Towing Jehovah (4 page)

"What task?" asked Thomas.

"Salvaging the Corpus Dei." Bright tears spilled down Gabriel's fissured cheeks. Luminous mucus leaked from his nostrils. "Protecting Him from those"—the angel cast a quick glance toward Di Luca—"who would exploit His condition for their own ends. Giving Him a decent burial."

"Once the body's in Arctic waters," Orselli explained, "the putrefaction will stop."

"We have prepared a place," said Gabriel, listlessly picking out the
Dies Irae
on his instrument. "An iceberg tomb adjoining Kvitoya."

"And all the while,
you'll
be on the navigation bridge," said Di Luca, laying a red-gloved hand on Thomas's shoulder. "Our sole liaison, keeping Van Horne on his appointed path. The man's no Catholic, you see. He's barely a Christian."

"The ship's manifest will list you as a PAC—a Person in Addition to Crew," said Orselli. "In reality you'll be the most important man on the voyage."

"Let me be explicit." Gabriel fixed his electric eyes directly on Innocent XIV. "We want an honorable interment, nothing more. No stunts, Holiness. None of your billion-dollar funerals, no priceless sculpture on the tomb, no carving Him up for relics."

"We understand," said the Pope.

"I'm not sure you do. You run a tenacious organization, gentlemen. We're afraid you don't know when to quit."

"You can trust us," said Di Luca.

Curling his left wing into a semicircle, Gabriel brushed Thomas's cheek with the tip. "I envy you, Professor. Unlike me, you'll have time to figure out why this awful event happened. I'm convinced that, if you apply the full measure of your Jesuit intellect to the problem, pondering it night and day as the
Valparaíso
plies the North Atlantic, you're bound to hit upon the solution."

"Through reason alone?" said Thomas.

"Through reason alone. I can practically guarantee it. Give yourself till journey's end, and the answer to the riddle will suddenly—"

A harsh, guttural groan. Dr. Carminati rushed over and, opening the angel's robe, pressed the stethoscope against his milk-white bosom. Whimpering softly, Innocent XIV brought his right hand to his lips and sucked the velvet fingertips.

Gabriel sank into the nearest seat, his halo darkening until it came to resemble a lei of dead flowers.

"Pardon, Holiness"—the physician popped the stethoscope out of his ears—"but we should return him to the infirmary now.

"Go with God," said the Pope, raising his moistened hand, rotating it sideways, and etching an invisible cross in the air.

"Remember," said the angel, "no stunts."

The young doctor looped his arm around Gabriel's shoulder and, like a dutiful son guiding his dying father down the hallway of a cancer ward, escorted him out of the room.

Thomas studied the barren screen. God's dead body? God had a body? What were the cosmological implications of this astonishing claim? Was He truly gone, or had His spirit merely vacated some gratuitous husk? (Gabriel's grief suggested there was no putting a happy face on the situation.) Did heaven still exist? (Since the afterlife consisted essentially in God's eternal presence, then the answer was logically no, but surely the question merited further study.) What of the Son and the Ghost? (Assuming Catholic theology counted for anything, then these Persons were inert now too, the Trinity being ipso facto indivisible, but, again, the issue manifestly deserved the attentions of a synod or perhaps even a Vatican Council.)

He turned to the other clerics. "There are problems here."

"A secret consistory has been in session since Tuesday," said the Pope, nodding. "The entire College of Cardinals, burning the midnight oil. We're tackling the full spectrum: the possible causes of death, the chances of resuscitation, the future of the Church . . ."

"We'd like your answer now, Father Ockham," said Di Luca. "The
Valparaíso
weighs anchor in just five days."

Thomas took a deep breath, enjoying the rich, savory hypocrisy of the moment. Historically, Rome had tended to regard her Jesuits as expendable, something between a nuisance and a threat. Ah, but now that the chips were down, to whom did the Vatican turn? To the faithful, unflappable warriors of Ignatius Loyola, that's who.

"May I keep this?" Thomas lifted a stray feather from the floor.

"Very well," said Innocent XIV.

Thomas's gaze wandered back and forth between the Pope and the feather. "One item on your agenda confuses me."

"Do you accept?" demanded Di Luca.

"What item?" asked the Pope.

The feather exuded a feeble glow, like a burning candle fashioned from the tallow of some lost, forsaken lamb.

"Resuscitation."

Resuscitation:
the word wove tauntingly through Thomas's head as he emerged from the fetid dampness of Union Square Station and started down Fourteenth Street. It was all highly speculative, of course; the desiccation rate Di Luca had selected for a Supreme Being's central nervous system (ten thousand neurons a minute) bordered on the arbitrary. But assuming the
cardinale
knew whereof he spoke, an encouraging conclusion followed. According to the Vatican's OMNIVAC-5000, He would not be brain-dead before the eighteenth of August—a sufficient interval in which to ferry Him above the Arctic Circle—though it had to be allowed that the computer had made the prediction under protest, crying INSUFFICIENT DATA all the way.

The June air fell heavily on Thomas's flesh, an oppressive cloak of raw Manhattan heat. His face grew slick with perspiration, making his bifocals slide down his nose. On both sides of the street, peddlers labored in the sultry dusk, gathering up their shrinkwrapped audiocassettes, phony Cartier watches, and spastic mechanical bears and piling them into their station wagons. To Thomas's eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of
The Arabian Nights
with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart. Each vendor wore a wholly impassive face, the shell-shocked, world-weary stare of the urban foot soldier. Thomas envied them their ignorance. Whatever their present pains, whatever defeats and disasters they were sustaining, at least they could imagine that a living God presided over their planet. He turned right onto Second Avenue, walked south two blocks, and, pulling Gabriel's feather from his breast pocket, climbed the steps of a mottled brownstone. Crescents of sweat marred the armpits of his black shirt, pasting the cotton to his skin. He scanned the names (Goldstein, Smith, Delgado, Spinelli, Chen: more New York pluralism, another intimation of the Kingdom), then pressed the button labeled VAN HORNE— 3 REAR.

A metallic buzz jangled the lock. Thomas opened the door, ascended three flights of mildew-scented stairs, and found himself face to face with a tall, bearded, obliquely handsome man wearing nothing but a spotless white bath towel wrapped around his waist.

He was dripping wet. A tattooed mermaid resembling Rita Hayworth decorated his left forearm.

"The first thing you must tell me," said Anthony Van Horne, "is that I haven't gone crazy."

"If you have," said the priest, "then I have too, and so has the Holy See." Van Horne disappeared into his apartment and returned gripping an object that disturbed Thomas as much for its chilling familiarity as for its eschatological resonances. Like members of some secret society engaged in an induction ritual, the two men held up their feathers, moving them in languid circles. For a brief moment, a deep and silent understanding flowed between Anthony Van Horne and Thomas Ockham, the only nonpsychotic individuals in New York City who'd ever conversed with angels.

"Come in, Father Ockham."

"Call me Thomas."

"Wanna beer?"

" Sure."

It was not what Thomas expected. A captain's abode, he felt, should have a sense of the sea about it. Where were the giant conches from Bora Bora, the ceramic elephants from Sri Lanka, the tribal masks from New Guinea? With a half-dozen Sunkist orange crates serving as chairs and an AT&T cable spool in lieu of a coffee table, the place seemed more suited to an unemployed actor or a starving artist than to a sailor of fortune like Van Horne.

"Old Milwaukee okay?" The captain sidled into his cramped kitchenette. "It's all I can afford."

"Fine." Thomas lowered himself onto a Sunkist crate. "You Dutchmen have always been merchant mariners, haven't you— you and your
fluytschips.
This life is in your blood."

"I don't believe in blood," said Van Horne, pulling two dewy brown bottles from his refrigerator.

"But your father—he was also a sailor, right?"

The captain laughed. "He was never anything else. He certainly wasn't a father, not much of a husband either, though I believe he thought he was both." Ambling back into the living room, he pressed an Old Milwaukee into Thomas's hand. "Dad's idea of a vacation was to desert his family and go slogging 'round the South Pacific in a tramp freighter, hoping to find an uncharted island. He never quite figured out the world's been mapped already, no
terrae incognitas
left."

"And your mother—was she a dreamer too?"

"Mom climbed mountains. I think she needed to get as far above sea level as possible. A dangerous business—much more dangerous than the Merchant Marine. When I was fifteen, she fell off Annapurna." The captain unhitched the bath towel and scratched his lean, drumtight abdomen. "Have we got a crew yet?"

"Lord, I'm sorry." Even as the sympathy swelled up in Thomas, a sympathy as profound as any he'd ever known, he felt an odd sense of relief. Evidently they were living in a non-contingent universe, one requiring no ongoing input from the Divine. The Creator was gone, yet all His vital inventions— gravity, grace, love, pity—endured.

"Tell me about the crew."

Thomas twisted the lid off his beer, sealed his lips around the rim, and drank. "This morning I signed up that steward you wanted. Sam somebody."

"Follingsbee. I'll never get over the irony—the sea cook who hates seafood. Doesn't matter. The man knows exactly what today's sailor wants. He can mimic it all: Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken . . ."

"Buzzy Longchamps turned down the first mate's position."

"Because he'd be working for me again?"

"Because he'd be working on the
Valparaíso
again. Superstitious." Thomas set his briefcase on the AT&T spool, popped the clasps, and removed his
Jerusalem Bible.
"Your second choice said yes."

"Rafferty? Never sailed with him, but they say he knows more about salvage than anybody this side of . .

."

The captain's voice trailed off. A faraway look settled into his eyes. Taking a large gulp of humid air, he ran the nail of his index finger along the belly of his tattooed mermaid, as if performing a caesarean section.

"The oil won't go," he said tonelessly.

"What?"

"Matagorda Bay. When I'm asleep, a heron flies into my bedroom, black oil dripping from its wings. It circles above me like a vulture over a carcass, screeching curses. Sometimes it's an egret, sometimes an ibis or a roseate spoonbill. Did you know that when the sludge hit their faces, the manatees rubbed their eyes with their flippers until they went blind?"

"I'm . . . sorry," said Thomas.

"Stone blind." Van Horne made his right hand into tongs, squeezing his forehead between thumb and ring finger. With his left hand he lifted his Old Milwaukee and chugged down half the bottle. "What about a second mate?"

"You mustn't hate yourself, Anthony."

"An engineer?"

"Hate what you did, but don't hate yourself."

"A bos'n?"

Opening his Bible, Thomas slipped out the set of 8 X 10 glossies that
L'Osservatore romano's
photography editor had printed from Gabriel's 35mm slides. "It all happens tomorrow—an officer's call down at the mates' union, a seaman's call over in Jersey City . . .” The captain disappeared into his bedroom, returning two minutes later in red Bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Exxon tiger. "Big sucker, eh?" he said, staring at the photos. "Two miles long, Raphael told me. About the size of downtown Wilkes-Barre." He dragged the edge of his hand along the blurry corpse. "Small for a city, large for a person. You figured His displacement?" Thomas treated himself to a hearty swallow of Old Milwaukee. "Hard to say. Close to seven million tons, I'd guess." The enjoyment of cold beer was probably the closest he ever came to sinning—beer, and the pride he took in seeing himself footnoted in
The Journal of Experimental Physics

—beer, footnotes, and the viscous oblations that followed his occasional purchase of a
Playboy.

"Captain, how do you see this voyage of ours?"

"Huh?"

"What's our purpose?"

Van Horne flopped into his ruptured couch. "We're giving Him a decent burial."

"Your angel say anything about resuscitation?"

"Nope."

Thomas closed his eyes, as if he were about to offer his undergraduates some particularly difficult and disconcerting idea, like strange attractors or the many-worlds hypothesis. "The Catholic Church is not an institution that readily abandons hope. Her position is this: while the divine heart has evidently stopped beating, the divine nervous system may still boast a few healthy cells. In short, the Holy Father proposes we apply the science of cryonics to this crisis. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"We should get God on ice before His brain dies?"

"Precisely. Personally, I believe the Pope's being far too optimistic." An uncanny but entirely reasonable gleam overcame Van Horne, the inevitable luminescence of a man who's been given the opportunity to save the universe. "But if he's
not
being too optimistic," said the captain, a mild tremor in his voice, "how much time ... ?"

"The Vatican computer wants us to cross the Arctic Circle no later than the eighteenth of August." Van Horne chugged down the rest of his beer. "Damn, I wish we had the
Val
now. I'd leave with the morning tide, crew or no.