Towing Jehovah (21 page)

"Anthony! Anthony!"

Rising from the slab, he realized he was hearing Ockham's professorial voice. "Padre!" Dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Panama hat, the priest stood panting in the sodomite's shadow. He looked dazed, shell-shocked, as might any man of his vocation beholding the gritty particulars of bestiality.

"We were on the corpse when the earbones snapped," said Ockham. "Most terrible noise I ever heard, the crack of doom. Somehow we made our way to the
Juan Fernandez."

"Thomas, I'm happy to see you," said Anthony, touching the priest's arm with the empty Monte Alban bottle. With decadence rampant among the crew and stone gods rising from the seabed, it was good to be with someone who'd heard of the Sermon on the Mount. "Everything's falling apart, and there you are, a port in a storm."

"Yesterday I danced naked in God's navel."

Anthony shuddered and gulped. "Oh?"

"With Sister Miriam." The priest seized the neck of his sweatshirt and peeled the sticky cotton from his chest. "A slip. The Idea of the Corpse. I'm in control now. Really."

"Father, what's going on? This island makes no sense."

"Miriam and I discussed the problem over dinner."

"Come up with anything?"

"Yeah, but it's pretty wild. Ready? I don't suppose you keep up with so-called chaos theory ..."

"I don't."

". . . but one of its key concepts is the 'strange attractor,' the phenomenon that evidently underlies turbulence and other seemingly random events. As the
Val
and her cargo traveled north, they may have generated a unique variety of turbulence, and the body—this is just a guess—the body became a strange attractor. Now, here's the crux. The old, pagan order would be particularly energized by an attractor of this sort. Understand? As the Corpus Dei passed overhead, this world was naturally drawn to it, eager to assert itself once again. You follow me?"

"You're saying His body acted like a magnet?"

"Exactly. A metaphysical magnet, pulling down preternatural mists from heaven even as it sucked up a pagan civilization from the ocean floor."

"Why didn't something like this happen way back in the Gulf of Guinea?"

"Presumably no pagan civilizations lie at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea."

"I've heard Atlantis used to be somewhere around here."

"Plato to the contrary, I'm quite certain Atlantis never existed."

"Then we'll keep calling it Van Horne Island."

Marching up to the glutton, Anthony pondered the peculiar combination of terror and rhapsody sculpted onto the doomed boar's face. Chaos theory . . . strange attractors . . . metaphysical magnets. Jesus.

"We won't let this place defeat us, right?" said the captain. "Maybe our ship's beached and our cargo's lost, but we'll still put up a fight. We'll get the deckies to dig us a canal."

"No," said Ockham. "Not possible." His tone was leaden and portentous. "They quit, Anthony."

"Who quit?"

"The crew."

"What?"

"It happened around midnight. They sprang Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Weisinger from the brig, then rigged up a gantry and unloaded a lot of stuff over the side—galley gear, video projectors, some heavy machinery, most of our food . . ."

"I don't believe I'm hearing this."

"Plus maybe a dozen crates of smuggled liquor and about two hundred six-packs."

"And then?"

"They took off. They're gone, Anthony."

"Gone?"
In the warm, bloody folds of the captain's cerebrum, a migraine began taking root. "Gone where?"

"I last saw them heading north across the dunes."

"Officers too? Engineers?"

"Spicer, Haycox, Ramsey."

"Who stayed?"

"Miriam, of course, plus Rafferty, O'Connor, our castaway, our radio officer—"

"Cassie stayed? Good."

"Her way of repaying us, I suppose."

"Anybody else?"

"Chickering. Follingsbee. Counting me, you've got eight people on your side."

"Mutiny," said Anthony, the word turning to dung in his mouth.

"Desertion, more like."

"No, mutiny." Gripping the empty mescal bottle by the neck, he smashed it against the glutton's left knee, launching the pickled worm into the air. Bastards. He'd show them. It was one thing to break every law known on land and quite another to violate the first commandment of the sea. Turn against your captain?

You might as well eat lye, fire a laser at a mirror, write the Devil a bad check. "What do they think they can accomplish with this shit?"

"Hard to say."

"We're gonna hunt 'em down, Thomas."

"Spicer mentioned one goal."

"Hunt 'em down and hang 'em from the kingposts! Every last mutineer! What goal?"

"He said they'd be giving their prisoners—quote—'the punishment they deserve'.''

When Cassie learned that Big Joe Spicer, Dolores Haycox, Bud Ramsey, and most of the crew had gone berserk, looting the tanker and fleeing across the sands, a rage rushed through her such as she'd not known since the
Village Voice
had called her Jephthah play "the sort of theatrical evening that gives sophomoric humor a bad name." Without a crew, there was no way to free the ship; without a ship, no way to catch the carcass and resume the tow; without a tow, no way for Oliver's mercenaries to locate and sink their target. Meanwhile, the damn thing was bobbing around in the Gibraltar Sea, where any fool could stumble on it. Perhaps any fool
had
stumbled on it. For all Cassie knew, a bunch of Texas fundamentalists were busy hauling the Corpus Dei toward Galveston Bay, intending to make it the centerpiece of a Christian theme park.

What most frustrated her was the feebleness of the deserters' reasoning, the way they were exploiting God's body to justify their spurious embrace of anarchy. "They're using it as an
excuse"
she complained to Father Thomas and Sister Miriam. "Why can't they see that?"

"I suspect they
can
see it," said the priest. "But they love their newfound freedom, right? They need to keep on following it, all the way to the edge."

"It's the logic of Ivan Karamazov, isn't it?" said Miriam. "If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted." The priest knitted his brow. "One also thinks of Schopenhauer. Without a Supreme Being, life becomes sterile and meaningless. I hope Kant had it right—I hope people possess some scrt of inborn ethical sense. I seem to recall him rhapsodizing somewhere about 'the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.' “

"Critique of Practical Reason,"
said Miriam. "I agree, Tom. The deserters, all of us, we've got to make Kant's leap of faith— his leap
out
of faith, I should say. We must get in touch with our congenital consciences. Otherwise we're lost."

Thomas and Miriam, Cassie decided, enjoyed a rapport and an affection—indeed, a passion—many married couples would have envied. "I made that leap years ago," she said. "Take a hard-nosed look at Part Two of
The Ten Commandments,
and you'll see that God knows nothing of goodness."

"Well, I certainly wouldn't go that far," said Miriam.

"I would," said Cassie.

"I know you would," said Father Thomas dryly.

"It's not like Kant was an
atheist,"
added the nun, setting her exquisite teeth in a grim smile. As the day wore on, Cassie inevitably found herself thinking of
God Without Tears,
her one-act deconstruction of
The Ten Commandments.
God knew nothing of goodness, goodness knew nothing of God — it was all so wrenchingly obvious, yet over three-quarters of the ship's company had succumbed to the Idea of the Corpse. Maddening.

Her dream that night carried her off the island, over the Atlantic, and back to New York City, where she found herself sitting front row center at Playwrights Horizons, attending the premiere of
God Without
Tears.
Up on the stage, the glow of a spotlight caught the prophet Moses crouching at the base of a Dead Sea sand dune, fielding questions from an unseen interviewer who wanted to know all about "the legendary unexpurgated version of DeMille's motion picture masterpiece." The audience consisted entirely of the
Valparaíso's
officers and crew. To Cassie's left sat Joe Spicer, petting a creature that alternated between being a Norway rat and a horseshoe crab. To her right: Dolores Haycox, methodically tying knots in a Liberian sea snake. Behind her: Bud Ramsey, smoking a Dacron mooring line.

Moses hikes up the dune and caresses the Tablets of the Law, which out of the sand like the ears
on a Mickey Mouse cap.

Is it true DeMille's original cut was over seven hours long?

Uh-huh. The exhibitors insisted he trim it back to four,
(holds up fistful of motion picture film).
During the last decade, I've managed to collect bits and pieces from nearly every lost scene.

For example?

The Plagues of Egypt. The release prints included blood, darkness, and hail, but they were missing all the really interesting ones.

The spotlight shifts to two elderly, wording-class Egyptian women, Baketamon and Nellifer,
potters by trade, pulling clay from the banks of the Nile.

Tell me about the frogs.

It was hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

You'd open your unmentionables drawer and—pop—one of them little fuckers would jump in your face.

Don't let anyone tell you God hasn't got a sense of humor.

Which plague was the worst?

The boils, I'd say.

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

The mosquitoes were pretty bad, too.

And the flies.

And the cattle getting murrain.

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

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

We were lucky. Our firstborns were already dead.

Mine died in the hail.

Frozen?

Beaned.

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

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 that turpentine.

No, my
secondborn
died much later, drowned when the Red Sea rolled back into its bed. My
thirdborn
drank the turpentine. A mother remembers these things.

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

Initially we thought the plagues were unjust. Then we came to understand our innate depravity and intrinsic wickedness.

There's only one good Person in the whole universe, and that's the Lord God Jehovah.

You've converted to monotheism?

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

All our soul.

All our strength.

Besides, there's no telling what He might do to us next.

Fire ants, possibly.

Killer bees.

Meningitis.

I've got two sons left.

I'm still up a daughter.

The Lord giveth.

And the Lord taketh away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Cassie scanned the audience. Shimmering halos of pure reason hovered above Joe Spicer, Dolores Haycox, and Bud Ramsey, igniting their faces with skepticism's holy glow. The Enlightenment, she sensed, was about to prevail. As
God Without Tears
progressed, the
Valparaíso
deserters would inevitably come to apprehend and reject the fatal fallacy on which they were predicating their rebellion.
The spotlight swings back to Moses atop the sand dune.

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

DeMille shot everything, Marty, all six hundred and twelve laws, each one destined for the cutting-room floor.

A rear-projection screen descends, displaying an excerpt from
The Ten Commandments.
God's
animated forefinger is busily etching the Decalogue on the face of Sinai. 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.

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

You got it, Marty. He was a much 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.

"Private parts"? DeMille used
that?

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.