James Morrow: Towing Jehovah

“Resuscitation.”

Resuscitation: the word wove tauntingly through Thomas’s head as he emerged from the fetid dampness of Union Square Station and started down Fourteenth Street. It was all highly speculative, of course; the desiccation rate Di Luca had selected for a Supreme Being’s central nervous system (ten thousand neurons a minute) bordered on the arbitrary. But assuming the cardinale knew whereof he spoke, an encouraging conclusion followed. According to the Vatican’s OMNIVAC-5000, He would not be brain-dead before the eighteenth of August — a sufficient interval in which to ferry Him above the Arctic Circle — though it had to be allowed that the computer had made the prediction under protest, crying INSUFFICIENT DATA all the way.

The June air fell heavily on Thomas’s flesh, an oppressive cloak of raw Manhattan heat. His face grew slick with perspiration, making his bifocals slide down his nose. On both sides of the street, peddlers labored in the sultry dusk, gathering up their shrinkwrapped audiocassettes, phony Cartier watches, and spastic mechanical bears and piling them into their station wagons. To Thomas’s eye, Union Square combined the exoticism of The Arabian Nights with the bedrock banality of American commerce, as if a medieval Persian bazaar had been transplanted to the twentieth century and taken over by Wal-Mart. Each vendor wore a wholly impassive face, the shell-shocked, world-weary stare of the urban foot soldier. Thomas envied them their ignorance. Whatever their present pains, whatever defeats and disasters they were sustaining, at least they could imagine that a living God presided over their planet.

He turned right onto Second Avenue, walked south two blocks, and, pulling Gabriel’s feather from his breast pocket, climbed the steps of a mottled brownstone. Crescents of sweat marred the armpits of his black shirt, pasting the cotton to his skin. He scanned the names (Goldstein, Smith, Delgado, Spinelli, Chen: more New York pluralism, another intimation of the Kingdom), then pressed the button labeled VAN HORNE — 3 REAR.

A metallic buzz jangled the lock. Thomas opened the door, ascended three flights of mildew-scented stairs, and found himself face to face with a tall, bearded, obliquely handsome man wearing nothing but a spotless white bath towel wrapped around his waist.

He was dripping wet. A tattooed mermaid resembling Rita Hayworth decorated his left forearm.

“The first thing you must tell me,” said Anthony Van Horne, “is that I haven’t gone crazy.”

“If you have,” said the priest, “then I have too, and so has the Holy See.”

Van Horne disappeared into his apartment and returned gripping an object that disturbed Thomas as much for its chilling familiarity as for its eschatological resonances. Like members of some secret society engaged in an induction ritual, the two men held up their feathers, moving them in languid circles. For a brief moment, a deep and silent understanding flowed between Anthony Van Horne and Thomas Ockham, the only nonpsychotic individuals in New York City who’d ever conversed with angels.

“Come in, Father Ockham.”

“Call me Thomas.”

“Wanna beer?”

“ Sure.”

It was not what Thomas expected. A captain’s abode, he felt, should have a sense of the sea about it. Where were the giant conches from Bora Bora, the ceramic elephants from Sri Lanka, the tribal masks from New Guinea? With a half-dozen Sunkist orange crates serving as chairs and an AT T cable spool in lieu of a coffee table, the place seemed more suited to an unemployed actor or a starving artist than to a sailor of fortune like Van Horne.

“Old Milwaukee okay?” The captain sidled into his cramped kitchenette. “It’s all I can afford.”

“Fine.” Thomas lowered himself onto a Sunkist crate. “You Dutchmen have always been merchant mariners, haven’t you — you and your fluytschips. This life is in your blood.”

“I don’t believe in blood,” said Van Horne, pulling two dewy brown bottles from his refrigerator.

“But your father — he was also a sailor, right?”

The captain laughed. “He was never anything else. He certainly wasn’t a father, not much of a husband either, though I believe he thought he was both.” Ambling back into the living room, he pressed an Old Milwaukee into Thomas’s hand. “Dad’s idea of a vacation was to desert his family and go slogging ’round the South Pacific in a tramp freighter, hoping to find an uncharted island. He never quite figured out the world’s been mapped already, no terrae incognitas left.”

“And your mother — was she a dreamer too?”

“Mom climbed mountains. I think she needed to get as far above sea level as possible. A dangerous business — much more dangerous than the Merchant Marine. When I was fifteen, she fell off Annapurna.” The captain unhitched the bath towel and scratched his lean, drumtight abdomen. “Have we got a crew yet?”

“Lord, I’m sorry.” Even as the sympathy swelled up in Thomas, a sympathy as profound as any he’d ever known, he felt an odd sense of relief. Evidently they were living in a non-contingent universe, one requiring no ongoing input from the Divine. The Creator was gone, yet all His vital inventions — gravity, grace, love, pity — endured.

“Tell me about the crew.”

Thomas twisted the lid off his beer, sealed his lips around the rim, and drank. “This morning I signed up that steward you wanted. Sam somebody.”

“Follingsbee. I’ll never get over the irony — the sea cook who hates seafood. Doesn’t matter. The man knows exactly what today’s sailor wants. He can mimic it all: Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken…”

“Buzzy Longchamps turned down the first mate’s position.”

“Because he’d be working for me again?”

“Because he’d be working on the Valparaíso again. Superstitious.” Thomas set his briefcase on the AT T spool, popped the clasps, and removed his Jerusalem Bible. “Your second choice said yes.”

“Rafferty? Never sailed with him, but they say he knows more about salvage than anybody this side of…”

The captain’s voice trailed off. A faraway look settled into his eyes. Taking a large gulp of humid air, he ran the nail of his index finger along the belly of his tattooed mermaid, as if performing a caesarean section.

“The oil won’t go,” he said tonelessly.

“What?”

“Matagorda Bay. When I’m asleep, a heron flies into my bedroom, black oil dripping from its wings. It circles above me like a vulture over a carcass, screeching curses. Sometimes it’s an egret, sometimes an ibis or a roseate spoonbill. Did you know that when the sludge hit their faces, the manatees rubbed their eyes with their flippers until they went blind?”

“I’m… sorry,” said Thomas.

“Stone blind.” Van Horne made his right hand into tongs, squeezing his forehead between thumb and ring finger. With his left hand he lifted his Old Milwaukee and chugged down half the bottle. “What about a second mate?”

“You mustn’t hate yourself, Anthony.”

“An engineer?”

“Hate what you did, but don’t hate yourself.”

“A bos’n?”

Opening his Bible, Thomas slipped out the set of 8 X 10 glossies that L’Osservatore romano’s photography editor had printed from Gabriel’s 35mm slides. “It all happens tomorrow — an officer’s call down at the mates’ union, a seaman’s call over in Jersey City…”

The captain disappeared into his bedroom, returning two minutes later in red Bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Exxon tiger. “Big sucker, eh?” he said, staring at the photos. “Two miles long, Raphael told me. About the size of downtown Wilkes-Barre.” He dragged the edge of his hand along the blurry corpse. “Small for a city, large for a person. You figured His displacement?”