James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

“If you vote yes,” said Fowler, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

For an entire minute, Van Horne said nothing. He sat silently before his egg noodles, absently combing the pale yellow strands with his fork. Thomas fancied he could see the workings of the captain’s brain, the throb and flash of his five billion neurons.

“I think…”

“Yes?”

“…that I would like to sleep on it.”

September 30.

Night. A starless sky. A 10-knot wind from the east.

So the angels lied to us. No, they didn’t lie, exactly. They trod beyond the truth; they permitted their grief to obscure God’s will. And if Raphael was overstating the case for an entombment, maybe he was overstating a few other notions as well — like my father being the man to absolve me.

When angels dissemble, Popeye, whom can you trust?

We’re steaming round and round the Hebrides, and my mind’s moving in circles too. I can see both sides, and it’s making me insane. If I give the padre his grand tour, it won’t be for personal gain. “Exhume Him,” Cassie tells me, “and I’ll walk out of your life forever.”

And yet I wonder if Ockham and Sister Miriam aren’t right.

I wonder if we don’t owe our species the truth.

I wonder if hearing the bad news might not be the best thing that’s ever happened to Homo sapiens sapiens.

For the first four years they lived like peasants in the cramped cottage Cassie had been renting in Irvington, but after they struck it rich they decided to indulge themselves and move into the city. Despite their newfound wealth, Cassie held onto her job, doggedly explicating natural selection and other unsettling ideas for the God-fearing students of Tarrytown Community College while Anthony stayed home and took care of little Stevie. Best to play it safe, they decided. Their money might run out sooner than expected.

Being a parent in Manhattan was a sobering and faintly absurd undertaking. Police sirens sabotaged naps. Air pollution aggravated colds. To make sure Stevie got home safely from Montessori each afternoon, Anthony and Cassie had to hire a Korean martial-arts instructor as his escort. Still, they would have had it no other way. The spacious fourth-floor walk-up they’d acquired on the Upper East Side included full roof rights, and after Stevie was asleep they would snuggle together on their beach recliners, stare at the grimy sky, and imagine they were lying on the fo’c’sle deck of the late Valparaíso.

Their fortune traced to an unlikely source. Shortly after landing back in Manhattan, Anthony got the idea of showing his private papers to Father Ockham, who in turn delivered them to Joanne Margolis, the eccentric literary agent who handled the priest’s cosmology books. Margolis forthwith pronounced Anthony’s journal “the finest surrealistic sea adventure ever written,” showed it to an editor at the Naval Institute Press, and secured a modest advance of three thousand dollars. No one ever imagined so strange a book becoming a New York Times best-seller, but within six months of publication The Gospel According to Popeye had miraculously beaten the odds.

At first Anthony and Cassie feared the bulk of the royalties would go toward lawyers’ fees and court costs, but then it became clear that neither the United States Attorney General nor the Norwegian government had any interest in prosecuting what appeared to be less a criminal case than an instance of fantasy role-playing gone horribly awry. The families of the three dead actors were infuriated by this inertia (Carny Otis’s widow journeyed all the way to Oslo in an effort to move the wheels of justice), and their rage persisted until the Vatican Secretary of State intervened. Having hired the impetuous Christopher Van Horne in the first place, Eugenic Cardinal Orselli naturally regarded it as his moral duty to recompense the bereaved. Each next of kin received a tax-free gift of three and a half million dollars. By the summer of ’99, the whole messy affair of Midway Redux no longer haunted the Van Horne-Fowler household.

Anthony couldn’t decide whether his decision to leave the corpse in place was courageous or a cop-out. At least once a week he would travel uptown and join Thomas Ockham for a picnic lunch of Brie sandwiches and white wine in Fort Tryon Park, after which they would stroll through the Cloisters, puzzling out their obligations to Homo sapiens sapiens. Once Anthony thought he saw a robed angel swoop through the Fuentiduena Chapel, but it was only a beautiful Columbia grad student in a long white dress, applying for a job as a docent.

The deal they’d cut with Di Luca and Orselli was a paragon of symmetry. Anthony and Ockham would not reveal that The Gospel According to Popeye was factual, and Rome would not appropriate the corpse and burn it. While the notion of a grand tour continued to intrigue both the captain and the priest, they were coming to realize that such a spectacle might very well lead to something far sadder and bloodier than the brave new world Ockham had envisioned the day he’d explored the derelict Regina Marts. Then, too, there was the appalling presumption of it all. Nobody, Anthony felt, had the right to take the illusion of God away — not even God had that right, despite His evidently having attempted to do so.

The party Anthony and Cassie threw when Stevie turned six served a dual purpose. It celebrated the boy’s birthday, and it brought together seven alumni of the Valparaíso’s last voyage. They came bearing gifts: stuffed whale, jigsaw puzzle, six-shooter and holster, electric train, first-baseman’s mitt, toy tugboat, set of Fisher-Price homunculi. Sam Follingsbee baked the cake, Stevie’s favorite, Swiss chocolate with cherry frosting.

As the moon rose, the confessions began, each sailor admitting to an intense private terror that his knowledge of what lay entombed above Svalbard might one day deprive him of his sanity. Marbles Rafferty disclosed that suicide figured in his fantasies with much greater frequency than before his trip to the Arctic. Crock O’Connor frankly discussed his impulse to call up Larry King Live and tell the world its prayers were falling on ruptured eardrums. And yet, so far, they’d all managed to become functional and even flourishing citizens of Anno Postdomini Seven.

Rafferty was now master of the Exxon Bangor. O’Connor, retired from the sea, currently spent his days and nights trying to invent a holographic tattoo. Follingsbee ran the Octopus’s Garden in Bayonne, an atmospheric waterfront restaurant whose menu included not a single item of seafood. Lou Chickering was playing a chronically adulterous brain surgeon on The Sands of Time and had just been featured as Heartthrob of the Week in Suds and Studs magazine. Lianne Bliss was working as the technical director of a radical feminist radio station broadcasting from Queens. Ockham and Sister Miriam had recently coauthored Out of Many, One, a comprehensive history of humankind’s ever-changing images of God, from the radical monotheism of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton to the Cosmic Christ of Teilhard de Chardin. The introduction was by Neil Weisinger, presently a rabbi serving a thriving congregation of Reform Jews in Brooklyn.

After the party, while the grown-ups lingered downstairs, indulging in second helpings of cake and admiring the conches and birds’ nests Cassie had collected on her honeymoon cruise to the Galapagos, father and son retired to the roof. The wind was crisp, the night miraculously clear. It was as if the island itself had set sail, flying beneath a cloudless sky.

“Who made them?” Stevie asked, pointing to the stars.

Anthony wanted to say “an old man at the North Pole,” but he knew this would only confuse the boy.