by James Morrow
“I gather this isn’t a regular voyage.”
Lianne tugged on her UTERUS ENVY button. “It’s a goddamn cover-up, Cassie. Evidently Holy Mother Church has detected some huge tarball coagulating off Africa, but she’s promised to keep the matter quiet if Carpco ropes the sucker in and gives it to charity. Personally, I think the whole arrangement stinks.”
“I’m a charter member of the Central Park West Enlightenment League,” said Cassie with a knowing nod, as if it went without saying that any charter member of the Central Park West Enlightenment League needn’t be instructed in the defects of Holy Mother Church. “A vital organization, I believe, a real bulwark”—she pointed to Lianne’s pendant—“though you wouldn’t like our opinion of those things.”
“Small tits?”
“Magic crystals.”
“It got rid of my herpes.”
“I doubt that.”
“You have a better explanation?”
“The placebo effect.”
“Know what, Cassie Fowler? You should spend more time on ships. Standing lookout in the bow, with the ocean roaring all around you and the entire universe spread over your head—well, you just know there’s some sort of eternal presence out there.”
“An old man with a beard?” said Cassie, suppressing a sneer.
“Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.”
July 12.
Two days ago we reached our destination, 0°0'N, 0°0'E, 600 miles off the coast of Gabon. Both scopes remained clear, and I should’ve expected as much—Raphael told me the body’s been drifting.
I guess I was hoping we’d find something.
Our search pattern is an ever-expanding spiral, south to north, west to east, north to south, east to west, south to north, a course that should bring us within sight of São Tomé by Tuesday. We’re weaving a net in the sea, Popeye. Big gaps. But then again: big fish.
Crock O’Connor’s still giving me my 18 knots, which means we’ll hit the equator twice more before midnight.
That Cassie Fowler hates me, I can tell. No doubt she’s one of those. Tree huggers, bug lovers, squid kissers—I can spot them a mile away, people for whom a polluter like Anthony Van Horne deserves to be eaten alive by ferrets. But I must say this: she’s an appealing lady, voluptuous as old Lorelei here on my arm, with frizzy black hair and one of those long, horsy faces that look comical one minute, beautiful the next. I’ve decided to put her to work—scraping rust, maybe scrubbing a John or two. On the Carpco Valparaíso there are no free riders.
At dinner I issued a standing order. “Call me the minute anything odd shows on either scope, night or day.” To which Joe Spicer replied, suspiciously, “All this fuss over a lousy hunk of asphalt.”
We’re not a happy ship, Popeye. The crew’s fed up. They’re sick of steaming in circles and seeing The Ten Commandments and wondering what I’m hiding from them.
Every time we cross 0° north, Spicer drops a penny on the equator.
“For luck,” he says.
“We’ll need it,” I tell him.
“Captain, this is strange…”
Anthony recognized his navigator’s voice, crackling out of the intercom speaker: his navigator’s voice, and more—the same mix of incredulity and fear with which First Mate Buzzy Longchamps had delivered his verdict, Sir, I think we’re in a peck of trouble, the night the Val slammed into Bolivar Reef.
He lurched toward the wall-mounted intercom, tearing at the sheets, clawing his way through his insomniac’s daze. “Strange?” he mumbled, pressing the switch. “What’s strange?”
“Sorry to wake you,” said Big Joe Spicer, “but we’ve got ourselves a target.”
Climbing out of his bunk, Anthony picked a tiny grain of sand from his eye and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, then glanced around for his shoes. He was otherwise fully dressed, right down to his ratty pea jacket and canvas Mets cap. Ever since reaching zero-by-zero, he’d stripped his life of irrelevancies, eating sporadically, sleeping in his clothes, letting his beard grow wild. For seventy-two hours, his mind had known only the hunt.
He grabbed his Carpco mug, shoved his knobby feet into his tennis shoes, and, without bothering to lace them, sprinted to the elevator.
A soft glow lit the bridge: radar scopes, collision-avoidance system, Marisat terminal, clock. It was 0247. Spicer stood hunched over the twelve-mile radar, fiddling with the rain-snow clutter control. “Captain, I’ve seen my brother-in-law’s laserdisc of Deep Throat and just about every episode of Green Acres, and I swear to you”—he pointed to the target—“that’s gotta be the weirdest thing ever to show on a cathode-ray tube.”
“Fog bank?”
“That’s what it looked like on the fifty-mile scope, but no more. This sucker’s got bulk.”
“São Tomé?”
“I checked our position three times. São Tomé’s fifteen miles in the opposite direction.”
“The asphalt?”
“Much too big.”
Anthony made a fist. His chest tightened. The mermaid on his forearm grew tense. “Steady,” he told the AB at the helm, the brawny Lakota Sioux, James Echohawk.
“Steady,” said Echohawk.
Anthony locked his bleary eyes on the scope. The screen displayed a long jagged blob, momentous as a shadow on a lung X-ray. Fuzzy, shapeless—and yet he knew exactly Whose electronically graven image he was beholding.
“So what is it?” asked Spicer.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Anthony grasped the throttles, dropping both screws to sixty-five rpm’s. He hadn’t pushed his ship past the recommended speeds and driven her through Hurricane Beatrice just so they could smash into their cargo and sink. “I’ll stand the rest of your watch for you, Joe. Go grab some sleep.”
The second mate looked into his captain’s eyes. Silent signals traveled between the men. The last time an officer had left the bridge of the Valparaíso, eleven million gallons of oil had poured into the Gulf of Mexico.
“Thanks, Captain,” said Spicer, joining Anthony at the console, “but I think I’ll stick around.”
“How’s Follingsbee’s coffee tonight?” Anthony asked the helmsman. “Strong enough?”
“You could prime a kingpost with it, sir,” said Echohawk.
“Let’s drop her another notch, Joe. Sixty rpm’s.”
“Aye. Sixty.”
Anthony seized the Exxon thermos, splashing jamoke into the stained interior of his Carpco mug. “Come left ten degrees,” he said, eyes locked on the radar. “Steady up on zero-seven-five.”
“Zero-seven-five,” Echohawk replied.
“Glass falling,” said Spicer, fixing on the barometer. “Down to nine-nine-six.”
Lifting the bridge binoculars from their bin, Anthony gazed through the grimy, rain-beaded windshield toward the horizon. Glass falling: quite so. Lightning flashed, dropping from heaven like a crooked gangway, illuminating a hundred thousand white-caps. Fat gray clouds hung in the northern sky like acromegalic sheep.
“Fifty-five rpm’s.”
“Fifty-five.”
Anthony gulped his coffee. Hot, marvelously hot, but not enough to thaw his bowels. “Joe, I want you to place a call to Father Ockham’s quarters,” he ordered, pulling back the door to the starboard wing. The storm rushed in, spattering his face, twisting the fringes of his beard. “Tell him to transport his ass up here on the double.”
“It’s three A.M., sir.”
“He wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Anthony, starting out of the wheelhouse.
“Glass still falling!” the second mate shouted after him. “Nine-eight-seven!”
The instant Anthony stepped into the turbulent night, the odor hit him, roiling across the bridge wing. Sharp and gravid, oddly sweet, not so much the stink of death as the fragrance of transformation: leaves festering in damp gutters, jack-o’-lanterns wrinkling on suburban doorsteps,
bananas softening inside their leathery black peels. “Fifty rpm’s, Joe!” he screamed through the open door.
“Fifty, sir!”
Then came the sound, thick and layered, a kind of choral moan hovering above the drone of the engines and the roar of the Atlantic. Anthony raised the binoculars. A long, brilliant trident of electricity speared the sea. Another ten minutes, he figured, certainly no more than fifteen, and they’d have visual contact…
“That sound,” said Father Ockham, pulling on his Panama hat and buttoning his black vinyl raincoat as he hurried onto the wing.
“Odd, isn’t it?”
Sad.
“What do you suppose…?”
“A dirge.”
“Huh?”
Even as Ockham repeated the word, a lightning bolt revealed the truth of it. Dirge, oh, yes. In the sudden brightness Anthony saw the mourners, flopping and rolling over the boiling sea, swarming across the churning sky. Pods of bereaved narwhals to starboard, herds of bereft rorquals to port, flocks of orphaned cormorants above. Flash, and more species still, herring gulls, great skuas, fulmars, shearwaters, petrels, prions, puffins, leopard seals, ringed seals, harbor seals, belugas, manatees—multitudes upon multitudes, most of them hundreds of miles from habitat and home, their voices rising in preternatural grief, a blend of every seaborne lung and aquatic larynx God had ever placed on earth.
“Come right ten degrees!”
“Right ten!”
“Forty-five rpm’s!”
“Forty-five!”
Miraculously, each tongue kept its identity even as it joined the general lament. Closing his eyes, Anthony grasped the rail and listened, awed by the bottlenose dolphins’ whistled elegies, the sea lions’ throaty orations, and the low coarse keening of a thousand frigate birds.
“The smell,” said the priest. “It’s rather…”
“Fruity?”
“Exactly. He hasn’t started to turn.”
Anthony opened his eyes. “Joe, forty rpm’s!”
“Forty, sir!”
Flash, a massive something, bearing zero-one-five.
Flash, a series of tall rounded forms, all aspiring to heaven.
Flash, the forms again, like mountains spread along a seacoast, each higher than the next.
“You saw that?”
“I saw,” said the priest.
“And…?”
Ockham, shivering, slipped a Sony Handicam from his raincoat pocket. “I think it’s the toes.”
“The what?”
“Toes. I just lost a small wager. Sister Miriam believed He’d be supine”—Ockham choked up—“whereas I assumed…”
“Supine,” Anthony echoed. “He’s smiling, Raphael told me. You in trouble, Thomas?”
The priest tried sighting through the Handicam’s viewfinder, but he was trembling too badly to connect eye with eyecup. Rain and tears spilled down his face in equal measure. “I’ll get over it.”
“You aren’t gonna faint, are you?”
“I said I’ll get over it.” On his second attempt, Ockham managed to elevate the Handicam and fire off a quick burst of tape. “It’s rather poetic, seeing the toes first. The word has special meaning in my field. T-O-E: Theory of Everything.”
“Everything?”
“We’re looking for one, we cosmologists.” The priest panned across the phalanxes of mourners. “At the moment, we’ve got TOE equations that work on the submicroscopic level, but nothing that”—his voice splintered—“handles gravity too. It’s so horrible.”
“Not having a TOE?”
“Not having a heavenly Father.”
Another celestial explosion. Yes, Anthony decided, no question: ten pale and craggy toes, stiff with rigor mortis, arching into the gloomy sky like onion domes crowning a Byzantine city.
“Dead slow!”
“Dead slow!”
“Wish I could help you,” said Anthony.
“Just try to understand.” The priest returned the Handicam to his raincoat pocket and pulled off his bifocals. “Try to understand,” he said again, wiping the lenses with his sleeve. “Try,” groaned Father Thomas Ockham, calling above the storm, the sea, and the mad, ragged music of the wake.
In the old days, Neil Weisinger mused, merchant ships had galley slaves: thieves and murderers who died chained to their oars. Today they had able-bodied seamen: fools and dupes who keeled over gripping their pneumatic Black and Decker needle guns. Chip and paint, chip and paint, all you did was chip and paint. Even on so extraordinary a voyage as this—a voyage on which a huge pulpy island lay off your starboard quarter, tirelessly attended by moaning whales and squawking birds—you got no relief from chipping, no respite from painting.
Neil was on the fo’c’sle deck, chipping rust off a samson post, when a voice screeched out of the PA system, overpowering the noise of his needle gun and penetrating the rubber plugs in his ears. “Ship’s-com-pan-y!” cried Marbles Rafferty, the gun’s racket fracturing his words into syllables. “Now-hear-this! All-hands-re-port-to-off-i-cers’-ward-room-at-six-teen-fif-teen-hours!”
Neil killed the gun, popped the earplugs.
“Repeat: all hands report…”
Ever since Neil’s Aunt Sarah had come to him at Yeshiva and insisted that he stop wallowing in grief—it had been over five years, she pointed out, since his parents’ deaths—the AB had labored to avoid self-pity. Life is intrinsically tragic, his aunt had lectured him. It’s time you got used to it.
“…sixteen-fifteen hours.”
But there were moments, such as now, when self-pity seemed the only appropriate emotion. 1615 hours: right after he got off duty. He’d been planning to spend the break in his cabin, reading a Star Trek novel and nursing a contraband Budweiser.
Dipping his wire brush into the HCL bottle, Neil lifted the acid-soaked bristles free and began basting the corroded post. Dialogue drifted through his mind, verbal gems from The Ten Commandments. “Beauty is but a curse to our women…” “So let it be written, so let it be done…” “The people have been plagued by thirst! They’ve been plagued by frogs, by lice, by flies, by sickness, by boils! They can endure no more!” The Val had left New York with only one movie in her hold, but at least it was a good one.
It took him over twenty minutes to wash up. Despite his earplugs, goggles, mask, cap, and jumpsuit, the rust had gotten through, clinging to his hair like red dandruff, covering his chest like metallic eczema, and so he was the last sailor to arrive.
He’d never been on level five before. Twentieth-century ABs got invited to their officers’ wardrooms about as often as fourteenth-century Jews got invited to the Alhambra. Billiard table, crystal chandeliers, teakwood paneling, Oriental rug, silver coffee urn, mahogany bar…so this was his bosses’ tawdry little secret: spend your watches mixing with the mob, pretending you’re just another packet rat, then slip away to the Waldorf-Astoria for a cocktail. As far as Neil could tell, everyone on board was there (officers, deckies, priest, even that castaway, Cassie Fowler, red and peeling but on the whole looking far healthier than when they’d pulled her off Saint Paul’s Rocks), with the exceptions of Lou Chickering, probably down in the engine flat, and Big Joe Spicer, doubtless on the bridge making sure they didn’t collide with the island.
Van Horne stood atop the mahogany bar, outfitted in his dress blues, the sobriety of the dark serge intermittently relieved by brass buttons and gold piping. “Well, sailors, we’ve all seen it, we’ve all smelled it,” he told the assembled company. “Believe me, there’s never been such a corpse before, none so large, none so important.”
Third Mate Dolores Haycox shifted her weight from one tree-stump leg to the other. “A corpse, sir? You say it’s a corpse?”
A corpse? thought Neil.
“A corpse,” said Van Horne. “Now—any guesses?”
“A whale?” ventured gnomish little Charlie Horrocks, the pumpman.
“No whale could be that huge, could it?”
“I suppose
not,” said Horrocks.
“A dinosaur?” offered Isabel Bostwick, an Amazonian wiper with buck teeth and a buzz cut.
“You’re not thinking on the right scale.”
“An outer-space alien?” said the alcoholic bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, his face so ravaged by acne it looked like a used archery target.
“No. Not an outer-space alien—not exactly. Our friend Father Thomas has a theory for you.”
Slowly, with great dignity, the priest walked in a wide loop, circling the company, corralling them with his stride. “How many of you believe in God?”
Rumblings of surprise filled the wardroom, echoing off the teakwood. Leo Zook’s hand shot up. Cassie Fowler burst into giggles.
“Depends on what you mean by God,” said Lianne Bliss.
“Don’t analyze, just answer.”
One by one, the sailors reached skyward, fingers wiggling, arms swaying, until the wardroom came to resemble a garden of anemones. Neil joined the consensus. Why not? Didn’t he have his enigmatic something-or-other, his En Sof, his God of the four A.M. watch? He counted a mere half-dozen atheists: Fowler, Wheatstone, Bostwick, a corpulent demac named Stubby Barnes, a spidery black pastry chef named Willie Pindar, and Ralph Mungo, the decrepit guy from the union hall with the I LOVE BRENDA tattoo—and of these six only Fowler seemed confident, going so far as to thrust both hands into the pockets of her khaki shorts.
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” said Leo Zook, “maker of heaven and earth, and in His only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord…”
The priest cleared his throat, his Adam’s apple bumping against his Roman collar. “Keep your hand up if you think that God is essentially a spirit—an invisible, formless spirit.”
Not one hand dropped.
“Okay. Now. Keep your hand up if you think that, when all is said and done, our Creator is quite a bit like a person—a powerful, stupendous, gigantic person, complete with bones, muscles…”
The vast majority of arms descended, Neil’s among them. Spirit and flesh: God couldn’t be both. He wondered about the three sailors whose arms remained aloft.
