Towing Jehovah (23 page)

"No,
you
settle down!" wailed Thomas.

"Take it easy." Stubby Barnes lifted the bottle high over his head.

"No,
you
take it easy!"

"We can do whatever we want, man," Barnes insisted, letting the Cutty Sark fly.

"Listen to your congenital conscience!"

The bottle struck Thomas squarely, a pound of glass crashing into his temple. He felt warm blood rolling down his face, tickling his cheeks, and then he felt nothing at all.

August 7.

It goes from bad to worse. Yesterday at 0915 Ockham and Sister Miriam came stumbling back to the ship, the padre bleeding from a nasty head wound. Their news knocked me for a loop. The mutineers have executed Wheatstone and Jaworski in some sort of crazy rodeo. Joe Spicer's dead too, killed when Able Seaman Weisinger turned the tables on him.

If you want my opinion, Spicer got what he deserved.

Ever try mescal, Popeye? It has all the kick of spinach, I promise you, and it dulls the pain. Somehow the bastards missed my supply. I've given the creatures in the remaining bottles names. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar—the Three Wise Worms.

I shouldn't drink, of course. I'm vulnerable. Dad's probably an alky, and somewhere along the line I had a wino aunt who burned down her house, plus a rummy cousin who shot the mailman for bringing the wrong size welfare check. But what the hell—this is Anno Postdomini One, right? It's the era when anything goes.

We have exactly 10 days to get Him to the Arctic.

Last night I polished off the first bottle, leaving Caspar beached like the
Val,
after which I went a bit berserk. Stuck a lighted Marlboro in my palm, puked my guts out, climbed down the anchor chain and rolled around in the sand. I woke up beside the keel, sober but numb, clutching an aluminum soup ladle to my breast.

It was Cassie who found me. What a pathetic creature I must've seemed, beard clogged with rust, clothes soaked in mescal. She guided me back up the chain, led me to the main galley, and began doling out aspirin and coffee.

"I didn't crash into this island," I insisted, as if she'd said I had.

"This island crashed into you."

"Am I repulsive, Doc? Am I downright disgusting? Do I smell like Davy Jones's jockstrap?"

"No, but you ought to shave off that beard."

"I'll consider it."

"I've always hated beards."

"Yeah?"

"It's like kissing a Brillo pad."

The word
kissing
lingered in the air. We both noticed it.

"I think I'm going crazy," I told her. "I tried digging us out with a soup ladle."

"That's not crazy."

"Oh?"

"Crazy would've been if you'd used a teaspoon."

And then, with a flirtatious toss of her head, or so it seemed, she left me alone with my hangover. As Thomas entered the empty arena, mirages made of late-afternoon heat arose, twisting and shimmering above the bloody sand. The forklift truck sat inertly in the southeast corner, right prong clean, the left tarnished with Karl Jaworski.

Van Horne and Miriam had both been appalled by the idea of a second mission to the deserters—"Lord, Tom," the nun had said, "they'll execute
you
next time"—but Thomas's sense of duty demanded not only that he bury the dead but that he once again try to help the living find the Kantian moral law within.

Like a conquistador planting the Spanish flag in the New World, he thrust his steel spade into the ground. Ten yards away, Jaworski's punctured body lay festering in the shadow of the sculpted hermaphrodite. Beyond, the netted remains of Eddie Wheatstone lay across the eviscerated carcass of Joe Spicer. A mere twenty-four hours had elapsed since their executions, but the decomposition process was fully under way, filling the priest's nostrils with an acid stench.

Licking sweat from his lips, he retrieved the spade and got busy. The sand, though heavy, was as easily dislodged as new-fallen snow, and the job went effortlessly—so effortlessly, he decided, that should rationality ever descend upon Van Horne Island, then excavating the stranded
Valparaíso
might prove more feasible than he'd supposed. One hour later, a mass grave yawned in the center of the field. He dumped in the corpses, prayed for their souls, and shoveled back the sand. Following the deserters' trail out of the amphitheater was no problem. Cigarette butts, beer-can tabs, wine-bottle corks, peanut shells, orange rinds, and banana peels marked the way. Inevitably Thomas thought of Hansel and Gretel, dropping their pebbles so they'd be able to rejoin their tractable father and malicious stepmother. Even a dysfunctional family, apparently, was better than none at all. The route took him through typical terrain—past decaying appliances and discarded 55-gallon drums, past mounds of automobile tires clumped together like gigantic charred bagels— and then, suddenly, it appeared: the wall.

It was huge, sixty feet from foundation to battlements, assembled from the purest marble, each block bleached white as bone. Spidery characters decorated the gateway, the forgotten phonemes of some long-unspoken tongue. He entered.

Music screamed in the city's heart—amplified guitars, high-tech keyboards. It seemed to Thomas not so much a song as a warning, the sort of sound with which a city might alert its citizens to incoming nuclear warheads. Mud lay everywhere, thick brown seabed pies drooping from the cornices and oozing off the balconies. Cloaked in the omnipresent mist, the temples, shops, and houses were in a sorry state, their roofs crushed by the weight of the Gibraltar Sea, their façades erased by underwater currents. But could natural processes alone account for this destruction, or had God, too, had a hand in it? Was this another of those wicked cities the Almighty had elected to eradicate personally, sister to Babylon, kin to Gomorrah?

Ringed by fluted columns, a vast public building loomed over the priest, its gaping bronze doors carved with bas-relief images of the island's four reigning deities. He climbed the steps, entered the vaulted foyer, and started down the mud-carpeted hallway beyond. The music, louder now, assaulted his brain. Moving past the rooms, he imagined he was wandering through one of those hands-on museums to which upscale parents liked to drag their children, though here the exhibits were strictly for adults. One space, to judge from the mosaics, had been an opium den. Another, a masturbation booth, frescoed with antediluvian centerfolds. There was a cubicle for pederasty. For bestiality. Sadomasochism. Necrophilia. Incest. Obsession after obsession, perversion upon perversion, a Museum of Unnatural History. The hall turned a corner, opening onto a flagstone courtyard bordered by airy arcades and packed with the
Valparaíso
deserters, most of them naked. Such an astonishing range of skin tones, thought Thomas: ivory, pink, bronze, saffron, fawn, flaxen, dun, cocoa, sorrel, umber, ochre, maple sugar. It was like gazing upon a jar of mixed nuts, or a Whitman's Sampler. Many of the sailors had painted themselves, sketching sinuous arrows and coiled serpents on their bodies with mashed grapes, the juices running down their limbs like purple sweat. Wall to wall, the courtyard vibrated with a combination binge, bacchanal, orgy, brawl, and disco tourney, with many revelers participating in all five possibilities—drinking, eating, fornicating, fighting, dancing—simultaneously. Marijuana smoke mingled with the fog. Strobelights brightened the dusk. Along the southern arcade, Ralph Mungo and James Echohawk dueled with the decorative cutlasses they'd stolen from the wardroom, while a few yards away eight men stood in a circle, each plugged into another, a carousel of sodomy. Crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles littered the ground. Scores of spent condoms lay about like an infestation of giant planaria, a fact from which Thomas drew a modicum of hope: if the revelers were sane enough to worry about pregnancy and AIDS, they might be sane enough to ponder the categorical imperative. Arms undulated, hips shimmied, breasts swayed, penises swung—the sybaritic aerobics of Anno Postdomini One.

"Hiya, Tommy!" Neil Weisinger strode over, an unlit cigarette parked in his mouth, gleefully ripping a barbecued chicken in two. "Didn't expect to see
you
here!" he said drunkenly.

"That music . . ."

"Scorched Earth, from Sweden. The album's called
Chemotherapy.
You should see their stage act. They read entrails."

Dominating the courtyard was a polished obsidian banquet table, its surface supporting not only four enormous hams and two sides of beef but a diesel generator, a CD player, and an RCA Colortrak-5000

video projector spraying concupiscent images on a white bedsheet hanging wraithlike inside the northern arcade. Thomas had never seen Bob Guccione's notorious
Caligula,
but he guessed that's what the movie was. The camera dollied along the main deck of a Roman trireme on which nearly everyone was rutting.

"Helluva party, huh?" said Weisinger, waving half the bisected chicken in Thomas's face. The air reeked of semen, tobacco, alcohol, vomit, and pot. "Want some dinner?"

“No.”

"Go ahead. Eat."

"I said no."

The kid displayed a bottle of Löwenbrau. "Beer?"

"Neil, I saw you in the amphitheater Tuesday."

"I really nailed Spicer, didn't I? Got him like some nervy goyische cowboy roping a steer."

"An immoral act, Neil. Tell me you understand that."

"This looks like just another Löwenbrau bottle," said Weisinger, "but it's much, much more than that. Washed up on the beach yesterday. Inside was a message. Ask me what message."

"Neil . . ."

"Go ahead. Ask."

"What message?"

" 'Thou shalt have whatever other gods thou feels like,' it said. 'Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's wife.' Sure you don't wanna beer?"

"No."

“ 'Thou shalt bugger thy neighbor's ass'.''

Everywhere Thomas looked, food was being squandered on a grand scale. Huge untended caldrons sat atop driftwood fires, rapidly reducing entire wheels of cheddar, Muenster, and Swiss to an inedible tar. Five sailors from the engine crew and five from the deck crew battled it out with what seemed like the
Valparaíso's
entire stock of fresh eggs. Charlie Horrocks, Isabel Bostwick, Bud Ramsey, and Juanita Torres ripped the lids off vacuum-packed cans and merrily showered themselves with clam chowder, vegetable soup, baked beans, chocolate topping, and butterscotch sauce. They licked each other like mother cats grooming their young, the residue spilling down their flesh and disappearing amid the flagstones.

Weaving through the tangle of bodies, Thomas made his way to the banquet table. He studied the metal plate on the generator:

750O WATTS, I2O/240 VOLTS, SINGLE-PHASE, FOUR-STROKE, WATER-COOLED, 1800

RPMS, 13.2 HP—the only piece of rational discourse in the entire museum. The music was at a fever pitch, handsaws dying of cancer. He shut off the CD player.

"What'd ya do
that
for?" wailed Dolores Hay cox.

"Turn it back on!" screamed Stubby Barnes.

"You must listen to me!" Thomas leaned toward the Color-trak-5000, currently projecting Malcolm McDowell working his greased fist into a wincing man's anus, and pushed EJECT.

"Put the movie back on!"

"Start the music!"

"Fuck you!"

"Caligula!"

"Listen to me!" Thomas insisted.

"Scorched Earth!"

"Caligula!"

"Scorched Earth!"

"Caligula!"

"You're using the corpse as an excuse!" the priest shouted. "Schopenhauer was wrong! A Godless world is not ipso facto meaningless!"

The food came from every point of the compass—barrages of boiled potatoes, salvos of Italian bread, cannonades of grapefruit. A large, scabrous coconut grazed Thomas's left cheek. A pomegranate smashed into his shoulder. Eggs and tomatoes exploded against his chest.

"There's a Kantian moral law within!"

Someone restarted
Caligula.
Under the persuasion of a Roman senator's wife's tongue, a large erect penis not belonging to the senator released its milky contents like a volcano spewing lava. Thomas rubbed his eyes. The erupting organ stayed with him, hovering in his mind like a flashbulb afterimage as he fled the Museum of Unnatural History.

"Immanuel Kant!" cried the despairing priest, rushing through the city streets. He reached under his Fermilab shirt and squeezed his crucifix, as if to mash Christ and Cross into a single object. "Immanuel, Immanuel, where are you?"

FAMINE

VIEWED THROUGH THE frosted window of the twin-engine Cessna, Jan Mayen Island appeared to Oliver Shostak as one of his favorite objects in the world, the white lace French brassiere he'd given Cassie for her thirtieth birthday. Corresponding to the cups were two symmetrical blobs, Lower Mayen and Upper Mayen, masses of mountainous terrain connected by a natural granite bridge. Raising his field glasses, he ran his gaze along the Upper Mayen coastline until he reached Eylandt Fjord, a groove so raw and ragged it suggested the aftermath of a bungled tooth extraction.

"There it is!" Oliver called above the engines' roar. "There's Point Luck!" he shouted, giving the bay the name by which Pembroke and Flume insisted it be called.

"Where?" asked Barclay Cabot and Winston Hawke in unison.

"There—to the east!"

"No, that's Eylandt Fjord!" corrected the Cessna's pilot, a weatherbeaten Trondheim native named Oswald Jorsalafar.

No, thought Oliver—Point Luck: that hallowed piece of the Pacific northwest of Midway Island where, on June 4, 1942, three American aircraft carriers had lain in wait to ambush the Japanese Imperial Navy.

He panned the field glasses back and forth. No sign of the
Enterprise,
but he wasn't surprised. Only by Pembroke and Flume's best-case scenario would they have already made the crossing from Cape Cod to the Arctic Ocean. Most likely they were still south of Greenland.

Jan Mayen's sole airstrip lay along the eastern fringe of its only settlement, a scientific-research station grandiosely named Ibsen City. As the Cessna touched down, the prop wash set up a tornado of snow, ice, volcanic ash, and empty Frydenlund beer bottles. Oliver paid Jorsalafar, tipped him generously, and, shouldering his backpack, joined the magician and the Marxist on the cold march west. In the pallid rays of the midnight sun, Ibsen City stood revealed as a collection of rusting Quonset huts and dilapidated clapboard houses, each set on a gravel foundation lest it sink into the illusory ground called permafrost. Reaching the central square, Oliver, Barclay, and Winston made for the Hedda Gabler Inn, a split-level motel grafted onto a tavern fashioned from a corrugated-aluminum airplane hangar. A neon sign reading SUN-DOG SALOON flashed in the tavern window, a beacon on the tundra. The inn's manager, Vladimir Panshin, a Russian expatriate with the raw, earthy look of a Brueghel peasant, didn't buy the atheists' claim to be disaffected jetsetters seeking those exotic, exciting places the travel bureaus didn't know about. ("Whoever told you Jan Mayen is exciting," said Panshin, "must get an orgasm from flossing his teeth.") But ultimately his suspicions didn't matter. He was more than happy to book the atheists into the Gabler and sell them the half pound of Gouda cheese (five American dollars), the gallon of reindeer milk (six dollars), and the dozen sticks of caribou jerky (one dollar each) they'd need for the next day's trek.