Towing Jehovah

TEETH

AS THE BURDENED Valparaíso crawled north through the Gulf of Guinea, Cassie Fowler realized that her desire to see their cargo destroyed was more complicated than she’d initially supposed. Yes, this body threatened to further empower the patriarchy. Yes, it was a terrible blow to reason. But something else was going on, something a bit more personal. If her dear Oliver could actually bring off such a spectacular feat, successfully applying his brains and wealth toward God’s obliteration, he would emerge in her eyes as a hero, second only to Charles Darwin. She might even, after all these years, acquiesce to Oliver’s longstanding proposal of marriage.

On July 14, at 0900, Cassie went to the radio shack and made her pitch to Lianne “Sparks” Bliss. They must send Oliver a secret fax. Immediate and total sabotage was required. The future of feminism hung in the balance.

Not that she didn’t love Oliver as he was: a sweet man, a committed atheist, and probably the best president the Central Park West Enlightenment League had ever had — yet also, Cassie felt, a castaway like herself, shipwrecked on the shores of his own essential uselessness, not just a Sunday painter but a Sunday human being. How better for a person to acquire some self-respect than to save Western Civilization from a return to misogynist theocracy?

“The future of feminism?” said Lianne, nervously fingering her crystal pendant. “Are you serious?”

“Deadly,” said Cassie.

“Yeah? Well, nobody except Father Thomas is allowed to contact the outside world. Captain’s orders.”

“Lianne, this damn body is exactly what the patriarchy has been waiting for — evidence that the world was created by the male chauvinist bully of the Old Testament.”

“Okay, but even if we did send a message, would your skeptic friends believe you?”

“Of course my skeptic friends wouldn’t believe me. They’re skeptics. They’d have to fly over, take pictures, argue among themselves…”

“Forget it, sweetie. I could get booted out of the Merchant Marine for something like this.”

“The future of feminism, Lianne…”

“I said forget it.”

The next morning, Cassie tried again.

“Century after century of phallocratic oppression, and finally women are gaining some ground. And now — bang — it’s back to square one.”

“Aren’t you overreacting a bit? We’re gonna bury the thing, not put it on fucking Oprah.”

“Yeah, but what’s to prevent somebody from happening on the tomb in a year or two and spilling the beans?”

“Father Thomas talked to an angel,” said Lianne defensively. “There’s obviously a cosmic necessity behind this voyage.”

“There’s a cosmic necessity behind feminism, too.”

“We shouldn’t go tampering with the cosmos, friend. We absolutely shouldn’t.”

For the rest of the day, Cassie made a point of avoiding Lianne. She had presented her case fully, outlining the ominous political implications of a male Corpus Dei. Now it was time to let the arguments sink in.

How different all this was from Cassie’s previous voyage. On the Beagle II you were periodically knocked off your feet, thrown from your bunk, plunged into nausea: you knew you were at sea. But the Valparaíso felt less like a ship than like some great metal island rooted to the ocean floor. To get any sense of motion, you had to climb down into the forward lookout post, a kind of steel patio thrust out over the water, and watch the stem plates smashing through the waves.

On the evening of July 13, Cassie stood in the bow, sipping coffee, savoring the sunset — a breathtaking spectacle to which the tubby AB on duty, Karl Jaworski, seemed oblivious — and imagining the androgynous marvels that lay perhaps two miles beneath her feet. Hippocampus guttulatus, for instance, the sea horse, whose males incubated the eggs in special ventral pouches; or groupers, all of whom began life as females (half destined to undergo a sex change at adulthood); or the wonderfully subversive lumpfish, a species whose maternal instincts resided exclusively within the fathers (it being they who oxygenated the eggs during incubation and subsequently guarded the fry). To her right, beyond the horizon, spread the wide sultry delta of the Niger River. To her left, likewise hidden by the planet’s curve, lay Ascension Island. A suffocating heat arose, clothing her in equatorial steam, and she resolved to escape to the Valparaíso’s congenial little movie theater. True, she’d seen The Ten Commandments before — most recently Oliver’s laserdisc of the 35th Anniversary Collector’s Edition — so it wouldn’t have much dramatic impact, but at the moment air-conditioning mattered more than catharsis.

She took the elevator to level three, opened the door to the theater, and plunged into the gloriously cool air.

As it happened, Cassie harbored a special affection for The Ten Commandments. Without it, she would never have written her angriest play, God Without Tears (a prophetic title, she now realized), a one-act satire on the many bowdlerizations Cecil B. DeMille and company had committed in transferring Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to the screen. She’d been particularly severe with DeMille’s unwillingness to consider the moral implications of the Ten Plagues, with his failure to record the injustices the Hebrews had suffered at their Sponsor’s hands as they wandered in the wilderness (Yahweh striking down the people who disparaged Canaan, firebombing those who complained at Hormah, sending serpents against the ones who grumbled on the road from Mount Hor, visiting a pestilence upon everybody who backslid at Peor), and with his glaring omission of the speech Moses had made to his generals following the subjugation of the Midianites: “Why have you spared the life of all the women? These were the very ones who perverted the sons of Israel! Kill all the male children! Kill also all the women who have slept with a man! Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves!” Paired with Runkleberg, God Without Tears had run for two weeks at Playwrights Horizons on West Forty-second Street, a bill that drew a rave review in Newsday, a pan in the Village Voice, and an Op-Ed letter of condemnation in the Times, written by Terence Cardinal Cooke himself.

Whatever its artistic shortcomings, DeMille’s homage to God’s omnipotence fully acknowledged the bladder’s limits. The movie had an intermission. After an hour and forty minutes, as Moses began his audience with the Burning Bush, the urge to urinate arose. Cassie decided to hold out. She couldn’t remember exactly when the hiatus came, but she knew it was imminent. Besides, she was enjoying herself, in a perverse sort of way. The urge worsened. She was about to leave in medias res — Moses heading back to Egypt with the aim of liberating his people — when the music swelled, the image faded, and the curtains closed.

Two women were ahead of her, almond-eyed Juanita Torres and asthmatic An-mei Jong, waiting to use the single-toilet ladies’ room. There she stood, mulling over her theory that the patriarchy derived in large measure from urinary flexibility, the male’s enviable ability to pee on the run, when a deep, familiar voice intruded.

“Want some?” said Lianne, extending a large, half-empty bag of popcorn. “Vegetarian style — no butter.”

Cassie grabbed a handful. “Seen this movie before?”

“My Sunday school class went in the mid-sixties, some sort of revival. ‘Beauty is but a curse to our women.’ Yech. If it weren’t for Follingsbee’s popcorn, I’d leave.”

A breach, thought Cassie. A chink in Lianne’s armor. “Watch what they do with Queen Nefretiri in Part Two.”

“I don’t like what they do with any of the women.”

“Yeah, but watch what they do with Nefretiri — DeMille and the patriarchy, watch what they do. Notice how, whenever Pharaoh commits some atrocity, chasing after the Hebrews with his chariots and so on, it’s because Nefretiri put him up to it. Same old story, right? Blame the woman. The patriarchy never sleeps, Lianne.”

“I can’t send your boyfriend a fax.”

“I understand.”

“They could take away my FCC license.”

“Right.”

“I can’t send it.”

“Of course you can’t.” Cassie took a greedy helping of Follingsbee’s popcorn. “Watch what they do with Nefretiri.”

July 16.

Latitude: 2°6’N. Longitude: 10°4’W. Course: 272. Speed: 9 knots when the Southeast Trades are with us, 3 in a headwind, 6 on average. Slow — much too slow. At this rate, we won’t cross the Arctic Circle before August 25, a full week behind schedule. More bad news. The promised predators have finally caught our scent, and at 6 knots we can’t outrun them. We’re killing a dozen sharks on nearly every watch, and almost as many Liberian sea snakes and Cameroon vultures, but they keep on coming. When I sit down to write the official chronicle of this voyage, I’ll dub these bloody days the Battle of the Guinea Current.

“Why don’t they show their Creator a little more respect,” I ask Ockham, “like the porpoises and manatees did last week?”

“Respect?”

“He made them, right? They owe Him everything.”

“In partaking of such a meal,” says Ockham, “quite possibly they are showing Him respect.”

Our afterdeck groans, our windlasses creak, our chains rattle. We sound like Halloween. God forbid a link should break. Once, when I was third mate on the Arco Bangkok, ferrying napalm into the Gulf of Thailand, I saw a towline snap in two, whip across the poop deck, and cut the bos’n in half. Poor bastard lived for a good three minutes afterward. His last words were, “What are we doing in Vietnam, anyway?”

This morning I sent Dad a fax. I told him I’ve gotten the Valparaíso back and am now working for Pope Innocent XIV. “If it’s okay with you,” I wrote, “I’ll be dropping by Valladolid on my return trip.”

The snowy egrets loathe me, Popeye. The sea turtles scream for my blood.

At least once a day, I make a point of ferrying myself over to God, picking up a bazooka or a harpoon gun, and joining the battle. It helps the crew’s morale. The work is dangerous and exhausting, but they’re acquitting themselves well. I think they see our cargo as one of those things worth fighting for, like honor or the American flag.

Every evening, beginning around 1800 hours, Cassie Fowler drinks coffee in the forward lookout post. I’ve pretended to bump into her three times already. I think she’s catching on.

To what uncharted places did your passion for Olive Oyl take you, Popeye? Did you ever imagine lying with her on the fo’c’sle deck at the height of a monsoon, making furious love as the hot rain slicked your naked bodies? Did your creators ever animate such a moment for you, just to give you the thrill?

When the deckies think I’m not looking, they plunder the Corpus Dei, scraping off bits and pieces from the hairs, pimples, warts, and moles, then mixing them with potable water to make a kind of ointment.

“What’s it for?” I ask Ockham.

“Whatever ails them,” he replies.

An-mei Jong, the padre explains, swallows the stuff by the spoonful, hoping to relieve her asthma. Karl Jaworski rubs it on his arthritic joints. Ralph Mungo sticks it on an old Korean War wound that keeps acting up. Juanita Torres uses it for menstrual cramps.

“Does it help?” I ask Ockham.

“They say it does. These things are so subjective. Cassie Fowler calls it the placebo effect. The deckies call it glory grease.”

If I smear some glory grease on my forehead, Popeye, will the migraines go away?

“Shark off the starboard knee! Repeat: shark off the starboard kneel”

Neil Weisinger rose from his bed of holy flesh, set his WP-17 exploding-harpoon gun upright inside a kneecap pore, and pressed the SEND button on his Matsushita walkie-talkie. The heat was unbearable, as if the Guinea Current were about to boil. Had he not slathered his neck and shoulders with glory grease, they would surely have blistered by now. “Course?” he radioed the bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, currently on lookout.

“Zero-zero-two.”

In his dozen or so voyages as a merchant mariner, Neil had performed many hateful duties, but none so hateful as predator patrol. While washing toilets was degrading, cleaning ballast tanks disgusting, and chipping rust tedious beyond words, at least these jobs entailed no immediate threat to life and limb. Twice already, he’d taken the elevator up to the chief mate’s quarters, determined to lodge a formal complaint, but on both occasions his courage had deserted him at the last minute.

Clipping the Matsushita to his utility belt, right next to the WP-17’s transmitter, Neil raised his field glasses to his eyes and looked east. From his present station he couldn’t see Eddie — too much distance, too much mist — but he knew the bos’n was there all right, standing on the lee side of a starboard toe and surveying the choppy bay created by God’s half-submerged legs. He hit SEND. “Bearing?”

“Zero-four-six. He’s a twenty-footer, Neil! I’ve never seen so many teeth in one mouth before!”

Lifting the harpoon gun from its pore, Neil marched across the wrinkled, spongy beach that stretched for sixty yards from His knee to the ocean. Water reared up, a high spuming wall eternally created and re-created as the great patella cut its way through the Atlantic. “Operation Jehovah,” the captain was forever calling this peculiar tow, evidently unaware that for a Jew like Neil the word Jehovah was vaguely offensive, the secret and unspeakable YHWH contaminated with secular vowels.

He scanned the churning rollers. Eddie was right: a twenty-foot hammerhead shark, swimming coastwise like some huge organic mallet bred to nail the divine coffin shut. Balancing the WP-17 on his shoulder, Neil cupped the telescopic sight against his eye and plucked the walkie-talkie from his belt.

“Speed?”

“Twelve knots.”

“We aren’t required to do this,” Neil informed the bos’n. “I’ll bet you anything it’s against union rules. We simply aren’t required. Range?”

“Sixteen yards.”

Curious, he mused, how each predator had staked out its own culinary territory. From on high came the Cameroon vultures, swooping down like degenerate angels as they laid claim to the corneas and tear ducts. From below came the Liberian sea snakes, ruthlessly devouring the succulent meat of the buttocks. The surface belonged to the sharks — vicious makos, malicious blues, crazed hammerheads — nibbling away at the soft bearded cheeks and picking at the tender webbing between the fingers. And, indeed, the instant Neil drew a bead on the hammerhead, it turned abruptly and swam west, fully intending to bite the hand that made it.

He tracked the shark via the telescopic sight, aligning the crosshairs with the hammerhead’s cartilaginous hump as he looped his finger around the trigger. He squeezed. With a sudden throaty explosion the harpoon leapt from the muzzle. Rocketing across the sea, it struck the surprised animal in the brow and burrowed into its brain.

Neil took a large swallow of moist African air. Poor beast — it didn’t deserve this, it had committed no sin. Even as the shark spun sixty degrees and headed straight for the knee, the AB felt nothing toward it save pity.

“Throw the switch, buddy!”

“Roger, Eddie!”

“Throw it!”

Singing with pain, spouting blood, the shark hurled itself on the fleshy shore, raging so furiously that Neil half expected it to sprout legs and come crawling after him. He clasped the harpoon gun against his fishnet shirt, reached toward the transmitter on his utility belt, and threw the switch.

“Run!” cried Eddie. “Run, for Christ’s sake!”

Neil turned, sprinting across the squishy terrain. Seconds later he heard the warhead explode, the awful grunt of TNT crushing live tissue and vaporizing fresh blood. He looked back. The shock wave was wet and red, a bright sloshy blossom filling the sky with bulbous lumps of brain.

“You okay, buddy? You aren’t hurt, are you?”

As Neil mounted the kneecap, the debris came down, a glutinous rain of shark thoughts, all the hammerhead’s dead hopes and shattered dreams, spattering the AB’s jeans and shirt.

“I swear, I’m goin’ straight to Rafferty!” he wailed. “I’m gonna stick this harpoon gun right smack in his face and tell him I didn’t sign on for this shit!”

“Settle down, Neil.”

The hammerhead’s blood smelled like burning hair. “My grandfather never had to blow up sharks!”

“In thirty-five minutes we’re outta here.”

“If Rafferty won’t take me off this stupid duty, I’m gonna harpoon him! I’m not kiddin’! Bang, right between the eyes!”

“Think how good that shower’s gonna feel.”

And the truly strange thing, Neil realized, throbbing with freedom — the strange, astonishing, terrifying thing — was that he wasn’t kidding.

“There’s no more God, Eddie! Don’t you get it? No God, no rules, no eyes on us!”

“Think about Follingsbee’s Chicken McNuggets. I’ll even slip you one of my Budweisers.”

Neil propped his gun against the shaft of a particularly thick hair, leaned toward the barrel, and, wetting his sun-baked lips, kissed the hot, vibrant metal. “No eyes on us…”

It was appropriate, Oliver Shostak felt, that the Central Park West Enlightenment League followed only a loose approximation ofRobert’s Rules of Order, for neither rules nor order had anything to do with the organization’s raison d’ кtre. People didn’t understand that. Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chuckle-head, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions — the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth, or reading the fax from the SS Carpco Valparaíso currently residing in his vest pocket.

“Let’s get started,” he said, signaling to the attractive young Juilliard student playing the harpsichord on the far side of the room. She lifted her hands from the keyboard; the music stopped in midmeasure, Mozart’s deliciously intricate Fantasia in D Minor. No gavel, of course. No table, no minutes, no agenda. The eighteen members sat in an informal circle, submerged in the splendor of soft recamier couches and lush velvet divans.

Oliver had appointed the room himself. He could afford it. He could afford anything. Thanks to the near-simultaneous ascents of feminism, fornication, and several major venereal diseases, the planet was using latex condoms in unprecedented quantities, and in the late eighties his father’s amazing invention, the Shostak Supersensitive, had emerged as the brand of choice. By the turn of the decade, astonishing quantities of cash had begun flowing into the family’s coffers, an ever-rising tide of profit. At times it seemed to Oliver that his father had somehow patented the sex act itself.

He sipped his brandy and said, “The chair recognizes Barclay.”

Deciphering Cassie’s fax had been easy. It was in Heresy, the numerical code they’d invented in tenth grade to obscure the records of the organization they’d founded, the Freethinkers Club. (Besides Cassie and Oliver, the club had boasted only two other members, the lonely, homely, and hugely unpopular Maldonado twins.) This is no joke. Come see for yourself. We are really towing…

As the League’s vice president rose, the entire membership drew to attention, not simply to hear Barclay’s report but to bathe in his celebrity. In recent years the United States of America had managed to accommodate a full-time debunker — a counterweight to its twenty thousand astrologers, five thousand past-life therapists, and scores of scoundrels routinely cranking out bestsellers about UFO encounters and the joy of runes — and that debunker was golden-haired Barclay Cabot. Barclay, handsome devil, had media presence. The camera liked him. He’d done all the major talk shows, demonstrating how charlatans appeared to bend spoons and read minds when in fact they were doing nothing of the kind.

He began by reviewing the crisis. Two weeks earlier, the Texas legislature had voted to purge all the state’s high schools of any curriculum materials that failed to accord so-called scientific creationism “equal time” with the theory of natural selection. Not that the Enlightenment League doubted the outcome of a showdown between the God hypothesis and Darwin. The fossils shouted evolution; the chromosomes screamed descent; the rocks declared their antiquity. What the League feared was that America’s textbook publishers would simply elect to duck the whole issue and, readopting their spineless expedient of the forties and fifties, omit any consideration of human origins whatsoever.

Meanwhile, every Sunday, creationism would continue to be taught unchallenged.

In conspiratorial tones, Barclay outlined his committee’s plan. Under cover of night, a small subset of the League, a kind of atheist commando unit, would crawl across the luxurious lawn of the First Baptist Church of Dallas — “the Pentagon of Christianity,” as Barclay put it — and jimmy open a basement window. They would sneak into the church. Infiltrate the nave. Secure the pews. And then, unholstering their Swingline staplers, they would take up each Bible in turn and, before replacing it, neatly affix a thirty-page precis of On the Origin of Species between the table of contents and Genesis.

Equal time for Darwin.

What a bold scenario, thought Oliver, as audacious as the time they’d faked a materialization of the Virgin Mary on Boston Common, as nervy as when they’d upstaged an antiabortion rally in Salt Lake City by hiring the notorious rock group Flesh Before Breakfast to stand across the street singing “What a Drug We Have in Jesus.”

“All in favor of the proposed counterattack…”

Seventeen ayes reverberated through the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall.

“All opposed…”

Inevitably, the League’s recording secretary, cantankerous Sylvia Endicott, stood up. “Nay,” she said, not so much speaking the word as growling it. “Nay and nay again.” Sylvia Endicott: skepticism’s oldest living warrior, the woman who in her radical youth had led a losing campaign to have IN GOD WE TRUST removed from the nation’s coins and an equally unsuccessful fight to get a plaque installed on the Kansas City street corner where Sinclair Lewis had dared the Almighty to strike him dead. “You know my views on scientific creationism — O paragon of oxymorons. You know where I stand on Dallas Baptists. But come on, people. This so-called ‘counterattack’ is really just a prank. We’re the children of Franзois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, for Christ’s sake. We aren’t the fucking Marx Brothers.”

“The ayes have it,” said Oliver. He’d never cared for Sylvia Endicott, who said pompous things like O paragon of oxymorons whenever she got the floor.

“When will we stop being a bunch of dilettantes and start playing hardball?” Sylvia persisted. “I can remember a time when this organization would’ve sued the Texas legislature for de facto censorship.”

“You want to make a motion?”

“No, I want us to acquire some backbone.”

“Any new business?”

“Backbone, people. Backbone!”

“Any new business?” said Oliver again.

Silence, even from Sylvia. The crone of reason sank back into her chair. The fire crackled merrily in the hearth. Throughout the city, the hot July evening simmered away, but within Montesquieu Hall an ingenious deployment of insulation and air conditioners was neatly simulating a frigid February night. It was Oliver’s idea. He’d covered the costs. An extravagance? Yes, but why be wealthy if one didn’t occasionally indulge a personal foible or two?

“I have some new business,” said Oliver, reaching into his silk vest and taking out the troubling communique. “This fax is from Cassie Fowler, currently aboard the supertanker Carpco Valparaíso somewhere off the coast of Liberia. You can see the Carpco logo” — Oliver pointed to the famous stegosaurus — “right here on the letterhead. So the telegram her mother received last week was evidently authentic, and Cassandra is very much alive. That’s the good news.”

“And the bad?” asked comely, jewel-eyed Pamela Harcourt, the guiding light behind the League’s feisty and unprofitable periodical, The Sceptical Investigator (circulation: 1,042).

“The bad branches into two possibilities.” Oliver held up his index finger. “Either Cassandra is having a psychotic breakdown” — he added his middle finger to the illustration — “or the Valparaíso is towing the corpse of God.”

“Towing the what?” Taylor Scott, a frail young man whose affection for the Enlightenment extended to wearing greatcoats and ruffles, flipped open his silver cigarette case.

“Corpse of God. It’s evidently rather large.”

Taylor removed a Turkish cigarette and slid it between his lips. “I don’t understand.”

“Two miles long, she says here. Humanoid, nude, Caucasian, male, and dead.”

“Huh?”

“Corpus Dei. How can I be clearer?”

“Fiddlesticks,” said Taylor.

“Horse manure,” said Barclay.

“Cassandra assumed that would be our reaction,” said Oliver.

“I should hope so,” said Pamela. “Oliver, dear, what’s this all about?”

“I don’t know what it’s all about.” Brandy snifter in hand, Oliver rose and, stepping outside the ring of rationalists, slowly paced the perimeter. Under ordinary circumstances, the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall was his favorite place on earth, a soothing conjunction of mullioned windows, fabric-lined walls, eighteenth-century French redoute floral prints, and his own original oil paintings of famous freethinkers striking characteristic poses: Thomas Paine hurling a copy of The Age of Reason through a cathedral window, Baron d’Holbach offering Pope Leo XII a Bronx cheer, Bertrand Russell and David Hume playing chess with creche figurines. (Two weeks earlier Oliver had added a self-portrait to the gallery, a gesture that might have seemed presumptuous had the painting not included a brutally truthful depiction of his faltering chin and ill-proportioned nose.) But tonight the lounge brought him no comfort. It seemed gloomy and damp, besieged by ignorant armies. “The tanker’s on some sort of burial mission,” he continued. “There’s a tomb in the Arctic. Angels have been spotted. Look, I admit this all sounds utterly crazy, but Cassandra is inviting us to inspect the evidence.”

“Evidence?” said Pamela. “How can there be evidence?”

“She proposes that we fly to Senegal, charter a helicopter, and reconnoiter the Valparaíso’s cargo.”

“Why, oh, why, are you wasting our time like this?” Winston Hawke, an intense, nervous little man for whom the collapse of Soviet communism merely heralded the True Revolution to come, sprang to his feet. “The Baptists are taking over,” cried the Marxist, “the yokels are on the march, the yahoos are at the gates, and you’re giving us a lot of shit about a supertanker!”

“Let me make a motion,” said Oliver. “I move that we dispatch a task force to Dakar before sundown tomorrow.”

“I can’t believe you’re serious,” said owlish Rainsford Fitch, a computer programmer who spent his nights hunched over his Macintosh SE-30, working out complicated mathematical disproofs of God’s existence.

“Neither can I,” said Oliver. “Would anyone like to second the motion?”

The League’s treasurer, matronly Meredith Lodge, an IRS functionary whose lifelong ambition was to deliver a tax bill to the Mormon Church, popped open her ledger book. “Is this really the sort of enterprise we should be spending our money on?”

“I’ll pay for everything.” Oliver polished off his brandy. “Plane fares, helicopter rentals…”

“Pray tell,” said Barclay, making no effort to stifle his smirk, “did the late Jehovah bequeath anything to His creatures?”

“I said, ‘Would anyone like to second the motion?’ ”

“Ah, but of course He did,” Barclay persisted. “We’ve all heard of God’s will!” Appreciative guffaws rippled through the lounge. “I do hope He left me something nice. The Colorado River, maybe, or perhaps a small planet in Andromeda, or else—”

“Second the motion,” interrupted Pamela, flashing a sturdy smile. “And while I’m at it, let me volunteer to head up the task force. I mean, what’s the big deal, friends? What are we afraid of? We all know the Valparaíso isn’t towing God.”

Thank goodness for off-road vehicles, thought Thomas Ockham as, dropping the Jeep Wrangler into first gear, he guided it up the wrinkled, spongy slope of the forehead. An ordinary car — his Honda Civic, for example — would have been defeated by now, hung up on a pimple or mired in a pore. It all sounded like an announcement you’d see emblazoned outside some rundown Evangelical church in Memphis. TODAY’S SERMON: IT TAKES FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE TO REALLY KNOW THE LORD.

Lifting his hand from the gearshift lever, he accidentally brushed Sister Miriam’s left thigh.

Initially she hadn’t wanted to come along. “I’m not prepared to meet Him that way,” she’d said, but then Thomas had pointed out that, if they were ever going to get beyond their grief, they would first have to confront the corpse directly, pimples, pores, moles, warts, and all. “The logic of the open casket,” as he’d put it.

Struggling against a headwind, the corpse was riding low this morning, so low that the CB radio reports arriving from the torso sentries spoke of waves breaking against the nipples and a tidal pool swirling in the navel. To wit, the Wrangler wouldn’t be making the full trip today — down the jaw, over the Adam’s apple, across the chest and belly. Just as well. Forty-eight hours earlier Thomas had traveled the entire length, pausing briefly atop the abdomen to behold the great veiny cylinder floating between the legs (a truly unnerving sight, the scrotal sac undulating like the gasbag of some unimaginable blimp), and he was loath to repeat the experience with Miriam. It wasn’t just that the sharks had wrought such terrible destruction, stripping off the foreskin like a gang of sadistic mohels. Even if in good shape, God’s penis would still rank high among those vistas a priest and a nun could not comfortably share.

They crested the brow and started downward, bound for the deep, windswept gorge from which the great nose grew.

Technically, of course, His gonads made no sense; they might even be marshaled to dispute the corpse’s authenticity. But such an objection, Thomas felt, smacked of hubris. If their Creator had once wanted (for whatever reasons) to reshape Himself in the image of His products, He’d have gone ahead and done so. “Let there be a penis,” and there would be a penis. Indeed, the more Thomas thought about it, the more inevitable the appendage became. A God without a penis would be a limited God, a God to whom some possibility had been closed, hence not God at all. In a way it was rather noble of Him to have endorsed this most controversial of organs. Inevitably Thomas thought of Paul’s beautiful First Letter to the Corinthians: “And those members of the body which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor…”

The Wrangler was ascending again, conquering the proboscis at five miles per hour. Miriam jammed one of her audiocassettes into the tape deck, realized she’d loaded it upside down, tried again. She pushed PLAY. Instantly the bombastic opening of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra erupted from the speakers, a fanfare popularized by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the great eschatological movie she and Thomas had seen twenty-four years earlier on what the secular world would have termed a date.

While the genitalia held an intrinsic fascination for the priest, the things the Val’s cargo lacked likewise engaged his curiosity. There was no dirt under the fingernails, for example, no clay of Creation — more evidence for calling the corpse counterfeit, although the scouring action of the sea offered an equally likely explanation. The wrists exhibited no crucifixion marks: an instance of divine self-healing, Thomas surmised, although a Unitarian might legitimately seize upon this circumstance to rail against conventional Christianity’s obsession with the Trinity. The flesh displayed none of the scorching that would normally result from a plunge through the earth’s atmosphere; it was as if the carcass hadn’t “fallen” in the literal sense but had materialized instead — or maybe He’d been alive during His descent, willfully exempting Himself from friction and allowing Himself to perish only upon hitting the Gulf of Guinea.

As they reached the summit, Miriam said, “It’s a paradox, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“How the fact of God steals away our faith in God.”

Thomas killed the engine, then rotated the ignition key forward a notch so the cassette would keep playing. “The literalness of all this is most depressing, I’ll grant you. But it’s important to sense the mystery behind the meat. What is flesh, really? What is matter? Do we know? We don’t. In its own way, carrion is as numinous as the Host.”

“Maybe,” said Miriam evenly. “Could be,” she added without emotion. “Sure. Right. I want my belief back, Tom. I want to feel that old-time religion again.”

Yanking the emergency brake with one hand, Thomas gave his friend’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze with the other. “I suppose we could try believing in a God synonymous with something beyond this corpse — a God outside God. But Gabriel didn’t allow us that option. He was a good Catholic, my angel. He understood the ultimate indivisibility of body and spirit.”

The priest climbed out of the cab, laying his palm on the hot steel hood. A Wrangler’s engine, a Homo sapiens sapiens, a Supreme Being — in each case, the soul of the thing could not be abstracted from the thing itself. Just as Einstein had demonstrated the fundamental equivalence of matter and energy, so did Thomas’s church teach the fundamental equivalence of existence and essence. There was no ghost in the machine.

Pulling his Handicam from the rear compartment, the priest pivoted toward the great glassy lake of their cargo’s left eye. Both irises were a vibrant cyan, the luxurious hue of unoxygenated blood. (And God said, “Let me have Scandinavian eyes.”) He put the camera on STANDBY. Gradually the scene painted itself across the viewfinder screen: a frightened deckie on predator patrol, bazooka at the ready, standing by the shore of the watery cornea as he scanned the sky for Cameroon vultures. Beyond lay His great frozen smile, each visible tooth sparkling like a sun-struck glacier.

Teeth, eyes, hands, gonads — so much to contemplate, and yet Thomas also found himself pondering those parts presently hidden from view. Did the hair swirl clockwise, like a human’s? Were the palms callused? Were the molars configured in a manner suggesting a particular diet? (Given the popularity of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, it was unlikely He’d been a vegetarian.) Anything remarkable about the buttocks evoked so enigmatically in Exodus 33:23?

“Then, of course,” called Miriam above Also Sprach Zara-thustra, “there’s the question of why. Any theories, Tom?”

He pulled the Handicam’s trigger, preserving God’s sightless gaze and grinning rictus on half-inch videotape. “I plan to organize my thoughts tonight and send them to Rome. In my gut I feel it was an empathic death. He died from a bad case of the twentieth century.”

Miriam offered a nod of assent. “We’ve killed Him a hundred million times in recent memory, haven’t we? And we never even bothered to hide the bodies.”

What a supple, sensuous mind, he thought. “ ‘Hide the bodies,’ ” he echoed. “Would it be all right if I quoted you in my fax to Cardinal Di Luca?”

“I’d be flattered,” the nun said, smiling spectacularly. Like God, she had perfect teeth: no surprise, really, the poverty of Carmelites being strictly genteel, poverty with a dental plan.

Scrambling out of the passenger seat, Miriam circumvented the tarry surface of a blackhead and ambled confidently to his side. Her getup, he admitted — pith helmet, dungarees, safari jacket sealed tightly with bone buttons — aroused in him a certain prurience. All during his youth, Thomas had harbored a vague notion that, lifting the edge of a nun’s habit, you’d find nothing there. How wrong he’d been. The denim clung to her hips, thighs, and calves, outlining her like the drifting snow into which the dying Claude Rains had fallen at the climax of The Invisible Man.

“ ‘The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances,’ ” she said, reciting a famous passage from Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. “ ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you; We have killed Him — you and I. We are all His murderers.’ ”

“ ‘But how was this done?’ ” said Thomas, continuing the passage. They couldn’t get away from Nietzsche today: Zarathustra on the tape deck, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft on their tongues. “ ‘How were we able to drink up the sea?’ ” He shut off the Handicam. “ ‘Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’ ”

They returned to the Wrangler, drove down the western nasal slope, and improvised a path through the whiskers of the left cheek. On its fringes, the beard had become a kind of fishing net, a vast natural web the seafaring apostles might have envied, jammed with entangled groupers, porpoises, and marlin. The Wrangler bucked and lurched but stayed on course, looping steadily eastward into the mustache.

Twin caverns rose before them, the great yawning tunnels through which their cargo had once breathed and sneezed.

“To be honest” — Miriam stared into the moist depths — “I’m learning more than I care to.”

“Quite so,” said Thomas, grimacing. Marshes of mucus, boulders of dried snot, nose hairs the size of obelisks: this was not the Lord God of Hosts they’d grown up with. “But we can’t leave yet.” He swung the steering wheel hard over and, putting the Wrangler in reverse, eased the rear bumper against the high escarpment running between upper lip and right nostril. Leaning out the window, he wiped the sea spray from the rearview mirror, a saucer-sized disk jutting into space on rusted aluminum struts. “A test,” he explained.

“I suppose there’s always hope.”

“Always,” Thomas muttered without conviction.

Together they studied the glass, watching it with the same rapt intensity of the prophet Daniel beholding MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN materialize upon the wall. The merest cloud would have satisfied them — the slightest smudge, the feeblest hint of fog.

Nothing. The surface remained mockingly clear, obscenely pristine. God, the mirror said, was dead.

Miriam took Thomas’s hand, pressing it so firmly between her palms that the blood crowded into his fingertips. “Then, of course, there’s the toughest question of all.”

Yes?

“Now that we know He’s gone, really gone, making no judgments, preparing no punishments, now that we truly know these things” — the nun offered a diffident little grin — “why should we fear to sin?”

July 26.

Latitude: 25°8'N. Longitude: 20°30'E. Course: 358. Speed: 6 lousy knots. We’re rounding the great bulge of northwest Africa, tracing in reverse those audacious voyages of exploration Prince Henry the Navigator dispatched from Portugal beginning in 1455. If dear old Dad was Christopher Columbus in a previous life, perhaps I used to be Prince Henry. When the benighted monarch died, his friends stripped him down and found he was wearing a hair shirt.

My plan is amazingly clever. Ready, Popeye? I’m going to blow the ballast. All of it: the 60,000 tons we picked up in New York Harbor, the 15,000 (so far) with which we’ve been compensating for spent bunker fuel. And then — here’s the brilliant part — we’re going to trim the Val with His blood.

Think of it. One simple, standard pumping operation, no longer than 5 hours, and we’ll have reduced our towing load by 15 percent. According to Crock O’Connor, we can run both engines at a steady 85 rpm’s after that, maybe even 90.

Count on Father Ockham to object.

“After we blow the ballast, we’ll be at the corpse’s mercy,” he asserted, ever the physics professor. “A strong wind, and the thing could drag us a hundred miles off course.”

“It’ll be like a transfusion,” I explained. “As the water goes shooting out of the ballast tanks, the blood’ll come pouring into the cargo tanks. We’ll remain in trim the whole time.”

“You mean you’re going to drain our Creator’s liquid essence into those filthy cargo tanks?”

I figured I should tell him the truth, even though I could see where he was heading. “Yes, Thomas, that’s one way to put it.”

“We’ll have to clear it with Rome.”

“No, we won’t.”

“Yes, we will.”

The Vatican got back to us in less than an hour.

“The synod has reached a consensus,” said somebody named Tullio Cardinal Di Luca. “Under no circumstances may His blood be defiled with secular oil. Before the transfusion, you must scrub the cargo tanks thoroughly.”

“Scrub them?” I moaned. “That’ll take two days!”

“Then we’d better start right now,” said the padre, simultaneously smiling and frowning.

Eat more yogurt, Neil Weisinger’s physician had advised him upon appraising the cramps, diarrhea, and general misery that had settled in his gut shortly after his twentieth birthday. Yogurt, Dr. Cinsavich had explained, would increase his acidophilus count and aid his digestion. Until that moment, Neil hadn’t even realized that his intestines housed bacteria, much less that the bugs performed a welfare function. And so he tried the yogurt cure, and while it didn’t work (he was in fact suffering from lactose intolerance, a condition he eventually conquered by abstaining from dairy products), he nevertheless came away with an intense respect for his internal ecosystem.

Four years after his visit to Dr. Cinsavich, as Neil climbed into number two center tank aboard the SS Carpco Valparaíso, he found himself identifying fiercely with the microbial proletariat teeming inside him. It was germs’ work, this thankless and malodorous business of scouring the ship’s innards, preparing them to receive God’s blood. Although the washing machine had done a good job, pulverizing the largest tarballs and flushing them away, there was still a considerable residue to harvest, gluey blobs of asphalt clinging to the ladders and catwalks like immense wads of discarded chewing gum. Gradually he descended — hand under hand, Leo Zook by his side — below the hawsepipes and the Plimsoll line, past the churning surface of the sea, deeper, ever deeper, into the hull. They scrubbed as they went, scooping up the gunk with their ladles and plopping it into a huge steel mucking bucket dangling beside them on a chain. Whenever the bucket became full, they broadcast the news via walkie-talkie to Eddie Wheatstone on the weather deck, and he winched the load aloft.

Grandfather Moshe, no doubt, would have found redemption in this drudgery. The old man actually liked crude oil. “Oil’s a fluid fossil,” he’d once lectured his ten-year-old grandson as they stood on the Baltimore docks watching a supertanker glide across the horizon. “Memories of the Permian, messages from the Cretaceous, crushed and cooked and turned to jam. That ship’s a pail of history, Neil. That ship carries liquid dinosaurs.”

Having Zook along only made things worse. In recent days the Evangelical’s piety had taken a truly ugly turn, degenerating into full-blown anti-Semitism. True, his mind was in upheaval, his soul in torment, his worldview in flames. But that was no excuse.

“Please understand, I don’t think you’re in any way responsible for this terrible thing that’s happened,” said Zook, sweat leaking from beneath his hard hat and trickling down his freckled face.

“That’s mighty gracious of you,” said Neil with a sneer. His voice reverberated madly in the great chamber, echoes of echoes of echoes.

“But if I had to point a finger, which is not my style, but if I had to point, all I could say is, ‘Your people killed God once before, so maybe they did it this time too.’ ”

“I don’t want to hear this shit, Leo.”

“I’m not talking about you personally.”

“Oh, yes, you are.”

“I’m talking about Jews in general.”

During their first hour in the tank, the midday sun lit their path, the bright golden shafts slanting through the open hatchway, but fifty feet down they had to switch on the electric lamps bolted atop their hard hats. The beams shot forward a dozen feet and vanished, swallowed by the darkness. Neil hacked a wad of mucus into his throat. He spit. A goddamn underwater coal miner, that’s what he was. How had this happened to him? Why had his life come to so little?

At last they reached the bottom — a grid of high steel walls flung outward from the keelson, dividing the tank into twenty gloomy bays, each the size of a two-car garage. Neil unhooked the bucket and took a deep breath. So far, so good: no hydrocarbon stink. Groping toward his utility belt, he snapped up the walkie-talkie.

“You with us, bos’n?” he radioed Eddie.

“Roger. How’s the weather down there?”

“Swell, I think, but be ready to bail us out, okay?”

“Gotcha.”

Mucking bucket at the ready, Neil began the inspection, crawling from compartment to compartment via the two-foot-long culverts cut into the bulkheads, Zook right behind. Bay one proved clean. Bay two held not a smudge. You could eat your lunch off the floor of three and blithely lick the walls of four. Five was the purest space yet, home to the washing machine itself, a conical mountain of pipes and nozzles rising over twenty feet. In six they finally found something worth removing, a glop of paraffin cleaving to a handgrip. They ladled it into the bucket and pressed on.

It happened the instant Neil stepped into bay seven. At first there was just the odor — the ghastly aroma of a ruptured gas bubble, drilling into his nose. Then came the tingling in his fingertips and the patterns in his head: silvery pinwheels, red mandalas, shooting stars. His stomach unhooked itself, plunging downward.

“Gas!” he screamed into the walkie-talkie. No doubt the malignant sphere had been waiting there for months, crouching in the prison of its own surface, and now the beast was out, popped free by Neil’s footfalls. “Gas!”

“Jesus!” wailed Zook.

“Gas!” Neil screamed again. “Eddie, we got gas down here!” He looked skyward. The hatchway drifted two hundred feet above his head, shimmering in the corrupted air like a harvest moon. “Drop the Dragens, Eddie! Bay seven!”

“Jesus Lord God!”

“Gas! Bay seven! Gas!”

“God!”

“Stay put, guys!” came Eddie’s voice, crackling out of the walkie-talkie. “The Dragens are coming!”

Both sailors were weeping now, tear ducts spasming, cheeks running with salt water. Neil’s flesh grew bumpy and numb. His tongue itched.

“Hurry!”

Zook tucked his thumb against his palm and uncurled his fingers. One… two… three… four.

Four. It was something you learned during seamanship training. A man gassed at the bottom of a cargo tank has four minutes to live.

“They’re coming,” said the Evangelical, choking on the words.

“The Dragens,” Neil agreed, reaching uncertainly into the side pocket of his overalls. His hands had taken on lives of their own, trembling like epileptic crabs.

“No, the horsemen,” Zook gasped, still holding up his fingers.

“Horsemen?”

“The four horsemen. Plague, famine, war, death.”

As Neil tore the Ben-Gurion medal free, a hot stream of half-digested Chicken McNuggets coursed up his windpipe. He vomited into the mucking bucket. What ship was this? The Carpco Valparaíso? No. The Argo Lykes? No. The rogue freighter on which Chief Mate Moshe Weisinger had borne fifteen hundred Jews to Palestine? No, not a merchant vessel of any sort. Something else. A floating concentration camp. Birkenau with a rudder. And here was Neil, trapped in a subsurface gas chamber as the Kommandant flooded it with Zyklon-B.

“Death,” he echoed, dropping the Ben-Gurion medal. The bronze disc bounced off the rim of the bucket and clanked against the steel floor. “Death by Zyklon-B.”

“Huh?” said Kommandant Zook.

Neil’s brain was airborne, hovering outside his skull, bobbing around on the end of his spinal cord like a meat balloon. “I know your game, Kommandant. ‘Lock those prisoners in the showers! Turn on the Zyklon-B!’ ”

Like spiders descending on silvery threads, a pair of Dragen rigs floated down from the weather deck. Caught in the beam of Neil’s hard-hat lamp, the oxygen tanks glowed a brilliant orange. The black masks and blue hoses spun wildly, intertwining. Lunging forward, he flexed his unfeeling fingers and began loosening the rubbery knot.

“Zyklon what?” said Zook.

Neil freed up a pear-shaped mask. Frantically he strapped it in place. He reached out, arched his fingers around the valve, rotated his wrist. Stuck. He tried again. Stuck. Again. It moved! Half an inch. An inch. Two. Air! Closing his eyes, he inhaled, sucking the sweetness through his mouth — nose — pores. Air, glorious oxygen, an invisible poultice drawing the poison from his brain.

He opened his eyes. Kommandant Zook sat on the floor, skin pale as a mushroom, lips fluted in a moan. One hand held his mask in place. The other rested atop the tank, curled over the valve like a gigantic tick in the act of siphoning blood.

“Help me.”

It took Neil several seconds to grasp Zook’s predicament. The Nazi was completely immobile, frozen by some dreadful combination of brain damage and fear.

“Plague,” said Neil. Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, he hobbled to Zook’s side.

“P-please.”

Freedom rushed through Neil like a hit of cocaine. YHWH wasn’t watching. No eyes on Neil. He could do whatever he felt like. Open the Kommandant’s valve — or cut his hose in two. Give him a shot of oxygen from the functioning rig — or spit in his face. Anything. Nothing.

“Famine,” said Neil.

The Kommandant stopped moaning. His jaw went slack. His eyes turned dull and milky, as if made of quartz.

“War,” Neil whispered to Leo Zook’s corpse.

From his breast pocket he drew out his Swiss Army knife. He pinched the spear blade, rotated it outward. He clenched the red handle; he stabbed; the blade pierced the rubber as easily as if it were soap. Laughing, reveling in his freedom, he carved a long, ragged incision along the axis of the Nazi’s hose.

“Death.”

Neil crouched beside the suffocated man, drank the delicious oxygen, and listened to the slow, steady thunder of the retreating horsemen.

PLAGUE

FOR OLIVER SHOSTAK, learning that the illusory deity of Judeo-Christianity had once actually inhabited the heavens and the earth, running reality and dictating the Bible, was hands-down the worst experience of his life. On the scale of disillusionment, it far outranked his deduction at age five that Santa Glaus was a mountebank, his discovery at seventeen that his father was routinely screwing the woman who boarded the family’s Weimaraners, and the judgment he’d suffered on his thirty-second birthday when he’d asked the curator of the Castelli Gallery in SoHo to exhibit the highlights of his abstract-expressionist period. (“The great drawback of these paintings,” the stiff-necked old lady had replied, “is that they aren’t any good.”) But the fruits of Pamela Harcourt’s recent expedition could not be denied: a dozen full-color photographs, each showing a large, male, grinning, supine body being towed by its ears northward through the Atlantic Ocean. The 30 X 40 blowups hung in the west lounge of Montesquieu Hall like ancestral portraits — which, in a manner of speaking, they were.

“Our labors of late have been, if I may speak mythologically, Herculean,” Barclay Cabot began, his haggard face breaking into a yawn. “Our itinerary included stops in Asia, Europe, the Middle East…”

Oliver fixed on the blowups. He loathed them. No feminist forced to sit through a Linda Lovelace film festival had ever felt more offended. Yet he refused to admit defeat. Indeed, on receiving Pamela’s dire bulletin from Dakar he’d swung into action immediately, deputizing Barclay to form an ad hoc committee and lead it on a frantic journey around the world.

Winston Hawke finished off a petit four, wiping his hands on his Trotsky sweatshirt. “After eighty-four hours of unbroken effort, our team has reached a sobering conclusion.”

Rising, Barclay slipped a sheet of legal paper out of his waistcoat pocket. “By presenting yourself as the agent of a foreign government eager to prevent its financial resources from falling into the wrong hands…”

“Its own people, for example,” said Winston.

“…you can, these days, obtain almost any tool of mass destruction that catches your fancy. To be specific” — Barclay perused the legal paper — “the French Ministry of Defense was prepared to rent us a Robespierre-class attack submarine equipped with eighteen forward-launched torpedoes. The Iranian State Department proposed to sell us the nine million gallons of Vietnam-surplus napalm it acquired from the American CIA in 1976, plus ten F-15 Eagle fighter jets with which to dispense it. The Argentine Navy offered us a two-month lease on the battleship Eva Peron, and if we’d closed the deal on the spot, they’d have thrown in six thousand rounds of ammunition for free. Finally, as long as we agreed to keep the source a secret, the People’s Republic of China would’ve given us what they called a ‘package deal’ on a tactical nuclear weapon and the delivery system of our choice.”

“Every one of these offers fell through the minute the merchants learned we did not in fact represent a sovereign state.” Winston selected a second petit four. “It’s immoral and destabilizing, they said, for private citizens to possess such technologies.”

“The sole dissenter from this policy was itself a private institution, the American National Rifle Association,” said Barclay. “But the things they wanted to sell us — four MHO howitzers and seven wire-guided TOW missiles — are useless for our purposes.”

Oliver groaned softly. He’d been hoping for a more encouraging report: not simply because he wished to impress Cassandra, whose fax had clearly contained a subtext — prove yourself, she was saying between the lines, show me you’re a man of substance — but also because he truly wanted to spare his species a millennium of theistic ignorance and mindless superstition.

“So we’re licked?” asked Pamela.

“There is one ray of hope,” said Winston, devouring the tiny cake. “This afternoon we spoke with—”

The Marxist stopped in midsentence, stunned by the ascent of Sylvia Endicott, a surge so abrupt it was as if the springs of her Empire chair had suddenly popped free. “Have I missed something?” the old woman demanded in a low, liquid hiss. “Did I fail to attend a crucial meeting? Was I out of town during an emergency session? When, exactly, did we agree on this sabotage business?”

“We never put it to a formal vote,” Oliver replied, “but clearly that’s the consensus in the room.”

“Not in this part of the room.”

“What are you saying, Sylvia?” snarled Pamela. “ ‘Sit back and do nothing’?”

“The Svalbard tomb can hardly be a secure place,” Meredith Lodge hastened to add. “Hell, I suspect it’s vulnerable as Cheops’s pyramid.”

“Obliteration’s the only answer,” said Rainsford Fitch.

Scowling profoundly, Sylvia shuffled to the bust of Charles Darwin stationed by the fireplace.

“Assuming for a moment the Valparaíso is really towing what Cassie Fowler says it’s towing,” she began, “shouldn’t we have the collective courage, if not the simple decency, to admit we’ve been wrong all these years?”

“Wrong?” said Rainsford.

“Yes. Wrong.”

“That’s a rather extreme word,” said Barclay.

“It’s probably time to amend our charter,” said Taylor Scott, puffing on a Turkish cigarette, “but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The theistic world was a nightmare, Sylvia. Have you forgotten the Renaissance witch hunts?”

“But we’re not being honest.”

“The trial of Galileo? The massacre of the Incas?”

“I haven’t forgotten those things, nor have I forgotten the scientific curiosity that is the sine qua non of this organization.” Sylvia tightened her woolen shawl, her primary protection against the ersatz winter raging through Montesquieu Hall. “We should be studying this corpse, not sweeping it under the rug.”

“Let’s look at it from another angle,” said Winston. “Yes, some sort of large entity is currently being hauled toward the Arctic, and for all we know this entity hung the stars, spun the earth, and molded Adam out of clay. But does that mean it’s God? The unmoved mover? The first and final cause? The be-all and end-all? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake. What kind of Supreme Being goes belly up like that?”

“A fake Supreme Being,” said Rainsford.

“Exactly,” said Winston. “A fake, a fraud, a phony. The problem, of course, is that such logic will never impress the credulous masses. A relic like this becomes yet another confirmation of their faith. Ergo, for the good of all, in the name of reason, this God-who-isn’t-God must be removed.”

“Winston, you appall me.” Arms akimbo, Sylvia aimed her blighted corneas directly at the Marxist. “Reason, you said? ‘The name of reason’? This isn’t reason you’re doling out — it’s atheist fundamentalism!”

“Let’s not play with words.”

Sylvia tore off the shawl, hobbled into the foyer, and yanked open the front door. “Ladies and gentlemen, you leave me no other choice!” she foamed as the July heat wafted into the frigid lounge. “Honor dictates but one course for me — I must resign from the Central Park West Enlightenment League!”

“Lighten up, Sylvia,” said Pamela.

The old woman stepped into the steamy night. “Got that, you intellectual pharisees?” she called over her shoulder. “I’m quitting — forever!”

Oliver’s innards contracted. His throat grew dry. Sylvia, goddamn it, had a point.

“The sack of Jerusalem!” wailed Winston as the door slammed shut.

“The siege of Belfast!” howled Rainsford.

“The slaughter of the Huguenots!” screamed Meredith.

A point — but that was all Sylvia had, Oliver decided, a mere rational argument, and meanwhile the woods were burning.

“Let’s hear about that ray of hope,” said Pamela.

Barclay strode to the hearth, warming his hands over the roiling flames. “You’ve probably never heard of Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society, but it’s pretty much what the name implies — a couple of ambitious young impresarios who buy up mothballed B-17s and battleships and such. They hire hungry actors, unemployed merchant sailors, and discharged Navy fliers, then travel around simulating the major encounters between the Axis and the Allies.”

“Last summer, Pembroke and Flume put on their version of Rommel’s Africa campaign, substituting the Arizona desert for Tunisia,” said Winston, joining Barclay by the fire. “The winter before, they did the Ardennes counteroffensive in the Catskills. This year, as it happens, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, so they’ve got a Hollywood crew working up on Martha’s Vineyard, reconstructing the entire base out of Styro-foam and plywood. On August first, dozens of classic Japanese warplanes will take off from three-quarter-scale fiberglass facsimiles of the carriers Akagi, Soryu, Hiryu, and Kaga, then bomb the base to smithereens. The next day, all four Jap flattops will be sunk by a squadron of dive bombers from the vintage American carrier Enterprise — the pride of Pembroke and Flume’s collection.”

“Which is actually something of a cheat,” said Barclay. “The Yorktown and the Hornet also sent planes, but Pembroke and Flume are operating on a budget. On the other hand, they do use live bombs. The audience gets its money’s worth.”

“Bread and circuses,” said Winston, sneering. “Only in late-capitalist America, eh?”

“The relevant fact is this: once they’re done with Midway, Pembroke and Flume have no immediate prospects,” said Barclay. “They’ll be eager to let us hire ’em.”

“Hire ’em to do what?” asked Meredith.

“Restage the battle all over again — with fresh ammunition. Between their dive bombers and their torpedo planes, we’re pretty sure they can deliver enough TNT to scuttle Van Horne’s cargo.”

A quick, delicious thrill shot through Oliver as, rising from his meridienne daybed, he marched across the Aubusson carpet to the bust of Darwin. He liked this Midway business. He liked it very much. “What’ll they charge us?”

“They quoted a few rough figures at lunch,” said Winston, scanning a ragged 3X5 card. “Salaries, food, gasoline, bombs, lawyers, insurance riders…”

“And the bottom line?”

“Gimme a minute.” Winston’s index finger danced along the keyboard of his pocket calculator. “Sixteen million, two hundred and twenty thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Think we can get ’em down to fifteen?” asked Oliver, sliding his thumb across the marble furrows of Darwin’s frown. Not that it mattered. If his sister could squander her trust fund collecting Abraham Lincoln memorabilia and his brother could piss away his making cornball biographical movies about major-league baseball stars, Oliver was not about to balk at financing so worthy a project as this.

“Damn good chance of it,” Winston replied. “I mean, these clowns really need us. They practically lost their shirts on Pearl Harbor.”

July 28.

Midnight. Latitude: 30°6'N. Longitude: 22°12'W. Course: 015. Speed: 6 knots. Wind: 4 on the Beaufort. Heading north across the Cape Verde Abyssal Plain, the Canaries to starboard, the Azores dead ahead, Ursa Minor directly above.

This afternoon, in preparation for the blood transfer, we tried piercing His right carotid artery with a series of interconnected chicksans — “the world’s biggest hypodermic needle,” as Crock O’Connor put it. A disaster. Ten feet below the epidermis, He becomes hard as iron. Easier to rupture a football with a banana.

Assuming there’s no mutiny in the meantime, we’ll try again tomorrow.

You think I’m kidding about a mutiny, Popeye? I’m not.

Something strange is happening aboard the Carpco Valparaíso. Every time Bud Ramsey organizes a poker game, one of the players cheats and the whole affair turns into a bloody brawl. Graffiti’s been appearing on the bulkheads faster than I can order it sandblasted away: JESUS IS COMING IN HIS PANTS, and worse.

(I’m not a religious man, but I won’t have that kind of crap on my ship.) The deckies are constantly smoking near the cargo bays, thus breaking the first rule of oil-tanker safety.

Marbles Rafferty informs me that not an hour goes by without somebody pounding on his door to report a theft. Wallets, cameras, radios, knives.

I told our bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, he’d either learn to hold his liquor or I’d clap him in irons. So this morning, what does the idiot do? Gets roaring drunk and smashes up the rec-room pinball machine, thereby obliging me to jam his ass in the brig.

Able Seaman Karl Jaworski insisted he gave Isabel Bostwick “nothing but a friendly good-night kiss.” Then I talked to the woman, a wiper, and she showed me her cuts and bruises, and after that two others came forward, An-mei Jong and Juanita Torres, with similar marks and similar complaints about Jaworski. I stuck him in the cell next to Wheatstone.

Until 48 hours ago, nobody had ever died on a vessel under my command.

Leo Zook. An AB. Poor bastard caught a lethal dose of hydrocarbon gas while cleaning out number 2 center tank. Now here’s the really troubling part. The hose of his Dragen rig was cut to pieces, and when Rafferty arrived on the scene, Zook’s mucking partner — Neil Weisinger, that nervy kid who manned the helm during Beatrice — was crouching beside the body holding a Swiss Army knife.

Whenever I stand outside Weisinger’s cell and ask him to tell what happened, he just laughs.

“The corpse is taking hold,” is how Ockham explains our situation. “Not the corpse per se, the idea of the corpse — that’s our great enemy, that’s the source of this disorder. In the old days,” says the padre, “whether you were a believer, a nonbeliever, or a confused agnostic, at some level, conscious or unconscious, you felt God was watching you, and the intuition kept you in check. Now a whole new era is upon us.”

“New era?” I say.

“Anno Postdomini One,” he says.

The Idea of the Corpse. Anno Postdomini One. Sometimes I think Ockham’s losing it, sometimes I think he’s dead right. I hate locking up my own crew, especially with His carotid artery still unbreached and the sharks running so thick, but what other choice do I have? I fear that we’re a plague ship, Popeye. Our cargo’s gotten inside us, sporing and spawning, and I’m no longer certain who’s towing whom.

A profound sense of regret fell upon Thomas Ockham as, dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Levi Strauss jeans, he descended the narrow ladder to the Valparaíso’s makeshift brig. This, he decided, is how he should have spent his life — collar off, moving among the rejected and the jailed, siding with the world’s outcasts. Jesus hadn’t wasted His time worrying about superstrings or some eternally elusive TOE. The Master had gone where needed.

Lower than the pump room, lower even than the engine flat, the cells were strung along an obscure starboard passageway crowded with shielded cables and perspiring pipes. Thomas advanced at a crouch. The three prisoners were invisible, locked behind riveted steel doors improvised from boiler plates. Slowly, haltingly, the priest moved down the row, past the vandal Wheatstone and the lecher Jaworski, pausing before the case he found most disturbing, Able Seaman Neil Weisinger.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Thomas had contacted Rome. “In your opinion, does our current ethical disarray trace to some palpable force generated by the process of divine decay,” ran his fax’s final sentence, “or to some subjective psychological effect spawned by theothanatopsis, that is, to the Idea of the Corpse?”

To which Tullio Di Luca had replied, “How much travel time do you estimate will be lost to this development?”

Outside the cell, Big Joe Spicer sat on an aluminum folding chair, a flare pistol strapped menacingly to his shoulder and a Playboy centerfold lying open on his lap.

“Hello, Joe. I’m here to see Weisinger.”

Spicer scowled. “Why?”

“A troubled soul.”

“Nah, he’s happy as a clam at high tide.” The second mate jabbed a dull brass skeleton key into the lock, twisting it suddenly like a race-car driver starting his engine. “Listen. The kid makes any threatening gestures” — he patted the flare pistol — “you let out a holler, and I’ll come set his face on fire.”

“I don’t see you at Mass anymore.”

“It’s like fucking, Father. You gotta be up for it.”

Stepping inside the cell, Thomas nearly gagged on the smell, a noxious brew of sweat, urine, and chemically treated feces. Naked to the waist, Weisinger lay atop his bunk, staring upward like a victim of premature burial contemplating the lid of his coffin.

“Hello, Neil.”

The kid rolled over. His eyes were the dull matted gray of expired light bulbs. “Whaddya want?”

“To talk.”

“About what?”

“About what happened in number two center tank.”

“You got any cigarettes?” asked Weisinger.

“Didn’t know you were a smoker,” said Thomas.

“I’m not. You got any?”

“No.”

“Sure could use a cigarette. A Jew-hater died.”

“Zook hated Jews?”

“He thinks we murdered Jesus. God. One of those people. What day is this, anyway? You lose all sense of time down here.”

“Wednesday, July twenty-ninth, noon. Did you kill him?”

“God. Nope. Zook? Wanted to.” Weisinger climbed off his bunk and, staggering to the bulkhead, knelt beside his cistern, a battered copper kettle filled with water the color of Abbaye de Scourmont ale. “Ever known a moment of pure, white-hot clarity, Father Tom? Ever stood over a suffocating man with a Swiss Army knife clutched in your fist? It clears all the cobwebs out of your brain.”

“You cut Zook’s hose?”

“Of course I cut his hose.” The kid splashed his doughy chest with handfuls of dirty water. “But maybe he was already dead, ever think of that?”

“Was he?” asked Thomas.

“What difference would it make?”

“Big difference.”

“Not these days. The cat’s away, Tommy. No eyes on us. The Tablets of the Law: fizz, fizz, gone, like two Alka Seltzers dissolving in a glass of water. Be honest, don’t you feel it too? Don’t you find yourself dreaming of your friend Miriam and her world-class tits?”

“I won’t pretend things haven’t gotten confusing around here.” Thomas gritted his teeth so hard a tingling arose in his right middle ear. His musings concerning Sister Miriam had indeed been intense of late, including the features specified by Weisinger. He’d even, heaven help him, given them names. “I’ll admit the Idea of the Corpse threatens this ship.” Wendy and Wanda. “I’ll admit we’re in the throes of Anno Postdomini One.”

“Fizz, fizz — I can think any damn thought I want. I can think about picking up a Black and Decker needle gun and drilling my Aunt Sarah’s eyes out. I’m free, Tommy.”

“You’re in the brig.”

Weisinger dipped a Carpco coffee mug into the cistern and, raising the water to his lips, drank. “You wanna know why I scare you?”

“You don’t scare me.” The kid terrified Thomas.

“I scare you because you look at me and you see that anybody here on the Val could find the freedom I’ve got. Joe Spicer out there could find it. Rafferty could find it. Sure you don’t have a cigarette?”

“Sorry.” Thomas sidled toward the door and paused, transfixed by the steel rivets; they were pathological and obscene, boils on the back of some leprous robot. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this sort of work. Maybe he’d better stick with quantum mechanics and his meditations on why God died. He looked at Weisinger and said, “Does it help, talking with me like this?”

“O’Connor could find it.”

“Does it help?”

“Haycox could find it.”

“Anytime you get the urge to talk, just have Spicer send for me.”

“Captain Van Horne could find it.”

“I really want to help you,” said the priest, rushing blindly out of the cell.

“Even you could find it, Tommy,” the kid called after him. “Even you!”

As the shabby and foul-smelling taxi pulled up to 625 West Forty-second Street, Oliver realized they were only a block away from Playwrights Horizons, the theater where his personal favorite among Cassie’s plays, Runkleberg, had premiered on a double bill with his least favorite, God Without Tears. Lord, what a sexy genius she was. For her he would do anything. For Cassandra he would rob a bank, walk on burning coals, blow God to Kingdom Come.

Viewed from the sidewalk, the New York offices of Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society looked like just another Manhattan storefront, indistinguishable from a dozen such establishments occupying the civilized side of Eighth Avenue, that asphalt DMZ beyond which the sex shops and peep shows had not yet advanced. The instant the three atheists entered, however, a curious displacement occurred. Stumbling into the dark foyer, attache case swinging at his side, Oliver felt as if he’d tumbled through time and landed in the private chambers of a nineteenth-century railroad magnate. A Persian rug absorbed his footfalls. A full-length, gilt-edged mirror rose before him, flanked by luminous cut-glass globes straight from the age of gaslight. A massive grandfather clock announced the hour, four P.M., tolling with such languor as to suggest its true purpose lay not in keeping time but in exhorting people to slow down and savor life.

They were met by a tall, swan-necked woman in a Mary Astor fedora and a sky blue business suit with padded shoulders, and while she was obviously too young to be Pembroke and Flume’s mother, she treated the atheists less like clients than like a gang of neighborhood boys who’d come over to play with her own children. “I’m Eleanor,” she said, leading them into a small paneled office, blessedly air-conditioned. Posters decorated the walls. PEMBROKE AND FLUME PRESENT BATTLE OF THE BULGE (the four Ts formed by the muzzles of tank cannons)… PEMBROKE AND FLUME PRESENT ATTACK ON TOBRUK (cut into the battlements of a fortified harbor)… PEMBROKE AND FLUME PRESENT FIGHT FOR IWO JIMA (written in blood on a sand dune). “I’ll bet you fellas would like something cold and wet.” Eleanor ambled over to an early-forties Frigidaire icebox and opened the door to reveal a slew of classic labels: Ruppert, Rheingold, Ballantine, Pabst Blue Ribbon. “New beer in old bottles,” she explained. “Budweiser, in fact, from the bodega around the corner.

“I’ll take a Rheingold,” said Oliver. “Pabst for me,” said Barclay.

“Ah, the pseudo-choices of late capitalism,” said Winston. “Make mine a Ballantine.”

“Sidney and Albert are in the back parlor, listening to their favorite program.” Eleanor removed the beers, popping the caps with a hand-painted Jimmy Durante opener. “Second door on the left.”

As Oliver entered the parlor in question — a dark, snug sanctum decorated with pinup photos of Esther Williams and Betty Grable — a high, attenuated male voice greeted him: “…where they discovered that Dr. Seybold had perfected his cosmo-tomic energizer. Listen now as Jack and Billy investigate that lonely stone house known as the Devil’s Castle.”

Two pale young men sat on opposite ends of a green velvet sofa, holding Rupperts and leaning toward a Chippendale coffee table on which rested an antique cathedral radio, its output evidently being supplied by the adjacent audiocassette player. Noticing their visitors, one man slipped a cigarette from a yellowing pack of Chesterfields while the other stood up, bowed politely, and shook Barclay’s hand.

On the radio, a teenaged boy said, “Great whales and little fishes, Jack! Can you imagine some foreign nation having all that electrical energy for nothing? We’ll be reduced to a pauper country!”

Barclay made the introductions. Because the moniker “Pembroke and Flume” seemed to suggest a cinematic comedy team whose trademarks included the physical disparity between its members — Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy — Oliver was taken aback by the impresarios’ similarity to each other. They could have been brothers, or even fraternal twins, a notion underscored by the matching red-and-black-striped zoot suits hanging from their elongated frames: Giacometti bodies, Oliver, the artist, decided. Both men had the same blue eyes, gold fillings, and blond pomaded hair, and it was only through concentrated effort that he distinguished Sidney Pembroke’s open, smiling countenance from the more austere, vaguely sinister visage of Albert Flume.

“I see Eleanor found you some brews,” said Pembroke, ejecting the cassette. “Good, good.”

“What were you listening to?” asked Winston.

“Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Really?” said Flume with a mixture of disbelief and disdain. “You’re not serious.”

Whereupon the partners threw their arms across each other’s shoulders and sang.

Wave the flag for Hudson High, boys, Show them how we stand! Ever shall our team be champions, Known throughout the land!

“There are better programs, of course,” said Flume, lighting his cigarette with a silver-plated Zippo. “The Green Hornet: ‘He hunts the biggest game of all — the public enemies who try to destroy our America!’ ”

“And Inner Sanctum, if you’ve got really strong nerves,” said Pembroke.

Flume faced Oliver squarely, taking a long drag on his Chesterfield. “I’m told your organization wishes to purchase our services.”

“I was quoted a figure approaching fifteen million.”

“Were you, now?” said Flume cryptically. Obviously the dominant partner.

“Could you tell us more about the target?” asked Pembroke eagerly. “We don’t have a clear picture yet.”

Oliver’s blood froze. Here it was, the moment when he must explain why obliterating a seven-million-ton corpse that didn’t belong to any of them was a necessary course of action. Opening his attach й case, he removed an 8X 10 color photo and balanced it atop the radio cabinet.

“As you know,” he began, “the Japanese have always been self-conscious about their height.”

“The Japs?” said Flume, looking perplexed. “Indeed.”

So far, so good. “According to the Freudian interpretation of World War Two, they sought to expand horizontally in compensation for their genetic inability to expand vertically. As scholars of that particular conflict, you’re undoubtedly familiar with this theory.”

“Oh, yes,” said Pembroke, even though Oliver had invented it the previous Tuesday.

“Well, gentlemen, the stark fact is that, at the beginning of this year, a team of Japanese scientists over in Scotland found a way to expand vertically. By exploiting the latest breakthroughs in genetic engineering, they’ve grown the Asian of the future — the gigantic humanoid creature whose prototype you see in this picture. You with me?”

“Sounds like a rejected Green Hornet script,” said Flume, coiling the gold chain of his zoot suit around his index finger.

“They call it Project Golem,” said Barclay.

“Most golems are Jewish,” said Winston.

“This one’s Japanese.

“The Japs are in Scotland?” said Pembroke.

“The Japs are everywhere,” admonished Flume.

“Thus far they’ve failed to endow their golem with life,” said Winston, “but if they ever do — well, you can imagine the danger such a megaspecies would pose for the environment, not to mention the free enterprise system.”

“Jack Armstrong would shit his knickers,” said Barclay.

“Luckily, the coming weeks afford us a perfect opportunity to stop Project Golem in its tracks,” said Oliver. “Ever since the hot weather hit, the scientists have been looking for a way to freeze the prototype before it putrefies. Then, last Wednesday, they resolved to hook it up to the supertanker Valparaíso and tow it above the Arctic Circle.”

“Valparaíso — that’s not a Jap name,” said Pembroke.

“Neither is ‘Rockefeller Center,’ ” said Winston.

“I don’t understand why private enterprise must redress this matter,” said Flume. “The United States of America boasts the largest navy in the world. Much larger than Sid’s and mine.”

“Yeah, but you can’t use the American Navy without Congressional approval,” said Barclay.

“The CIA?”

“Good people, but we’d never mobilize ’em in time,” said Oliver.

“This is clearly a job for concerned businessmen like ourselves,” said Winston. “Vigilante capitalism, eh?”

“I’m not a mystical sort of fella,” said Barclay, “but I feel it’s no accident your ship is named Enterprise.”

Oliver took a hearty swallow of beer. “So, what do you think?”

Pembroke shot his partner a pained glance. “What do we think, Alby?”

Flume flicked his cigarette ashes into a pewter tray shaped like Dumbo the Flying Elephant. “We think it sounds pretty fishy.”

“Fishy?” said Oliver, peeling the label off his Rheingold bottle.

“Fishy as the hold of a Portuguese trawler.”

“Oh?”

“We think this thing you want out of the way might be a Jap golem, and then again it might not be.” Flume took a drag, blew a smoke ring. “We also think this: money talks. You mentioned fifteen million. That’s a good start. A darn good start.”

“It’s more than a start,” grunted Oliver.

“Indeed. The thing is…”

“All right — sixteen.”

“The thing is, you’re not asking us to do a normal reenactment. In some ways, this is the real McCoy.” Flume blew two rings this time, one inside the other. “Wars have a way of going over budget.”

“A single strike might not be enough to remove the target,” Pembroke elaborated. “The planes might have to return to Enterprise and rearm.”

“Final offer,” said Oliver. “This is it. Tops. Ready? Seventeen million dollars. For that kind of money, you could stage a goddamn musical of my eighth-grade civics text on the back of the moon and keep it running for ten years.”

Had the impresarios been dogs, Oliver decided, their ears would have shot straight up and stayed there.

“Overlord,” said Flume in a hushed and reverent voice.

“What?” said Oliver.

“Operation Overlord. An old dream of ours.”

“You know — Normandy,” said an equally respectful Pembroke.

“D-Day,” said Flume. “I mean, if you’re serious about seventeen million dollars, really serious, no strings attached, then, with a certain amount of luck — like maybe the job turns out to be a cakewalk, you know, a one-strike affair — well, we’d probably have enough left over for a D-Day. All of it. The diversionary bombings, the amphibious landing, the sweep through France. A risky venture, sure, but I predict it’ll turn a profit, don’t you, Sid?”

“Enough to finance Stalingrad, I should imagine,” said Pembroke.

“Or Arnhem, eh?” said Flume. “Forty thousand Allied paratroopers dropping out of the sky like sleet.”

“Or maybe even Hiroshima,” said Pembroke.

“No,” said Flume firmly.

“No?”

“No.”

“Poor taste?”

“Execrable.”

“World War Two,” sighed Pembroke. “We’ll never see its like again.”

“Let’s get one thing straight,” said Oliver. “You can’t just damage the golem — it’s got to vanish without a trace.”

“Korea was a crummy stalemate,” Pembroke persisted.

“We expect you to blast the tow chains apart,” said Oliver, “and send the sucker straight into the Mohns Trench.”

“Vietnam had potential,” said Flume, “but then the hippies got their hands on it.”

“Don’t even talk to us about Operation Desert Storm,” said Pembroke.

“A lousy video game,” said Flume.

“A goddamn mini-series,” said Pembroke.

“Do you understand me?” said Oliver. “The Valparaíso’s cargo must disappear.”

“No problem,” said Flume. “Only we follow U.S. Navy usage ’round here, okay? No ‘the’ before a ship’s name. It’s Valparaíso, not ‘the’ Valparaíso. Enterprise, not ‘the’ Enterprise. Got that?”

Hovering over the photo, Pembroke jabbed his index finger into the carcass’s chest. “Why’s it grinning like that?”

“If you were that big,” said Barclay, “you’d grin too.”

“Any reason to suspect we won’t get a clear shot at it?” asked Flume. “When Scout Bombing Six sank Akagi, Commander McClusky had to put up with all sorts of crap — fighter pianes, screening vessels, flak. Valparaíso isn’t carrying any Bofors guns, is she?”

“Of course not,” said Winston.

“No destroyer escort?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Oh,” said Pembroke, sounding vaguely disappointed. “I think we should use TBD-1 Devastator torpedo planes, don’t you, Alby?”

“They’d clearly be the most effective against a target of this sort,” said Flume, nodding. “On the other hand…” Gripped by a sudden reverie, the impresario closed his eyes.

“On the other hand… ?” said Winston.

“On the other hand, it was SBD-2 Dauntless dive bombers that actually blew Akagi out of the water.”

“So while the Devastators would work the best… ,” said Pembroke.

“The Dauntlesses would be more historically accurate,” said Flume.

“I’d vote for the Devastators,” said Oliver.

“A tough call either way. Shall we leave it to the admiral, Sid?”

“Good idea.”

Flume stubbed out his cigarette in the Dumbo tray. “Naturally this has to be a hit-and-run operation. I figure if Enterprise hunkers down, say, a hundred and fifty miles west of the target, the Nips’ll never know where the planes came from.”

“The last thing we want is for Japan to be pissed at Alby and me,” Pembroke explained. “We’re gonna need their full cooperation for Guadalcanal.”

“Swing by Shields, McLaughlin, Babcock, and Kaminsky on Wednesday, and they’ll give you a rough draft to shoot past your lawyers,” said Flume. “It’ll probably take a couple weeks to nail down all the details — payment schedules, representations and warranties, the indemnity picture…”

“You mean — we’ve got ourselves a deal?” said Winston eagerly.

“Seventeen million?” said Flume, raising his Ruppert.

“Seventeen million,” Oliver confirmed, lifting his Rheingold.

Two vintage beer bottles came together, clanking in the hot Manhattan air.

“You know what I think we should do right now?” said Pembroke. “I think we should bow our heads and pray.”

A silken breeze blew across the Valparaíso’s stem as Cassie climbed down the ladder and, like Juliet stepping onto her balcony, joined Able Seaman Ralph Mungo in the forward lookout post. The cool air caressed her flesh. Slowly the sweat evaporated from her face. By morning, thank God, they’d be across the thirty-third parallel, the wretched North African summer forever behind them.

Puffing on a Marlboro, Mungo stared out to sea. The waxing moon hung low, fixed in the starry sky like a luminous slice of cantaloupe. Cassie set her flip-top coffee Thermos on the rail, reached into her shorts pocket, and removed the encrypted fax Lianne had intercepted that afternoon up in the radio shack.

Oliver’s love letters, with their mawkish poems illustrated by pornographic sketches, had never truly touched Cassie, but these words cut to her core. Decoding them, she’d experienced something primal, the same variety of awe that Darwin, Galileo, and a handful of others must have felt upon realizing they were shaping the course of intellectual history. True, the particulars were troubling: despite her affection for all things theatrical, she did not like placing reason’s fate in the hands of any organization that would call itself Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society. (These men did not sound like the saviors of secular humanism; they sounded like a couple of lunatics.) What Cassie found so moving was Oliver’s rationality, the fact that he’d correctly interpreted the body as a menace and immediately swung into action. His insistence on security struck her as particularly astute. Intuitively he’d sensed that if the Vatican got wind of an impending attack, they’d either reroute the mission or erect defenses the Reenactment Society could never hope to penetrate. “This will be my only communique,” he’d written near the end.

Expect air stride at 68°11'N, 2°35'W, 150 miles east of launch point, Jan Mayen Island. In restaging Midway, planes will sever tow chains, breach target, and send our troubles to bottom of Mohns Trench…

Leaning over the rail, she accorded the fax the same treatment she’d inflicted on the blisteringly negative review the Village Voice had given her play about Jephthah, the warrior in the Book of Judges who immolated his own daughter by way of keeping a bargain with God. “Authentic satire is to puerile sniggering as a firecracker is to a soda cracker, a distinction to which a young author named Cassie Fowler is evidently oblivious…”

Good old Oliver. He’d always stuck by her — hadn’t he? — even when she was a struggling playwright and he a leftist ne’er-do-well painting grim urban landscapes while waiting for his trust fund to kick in. There she’d be, sitting in the basement of some Broome Street saloon or Avenue D hockshop, one of those scuzzy roach reserves that had the nerve to call themselves off-Broadway theaters (any farther off, and she’d have been in Queens), watching a disastrous rehearsal of Runkleberg or God Without Tears, and suddenly Oliver would appear, even if it was three A.M., bringing her black coffee and sweet rolls, telling her she was the Lower East Side Jonathan Swift.

No sooner had Cassie tossed the bits of paper into the Portugal Current than Anthony Van Horne himself descended into the lookout post, dressed in his tattered Mets baseball jacket and John Deere visor cap. A spasm of guilt shot through her. This man had saved her life, and here she was, plotting to abort his mission.

“You’re in luck, sailor — I’m taking over your watch,” Van Horne told Ralph Mungo. A large purple bruise, frosted with glory grease, spread outward from the old AB’s right eye. “That okay with you?”

“Aye-aye, sir.” Saluting, grinning, Mungo threw his cigarette butt overboard and scooted up the ladder.

“Stargazing?” the captain asked Cassie.

“Something like that.” Raising the Thermos to her lips, she took a big swallow of jamoke. It was the fifth time she’d run into him here. She suspected she was being pursued — a flattering thought, but the last thing she needed just then was her adversary developing a crush on her. “I’ve decided to rename the constellations.” She pointed heavenward. “It’s time for a wholly American mythology, don’t you think? Look, there’s the Myth of the Family. There’s Equality. There’s One Nation Under God with Liberty and Justice for All.”

“You hate our cargo, don’t you?”

Cassie nodded. “That’s why I hang out here — the farthest I can get from Him without ending up in the water. And what about you, Captain? Do you hate our cargo?”

“I never knew Him.” The captain yawned; the reflex took hold of him, rippling through his face and shoulders. “I only know it’s good to be at sea again.”

“You’re exhausted, sir.”

“We’ve been trying to siphon His blood into the tanks — a way to get us moving faster — but His neck won’t accept the chicksans.” Another elaborate yawn. “The worst of it’s… I’m not sure what word to use. The anarchy, Cassie. Notice that AB’s black eye? He got it in a brawl. It’s been a week of fistfights, attempted rapes, possibly even a murder. I’ve had to put three men in the brig.”

An odd combination of dread and annoyance crept over Cassie. “Murder? Jesus. Who died?”

“Deckie named Zook — he got gassed in a cargo bay. Ockham says we’re in thrall to the corpse. Not the corpse itself, the Idea of the Corpse. With God out of the picture, people have lost their main reason to be moral. They can’t help experimenting with sin.

As she always did in the presence of intellectually untenable arguments, Cassie thrust her left hand into her pocket and pinched her inner thigh through the fabric. “Can’t help it? Gimme a break, Anthony. The whole thing’s an alibi. A clever alibi, but an alibi. These sailors of yours — want my opinion? They’re seizing on the carcass to rationalize their crimes. God’s death is so convenient.”

“I think it goes deeper than that.” Reaching into his baseball jacket, Anthony produced a sheet of beige paper covered with smeary black characters, and for one awful instant Cassie imagined he meant to confront her with a copy of Oliver’s communique. “Do me a favor, Doc. Read this. It’s from my father.”

The letter was handwritten on Exxon Shipping stationery: a cramped, feathery scrawl that struck her as oddly feminine.

“This seems awfully personal.”

“Just read it.”

“So, what do you make of it?” asked Anthony.

“Who’s Tiffany?”

“My stepmother. Major airhead. What’s he telling me?”

A humbling sense of her own parochialism crept over Cassie. So far in her life, the worst burdens she’d had to bear were rotten reviews in the Voice and deadhead students in her classes, nothing remotely comparable to a hostile father, an unbreachable neck, or a supertanker crew lapsing into vice. “I’m no psychologist… but when he says you have grievances against him, maybe he’s really saying he has grievances against you.”

“Of course he has grievances against me. I dishonored him at Matagorda Bay. I dragged the family name through an oil slick.”

“What’s this ‘parrot business’?”

Anthony snorted, grimaced, and put on his mirrorshades.

“For my tenth birthday, Dad brought back a scarlet macaw from Guatemala.”

“Order Psittaciformes. Family Psittaddae.”

“Yeah. Beautiful bird. She arrived speaking Spanish. ‘Vaya con Dios.’ ‘Que pasa?’ I tried teaching her ‘See you later, alligator,’ but it didn’t stick. I named her Rainbow. So, four months later, what does Dad do? He decides Rainbow’s costing us too much in parrot food and vet bills, and she’s noisy besides, messy too, so he drives me and the bird across town to a pet store, and he goes up to the counter, and he says, ‘If anybody comes in and wants this miserable beast, I’ll split the take with you, fifty-fifty.’ ”

“How mean.”

“There’s a pattern here, actually. I’m eleven — okay? — and the thing I most want for Christmas is a Revell plastic model kit of the USS Constitution, one to the forty-second scale, two hundred and thirty separate pieces, real canvas for the sails. Dad buys me the kit all right, but he won’t let me put it together. He says I’ll screw it up.”

“So he does it himself?”

“Yeah, and here’s the weird part. He gets some glass blower in Wilmington to seal up my ship in a big blue water-cooler bottle. So I can’t touch it, right? I can’t hold the Constitution or play with it. It isn’t really mine.” Anthony took back the fax, wadded it up, and stuffed the ball in his jacket. “The problem is that I need the bastard.”

“No, you don’t.”

“He’s the one who can wash the oil away.”

“Matagorda Bay?”

“Yeah. I won’t be free till Dad looks right at me and says, ‘Good job, Anthony. You laid His bones to rest.’ ”

“Oh, come on.”

“I got it straight from Raphael’s lips.”

“I don’t care whose lips you got it from.” A completely irrational theory, Cassie decided as she drained the last of her jamoke. “It doesn’t add up.” The breeze turned nasty, clawing at her cheeks, biting her fingers. She pulled the zipper tab of Lianne’s windbreaker as high as it would go. “I need some of Follingsbee’s hot cocoa.”

The captain cocked his head. Aries lay reflected in both lenses of his mirrorshades. “Birds fly through my dreams.”

“Birds? Parrots, you mean?”

“Egrets, herons, ibises — dripping oil. I take showers, but it doesn’t help. Only my father… you understand?”

“No. I don’t. But even if I did… well, what if your dad regards absolution as just another present? What if he gives you a clear conscience and then — bang — he takes that away too?”

“He wouldn’t.”

“The man who sent you that fax” — Cassie indicated the bulge in Anthony’s jacket — “is not a man you can trust.” She started up the ladder, retreating not so much from the cold as from this confused, frightening, peculiarly alluring man, this captain who dreamed of oiled egrets. “Know something, sir? When we get back to New York, I’m going to buy you a scarlet macaw.”

“I’d like that, Doc.”

“Know something else?” She paused on the topmost rung. “It’s perfectly okay to hate our cargo. It’s really quite okay.”

August 3.

On this day in 1924, my Mariner’s Pocket Companion notes, “Joseph Conrad, author of Lord Jim, Typhoon, and other classics of the sea, died in Bishopsbourne, England.”

I’ll start with the good news. For reasons best known to themselves, the predators have thrown in the towel. When it comes to the vultures and snakes, my guess is that we’ve sailed too far beyond their territories. As for the sharks — well, who knows what goes on in those antique minds?

This morning I had Rafferty gather up all the antipredator materiel, remove the shells and charges, and secure the empty weapons in the fo’c’sle hold. We no longer need the stuff, and in the present anarchic atmosphere I can easily imagine the deckies making murderous use of a harpoon gun or a bazooka.

Once again we tried screwing chicksans into His right carotid artery, and once again we failed, but that’s not the really bad news.

The fights and thefts continue, but that’s not the really bad news either.

The really bad news is the weather.

Dead reckoning places us 50 miles south of the Azores. It’s hard to know for sure, because the Marisat signals aren’t getting through, and we can’t see more than 20 yards in any direction. Fog I can deal with, but this is something else, a stew so thick it’s blinded both our radars. Forget the sextants.

An hour ago I explained our options to Ockham. Either we break radio silence and ask the Portuguese Coast Guard where the hell we are, or we slow to a crawl to avoid ramming into the Azores.

“You mean like four knots?”

“I mean like three knots.”

“At that speed, we won’t beat the deadline,” noted the padre.

“Correct.”

“His neurons will die.”

“Yeah, if He’s got any left.”

“What’s your preference?” Ockham wanted to know.

“Raphael never mentioned neurons,” I replied.

“Neither did Gabriel. You want us to slow down?”

“No, I want us to save His brain.”

“So do I, Anthony. So do I.”

At 1355 we broke radio silence. In our hearts we both knew it wouldn’t work. The damn fog devoured everything we put out: shortwave broadcasts, CB signals, fax transmissions.

Got to go, Popeye. Got to drop us back to 10 rpm’s. My present migraine is the worst ever, despite generous applications of glory grease. It’s like my brain is dying, cell by cell by cell, shutting down along with His.

Again, the music of Strauss — Salome this time, a hundred operatic voices filling the Jeep Wrangler’s cab as Thomas drove into the soggy depths of the navel. The route was dangerous, an ever-narrowing gyre cloaked in glutinous fog, but the Wrangler cleaved to the path, carrying Jesuit and Carmelite through the omphalogical terrain like a burro bearing tourists into the Grand Canyon.

The trip, he would admit, was an act of desperation, a last-ditch effort to discredit the body in question, for only by invalidating the corpse per se could he hope to invalidate the Idea of the Corpse and thus — perhaps — end the plague now raging aboard the Valparaíso. At first blush, of course, their cargo’s navel held no more teleological meaning than its warts (“Let there be a bellybutton,” and there was a bellybutton), and yet something about this particular feature, with its clear implications of a previous generation, had aroused in Thomas an uncharacteristic optimism. Did a navel not herald a Creator’s Creator? Did it not bespeak a God before God?

Within minutes they were at the bottom, a half-acre of flesh mottled with chunks of coral, swatches of algae, and an occasional dead crab. Thomas rotated the ignition key, shutting off the engine along with Salome. He inhaled. The fog filled his lungs like steam rising from a Mesozoic swamp. In a move the priest found perplexing, Sister Miriam leaned over and aggressively rotated the ignition key, restoring Salome to life.

He unhooked his seat belt, climbed out of the cab, and made his way across the damp, briny basin. Dropping to his knees, he ran his palm along the epidermis, searching for some clue that an umbilicus had once towered, sequoialike, from this spot — evidence of a proto-Deity, sign of a pre-Creator, proof of an unimaginable placenta floating through the Milky Way like an emission nebula.

Nothing. Zero. Not a nub.

He’d expected as much. And yet he persisted, massaging the terrain as if attempting some eschatological variety of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

“Any luck?”

Until that moment, he hadn’t realized Miriam was beside him.

Or naked.

What astonished him was how detailed she was, how wonderfully particularized. The blue veins spidering across her breasts, the wiry twists and turns of her pubic hairs, the cyclopean gaze of her navel, the tampon string dangling between her legs like a fuse. Her pimples. Her freckles. Her birthmarks, pores, and scabs. This wasn’t Miss November. This was a woman.

So Weisinger had called it right. Anyone, even Miriam, could find the freedom that travels in God’s wake. “No luck,” Thomas replied nervously, lifting his palm from the cavity’s floor. A loud glunk escaped his throat. “I don’t f-feel a thing.”

“What we’re really talking about, of course,” said Miriam, sucking in a deep breath, “is Gnosticism.” Her clothes — dungarees, khaki work shirt, underwear, all of it — lay puddled at her feet. Stepping uncertainly forward, she called to mind Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her seashell, a humanoid and endlessly desirable scallop.

“True.” Sweat circled Thomas’s neck. He popped open his saturated collar. “We’re praying our cargo will t-turn out to be the D-Demiurge,” he continued, unbuttoning his black shirt.

“We’re hoping it’s not God at all.”

“Except Gnosticism’s a heresy,” the priest noted, climbing out of his Levi’s. “No, worse than a heresy: it’s depressing. It reduces us to st-stifled spirits trapped in evil flesh.”

A furious drumming poured from the Wrangler’s speakers.

“The Dance of the Seven Veils,” Miriam explained nervously, wiggling her epic hips. Wendy and Wanda were on the move, flouncing in hypnotic oscillations. “The trumpets and trombones speak up next, and then it becomes a waltz. Have you ever waltzed naked in God’s navel, Tom?”

The priest removed his shirt and Jockey shorts. “Never.”

Trumpets shrieked, trombones bleated, a lone tuba blared. At first Thomas simply watched, wearing nothing but his bifocals. He imagined he was Herod Antipas, beholding the impossibly sensual dance that, in a paroxysm of pedophilia, he’d commissioned from his nubile stepdaughter, Salome, never guessing that her price would be John the Baptist’s head. And Miriam’s movements were indeed sensual — not lewd, not lascivious, but sensual, like the Song of Solomon, or Bathsheba’s ablutions, or the Magdalene washing the Lord’s dusty feet.

Taking his friend’s hand, he encircled her fine, substantive waist. They waltzed: awkwardly at first, clownishly, in fact, but then some buried engram took over, some latent feeling for rhythm and form, and he guided her across the rubbery floor with bold, sweeping strides. The strange fog hung everywhere, blankets of mist wrapping their spinning bodies in a thick, delicious warmth. Something stirred in his mothballed loins. No erection followed. No lust consumed him. He was glad. This dance went deeper than loins, well beyond lust, back to some ancient, presexual existence they shared with sponges and amoebas.

“Nobody’s watching,” noted Miriam.

Their bodies pressed tightly together, like hands clasped in prayer. “We’re alone,” Thomas corroborated. So true, so pathetically true; they were orphans in Anno Postdomini One, beyond good and evil. It was like living inside a naughty joke. How much fun do priests have? Nun. He felt soiled, wicked, damned, ecstatic.

A tremor caressed their bare feet.

“The High Court’s adjourned,” said Miriam.

A second tremor, twice the intensity of the first.

“The bench has been eaten by worms.”

A fearsome quaking shook the navel.

They separated, throwing their arms out for balance. Confusion swept through Thomas. Resurrection? Their dancing was so sinful it had roused God from His coma?

“What’s happening?” gasped Miriam.

Typhoon? Tidal wave? “I don’t know. But I think this is the wrong place to be right now.”

They dressed hurriedly and incompletely, Thomas pausing briefly to observe an act he’d never seen before, the odd yogic posture by which a woman snaps on her brassiere. The flesh beneath their feet jiggled like a field of aspic. Explosions rattled the air. Spray splashed into the gorge. It seemed as if the entire Corpus Dei were aquiver, seized by some posthumous epileptic fit.

Shoes and socks in hand, they dashed back to the Wrangler, climbed inside, and, silencing Salome, zoomed away.

“Whirlpool?” asked Miriam.

“Possibly.”

“Waterspout?”

“Could be.”

Gunning the engine, Thomas guided the Wrangler to the surface of the belly and, heedless of the blinding fog, started along the midriff. Veering east, he stopped. The Juan Fernandez, thank heaven, was where they’d left her, tied to the rubber wharf Rafferty had moored to the starboard armpit shortly before the tow began. Abandoning the Wrangler, they climbed down the Jacob’s ladder, crawled on hands and knees across the rolling pier, and vaulted into the launch.

“How do you feel?” Thomas asked, settling behind the steering wheel.

“Guilty.” Miriam cast off. “We sinned, didn’t we? We gazed upon each other’s nakedness.”

“We sinned,” he agreed, twisting the ignition key. The engine turned over and held. “You’re beautiful, Miriam.”

“So are you.”

He brought the Juan Fernandez about and, opening the throttle all the way, piloted her across the submerged elbow. The passage along the cheek was choppy and treacherous, and it took them nearly fifteen minutes to gain open water. Dead ahead lay the supertanker, deckhouse shrouded in fog, hull pitching and rocking as if making passionate love to the sea.

“And how does guilt feel?” asked Thomas, steering the launch along a course defined by the starboard tow chain.

“Bad,” she replied.

“Bad,” he agreed.

“Guilt does not feel as bad,” she added, after some thought, “as dancing feels good.”

At which juncture — defying logic, denying gravity, snubbing Newtonian physics — the Valparaíso began to rise. Locking the steering wheel with his elbows, Thomas tore off his bifocals and wiped the condensation with his sleeve. He repositioned them. Yes, it was truly happening, an entire ULCC moving toward heaven, great sheets of seawater spilling from her hull and keel. He groaned. In the new, normless universe, what arcane force was struggling to be born? What had God’s death wrought?

Now came the answer. An island: a six-mile sprawl of ragged coves and crimson cliffs pushing free of the Gibraltar Sea like a breaching whale, carrying the tanker with it. Huge waves poured from the ascending mass, spewing foam and flotsam as, flowing south, they broke against the divine cranium.

“Oh, hell,” said Miriam. “Oh, bloody, bloody hell.”

A sudden crack echoed across the Portugal Current, like the hatching of some gigantic egg: God’s earbones snapping, Thomas realized, a sound no human being had ever heard before.

When at last the newborn island halted — leaving the Valparaíso beached, the corpse adrift, and every chart of the Gibraltar Sea obsolete — Miriam took the priest’s knobby, trembling hand. “Jesus, Tom, we lost Him.”

“We lost Him,” he agreed.

“We found Him, and now we’ve lost Him. What does it mean? Is it our fault?”

“Our fault? I hardly think so.”

“But we sinned,” said the nun.

“Not on this scale,” he said, pointing toward the errant land mass.

Whereupon Thomas Wickliff Ockham, S.J., his God gone, his self-respect shattered, threw himself against the steering wheel and wept.

ISLAND

ANTHONY COULDN’T STOP laughing. Ever since they’d steamed out of New York Harbor, he realized, the universe had been casting about for some particularly cruel and elaborate joke to play on him, and now it had finally found one. Thrust an absurd little island out of the Gibraltar Sea. Beach Van Horne’s ship. Steal his cargo.

Hilarious.

The bridge was buzzing. Upon deducing that the Val was aground, nearly everyone above the rank of AB had instinctively gone looking for his captain, demanding that he explain this bizarre upwelling, though the tanker’s master was as mystified as his crew. Now they all stood amid the control consoles and radar scopes — officers, engineers, chief steward, pumpman — fidgeting like a congregation of millennialists awaiting the end of the world. Anthony could feel their hostility. He sensed their disgust. He knew what they were thinking. Never again, each mariner was promising himself. Never again shall I sail with Anthony Van Horne.

“I’m assumin’ I should kill the engines,” said Dolores Haycox, the mate on duty, leaning toward the joysticks.

Until that moment, Anthony hadn’t realized the propellers were still moving, spinning ineffectually in space. “Kill ’em,” he said, snickering.

“No need to hold the wheel, right?” asked James Echohawk, the AB at the helm.

“Right,” said the captain, giggling.

“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” asked Bud Ramsey.

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Try me.”

“The universe.”

“Huh?”

Choking down his laughter, Anthony grabbed the PA mike. “Now hear this! Now hear this! As you can see, sailors, we’re in quite a jam!” His amplified words boomed across the weather deck and vanished into the mist-shrouded dunes beyond. “It’ll take at least three days, maybe four, to dig ourselves out of here, after which we’ll find the body, reconnect” — he struggled to believe himself — “and get this show on the road again!”

The immediate problem, he realized, was not freeing the Val but simply climbing down and inspecting the damage. They were imprisoned in their own ship, cut off like the plastic Constitution his father had sealed up in the water-cooler bottle. On all sides, the tanker’s stranded hull plunged toward the wet sands, a drop no mere gangway or Jacob’s ladder could begin to plumb.

“Hey, any of you guys ever hear of such a thing?” moaned Charlie Horrocks. “An island comin’ outta nowhere like this, any of you ever even hear of it?”

“Not me,” said Bud Ramsey.

“It’s unprecedented,” said Big Joe Spicer. “Even on a weird-ass voyage like this, it’s totally unprecedented.”

“Maybe Father Thomas could give us an explanation,” said Lianne Bliss. “He’s a genius, right? Where’s Father Thomas?”

“Any more shit happens on this trip,” said Sam Follingsbee, “I’m gonna go outta my mind.”

“You really think we’ll be able to dig ourselves free?” asked Crock O’Connor, rubbing the ancient steam burn that covered his brow.

Good question, Anthony decided. “Of course I do.” The captain ran his index finger along the apex of his broken nose. “Faith can move mountains, and so can the United States Merchant Marine.”

“Want my opinion?” asked Marbles Rafferty. “Our only hope is for this damn thing to go sliding back down where it came from, suddenly, in a great big whoosh, exactly the way it arrived.”

“Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t count on that,” said Dolores Haycox. “If you ask me, it’s here to stay, and we are too, stuck on our own private paradise.”

“Private paradise,” Anthony repeated. “Then we’ve got the right to name it.” He curled his palm around Echohawk’s beefy arm. “The next entry in the quartermaster’s log goes like this: ‘At 1645 hours, the Valparaíso ran aground on Van Horne Island.’ ”

“How modest of you,” said Rafferty.

“I’m not naming it after me. My father spent his entire life trying to find an uncharted island. A major asshole, dear old Dad, but he deserves this.”

Anthony lifted his angel feather from the breast pocket of his pea jacket and scratched his itching forehead with the quill. Chains, he thought. Yes. Chains. The tow chains were impossibly fat, but an anchor lead would make a perfect ladder. Flipping on the intercom, he raised the engine flat and instructed Lou Chickering to send somebody forward with instructions to drop the port kedge.

“Crock told me we’re high and dry,” Chickering protested. “Fetched up on an atoll, right?”

“Something like that.”

“’Fraid we’ll drift?”

“Just lower the goddamn anchor, Lou.”

Rafferty inserted a Pall Mall between his lips. “If you like, Captain, I’d be happy to head up an exploration party.”

It was the logical next step, but Anthony knew that he himself must be the first man to take the measure of his father’s world. “Thanks, Marbles, but I’m reserving that particular job for yours truly. It’s a personal matter. Expect me back late tonight.”

“Maintain present course?” asked the chief mate, deadpan.

“Maintain present course,” said Anthony without batting an eye.

He rode the elevator to level three, visiting first his cabin and then the main galley as he provisioned himself for the conquest of Van Horne Island: food, water, compass, flashlight, bottle of Monte Alban mescal complete with pickled Oaxacan worm. Descending to the weather deck, he pedaled O’Connor’s trail bike along the catwalk, entered the fo’c’sle, and crawled into the damp, sewery reaches of the hawsepipe.

The climb down the anchor chain was treacherous and painful — the links were slippery, the coarse metal scraped his palms — but within fifteen minutes Anthony stood on the island’s spongy surface.

Scaly and gritty, red as claret, the stuff composing the surrounding dunes looked more like flecks of rust than like the brown-sugar sands one normally encountered along the 35th parallel. The deadness of the place unnerved him. It seemed not so much an island in the Gibraltar Sea as a meteor hewn from the crust of some singularly inert and sterile planet.

The Val’s wounds were ugly and deep. The lower half of her rudder was bent about ten degrees. Her keel was serrated like a carving knife. Her port shaft had sprung loose, and the propeller itself stood upright in a dune like the blades of a sinking windmill. Heavy damage, no question, but not so heavy that a smart skipper couldn’t compensate through some astute maneuvers and a few tricks of the trade. It all came down to the hull, the ship’s one truly vital organ. Anthony stared at the barnacle-encrusted plates; he rubbed them with his fingers, brushed them with his feather. A ragged seam ran for sixty yards along the starboard side like a surgical scar, evidence of her fateful encounter with Bolivar Reef, but the weld looked unscathed — indeed, the entire hull looked whole. Assuming they could in fact manage to dig the tanker loose, she would almost certainly float.

He stepped back. Like the Ark come to rest on Ararat, the tanker sat atop a mountain of sand, mud, coral, stones, and shells. The Vatican flag hung limply on its halyard. The tow chains drooped impotently off the stern, hit the dunes, and trailed away into the sea. Slipping on his mirrorshades, Anthony scanned the cove, hoping their cargo had miraculously drifted into the shallows, but he saw nothing except jagged rocks and clots of fibrous fog.

He drew the compass from his canvas knapsack, oriented himself, and marched north.

The farther Anthony went, the more obvious it became that Van Horne Island had lain beneath a major deep-sea dump site. Ascending from the ocean floor, the island had brought with it the trash of half a continent. This was Italy’s garbage can, England’s dustbin, Germany’s cesspool, France’s chamber pot.

Cupping a palm over his mouth and nose, he rushed past a huge mound of chemical waste, hundreds of 55-gallon drums stacked up in a kind of post-industrial Aztec pyramid. A mile beyond lay the remains of over a thousand automobiles, their gutted chassis piled side by side like skeletons flanking the promenade of a charnel house. Next came the appliances: blenders, toasters, refrigerators, ranges, microwaves, dishwashers — all randomly discarded yet collectively forming an oddly coherent setting, a backdrop for some post-theistic sitcom featuring an aging and demented Donna Reed brooding alone in her kitchen, plotting to poison her family.

Dusk descended, stealing the island’s warmth and turning its red sands black. Anthony zipped up his jacket, drew the bottle of Monte Alban from his knapsack, and, taking a long, hot swallow, pressed on.

An hour later, he found himself among the gods.

Four, to be exact: four granite idols over fifteen feet high, each commanding a different corner of a muddy flagstone plaza. Anthony gasped. Strange enough that Van Horne Island even existed, much less that the place had once hosted a human community — the Atlantic’s answer, perhaps, to that cheerless tribe that had made its home on Easter Island. To the north rose the graven image of a plump imbiber, lifting a goatskin container high above his parted lips and releasing a torrent of wine. To the east a fat-cheeked glutton, his belly the size of a wrecking ball, attempted to ingest an entire live boar in one grand gulp. To the south a goggle-eyed opium eater wolfed down a bouquet of poppies. To the west a sodomy aficionado, possessed of an erection so enormous he appeared to be riding a seesaw, made ready to copulate with a female manatee. Wandering among the idols, Anthony felt as if he’d been transported into the past, back to a time when the major sins were celebrated — no, not celebrated, exactly: it was more as if sin hadn’t been invented yet, and people simply did as their drives demanded, not worrying too much about any hypothetical Supreme Being’s opinion of such behaviors. The gods of Van Horne Island made no laws, passed no sentences, asked for no sympathy.

As night settled over the pantheon, Anthony switched on his flashlight. In the center of the plaza a ponderous marble slab rested atop the disembodied forepaws of a stone lion. The captain sprayed his flashlight beam across the altar’s surface. Mud. Crushed oyster shells. A grouper skeleton. Blood gutters.

Beyond, a high free-standing wall displayed a series of lurid instructional friezes. It was, Anthony realized, a kind of user’s guide to the altar, including the best way to position the victim, the proper angle at which to insert the knife, and the correct method for scooping out the contents of a human abdomen.

According to the friezes, the island’s gods were connoisseurs of entrails. Once lifted from their sloshy abodes, the duodena, jejuna, and ilea had evidently been transferred to clay tureens and set before the idols like steaming bowls of linguine. A jagged, star-shaped fragment from one such tureen lay at Anthony’s feet. He stomped on it with a mixture of fear and disgust, as if squashing a roach. Thus far on the voyage he’d failed to work up much affection for their cargo, that sour old smiler, that grinning judge, but Judeo-Christian monotheism suddenly seemed to him a major step forward.

Weariness crept through the captain’s bones. Drawing out his Monte Alban, he took a big gulp, then swept the trash from the slab and climbed on top. Another gulp. He stretched out, lay down. Another. In Anno Postdomini One, a man could drink as much as he pleased.

Anthony yawned. His eyelids drooped. Lemuria, Pan, Mu, Dis, Atlantis: to be a merchant sailor was to have heard of a dozen lost worlds. Going by the Val’s position alone — north of the Madeiras, east of the Azores, just beyond the Pillars of Hercules — Atlantis was the most likely candidate, but he knew it would take more than mere geography to make him rename his father’s island.

He awoke to the sound of a shout — a booming cry of “Anthony!” — and for an instant he thought the drunkard, glutton, opium eater, or sodomite had come to life and was calling to him. Sunlight suffused the temple, its hot rays slashing through the fog. He unbuttoned his pea jacket.

“Anthony! Anthony!”

Rising from the slab, he realized he was hearing Ockham’s professorial voice. “Padre!”

Dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Panama hat, the priest stood panting in the sodomite’s shadow. He looked dazed, shell-shocked, as might any man of his vocation beholding the gritty particulars of bestiality.

“We were on the corpse when the earbones snapped,” said Ockham. “Most terrible noise I ever heard, the crack of doom. Somehow we made our way to the Juan Fernandez.”

“Thomas, I’m happy to see you,” said Anthony, touching the priest’s arm with the empty Monte Alban bottle. With decadence rampant among the crew and stone gods rising from the seabed, it was good to be with someone who’d heard of the Sermon on the Mount. “Everything’s falling apart, and there you are, a port in a storm.”

“Yesterday I danced naked in God’s navel.”

Anthony shuddered and gulped. “Oh?”

“With Sister Miriam.” The priest seized the neck of his sweatshirt and peeled the sticky cotton from his chest. “A slip. The Idea of the Corpse. I’m in control now. Really.”

“Father, what’s going on? This island makes no sense.”

“Miriam and I discussed the problem over dinner.”

“Come up with anything?”

“Yeah, but it’s pretty wild. Ready? I don’t suppose you keep up with so-called chaos theory …”

“I don’t.”

“…but one of its key concepts is the ‘strange attractor,’ the phenomenon that evidently underlies turbulence and other seemingly random events. As the Val and her cargo traveled north, they may have generated a unique variety of turbulence, and the body — this is just a guess — the body became a strange attractor. Now, here’s the crux. The old, pagan order would be particularly energized by an attractor of this sort. Understand? As the Corpus Dei passed overhead, this world was naturally drawn to it, eager to assert itself once again. You follow me?”

“You’re saying His body acted like a magnet?”

“Exactly. A metaphysical magnet, pulling down preternatural mists from heaven even as it sucked up a pagan civilization from the ocean floor.”

“Why didn’t something like this happen way back in the Gulf of Guinea?”

“Presumably no pagan civilizations lie at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea.”

“I’ve heard Atlantis used to be somewhere around here.”

“Plato to the contrary, I’m quite certain Atlantis never existed.”

“Then we’ll keep calling it Van Horne Island.”

Marching up to the glutton, Anthony pondered the peculiar combination of terror and rhapsody sculpted onto the doomed boar’s face. Chaos theory… strange attractors… metaphysical magnets. Jesus.

“We won’t let this place defeat us, right?” said the captain. “Maybe our ship’s beached and our cargo’s lost, but we’ll still put up a fight. We’ll get the deckies to dig us a canal.”

“No,” said Ockham. “Not possible.” His tone was leaden and portentous. “They quit, Anthony.”

“Who quit?”

“The crew.”

“What?”

“It happened around midnight. They sprang Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Weisinger from the brig, then rigged up a gantry and unloaded a lot of stuff over the side — galley gear, video projectors, some heavy machinery, most of our food…”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“Plus maybe a dozen crates of smuggled liquor and about two hundred six-packs.”

“And then?”

“They took off. They’re gone, Anthony.”

“Gone?” In the warm, bloody folds of the captain’s cerebrum, a migraine began taking root. “Gone where?”

“I last saw them heading north across the dunes.”

“Officers too? Engineers?”

“Spicer, Haycox, Ramsey.”

“Who stayed?”

“Miriam, of course, plus Rafferty, O’Connor, our castaway, our radio officer—”

“Cassie stayed? Good.”

“Her way of repaying us, I suppose.”

“Anybody else?”

“Chickering. Follingsbee. Counting me, you’ve got eight people on your side.”

“Mutiny,” said Anthony, the word turning to dung in his mouth.

“Desertion, more like.”

“No, mutiny.” Gripping the empty mescal bottle by the neck, he smashed it against the glutton’s left knee, launching the pickled worm into the air. Bastards. He’d show them. It was one thing to break every law known on land and quite another to violate the first commandment of the sea. Turn against your captain? You might as well eat lye, fire a laser at a mirror, write the Devil a bad check. “What do they think they can accomplish with this shit?”

“Hard to say.”

“We’re gonna hunt ’em down, Thomas.”

“Spicer mentioned one goal.”

“Hunt ’em down and hang ’em from the kingposts! Every last mutineer! What goal?”

“He said they’d be giving their prisoners — quote — ‘the punishment they deserve’.”

When Cassie learned that Big Joe Spicer, Dolores Haycox, Bud Ramsey, and most of the crew had gone berserk, looting the tanker and fleeing across the sands, a rage rushed through her such as she’d not known since the Village Voice had called her Jephthah play “the sort of theatrical evening that gives sophomoric humor a bad name.” Without a crew, there was no way to free the ship; without a ship, no way to catch the carcass and resume the tow; without a tow, no way for Oliver’s mercenaries to locate and sink their target. Meanwhile, the damn thing was bobbing around in the Gibraltar Sea, where any fool could stumble on it. Perhaps any fool had stumbled on it. For all Cassie knew, a bunch of Texas fundamentalists were busy hauling the Corpus Dei toward Galveston Bay, intending to make it the centerpiece of a Christian theme park.

What most frustrated her was the feebleness of the deserters’ reasoning, the way they were exploiting God’s body to justify their spurious embrace of anarchy. “They’re using it as an excuse” she complained to Father Thomas and Sister Miriam. “Why can’t they see that?”

“I suspect they can see it,” said the priest. “But they love their newfound freedom, right? They need to keep on following it, all the way to the edge.”

“It’s the logic of Ivan Karamazov, isn’t it?” said Miriam. “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.”

The priest knitted his brow. “One also thinks of Schopenhauer. Without a Supreme Being, life becomes sterile and meaningless. I hope Kant had it right — I hope people possess some scrt of inborn ethical sense. I seem to recall him rhapsodizing somewhere about ‘the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.’ ”

“Critique of Practical Reason,” said Miriam. “I agree, Tom. The deserters, all of us, we’ve got to make Kant’s leap of faith — his leap out of faith, I should say. We must get in touch with our congenital consciences. Otherwise we’re lost.”

Thomas and Miriam, Cassie decided, enjoyed a rapport and an affection — indeed, a passion — many married couples would have envied. “I made that leap years ago,” she said. “Take a hard-nosed look at Part Two of The Ten Commandments, and you’ll see that God knows nothing of goodness.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t go that far,” said Miriam.

“I would,” said Cassie.

“I know you would,” said Father Thomas dryly.

“It’s not like Kant was an atheist,” added the nun, setting her exquisite teeth in a grim smile.

As the day wore on, Cassie inevitably found herself thinking of God Without Tears, her one-act deconstruction of The Ten Commandments. God knew nothing of goodness, goodness knew nothing of God — it was all so wrenchingly obvious, yet over three-quarters of the ship’s company had succumbed to the Idea of the Corpse. Maddening.

Her dream that night carried her off the island, over the Atlantic, and back to New York City, where she found herself sitting front row center at Playwrights Horizons, attending the premiere of God Without Tears. Up on the stage, the glow of a spotlight caught the prophet Moses crouching at the base of a Dead Sea sand dune, fielding questions from an unseen interviewer who wanted to know all about “the legendary unexpurgated version of DeMille’s motion picture masterpiece.”

The audience consisted entirely of the Valparaíso’s officers and crew. To Cassie’s left sat Joe Spicer, petting a creature that alternated between being a Norway rat and a horseshoe crab. To her right: Dolores Haycox, methodically tying knots in a Liberian sea snake. Behind her: Bud Ramsey, smoking a Dacron mooring line.

Moses hikes up the dune and caresses the Tablets of the Law, which out of the sand like the ears on a Mickey Mouse cap.

INTERVIEWER: Is it true DeMille’s original cut was over seven hours long?

MOSES: Uh-huh. The exhibitors insisted he trim it back to four, (holds up fistful of motion picture film). During the last decade, I’ve managed to collect bits and pieces from nearly every lost scene.

INTERVIEWER: For example?

MOSES: The Plagues of Egypt. The release prints included blood, darkness, and hail, but they were missing all the really interesting ones.

The spotlight shifts to two elderly, wording-class Egyptian women, Baketamon and Nellifer, potters by trade, pulling clay from the banks of the Nile.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about the frogs.

BAKETAMON: It was hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

NELLIFER: You’d open your unmentionables drawer and — pop — one of them little fuckers would jump in your face.

BAKETAMON: Don’t let anyone tell you God hasn’t got a sense of humor.

INTERVIEWER: Which plague was the worst?

BAKETAMON: The boils, I’d say.

NELLIFER: The boils, are you kidding? The locusts were far worse than the boils.

BAKETAMON: The mosquitoes were pretty bad, too.

NELLIFER: And the flies.

BAKETAMON: And the cattle getting murrain.

NELLIFER: And the death of the firstborn. A lot of people hated that one.

BAKETAMON: Of course, it didn’t touch Nelli and me.

NELLIFER: We were lucky. Our firstborns were already dead.

BAKETAMON: Mine died in the hail.

INTERVIEWER: Frozen?

BAKETAMON: Beaned.

NELLIFER: Mine had been suffering from chronic diarrhea since he was a month old, so when the waters became blood — zap, kid got dehydrated.

BAKETAMON: Nelli, your mind’s going. It was your secondborn who died when the waters became blood. Your firstborn died in the darkness, when he accidentally drank that turpentine.

NELLIFER: No, my secondborn died much later, drowned when the Red Sea rolled back into its bed. My thirdborn drank the turpentine. A mother remembers these things.

INTERVIEWER: I was certain you’d be more bitter about your ordeals.

NELLIFER: Initially we thought the plagues were unjust. Then we came to understand our innate depravity and intrinsic wickedness.

BAKETAMON: There’s only one good Person in the whole universe, and that’s the Lord God Jehovah.

INTERVIEWER: You’ve converted to monotheism?

BAKETAMON: (nodding) We love the Lord our God with all our heart.

NELLIFER: All our soul.

BAKETAMON: All our strength.

NELLIFER: Besides, there’s no telling what He might do to us next.

BAKETAMON: Fire ants, possibly.

NELLIFER: Killer bees.

BAKETAMON: Meningitis.

NELLIFER: I’ve got two sons left.

BAKETAMON: I’m still up a daughter.

NELLIFER: The Lord giveth.

BAKETAMON: And the Lord taketh away.

NELLIFER: Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Cassie scanned the audience. Shimmering halos of pure reason hovered above Joe Spicer, Dolores Haycox, and Bud Ramsey, igniting their faces with skepticism’s holy glow. The Enlightenment, she sensed, was about to prevail. As God Without Tears progressed, the Valparaíso deserters would inevitably come to apprehend and reject the fatal fallacy on which they were predicating their rebellion.

The spotlight swings back to Moses atop the sand dune.

INTERVIEWER: When you went up on Mount Sinai, Jehovah offered you a lot more than the Decalogue.

MOSES: DeMille shot everything, Marty, all six hundred and twelve laws, each one destined for the cutting-room floor.

A rear-projection screen descends, displaying an excerpt from The Ten Commandments. God’s animated forefinger is busily etching the Decalogue on the face of Sinai. As the last rule is carved — THOU SHALT NOT COVET — the frame suddenly freezes.

GOD: (voice-over) Now for the details, (beat) When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, if you see a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable, you may make her your wife.

INTERVIEWER: I have to admire DeMille for using something like that. Deuteronomy 21:10, right?

MOSES: You got it, Marty. He was a much gutsier filmmaker than his detractors imagine.

GOD: (voice-over) When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut off her hand and show no pity.

INTERVIEWER: “Private parts”? DeMille used that?

MOSES: Deuteronomy 25:11.

GOD: (voice-over) If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, his father and mother shall bring him out to the elders of the town, and all his fellow citizens shall stone the son to death.

MOSES: Deuteronomy 21:21.

INTERVIEWER: And here I’d always thought DeMille was afraid of controversy.

MOSES: One ballsy mogul, Marty.

INTERVIEWER: Damn theater chains.

MOSES: (nodding) They think they own the world.

Joe Spicer jumped to his feet, hurled down his horseshoe crab, and said, “Mates, we’ve been committing a serious epistemological error!”

“Schopenhauer was cracking walnuts in his ass!” agreed Dolores Haycox, tossing aside her Liberian sea snake. “Life’s meaning doesn’t come from God! Life’s meaning comes from life!”

“Captain, you gotta forgive us!” pleaded Bud Ramsey.

At which point Cassie woke up.

August 6.

Ockham wasn’t kidding. The bastards cleaned us out. Until we can get a fishing party together, we’ll be eating whatever stuff they dropped or didn’t want in the first place.

I’m burning up, Popeye. I’m ablaze with migraine auras and shimmering visions of what I’ll do to the mutineers once I catch them. I see myself keelhauling Ramsey, the Val’s barnacled bottom scraping off his skin like a galley grunt peeling a potato. I see myself cutting Haycox into neat little cubes and tossing them into the Gibraltar Sea, snacks for sharks. And Joe Spicer? Spicer I’ll tie to a Butterworth plate, whipping him till the sun glints off his backbone.

Welcome to Anno Postdomini One, Joe.

At 1320 Sam Follingsbee handed me an inventory: 1 bunch of bananas, 2 dozen hot dogs, 3 pounds of Cheerios, 5 loaves of bread, 4 slices of Kraft American cheese … I can’t go on, Popeye, it’s too depressing. I told the steward to work out a rationing system, something that will keep us functioning for the rest of the month.

“And after that?” he asked.

“We pray,” I replied.

Although the mutineers broke into the fo’c’sle hold and made off with all the antipredator weapons, they didn’t think to loot the deckhouse locker, so they’re without shells for the bazookas and harpoons for the WP-17s. When it comes to serious firepower, we have effectively disarmed each other. Unfortunately, they also ripped off two decorative cutlasses from the wardroom, six or seven flare pistols, and a handful of blasting caps. Given this arsenal and their superior numbers, I see no way to attack their camp and win.

So we sit. And wait. And stew.

Sparks keeps trying to raise the outside world. No luck. I can deal with a grounding, a food shortage, maybe even a mutiny, but this endless fog is making me nuts.

At 1430 Ockham and Sister Miriam filled their knapsacks and set off north across the dunes, looking for the bastards. “We’re assuming Immanuel Kant had it right,” the padre explained. “There’s a natural moral law — a categorical imperative — latent within every person’s soul.”

“If we can make the deserters understand that,” said Miriam, “they may very well recover.”

Know what I think, Popeye? I think they’re about to get themselves killed.

They found the deserters by their laughter: whoops of primitive delight and cries of post-theistic joy blowing across the wet sands. Thomas’s heart beat faster, rattling the miniature crucifix sandwiched between his chest and sweatshirt.

Straight ahead, a range of high, damp dunes sizzled in the sun. Side by side, Jesuit and Carmelite ascended, pausing halfway up to drink from their canteens and mop the perspiration from their brows.

“No matter how far they’ve sunk, we must offer them love,” Sister Miriam insisted.

“We’ve been there ourselves, haven’t we?” said Thomas. “We know what havoc the Idea of the Corpse can wreak.” Reaching the summit, he lifted Van Horne’s binoculars to his eyes. He blanched, transfixed by a sight so astonishing it rivaled Miriam’s recent Dance of the Seven Veils. “Lord…”

A marble amphitheater sprawled across the valley floor, its fa зade broken by arched niches in which resided eight-foot-high statues of nude men wearing the heads of bulls, vultures, and crocodiles, its main gate guarded by a sculpted hermaphrodite happily engaged in a singularly dexterous act of self-pleasuring. Built to accommodate several thousand spectators, the arena now held a mere thirty-two, each deserter stuffing his face with food while watching the gaudy entertainment frantically unfolding below.

In the center of the rocky field, the Val’s Toyota forklift truck careened in wild circles, its steel prongs menacing a terrified mariner dressed only in tennis shoes and black bathing trunks. Inevitably Thomas thought of the last time he’d seen the forklift in action, the night he and Van Horne had watched Miriam transport a paddock of fresh eggs across the galley. It seemed now as if this very truck had, like the crew, fallen into depravity, seized by some technological analogue of sin.

He twisted the focusing drive. The threatened sailor was Eddie Wheatstone, the alcoholic bos’n Van Horne had jailed for destroying the rec-room pinball machine. Sweat glazed the bos’n’s face. His eyes looked ready to burst. Thomas panned, focused.

Joe Spicer sat behind the steering wheel, dressed in a Michael Jackson T-shirt and khaki shorts, holding a can of Coors: sensitive Joe Spicer, the Merchant Marine’s most civilized officer, the man who brought books to the bridge, now mesmerized by the Idea of the Corpse. Pan, focus. Near the portcullis cowered blubber-bellied Karl Jaworski, the ship’s notorious lecher, in cotton briefs and Indian moccasins. Neil Weisinger, clad in nothing but a jockstrap, lay curled up beside the north wall like a catatonic.

The mismatch between Wheatstone and Spicer was outrageous. True, the bos’n was armed — in his right hand he grasped a stockless anchor from the Juan Fernandez — but no matter which way he dodged, the forklift kept pace with him, its prongs slashing the foggy air like the tusks of a charging elephant. Wheatstone grew wearier by the minute; the priest could practically see the lactic acid fouling the poor man’s blood, byproduct of his muscles’ hopeless attempt to burn up all their sugar.

“It’s even worse than we imagined,” said Thomas, passing the binoculars to his friend. “They’ve gone over to the gods.”

Miriam focused on the field and shuddered. “Is this the future, Tom — vigilante vengeance, public executions? Is this the shape of the post-theistic age?”

“We’ve got to have faith,” he said, taking back the binoculars.

Miraculously, Wheatstone now seized the initiative. As a bestial cry broke from his lips — a howl such as Thomas had last heard at an exorcism — the bos’n set the anchor twirling above his head, apparently aiming to puncture a tire. He released the rope. The anchor flew, hit the forklift’s right prong, and flipped into the mud. Applause erupted from the pagans, appreciation for a futile gesture well done.

Seconds later, they were urging Spicer to retaliate.

“Get him, Joe!” “Run the bastard down!” “Go!” “Go!” “Go!”

Laughing maniacally, Spicer pulled a cargo net from the forklift’s rear compartment and neatly dropped it over the terrified bos’n. Wheatstone tripped, falling face down. The more he fought, the more entangled he became, but it was only after he began sliding forward — body bouncing across the sharp rocks, forehead cutting through the mud like a plow making a furrow — that Thomas noticed the Dacron mooring line running from the cargo net to the rear bumper.

“Tom, he’s gonna kill that man!”

Round and round Spicer towed his prey, as if enacting some grotesque parody of the Val’s mission. Wheatstone screamed. He kicked and flailed. He started coming apart, his liquid constituents leaking through the interstices of the cargo net like squashed tomatoes permeating the bottom of a grocery bag.

When it became clear that Wheatstone was dead, two husky ordinaries rushed onto the field, cut the mooring line, and flung the bos’n’s trussed body toward the portcullis.

The pagans jumped to their feet and cheered.

“Yay, Joe!”

“Way to go!”

“Yay, Joe!”

“Way to go!”

Priest and nun raced into the valley, whimpering in dismay, wet sand grabbing at their boots. Together they passed through the main gate and entered the world beneath the tiers, a maze of slimy, silty tunnels in which plunder from the Val — bazookas, refrigerators, footlockers, diesel generators, video-game consoles — lay about like beached jetsam. Daylight beckoned. A ramp appeared. They charged into the open air.

A river of wine flowed down the marble steps; abandoned sausages festered under the seats; gnawed pizza slices and half-eaten apples rotted in the heat. As Karl Jaworski ran across the arena — ran, literally, for his life — Thomas and Miriam ascended a dozen rows and paused, panting, between Charlie Horrocks, his features buried in a huge slice of watermelon, and Bud Ramsey, his lips locked around a bottle of Budweiser. It took Thomas several seconds to realize that Dolores Haycox and James Echohawk, stretched out on the seats directly in front of him, were engaged in energetic sexual congress.

“Hiya, Father Tom!” said Ramsey. Beer foam flecked his chin. “Afternoon, Miriam.”

“Great party, huh?” said Horrocks, emerging from his watermelon chunk.

Haycox and Echohawk groaned in unison, groping toward orgasms of an intensity that, in the previous era, they could probably only have imagined.

To Horrocks’s left, Karl Jaworski’s three victims — robust Isabel Bostwick, svelte An-mei Jong, exotic Juanita Torres — sat huddled together, blowing kisses toward Spicer. Bostwick licked a Turkish taffy. Jong guzzled a bottle of Cook’s champagne. Dressed only in bra and panties, Torres shook a pair of pompoms she’d improvised by ripping up her Menudo T-shirt and tying the shreds to needle guns.

Despite the vivid frenzy on the field — despite the horrific fact that Spicer had somehow maneuvered Jaworski against the south wall and was now driving straight for him — it seemed to Thomas that what the arena really contained was a kind of Barthian Nichtige: an ontological nothingness where once God’s grace had been, its blind gravity devouring all goodness and mercy like a black hole feasting on light. Jaworski dropped to his knees. Spicer lowered the forklift prongs accordingly. In a choral display of utter joy, Bostwick, Jong, and Torres rose in a body and together shouted, “Kill!”

Thomas could see what was about to happen. He begged God that it wouldn’t.

“Kill!”

“Kill!”

Even as the entreaty took shape on the priest’s lips, the left forklift prong struck Jaworski squarely, slipping into his abdomen as smoothly as the spear of Longinus entering the crucified Savior.

“Bull’s-eye!” squealed Jong as Jaworski, impaled, ascended.

“No!” howled Thomas. “No! No!”

“Calm down, man,” said Ramsey. “Don’t have no fuckin’ cow.”

Spicer backed up. Jaworski, screaming in agony, hung suspended from the prong, wriggling like a beetle on a hatpin.

“No!” moaned Miriam.

“Right on!” yelled Torres.

“Mazel tov!” shouted Bostwick.

Brow knitted in a thoughtful frown, Spicer operated the lift controls, working the prong ever deeper as he raised the skewered man up and down, up and down. Jaworski gripped the wet steel shaft, bathing his hands in his own blood as he attempted, bravely but hopelessly, to free himself.

“Spicer, Spicer, he’s our man!” cried Bostwick. “If he can’t do it, no one can!”

An urge to vomit grew in Thomas, wrenching his stomach and burning his windpipe, as the same ordinaries who’d previously disposed of Wheatstone slid Jaworski’s corpse off the prong and casually dumped it in the mud. Miriam, weeping, took her friend’s hand, digging her thumbnail so deeply into his palm she drew blood. He beat back his nausea through force of will.

“Go, go, Joe, Joe!” shouted Torres, swishing her pom-poms. “Go, go, Joe, Joe! Go, go, Joe, Joe!”

Anchor at the ready, Neil Weisinger stumbled toward the center of the field. Spicer, downshifting, gave chase.

“Stop this!” cried Miriam. She sounded, Thomas had to admit, more like a teacher disciplining a kindergarten than like the voice of reason evoking the spirit of Immanuel Kant. “Stop this right now!”

Spicer threw his net.

He missed.

The kid retreated, anchor swinging at his side, his bare feet splashing through the mud. Gushing black exhaust, the forklift bore down on him at five, ten, fifteen miles an hour. Spicer elevated the prongs to the height of Weisinger’s belly.

“Go!”

“Go!”

The kid stopped, turned, waited.

“Kill!”

“Kill!”

And suddenly the anchor was airborne, arrowing straight for the driver’s seat.

“Go!”

“Go!”

Acting on instinct, Spicer swerved — the same pathetic impulse, Thomas guessed, by which a soldier walking into a hail of grapeshot will raise his arms to fend off the balls.

“Kill!”

“Kill!”

The anchor landed between the second mate’s legs. Shrieking with pain, he released the steering wheel and groped toward his crotch.

“Go!”

“Go!”

The forklift hit the wall at over thirty miles per hour, a collision of such force it threw Spicer from the cab and sent him somersaulting through the air. The two hundred and thirty pound man landed on his feet. His femurs shattered audibly. He collapsed, stabbed by his own bones, and began flopping around in the sand.

“Weisinger, Weisinger, he’s our man! If he can’t do it, no one can!”

The kid wasted no time. Retrieving the anchor from the forklift seat, he dashed across the arena and hunched over Spicer. He scanned the crowd. At first Thomas assumed Weisinger merely wanted to savor the moment — where, when, and under what other circumstances could an able-bodied seaman receive a standing ovation? — but then he realized the kid was waiting for a sign.

In a weirdly synchronous gesture, thirty-two hands shot forward, thumbs up.

With equally uncanny coordination, thirty-two wrists rotated.

Thumbs down.

“Neil, no!” cried Thomas, gaining his feet. “It’s me, Neil! It’s Father Thomas!”

“Don’t do it!” shouted Miriam.

Weisinger got to work, chopping relentlessly with the anchor, mooring himself to Spicer.

An enormous bare-chested sailor turned toward Thomas, exuding the sickly sweetness of whiskey. Black beard, bad skin, a face like the granite glutton on the far side of the island. Thomas recognized him as a demac named Stubby Barnes. The man had come to Mass twice. “Hey, you oughta settle down, Father. You too, Sister.” The demac’s right hand cradled an empty bottle of Cutty Sark. “I mean no disrespect, but this ain’t your party!”

“No, you settle down!” wailed Thomas.

“Take it easy.” Stubby Barnes lifted the bottle high over his head.

“No, you take it easy!”

“We can do whatever we want, man,” Barnes insisted, letting the Cutty Sark fly.

“Listen to your congenital conscience!”

The bottle struck Thomas squarely, a pound of glass crashing into his temple. He felt warm blood rolling down his face, tickling his cheeks, and then he felt nothing at all.

August 7.

It goes from bad to worse. Yesterday at 0915 Ockham and Sister Miriam came stumbling back to the ship, the padre bleeding from a nasty head wound. Their news knocked me for a loop. The mutineers have executed Wheatstone and Jaworski in some sort of crazy rodeo. Joe Spicer’s dead too, killed when Able Seaman Weisinger turned the tables on him.

If you want my opinion, Spicer got what he deserved.

Ever try mescal, Popeye? It has all the kick of spinach, I promise you, and it dulls the pain. Somehow the bastards missed my supply. I’ve given the creatures in the remaining bottles names. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar — the Three Wise Worms.

I shouldn’t drink, of course. I’m vulnerable. Dad’s probably an alky, and somewhere along the line I had a wino aunt who burned down her house, plus a rummy cousin who shot the mailman for bringing the wrong size welfare check. But what the hell — this is Anno Postdomini One, right? It’s the era when anything goes.

We have exactly 10 days to get Him to the Arctic.

Last night I polished off the first bottle, leaving Caspar beached like the Val, after which I went a bit berserk. Stuck a lighted Marlboro in my palm, puked my guts out, climbed down the anchor chain and rolled around in the sand. I woke up beside the keel, sober but numb, clutching an aluminum soup ladle to my breast.

It was Cassie who found me. What a pathetic creature I must’ve seemed, beard clogged with rust, clothes soaked in mescal. She guided me back up the chain, led me to the main galley, and began doling out aspirin and coffee.

“I didn’t crash into this island,” I insisted, as if she’d said I had.

“This island crashed into you.”

“Am I repulsive, Doc? Am I downright disgusting? Do I smell like Davy Jones’s jockstrap?”

“No, but you ought to shave off that beard.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“I’ve always hated beards.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s like kissing a Brillo pad.”

The word kissing lingered in the air. We both noticed it.

“I think I’m going crazy,” I told her. “I tried digging us out with a soup ladle.”

“That’s not crazy.”

“Oh?”

“Crazy would’ve been if you’d used a teaspoon.”

And then, with a flirtatious toss of her head, or so it seemed, she left me alone with my hangover.

As Thomas entered the empty arena, mirages made of late-afternoon heat arose, twisting and shimmering above the bloody sand. The forklift truck sat inertly in the southeast corner, right prong clean, the left tarnished with Karl Jaworski.

Van Horne and Miriam had both been appalled by the idea of a second mission to the deserters — “Lord, Tom,” the nun had said, “they’ll execute you next time” — but Thomas’s sense of duty demanded not only that he bury the dead but that he once again try to help the living find the Kantian moral law within.

Like a conquistador planting the Spanish flag in the New World, he thrust his steel spade into the ground. Ten yards away, Jaworski’s punctured body lay festering in the shadow of the sculpted hermaphrodite. Beyond, the netted remains of Eddie Wheatstone lay across the eviscerated carcass of Joe Spicer. A mere twenty-four hours had elapsed since their executions, but the decomposition process was fully under way, filling the priest’s nostrils with an acid stench.

Licking sweat from his lips, he retrieved the spade and got busy. The sand, though heavy, was as easily dislodged as new-fallen snow, and the job went effortlessly — so effortlessly, he decided, that should rationality ever descend upon Van Horne Island, then excavating the stranded Valparaíso might prove more feasible than he’d supposed. One hour later, a mass grave yawned in the center of the field.

He dumped in the corpses, prayed for their souls, and shoveled back the sand.

Following the deserters’ trail out of the amphitheater was no problem. Cigarette butts, beer-can tabs, wine-bottle corks, peanut shells, orange rinds, and banana peels marked the way. Inevitably Thomas thought of Hansel and Gretel, dropping their pebbles so they’d be able to rejoin their tractable father and malicious stepmother. Even a dysfunctional family, apparently, was better than none at all.

The route took him through typical terrain — past decaying appliances and discarded 55-gallon drums, past mounds of automobile tires clumped together like gigantic charred bagels — and then, suddenly, it appeared: the wall.

It was huge, sixty feet from foundation to battlements, assembled from the purest marble, each block bleached white as bone. Spidery characters decorated the gateway, the forgotten phonemes of some long-unspoken tongue. He entered.

Music screamed in the city’s heart — amplified guitars, high-tech keyboards. It seemed to Thomas not so much a song as a warning, the sort of sound with which a city might alert its citizens to incoming nuclear warheads. Mud lay everywhere, thick brown seabed pies drooping from the cornices and oozing off the balconies. Cloaked in the omnipresent mist, the temples, shops, and houses were in a sorry state, their roofs crushed by the weight of the Gibraltar Sea, their fa зades erased by underwater currents.

But could natural processes alone account for this destruction, or had God, too, had a hand in it? Was this another of those wicked cities the Almighty had elected to eradicate personally, sister to Babylon, kin to Gomorrah?

Ringed by fluted columns, a vast public building loomed over the priest, its gaping bronze doors carved with bas-relief images of the island’s four reigning deities. He climbed the steps, entered the vaulted foyer, and started down the mud-carpeted hallway beyond. The music, louder now, assaulted his brain. Moving past the rooms, he imagined he was wandering through one of those hands-on museums to which upscale parents liked to drag their children, though here the exhibits were strictly for adults. One space, to judge from the mosaics, had been an opium den. Another, a masturbation booth, frescoed with antediluvian centerfolds. There was a cubicle for pederasty. For bestiality. Sadomasochism. Necrophilia. Incest. Obsession after obsession, perversion upon perversion, a Museum of Unnatural History.

The hall turned a corner, opening onto a flagstone courtyard bordered by airy arcades and packed with the Valparaíso deserters, most of them naked. Such an astonishing range of skin tones, thought Thomas: ivory, pink, bronze, saffron, fawn, flaxen, dun, cocoa, sorrel, umber, ochre, maple sugar. It was like gazing upon a jar of mixed nuts, or a Whitman’s Sampler. Many of the sailors had painted themselves, sketching sinuous arrows and coiled serpents on their bodies with mashed grapes, the juices running down their limbs like purple sweat. Wall to wall, the courtyard vibrated with a combination binge, bacchanal, orgy, brawl, and disco tourney, with many revelers participating in all five possibilities — drinking, eating, fornicating, fighting, dancing — simultaneously. Marijuana smoke mingled with the fog. Strobelights brightened the dusk. Along the southern arcade, Ralph Mungo and James Echohawk dueled with the decorative cutlasses they’d stolen from the wardroom, while a few yards away eight men stood in a circle, each plugged into another, a carousel of sodomy.

Crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles littered the ground. Scores of spent condoms lay about like an infestation of giant planaria, a fact from which Thomas drew a modicum of hope: if the revelers were sane enough to worry about pregnancy and AIDS, they might be sane enough to ponder the categorical imperative. Arms undulated, hips shimmied, breasts swayed, penises swung — the sybaritic aerobics of Anno Postdomini One.

“Hiya, Tommy!” Neil Weisinger strode over, an unlit cigarette parked in his mouth, gleefully ripping a barbecued chicken in two. “Didn’t expect to see you here!” he said drunkenly.

“That music…”

“Scorched Earth, from Sweden. The album’s called Chemotherapy. You should see their stage act. They read entrails.”

Dominating the courtyard was a polished obsidian banquet table, its surface supporting not only four enormous hams and two sides of beef but a diesel generator, a CD player, and an RCA Colortrak-5000 video projector spraying concupiscent images on a white bedsheet hanging wraithlike inside the northern arcade. Thomas had never seen Bob Guccione’s notorious Caligula, but he guessed that’s what the movie was. The camera dollied along the main deck of a Roman trireme on which nearly everyone was rutting.

“Helluva party, huh?” said Weisinger, waving half the bisected chicken in Thomas’s face. The air reeked of semen, tobacco, alcohol, vomit, and pot. “Want some dinner?”

“No.”

“Go ahead. Eat.”

“I said no.”

The kid displayed a bottle of Lцwenbrau. “Beer?”

“Neil, I saw you in the amphitheater Tuesday.”

“I really nailed Spicer, didn’t I? Got him like some nervy goyische cowboy roping a steer.”

“An immoral act, Neil. Tell me you understand that.”

“This looks like just another Lцwenbrau bottle,” said Weisinger, “but it’s much, much more than that. Washed up on the beach yesterday. Inside was a message. Ask me what message.”

“Neil…”

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“What message?”

“ ‘Thou shalt have whatever other gods thou feels like,’ it said. ‘Thou shalt covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ Sure you don’t wanna beer?”

“No.”

“ ‘Thou shalt bugger thy neighbor’s ass’.”

Everywhere Thomas looked, food was being squandered on a grand scale. Huge untended caldrons sat atop driftwood fires, rapidly reducing entire wheels of cheddar, Muenster, and Swiss to an inedible tar. Five sailors from the engine crew and five from the deck crew battled it out with what seemed like the Valparaíso’s entire stock of fresh eggs. Charlie Horrocks, Isabel Bostwick, Bud Ramsey, and Juanita Torres ripped the lids off vacuum-packed cans and merrily showered themselves with clam chowder, vegetable soup, baked beans, chocolate topping, and butterscotch sauce. They licked each other like mother cats grooming their young, the residue spilling down their flesh and disappearing amid the flagstones.

Weaving through the tangle of bodies, Thomas made his way to the banquet table. He studied the metal plate on the generator:

7500 WATTS, I20/240 VOLTS, SINGLE-PHASE, FOUR-STROKE, WATER-COOLED, 1800 RPMS, 13.2 HP — the only piece of rational discourse in the entire museum. The music was at a fever pitch, handsaws dying of cancer. He shut off the CD player.

“What’d ya do that for?” wailed Dolores Hay cox.

“Turn it back on!” screamed Stubby Barnes.

“You must listen to me!” Thomas leaned toward the Color-trak-5000, currently projecting Malcolm McDowell working his greased fist into a wincing man’s anus, and pushed EJECT.

“Put the movie back on!”

“Start the music!”

“Fuck you!”

“Caligula!”

“Listen to me!” Thomas insisted.

“Scorched Earth!”

“Caligula!”

“Scorched Earth!”

“Caligula!”

“You’re using the corpse as an excuse!” the priest shouted. “Schopenhauer was wrong! A Godless world is not ipso facto meaningless!”

The food came from every point of the compass — barrages of boiled potatoes, salvos of Italian bread, cannonades of grapefruit. A large, scabrous coconut grazed Thomas’s left cheek. A pomegranate smashed into his shoulder. Eggs and tomatoes exploded against his chest.

“There’s a Kantian moral law within!”

Someone restarted Caligula. Under the persuasion of a Roman senator’s wife’s tongue, a large erect penis not belonging to the senator released its milky contents like a volcano spewing lava. Thomas rubbed his eyes. The erupting organ stayed with him, hovering in his mind like a flashbulb afterimage as he fled the Museum of Unnatural History.

“Immanuel Kant!” cried the despairing priest, rushing through the city streets. He reached under his Fermilab shirt and squeezed his crucifix, as if to mash Christ and Cross into a single object. “Immanuel, Immanuel, where are you?”

FAMINE

VIEWED THROUGH THE frosted window of the twin-engine Cessna, Jan Mayen Island appeared to Oliver Shostak as one of his favorite objects in the world, the white lace French brassiere he’d given Cassie for her thirtieth birthday. Corresponding to the cups were two symmetrical blobs, Lower Mayen and Upper Mayen, masses of mountainous terrain connected by a natural granite bridge. Raising his field glasses, he ran his gaze along the Upper Mayen coastline until he reached Eylandt Fjord, a groove so raw and ragged it suggested the aftermath of a bungled tooth extraction.

“There it is!” Oliver called above the engines’ roar. “There’s Point Luck!” he shouted, giving the bay the name by which Pembroke and Flume insisted it be called.

“Where?” asked Barclay Cabot and Winston Hawke in unison.

“There — to the east!”

“No, that’s Eylandt Fjord!” corrected the Cessna’s pilot, a weatherbeaten Trondheim native named Oswald Jorsalafar.

No, thought Oliver — Point Luck: that hallowed piece of the Pacific northwest of Midway Island where, on June 4, 1942, three American aircraft carriers had lain in wait to ambush the Japanese Imperial Navy.

He panned the field glasses back and forth. No sign of the Enterprise, but he wasn’t surprised. Only by Pembroke and Flume’s best-case scenario would they have already made the crossing from Cape Cod to the Arctic Ocean. Most likely they were still south of Greenland.

Jan Mayen’s sole airstrip lay along the eastern fringe of its only settlement, a scientific-research station grandiosely named Ibsen City. As the Cessna touched down, the prop wash set up a tornado of snow, ice, volcanic ash, and empty Frydenlund beer bottles. Oliver paid Jorsalafar, tipped him generously, and, shouldering his backpack, joined the magician and the Marxist on the cold march west.

In the pallid rays of the midnight sun, Ibsen City stood revealed as a collection of rusting Quonset huts and dilapidated clapboard houses, each set on a gravel foundation lest it sink into the illusory ground called permafrost. Reaching the central square, Oliver, Barclay, and Winston made for the Hedda Gabler Inn, a split-level motel grafted onto a tavern fashioned from a corrugated-aluminum airplane hangar. A neon sign reading SUN-DOG SALOON flashed in the tavern window, a beacon on the tundra.

The inn’s manager, Vladimir Panshin, a Russian expatriate with the raw, earthy look of a Brueghel peasant, didn’t buy the atheists’ claim to be disaffected jetsetters seeking those exotic, exciting places the travel bureaus didn’t know about. (“Whoever told you Jan Mayen is exciting,” said Panshin, “must get an orgasm from flossing his teeth.”) But ultimately his suspicions didn’t matter. He was more than happy to book the atheists into the Gabler and sell them the half pound of Gouda cheese (five American dollars), the gallon of reindeer milk (six dollars), and the dozen sticks of caribou jerky (one dollar each) they’d need for the next day’s trek.

Oliver slept badly that evening — Winston’s cyclonic snoring combined with the challenge of digesting overpriced ptarmigan stew — rousing himself the next morning only with the aid of the Gabler’s strongest coffee. At eight o’clock, Jan Mayen time, the atheists trudged past the city limits and entered the trackless tundra beyond.

After an hour’s hike they paused for lunch, spreading out their picnic on the narrow neck of rock marking the way to Upper Mayen. The cheese was moldy, the milk sour, the jerky tough and gritty. Inevitably Oliver imagined Anthony Van Horne’s cargo fashioning this particular isthmus: the gigantic hands reaching down from heaven, pinching the island in the middle. The vision alarmed and depressed him. What would the scientists back in Ibsen City do if they ever found out that their elaborate theories of uniformitarianism and plate tectonics were fundamentally meaningless? How would they react upon learning that the real answer to the geomorphic riddle was, of all things, divine intervention?

Crossing into Upper Mayen, the three men followed a pumice-covered path through the foothills of the Carolus Mountains, a journey made entertaining by a particularly dazzling performance from the aurora borealis. Had Oliver brought his art supplies along, he would have tried painting the phenomenon, laboring to capture on canvas its diaphanous arcs, ethereal swirls, and eerie crimson flickers.

At last Eylandt Fjord lay before them, a smooth expanse of steel blue water irregularly punctuated by gigantic chunks of floating pack ice. Oliver’s great fear was that the Enterprise would be delayed and they would have to camp on the tundra, so his mood brightened considerably when he saw her lying at anchor, four PBY flying boats tethered to her stern. His joy did not last.

The carrier looked old, feeble, small. She was small, he knew: smaller than the Valparaíso by half, smaller than God by a factor of twenty. The five dozen warplanes strapped to her flight deck did not seem remotely equal to the task at hand.

Barclay worked his portable semaphore, sending bursts of electric light across the fjord. G-O-D-H-E-A-D, the code name for their campaign.

The Enterprise replied: W-E-A-R-E-C-O-M-I-N-G.

The atheists scrambled down the cliff face, a treacherous descent through slippery patches of moss, jagged chunks of pumice, and a thorny, mean-spirited plant that tore their mukluks and bloodied their ankles. They reached the beach simultaneously with the carrier’s barge: a wooden inboard motorboat sporting a canvas canopy over her helm and flying a historically accurate 48-star flag. Dressed in a Memphis Belle bomber jacket, Sidney Pembroke sat on the foredeck, waving a mittened hand.

“Welcome to Point Luck!” Condensed breath gushed from Pembroke’s mouth. Even with the Arctic air flushing his cheeks, he still looked anemic. “Hop aboard, men!”

“There’s plenty of piping hot Campbell’s tomato soup back on Enterprise,” called Albert Flume, also bloodless, from behind the wheel. “Mmm, mmm, good!” He’d traded his zoot suit for the saboteur look: vicu сa vest, blue crewneck sweater, black watch cap, like Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone.

Wrapping a calfskin bombardier’s glove around the throttle, Flume eased the motor into neutral. Beside him stood a granite-jawed, swag-bellied man wearing the unassuming khaki uniform of an American naval officer in the process of winning World War Two. Admirals’ stars decorated his shoulders.

Oliver waded into the shallows, wincing as the icy water gushed through the rips in his mukluks, and climbed over the transom, Barclay and Winston right behind. The Navy man ducked out from under the canopy and smiled, an unlit briar pipe clamped between his teeth.

“You must be Mr. Shostak,” said the admiral, subjecting Oliver to a strenuous handshake. “Spruance here, Ray Spruance. I use your dad’s brand of rubber all the time. Boy, I’ll bet this AIDS thing’s been a real boon to your family, right? It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.”

Oliver grimaced and said, “These are my colleagues — Barclay Cabot, Winston Hawke.”

“Pleasure’s all mine, fellas.”

“What’s your actual name?” asked Winston, beating back a smirk.

“Doesn’t matter, Mr. Hawke. For the next two weeks, I’m Raymond A. Spruance, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, charged with the tactical side of this operation.”

“As opposed to the strategic?” asked Oliver. He was beginning to understand how these idiots thought.

“Yep. Strategy’s Admiral Nimitz, back at Pearl Harbor.”

“Where’s Nimitz really?”

“New York,” said Flume.

“We’re not paying him, are we?” asked Oliver.

“Of course we’re paying him.” Putting the motor in gear, Flume guided the barge away from the beach.

“Why are we paying him if he’s not doing anything?”

“He is doing something.”

“What?”

“Ray just told you. Strategy.”

“But we know the strategy.”

“Look, boys,” said Spruance’s portrayer, whipping the briar pipe from his mouth, “if I couldn’t picture old Chesty Nimitz back at Pearl, planning our strategy, I wouldn’t have the heart to go through with this.”

“But he’s not at Pearl,” said Oliver. “He’s in New York.”

“We could send him to Pearl if you wanted,” said Flume, “but it’d cost you a pretty penny.”

Biting his tongue, Oliver said nothing.

“You know, I’d never heard of vigilante capitalism until Sidney and Albert told me about it” — Spruance offered the atheists a sly, conspiratorial wink — “but I must say, I’m impressed.”

“Some folks think we’re out of line,” said Winston, “but that won’t stop us from doing our patriotic duty.”

“Hey, you needn’t persuade me,” said Spruance. “For years I been sayin’ the Nips are a bigger threat to America right now than they ever were in ’42.”

As Flume piloted them across the fjord, Pembroke climbed off the foredeck, wiped a dollop of eider-duck guano from his bomber jacket, and drew up beside Winston. “So how do you like Task Force Sixteen?” Pembroke asked, pointing toward the Enterprise.

“I see only one ship,” said Winston.

“Well, it’s a task force to us,” said Pembroke in an aggrieved tone. “Task Force Sixteen. We’ve got Enterprise, her barge, four PBYs…”

“Right.”

“A task force, yes?”

“You bet.”

“Things go okay on Martha’s Vineyard?” asked Barclay.

“Beautiful,” said Pembroke. “A sell-out crowd.”

“We watched it all from Dad’s cabin cruiser,” said Flume. “A regular ringside seat.”

“Alby brought along the most amazing picnic.”

“Everything’s better with the Battle of Midway raging all around you.”

“Potato salad’s better. Chocolate cake’s better.”

“Except Soryu — wouldn’t you know it? — she didn’t sink,” said Flume, carefully maneuvering the barge alongside the carrier.

“Oh?” said Oliver.

“Yeah, she stayed afloat even after McClusky unloaded one of his eggs right down her aft smokestack,” said Spruance. “Hey, don’t get worried, son. We’ll be dropping fifty times more TNT on your golem than we did on Soryu.” The admiral vaulted athletically from the barge to the gangway. “Best torpedoes and demolition bombs in the whole damn navy. State-of-the-art ordnance.”

Disembarking, Oliver followed Spruance up the wobbly stairs, a route that took them directly past an open hangar bay. A middle-aged sailor in an ensign’s uniform stood hunched over the fuselage of a TBD-1 Devastator, tinkering with the engine.

“The way we figure it,” said Oliver, calling above the growl of the pack ice, “the Valparaíso won’t cross the circle till five or six days from now.”

“Okay, but we’d better start sending patrols out right away, just to make sure,” said Spruance. “Our PBYs will get the job done. State-of-the-art reconnaissance.”

“Any danger of the Val slipping past us?”

Spruance looked Oliver in the eye. The Arctic wind tousled the admiral’s dapple-gray hair. “A PBY is the finest search plane of its day, Mr. Shostak. Understand? The finest of its day.”

“What day?”

“Nineteen forty-two.”

“But it’s nineteen ninety-two.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. Anyway, we got brand-new radar equipment on Enterprise’s bridge.”

“State-of-the-art radar?” Oliver was feeling better now. The Devastator was a truly fearsome-looking machine. It radiated a kind of technological haughtiness, metal’s contempt for flesh.

“State-of-the-art radar,” echoed Ray Spruance’s portrayer with an emphatic thumbs-up. “Panasonic all the way.”

A low, steady growl. A sharp, gut-deep ache. Hunger? wondered Neil Weisinger, cracking into consciousness. Yes, that was the word, hunger.

Freeing himself from the knot of sleeping, snoring bodies, the young AB glanced at his digital watch. August 10. Wednesday. Nine A.M. Damn, he’d been asleep two whole days. His eyes itched. His bladder spasmed. Slowly he picked his way through the wreckage — the Miller Lite cans and Cook’s champagne bottles, the chicken bones and eggshells, the raunchy CDs and X-rated videocassettes — and, after walking stark naked through the southern arcade, peed copiously on a lovely bucolic fresco depicting a herd of rams gang-banging a buxom shepherdess.

“Quite a blowout,” groaned Charlie Horrocks, joining Neil at the improvised urinal.

“The social event of the season,” mumbled Neil. Lord, it was glorious being a pagan. The choices were so simple. Vodka, rum, or beer? Oral, anal, or vaginal?

“Somebody’s been playin’ football with my head,” said the pumpman.

“Somebody’s been playin’ billiards with my balls,” said Neil. Their revels, clearly, had ended, though whether this was because even pagans grow weary of pleasure or because the party had run out of fuel (no more beer in the kegs, soup in the kettles, bread in the baskets, jism in the testes), the AB couldn’t say. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Beats me.”

In the western arcade, a large and resonant stomach grumbled. Another took up the cry. A third joined in. A choral gurgling filled the air, as if the museum were honeycombed with defective storm drains. Stumbling aimlessly toward the banquet table, Neil grew suddenly aware of how encrusted he was, how wide the variety of dried substances clinging to his skin and matting his hair. He felt like an extension of the island itself, a repository for waste.

“I could eat a cow,” said Juanita Torres, slipping into a silk chemise.

“A herd of cows,” said Ralph Mungo. “A generation of cows.”

But there were no cattle on Van Horne Island.

“Hey, we got ourselves a problem here,” said Dolores Haycox, the ranking officer among the deserters now that Joe Spicer had been disemboweled with a stockless anchor. She spoke tentatively, as if uncertain whether to assume command or not. Should she elect to do so, Neil decided, she’d best put on some clothes. “I think we ought to, you know, talk,” rasped the third mate.

Potable water, everyone agreed, wasn’t an issue: the omnipresent fog continually deposited gallons of dew in the city’s various cisterns and gutters. Food was a different matter. Even with stringent rationing, there probably weren’t enough provisions left to satisfy their appetites for more than a day.

“Jeez … I feel so stupid,” said Mungo.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” said Torres.

“Stupid as an ox,” said Ramsey.

“If we dwell on the past,” said Haycox, slinging a tattered canvas seabag around her waist, “we’ll go mad.”

Ramsey wanted them to start scouring the island immediately. Despite its seeming sterility, he argued, the place might very well harbor a few stranded crustaceans or an edible species of kelp. But the revelers had seen far too many acres of lifeless mud and barren sand to work up much enthusiasm for this idea.

Horrocks suggested they go back to the Valparaíso and beg for a portion of whatever scraps they might have overlooked while looting the ship. This scenario sounded promising until James Echohawk pointed out that, if any such supplies existed, the loyalists had no reason to be generous with them.

It was Haycox who offered genuine hope. They must fashion a raft from the banquet table, she argued, and send it east. After reaching civilization — Portugal, most probably, though maybe Morocco was nearer — its crew would hunt out the authorities and arrange for a rescue ship to be dispatched. If the raft proved incapable of such a journey, her crew would return forthwith to Van Horne Island, laden with the deep-sea fish they were certain to catch along the way.

On Haycox’s orders the deserters got dressed and spent the morning scavenging. They cut the fat from hambones, dug pulp out of apricot pits, clawed bits of egg from shell fragments, pried globs of Chef Boyardee ravioli from steel cans, and chiseled nuggets of pizza from the flagstones. Once the museum itself was picked clean, the mariners retraced their steps to the amphitheater, following the path of their prodigality, gathering up each orange rind and banana peel as if it were a priceless gem.

Entering the arena, Neil was momentarily bewildered to realize that the corpses of Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Spicer were nowhere to be seen, but then he noticed a mound of mud in the center of the field, evidence that someone — Father Thomas, quite likely — had buried them. An unholy odor rose from the grave, so intense it instantly killed any notion of solving the incipient famine through the ingestion of former shipmates.

By 1530 the pagans were back in the city, sorting through the day’s harvest. It came to a little over thirty pounds, which Haycox divided into two equal stockpiles, storing the first in a seabag — bait, she explained — and parceling out the second on the spot. Greedily Neil grabbed his allotment, a conglomeration of apple cores, Concord grapes, and frankfurter stubs welded together with Turkish taffy and melted cheddar cheese. Staking out a shady spot beneath the banquet table, he sat down, lit a Marlboro, and puffed.

He stared at his meal. A sharp moan broke from his larynx. This wasn’t food. It was a travesty of food, a cruel impersonation of food, tormenting him the way a dead child’s voice torments its parents.

He devoured the ration in four big bites.

“I got a job for you.”

Neil looked up. Dolores Haycox stood over him, her stocky form now swathed in a beige Exxon jumpsuit.

“We need pontoons,” she said, handing Neil a set of battery-powered needle guns. “Four of ’em.”

“Aye-aye.”

“Take Mungo, Jong, and Echohawk. Locate some fifty-five-gallon drums. Good ones. Drain ’em.”

He took a drag on his Marlboro. “Gotcha.”

“We’re gonna get out of this mess, Weisinger.”

“You bet, Captain Haycox.”

After a half-hour’s hike across a mud flat riddled with aerosol cans and disposable diapers, Neil and his three shipmates reached the nearest chemical dump, a dark, viscous swamp where dozens of 55-gallon drums lay about like chunks of pineapple suspended in Jell-O. Most of the drums were fractured and leaking, but before long Mungo spotted a cluster that the dumpers, in an effort to either appease their consciences or cover their asses, had evidently sealed against saltwater corrosion. The sailors switched on their needle guns and got to work, chipping the rust from the caps with the radical caution of neurosurgeons severing frontal lobes: each cap had to be loosened but must not suffer damage in the process.

As Neil freed up his cap, two disquieting images arrived.

Leo Zook, suffocating.

Joe Spicer, bleeding.

Summoning all his pagan powers, the full force of Anno Postdomini One, he tore their livid faces from his mind.

He unplugged the drum, laid it on its side, and watched in appalled fascination as something that resembled black mucus and smelled like burning sulfur flowed forth. He screwed the cap on tight. Within minutes, Mungo, Jong, and Echohawk were emptying out their respective drums: a sudden rush of stinking yellow goo, a steady stream of putrid brown syrup, a slow trickle of acrid purple pus.

Like Sisyphus rolling his stone, Neil began pushing his drum across the mud flat, his companions following, and by sundown all four pontoons were safely within the city’s walls.

The deserters rose at dawn, carrying the banquet table to the beach and lashing the pontoons in place with wires and fan belts scrounged from the nearest auto graveyard. By 0800 the vessel, christened Cornucopia, was ready for sea. Captain Haycox assumed a commanding position in the bow, right beside the freshwater casks. Echohawk, the designated first mate, manned the tiller. Ramsey and Horrocks settled down amidships, their fists wrapped firmly around two jumper cables whose clamps had been twisted into fishhooks. Mungo and Jong took up a corroded pair of Datsun bumpers and began paddling.

Standing on the beach, Neil watched the Cornucopia smash through the breakers and vanish into the dark waters beyond. As fog engulfed the raft, he turned and joined the solemn little march back to the city.

For the next two days, Neil and his mates remained in the museum, lolling in the muddy yard like fourteenth-century Londoners in thrall to the Black Death. They spoke in grunts. They dreamed of food. Not simply the aquatic delicacies promised by Captain Haycox’s mission (lobster bisque, pollack chowder, marlin pie), not simply imitation franchise food from Follingsbee’s galley, but good old-fashioned sailors’ fare as well: hardtack, cracker hash, midshipman’s muffins, strike-me-blind. The fog thickened. Prayers drifted heavenward. Tears fell. Neil figured that each mariner’s reasoning was not unlike his own. Yes, Haycox and her crew might break the covenant, blithely fishing their way to Portugal and never bothering to save their stranded mates, but to do so would constitute betrayal on a cosmic scale. There is honor among the starving, the AB sensed. An unfathomable fraternity binds those who seriously contemplate cutting off their own toes and chewing the raw flesh from the bones.

“I hate you,” muttered Isabel Bostwick. “I hate all of you. You… you men, you and your slime. It’s a real fine line between a consensual orgy and a rape, that’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip, a real fine line.”

“I didn’t see you worryin’ about any fine lines during the party,” said Stubby Barnes.

“I’d better not be pregnant,” said Juanita Torres.

“If we don’t stop talking,” said Neil, “we’re gonna lose our strength.”

On the morning of the third day, the Cornucopia’s little company staggered into the museum. Their faces looked scored and deflated, as if painted on expiring helium balloons. The news was doubly bad. Not only did an impassable barricade of waterspouts and maelstroms surround Van Horne Island, but her bays and inlets were as bereft of fish as the dusty seas of the moon.

“We ate only our fair share,” said Haycox, setting the bait bag on the flagstones.

One by one, the sailors who’d stayed behind came forward, each thrusting a hand into the bag and drawing out his due measure. Neil’s portion consisted of half a Three Musketeers bar on which sat eleven raisins, a cherry LifeSaver, and five sugar-coated Alpha-Bits, K, T, A, S, E. He couldn’t help noticing that the letters, rearranged, spelled STEAK.

August 17.

Course: nowhere. Speed: 0 knots.

They came back 24 hours ago, weak, dizzy, and frightened, stumbling out of the fog like, as Ockham put it, “a bunch of extras from Night of the Living Dead.” I’ve never seen such a scraggly gang of sailors in my life. Led by their phony captain, Dolores Haycox, they threw down their weapons — bazookas, harpoon guns, flare pistols, blasting caps, decorative cutlasses — and collected in the shadow of the hull.

Their arrival proved no surprise to Ockham. On his return from the city, he told me their provisions would be gone by the 9th, so frantic was their bacchanal. Assuming the padre calculated correctly, the mutineers held out for over a week after eating their last morsel.

Impressive.

The minute I saw them, I ordered the anchor raised, locking the bastards out. It’s like some crazy inverse siege — the trapped defenders eating, the outside army starving. I am not a cruel man. I am not Captain Bligh. But if I don’t feed Rafferty and my other loyalists the last of our reserves, they won’t have the energy to keep taking the Juan Fernandez on the trolling expeditions that are our last, best, and only hope. So far nobody’s gotten more than two miles from shore before encountering a twenty-foot wall of turbulence, impossible for a small craft to penetrate. Within the navigable zone, though, we’re certain to find fish.

Last night I ordered Follingsbee to do a new inventory, this time throwing in everything that remotely qualifies as food.

3 pounds Cheerios

2 pounds Sun Maid raisins

3 12-oz. tubes Colgate toothpaste

2 loaves Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread

1 36-oz. can Libby’s string beans

1 48-oz. jar Hellman’s mayonnaise

1 12-oz. jar glory grease

4 12-oz. bottles Vick’s cough syrup

1 pound popcorn (gleaned from the floor of our movie theater)

2 1-gallon cans Campbell’s tomato juice

6 carrots

1 bunch broccoli

6 Oscar Mayer hot dogs (we’d better save most of these for bait)

607 communion wafers

311 acorn barnacles scraped from our rudder and hull (lucky thing we harvested these before the mutineers arrived)

76 goose barnacles (ditto)

1 banana

1 slice Kraft American cheese (we’ll set this aside for an emergency)

Sam’s worked out our rations for the coming week. Curious to know the menu aboard the luxury liner Valparaíso? Breakfast: 10 Cheerios, 4 ounces tomato juice. Lunch: 7 string beans, 2 communion wafers. Dinner: 2 acorn barnacles, 1 ounce bread, 1 carrot cube, 8 raisins. The captain, on occasion, will get a belt of mescal.

A force-12 gale swept across Van Horne Island this morning, driving squalls of rain before it. Did I imagine the accumulation might be enough to lift us free? Of course I did. Did I picture the winds blowing the fog away? I’m only human, Popeye.

The mutineers have decided to protect themselves from future storms. Their homes are grotesque, twisted shanties cobbled together from Toyota doors and Volvo hoods, bulging out of the sand like steel igloos.

“Please feed us,” gasps their emissary of the moment, a demac named Barnes, dressed only in hot pink bathing trunks. Evidently he’d been a real porker before the famine. His vacated skin hangs from his torso like blobs of wax dripping down the shaft of a candle.

“We have nothing to spare,” I call to him.

“I had a life,” moans the demac. “Done things. Slung hash, been to Borneo, fathered four boys, organized church picnics. I had a life, Captain Van Horne.”

Tomorrow, as it happens, is the OMNIVAC’s deadline for hauling God across the Arctic Circle. I can see His brain disintegrating, Popeye, each neuron entering oblivion with a sudden, brilliant burst, like five billion flashbulbs firing at some apocalyptic press conference.

During his first three days aboard the Enterprise, Oliver’s favorite amusement was to stand in the forward lookout post and sketch the PBYs as they left on their daily reconnaissance patrols. Scooting along on their flat bottoms, weaving amid the pack ice, the four flying boats would suddenly retract their stabilizer floats and begin their clumsy ascents, fighting their way skyward like a flock of arthritic herons rising from a marsh.

By the end of the week, the PBYs had flown seventy-three separate missions without spotting anything resembling a supertanker towing a golem.

“Think she got sidetracked by a hurricane?” asked Winston.

“How the hell should I know?” replied Oliver.

“If the body’s started to rot, it might be soaking up seawater,” said Barclay. “A few thousand extra tons could cut Van Horne’s speed in half.”

“Maybe the problem’s mechanical,” said Winston. “Merchant ships are built to fall apart. That’s how capitalism works.”

As far as Oliver was concerned, none of these theories could begin to account for the Valparaíso being so woefully behind schedule. On the morning of August 22, he went to the cabin of Ray Spruance’s portrayer and inquired whether the Enterprise had a fax machine.

“Enterprise, not ‘the’ Enterprise,” said the admiral, chewing on the stem of his briar pipe. “Sure we got one, a Mitsubishi-7000.”

“I want to send a message to our agent on the tanker.”

“Since when do we have an agent on the tanker?”

“A long story. She’s my girlfriend, Cassie Fowler. Something’s obviously gone wrong.”

“At this point, Mr. Shostak, any communication with Valparaíso would be a bad idea. Absolute radio silence figured crucially in the American victory at Midway.”

“I don’t give a fuck about Midway. I’m worried about my girlfriend.”

“If you don’t give a fuck about Midway, you don’t belong on this ship.”

“Jesus — do you people always have to live in the past?”

The admiral scowled, manifestly taken aback. He sucked on his pipe. “Yes, friend,” he said at last, “as a matter of fact we do always have to live in the past, and if you’d give it a minute’s thought, you’d want to live there too.” Eyes flashing, Spruance paced compulsively around his cabin, back and forth, like a caged wolf. “Do you realize there was a time when the United States of America actually made sense? A time when you could look at a Norman Rockwell painting of a GI peeling potatoes for Mom and get all choked up and nobody’d laugh at you? A time when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn like they’re supposed to be and there were no jigaboos shooting up our cities and every schoolday started with the Lord’s Prayer? It’s all gone, Shostak. People are scared of their own food, for Christ’s sake. In the forties nobody ate yogurt or Egg Beaters or goddamn turkey franks.”

“You know, Admiral, if you won’t let me contact Cassie Fowler, I might just go out and hire a different set of mercenaries.”

“Don’t diddle me. I like you, friend, but I won’t be diddled.”

“I’m serious, Spruance, or whatever the hell your name is,” snapped Oliver, pleased to be discovering unexpected reserves of impertinence within himself. “As long as I’m paying the piper, I’m also calling the tune.”

It took Oliver over an hour to compose a fax that met the admiral’s standards. The message had to convey curiosity about the Valparaíso’s position yet remain sufficiently ambiguous that if it fell into what Spruance insisted on calling “enemy hands,” and if that enemy succeeded in cracking the code (it was in Heresy), nobody would suspect the tanker’s cargo had been targeted. “You are my heart’s most valued occupant, dearest Cassandra,” Oliver wrote, “though in which chamber you currently reside I cannot say.”

At 1115 hours, the Enterprise’s radio officer, a scrawny Latino actor named Henry Ramirez, fed Oliver’s letter into the Mitsubishi-7000. At 1116, a message popped onto the concomitant computer screen.

TRANSMISSION TERMINATED — ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.

“Heavy weather?” asked Spruance’s portrayer. “There’s no storm activity anywhere in the North Atlantic today,” Ramirez replied.

An hour later, the radio officer tried again. TRANSMISSION TERMINATED — ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.

He made a third attempt an hour after that. TRANSMISSION TERMINATED — ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.

But it wasn’t really “atmospheric disturbance,” Oliver decided; it was something far more sinister. It was the New Dark Ages, spilling across the globe, spreading their inky ignorance everywhere like oil gushing from the Valparaíso’s broken hull, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, a mere rich atheist could do about it.

Cassie seized the compass binnacle, hugging it with the desperation of a wino bag lady steadying herself on a lamppost. She could no longer imagine what a clear head was like, couldn’t remember a time when moving, breathing, or thinking had come easily. Clutching her inflamed belly, she stared at the twelve-mile radar. Fog, always fog, like the output of some demented cable station devoted to anomie and existential dread, the Malaise Channel.

And suddenly here was Father Thomas, holding out a cupped hand. A mound of Cheerios, doubtless from his own allotment, lay in his palm. His generosity did not surprise her. The day before, she’d seen him lean over the Val’s starboard rail and, in a benevolent and forbidden act, throw down a handful of goose barnacles for the poor moaning wretches in the shantytown.

“I don’t deserve them.”

“Eat,” ordered the priest.

“I’m not even supposed to be on this voyage.”

“Eat,” he said again.

Cassie ate. “You’re a good person, Father.”

Sweeping her bleary gaze past the twelve-mile radar, the fifty-mile radar, and the Marisat terminal, she focused on the beach. Marbles Rafferty and Lou Chickering were climbing out of the Juan Fernandez, having just returned from another manifestly disastrous sea hunt. They jumped into the breakers and, collecting their trolling gear, waded ashore.

“Not even an old inner tube,” sighed Sam Follingsbee, slumped over the control console. “Too bad — I got an incredible recipe for vulcanized rubber in cream sauce.”

“Shut up,” said Crock O’Connor.

“If only they’d found a boot or two. You should taste my cuir tartare.”

“I said shut up.”

Lifting the late Joe Spicer’s copy of A Brief History of Time from atop the Marisat, Cassie slipped it under the cowhide belt she’d borrowed from Lou Chickering. Miraculously, the book seemed to ease her stomach pains. She limped into the radio shack.

Lianne Bliss sat faithfully at her post, her sweaty fist clamped around the shortwave mike. “…the SS Carpco Valparaíso” she muttered, “thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north…”

“Any luck?”

The radio officer tore away her headset. Her cheeks were sunken, eyes bloodshot; she looked like an antique photograph of herself, a daguerreotype or mezzotint, gray, faded, and wrinkled. “Occasionally I hear something — bits of sports shows from the States, weather reports from Europe — but I’m not gettin’ through. Too bad the deckies aren’t here. Big news. The Yankees are in first place.” Lianne put her headset back on and leaned toward the mike. “Thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north. Sixteen degrees, forty-seven minutes, west.” Again she removed her headset. “The worst of it’s the moaning, don’t you think? Those poor bastards. At least we get our communion wafers.”

“And our barnacles.”

“The barnacles are hard for me. I eat ’em, but it’s hard.”

“I understand.” Cassie brushed the sea goddess on Lianne’s biceps. “The last time I was in a jam like this…”

“Saint Paul’s Rocks?”

“Right. I behaved shamefully, Lianne. I prayed for deliverance.”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetie. In your shoes I’d have done the same thing.”

“There are no atheists in foxholes, people say, and it’s so true, it’s so fucking true.” Cassie swallowed, savoring the aftertaste of the Cheerios. “No… no, I’m being too hard on myself. That maxim, it’s not an argument against atheism — it’s an argument against foxholes.”

“Exactly.”

A cold gray tide washed through Cassie’s mind. “Lianne, there’s something you should know.”

“Yeah?”

“I think I’m about to faint.”

The radio officer rose from her chair. Her mouth moved, but Cassie heard no words.

“Help… ,” said Cassie.

The tide crested, crashing against her skull. She slipped down slowly, through the floor of the radio’shack… through the superstructure… the weather deck… hull… island… sea.

Into the green fathoms.

Into the thick silence.

“This is for you.”

A deep voice — deeper, even, than Lianne’s.

“This is for you,” said Anthony again, handing her a stale slice of American cheese, its corners curled, its center inhabited by a patch of green mold.

She blinked. “Was I … unconscious?”

“Yeah.”

“Long?”

“An hour.” The Exxon tiger grinned down from Anthony’s T-shirt. “Sam and I agreed that the first person who passed out would get the emergency ration. It’s not much, Doc, but it’s yours.”

Cassie folded the slice into quarters and, pushing the ragged stack into her mouth, gratefully wolfed it down. “Th-thanks…”

She rose from the bunk. Anthony’s cabin was twice as large as hers, but so cluttered it seemed cramped. Books and magazines were scattered everywhere, a Complete Pelican Shakespeare on the bureau, a stack of Mariners’ Weather Logs on the washbasin, a Carpco Manual and a Girls of Penthouse on the floor. A spiral notebook lay on his desk, its cover displaying an airbrushed portrait of Popeye the Sailor.

“You’ll have some, won’t you?” asked Anthony, flashing her a half-empty bottle of Monte Alban. MEZCAL CON GUSANO, the label said. Mescal with worm. Without waiting for a reply, he sloshed several ounces into two ceramic Arco mugs.

“It’s hell being a biologist. I know too much.” As the pains started up again, Cassie pressed her palm against the Brief History of Time belted to her stomach. “Our fats were the first to go, and now it’s the proteins. I can practically feel my muscles coming apart, cracking, splitting. The nitrogen floats free, spilling into our blood, our kidneys…”

The captain took a protracted sip of mescal. “That why my urine smells like ammonia?”

She nodded.

“My breath stinks too,” he said, handing her an Arco mug.

“Ketosis. The odor of sanctity, they used to call it, back when people fasted for God.”

“How soon before we… ?”

“It’s an individual sort of thing. Big fellas like Follingsbee, they’re likely to last another month. Rafferty and Lianne — four or five days, maybe.”

The captain drained his mescal. “This voyage started out so well. Hell, I even thought we’d save His brain. It’s hash by now, don’t you think?”

“Quite likely.”

Settling behind his desk, Anthony refilled his mug and retrieved a brass sextant from among the nautical charts and Styrofoam coffee cups. “Know something, Doc? I’m just tipsy enough to say I think you’re an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady.”

The remark aroused in Cassie a strange conjunction of delight and apprehension. A door to chaos had just been opened, and now she’d do best to fling it closed. “I’m flattered,” she said, taking a hot gulp of Monte Alban. “Let’s not forget I’m practically engaged.”

“I was practically engaged once.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Janet Yost, a bos’n with Chevron Shipping.” The captain sighted Cassie through his sextant; a lascivious grin twisted his lips, as if the instrument somehow rendered her blouse transparent. “We bunked together for nearly two years, running the glop down from Alaska. Once or twice we talked about a wedding. Far as I’m concerned, she was my fiancй e. Then she got pregnant.”

“By you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And… ?”

“And I freaked out. A baby’s no way to start a marriage.”

“Did you ask her to get an abortion?”

“Not in so many words, but she could tell that’s where I stood. I’m not fit for fatherhood, Cassie. Look at who I’ve got for a model. It’s like a surgeon learning his business from Jack the Ripper.”

“Maybe you could’ve… hunted around, right? Gotten some guidance.”

“I tried, Doc. Talked to sailors with kids, walked uptown to F.A.O. Schwarz and bought a Baby Feels-So-Real, you know, one of those authentic-type dolls, so I could take it home and hold it a lot — I felt pretty embarrassed buying the thing, I’ll tell you, like it was some sort of sexual aid. And, hey, let’s not forget my trips to Saint Vincent’s for purposes of studying the newborns and seeing what sort of creatures they were. You realize how easy it is to sneak into a maternity ward? Act like an uncle, that’s all. None of this shit worked. To this day, babies scare me.”

“I’m sure you could get over it. Alexander did.”

“Who?”

“A Norway rat. When I forced him to live with his own offspring, he started taking care of them. Sea horses make good fathers too. Also lumpfish. Did Janet get the abortion?”

“Wasn’t necessary. Mother Nature stepped in. Before I knew it, we’d lost the relationship too. An awful time, terrible fights. Once she threw a sextant at me — that’s how my nose got busted. After that we made a point of staying on separate ships. Maybe we passed in the night. Didn’t hear from her for three whole years, but then, when the Val hit Bolivar Reef, she wrote to me and said she knew it wasn’t my fault.”

“Was it your fault?”

“I left the bridge.”

Gritting her teeth, Cassie placed both her hands against A Brief History of Time and pushed. “We ever gonna find food out there?”

“Sure we are, Doc. I guarantee it. You okay?”

“Woozy. Abdominal pains. I don’t suppose you have any more cheese?”

“Sorry.”

She stretched out on the rug. Her brain had become a sponge, a Polymastia mamillaris dripping with Monte Alban. A mescal haze lay between her psyche and the world, hanging in space like a theatrical scrim, backlit, imprinted with twinkling stars. A scarlet macaw flew across the constellations — the very bird she’d promised to buy Anthony once they were home — and suddenly it was molting, feather by feather, until only the bare, breathing flesh remained, knobby, soft, and edible.

The minutes locked by. Cassie nodded off, roused herself, nodded off…

“Am I dying?” she asked.

Anthony now sat beside her, his back against the desk, cradling her in his bare, sweaty arms. His tattooed mermaid looked anorectic. Slowly he extended his palm, its lifeline bisected by three objects resembling thick, stubby pretzel sticks.

“You won’t die,” he said. “I won’t let anybody die.”

“Pretzels?”

“Pickled mescal worms. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar.”

“W-worms?”

“All meat,” he insisted, languorously lifting Caspar — or maybe it was Melchior, or possibly Balthazar — to her mouth. The creature was flaxen and segmented: not a true worm, she realized, but the larva of some Mexican moth or other. “Fresh from Oaxaca,” he said.

“Yes. Yes. Good.”

Gently, Anthony inserted Caspar. She sucked, the oldest of all survival reflexes, wetting the captain’s fingers, saturating his larva. Satisfaction beamed from his face, a fulfillment akin to what a mother experiences while nursing — not bad, she decided, for a man who’d panicked at his girlfriend’s pregnancy. She worked her jaw. Caspar disintegrated. He had a crude, spiky, medicinal flavor, a blend of raw mescal and Lepidoptera innards.

“Tell me what you told me before,” said Cassie. “About my being — how did you put it? — ‘a wonderfully attractive…’ ”

He fed her Melchior. “An incredibly attractive…”

“Yeah.” She devoured the larva. “That.”

Now came Balthazar. “I think you’re an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady,” Anthony informed her for the second time that day.

As Cassie chewed, a mild sense of well-being took hold of her, transient but real. The wheat of General Mills, the cheese of Kraft, the worms of Oaxaca. She licked her lips and drifted toward sleep. Faith did not exist aboard the Carpco Valparaíso, nor hope either, but for the moment, at least, there was charity.

Whatever the cause of the Valparaíso’s failure to appear in Arctic waters, Oliver couldn’t help noticing that the World War Two Reenactment Society was profiting heavily from the delay. According to the contract the Enlightenment League had signed with Pembroke and Flume, each sailor, pilot, and gunner had to receive “full combat pay” for every day he served aboard the carrier. Not that the men didn’t earn it. Their commanders worked them around the clock, as if there were a war on. But Oliver still felt resentful. His money, he decided, was like Cassie’s large chest. All during high school, she’d never known for certain why she was constantly being asked out — or, rather, she had known, and she didn’t like it. A person should be valued for what he gave, Oliver believed, not for what he possessed.

The short, homely man portraying Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the officer in charge of Air Group Six, required both his squadrons to fly two practice missions a day, dropping wooden bombs and Styrofoam torpedoes on the icebergs of Tromso Fjord. Meanwhile, the fellow playing the carrier’s skipper, a burly Irishman with a handlebar mustache, made his men keep the flight deck completely clear of ice and snow, even during those hours when the warplanes weren’t flying their milk runs. For Captain George Murray’s beleaguered sailors, combat duty aboard the Enterprise was like living in some suburbanite hell, a world where your driveway was six hundred feet long and needed shoveling even in the middle of summer.

An hour after the ninetieth straight PBY mission failed to find the Valparaíso, Pembroke and Flume summoned Oliver to their cabin. During World War Two, these spacious quarters had functioned as the wardroom, but the impresarios had converted it into a two-bedroom suite featuring a parlor furnished with an eye to late-Victorian ostentation.

“The crew’s getting itchy,” Albert Flume began, guiding Oliver toward a plush divan reminiscent of the couch in Delacroix’s Odalisque.

“Our pilots and gunners’re going nuts.” Sidney Pembroke unwrapped a facsimile of a Baby Ruth candy bar circa 1944. “If something doesn’t happen soon to improve morale, they’ll be asking to go home.”

“To wit, we’d like to start granting the boys shore leave.”

“At full combat pay.”

Oliver glowered and clenched his fists. “Shore leave? Shore leave to where? Oslo?”

Flume shook his head. “No way to get ’em there. The PBYs are tied up with reconnaissance, and we can’t hire bush pilots without attracting attention.”

“We hopped over to Ibsen City last night,” said Pembroke. “Dull place on the whole, but that Sundog Saloon has possibilities.”

Oliver scowled. “It’s nothing but an old airplane hangar.”

“We’ll give it to you straight,” said Pembroke, merrily devouring his candy bar. “Assuming you’re willing to bankroll us, Alby and I intend to turn the Sundog into a classic-type USO Club. You know, a home away from home, a place for the boys to get a free sandwich, dance with a pretty hostess, and hear Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’.”

“If it’s entertainment your people want,” said Oliver, “Barclay does a damn good magic act. Last year he was on the Tonight show, debunking faith healers.”

“Debunking faith?” Flume opened the refrigerator, removed a Rheingold, and popped the cap. “What is he, an atheist?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“We don’t mean to disparage your friend’s abilities,” said Pembroke, “but we’re envisioning something more along the lines of Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby…”

“Aren’t those people dead?”

“Yeah, but it’s not that hard to come up with impersonators.”

“We’ll also be importing a string of attractive young women to work the room,” said Flume. “You know, nice girl-next-door types handing out cigarettes, offering to dance, and maybe allowing a stolen kiss or two.”

“No bimbos, of course,” said Pembroke. “Wholesome, aspiring actresses who know there’s more to life than topless bars and wet T-shirt contests.”

“Right now it’s three A.M. in Manhattan,” said Flume, “but if we get on the phone ’round suppertime we’ll be able to reach the relevant talent agencies.”

“You actually think the average New York actor will drop whatever he’s doing and catch the first plane to Oslo?” said Oliver.

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because for the average New York actor,” said Flume, swallowing Rheingold, “getting paid a scale wage to impersonate Bing Crosby on an obscure island in the Arctic Ocean is the closest he’s come to a job in years.”

August 27.

In my entry of July 14, I told you what I heard, saw, and felt when I first laid eyes on our cargo. For sheer exhilaration, Popeye, it was nothing compared to my second epiphany.

At 0900 I was standing outside the wheelhouse, binoculars raised, watching the mutineers lying about in the streets of their shantytown. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized what a difference our feeble rations make. We, at least, can move.

A gamey fragrance wafted across the bridge wing. Then: a low, deep drumming. I pivoted toward the beach.

And there it was, the glorious promontory of His nose, rising in the distance like Mount Sinai itself. My migraine vanished. My blood jumped. The drumming continued, the steady boom-boom-boom of surf crashing inside His armpits.

Whether this amazing break ultimately traces to rogue winds, maverick currents, chaos theory, or some posthumous form of divine intervention, I can’t really say.

I only know He’s back.

After considerable soul-searching and much mental agony, Thomas decided to start with the bosom. Given its vastness, he reasoned, mutilating this feature would constitute a lesser violation than an equivalent assault on the brow or cheeks. Even so, he was not at peace. Situational ethics had always given him pause. Were the Valparaíso not cut off from the outside world, Thomas would certainly have faxed Rome, soliciting the cardinals’ official views on deophagy.

The eight loyalists and their captain made the crossing in the Juan Fernandez and, maneuvering past the starboard ribs, landed on the inflatable wharf. Shouldering their various backpacks and seabags, they fought their way up the Jacob’s ladder, and, led by Van Horne, began the dizzying hike east across the collarbone and south along the sternum. Pots and pans swung from the loyalists’ belts like gigantic jail keys, clanging in counterpoint to the thunder booming from His armpits.

At last they reached the edge of the areola, a red, rubbery pasture dominated by the tall, pillarlike form of the nipple. Thomas stopped, turned, removed his Panama hat. He bade his congregation sit down. Everyone obeyed, even Van Horne, though the captain kept his distance, secluding himself in the shadow of a mole.

Opening his knapsack, Thomas drew out the sacred hardware: candlesticks, chalice, ciborium, silver salver, antependium (the pride of his collection, pure silk, printed with the Stations of the Cross). The congregation awaited the sacrament eagerly but respectfully — all except Van Horne and Cassie Fowler, who both looked highly annoyed. Eight communicants, Thomas thought with a wry smile, the most he’d ever had at a Valparaíso Mass, either before or after His death became known aboard the tanker.

Sister Miriam reached into her seabag and removed the altar: a situational-ethics altar, he had to admit, for in truth it was a Coleman stove fueled by propane gas. While Miriam unfolded the aluminum legs and dug them into the soft epidermis, Thomas spread out the antependium like a picnic blanket, fastening the corners with candlesticks.

“Can’t he move any faster?” grumbled Fowler.

“He’s doing his best,” snapped Miriam.

As Sam Follingsbee handed the nun a battery-powered carving knife, Crock O’Connor gave her one of the waterproof chain saws he’d used to open God’s eardrums, and she in turn passed these tools to Thomas. In the interest of speed, he elected to dispense with the normal preliminaries — the Incensing of the Faithful, the Washing of the Hands, the Orate Fratres, the Reading of the Diptychs — and move straight to the matter of deconsecration. But here he was stuck. There was no antidote for transubstantiation in the missal, no recognized procedure for turning the divine body back into daily bread. Perhaps it would be sufficient simply to reverse the famous words of the Last Supper, “Accipite et manducate ex hoc omnes, hoc est enim corpus Meum.” Take and eat ye all of this, for this is My body. Very well, he thought. Sure. Why not?

Thomas hunkered down. He yanked the starter cord. Instantly the chain saw kicked in, buzzing like a horror-movie hornet. Clouds of black smoke poured from the engine housing. Groaning softly, the priest lowered the saw, firmed his grip, and stabbed his Creator.

He jerked the saw away.

“What’s the matter?” gasped Miriam.

It simply wasn’t right. How could it be right? “Better to starve,” he muttered.

“Tom, you must.”

“No.”

“Tom.”

Again he lowered the saw. The spinning teeth bit into the flesh, releasing a stream of rosy plasma.

He raised the saw.

“Hurry,” rasped Lou Chickering.

“Please,” moaned Marbles Rafferty.

He eased the smoking machine back into the wound. Languidly, reluctantly, he dragged the blade along a horizontal path. Then a second cut, at right angles to the first. A third. A fourth. Peeling away the patch of epidermis, he inserted the saw clear to the engine housing and began his quest for true meat.

“Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria Tua,” Miriam recited as she primed the altar. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Opening a box of Diamond kitchen matches, she ignited a stick, cupped the vulnerable flame, and lit the right-hand burner. “Hosanna in excelsis.” Instinctively they were opting for the grand manner, Thomas realized: an old-style Eucharist, complete with the Latin.

The fog hissed as it hit the little fire. Miriam seized Pollingsbee’s eighteen-inch iron skillet and set it atop the burner.

“Meum corpus enim est hoc,” muttered Thomas, cutting and slashing as he desacralized the tissues, “omnes hoc ex manducate et accipite.” As heavy magenta blood came bubbling to the surface, Miriam took the chalice, knelt down, and scooped up several pints. “Omnes eo ex bibite et accipite,” said the priest, filtering the holiness from the blood. He kept working the saw, at last freeing up a three-pound swatch of flesh.

It had to be this way. No other choice existed. If he didn’t do it, Van Horne would.

Shutting off the vibrating blade, he carried the fillet to the altar and dropped it into the skillet. The meat sizzled, pink juices rushing from its depths. A wondrous scent arose, the sweet aroma of seared divinity, making Thomas’s mouth water.

“It’s done,” seethed Cassie Fowler. “It’s fucking done.”

“Patience,” snarled Miriam.

“Christ on a raft…”

Sixty seconds passed. Thomas grabbed the spatula and flipped the fillet. A matter of balances: he must heat the thing long enough to kill the pathogens, but not so long as to destroy the precious proteins for which their bodies screamed.

“What’s next?” snorted Van Horne.

“The Fraction of the Host,” said Miriam.

“Screw it,” he said.

“Screw you,” she said.

Sliding the spatula under the meat, Thomas transferred it to the silver salver. He took a breath and, switching on the carving knife, divided the great steak into nine equal portions, each the size of a brownie. “Haec commixtio,” he said, slicing a tiny bit off his own share, “corporis et sanguinis Dei” — with the particle he made the Sign of the Cross over the chalice and dropped it in — “fiat accipientibus nobis.” May this mingling of the body and blood of God be effectual to us who receive it. “Amen.”

“Stop stretching it out,” gasped Fowler.

“This is sadistic,” whined Van Horne.

“If you don’t like it,” said Miriam, “find another church.”

Squeezing his portion between thumb and forefinger, feeling the sticky warmth roll across his palm, Thomas raised it to his lips. He opened his mouth. “Perceptio corporis Tui, Domine, quod ego indignus sumere praesumo, non mihi proveniat in con-demnationem.” Let not the partaking of Thy body, O Lord, which I, though unworthy, presume to receive, turn to my condemnation. He sank his teeth into the meat. He chewed slowly and gulped. The flavor astonished him. He’d been expecting something manifestly classy and valuable — London broil, perhaps, or milk-fed veal — but instead it evoked Follingsbee’s version of a Big Mac.

And the priest thought: of course. God had been for everyone, hadn’t He? He’d belonged to the fast-food multitudes, to all those overweight mothers Thomas was forever seeing in the Bronxdale Avenue McDonald’s, ordering Happy Meals for their chubby broods.

“Corpus Tuum, Domine, quod sumpsit, adhaereat visceribus meis,” he said. May Thy body, O Lord, which I have received, cleave to my inmost parts. He felt a sudden, electric surge, though whether this traced to the meat itself or to the Idea of the Meat he couldn’t say. “Amen.”

Myriad sensations gamboled among Thomas’s taste buds as, silver salver in hand, he approached Follingsbee. Beyond the burgerness lay something not unlike Kentucky Fried Chicken, and beyond that lay intimations of a Wendy’s Triple.

“Father, I feel real bad about this,” said the plump chef.

“I’m sure you could’ve cooked it better. Don’t tell the stewards’ union.”

Follingsbee winced. “I used to be an altar boy, remember?”

“It’s perfectly okay, Sam.”

“You promise? It seems sinful.”

“I promise.”

“It’s okay? You sure?”

“Open your mouth.”

The chef’s lips parted.

“Corpus Dei custodial corpus tuum,” said Thomas, inserting Follingsbee’s portion. May God’s body preserve thy own. “Eat slowly,” he admonished, “or you’ll get sick.”

As Follingsbee chewed, Thomas moved down the line — Rafferty, O’Connor, Chickering, Bliss, Fowler, Van Horne, Sister Miriam — laying a share on each extended tongue. “Corpus Dei custodial corpus tuum,” he told them. “Not too fast,” he warned.

The communicants worked their jaws and swallowed.

“Domine, non sum dignus,” said Miriam, licking her lips. Lord, I am not worthy.

“Domine, non sum dignus,” said Follingsbee, eyes closed, savoring his salvation.

“Domine… non… sum… dignus,” groaned the radio officer, shuddering with self-disgust. For a committed vegetarian like Lianne Bliss, this was obviously a terrible ordeal.

“Domine, non sum dignus,” said Rafferty, O’Connor, and Chickering in unison. Only Van Horne and Fowler remained silent.

“Dominus vobiscum,” Thomas told the congregation, stepping onto the areola.

Under the captain’s direction the loyalists drew out their machetes, stilettos, and Swiss Army knives and set to work, systematically enlarging the original indentation as they carved out additional fillets for their mates back in the shantytown, and within an hour they had flensed the corpse sufficiently to fill every pot and pan.

“He smells ripe,” said Van Horne, pinching his nostrils as he joined Thomas on the areola.

“If not rotten,” said the priest, watching Miriam cram a bloody fillet into the ciborium.

“You know, I probably believe in Him more strongly right now than I ever did when He was alive.” The captain dropped his hand, letting his nostrils spring open. “It’s an absolute miracle, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know what it is.” Fanning himself with his Panama hat, Thomas turned toward the communicants.

“Either that, or His body got caught on the crest of the Canary Current, entered the North Atlantic Drift…”

“Ite,” Thomas announced in a strong, clear voice.

“…and then came ’round full circle.”

“Missa est.”

“So what do you think, Father? A miracle, or the North Atlantic Drift?”

“I think it’s all the same thing,” said the dazed, exhausted, satiated priest.

FEAST

WILD APPLAUSE AND delirious cheers greeted Bob Hope as, dressed in baggy green combat fatigues and a white golfing cap, he stepped onto the stage of the Midnight Sun Canteen. The spotlight caught his famous and complex nose, limning its beloved contours.

“I’m sure havin’ a swell time here on Jan Mayen Island,” the comedian began, waving to his audience: a hundred and thirty-two Navy pilots and gunners — most of them wearing chocolate brown bomber jackets with black fur collars — plus two hundred and ten sailors in white bucket hats and blue neckerchiefs. “You all know what Jan Mayen is.” He tapped the floor mike, producing an amplified thock. “Shangri-La with icicles!”

Appreciative howls. Delighted guffaws.

Oliver, sitting alone, did not laugh. He polished off his second Frydenlund beer of the evening, burped, and slumped down farther in his chair. Some terrible tragedy, he was sure, had overtaken Cassandra and the Valparaíso. Typhoon, maelstrom, tsunami — or maybe the force was human, for surely there were institutions other than the Central Park West Enlightenment League that wished to get God’s carcass out of the way, institutions that wouldn’t hesitate to sink a supertanker or two in the process.

Albert Flume and his partner ambled up to Oliver’s table. “May we join you?”

“Sure.”

“Another beer?” asked Sidney Pembroke, pointing to the pair of empty bottles.

“Yeah, why not?”

“Last night I slept in the barracks along with the boys,” said Bob Hope. Hands in pockets, he hunched toward the mike. “You know what barracks are. That’s two thousand cots separated by individual crap games.”

A Hope classic. The pilots, gunners, and sailors nearly fell out of their chairs.

“Alby, we done good,” said Pembroke.

“Definitely one of our better productions,” said Flume. “Hey, girl-o’-my-dreams!” he called toward a pretty, honey-blonde hostess as, hips swaying, she carried a plate of ham sandwiches across the room. “Bring our friend Oliver here a Frydenlund!”

The impresarios’ pride was in fact justified. In a mere three days they’d managed to turn the Sundog Saloon into a forties USO club. Except for the availability of beer, the Midnight Sun Canteen was entirely authentic, right down to the fluted public-address speakers on the girders, the SERVICEMEN ONLY sign above the front door, and the LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS and NIMITZ HAS NO LIMITS posters on the walls. At first Vladimir Panshin had resisted the transformation, figuring his usual clientele would be irate, but then he realized that for every Ibsen City scientist who stayed away at least two Reenactment Society members would take his place.

The refurbishing had cost Oliver nearly eighty-five thousand dollars, most of it going to the carpenters and electricians they’d ferried over from Trondheim, but that sum was nothing compared to the sizable percentage of his bank account Pembroke and Flume had consumed in procuring the talent. The New York office of Actors Equity had sent two dozen ingenues and chorus girls, all of them more than willing to put on cocktail aprons and flirt with a bunch of middle-aged schizophrenics who thought they were fighting World War Two. From the William Morris Agency had come Sonny Orbach and His Harmonicoots, sixteen septuagenarian musicians who, when sufficiently plastered on Frydenlund, became a veritable reincarnation of Glenn Miller’s band. But the impresarios’ real coup was tracking down the amazingly gifted and chronically obscure Kovitsky Brothers: Myron, Arnold, and Jake, aka the Great American Nostalgia Machine — borscht-circuit mimics whose repertoire extended beyond such obvious choices as Bob Hope and Al Jolson into the rarefied world of female impersonation. Myron did a first-rate Kate Smith, Arnold a credible Marlene Dietrich, Jake a passable Ethel Merman and a positively uncanny Frances Langford. Fusing their falsettos in tight, three-part harmony, the Kovitsky Brothers could make you swear you were hearing the Andrews Sisters singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me).”

Oliver looked at his watch. Five P.M. Damn. Commander Wade McClusky’s portrayer should have reported in well over an hour ago.

“You know, I recently figured out that all General Tojo wants is peace,” said Hope. “A piece of China, a piece of Australia, a piece of the Philippines…”

By his own account, Wade McClusky was a crackerjack target spotter. While still an ensign, he’d become known as the man who could pick out a camouflaged aircraft factory from three miles up, though Oliver was unclear on whether it was the real McClusky, the real McClusky’s portrayer, or the real McClusky’s portrayer’s fictionalized version of the real McClusky who boasted this talent. In any event, ten hours earlier the stalwart leader of Air Group Six had taken personal charge of the reconnaisance operation, assuming command of the PBY flying boat code-named “Strawberry Eight.” An auspicious development, Oliver felt. So why wasn’t McClusky back yet? Was the Valparaíso armed with Bofors guns after all? Had Van Horne shot Strawberry Eight out of the sky?

Hope motioned for the gorgeous and curvaceous Dorothy Lamour — Myron Kovitsky in wig, makeup, evening gown, and latex breasts — to join him on stage. Smiling, blowing kisses, Lamour slithered across the canteen, accompanied by choruses of wolf whistles.

“Just wanted you boys to see what you’re fighting for.” Another Hope classic. “Yesterday, Crosby and I were—”

“Attention, everyone! Attention!” A breathless voice broke from the loudspeakers, popping and fizzing like a draught of Moxie encountering an ice cube. “This is Admiral Spruance on Enterprise! Great news, men! Barely four hours ago, sixteen army B-25s took off from the carrier Hornet under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle and dropped over fifty demolition bombs on the industrial heart of Tokyo!”

Whoops and applause resounded through the Midnight Sun Canteen.

“The extent of the damage is not known,” Spruance’s portrayer continued, “but President Roosevelt is calling the Doolittle raid ‘a major blow to enemy morale’!”

The war reenactors stomped their feet. Bewildered but eager to please, the hostesses set down their sandwich trays and cheered.

“That is all, men!”

When the tumult died away, the spotlight pivoted toward the northeast corner, just as Sonny Orbach and His Harmonicoots, in full evening attire, launched into a spirited imitation of Glenn Miller’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” Leaping up, the Midnight Sun Canteen’s patrons began jitterbugging — with each other, with their hostesses, and, in the case of one fantastically lucky tail gunner, with Dorothy Lamour herself.

At the next table over, a perky redheaded hostess was busy earning her salary, sharing a Coca-Cola with a chunky sailor in his early forties.

“…not supposed to ask where you’re going,” the hostess was saying as Oliver tuned in their conversation.

“That’s right,” the sailor replied. “The Japs have spies everywhere.”

“But I can ask where you’re from.”

“Georgia, ma’am. Little town called Peach Landing.”

“Really?”

“Newark, actually.”

“Golly, I never met anyone from Georgia.” The hostess batted her eyes. “Got a girl, sailor?”

“Sure do, ma’am.”

“Carry her picture with you, by any chance?”

“Yes, ma’am.” With a sheepish grin the sailor pulled his wallet from his bell-bottoms and, slipping out a small photograph, handed it to the hostess. “Her name’s Mindy Sue.”

“She looks real sweet, sailor. Does she blow you?”

“What?”

At 1815 hours, the unmistakable roar of a PBY flying boat’s Pratt and Whitney engines passed over the Midnight Sun Canteen, rattling the Frydenlund bottles. A delicious anticipation flooded through Oliver. Surely this was Wade McClusky, heading for the nearest fjord in Strawberry Eight. Surely the Valparaíso had been spotted.

Glenn Miller followed “Pistol Packin’ Mama” with “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” then the spotlight swung back to the stage for the Andrews Sisters singing “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” (At some point Myron had sneaked off and changed costumes.) Next came Bing Crosby crooning “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” after which Hope sauntered over to his buddy. Swaying back and forth, the two of them offered their famous rendition of “Mairzy Doats.”

“Speaking of mares,” said Flume as Hope and Crosby welcomed Frances Langford on stage, “did you know our subs used to carry buckets of horse guts along on their missions?”

Oliver wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “Buckets of… ?”

“Horse guts. Sometimes sheep guts. That way, whenever the Nazis dropped their depth charges, the sub commander could send the stuff to the surface, and the enemy would think he’d scored a hit!”

“What an amazing war,” said Pembroke, sighing with admiration.

“I’m in the mood for love,” sang Frances Langford.

“Baby, you came to the right place!” a randy sailor shouted.

“Simply because you’re near me…”

The front door flew open, and a small gale swept through the Midnight Sun Canteen. Blue with cold, Wade McClusky’s craggy portrayer strode inside and marched over to Oliver’s table. Ice crystals glittered on his flight jacket. Snow sat on his shoulders like a prodigious case of dandruff.

“Jeez, am I glad to see you!” shouted Oliver, slapping the group leader on the back. “Any luck?”

Smiling, blowing kisses, Frances Langford launched into her signature tune, “Embraceable You.”

“Gimme a lousy minute.” McClusky pulled a pack of Wrigley’s spearmint from his flight jacket, then slid a stick into his mouth like a doctor inserting a tongue depressor. “Hey, cutie!” he called to the redheaded hostess, who was still drinking Coke with the chunky sailor. “We’ll take a Frydenlund over here!”

“Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you,” sang Frances Langford. “Embrace me, my irreplaceable you…”

“You know, there’s a wonderful story connected with that number,” said Pembroke. “Miss Langford was visiting a field hospital in the African desert. There’d been a big tank battle earlier that week, and some of the boys were shot up pretty bad.”

“Hope suggested she give ’em a song,” said Flume, “so naturally Frances trotted out ‘Embraceable You.’ And when she looked toward the nearest bed — well, you’ll never guess what she saw.”

“Did you find the Valparaíso?” Oliver demanded. “Did you find the golem?”

“I didn’t find a goddamn thing,” said McClusky, accepting his beer from the hostess.

“She saw a soldier without any arms,” said Pembroke. “Both of ’em had been burned off. Isn’t that a wonderful story?”

The late-afternoon breeze lifted nuggets of rust from the dunes, hurling them over the starboard bulwark and scattering them across the weather deck like buckshot. Anthony donned his mirrorshades and, peering through the sandstorm, studied the approaching procession. His stomach, filled, purred contentedly. Like pallbearers transporting a small but emotionally burdensome coffin — the coffin of a pet, a child, a beloved dwarf — Ockham and Sister Miriam carried an aluminum footlocker down the catwalk. Descending to the deck, they set the box at Anthony’s feet. They opened it.

Packaged in wax paper, sixty sandwiches lay in neat ranks, files, and layers. Closing his eyes, Anthony inhaled the robust fragrance. Follingsbee’s great breakthrough had occurred less than an hour after the inverse Eucharist, when he’d discovered that their cargo’s epidermis could be mashed into a paste possessing all the best qualities of bread dough. While Rafferty and Chickering had fried the patties, Follingsbee had baked the buns. In Anthony’s view, the fact that he’d be giving his crew not just meat but a facsimile of their favorite cuisine all but guaranteed the mutiny’s end.

The captain leaned over the rail. Today’s emissary from the shantytown was an elderly, cod-faced man, stripped to the waist and wearing black bicycle pants. He sat motionless amid the thick mist and swirling rust, arms outstretched in a gesture of entreaty, ribs bulging from his shriveled torso like bars on a marimba.

“What’s your name?” Anthony called to the starving man.

“Mungo, sir.” The sailor rose and stumbled backward, slumping against the tanker’s thrown propeller like a leprechaun crucified on a gigantic shamrock. “Able Seaman Ralph Mungo.”

“Find your shipmates, Mungo. Tell ’em to report here at once.

“Aye-aye.”

“Give ’em a message.”

“What message?”

“ ‘Van Horne is the bread of life.’ Got that?”

“Aye.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” said Ockham, cupping his palm around Anthony’s shoulder.

“Repeat it,” Anthony ordered the sailor.

“Van Horne is the bread of life.” Mungo pushed off from the orphan screw. Gasping for breath, he staggered away. “Van Horne is the bread…”

Twenty minutes later the mutineers appeared, flopping and crawling across the foggy dunes, and soon the lot of them sat clustered around the propeller. The allegory pleased Anthony. Above: he, Captain Van Horne, master of the Valparaíso, splendid in his dress blues and braided cap. Below: they, abject mortals, groveling in the muck. He wasn’t out to torment them. He had no wish to steal their wills or claim their souls. But now was the time to bring these traitors to heel once and for all, now was the time to bury the Idea of the Corpse in the deepest, darkest hole this side of the Mariana Trench.

Anthony drew a package from the footlocker. “This soup kitchen’s like any other, sailors. First the sermon, then the sandwich.” He cleared his throat. “ ‘When evening came, the disciples went to Him and said, “Send the people away, and they can go to the villages to buy themselves some food.’ ” He’d spent the noon-to-four watch paging through Ockham’s Jerusalem Bible, studying the great precedents: the manna from heaven, the water from the rock, the feeding of the five thousand. “ ‘Jesus replied, “Give them something to eat yourselves.” But they answered, “All we have is five loaves and two fish.” ’ ”

Tearing off his Panama hat, Ockham squeezed Anthony’s wrist. “Cut the crap, okay?”

So far Follingsbee had wrung four distinct variations. The steward’s own favorite was the basic hamburger, while Rafferty found the Filet-o-Fish unbeatable (seafood flavor derived from areola tissue) and Chickering preferred the Quarter Pounder with Cheese (curds cultivated from divine lymph). Nobody much liked the McNuggets.

“ ‘Breaking the loaves, He handed them to His disciples,’ ” Anthony persisted, “ ‘who gave them to the crowds.’ ” He hurled the sandwich over the side. “ ‘They all ate as much as they wanted…’ ”

The Filet-o-Fish arced toward the mutineers. Reaching up, Able Seaman Weisinger made the catch. Incredulous, he unwrapped the wax paper and stared at the gift. He rubbed the bun. He sniffed the meat. Tears of gratitude ran down his face in parallel tracks. Crumpling the paper into a ball, he tossed it aside, raised the sandwich to his mouth, and swept his lips along the breaded, juicy fibers.

“Eat,” Anthony commanded.

Placing one index finger under his nose, Weisinger hooked the other over his lower teeth and pried his jaw open. He inserted the Filet-o-Fish, bit off a large piece. He swallowed. Gulped. Shuddered. A retching noise issued from his throat, like a ship scraping bottom. Seconds later he vomited up the offering, marring his lap with a sticky mixture of amber fat and sea green bile.

“Chew it!” called Anthony. “You aren’t scarfing down peanuts in a fucking waterfront dive! Chew it!”

Weisinger broke off a modest morsel and tried again. His jaw moved slowly, deliberately. “It’s good!” rasped the AB. “It’s so good!”

“Of course it’s good!” shouted Anthony.

“Where’d you get it?” asked Ralph Mungo.

“All good things come from God!” cried Sister Miriam.

Anthony drew a Quarter Pounder with Cheese from the locker. “Who is your captain?” he screamed into the wind.

“You are!” cried Dolores Haycox.

“You are!” insisted Charlie Horrocks.

“You are!” chimed in Ralph Mungo, Bud Ramsey, James Echohawk, Stubby Barnes, Juanita Torres, Isabel Bostwick, An-mei Jong, and a dozen more.

Quarter Pounder in hand, Anthony thrust his arm over the rail. “Who is the bread of life?”

“You are!” cried a chorus of mutineers.

He waved the sandwich around. “Who can forgive your sins against this ship?”

“You can!”

Springing sideways, Sister Miriam grabbed the Quarter Pounder from Anthony and tossed it into the air. Like a tight end catching a forward pass, Haycox snagged the package, instantly ripping away the wax paper.

“You had no right to do that,” Anthony informed the nun. “You’re just a passenger, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m just a passenger,” she agreed. “For Christ’s sake,” she repeated, curling her lower lip.

Ockham rummaged around in the locker, drawing out four hamburgers and four boxes of McNuggets. “You each get two!” he shouted, chucking the packages over the rail. “Eat slowly!”

“Very slowly,” said Miriam, throwing down six Filets-o-Fish.

The sky rained godsend. Half the packages were caught in midair, half hit the sands. Anthony was impressed not only by the orderliness with which the mutineers retrieved the fallen meat but by the fact that no sailor took more than his or her share.

“They fear me,” he observed.

“You proud of that?” asked Ockham.

“Yes. No. I want my ship back, Thomas.”

“How does it feel, being feared? Heady stuff?”

“Heady stuff.”

“That all?”

“All right, I’ll be frank — sure, I’m tempted to have my ass kissed. I’m tempted to become their god.” Anthony fixed on Ockham. “If you had my power,” said the captain, voice dripping with sarcasm, “no doubt you’d use it only for good.”

“If I had your power,” said the priest, closing the footlocker, “I’d try not to use it for anything at all.”

August 28.

I saved them, Popeye, and for the moment I am their god. It’s not really me they worship, of course — it’s the Idea of the Quarter Pounder. No matter. They still do whatever I say.

Their thirst is fearsome, but they don’t stop excavating. The sun shines without mercy, burning through the mist and frying their backs and shoulders, but they keep at it, pausing only long enough to wolf down sandwiches or apply protective coatings of glory grease to their skin.

“They’ve discovered the categorical imperative,” Ockham tells me.

“They’ve discovered the full belly,” I correct him.

I am their god, but Sister Miriam is their savior. Canteen in hand, she moves from digger to digger. Inevitably she evokes Debra Paget working the brick pits in The Ten Commandments, giving water to the Hebrew slaves.

Cassie may be a cynic and an egghead, but she’s certainly doing her part toward getting us out of here, dispensing water alongside Miriam and sometimes even digging herself. Furtively I watch. Until the day I die, I shall retain the image of a beauteous, raven-haired woman in cut-off jeans and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, shoveling out the Carpco Valparaíso.

When we first went on this diet, we all assumed it would change us in some way. Has it? Hard to say. I’ve seen nothing truly astonishing so far, no big jump in anybody’s reading speed or knot-tying skills. While our bowel movements have been remarkably pale and coherent — it’s like shitting soap — that’s hardly a miracle. (Sparks points out you can get the same result from macrobiotic food.) True, the deckies have tons of energy, a phenomenal amount, but Cassie insists there’s nothing supernatural going on. “His flesh is acting like Dumbo’s magic feather,” she says, “enabling us to tap our own latent powers.”

With Spicer and Wheatstone both gone, we’ve had to reapportion the duties. Dolores Haycox seems completely rehabilitated, and so we’ve made her our second mate, bumping James Echohawk up to third. The new bos’n is Ralph Mungo. I’m inclined to stick Weisinger back in the brig, but Ockham is convinced that Zook died before the kid ripped his hose, and right now we need every available pair of hands.

While Rafferty’s people disassemble the mountain, O’Connor’s men repair the damage, smoothing the keel with scrap-metal patches and straightening the port shaft by banging it with a sledgehammer. It turns out the thrown propeller has a seven-foot fissure running through one blade, but the backup screw seems fine, and that’s the one we’ll be mounting.

This morning Rafferty and Ockham made exploratory dives. Their report was encouraging. Just as we suspected, the anvil bones snapped in both His ears, but the padre says we can almost certainly get a firm grip on the stirrups.

Okay, I’ll admit it: His brain is surely mush by now. I keep telling myself this doesn’t matter. The angels wanted a decent burial, that’s all. Just a decent burial.

During the past twenty-four hours, Sam Follingsbee has gone way beyond McDonald’s, finding amazingly creative ways to prepare the fillets. He’s frustrated that so many spices and condiments got gobbled up during the famine, but he’s a wiz at making do. The local sand, for example, has a decidedly peppery flavor. The body itself supplies other essentials: wart fragments for mushrooms, mole scrapings for garlic cloves, tear duct chunks for onions. Most astonishing of all, by combining a fresh-water condenser and a microwave oven into a contraption that causes rapid fermentation, our chef can now distill His blood into something that tastes exactly like first-class burgundy.

The names Sam gives his dishes — Dieu Bourguignon, Domine Gumbo, Pater Stroganoff, Mock Turtle Soup — don’t begin to convey how filling and delicious they are. Believe me, Popeye, no human palate has ever known such wonders.

Dieu Bourguignon

20 lbs. meat, cubed

42 small onions, sliced

14 cups burgundy

7 cups stock

3 lbs. mushrooms, sliced

7 cloves garlic

Marinate meat in wine and stock for 4 hours. Remove meat, reserve marinade. Brown onions in 3 heavy skillets, remove and reserve. Brown meat in same skillets. Add marinade, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer 2 hours. Return onions to skillets, add mushrooms, garlic cloves, and simmer, covered, 1 hour more. Serves 35.

For all this, the poor steward frets about our nutrition. He’s been trying everything he can think of, extracting selenium, iodine, and other minerals from the Gibraltar Sea and mixing them into the recipes, but it’s not enough. “All we’re really getting is fat and protein,” he tells me. “Folks recovering from a famine need Vitamin C, sir. They need Vitamin A, the B-complex, calcium, potassium…”

“Maybe we could mine His liver,” I suggest.

“Thought of that. To get there, you’d have to cut through eighty-five yards of the toughest flesh on the planet, a three-week dig at least.”

There hasn’t been an outbreak of scurvy on an American merchant ship since 1903, Popeye, but that happy fact may be about to change.

When the dinner bell finally rang — a low blast from the Valparaíso’s foghorn, like a shofar heralding Rosh Hashanah — Neil Weisinger took a long, hard look at his hands. He barely recognized them. Blisters speckled his palms like clutches of tiny red eggs. A white callus covered the root of each finger.

He jabbed his spade into the wet sand, seized his Bugs Bunny lunch box, and sat down. His back ached. His arms throbbed. All around him, sweaty deckies opened their various boxes and buckets and removed their McNuggets, Quarter Pounders, and Filets-o-Fish, devouring them with piggish zeal. They were proud of themselves. They deserved to be. In a mere four and a half days they’d dismantled a three-hundred-thousand-ton mountain and brought the world’s largest oil tanker back down to sea level.

Neil glanced toward the cove. The setting sun sparkled in their cargo’s starboard eye. Mist cloaked the archipelago of His toes. Languidly the tide rolled in, soughing beneath the Valparaíso’s hull and splashing against her keel. He imagined the moon as a kind of loving mother, gently drawing a blanket of surf across the island’s southern shore, and he continued to imagine this tender scene as, picking up his lunch box, he began his bold little march away from the ship.

Slipping a hand into his pants pocket, Neil ran his finger along the grooved edge of his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal. At any moment, he knew, his courage might desert him. Nerves shot, he would return and join his mates in fleeing this wretched place. But he kept on walking, past the crimson dunes and the 55-gallon drums, the rusting Volvos and the rotting Goodyear tires, following the shrouded shoreline.

Ahead, a classic Mediterranean fig tree stood perched on a sandy knoll, and the instant Neil saw the fruited branches he resolved to venture no farther. This was it — his own private Burning Bush, the place where he would at last encounter YHWH’s unknowable essence, the vantage from which he would finally behold the God of the four A.M. watch. He ascended the knoll and caressed the trunk. Cold, coarse, hard. A rock. His fingertips continued exploring. Branches, bark, leaves, fruit: rock, all of it — a tree become stone, like Lot’s wife turned to salt. No matter. The thing would serve its purpose.

A man said, “Astonishing.”

Neil spun around. Father Thomas stood beside him, dressed in black jeans and a yellow windbreaker, sweat dribbling from beneath his Panama hat.

“What happened to it?” Neil asked.

“The Gibraltar Sea’s full of minerals — that’s how Pollingsbee’s been seasoning our meals. I suspect they petrified the fibers.”

Neil peeled off his fishnet shirt and, mopping his brow, looked south. The moon was performing its hydraulic miracle, flooding the cove with tidewater and levitating the tanker inch by inch. “Can you keep a secret, Father? When the Val leaves tonight, I’ll be standing by this fig tree.”

“You aren’t coming with us?” Father Thomas frowned, tangling his bushy eyebrows.

“It’s what a Christian would call an act of contrition.”

“Leo Zook was dead before you took out your knife,” the priest protested. “And with Joe Spicer — self-defense, right?”

“There’s a picture in my head, Father, a scene I keep playing over and over. I’m in number two center tank, and all that’s needed is for me to reach out and open Zook’s oxygen valve. A simple twist of the wrist, that’s all.” Neil hugged the immortal trunk. “If only I could go back and do it…”

“Your brain was full of hydrocarbon gas. It was wrecking your judgment.”

“Maybe.”

“You couldn’t think straight.”

“A man died.”

“If you stay here, you’ll die.”

Neil plucked a stone fig. “Maybe so, maybe not.”

“Of course you’ll die. You can’t eat that thing, and we’re taking God with us.”

“You really think our cargo is God?”

“Difficult question. Let’s discuss it on the ship.”

“Ever since I can remember, my Aunt Sarah’s been saying I’m trapped inside myself — ‘Neil the hermit, hauling his private cave around with him wherever he goes’ — and now I’m really going to become one, a hermit just like…”

“No.”

“…like Rabbi Shimon.”

“Who?”

“Shimon bar Yochai. At the end of the second century, Rabbi Shimon climbed into a hole in the ground and stayed there, and what do you think finally happened to him?”

“He starved to death.”

“He partook of the Creator’s unknowable essence. He encountered En Sof.”

“You mean he saw God?”

“He saw God. The true, formless, nameless God, the God of the four A.M. watch, not King Kong out there.”

“For all we know, this crazy island might suddenly sink back where it came from.” Father Thomas doffed his Panama hat and raked a withered hand through his hair. “Chaos is … chaotic. You’d drown like a rat.”

Neil walked his fingers along the stone bark. “If He forgives me, He’ll deliver me.”

“An action like this — it’s irresponsible, Neil. There are people back home who care about you.”

“My parents are dead.”

“What about your friends? Your relatives?”

“I have no friends. My aunts can’t stand me. I adored my grandfather, but he died — what? — six years ago.”

The priest harvested a rock. He tossed it into the air, caught it, tossed it, caught it. “I’ll be honest,” he said at last. “This En Sof of yours — I want to know it too, I really do.” He put his hat back on, snugging the brim all the way to his eyebrows. “Sometimes I think my church made a fatal error, turning God into a man. I love Christ, truly, but He’s too easily imagined.”

“Then I’ve got your blessing?”

“Not my blessing, no. But…”

“What?”

“If this is what your conscience demands…”

Sighing, Father Thomas extended his right arm. Neil reached out. Their bruised fingers intertwined. Their battered palms connected.

“Good-bye, Able Seaman Weisinger. Good-bye and good luck.”

Neil sat down beside the immortal trunk. “God be with you, Father Thomas.”

Turning, the priest descended the knoll and marched back toward the whispering surf.

Two hours later, Neil had not moved. The night wind cooled his face. Stars peeked through the fog like candles shining behind frosted windows. Moonlight spilled down, glazing the breakers, transforming the dunes into mounds of sparkling gems.

Lunch box in hand, Neil climbed the tree, progressing branch by branch, as if scaling a mainmast. As he settled into a high crook, both of the Valparaíso’s engines started up, their hisses and chugs echoing across Van Horne Island, and within minutes she was sailing out of the harbor. The tow chains tightened, their links grinding together like the wisdom teeth of some immense insomniac dragon. The ship kept moving, all ahead full. Panic seized the AB. It was not too late. He could still give himself a reprieve, charging down to the beach and screaming for the tanker to stop. If worse came to worst, he could even try swimming after her.

His stomach muscles spasmed. His digestive juices burbled. Drawing out his Ben-Gurion medal, he rubbed his thumb across the old man’s profile. There, that was better, yes, yes. Any day now, any hour now, the tree would grow warm — warmer — hot — begin smoking — catch fire.

And it would not be consumed.

Neil Weisinger opened his Bugs Bunny lunch box, removed a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and ate it very, very slowly.