Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “Tom, he’s gonna kill that man!”

  Round and round Spicer towed his prey, as if enacting some grotesque parody of the Val’s mission. Wheatstone screamed. He kicked and flailed. He started coming apart, his liquid constituents leaking through the interstices of the cargo net like squashed tomatoes permeating the bottom of a grocery bag.

  When it became clear that Wheatstone was dead, two husky ordinaries rushed onto the field, cut the mooring line, and flung the bos’n’s trussed body toward the portcullis.

  The pagans jumped to their feet and cheered.

  “Yay, Joe!”

  “Way to go!”

  “Yay, Joe!”

  “Way to go!”

  Priest and nun raced into the valley, whimpering in dismay, wet sand grabbing at their boots. Together they passed through the main gate and entered the world beneath the tiers, a maze of slimy, silty tunnels in which plunder from the Val—bazookas, refrigerators, footlockers, diesel generators, video-game consoles—lay about like beached jetsam. Daylight beckoned. A ramp appeared. They charged into the open air.

  A river of wine flowed down the marble steps; abandoned sausages festered under the seats; gnawed pizza slices and half-eaten apples rotted in the heat. As Karl Jaworski ran across the arena—ran, literally, for his life—Thomas and Miriam ascended a dozen rows and paused, panting, between Charlie Horrocks, his features buried in a huge slice of watermelon, and Bud Ramsey, his lips locked around a bottle of Budweiser. It took Thomas several seconds to realize that Dolores Haycox and James Echohawk, stretched out on the seats directly in front of him, were engaged in energetic sexual congress.

  “Hiya, Father Tom!” said Ramsey. Beer foam flecked his chin. “Afternoon, Miriam.”

  “Great party, huh?” said Horrocks, emerging from his watermelon chunk.

  Haycox and Echohawk groaned in unison, groping toward orgasms of an intensity that, in the previous era, they could probably only have imagined.

  To Horrocks’s left, Karl Jaworski’s three victims—robust Isabel Bostwick, svelte An-mei Jong, exotic Juanita Torres—sat huddled together, blowing kisses toward Spicer. Bostwick licked a Turkish taffy. Jong guzzled a bottle of Cook’s champagne. Dressed only in bra and panties, Torres shook a pair of pompoms she’d improvised by ripping up her Menudo T-shirt and tying the shreds to needle guns.

  Despite the vivid frenzy on the field—despite the horrific fact that Spicer had somehow maneuvered Jaworski against the south wall and was now driving straight for him—it seemed to Thomas that what the arena really contained was a kind of Barthian Nichtige: an ontological nothingness where once God’s grace had been, its blind gravity devouring all goodness and mercy like a black hole feasting on light. Jaworski dropped to his knees. Spicer lowered the forklift prongs accordingly. In a choral display of utter joy, Bostwick, Jong, and Torres rose in a body and together shouted, “Kill!”

  Thomas could see what was about to happen. He begged God that it wouldn’t.

  “Kill!”

  “Kill!”

  Even as the entreaty took shape on the priest’s lips, the left forklift prong struck Jaworski squarely, slipping into his abdomen as smoothly as the spear of Longinus entering the crucified Savior.

  “Bull’s-eye!” squealed Jong as Jaworski, impaled, ascended.

  “No!” howled Thomas. “No! No!”

  “Calm down, man,” said Ramsey. “Don’t have no fuckin’ cow.”

  Spicer backed up. Jaworski, screaming in agony, hung suspended from the prong, wriggling like a beetle on a hatpin.

  “No!” moaned Miriam.

  “Right on!” yelled Torres.

  “Mazel tov!” shouted Bostwick.

  Brow knitted in a thoughtful frown, Spicer operated the lift controls, working the prong ever deeper as he raised the skewered man up and down, up and down. Jaworski gripped the wet steel shaft, bathing his hands in his own blood as he attempted, bravely but hopelessly, to free himself.

  “Spicer, Spicer, he’s our man!” cried Bostwick. “If he can’t do it, no one can!”

  An urge to vomit grew in Thomas, wrenching his stomach and burning his windpipe, as the same ordinaries who’d previously disposed of Wheatstone slid Jaworski’s corpse off the prong and casually dumped it in the mud. Miriam, weeping, took her friend’s hand, digging her thumbnail so deeply into his palm she drew blood. He beat back his nausea through force of will.

  “Go, go, Joe, Joe!” shouted Torres, swishing her pom-poms. “Go, go, Joe, Joe! Go, go, Joe, Joe!”

  Anchor at the ready, Neil Weisinger stumbled toward the center of the field. Spicer, downshifting, gave chase.

  “Stop this!” cried Miriam. She sounded, Thomas had to admit, more like a teacher disciplining a kindergarten than like the voice of reason evoking the spirit of Immanuel Kant. “Stop this right now!”

  Spicer threw his net.

  He missed.

  The kid retreated, anchor swinging at his side, his bare feet splashing through the mud. Gushing black exhaust, the forklift bore down on him at five, ten, fifteen miles an hour. Spicer elevated the prongs to the height of Weisinger’s belly.

  “Go!”

  “Go!”

  The kid stopped, turned, waited.

  “Kill!”

  “Kill!”

  And suddenly the anchor was airborne, arrowing straight for the driver’s seat.

  “Go!”

  “Go!”

  Acting on instinct, Spicer swerved—the same pathetic impulse, Thomas guessed, by which a soldier walking into a hail of grapeshot will raise his arms to fend off the balls.

  “Kill!”

  “Kill!”

  The anchor landed between the second mate’s legs. Shrieking with pain, he released the steering wheel and groped toward his crotch.

  “Go!”

  “Go!”

  The forklift hit the wall at over thirty miles per hour, a collision of such force it threw Spicer from the cab and sent him somersaulting through the air. The two hundred and thirty pound man landed on his feet. His femurs shattered audibly. He collapsed, stabbed by his own bones, and began flopping around in the sand.

  “Weisinger, Weisinger, he’s our man! If he can’t do it, no one can!”

  The kid wasted no time. Retrieving the anchor from the forklift seat, he dashed across the arena and hunched over Spicer. He scanned the crowd. At first Thomas assumed Weisinger merely wanted to savor the moment—where, when, and under what other circumstances could an able-bodied seaman receive a standing ovation?—but then he realized the kid was waiting for a sign.

  In a weirdly synchronous gesture, thirty-two hands shot forward, thumbs up.

  With equally uncanny coordination, thirty-two wrists rotated.

  Thumbs down.

  “Neil, no!” cried Thomas, gaining his feet. “It’s me, Neil! It’s Father Thomas!”

  “Don’t do it!” shouted Miriam.

  Weisinger got to work, chopping relentlessly with the anchor, mooring himself to Spicer.

  An enormous bare-chested sailor turned toward Thomas, exuding the sickly sweetness of whiskey. Black beard, bad skin, a face like the granite glutton on the far side of the island. Thomas recognized him as a demac named Stubby Barnes. The man had come to Mass twice. “Hey, you oughta settle down, Father. You too, Sister.” The demac’s right hand cradled an empty bottle of Cutty Sark. “I mean no disrespect, but this ain’t your party!”

  “No, you settle down!” wailed Thomas.

  “Take it easy.” Stubby Barnes lifted the bottle high over his head.

  “No, you take it easy!”

  “We can do whatever we want, man,” Barnes insisted, letting the Cutty Sark fly.

  “Listen to your congenital conscience!”

  The bottle struck Thomas squarely, a pound of glass crashing into his temple. He felt warm blood rolling down his face, tickling his cheeks, and then he felt nothing at all.

  August 7.

  It goes from bad to worse. Yesterday at 0915
Ockham and Sister Miriam came stumbling back to the ship, the padre bleeding from a nasty head wound. Their news knocked me for a loop. The mutineers have executed Wheatstone and Jaworski in some sort of crazy rodeo. Joe Spicer’s dead too, killed when Able Seaman Weisinger turned the tables on him.

  If you want my opinion, Spicer got what he deserved.

  Ever try mescal, Popeye? It has all the kick of spinach, I promise you, and it dulls the pain. Somehow the bastards missed my supply. I’ve given the creatures in the remaining bottles names. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar—the Three Wise Worms.

  I shouldn’t drink, of course. I’m vulnerable. Dad’s probably an alky, and somewhere along the line I had a wino aunt who burned down her house, plus a rummy cousin who shot the mailman for bringing the wrong size welfare check. But what the hell—this is Anno Postdomini One, right? It’s the era when anything goes.

  We have exactly 10 days to get Him to the Arctic.

  Last night I polished off the first bottle, leaving Caspar beached like the Val, after which I went a bit berserk. Stuck a lighted Marlboro in my palm, puked my guts out, climbed down the anchor chain and rolled around in the sand. I woke up beside the keel, sober but numb, clutching an aluminum soup ladle to my breast.

  It was Cassie who found me. What a pathetic creature I must’ve seemed, beard clogged with rust, clothes soaked in mescal. She guided me back up the chain, led me to the main galley, and began doling out aspirin and coffee.

  “I didn’t crash into this island,” I insisted, as if she’d said I had.

  “This island crashed into you.”

  “Am I repulsive, Doc? Am I downright disgusting? Do I smell like Davy Jones’s jockstrap?”

  “No, but you ought to shave off that beard.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  “I’ve always hated beards.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s like kissing a Brillo pad.”

  The word kissing lingered in the air. We both noticed it.

  “I think I’m going crazy,” I told her. “I tried digging us out with a soup ladle.”

  “That’s not crazy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Crazy would’ve been if you’d used a teaspoon.”

  And then, with a flirtatious toss of her head, or so it seemed, she left me alone with my hangover.

  As Thomas entered the empty arena, mirages made of late-afternoon heat arose, twisting and shimmering above the bloody sand. The forklift truck sat inertly in the southeast corner, right prong clean, the left tarnished with Karl Jaworski.

  Van Horne and Miriam had both been appalled by the idea of a second mission to the deserters—“Lord, Tom,” the nun had said, “they’ll execute you next time”—but Thomas’s sense of duty demanded not only that he bury the dead but that he once again try to help the living find the Kantian moral law within.

  Like a conquistador planting the Spanish flag in the New World, he thrust his steel spade into the ground. Ten yards away, Jaworski’s punctured body lay festering in the shadow of the sculpted hermaphrodite. Beyond, the netted remains of Eddie Wheatstone lay across the eviscerated carcass of Joe Spicer. A mere twenty-four hours had elapsed since their executions, but the decomposition process was fully under way, filling the priest’s nostrils with an acid stench.

  Licking sweat from his lips, he retrieved the spade and got busy. The sand, though heavy, was as easily dislodged as new-fallen snow, and the job went effortlessly—so effortlessly, he decided, that should rationality ever descend upon Van Horne Island, then excavating the stranded Valparaíso might prove more feasible than he’d supposed. One hour later, a mass grave yawned in the center of the field.

  He dumped in the corpses, prayed for their souls, and shoveled back the sand.

  Following the deserters’ trail out of the amphitheater was no problem. Cigarette butts, beer-can tabs, wine-bottle corks, peanut shells, orange rinds, and banana peels marked the way. Inevitably Thomas thought of Hansel and Gretel, dropping their pebbles so they’d be able to rejoin their tractable father and malicious stepmother. Even a dysfunctional family, apparently, was better than none at all.

  The route took him through typical terrain—past decaying appliances and discarded 55-gallon drums, past mounds of automobile tires clumped together like gigantic charred bagels—and then, suddenly, it appeared: the wall.

  It was huge, sixty feet from foundation to battlements, assembled from the purest marble, each block bleached white as bone. Spidery characters decorated the gateway, the forgotten phonemes of some long-unspoken tongue. He entered.

  Music screamed in the city’s heart—amplified guitars, high-tech keyboards. It seemed to Thomas not so much a song as a warning, the sort of sound with which a city might alert its citizens to incoming nuclear warheads. Mud lay everywhere, thick brown seabed pies drooping from the cornices and oozing off the balconies. Cloaked in the omnipresent mist, the temples, shops, and houses were in a sorry state, their roofs crushed by the weight of the Gibraltar Sea, their façades erased by underwater currents. But could natural processes alone account for this destruction, or had God, too, had a hand in it? Was this another of those wicked cities the Almighty had elected to eradicate personally, sister to Babylon, kin to Gomorrah?

  Ringed by fluted columns, a vast public building loomed over the priest, its gaping bronze doors carved with bas-relief images of the island’s four reigning deities. He climbed the steps, entered the vaulted foyer, and started down the mud-carpeted hallway beyond. The music, louder now, assaulted his brain. Moving past the rooms, he imagined he was wandering through one of those hands-on museums to which upscale parents liked to drag their children, though here the exhibits were strictly for adults. One space, to judge from the mosaics, had been an opium den. Another, a masturbation booth, frescoed with antediluvian centerfolds. There was a cubicle for pederasty. For bestiality. Sadomasochism. Necrophilia. Incest. Obsession after obsession, perversion upon perversion, a Museum of Unnatural History.

  The hall turned a corner, opening onto a flagstone courtyard bordered by airy arcades and packed with the Valparaíso deserters, most of them naked. Such an astonishing range of skin tones, thought Thomas: ivory, pink, bronze, saffron, fawn, flaxen, dun, cocoa, sorrel, umber, ochre, maple sugar. It was like gazing upon a jar of mixed nuts, or a Whitman’s Sampler. Many of the sailors had painted themselves, sketching sinuous arrows and coiled serpents on their bodies with mashed grapes, the juices running down their limbs like purple sweat. Wall to wall, the courtyard vibrated with a combination binge, bacchanal, orgy, brawl, and disco tourney, with many revelers participating in all five possibilities—drinking, eating, fornicating, fighting, dancing—simultaneously. Marijuana smoke mingled with the fog. Strobelights brightened the dusk. Along the southern arcade, Ralph Mungo and James Echohawk dueled with the decorative cutlasses they’d stolen from the wardroom, while a few yards away eight men stood in a circle, each plugged into another, a carousel of sodomy. Crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles littered the ground. Scores of spent condoms lay about like an infestation of giant planaria, a fact from which Thomas drew a modicum of hope: if the revelers were sane enough to worry about pregnancy and AIDS, they might be sane enough to ponder the categorical imperative. Arms undulated, hips shimmied, breasts swayed, penises swung—the sybaritic aerobics of Anno Postdomini One.

  “Hiya, Tommy!” Neil Weisinger strode over, an unlit cigarette parked in his mouth, gleefully ripping a barbecued chicken in two. “Didn’t expect to see you here!” he said drunkenly.

  “That music…”

  “Scorched Earth, from Sweden. The album’s called Chemotherapy. You should see their stage act. They read entrails.”

  Dominating the courtyard was a polished obsidian banquet table, its surface supporting not only four enormous hams and two sides of beef but a diesel generator, a CD player, and an RCA Colortrak-5000 video projector spraying concupiscent images on a white bedsheet hanging wraithlike inside the northern arcade. Thomas had
never seen Bob Guccione’s notorious Caligula, but he guessed that’s what the movie was. The camera dollied along the main deck of a Roman trireme on which nearly everyone was rutting.

  “Helluva party, huh?” said Weisinger, waving half the bisected chicken in Thomas’s face. The air reeked of semen, tobacco, alcohol, vomit, and pot. “Want some dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Go ahead. Eat.”

  “I said no.”

  The kid displayed a bottle of Löwenbrau. “Beer?”

  “Neil, I saw you in the amphitheater Tuesday.”

  “I really nailed Spicer, didn’t I? Got him like some nervy goyische cowboy roping a steer.”

  “An immoral act, Neil. Tell me you understand that.”

  “This looks like just another Löwenbrau bottle,” said Weisinger, “but it’s much, much more than that. Washed up on the beach yesterday. Inside was a message. Ask me what message.”

  “Neil…”

  “Go ahead. Ask.”

  “What message?”

  “‘Thou shalt have whatever other gods thou feels like,’ it said. ‘Thou shalt covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ Sure you don’t wanna beer?”

  “No.”

  “‘Thou shalt bugger thy neighbor’s ass’.”

  Everywhere Thomas looked, food was being squandered on a grand scale. Huge untended caldrons sat atop driftwood fires, rapidly reducing entire wheels of cheddar, Muenster, and Swiss to an inedible tar. Five sailors from the engine crew and five from the deck crew battled it out with what seemed like the Valparaíso’s entire stock of fresh eggs. Charlie Horrocks, Isabel Bostwick, Bud Ramsey, and Juanita Torres ripped the lids off vacuum-packed cans and merrily showered themselves with clam chowder, vegetable soup, baked beans, chocolate topping, and butterscotch sauce. They licked each other like mother cats grooming their young, the residue spilling down their flesh and disappearing amid the flagstones.