by James Morrow
Expect air stride at 68°11'N, 2°35'W, 150 miles east of launch point, Jan Mayen Island. In restaging Midway, planes will sever tow chains, breach target, and send our troubles to bottom of Mohns Trench…
Leaning over the rail, she accorded the fax the same treatment she’d inflicted on the blisteringly negative review the Village Voice had given her play about Jephthah, the warrior in the Book of Judges who immolated his own daughter by way of keeping a bargain with God. “Authentic satire is to puerile sniggering as a firecracker is to a soda cracker, a distinction to which a young author named Cassie Fowler is evidently oblivious…”
Good old Oliver. He’d always stuck by her—hadn’t he?—even when she was a struggling playwright and he a leftist ne’er-do-well painting grim urban landscapes while waiting for his trust fund to kick in. There she’d be, sitting in the basement of some Broome Street saloon or Avenue D hockshop, one of those scuzzy roach reserves that had the nerve to call themselves off-Broadway theaters (any farther off, and she’d have been in Queens), watching a disastrous rehearsal of Runkleberg or God Without Tears, and suddenly Oliver would appear, even if it was three A.M., bringing her black coffee and sweet rolls, telling her she was the Lower East Side Jonathan Swift.
No sooner had Cassie tossed the bits of paper into the Portugal Current than Anthony Van Horne himself descended into the lookout post, dressed in his tattered Mets baseball jacket and John Deere visor cap. A spasm of guilt shot through her. This man had saved her life, and here she was, plotting to abort his mission.
“You’re in luck, sailor—I’m taking over your watch,” Van Horne told Ralph Mungo. A large purple bruise, frosted with glory grease, spread outward from the old AB’s right eye. “That okay with you?”
“Aye-aye, sir.” Saluting, grinning, Mungo threw his cigarette butt overboard and scooted up the ladder.
“Stargazing?” the captain asked Cassie.
“Something like that.” Raising the Thermos to her lips, she took a big swallow of jamoke. It was the fifth time she’d run into him here. She suspected she was being pursued—a flattering thought, but the last thing she needed just then was her adversary developing a crush on her. “I’ve decided to rename the constellations.” She pointed heavenward. “It’s time for a wholly American mythology, don’t you think? Look, there’s the Myth of the Family. There’s Equality. There’s One Nation Under God with Liberty and Justice for All.”
“You hate our cargo, don’t you?”
Cassie nodded. “That’s why I hang out here—the farthest I can get from Him without ending up in the water. And what about you, Captain? Do you hate our cargo?”
“I never knew Him.” The captain yawned; the reflex took hold of him, rippling through his face and shoulders. “I only know it’s good to be at sea again.”
“You’re exhausted, sir.”
“We’ve been trying to siphon His blood into the tanks—a way to get us moving faster—but His neck won’t accept the chicksans.” Another elaborate yawn. “The worst of it’s…I’m not sure what word to use. The anarchy, Cassie. Notice that AB’s black eye? He got it in a brawl. It’s been a week of fistfights, attempted rapes, possibly even a murder. I’ve had to put three men in the brig.”
An odd combination of dread and annoyance crept over Cassie. “Murder? Jesus. Who died?”
“Deckie named Zook—he got gassed in a cargo bay. Ockham says we’re in thrall to the corpse. Not the corpse itself, the Idea of the Corpse. With God out of the picture, people have lost their main reason to be moral. They can’t help experimenting with sin.”
As she always did in the presence of intellectually untenable arguments, Cassie thrust her left hand into her pocket and pinched her inner thigh through the fabric. “Can’t help it? Gimme a break, Anthony. The whole thing’s an alibi. A clever alibi, but an alibi. These sailors of yours—want my opinion? They’re seizing on the carcass to rationalize their crimes. God’s death is so convenient.”
“I think it goes deeper than that.” Reaching into his baseball jacket, Anthony produced a sheet of beige paper covered with smeary black characters, and for one awful instant Cassie imagined he meant to confront her with a copy of Oliver’s communiqué. “Do me a favor, Doc. Read this. It’s from my father.”
The letter was handwritten on Exxon Shipping stationery: a cramped, feathery scrawl that struck her as oddly feminine.
Dear Anthony:
You say you want to visit, but that’s not a very good idea. Tiffany gets easily flustered by guests, and you probably intend to bring up a lot of old grievances, like the…
“This seems awfully personal.”
“Just read it.”
…parrot business. My idea of a relaxing retirement—can you believe it?—includes not having my firstborn dropping by and screaming at me.
Don’t think I wasn’t pleasantly surprised to receive your letter. You’re a good sailor, son. Flappable, but good. You deserved to get the Val back, though I can’t imagine what the Vatican needs with a ULCC.
Hauling holy water, are you?
Love,
Dad.
“So, what do you make of it?” asked Anthony.
“Who’s Tiffany?”
“My stepmother. Major airhead. What’s he telling me?”
A humbling sense of her own parochialism crept over Cassie. So far in her life, the worst burdens she’d had to bear were rotten reviews in the Voice and deadhead students in her classes, nothing remotely comparable to a hostile father, an unbreachable neck, or a supertanker crew lapsing into vice. “I’m no psychologist…but when he says you have grievances against him, maybe he’s really saying he has grievances against you.”
“Of course he has grievances against me. I dishonored him at Matagorda Bay. I dragged the family name through an oil slick.”
“What’s this ‘parrot business’?”
Anthony snorted, grimaced, and put on his mirrorshades.
“For my tenth birthday, Dad brought back a scarlet macaw from Guatemala.”
“Order Psittaciformes. Family Psittacidae.”
“Yeah. Beautiful bird. She arrived speaking Spanish. ‘Vaya con Dios.’ ‘¿Qué pasa?’ I tried teaching her ‘See you later, alligator,’ but it didn’t stick. I named her Rainbow. So, four months later, what does Dad do? He decides Rainbow’s costing us too much in parrot food and vet bills, and she’s noisy besides, messy too, so he drives me and the bird across town to a pet store, and he goes up to the counter, and he says, ‘If anybody comes in and wants this miserable beast, I’ll split the take with you, fifty-fifty.’”
“How mean.”
“There’s a pattern here, actually. I’m eleven—okay?—and the thing I most want for Christmas is a Revell plastic model kit of the USS Constitution, one to the forty-second scale, two hundred and thirty separate pieces, real canvas for the sails. Dad buys me the kit all right, but he won’t let me put it together. He says I’ll screw it up.”
“So he does it himself?”
“Yeah, and here’s the weird part. He gets some glass blower in Wilmington to seal up my ship in a big blue water-cooler bottle. So I can’t touch it, right? I can’t hold the Constitution or play with it. It isn’t really mine.” Anthony took back the fax, wadded it up, and stuffed the ball in his jacket. “The problem is that I need the bastard.”
“No, you don’t.”
“He’s the one who can wash the oil away.”
“Matagorda Bay?”
“Yeah. I won’t be free till Dad looks right at me and says, ‘Good job, Anthony. You laid His bones to rest.’”
“Oh, come on.”
“I got it straight from Raphael’s lips.”
“I don’t care whose lips you got it from.” A completely irrational theory, Cassie decided as she drained the last of her jamoke. “It doesn’t add up.” The breeze turned nasty, clawing at her cheeks, biting her fingers. She pulled the zipper tab of Lianne’s windbreaker as high as it would go. “I need some of Follingsbee
’s hot cocoa.”
The captain cocked his head. Aries lay reflected in both lenses of his mirrorshades. “Birds fly through my dreams.”
“Birds? Parrots, you mean?”
“Egrets, herons, ibises—dripping oil. I take showers, but it doesn’t help. Only my father…you understand?”
“No. I don’t. But even if I did…well, what if your dad regards absolution as just another present? What if he gives you a clear conscience and then—bang—he takes that away too?”
“He wouldn’t.”
“The man who sent you that fax”—Cassie indicated the bulge in Anthony’s jacket—“is not a man you can trust.” She started up the ladder, retreating not so much from the cold as from this confused, frightening, peculiarly alluring man, this captain who dreamed of oiled egrets. “Know something, sir? When we get back to New York, I’m going to buy you a scarlet macaw.”
“I’d like that, Doc.”
“Know something else?” She paused on the topmost rung. “It’s perfectly okay to hate our cargo. It’s really quite okay.”
August 3.
On this day in 1924, my Mariner’s Pocket Companion notes, “Joseph Conrad, author of Lord Jim, Typhoon, and other classics of the sea, died in Bishopsbourne, England.”
I’ll start with the good news. For reasons best known to themselves, the predators have thrown in the towel. When it comes to the vultures and snakes, my guess is that we’ve sailed too far beyond their territories. As for the sharks—well, who knows what goes on in those antique minds?
This morning I had Rafferty gather up all the antipredator materiel, remove the shells and charges, and secure the empty weapons in the fo’c’sle hold. We no longer need the stuff, and in the present anarchic atmosphere I can easily imagine the deckies making murderous use of a harpoon gun or a bazooka.
Once again we tried screwing chicksans into His right carotid artery, and once again we failed, but that’s not the really bad news.
The fights and thefts continue, but that’s not the really bad news either.
The really bad news is the weather.
Dead reckoning places us 50 miles south of the Azores. It’s hard to know for sure, because the Marisat signals aren’t getting through, and we can’t see more than 20 yards in any direction. Fog I can deal with, but this is something else, a stew so thick it’s blinded both our radars. Forget the sextants.
An hour ago I explained our options to Ockham. Either we break radio silence and ask the Portuguese Coast Guard where the hell we are, or we slow to a crawl to avoid ramming into the Azores.
“You mean like four knots?”
“I mean like three knots.”
“At that speed, we won’t beat the deadline,” noted the padre.
“Correct.”
“His neurons will die.”
“Yeah, if He’s got any left.”
“What’s your preference?” Ockham wanted to know.
“Raphael never mentioned neurons,” I replied.
“Neither did Gabriel. You want us to slow down?”
“No, I want us to save His brain.”
“So do I, Anthony. So do I.”
At 1355 we broke radio silence. In our hearts we both knew it wouldn’t work. The damn fog devoured everything we put out: shortwave broadcasts, CB signals, fax transmissions.
Got to go, Popeye. Got to drop us back to 10 rpm’s. My present migraine is the worst ever, despite generous applications of glory grease. It’s like my brain is dying, cell by cell by cell, shutting down along with His.
Again, the music of Strauss—Salomé this time, a hundred operatic voices filling the Jeep Wrangler’s cab as Thomas drove into the soggy depths of the navel. The route was dangerous, an ever-narrowing gyre cloaked in glutinous fog, but the Wrangler cleaved to the path, carrying Jesuit and Carmelite through the omphalogical terrain like a burro bearing tourists into the Grand Canyon.
The trip, he would admit, was an act of desperation, a last-ditch effort to discredit the body in question, for only by invalidating the corpse per se could he hope to invalidate the Idea of the Corpse and thus—perhaps—end the plague now raging aboard the Valparaíso. At first blush, of course, their cargo’s navel held no more teleological meaning than its warts (“Let there be a bellybutton,” and there was a bellybutton), and yet something about this particular feature, with its clear implications of a previous generation, had aroused in Thomas an uncharacteristic optimism. Did a navel not herald a Creator’s Creator? Did it not bespeak a God before God?
Within minutes they were at the bottom, a half-acre of flesh mottled with chunks of coral, swatches of algae, and an occasional dead crab. Thomas rotated the ignition key, shutting off the engine along with Salomé. He inhaled. The fog filled his lungs like steam rising from a Mesozoic swamp. In a move the priest found perplexing, Sister Miriam leaned over and aggressively rotated the ignition key, restoring Salomé to life.
He unhooked his seat belt, climbed out of the cab, and made his way across the damp, briny basin. Dropping to his knees, he ran his palm along the epidermis, searching for some clue that an umbilicus had once towered, sequoialike, from this spot—evidence of a proto-Deity, sign of a pre-Creator, proof of an unimaginable placenta floating through the Milky Way like an emission nebula.
Nothing. Zero. Not a nub.
He’d expected as much. And yet he persisted, massaging the terrain as if attempting some eschatological variety of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.
“Any luck?”
Until that moment, he hadn’t realized Miriam was beside him.
Or naked.
What astonished him was how detailed she was, how wonderfully particularized. The blue veins spidering across her breasts, the wiry twists and turns of her pubic hairs, the cyclopean gaze of her navel, the tampon string dangling between her legs like a fuse. Her pimples. Her freckles. Her birthmarks, pores, and scabs. This wasn’t Miss November. This was a woman.
So Weisinger had called it right. Anyone, even Miriam, could find the freedom that travels in God’s wake. “No luck,” Thomas replied nervously, lifting his palm from the cavity’s floor. A loud glunk escaped his throat. “I don’t f-feel a thing.”
“What we’re really talking about, of course,” said Miriam, sucking in a deep breath, “is Gnosticism.” Her clothes—dungarees, khaki work shirt, underwear, all of it—lay puddled at her feet. Stepping uncertainly forward, she called to mind Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her seashell, a humanoid and endlessly desirable scallop.
“True.” Sweat circled Thomas’s neck. He popped open his saturated collar. “We’re praying our cargo will t-turn out to be the D-Demiurge,” he continued, unbuttoning his black shirt.
“We’re hoping it’s not God at all.”
“Except Gnosticism’s a heresy,” the priest noted, climbing out of his Levi’s. “No, worse than a heresy: it’s depressing. It reduces us to st-stifled spirits trapped in evil flesh.”
A furious drumming poured from the Wrangler’s speakers.
“The Dance of the Seven Veils,” Miriam explained nervously, wiggling her epic hips. Wendy and Wanda were on the move, flouncing in hypnotic oscillations. “The trumpets and trombones speak up next, and then it becomes a waltz. Have you ever waltzed naked in God’s navel, Tom?”
The priest removed his shirt and Jockey shorts. “Never.”
Trumpets shrieked, trombones bleated, a lone tuba blared. At first Thomas simply watched, wearing nothing but his bifocals. He imagined he was Herod Antipas, beholding the impossibly sensual dance that, in a paroxysm of pedophilia, he’d commissioned from his nubile stepdaughter, Salomé, never guessing that her price would be John the Baptist’s head. And Miriam’s movements were indeed sensual—not lewd, not lascivious, but sensual, like the Song of Solomon, or Bathsheba’s ablutions, or the Magdalene washing the Lord’s dusty feet.
Taking his friend’s hand, he encircled her fine, substantive waist. They waltzed: awkwardly at first, clownishly, in fact, but the
n some buried engram took over, some latent feeling for rhythm and form, and he guided her across the rubbery floor with bold, sweeping strides. The strange fog hung everywhere, blankets of mist wrapping their spinning bodies in a thick, delicious warmth. Something stirred in his mothballed loins. No erection followed. No lust consumed him. He was glad. This dance went deeper than loins, well beyond lust, back to some ancient, presexual existence they shared with sponges and amoebas.
“Nobody’s watching,” noted Miriam.
Their bodies pressed tightly together, like hands clasped in prayer. “We’re alone,” Thomas corroborated. So true, so pathetically true; they were orphans in Anno Postdomini One, beyond good and evil. It was like living inside a naughty joke. How much fun do priests have? Nun. He felt soiled, wicked, damned, ecstatic.
A tremor caressed their bare feet.
“The High Court’s adjourned,” said Miriam.
A second tremor, twice the intensity of the first.
“The bench has been eaten by worms.”
A fearsome quaking shook the navel.
They separated, throwing their arms out for balance. Confusion swept through Thomas. Resurrection? Their dancing was so sinful it had roused God from His coma?
“What’s happening?” gasped Miriam.
Typhoon? Tidal wave? “I don’t know. But I think this is the wrong place to be right now.”
They dressed hurriedly and incompletely, Thomas pausing briefly to observe an act he’d never seen before, the odd yogic posture by which a woman snaps on her brassiere. The flesh beneath their feet jiggled like a field of aspic. Explosions rattled the air. Spray splashed into the gorge. It seemed as if the entire Corpus Dei were aquiver, seized by some posthumous epileptic fit.
Shoes and socks in hand, they dashed back to the Wrangler, climbed inside, and, silencing Salomé, zoomed away.
