James Morrow: Towing Jehovah

Ten months later, a grand jury exonerated Anthony of all the charges the state of Texas had leveled against him: negligence, incompetence, abandoning the bridge. An unfortunate verdict. For if the captain wasn’t guilty, then somebody else had to be, somebody named Caribbean Petroleum — Carpco, with its understaffed ships, overworked crews, steadfast refusal to build double-hulled tankers, and gimcrack oil-spill contingency plan (a scheme Judge Lucius Percy quickly dubbed “the greatest work of maritime fiction since Moby-Dick. Even as the legal system was vindicating Anthony, his bosses were arranging their revenge. They told him he would never command a supertanker again, a prophecy they proceeded to fulfill by persuading the Coast Guard to rescind his license. Within one year Anthony went from the six-figure salary of a ship’s master to the paltry income of those human marginalia who haunt the New York docks taking whatever work they can get. He unloaded cargo until his hands became mottled with calluses. He tied up bulk carriers and Ro-Ros. He repaired rigging, spliced mooring lines, painted bollards, and cleaned out ballast tanks.

And he took showers. Hundreds of them. The morning after the spill, Anthony checked into Port Lavaca’s only Holiday Inn and stood beneath the steaming water for nearly an hour. The oil wouldn’t come off. After dinner he tried again. The oil remained. Before bed, another shower. Useless. Endless oil, eleven million gallons, a petroleum tumor spreading into the depths of his flesh. Before the year ended, Anthony Van Horne was showering four times a day, seven days a week. “You left the bridge,” a voice would rasp in his ear as the water drummed against his chest.

Two officers must be on the bridge at all times…

“You left the bridge…”

“You left the bridge,” said the angel Raphael, wiping his silver tears with the hem of his silken sleeve.

“I left the bridge,” Anthony agreed.

“I don’t weep because you left the bridge. Beaches and egrets mean nothing to me these days.”

“You weep because” — he gulped — “God is dead.” The words felt impossibly odd on Anthony’s tongue, as if he were suddenly speaking Senegalese. “How can God be dead? How can God have a body?”

“How can He not?”

“Isn’t He… immaterial?”

“Bodies are immaterial, essentially. Any physicist will tell you as much.”

Groaning softly, Raphael aimed his left wing toward the Late Gothic Hall and took off, flying in the halting, stumbling manner of a damaged moth. As Anthony followed, he noticed that the angel was disintegrating. Feathers drifted through the air like the residue of a pillow fight.

“Insubstantial stuff, matter,” Raphael continued, hovering. “Quirky. Quarky. It’s barely there. Ask Father Ockham.”

Alighting amid the medieval treasures, the creature took Anthony’s hand — those cold fingers again, like mooring lines dipped in the Weddell Sea — and led him to an anonymous Italian Renaissance altarpiece in the southeast corner.

“Religion’s become too abstract of late. God as spirit, light, love — forget that neo-Platonic twaddle. God’s a Person, Anthony. He made you in His own image, Genesis 1:26. He has a nose, Genesis 8:20. Buttocks, Exodus 33:23. He gets excrement on His feet, Deuteronomy 23:14.”

“But aren’t those just … ?”

“What?”

“You know. Metaphors.”

“Everything’s a metaphor. Meanwhile, His toenails are growing, an inevitable phenomenon with corpses.” Raphael pointed to the altarpiece, which according to its caption depicted Christ and the Virgin Mary kneeling before God, interceding on behalf of a prominent Florentine family. “Your artists have always known what they were doing. Michelangelo Buonarroti goes to paint the Creation of Adam, and a year later there’s God Himself on the Sistine Chapel — an old man with a beard, perfect. Or take William Blake, diligently illustrating Job, getting everything right — God the Father, ancient of days. Or consider the evidence before you…” And indeed, Anthony realized, here was God, peering out of the altarpiece: a bearded patriarch, at once serene and severe, loving and fierce.

But no. This was madness. Raphael Azarias was a fraud, a con man, a certifiable paranoid.

“You’re molting.”

“I’m dying,” the angel corrected Anthony. Indeed. His halo, previously as red as the Texaco logo, now flickered an anemic pink. His once-bright feathers emitted a sallow, sickly aura, as if infested with aging fireflies. Tiny scarlet veins entwined his eyeballs. “The entire heavenly host is dying. Such is the depth of our sorrow.”

“You spoke of my ship.”

“The corpse must be salvaged. Salvaged, towed, and entombed. Of all vessels on earth, only the Carpco Valparaíso is equal to the task.”

“The Val’s a cripple.”

“They refloated her last week. She’s in Connecticut at the moment, taking up most of the National Steel Shipyard, awaiting whatever new fittings you believe the job will require.”

Anthony stared at his forearm, flexing and unflexing the muscle, making his tattooed mermaid do a series of bumps and grinds.

“God’s body…”

“Precisely,” said Raphael.

“I would imagine it’s large.”

“Two miles fore to aft.”

“Face up?”

“Yes. He’s smiling, oddly enough. Rigor mortis, we suspect, or perhaps He elected to assume the expression before passing away.”

The captain fixed on the altarpiece, noting the life-giving milk streaming from the Virgin’s right breast. Two miles? Two goddamn miles? “Then I guess we’ll be reading about it in tomorrow’s Times, huh?”

“Unlikely. He’s too dense to catch the attention of weather satellites, and He’s giving off so much heat He registers on long-range radar as nothing but a queer-looking patch of fog.” As the angel guided Anthony into the foyer, his tears started up again. “We can’t let Him rot. We can’t leave Him to the predators and worms.”

“God doesn’t have a body. God doesn’t die.”

“God has a body — and for reasons wholly obscure to us, that body has expired.” Raphael’s tears kept coming, as if connected to a source as fecund as the Trans-Texas Pipeline. “Bear Him north. Let the Arctic freeze Him. Bury His remains.” From the counter he snatched up a brochure promoting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its cover emblazoned with Piero della Francesca’s Discovery and Proving of the True Cross. “A gigantic iceberg lies above Svalbard, permanently pinned against the upper shores of Kvitoya. Nobody goes there. We’ve hollowed it out: portal, passageways, crypt. You merely have to haul Him inside.” The angel plucked a feather from his left wing, eased it toward his eye, and wet the nib with a silver tear. Flipping over the brochure, he began writing on the back in luminous salt water. “Latitude: eighty degrees, six minutes, north. Longitude: thirty-four degrees…”

“You’re talking to the wrong man, Mr. Azarias. You want a tugboat skipper, not a tanker captain.”

“We want a tanker captain. We want you.” Raphael’s feather continued moving, spewing out characters so bright and fiery they made Anthony squint. “Your new license is in the mail. It’s from the Brazilian Coast Guard.” As if posting a letter, the angel slid the brochure under the captain’s left arm. “The minute the Valparaíso’s been fitted for a tow, Carpco will send her on a shakedown cruise to New York.”

“Carpco? Oh, no, not those bastards again, not them.”

“Of course not them. Your ship’s been chartered by an outside agent.”

“Honest captains don’t sail unregistered vessels.”