Towing Jehovah (8 page)

And suddenly they appeared, Saint Paul's Rocks, six granite spires rising from the equator like aquatic stalactites, their peaks frosted with heaping mounds of seabird droppings. Briefly she savored the peculiar poetry of the moment. On February 12, 1832, the original
Beagle
had anchored here. At least I'll go out in Darwin's shadow, she mused. At least I've followed him to the end. By dusk Cassie had made a landfall, maneuvering the dinghy against the lee side of the islet. Transceiver in hand, Betty Boop towel flung over her shoulder, she dragged herself up the highest spire, the jagged pumice tearing her palms and scouring her knees. An ice-cold can of Diet Coke hovered just out of reach; a frosty pitcher of lemonade beckoned from a neighboring crag; a frigid geyser of Hawaiian Punch spewed heavenward from a tide pool. Reaching the summit, she stood up, the towel spilling down her back like a monarch's cape. It was all hers, the whole dreadful little archipelego. Her Royal Highness Cassie Fowler, Empress of Guano.

The wayfarers swooped down, squadron after squadron, brazen cormorants perching on her shoulders, bold gannets pecking at her hair. For all her terror and misery, she found herself wishing her students could see these birds; she was prepared to lecture about the
Sulidae
family in general and the blue-footed booby in particular. The blue-foot was a bird with a vision. While its red-shod cousin laid its eggs in a conventional nest built near the top of a tree, the blue-foot employed a
picture
of a nest, an elegant abstraction it created by squirting a ring of guano on the ground. Cassie loved the blue-footed booby, not only for its politics (the males did their fair share of sitting on the eggs and caring for the chicks) but also because here was a creature for whom the distinctions between life, art, and shit were less obvious than commonly supposed.

On all sides, the grim Darwinian rhythms played out: crabs eating plankton, gannets devouring crabs, big fish preying on little fish, an eternal orgy of killing, feasting, digesting, eliminating. Never before had Cassie felt so connected to brute evolutionary truth. Here was Nature, real Nature, red in claw, white in ca-ca, stripped of all Rousseauistic sentiment, rhapsodic as a cold sore, romantic as a yeast infection. With the last of her strength she shooed the birds away, then squatted, Joblike, amid the guano. Ironically, Cassie's personal favorite among her plays,
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap
Opera,
was a freewheeling sequel to Job. Two thousand years after being tortured, browbeaten, and bought off by God, the hero returns to the dung heap for a rematch.

Her tongue was a stone. She was too dry to weep. I shall not succumb to faith, she swore, staring across the vast, faceless sea. There are no atheists in foxholes. "Help," Cassie rasped, cranking the transceiver.

"Please. Help. The
Beagle
is a stupid name for a ship," she groaned. "Beagles are
dogs,
not ships. Help. Please, God, it's me," muttered the lapsed Darwinist. "It's Cassie Fowler. Saint Paul's Rocks. Beagles are dogs. Please, God, help me.”

July 4.

Our fair republic's birthday. Latitude: 20°9'N. Longitude: 37°15'W. Course: 170. Speed: 18

knots. Distance made good since New York: 1106 nautical miles.

If I didn't know better, I'd say Jehovah himself had sent that hurricane. Not only did we survive, we got carried 184 miles at 40 knots, and now we're almost a day ahead of schedule. A loaded tanker probably could've smashed those rollers apart, but we actually had to
ride
them—full speed ahead in the troughs, dead slow along the crests. There was so much foam, the waves turned pure white, as if the sea herself had died.

We had a good man at the helm, a moon-faced Jersey kid named Neil Weisinger, and somehow we bullied our way through, but only after a Marisat dome cracked in two and a starboard kingpost got torn out by the roots. Not to mention 4 lifeboats blown overboard, 15 shattered windows in the deckhouse, 2

broken arms, 1 sprained ankle.

On a normal voyage, whenever the crew gets drunk and rowdy, I can usually scare them into sobriety by waving a flare pistol around. But on this trip, if things go as I expect, we'll eventually be arming the deckies with those damn antipredator weapons. I'm nervous, Popeye. A potted sailor and a T-62

bazooka are a bad combination.

It doesn't matter that alcoholic beverages are forbidden in the U.S. Merchant Marine. We're not a dry ship—this I know. Judging from past experience, I'd guess we left port with about 30 cases of contraband beer and 65 bottles of hidden liquor. Rum is especially popular, I've noticed over the years. Pirate fantasies, I think. I myself keep 4 bottles of mescal in the chart room, secluded under Madagascar. To date we've had only one minor setback. The Vatican was supposed to send us the cream of its film collection, but either the reels never arrived or those Carmelites forgot to load them, and the only picture that actually made it on board is a 16mm pan-and-scan print of
The Ten Commandments.
So we've got this fancy theater and just one movie to run in it. It's a pretty awful flick, and I suspect we'll be chucking tomatoes at the screen long about the tenth showing.

There are 4 or 5 VCRs kicking around, and dozens of cassettes with titles like
Babs Boffs Boston.
We've even got the notorious
Caligula.
But such fare tends to leave about a third of the men and nearly all the women cold.

Whenever I slip Raphael's feather from my sea chest and stare at it, the same questions run through my mind. Did my angel speak the truth? Is Dad really the one who can wash away the oil? Or was Raphael just making absolutely sure I'd accept the mission?

In any event, I'm figuring to return from the Arctic by way of Spain. I'll dock in Cadiz, give the crew shore leave, and hop on the first bus to Valladolid.

"I did it," I'll tell him. "I got the job done."

Although zero by zero degrees still lay half an ocean away, Thomas Ockham nevertheless found himself grappling night and day with the eschatological implications of a Corpus Dei. Beyond the information Rome explicitly requested—course, speed, position, estimated date of rendezvous—his daily faxes contained as much speculative theology as he thought the cardinals could stand.

"At first blush, Eminence," he wrote to Di Luca on the Fourth of July, "the death of God is a scandalous and enervating notion. But do you remember the riches certain thinkers mined from this vein in the late fifties and early sixties? I'm thinking in particular of Roger Milton's
Post Mortem Dei,
Gabriel Vahanian's
Culture of the Post-Christian Era,
and Martin Buber's
Eclipse of God.
True, these men had no actual body on their hands (nor do we, as of yet). I sense, however, that if we look beyond our immediate
angst,
we may find some surprises. In an odd way, this whole business is a ringing vindication of Judeo-Christianity (if I may use that mongrel and oxymoronic term), proof that we've been on to something all these centuries. From a robust theothanatology, I daresay, some surprising spiritual insights may emerge."

Truth to tell, Thomas did not believe these brave words. Truth to tell, the idea of a robust theothanatology depressed him to the point of paralysis. A dark and violent country lay beyond the Corpus Dei, the old priest felt in his heart—a landfall toward which Ultra Large Crude Carriers sailed only at their peril.

"Dear Professor Ockham," Di Luca wrote back on July 5, "at the moment we are not interested in Martin Buber or any other atheist egghead. We are interested in Anthony Van Horne. Did the angels pick the right man? Does the crew respect him? Was his decision to dive into Hurricane Beatrice wise or was it rash?"

In drafting his answer, Thomas addressed Di Luca's concerns as forthrightly as he could. "Our captain knows his ropes, but I sometimes fear his zeal will jeopardize the mission. He's obsessed with the OMNIVAC's deadline. Yesterday we entered a new time zone, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that he ordered the clocks set forward . . ."

Thomas typed the reply on his portable Smith-Corona—the same antique on which he'd written
The Mechanics of Grace.
He signed his name with an angel feather dipped in India ink, then carried the letter up to the wheelhouse.

It was 1700, an hour into the second mate's watch. From the very first, Big Joe Spicer had struck Thomas as the smartest officer aboard the
Valparaíso,
excluding Van Horne himself. Certainly he was the only officer who brought books to the bridge—real books, not collections of cat cartoons or paperback novels about telekinetic children.

"Good afternoon, Joe."

"Hi there, Father." Rotating ninety degrees in his swivel chair, the hulking navigator flashed a copy of Stephen Hawking's
A Brief History of Time.
"Ever read this?"

"I assign it in Cosmology 412," said Thomas, glancing nervously at the AB on duty, Leo Zook. The day before, he and the Evangelical had engaged in a
brief, unsatisfactory argument about Charles Darwin, Zook being against evolution, Thomas pointing out its fundamental plausibility.

"If I understand this stuff," said Spicer, drumming his knuckles on
A Brief History of Time,
"God's out of a job."

"Perhaps," said Thomas.

"Don't be ridiculous," said Zook.

"In the Stephen Hawking universe," said Spicer, pivoting toward the Evangelical, "there's nothing for God to do."

"Then Stephen Hawking is wrong," said Zook.

"What would
you
know about it? You ever even
heard
of the Big Bang?"

"In the beginning was the Word."

Thomas couldn't decide whether Zook truly wished to discuss
A Brief History of Time
or whether he was irritating Spicer merely to relieve his boredom, the ship being on autopilot just then. Declining the bait, the navigator turned back to Thomas. "Celebrating Mass today?"

"Fifteen hundred hours."

"I'll be there."

Good, the priest thought—you, Follingsbee, Sister Miriam, Karl Jaworski, and nobody else. The sparsest parish this side of the prime meridian.

As Thomas started toward the radio shack, wondering which profited the world more—the rhapsodic atheism of a Hawking or the unshakable faith of a Zook—he nearly collided with Lianne Bliss. Eyes darting, she dashed up to the navigator, swiveling him like a barber aiming a customer at a mirror.

"Joe, call the boss!"

"Why?"

"Call him! SOS!"

Six minutes later Van Horne was on the bridge, hearing how a Hurricane Beatrice survivor named Cassie Fowler had evidently landed a rubber dinghy on Saint Paul's Rocks.

"Could be a trap," said the captain to Bliss. Fresh water dripped from his hair and beard, residue of an interrupted shower. "You didn't break radio silence, did you?"

"No. Not that I didn't want to. What do you mean, a trap?"

Saying nothing, Van Horne marched to the twelve-mile radar and stared intently at the target: a flock of migrating boobies, Thomas suspected. "Get on the horn, Sparks," ordered the captain. "Tell the world we're the
Arco Fairbanks,
due south of the Canaries. Whoever reports in, give 'em Fowler's coordinates."

"Is it necessary to lie?" asked Thomas.

"Every order I give is necessary. Otherwise I wouldn't give it."

"May I call the woman?" asked Bliss, starting back into the shack. Van Horne ran his index finger around the radar screen, encircling the birds. "Tell her help is on the way. Period."

At sundown Bliss returned to the bridge and offered her report. The
Valparaíso
was evidently the only ship within three hundred miles of Saint Paul's Rocks. She'd contacted a dozen ports from Trinidad to Rio, and among those few Coast Guard officers and International Red Cross workers who understood her frantic mix of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, not one commanded a plane or chopper with enough fuel capacity to get halfway across the Atlantic and back.

"What did Fowler say when you called her?" asked Thomas.

"She wanted to know if I was an angel."

"What did you tell her?"

Bliss shot an angry scowl toward Van Horne. "I told her I wasn't authorized to answer." Setting
A Brief History of Time
atop the Marisat terminal, Spicer strode to the helm and snapped off the autopilot. "Course two-seven-three, right?"

"No," said Van Horne. "We're holding."

"Holding?" said Zook, grabbing the wheel.

"You're joking," said Spicer.

"I can't throw twenty-four hours away, Joe. That's everything we gained from Beatrice. Put us back on iron mike."

Thomas bit down, his molars clamping the soft flesh of his inner cheeks. Never before had he faced such a dilemma. Did the Christian course lie west, along the equator, or southeast, toward God? How many divine brain cells equaled a single human castaway? A million? A thousand? Ten? Two? His skepticism regarding the OMNIVAC's prediction did little to relieve his anxiety. Even
one
salvaged neuron might eventually prove so scientifically and spiritually valuable it would start to seem worth a dozen castaways—two dozen castaways—three dozen—four —the lives of all the castaways since Jonah.

Except that Jonah had been delivered, hadn't he?

The whale had vomited him out.

"Captain, you must bring us about," said Thomas.

Snatching up the bridge binoculars, Van Horne issued an angry snort. "What?"

"I'm telling you to bring us about. Turn the
Val
around and point her toward Saint Paul's Rocks."

"You seem to have forgotten who's commanding this operation."

"And you seem to have forgotten who's paying for it. Don't imagine you can't be replaced, sir. If the cardinals hear you neglected an obvious Christian duty, they won't hesitate to airlift in a new skipper."

"I think we should talk in my cabin."

"I think we should bring the ship about."

Van Horne raised the binoculars and, inverting them, looked at Thomas through the wrong ends, as if by diminishing the priest's size he could also diminish his authority.