James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

The captain shrugged.

She broke off a quadrisphere of tangerine and chewed. The pulp tasted sweet, wet, crisp — alive. She savored the word, the holy vocable. Alive, alive.

“Alive,” she said aloud, and even before the second syllable passed her lips, she felt her exhilaration slipping away. “Thirty-three passengers,” she muttered, her voice at once mournful and bitter. “Ten sailors…”

Father Thomas nodded empathically. His eyebrows, she noticed, extended onto the bridge of his nose, meshing like two gray caterpillars in the act of kissing. “It’s tragic,” he said.

“God killed them with His hurricane,” she said.

“God had nothing to do with it.”

“Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” said the priest cryptically.

Cassie finished her tangerine. In her irreverent sequel to Job, the hero’s mistress kept repeating a line from the original, over and over. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

“This your cabin?” she asked, pointing to the ceramic Christ.

“Was. I’ve moved.”

“You forgot your crucifix.”

“I left it here on purpose,” said Father Thomas without elaboration.

“Excuse my ignorance,” said Cassie, “but do oil tankers normally carry clergy?”

“This isn’t a normal voyage, Dr. Fowler.” The priest’s eyes grew wide and wild, darting every which way like bees who’d lost track of their hive. “Abnormal, in fact.”

“Once our mission’s accomplished,” said the captain, “we’ll ferry you back to the States.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“For the next nine weeks,” said Van Horne, “you’ll be our guest.”

Cassie scowled, her broiled body hardening with confusion and anger. “Nine weeks? Nine weeks? No, folks, I start teaching at the end of August.”

“Sorry.”

“Send for a helicopter, okay?” Slowly, like some heroic, evolution-minded fish hauling itself onto dry land, she rose from the berth, and only after her feet touched the green shag carpet did she bother to wonder whether she was clothed. “Do you understand?” Looking down, she saw that someone had swapped her bikini for a kimono printed with zodiac signs. Glued by Noxzema, the silk stuck to her skin in large amorphous patches. “I want you to charter me an International Red Cross helicopter, the sooner the better.”

“I’m not authorized to report our position to the International Red Cross,” said Van Horne.

“Please — my mother, she’ll go nuts,” Cassie protested, not knowing whether to sound desperate or furious. “Oliver, too. Please…”

“We’ll allow you one brief message home.”

An old scenario, and Cassie hated it, the patriarchy wielding its power. Yeah, lady, I think we might eventually get around to fixing your reduction gear, as if you knew what the hell a reduction gear is. “Where’s the phone?”

Blue veins bulged from Van Horne’s brow. “We’re not offering you a phone, Dr. Fowler. The Valparaíso isn’t some farmhouse you stumbled into after getting a flat tire.”

“So what are you offering me?”

“All communication goes through our radio shack up on the bridge.”

A spasm of sunburn pain tore through Cassie’s neck and back as she followed Father Thomas down a gleaming mahogany corridor and into the sudden claustrophobia of an elevator car. She closed her eyes and grimaced.

“Who’s Runkleberg?” the priest asked as they ascended.

“I babbled about Runkleberg? I haven’t thought of him in years.”

“Another boyfriend?”

“A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg’s my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he’s out watering his roses, and he hears God’s voice telling him to sacrifice his son.”

“Does he obey?”

“His wife intervenes.”

“How?”

“She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.”

The priest gulped audibly. The elevator halted on the seventh floor.

“Biology and theater” — he guided them down another glossy corridor — “the two disciplines aren’t normally pursued by the same person.”

“Father, I simply can’t stay on this boat.”

“But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the biologist and the dramatist have much in common.”

“Not for nine weeks. I have to clean up my office, prepare my lectures…”

“Explorers, right? The biologist seeks to discover Nature’s laws, the dramatist her truths.”

“Nine weeks is out of the question. I’ll die of boredom.”

The Valparaíso’s radio shack was a congestion of transceivers, keyboards, fax machines, and telex terminals threaded together by coaxial cables. In the middle of the mess lounged a slender young woman with carrot-colored hair and skin the complexion of provolone. Cassie smiled, grateful for the two metal buttons pinned to the radio officer’s red camisole: a clenched fist sprouting from the medical symbol for Woman, and the motto MEN HAVE UTERUS ENVY. Only the officer’s pendant, a quartz crystal housed in silver, gave Cassie pause, but she had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds — crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca — her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.

“I like your buttons.”

“You look good in my kimono,” said the radio officer in a voice so deep it might have come from someone twice her size.

“She gets one telegram, Sparks,” said Father Thomas, backing out of the shack. “Twenty-five words to her mother — period. Nothing about a ship called the Valparaíso.”

“Roger.” The woman stretched out her bare arm, its biceps decorated with a tattoo of a svelte sea goddess riding the waves like a surfboard passenger. “Lianne Bliss, Sagittarius. I’m the one who picked up your SOS.”

The biologist shook Lianne BJiss’s hand, slick with equatorial sweat. “I’m Cassie Fowler.”

“I know. You’ve had quite an adventure, Cassie Fowler. You drew the Death card, then Fate reversed it.”

“Huh?”

“Tarot talk.”

“ ’Fraid I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“You don’t believe in Oliver either.”

“Jesus.”

“There are no private lives on a supertanker, Cassie. The sooner you learn that, the better. Okay, so the boy’s got a bankroll, but I still think you should drop him. He sounds like a popinjay.”

“Oliver sends back the wine,” Cassie admitted, frowning.

“I gather he plans to be the next Van Gogh.”

“Much too sane. A Sunday painter at best… I’m alive, aren’t I, Lianne? Incredible.”

“You’re alive, sweetie.”

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Extending her index finger, Cassie fiddled with a disembodied telegraph key, absently tapping out gibberish. “Now that all my secrets have been revealed, what about yours? Do you hate your job?”

“I love my job. I get to eavesdrop on the whole damn planet. On a clear night I might tune in a Tokyo businessman and his mistress having cellular-phone sex, a couple of ham-radio drug dealers planning an opium drop in Hong Kong, some neo-Nazis ranting to each other on their CBs in Berlin. I can pipe everything through to the deckies’ quarters, and you know what they really want? Baseball from the States! What a waste. If I ever hear another Yankees game, I’ll puke.” She lifted a blue Carpco pencil to her mouth and licked the point. “So — what do we tell Mom?”

The radio shack, Cassie decided, would make a great set for a play. She imagined a one-act satire laid entirely in heaven’s central communications complex, God working the dials, bypassing the screams of pain and the cries for help as He attempts to pick up Yankee Stadium.