Towing Jehovah

by James Morrow

September 30.

  Night. A starless sky. A 10-knot wind from the east.

  So the angels lied to us. No, they didn’t lie, exactly. They trod beyond the truth; they permitted their grief to obscure God’s will. And if Raphael was overstating the case for an entombment, maybe he was overstating a few other notions as well—like my father being the man to absolve me.

  When angels dissemble, Popeye, whom can you trust?

  We’re steaming round and round the Hebrides, and my mind’s moving in circles too. I can see both sides, and it’s making me insane. If I give the padre his grand tour, it won’t be for personal gain. “Exhume Him,” Cassie tells me, “and I’ll walk out of your life forever.”

  And yet I wonder if Ockham and Sister Miriam aren’t right.

  I wonder if we don’t owe our species the truth.

  I wonder if hearing the bad news might not be the best thing that’s ever happened to Homo sapiens sapiens.

  For the first four years they lived like peasants in the cramped cottage Cassie had been renting in Irvington, but after they struck it rich they decided to indulge themselves and move into the city. Despite their newfound wealth, Cassie held onto her job, doggedly explicating natural selection and other unsettling ideas for the God-fearing students of Tarrytown Community College while Anthony stayed home and took care of little Stevie. Best to play it safe, they decided. Their money might run out sooner than expected.

  Being a parent in Manhattan was a sobering and faintly absurd undertaking. Police sirens sabotaged naps. Air pollution aggravated colds. To make sure Stevie got home safely from Montessori each afternoon, Anthony and Cassie had to hire a Korean martial-arts instructor as his escort. Still, they would have had it no other way. The spacious fourth-floor walk-up they’d acquired on the Upper East Side included full roof rights, and after Stevie was asleep they would snuggle together on their beach recliners, stare at the grimy sky, and imagine they were lying on the fo’c’sle deck of the late Valparaíso.

  Their fortune traced to an unlikely source. Shortly after landing back in Manhattan, Anthony got the idea of showing his private papers to Father Ockham, who in turn delivered them to Joanne Margolis, the eccentric literary agent who handled the priest’s cosmology books. Margolis forthwith pronounced Anthony’s journal “the finest surrealistic sea adventure ever written,” showed it to an editor at the Naval Institute Press, and secured a modest advance of three thousand dollars. No one ever imagined so strange a book becoming a New York Times best-seller, but within six months of publication The Gospel According to Popeye had miraculously beaten the odds.

  At first Anthony and Cassie feared the bulk of the royalties would go toward lawyers’ fees and court costs, but then it became clear that neither the United States Attorney General nor the Norwegian government had any interest in prosecuting what appeared to be less a criminal case than an instance of fantasy role-playing gone horribly awry. The families of the three dead actors were infuriated by this inertia (Carny Otis’s widow journeyed all the way to Oslo in an effort to move the wheels of justice), and their rage persisted until the Vatican Secretary of State intervened. Having hired the impetuous Christopher Van Horne in the first place, Eugenic Cardinal Orselli naturally regarded it as his moral duty to recompense the bereaved. Each next of kin received a tax-free gift of three and a half million dollars. By the summer of ’99, the whole messy affair of Midway Redux no longer haunted the Van Horne-Fowler household.

  Anthony couldn’t decide whether his decision to leave the corpse in place was courageous or a cop-out. At least once a week he would travel uptown and join Thomas Ockham for a picnic lunch of Brie sandwiches and white wine in Fort Tryon Park, after which they would stroll through the Cloisters, puzzling out their obligations to Homo sapiens sapiens. Once Anthony thought he saw a robed angel swoop through the Fuentidueña Chapel, but it was only a beautiful Columbia grad student in a long white dress, applying for a job as a docent.

  The deal they’d cut with Di Luca and Orselli was a paragon of symmetry. Anthony and Ockham would not reveal that The Gospel According to Popeye was factual, and Rome would not appropriate the corpse and burn it. While the notion of a grand tour continued to intrigue both the captain and the priest, they were coming to realize that such a spectacle might very well lead to something far sadder and bloodier than the brave new world Ockham had envisioned the day he’d explored the derelict Regina Maris. Then, too, there was the appalling presumption of it all. Nobody, Anthony felt, had the right to take the illusion of God away—not even God had that right, despite His evidently having attempted to do so.

  The party Anthony and Cassie threw when Stevie turned six served a dual purpose. It celebrated the boy’s birthday, and it brought together seven alumni of the Valparaíso’s last voyage. They came bearing gifts: stuffed whale, jigsaw puzzle, six-shooter and holster, electric train, first-baseman’s mitt, toy tugboat, set of Fisher-Price homunculi. Sam Follingsbee baked the cake, Stevie’s favorite, Swiss chocolate with cherry frosting.

  As the moon rose, the confessions began, each sailor admitting to an intense private terror that his knowledge of what lay entombed above Svalbard might one day deprive him of his sanity. Marbles Rafferty disclosed that suicide figured in his fantasies with much greater frequency than before his trip to the Arctic. Crock O’Connor frankly discussed his impulse to call up Larry King Live and tell the world its prayers were falling on ruptured eardrums. And yet, so far, they’d all managed to become functional and even flourishing citizens of Anno Postdomini Seven.

  Rafferty was now master of the Exxon Bangor. O’Connor, retired from the sea, currently spent his days and nights trying to invent a holographic tattoo. Follingsbee ran the Octopus’s Garden in Bayonne, an atmospheric waterfront restaurant whose menu included not a single item of seafood. Lou Chickering was playing a chronically adulterous brain surgeon on The Sands of Time and had just been featured as Heartthrob of the Week in Suds and Studs magazine. Lianne Bliss was working as the technical director of a radical feminist radio station broadcasting from Queens. Ockham and Sister Miriam had recently coauthored Out of Many, One, a comprehensive history of humankind’s ever-changing images of God, from the radical monotheism of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton to the Cosmic Christ of Teilhard de Chardin. The introduction was by Neil Weisinger, presently a rabbi serving a thriving congregation of Reform Jews in Brooklyn.

  After the party, while the grown-ups lingered downstairs, indulging in second helpings of cake and admiring the conches and birds’ nests Cassie had collected on her honeymoon cruise to the Galápagos, father and son retired to the roof. The wind was crisp, the night miraculously clear. It was as if the island itself had set sail, flying beneath a cloudless sky.

  “Who made them?” Stevie asked, pointing to the stars.

  Anthony wanted to say “an old man at the North Pole,” but he knew this would only confuse the boy. “God did.”

  “Who’s God?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “When did He do it?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Is He still around?”

  The captain inhaled a lungful of gritty Manhattan air. “Of course He’s still around.”

  “Good.”

  Together they picked out their favorites: Sirius, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Aldebaran, Orion’s belt. Stevie Van Horne was a sailor’s boy. He knew the Milky Way like the back of his hand. As the child’s eyes drooped, Anthony chanted the several names of the mariner’s best friend: “North Star, Lodestar, Polestar, Polaris,” he sang, over and over—“North Star, Lodestar, Polestar, Polaris”—and by this method brought his son to the brink of sleep.

  “Happy birthday, Stevie,” Anthony told the drowsy child, carrying him down the ladder. “I love you,” he said, tucking the boy in bed.

  “Daddy loves Stevie,” squawked Pirate Jenny. “Froggy loves Tiffany. Daddy loves Stevie.”

  As it turned out, Tiffany hadn’t wanted the bird. She didn’t like animals, and she knew t
hat Jenny would function less as a sweet memento of her late husband than as a remorseless reminder of his death. Anthony had spent over twenty hours teaching the macaw her new trick, but it’d been worth it. All the world’s children, he felt, should fall asleep hearing some feathered and affectionate creature—a parrot, a mynah bird, an angel—whispering in their ears.

  For a time he stood looking at Stevie, just looking. The boy had his mother’s nose, his father’s chin, his paternal grandmother’s mouth. Moonlight poured into the room, bathing a plastic model of the starship Enterprise in a luminous haze. From the birdcage came the steady, clocklike tick of Pirate Jenny pecking at her mirror.

  Occasionally—not this night, but occasionally—a dark mantle of pungent Texas crude would materialize on the parrot, rolling down her back and wings, flowing across the floor of the cage, and falling drip-drip-drip onto the carpet.

  Whenever this happened, Anthony’s response was always the same. He would press Raphael’s feather against his chest and breathe deeply until the oil went away.

  “Froggy loves Tiffany. Daddy loves Stevie.”

  Anthony loves Cassie, he thought.

  The captain turned off the bedroom light, pulled the blue silk canopy over Jenny’s cage, and stepped back into the dark hallway. Sea fever rose in his soul. The moon tugged at his blood. The Atlantic said, Come hither. North Star, Lodestar, Polestar…

  How long would he be able to hold out? Until Cassie got her next sabbatical? Until Stevie was tall enough to take the helm and steer? No, the voyage must come sooner than that. Anthony could see it all now. In a year or so he’d get on the phone and make the arrangements. Cargo, crew, ship: not a supertanker, something more romantic—a bulk carrier, a freighter. A month later the whole family would rise at dawn and drive to Bayonne. They’d eat a fantastic breakfast at Follingsbee’s restaurant on Canal Street. Scrambled eggs slathered with catsup, crisp strips of real bacon, wet crescents of honeydew melon, bagel halves mortared together with Philadelphia cream cheese. Bellies full, all senses at peak, Anthony and Stevie would kiss Cassie goodbye. They’d get on board. Light the boilers. Pick a port. Plot a course. And then, like those canny Dutch traders who inhabited their blood, they’d set out toward the sun, steady as she goes: the captain and his cabin boy, off with the morning tide.

  James Morrow received the Nebula Award for his most recent novella, City of Truth, and the World Fantasy Award for his fourth novel, Only Begotten Daughter. His work has been called Swiftian, and he has been said to wield “a darkly glittering scalpel.” As Michael Bishop has admiringly put it, “In Iran, Morrow wouldn’t last two sentences.” He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two children.

  Bonus

  James Morrow writes, “Echoes of ‘Director’s Cut’ survive here and there in the [novel] manuscript, but the narrative structure could not accommodate a complete, autonomous one-cut play. And so, rather poetically, this play about ‘missing scenes’ is itself a missing scene.”

  Director’s Cut

  THE CURTAIN RISES ON the prophet MOSES, caught in the glow of a spotlight and sitting atop a mound of Dead Sea sand. The famous Tablets of the Law stick out of the dune like ears on a Mickey Mouse cap. A large rear-projection video screen hangs over Moses’s head. An off-stage INTERVIEWER addresses the patriarch.

  INTERVIEWER:

  So there we are, me and Dad and my little sister, sitting in the old Ziegfeld Theatre on 54th Street. The lights go down, the Paramount logo flashes across the screen, and then the movie comes on, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

  MOSES:

  What a terrific picture.

  INTERVIEWER:

  It sure impressed me as a kid. Today I find it a bit hokey.

  MOSES:

  Hokey? Hokey? Hell, no, Mr. DeMille was a certifiable genius.

  INTERVIEWER:

  IS it really true the original cut ran over seven hours?

  MOSES:

  (grunt of assent) No theater was willing to book the thing. The management would’ve had to serve dinner in the middle, like on a transcontinental flight from New York to Paris.

  INTERVIEWER:

  I heard a rumor that some of the original rushes still exist.

  MOSES:

  No way, Marty. You pull papyrus out by the roots and—bang—it disintegrates in a few weeks.

  Moses laughs boorishly.

  INTERVIEWER:

  In fact, I understand that those very rushes are in your possession.

  MOSES:

  Over the past forty years, I’ve managed to collect bits and pieces from nearly every missing scene.

  INTERVIEWER:

  For example?

  MOSES:

  The Plagues of Egypt. The release prints included blood, darkness, and hail…

  An excerpt from The Ten Commandments appears on the video screen: fiery hail clattering across the balcony of Pharaoh’s palace.

  MOSES:

  But they were lacking some of the really interesting ones. You should’ve seen what Mr. DeMille did with frogs.

  The screen displays two elderly, working-class Egyptian women, BAKETAMON and NELLIFER, potters by trade, sitting on the banks of the Nile River. As they speak, BAKETAMON fashions a canopic jar, NELLIFER a soup tureen.

  BAKETAMON:

  (addressing interviewer) The frogs? How could I ever forget the frogs?

  NELLIFER:

  You’d open your dresser drawer, hoping to find some clean socks and—pop—one of those little flickers would jump in your face.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Which plague was the worst?

  BAKETAMON:

  The boils, I think. My skin looked like the back of the moon.

  NELLIFER:

  The boils, are you kidding? The locusts were far worse than the boils.

  BAKETAMON:

  The mosquitoes were pretty nasty too.

  NELLIFER:

  And the gadflies.

  BAKETAMON:

  And the cattle getting murrain.

  NELLIFER:

  And the death of the firstborn. A lot of people hated that one.

  BAKETAMON:

  Of course, it didn’t touch Nelli and me.

  NELLIFER:

  We were lucky. Our firstborns were already dead.

  BAKETAMON:

  Mine froze solid in the hail.

  NELLIFER:

  Mine had been suffering from chronic diarrhea since he was a month old, so when the waters became blood—zap, kid got dehydrated.

  BAKETAMON:

  Nelli, your mind’s going. It was your secondborn who died when the waters became blood. Your firstborn died in the darkness, when he accidentally drank all that turpentine.

  NELLIFER:

  No, my secondborn got run over by a horse. It had nothing to do with religion. My third born drank the turpentine. A mother remembers these things.

  INTERVIEWER:

  I was certain you’d be more bitter about your ordeals.

  NELLIFER:

  Initially we thought the plagues were a bit much. We even wrote a book about it.

  BAKETAMON:

  When Bad Things Happen to Good Pagans.

  NELLIFER:

  Then we came to understand our innate depravity.

  BAKETAMON:

  There’s only one really good person in the whole universe, and that’s the Lord God Jehovah.

  NELLIFER:

  Next to Him, we’re a couple of slime molds.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Sounds as if you’ve converted to monotheism.

  BAKETAMON:

  (nodding) We love the Lord our God with all our heart.

  NELLIFER:

  And all our soul.

  BAKETAMON:

  And all our might.

  NELLIFER:

  And besides, there’s no telling what He might do to us next.

  BAKETAMON:

  Fire ants, possibly.

  NELLIFER:

  Killer
bees.

  BAKETAMON:

  Smallpox.

  NELLIFER:

  I got two sons left.

  BAKETAMON:

  I’m still up a daughter.

  NELLIFER:

  The Lord giveth.

  BAKETAMON:

  And the Lord taketh away.

  NELLIFER:

  Blessed be the name of the Lord.

  The screen goes blank.

  INTERVIEWER:

  When you went up on Mount Sinai, Jehovah offered you a lot more than the Decalogue.

  MOSES:

  (displays excised footage) Mr. DeMille shot everything, all six hundred and twelve laws. First to go were the prescriptions concerning slavery—the protocols for selling your daughter and so on. Unfortunately, those cuts reduced the running time a mere eight minutes.

  An excerpt from The Ten Commandments appears on the screen: God’s animated forefinger etching the Decalogue onto the face of Sinai, while Charlton Heston watches with a mixture of awe, fascination, and incredulity. As the last rule is carved—THOU SHALT NOT COVET—the frame suddenly freezes.

  GOD:

  (voice-over) Now for the details. (beat) When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, if you see a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable, you may make her your wife.

  INTERVIEWER:

  I have to admire Mr. DeMille for using something like that. Deuteronomy 21:10, right?

  MOSES:

  He was a gutsier filmmaker than his detractors imagine.

  GOD:

  (voice-over) When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut off her hand and show no pity.

  INTERVIEWER:

  Private parts?

  MOSES:

  The original Hebrew is less euphemistic. Deuteronomy 25:11.

  GOD:

  (voice-over) If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, his father and mother shall bring him out to the elders of the town, and all his fellow citizens shall stone the son to death.

  MOSES:

  Deuteronomy 21:18–21.

  INTERVIEWER: