by James Morrow
The Maracaibo sailed southeast, crashing through the Arctic Ocean at a brisk sixteen knots as she headed toward the coast of Russia. For Thomas Ockham, the mood aboard the tanker was difficult to decipher. Naturally the sailors were delighted to be going home, but beneath their happiness he sensed acute melancholy and a grief past understanding. On the night of their departure from Kvitoya, a dozen or so off-duty deckies gathered in the rec room for a kind of eschatological hootenanny, and soon the entire superstructure was resounding with “Rock of Ages,” “Kum-Ba-Yah,” “Go Down Moses,” “Amazing Grace,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” The next day at noon, Thomas celebrated Mass as usual, and for the first time ever a whopping ninety percent of available Christians showed up.
As it turned out, the port of Murmansk boasted a deep-water mooring platform, the sort of rig that allowed a tanker to discharge her cargo directly into seabed pipes without entering harbor. Van Horne arranged the transaction over the ship-to-shore radio, and within four hours of hooking up, the Maracaibo had been pumped dry. Although the Russians could not comprehend why the Catholic Church was giving them eight million gallons of Arabian crude oil for free, they quickly stopped looking this gift horse in the mouth. Winter was coming.
On the morning of September 25, as the Maracaibo drew near the Hebrides, the urge to think overcame Thomas. He knew just what to do. Early in the voyage, he’d discovered that a supertanker’s central catwalk was the perfect place for contemplation, as conducive to quietude as a monastery arcade. One slow march down its length and back, and he had effectively penetrated some great mystery—why existing TOE equations failed to accommodate gravity, why the universe contained more matter than antimatter, why God had died. A second such march, and he had ruthlessly generated a thousand reasons for calling his answer invalid.
Tall, choppy waves surrounded the Maracaibo. Walking aft, Thomas imagined himself as Moses leading the escaping Hebrews across the Red Sea basin, guiding them past the slippery rocks and bewildered fish, a cliff of suspended water towering on each side. But Thomas did not feel like Moses just then. He did not feel like any sort of prophet. He felt like the universe’s stooge, a man who could barely solve a riddle on a Happy Meal box, much less derive a Theory of Everything or crack the conundrum of his Creator’s passing.
A cosmic assassination?
An unimaginable supernatural virus?
A broken heart?
He looked to port.
The derelict bore the name Regina Maris: an old-style freighter with deckhouses both amidships and aft, dead in the water and drifting aimlessly through the Scottish mist like some phantom frigate out of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By 1400 Thomas was ascending her gangway, Marbles Rafferty right behind. The cold fog enshrouded them, turning their breath to vapor and roughening their skin with goose bumps.
As he stepped onto the main deck, Thomas saw that heaven’s very remnants had figured in the Regina’s ill-starred run. Evidently she’d been manned by cherubs. Their gray, bloated corpses lay everywhere—dozens of plump miniangels rotting atop the fo’c’sle, putrefying by the kingposts, suppurating on the quarterdeck. Tiny feathers danced on the North Sea breeze like snowflakes.
“Captain, it’s a pretty weird scene here,” said Rafferty into the walkie-talkie. “About forty dead children with wings on their backs.”
Van Horne’s voice sputtered from the speaker. “Children? Christ…”
“Let me talk to him,” Thomas insisted, appropriating the walkie-talkie. “Not children, Anthony. Cherubs.”
“Cherubs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No survivors?”
“I don’t think so. It’s amazing they got this far north.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Van Horne.
“When cherubs come,” said Thomas, “angels can’t be far behind.”
Pitted with rust, pocked with corrosion, the Regina was in no better shape than her crew. It was as if she’d been scooped up and sucked upon by God Himself—smashed against His cuspids, burned with His saliva—then spit back into the sea. Thomas started into the amidships deckhouse, following a sharp, fruity odor of such intensity it overpowered the cherubs’ stench. His jugular veins throbbed. Blood pounded in his ears. The scent led him down a damp corridor, up a narrow companionway, and into a gloomy cabin.
On the far bulkhead hung Robert Campin’s masterful Annunciation—either a copy or the original from the Manhattan Cloisters, the priest didn’t know for sure. A lambent glow issued from the bunk. Thomas approached at the same respectful pace he’d employed three months earlier when greeting Pope Innocent XIV.
“Who’s there?” asked the angel, propping himself up on his elbows. A black, fallen halo hung around his neck like a discarded fan belt from Van Horne Island.
“Thomas Ockham, Society of Jesus.”
“I’ve heard of you.” The bed sheet slipped to the floor, revealing the creature’s wasted body. His flesh, though cracked and gritty, was exquisite in its own way, like sandpaper manufactured for some holy task—smoothing the Cross, buffing the Ark. A small harp bridged the gap between his knobby knees. His wings, naked as a bat’s, rested atop mounds of shed feathers. “Call me Michael.”
“It’s an honor, Michael.” Thomas pressed SEND. “Anthony?”
“Yeah?”
“We were right. An angel.”
“The last angel,” rasped Michael. His voice had a dry, brittle quality, as if his larynx had rusted along with his ship.
“Anything I can do for you?” asked Thomas, slipping the walkie-talkie into the pocket of his parka. “You thirsty?”
“Thirsty. Quite so. Please—on the bureau…”
Crossing the cabin, Thomas located a four-chambered glass bottle shaped like a human heart and filled with water.
“Am I too late?” The angel lifted the harp from atop his knees. “Did I miss His funeral?”
“You missed it, yes.” Pressing the bottle to Michael’s withered lips, Thomas realized the angel was blind. His eyes, milky and motionless, lay in his head like pearls wrought by some terminally ill oyster. “I’m sorry.”
“But He’s safe now?”
“Quite safe.”
“Not too much decay?”
“Not too much.”
“Still smiling?”
“Still smiling.”
Michael laid his right hand on his harp and began picking out the famous zither theme from The Third Man. “Wh-where are we?”
“The Hebrides.”
“That near Kvitoya?”
“Kvitoya’s two thousand miles away,” the priest admitted.
“Then I won’t even get to visit the body.”
“True.” The angel’s fever was so intense Thomas could feel the heat against his cheeks. “You built Him a beautiful tomb.”
“We did, didn’t we? It was my idea to inter Him with His masterpieces. Whale, orchid, sparrow, cobra. We had a tough time deciding what to include. Adabiel made a big pitch for human inventions…argued they were His by extension. Wheel, plow, VCR, harpsichord, hardball—we’re all such Yankees fans—but then Zaphiel said, ‘Okay, let’s put in a .356 Magnum,’ and that settled the matter.”
A crepuscular cabin on a derelict freighter in the middle of the dreary North Sea: not a likely setting for revelation, yet that was what now struck Thomas Wickliff Ockham, S.J.—a revelation, a luminous truth blazing through his mortal soul.
“There’s a fact I must know,” he said. “Did God actually request the Kvitoya tomb? Did He come to you and say, ‘Bury Me in the Arctic’?”
Michael coughed explosively, peppering the Campin Annunciation with droplets of blood. “We peered over the edge of heaven. We saw His body adrift off Gabon. We said, ‘Something must be done.’”
“Let me get this straight. He never asked to be buried?”
“It seemed the decent thing to do,” said the angel.
“But He never asked.”
“No.”
“So in sending His corpse to earth, He may’ve had something other than a funeral in mind?”
“Possibly.”
Possibly. Probably. Certainly. “Do you want extreme unction?” asked Thomas. “I have no chrism, but there’s a ton of consecrated firefighting foam on the Maracaibo.”
Michael closed his sightless eyes. “That reminds me of an old joke. ‘How do you make holy water?’ Ever heard it, Father?”
“I don’t know.”
“You take some water and you boil the hell out of it.’ Extreme unction? No. Thank you—but no. The sacraments don’t matter anymore. Precious little matters anymore. I don’t even care if the Yankees are still in first place. Are they?”
Thomas would never know whether Michael heard the good news, for the instant the priest offered his reply—“Yes, the Yankees are still in first place”—the archangel’s eyes liquefied, his hands melted, and his torso disintegrated like the Tower of Babel crumbling beneath God’s withering breath.
Thomas stared at the bunk, beholding Michael’s ashy remains with a mixture of disbelief and awe. He drew out the walkie-talkie. “You there, Anthony?”
“What’s going on?” demanded Van Horne.
“We lost him.”
“I’m not surprised.”
The priest ran his fingers through the soft gray ephemera on the mattress. “Captain, I think I’ve got the answer.”
“You’ve discovered a TOE?”
“I know why God died. Not only that, I’ve decided what our next move should be.”
“Why’d He die?”
“It’s complicated. Listen—tonight’s supper will be a private affair. I’m inviting only four people: you, Miriam, Di Luca, your girlfriend.”
“Whatever your theory, I doubt that my girlfriend will accept it.”
“That’s exactly why I want her there. If I can persuade Cassie Fowler to disinter the corpse, I can persuade anybody.”
“Disinter it?”
Thomas bundled the divine dust and holy feathers into the bedsheet, securing the corners with a convoluted knot.
“Answer me, Thomas. What do you mean, ‘disinter it’?”
For reasons known only to himself, Sam Follingsbee bypassed the Maracaibo’s normal stores that evening and instead cooked up a copious Chinese buffet using the last of the meat they’d salvaged from the sinking Valparaíso. After Thomas said grace, he and his guests dug in. They ate slowly—reverently, in fact, even the habitually sacrilegious Cassie Fowler. Di Luca, too, seemed to approach his meal with piety, as if he somehow sensed its source.
Swallowing a mouthful of artificial mu gu gai pan, Thomas said, “I have a theory for you.”
“He’s solved the great riddle,” Van Horne explained, devouring a mock wonton.
“I’ll start with a question,” said Thomas. “What’s the most accurate metaphor for God?”
“Love,” said Sister Miriam.
“Try again.”
“Judge,” said Di Luca.
“Besides that?”
“Creator,” said Fowler.
“Close.”
“Father,” said Van Horne.
Thomas ate a morsel of bogus Szechuan beef. “Exactly. Father. And what would you say is every father’s ultimate obligation?”
“To respect his children,” said Van Horne.
“Provide them with unconditional love,” said Miriam.
“A strong moral foundation,” said Di Luca.
“Feed them, clothe them, house them,” said Fowler.
“Forgive me, but I think you’re all wrong,” said Thomas. “A father’s ultimate obligation is to stop being a father. You follow me? At some point, he must step aside and allow his sons and daughters to enter adulthood. And that’s precisely what I think God did. He realized our continued belief in Him was constraining us, holding us back—infantilizing us, if you will.”
“Oh, that old argument,” sneered Di Luca. “I must say, I’m saddened to hear it from the author of The Mechanics of Grace.”
“I think maybe Tom’s on to something,” said Miriam.
“You would,” said Di Luca.
“A father’s obliged to step aside,” said Van Horne. “He’s not obliged to drop dead.”
“He is if He’s you-know-Who,” said Thomas. “Think about it. As long as God kept aloof, His decision to enter oblivion would remain a secret. But if He incarnated Himself, came to earth…”
“Excuse me,” said Di Luca, “but at least one of us at this table believes just such an event happened about two thousand years ago.”
“I believe it happened too,” said Thomas. “But history marches on, Eminence. We can’t live in the past.”
Fowler sipped oolong tea. “What, exactly, are you saying, Father? Are you saying He killed Himself?”
“Yes.”
“Cripes.”
“Knowing full well His angels would die of empathy?” asked Van Horne.
“That’s how much He loved the world,” said Thomas. “He willed Himself out of existence, simultaneously giving us ponderous proof of the fact.”
“So where’s His suicide note?” asked Fowler.
“Maybe He never wrote one. Maybe it’s inscribed on His body in some arcane fashion.” Thomas loaded his fork with counterfeit calamari in black bean sauce. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I, for one, am quite moved by our Creator’s selflessness.”
“And I, for one, think you’re way out on a limb,” said Di Luca, eyes narrowing. “Could you tell us exactly how you arrived at this bizarre conclusion?”
“Jesuitical deduction,” Thomas replied, “combined with a crucial fact I learned this afternoon from Michael.”
“What fact?”
“God never asked to be buried. The archangels acted completely on their own. They looked down, saw His body, and with the last of their strength they built Him a tomb.”
“Pretty meager data,” said Di Luca, “for such a lofty hypothesis.”
Van Horne tore into his ersatz Hunan chicken. “When you radioed me from the Regina, you said you knew what our next move should be.”
“Our duty is clear—at least, I think it is,” said Thomas. “After supper, we must bring the Maracaibo about and go back to Svalbard. We’ll re-enter the tomb, hook ourselves up to the body again, and take it on a grand tour.”
“On a what?” said Di Luca.
“Grand tour.”
“The hell we will,” said Fowler.
“Have you lost your mind?” said Di Luca.
“We’ll visit every major Western port, corpse in tow,” Thomas insisted, rising from the table. “If the Maracaibo can’t handle the load, we’ll press other tankers into service en route. The news will travel ahead of us. We can count on CNN. Okay, sure, initially the public will react with denial, terror, grief, everything we observed on the Val when we told the sailors the score, and, yes, as the Idea of the Corpse takes hold there may be an epidemic of anomie such as occurred on Van Horne Island—though, of course, as the captain here explained to Tullio in the wardroom, that was primarily an effect of prolonged and intimate contact with the body—but in any case the categorical imperative will soon kick in, and after that euphoria will follow. Are you seeing this, people? Can you picture the excited mobs charging through the streets of Lisbon, Marseilles, Athens, Naples, and New York, thronging onto the docks, eager for a peek? The human race has been waiting for such an hour. They may not know it, but they’ve been waiting. Bands will play. Flags will fly. Vendors will hawk hot dogs, popcorn, T-shirts, pennants, bumper stickers, souvenir programs. ‘We’re free!’ everyone will shout. ‘Today we are grown men, today we are grown women—the universe is ours!’”
Thomas sat down and quietly loaded a flaky pancake with pseudo mu shu pork.
Fowler snorted.
Van Horne sighed.
“I must say, Professor,” said Di Luca, “that is quite the most
ridiculous proposal I have ever heard in my life.”
Despite Thomas’s profound lack of respect for Di Luca, the cardinal’s rejection hurt, cutting into him like the negative review The Christian Century had given The Mechanics of Grace.
Have I reasoned incorrectly? he wondered.
“I want to know what the rest of you think. I promised myself I wouldn’t pursue this plan unless a majority at this table tonight favored it.”
“I’ll tell you my opinion,” said Fowler. “If humankind ever learns en masse that God Almighty can no longer fog a mirror, they won’t feel like rushing out and climbing mountains—they’ll feel like crawling into holes and dying.”
“Well put, Dr. Fowler,” said Di Luca.
“And I also think, as I’ve been saying all along—I also think that, once they return to daylight, they’ll institute a theocracy so stifling and misogynistic it will make medieval Spain look like the Phil Donahue show.”
Thomas bit through an egg roll, pointing the stump toward Sister Miriam. “That’s two votes against my proposal and one vote—my own—for it.”
The nun patted her lips with a white linen napkin. “Goodness, Tom, it was so blasted much trouble laying Him to rest. The idea of undoing our efforts—it’s a bit overwhelming.” She wrapped the napkin tightly around her hand, as if bandaging a wounded palm. “But the more I think about it, the more I realize we probably have a responsibility to share the Corpus Dei with the rest of humankind. It’s what He wanted, right?”
“That’s two for, two against,” said Thomas. “It’s up to you, Captain.”
“If you vote yes,” said Fowler, “I’ll never speak to you again.”
For an entire minute, Van Horne said nothing. He sat silently before his egg noodles, absently combing the pale yellow strands with his fork. Thomas fancied he could see the workings of the captain’s brain, the throb and flash of his five billion neurons.
“I think…”
“Yes?”
“…that I would like to sleep on it.”
