborating evidence,” said Cardinal Orselli.

  “An electrocardiogram as flat as a flounder,” the creature explained.

  As the last slide vanished, the projector lamp again flooded the screen with its pristine radiance.

  “Is this some sort of a joke?” Thomas asked. What else could it be? In a civilization where tabloid art directors routinely forged photos of Bigfoot and UFO pilots, it would take more than a few slides of a foggy something-or-other to transform Thomas’s interior image of God along such radically anthropomorphic lines.

  Except that his knees were rattling.

  Sweat was collecting in his palms.

  He stared at the rug, contemplating its thick, sound-absorbent fibers, and when he looked up the angel’s eyes riveted him: golden eyes, sparkling and electric, like miniature Van de Graaff generators spewing out slivers of lightning.

  “Dead?” Thomas rasped.

  “Dead.”

  “Cause?”

  “Total mystery. We haven’t a clue.”

  “Are you…Raphael?”

  “Raphael’s in New York City, tracking down Anthony Van Horne—yes, Captain Anthony Van Horne, the man who turned Matagorda Bay to licorice.”

  As the angel brought up the house lights, Thomas saw that he was coming unglued. Silvery hairs floated down from his scalp. His wings exfoliated like a Mexican roof shedding tiles. “And the others?”

  “Adabiel and Haniel passed away yesterday,” said the angel, retrieving his harp from the lectern. “Terminal empathy. Michael’s fading fast, Chamuel’s not long for this world, Zaphiel’s on his deathbed…”

  “That leaves Gabriel.”

  The angel plucked his harp.

  “In short, Father Ockham,” said Monsignor Di Luca, as if he’d just finished explaining a great deal, when in fact he’d explained nothing, “we w
ant you on the ship. We want you on the Carpco Valparaíso.”

  “The only Ultra Large Crude Carrier ever chartered by the Vatican,” the Holy Father elaborated. “A sullied vessel, to be sure, but none other is equal to the task—or so Gabriel tells us.”

  “What task?” asked Thomas.

  “Salvaging the Corpus Dei.” Bright tears spilled down Gabriel’s fissured cheeks. Luminous mucus leaked from his nostrils. “Protecting Him from those”—the angel cast a quick glance toward Di Luca—“who would exploit His condition for their own ends. Giving Him a decent burial.”

  “Once the body’s in Arctic waters,” Orselli explained, “the putrefaction will stop.”

  “We have prepared a place,” said Gabriel, listlessly picking out the Dies Irae on his instrument. “An iceberg tomb adjoining Kvitoya.”

  “And all the while, you’ll be on the navigation bridge,” said Di Luca, laying a red-gloved hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Our sole liaison, keeping Van Horne on his appointed path. The man’s no Catholic, you see. He’s barely a Christian.”

  “The ship’s manifest will list you as a PAC—a Person in Addition to Crew,” said Orselli. “In reality you’ll be the most important man on the voyage.”

  “Let me be explicit.” Gabriel fixed his electric eyes directly on Innocent XIV. “We want an honorable interment, nothing more. No stunts, Holiness. None of your billion-dollar funerals, no priceless sculpture on the tomb, no carving Him up for relics.”

  “We understand,” said the Pope.

  “I’m not sure you do. You run a tenacious organization, gentlemen. We’re afraid you don’t know when to quit.”

  “You can trust us,” said Di Luca.

  Curling his left wing into a semicircle, Gabriel brushed Thomas’s cheek with the tip. “I envy you, Professor. Unlike me, you’ll have time to figure out why this awful event happened. I’m convinced that, if you apply the full measure of your Jesuit intellect to the problem, pondering it night and day as the Valparaíso plies the North Atlantic, you’re bound to hit upon the solution.”

  “Through reason alone?” said Thomas.

  “Through reason alone. I can practically guarantee it. Give yourself till journey’s end, and the answer to the riddle will suddenly—”

  A harsh, guttural groan. Dr. Carminati rushed over and, opening the angel’s robe, pressed the stethoscope against his milk-white bosom. Whimpering softly, Innocent XIV brought his right hand to his lips and sucked the velvet fingertips.

  Gabriel sank into the nearest seat, his halo darkening until it came to resemble a lei of dead flowers.

  “Pardon, Holiness”—the physician popped the stethoscope out of his ears—“but we should return him to the infirmary now.”

  “Go with God,” said the Pope, raising his moistened hand, rotating it sideways, and etching an invisible cross in the air.

  “Remember,” said the angel, “no stunts.”

  The young doctor looped his arm around Gabriel’s shoulder and, like a dutiful son guiding his dying father down the hallway of a cancer ward, escorted him out of the room.

  Thomas studied the barren screen. God’s dead body? God had a body? What were the cosmological implications of this astonishing claim? Was He truly gone, or had His spirit merely vacated some gratuitous husk? (Gabriel’s grief suggested there was no putting a happy face on the situation.) Did heaven still exist? (Since the afterlife consisted essentially in God’s eternal presence, then the answer was logically no, but surely the question merited further study.) What of the Son and the Ghost? (Assuming Catholic theology counted for anything, then these Persons were inert now too, the Trinity being ipso facto indivisible, but, again, the issue manifestly deserved the attentions of a synod or perhaps even a Vatican Council.)

  He turned to the other clerics. “There are problems here.”

  “A secret consistory has been in session since Tuesday,” said the Pope, nodding. “The entire College of Cardinals, burning the midnight oil. We’re tackling the full spectrum: the possible causes of death, the chances of resuscitation, the future of the Church…”

  “We’d like your answer now, Father Ockham,” said Di Luca. “The Valparaíso weighs anchor in just five days.”

  Thomas took a deep breath, enjoying the rich, savory hypocrisy of the moment. Historically, Rome had tended to regard her Jesuits as expendable, something between a nuisance and a threat. Ah, but now that the chips were down, to whom did the Vatican turn? To the faithful, unflappable warriors of Ignatius Loyola, that’s who.

  “May I keep this?” Thomas lifted a stray feather from the floor.

  “Very well,” said Innocent XIV.

  Thomas’s gaze wandered back and forth between the Pope and the feather. “One item on your agenda confuses me.”

  “Do you accept?” demanded Di Luca.

  “What item?” asked the Pope.

  The feather exuded a feeble glow, like a burning candle fashioned from the tallow of some lost, forsaken lamb.

  “Resuscitation.”

  Resuscitation: the word wove tauntingly through Thomas’s head as he emerged from the fetid dampness of Union Square Station and started down Fourteenth Street. It was all highly speculative, of course; the desiccation rate Di Luca had selected for a Supreme Being’s central nervous system (ten thousand neurons a minute) bordered on the arbitrary. But assuming the cardinale knew whereof he spoke, an encouraging conclusion followed. According to the Vatican’s OMNIVAC-5000, He would not be brain-dead before the eighteenth of August—a sufficient interval in which to ferry Him above the Arctic Circle—though it had to be allowed that the computer had made the prediction under protest, crying INSUFFICIENT DATA all the way.

  The June air fell heavily on Thomas’s flesh, an oppressive cloak of raw Manhattan heat. His face grew slick with perspiration, making his bifocals slide down his nose. On both sides of the street, peddlers labored in the sultry dusk, gathering up their shrinkwrapped audiocassettes, phony Cartier watches, and spastic mechanical bears and piling them into their station wagons. To Thomas’s eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of The Arabian Nights with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart. Each vendor wore a wholly impassive face, the shell-shocked, world-weary stare of the urban foot soldier. Thomas envied them their ignorance. Whatever their present pains, whatever defeats and disasters they were sustaining, at least they could imagine that a living God presided over their planet.

  He turned right onto Second Avenue, walked south two blocks, and, pulling Gabriel’s feather from his breast pocket, climbed the steps of a mottled brownstone. Crescents of sweat marred the armpits of his black shirt, pasting the cotton to his skin. He scanned the names (Goldstein, Smith, Delgado, Spinelli, Chen: more New York pluralism, another intimation of the Kingdom), then pressed the button labeled VAN HORNE—3 REAR.

  A metallic buzz jangled the lock. Thomas opened the door, ascended three flights of mildew-scented stairs, and found himself face to face with a tall, bearded, obliquely handsome man wearing nothing but a spotless white bath towel wrapped around his waist. He was dripping wet. A tattooed mermaid resembling Rita Hayworth decorated his left forearm.

  “The first thing you must tell me,” said Anthony Van Horne, “is that I haven’t gone crazy.”

  “If you have,” said the priest, “then I have too, and so has the Holy See.”

  Van Horne disappeared into his apartment and returned gripping an object that disturbed Thomas as much for its chilling familiarity as for its eschatological resonances. Like members of some secret society engaged in an induction ritual, the two men held up their feathers, moving them in languid circles. For a brief moment, a deep and silent understanding flowed between Anthony Van Horne and Thomas Ockham, the only nonpsychotic individuals in New York City who’d ever conversed with angels.

  “Come in, Father Ockham.”

  “Call me Thomas.”


  “Wanna beer?”

  “Sure.”

  It was not what Thomas expected. A captain’s abode, he felt, should have a sense of the sea about it. Where were the giant conches from Bora Bora, the ceramic elephants from Sri Lanka, the tribal masks from New Guinea? With a half-dozen Sunkist orange crates serving as chairs and an AT&T cable spool in lieu of a coffee table, the place seemed more suited to an unemployed actor or a starving artist than to a sailor of fortune like Van Horne.

  “Old Milwaukee okay?” The captain sidled into his cramped kitchenette. “It’s all I can afford.”

  “Fine.” Thomas lowered himself onto a Sunkist crate. “You Dutchmen have always been merchant mariners, haven’t you—you and your fluytschips. This life is in your blood.”

  “I don’t believe in blood,” said Van Horne, pulling two dewy brown bottles from his refrigerator.

  “But your father—he was also a sailor, right?”

  The captain laughed. “He was never anything else. He certainly wasn’t a father, not much of a husband either, though I believe he thought he was both.” Ambling back into the living room, he pressed an Old Milwaukee into Thomas’s hand. “Dad’s idea of a vacation was to desert his family and go slogging ’round the South Pacific in a tramp freighter, hoping to find an uncharted island. He never quite figured out the world’s been mapped already, no terrae incognitae left.”

  “And your mother—was she a dreamer too?”

  “Mom climbed mountains. I think she needed to get as far above sea level as possible. A dangerous business—much more dangerous than the Merchant Marine. When I was fifteen, she fell off Annapurna.” The captain unhitched the bath towel and scratched his lean, drumtight abdomen. “Have we got a crew yet?”

  “Lord, I’m sorry.” Even as the sympathy swelled up in Thomas, a sympathy as profound as any he’d ever known, he felt an odd sense of relief. Evidently they were living in a non-contingent universe, one requiring no ongoing input from the Divine. The Creator was gone, yet all His vital inventions—gravity, grace, love, pity—endured.