Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

  “Exactly.”

  A cold gray tide washed through Cassie’s mind. “Lianne, there’s something you should know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I’m about to faint.”

  The radio officer rose from her chair. Her mouth moved, but Cassie heard no words.

  “Help…,” said Cassie.

  The tide crested, crashing against her skull. She slipped down slowly, through the floor of the radio shack…through the superstructure…the weather deck…hull…island…sea.

  Into the green fathoms.

  Into the thick silence.

  “This is for you.”

  A deep voice—deeper, even, than Lianne’s.

  “This is for you,” said Anthony again, handing her a stale slice of American cheese, its corners curled, its center inhabited by a patch of green mold.

  She blinked. “Was I…unconscious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Long?”

  “An hour.” The Exxon tiger grinned down from Anthony’s T-shirt. “Sam and I agreed that the first person who passed out would get the emergency ration. It’s not much, Doc, but it’s yours.”

  Cassie folded the slice into quarters and, pushing the ragged stack into her mouth, gratefully wolfed it down. “Th-thanks…”

  She rose from the bunk. Anthony’s cabin was twice as large as hers, but so cluttered it seemed cramped. Books and magazines were scattered everywhere, a Complete Pelican Shakespeare on the bureau, a stack of Mariners’ Weather Logs on the washbasin, a Carpco Manual and a Girls of Penthouse on the floor. A spiral notebook lay on his desk, its cover displaying an airbrushed portrait of Popeye the Sailor.

  “You’ll have some, won’t you?” asked Anthony, flashing her a half-empty bottle of Monte Alban. MEZCAL CON GUSANO, the label said. Mescal with worm. Without waiting for a reply, he sloshed several ounces into two ceramic Arco mugs.

  “It’s hell being a biologist. I know too much.” As the pains started up again, Cassie pressed her palm against the Brief History of Time belted to her stomach. “Our fats were the first to go, and now it’s the proteins. I can practically feel my muscles coming apart, cracking, splitting. The nitrogen floats free, spilling into our blood, our kidneys…”

  The captain took a protracted sip of mescal. “That why my urine smells like ammonia?”

  She nodded.

  “My breath stinks too,” he said, handing her an Arco mug.

  “Ketosis. The odor of sanctity, they used to call it, back when people fasted for God.”

  “How soon before we…?”

  “It’s an individual sort of thing. Big fellas like Follingsbee, they’re likely to last another month. Rafferty and Lianne—four or five days, maybe.”

  The captain drained his mescal. “This voyage started out so well. Hell, I even thought we’d save His brain. It’s hash by now, don’t you think?”

  “Quite likely.”

  Settling behind his desk, Anthony refilled his mug and retrieved a brass sextant from among the nautical charts and Styrofoam coffee cups. “Know something, Doc? I’m just tipsy enough to say I think you’re an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady.”

  The remark aroused in Cassie a strange conjunction of delight and apprehension. A door to chaos had just been opened, and now she’d do best to fling it closed. “I’m flattered,” she said, taking a hot gulp of Monte Alban. “Let’s not forget I’m practically engaged.”

  “I was practically engaged once.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Janet Yost, a bos’n with Chevron Shipping.” The captain sighted Cassie through his sextant; a lascivious grin twisted his lips, as if the instrument somehow rendered her blouse transparent. “We bunked together for nearly two years, running the glop down from Alaska. Once or twice we talked about a wedding. Far as I’m concerned, she was my fiancée. Then she got pregnant.”

  “By you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And…?”

  “And I freaked out. A baby’s no way to start a marriage.”

  “Did you ask her to get an abortion?”

  “Not in so many words, but she could tell that’s where I stood. I’m not fit for fatherhood, Cassie. Look at who I’ve got for a model. It’s like a surgeon learning his business from Jack the Ripper.”

  “Maybe you could’ve…hunted around, right? Gotten some guidance.”

  “I tried, Doc. Talked to sailors with kids, walked uptown to F.A.O. Schwarz and bought a Baby Feels-So-Real, you know, one of those authentic-type dolls, so I could take it home and hold it a lot—I felt pretty embarrassed buying the thing, I’ll tell you, like it was some sort of sexual aid. And, hey, let’s not forget my trips to Saint Vincent’s for purposes of studying the newborns and seeing what sort of creatures they were. You realize how easy it is to sneak into a maternity ward? Act like an uncle, that’s all. None of this shit worked. To this day, babies scare me.”

  “I’m sure you could get over it. Alexander did.”

  “Who?”

  “A Norway rat. When I forced him to live with his own offspring, he started taking care of them. Sea horses make good fathers too. Also lumpfish. Did Janet get the abortion?”

  “Wasn’t necessary. Mother Nature stepped in. Before I knew it, we’d lost the relationship too. An awful time, terrible fights. Once she threw a sextant at me—that’s how my nose got busted. After that we made a point of staying on separate ships. Maybe we passed in the night. Didn’t hear from her for three whole years, but then, when the Val hit Bolivar Reef, she wrote to me and said she knew it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Was it your fault?”

  “I left the bridge.”

  Gritting her teeth, Cassie placed both her hands against A Brief History of Time and pushed. “We ever gonna find food out there?”

  “Sure we are, Doc. I guarantee it. You okay?”

  “Woozy. Abdominal pains. I don’t suppose you have any more cheese?”

  “Sorry.”

  She stretched out on the rug. Her brain had become a sponge, a Polymastia mamillaris dripping with Monte Alban. A mescal haze lay between her psyche and the world, hanging in space like a theatrical scrim, backlit, imprinted with twinkling stars. A scarlet macaw flew across the constellations—the very bird she’d promised to buy Anthony once they were home—and suddenly it was molting, feather by feather, until only the bare, breathing flesh remained, knobby, soft, and edible.

  The minutes locked by. Cassie nodded off, roused herself, nodded off…

  “Am I dying?” she asked.

  Anthony now sat beside her, his back against the desk, cradling her in his bare, sweaty arms. His tattooed mermaid looked anorectic. Slowly he extended his palm, its lifeline bisected by three objects resembling thick, stubby pretzel sticks.

  “You won’t die,” he said. “I won’t let anybody die.”

  “Pretzels?”

  “Pickled mescal worms. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar.”

  “W-worms?”

  “All meat,” he insisted, languorously lifting Caspar—or maybe it was Melchior, or possibly Balthazar—to her mouth. The creature was flaxen and segmented: not a true worm, she realized, but the larva of some Mexican moth or other. “Fresh from Oaxaca,” he said.

  “Yes. Yes. Good.”

  Gently, Anthony inserted Caspar. She sucked, the oldest of all survival reflexes, wetting the captain’s fingers, saturating his larva. Satisfaction beamed from his face, a fulfillment akin to what a mother experiences while nursing—not bad, she decided, for a man who’d panicked at his girlfriend’s pregnancy. She worked her jaw. Caspar disintegrated. He had a crude, spiky, medicinal flavor, a blend of raw mescal and Lepidoptera innards.

  “Tell me what you told me before,” said Cassie. “About my being—how did you put it?—‘a wonderfully attractive…’”

  He fed her Melchior. “An incredibly attractive…”

  “Yeah.” She devoured the larva. “That.”

  Now came Balthaz
ar. “I think you’re an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady,” Anthony informed her for the second time that day.

  As Cassie chewed, a mild sense of well-being took hold of her, transient but real. The wheat of General Mills, the cheese of Kraft, the worms of Oaxaca. She licked her lips and drifted toward sleep. Faith did not exist aboard the Carpco Valparaíso, nor hope either, but for the moment, at least, there was charity.

  Whatever the cause of the Valparaíso’s failure to appear in Arctic waters, Oliver couldn’t help noticing that the World War Two Reenactment Society was profiting heavily from the delay. According to the contract the Enlightenment League had signed with Pembroke and Flume, each sailor, pilot, and gunner had to receive “full combat pay” for every day he served aboard the carrier. Not that the men didn’t earn it. Their commanders worked them around the clock, as if there were a war on. But Oliver still felt resentful. His money, he decided, was like Cassie’s large chest. All during high school, she’d never known for certain why she was constantly being asked out—or, rather, she had known, and she didn’t like it. A person should be valued for what he gave, Oliver believed, not for what he possessed.

  The short, homely man portraying Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the officer in charge of Air Group Six, required both his squadrons to fly two practice missions a day, dropping wooden bombs and Styrofoam torpedoes on the icebergs of Tromso Fjord. Meanwhile, the fellow playing the carrier’s skipper, a burly Irishman with a handlebar mustache, made his men keep the flight deck completely clear of ice and snow, even during those hours when the warplanes weren’t flying their milk runs. For Captain George Murray’s beleaguered sailors, combat duty aboard the Enterprise was like living in some suburbanite hell, a world where your driveway was six hundred feet long and needed shoveling even in the middle of summer.

  An hour after the ninetieth straight PBY mission failed to find the Valparaíso, Pembroke and Flume summoned Oliver to their cabin. During World War Two, these spacious quarters had functioned as the wardroom, but the impresarios had converted it into a two-bedroom suite featuring a parlor furnished with an eye to late-Victorian ostentation.

  “The crew’s getting itchy,” Albert Flume began, guiding Oliver toward a plush divan reminiscent of the couch in Delacroix’s Odalisque.

  “Our pilots and gunners’re going nuts.” Sidney Pembroke unwrapped a facsimile of a Baby Ruth candy bar circa 1944. “If something doesn’t happen soon to improve morale, they’ll be asking to go home.”

  “To wit, we’d like to start granting the boys shore leave.”

  “At full combat pay.”

  Oliver glowered and clenched his fists. “Shore leave? Shore leave to where? Oslo?”

  Flume shook his head. “No way to get ’em there. The PBYs are tied up with reconnaissance, and we can’t hire bush pilots without attracting attention.”

  “We hopped over to Ibsen City last night,” said Pembroke. “Dull place on the whole, but that Sundog Saloon has possibilities.”

  Oliver scowled. “It’s nothing but an old airplane hangar.”

  “We’ll give it to you straight,” said Pembroke, merrily devouring his candy bar. “Assuming you’re willing to bankroll us, Alby and I intend to turn the Sundog into a classic-type USO Club. You know, a home away from home, a place for the boys to get a free sandwich, dance with a pretty hostess, and hear Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’.”

  “If it’s entertainment your people want,” said Oliver, “Barclay does a damn good magic act. Last year he was on the Tonight show, debunking faith healers.”

  “Debunking faith?” Flume opened the refrigerator, removed a Rheingold, and popped the cap. “What is he, an atheist?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “We don’t mean to disparage your friend’s abilities,” said Pembroke, “but we’re envisioning something more along the lines of Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby…”

  “Aren’t those people dead?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not that hard to come up with impersonators.”

  “We’ll also be importing a string of attractive young women to work the room,” said Flume. “You know, nice girl-next-door types handing out cigarettes, offering to dance, and maybe allowing a stolen kiss or two.”

  “No bimbos, of course,” said Pembroke. “Wholesome, aspiring actresses who know there’s more to life than topless bars and wet T-shirt contests.”

  “Right now it’s three A.M. in Manhattan,” said Flume, “but if we get on the phone ’round suppertime we’ll be able to reach the relevant talent agencies.”

  “You actually think the average New York actor will drop whatever he’s doing and catch the first plane to Oslo?” said Oliver.

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for the average New York actor,” said Flume, swallowing Rheingold, “getting paid a scale wage to impersonate Bing Crosby on an obscure island in the Arctic Ocean is the closest he’s come to a job in years.”

  August 27.

  In my entry of July 14, I told you what I heard, saw, and felt when I first laid eyes on our cargo. For sheer exhilaration, Popeye, it was nothing compared to my second epiphany.

  At 0900 I was standing outside the wheelhouse, binoculars raised, watching the mutineers lying about in the streets of their shantytown. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized what a difference our feeble rations make. We, at least, can move.

  A gamey fragrance wafted across the bridge wing. Then: a low, deep drumming. I pivoted toward the beach.

  And there it was, the glorious promontory of His nose, rising in the distance like Mount Sinai itself. My migraine vanished. My blood jumped. The drumming continued, the steady boom-boom-boom of surf crashing inside His armpits.

  Whether this amazing break ultimately traces to rogue winds, maverick currents, chaos theory, or some posthumous form of divine intervention, I can’t really say.

  I only know He’s back.

  After considerable soul-searching and much mental agony, Thomas decided to start with the bosom. Given its vastness, he reasoned, mutilating this feature would constitute a lesser violation than an equivalent assault on the brow or cheeks. Even so, he was not at peace. Situational ethics had always given him pause. Were the Valparaíso not cut off from the outside world, Thomas would certainly have faxed Rome, soliciting the cardinals’ official views on deophagy.

  The eight loyalists and their captain made the crossing in the Juan Fernández and, maneuvering past the starboard ribs, landed on the inflatable wharf. Shouldering their various backpacks and seabags, they fought their way up the Jacob’s ladder, and, led by Van Horne, began the dizzying hike east across the collarbone and south along the sternum. Pots and pans swung from the loyalists’ belts like gigantic jail keys, clanging in counterpoint to the thunder booming from His armpits.

  At last they reached the edge of the areola, a red, rubbery pasture dominated by the tall, pillarlike form of the nipple. Thomas stopped, turned, removed his Panama hat. He bade his congregation sit down. Everyone obeyed, even Van Horne, though the captain kept his distance, secluding himself in the shadow of a mole.

  Opening his knapsack, Thomas drew out the sacred hardware: candlesticks, chalice, ciborium, silver salver, antependium (the pride of his collection, pure silk, printed with the Stations of the Cross). The congregation awaited the sacrament eagerly but respectfully—all except Van Horne and Cassie Fowler, who both looked highly annoyed. Eight communicants, Thomas thought with a wry smile, the most he’d ever had at a Valparaíso Mass, either before or after His death became known aboard the tanker.

  Sister Miriam reached into her seabag and removed the altar: a situational-ethics altar, he had to admit, for in truth it was a Coleman stove fueled by propane gas. While Miriam unfolded the aluminum legs and dug them into the soft epidermis, Thomas spread out the antependium like a picnic blanket, fastening the corners with candlesticks.

  “Can’t he move any f
aster?” grumbled Fowler.

  “He’s doing his best,” snapped Miriam.

  As Sam Follingsbee handed the nun a battery-powered carving knife, Crock O’Connor gave her one of the waterproof chain saws he’d used to open God’s eardrums, and she in turn passed these tools to Thomas. In the interest of speed, he elected to dispense with the normal preliminaries—the Incensing of the Faithful, the Washing of the Hands, the Orate Fratres, the Reading of the Diptychs—and move straight to the matter of deconsecration. But here he was stuck. There was no antidote for transubstantiation in the missal, no recognized procedure for turning the divine body back into daily bread. Perhaps it would be sufficient simply to reverse the famous words of the Last Supper, “Accipite et manducate ex hoc omnes, hoc est enim corpus Meum.” Take and eat ye all of this, for this is My body. Very well, he thought. Sure. Why not?

  Thomas hunkered down. He yanked the starter cord. Instantly the chain saw kicked in, buzzing like a horror-movie hornet. Clouds of black smoke poured from the engine housing. Groaning softly, the priest lowered the saw, firmed his grip, and stabbed his Creator.

  He jerked the saw away.

  “What’s the matter?” gasped Miriam.

  It simply wasn’t right. How could it be right? “Better to starve,” he muttered.

  “Tom, you must.”

  “No.”

  “Tom.”

  Again he lowered the saw. The spinning teeth bit into the flesh, releasing a stream of rosy plasma.

  He raised the saw.

  “Hurry,” rasped Lou Chickering.

  “Please,” moaned Marbles Rafferty.

  He eased the smoking machine back into the wound. Languidly, reluctantly, he dragged the blade along a horizontal path. Then a second cut, at right angles to the first. A third. A fourth. Peeling away the patch of epidermis, he inserted the saw clear to the engine housing and began his quest for true meat.

  “Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria Tua,” Miriam recited as she primed the altar. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Opening a box of Diamond kitchen matches, she ignited a stick, cupped the vulnerable flame, and lit the right-hand burner. “Hosanna in excelsis.” Instinctively they were opting for the grand manner, Thomas realized: an old-style Eucharist, complete with the Latin.