James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

“Fifty-five.”

Anthony gulped his coffee. Hot, marvelously hot, but not enough to thaw his bowels. “Joe, I want you to place a call to Father Ockham’s quarters,” he ordered, pulling back the door to the starboard wing. The storm rushed in, spattering his face, twisting the fringes of his beard. “Tell him to transport his ass up here on the double.”

“It’s three A.M., sir.”

“He wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Anthony, starting out of the wheelhouse.

“Glass still falling!” the second mate shouted after him. “Nine-eight-seven!”

The instant Anthony stepped into the turbulent night, the odor hit him, roiling across the bridge wing. Sharp and gravid, oddly sweet, not so much the stink of death as the fragrance of transformation: leaves festering in damp gutters, jack-o’-lanterns wrinkling on suburban doorsteps, bananas softening inside their leathery black peels. “Fifty rpm’s, Joe!” he screamed through the open door.

“Fifty, sir!”

Then came the sound, thick and layered, a kind of choral moan hovering above the drone of the engines and the roar of the Atlantic. Anthony raised the binoculars. A long, brilliant trident of electricity speared the sea. Another ten minutes, he figured, certainly no more than fifteen, and they’d have visual contact…

“That sound,” said Father Ockham, pulling on his Panama hat and buttoning his black vinyl raincoat as he hurried onto the wing.

“Odd, isn’t it?”

Sad.

“What do you suppose… ?”

“A dirge.”

“Huh?”

Even as Ockham repeated the word, a lightning bolt revealed the truth of it. Dirge, oh, yes. In the sudden brightness Anthony saw the mourners, flopping and rolling over the boiling sea, swarming across the churning sky. Pods of bereaved narwhals to starboard, herds of bereft rorquals to port, flocks of orphaned cormorants above. Flash, and more species still, herring gulls, great skuas, fulmars, shearwaters, petrels, prions, puffins, leopard seals, ringed seals, harbor seals, belugas, manatees — multitudes upon multitudes, most of them hundreds of miles from habitat and home, their voices rising in preternatural grief, a blend of every seaborne lung and aquatic larynx God had ever placed on earth.

“Come right ten degrees!”

“Right ten!”

“Forty-five rpm’s!”

“Forty-five!”

Miraculously, each tongue kept its identity even as it joined the general lament. Closing his eyes, Anthony grasped the rail and listened, awed by the bottlenose dolphins’ whistled elegies, the sea lions’ throaty orations, and the low coarse keening of a thousand frigate birds.

“The smell,” said the priest. “It’s rather…”

“Fruity?”

“Exactly. He hasn’t started to turn.”

Anthony opened his eyes. “Joe, forty rpm’s!”

“Forty, sir!”

Flash, a massive something, bearing zero-one-five.

Flash, a series of tall rounded forms, all aspiring to heaven.

Flash, the forms again, like mountains spread along a seacoast, each higher than the next.

“You saw that?”

“I saw,” said the priest.

“And… ?”

Ockharn, shivering, slipped a Sony Handicam from his raincoat pocket. “I think it’s the toes.”

“The what?”

“Toes. I just lost a small wager. Sister Miriam believed He’d be supine” — Ockham choked up — “whereas I assumed…”

“Supine,” Anthony echoed. “He’s smiling, Raphael told me. You in trouble, Thomas?”

The priest tried sighting through the Handicam’s viewfinder, but he was trembling too badly to connect eye with eyecup. Rain and tears spilled down his face in equal measure. “I’ll get over it.”

“You aren’t gonna faint, are you?”

“I said I’ll get over it.” On his second attempt, Ockham managed to elevate the Handicam and fire off a quick burst of tape. “It’s rather poetic, seeing the toes first. The word has special meaning in my field. T-O-E: Theory of Everything.”

“Everything?”

“We’re looking for one, we cosmologists.” The priest panned across the phalanxes of mourners. “At the moment, we’ve got TOE equations that work on the submicroscopic level, but nothing that” — his voice splintered — “handles gravity too. It’s so horrible.”

“Not having a TOE?”

“Not having a heavenly Father.”

Another celestial explosion. Yes, Anthony decided, no question: ten pale and craggy toes, stiff with rigor mortis, arching into the gloomy sky like onion domes crowning a Byzantine city.

“Dead slow!”

“Dead slow!”

“Wish I could help you,” said Anthony.

“Just try to understand.” The priest returned the Handicam to his raincoat pocket and pulled off his bifocals. “Try to understand,” he said again, wiping the lenses with his sleeve. “Try,” groaned Father Thomas Ockham, calling above the storm, the sea, and the mad, ragged music of the wake.

In the old days, Neil Weisinger mused, merchant ships had galley slaves: thieves and murderers who died chained to their oars. Today they had able-bodied seamen: fools and dupes who keeled over gripping their pneumatic Black and Decker needle guns. Chip and paint, chip and paint, all you did was chip and paint. Even on so extraordinary a voyage as this — a voyage on which a huge pulpy island lay off your starboard quarter, tirelessly attended by moaning whales and squawking birds — you got no relief from chipping, no respite from painting.

Neil was on the fo’c’sle deck, chipping rust off a samson post, when a voice screeched out of the PA system, overpowering the noise of his needle gun and penetrating the rubber plugs in his ears. “Ship’s-com-pan-y!” cried Marbles Rafferty, the gun’s racket fracturing his words into syllables. “Now-hear-this! All-hands-re-port-to-off-i-cers’-ward-room-at-six-teen-fif-teen-hours!”

Neil killed the gun, popped the earplugs.

“Repeat: all hands report…”

Ever since Neil’s Aunt Sarah had come to him at Yeshiva and insisted that he stop wallowing in grief — it had been over five years, she pointed out, since his parents’ deaths — the AB had labored to avoid self-pity. Life is intrinsically tragic, his aunt had lectured him. It’s time you got used to it.

“…sixteen-fifteen hours.”

But there were moments, such as now, when self-pity seemed the only appropriate emotion. 1615 hours: right after he got off duty. He’d been planning to spend the break in his cabin, reading a Star Trek novel and nursing a contraband Budweiser.

Dipping his wire brush into the HCL bottle, Neil lifted the acid-soaked bristles free and began basting the corroded post. Dialogue drifted through his mind, verbal gems from The Ten Commandments. “Beauty is but a curse to our women…” “So let it be written, so let it be done…” “The people have been plagued by thirst! They’ve been plagued by frogs, by lice, by flies, by sickness, by boils! They can endure no more!” The Val had left New York with only one movie in her hold, but at least it was a good one.

It took him over twenty minutes to wash up. Despite his earplugs, goggles, mask, cap, and jumpsuit, the rust had gotten through, clinging to his hair like red dandruff, covering his chest like metallic eczema, and so he was the last sailor to arrive.

He’d never been on level five before. Twentieth-century ABs got invited to their officers’ wardrooms about as often as fourteenth-century Jews got invited to the Alhambra. Billiard table, crystal chandeliers, teakwood paneling, Oriental rug, silver coffee urn, mahogany bar … so this was his bosses’ tawdry little secret: spend your watches mixing with the mob, pretending you’re just another packet rat, then slip away to the Waldorf-Astoria for a cocktail. As far as Neil could tell, everyone on board was there (officers, deckies, priest, even that castaway, Cassie Fowler, red and peeling but on the whole looking far healthier than when they’d pulled her off Saint Paul’s Rocks), with the exceptions of Lou Chickering, probably down in the engine flat, and Big Joe Spicer, doubtless on the bridge making sure they didn’t collide with the island.