Towing Jehovah

JAMES MORROW

Copyright © 1994 by James Morrow

To the memory

of my father-in -law,

Albert L. Pierce

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I OWE A SINGULAR debt to my friend Able Seaman Gigi Marino, a splendid writer who taught me everything I wanted to know about oil tankers. The insights of my editor, John Radziewicz, were likewise invaluable, as was the support of my agent, Merrilee Heifetz. Throughout the composing process, I maintained close contact with many friends, colleagues, and relatives, probing them for their reactions to particular scenes as well as for their general views on theothanatology. Each of the following people will know the special reasons for which I am grateful to him or her: Joe Adamson, Linda Barnes, Deborah Beale, Lynn Crosson, Shira Daemon, Sean Develin, Travis DiNicola, Daniel Dubner, Margaret Duda, Gregory Feeley, Justin Fielding, Robert Hatten, Michael Kandel, Glenn Morrow, Jean Morrow, Elisabeth Rose, Joe Schall, Peter Schneeman, D. Alexander Smith, Kathryn Smith, James Stevens-Arce, and Judith Van Herik. And, finally, a hearty thanks to the Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference for improving the Eucharist.

WE HAVE LEFT the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity! Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the wall of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more
freedom
—and there is no longer any "land."

—Friedrich Nietzsche,

"In the Horizon of the Infinite,"
The Gay Science

And the Lord said, "Behold ... I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen."

—
The Book of Exodus

One

Angel

THE IRREDUCIBLE STRANGENESS of the universe was first made manifest to Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday, when a despondent angel named Raphael, a being with luminous white wings and a halo that blinked on and off like a neon quoit, appeared and told him of the days to come. That year, 1992, Anthony's Sundays were always the same. At four P.M. he would descend into the New York subway system, take the A-train north to 190th Street, hike across the rocky hills of Fort Tryon Park, and, after melding with the tourists, enter the simulated European monastery known as the Cloisters and slip behind the altar in the Fuentiduena Chapel. There he would wait, holding his breath and enduring his migraine, until the crowd went home.

The lead-off watchman, a rangy Jamaican with a limp, always made his rounds faithfully, but at midnight a new guard normally came on duty, an emaciated N.Y.U. student who made no rounds but instead entered the Unicorn Tapestries Room bearing an aquamarine nylon backpack jammed with textbooks. After seating himself on the cold stone floor, the student would switch on his flashlight and begin poring over his
Gray's Anatomy,
endlessly rehearsing the parts of the human body. "Gluteus medius, gluteus medius, gluteus medius," he would chant into the sacred precincts. "Rectus femoris, rectus femoris, rectus femoris."

That particular midnight, Anthony followed his usual custom. He stole out from behind the Fuentiduena altar, checked on the student (hard at work, drilling himself in the fissures and sulci of the left cerebral hemisphere), then proceeded along an arcade of Romanesque columns capped by snarling gargoyles and down a flagstone path to the gushing marble fountain that dominated the open-air Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa Cloister. Reaching into his freshly washed chinos, Anthony removed a translucent plastic box and set it on the ground. He climbed out of his pants, then pulled off his white cotton jersey, immaculate undershirt, spotless Jockey shorts, polished shoes, and clean socks. At last he stood naked in the hot night, his skin burnished by an orange moon drifting across the sky like a huge orbiting pumpkin.

"Sulcus frontalis superior, sulcus frontalis superior, sulcus frontalis superior," said the student. Anthony picked up the plastic box, popped the lid, and removed the egg-shaped cake. Pressing the soap against his chest, he leaned into the Cuxa fountain. In the golden pool he saw himself—the broken nose, the weary eyes sinking into bogs of flesh, the high forehead eroded by sea spray and baked hard by equatorial sun, the tangled gray beard spreading across a lantern jaw. He lathered up, letting the cake slide down his arms and chest like a tiny toboggan, catching it before it hit the flagstones.

"Sulcus praecentralis, sulcus praecentralis, sulcus praecentralis . . ." Ivory soap, mused Anthony as he rinsed, Procter and Gamble at its purest. At that exact moment he felt clean—though the oil, he knew, would be back the next day. The oil always came back. For what soap on earth could scrub away the endless black gallons that had spilled from the fractured hull of the SS
Carpco Valparaíso,
what caliber of purity could erase that particular stain?

During the cold months, Anthony had kept a Turkish bath towel handy, but now it was mid-June—the first day of summer, in fact—and a simple jog through the museum would be sufficient to get him dry. And so he put on his Jockey shorts and ran, moving past the Pontaut Chapter House . . . the Nine Heroes Tapestries Room . . . Robert Campin Hall with its homey
Annunciation:
the angel Gabriel advising Mary of God's intentions as she sits in the bourgeois parlor of the artist's patrons, surrounded by tokens of her innocence—fresh lilies, white candle, gleaming copper kettle. At the entry to the Langon Chapel, beneath a rounded arch set on lintels carved with blooming acanthus, a sixtyish man in a flowing white robe stood weeping.

"No," he moaned, his low, liquid sobs echoing off the limestone. "No . . ." Except for the man's wings, Anthony might have assumed the intruder was a penitent like himself. But there they were, huge and phosphorescent, sprouting from his shoulder blades in all their feathered improbability.

"No . . ."

The glowing man looked up. A halo hovered above his snowy hair, flashing bright red: on-off, on-off, on-off. His eyes were rheumy and inflamed. Silver droplets rolled from his tear ducts like beads of liquid mercury.

"Good evening," said the intruder, convulsively catching his breath. He laid his hand on his cheek and, like a blotter pressed against some infinitely sad letter, his palm absorbed the tears. "Good evening and happy birthday, Captain Van Horne."

"You
know
me?"

"This is not a chance meeting." The intruder's voice was wavering and fragmented, as if he were speaking through the whirling blades of an electric fan. "Your schedule is well known among us angels—these secret visits to the fountain, these sly ablutions . . ."

"Angels?"

"Call me Raphael." The intruder cleared his throat. "Raphael Azarias." His skin, yellow aspiring to gold, shone in the moonlight like a brass sextant. He smelled of all the succulent wonders Anthony had ever sampled on his journeys, of papayas and mangoes, guanabanas and tamarinds, guavas and guineppes.

"For I am indeed the celebrated archangel who vanquished the demon Asmodeus." A winged man. Robed, haloed, delusions of divinity: another New York lunatic, Anthony surmised. And yet he did not resist when the angel reached out, wrapped five frigid fingers around his wrist, and led him back to the Cuxa fountain.

"You think I'm an impostor?" asked Raphael.

"Well . . ."

"Be honest."

"Of course I think you're an impostor."

"Watch."

The angel plucked a feather from his left wing and tossed it into the pool. To Anthony's astonishment, a familiar human face appeared beneath the waters, rendered in the sort of ersatz depth he associated with 3-D comic books.

"Your father is a great sailor," said the angel. "Were he not in retirement, we might have chosen him over you."

Anthony shuddered. Yes, it was truly he, Christopher Van Horne, the handsome, dashing master of the
Amoco Caracas,
the
Exxon Fairbanks,
and a dozen other classic ships—the soaring brow, lofty cheekbones, frothy mane of pearl gray hair. JOHN VAN HORNE, his birth certificate read, though on turning twenty-one he'd changed his name in homage to his spiritual mentor, Christopher Columbus.

"He's a great sailor," Anthony agreed. He chucked a pebble into the pool, transforming his father's face into a series of concentric circles. Was this a dream? A migraine aura? "Chosen him for what?"

"For the most important voyage in human history."

As the waters grew calm, a second face appeared: lean, tense, and hawklike, perched atop the stiff white collar of a Roman Catholic priest.

"Father Thomas Ockham," the angel explained. "He works over in the Bronx, Fordham University, teaching particle physics and avant-garde cosmology."

"What does he have to do with me?"

"Our mutual Creator has passed away," said Raphael with a sigh compounded of pain, exhaustion, and grief.

"What?"

"God died."

Anthony took an involuntary step backward. "That's crazy."

"Died and fell into the sea." Raphael clamped his cold fingers around the tattooed mermaid on Anthony's naked forearm and abruptly drew him closer. "Listen carefully, Captain Van Horne. You're going to get your ship back."

There was a ship, a supertanker four football fields long, pride of the fleet owned and operated by Caribbean Petroleum Company, Anthony Van Horne in command. It should have been a routine trip for the
Carpco Valparaíso,
a midnight milk run from Port Lavaca, spigot of the Trans-Texas Pipeline, across the Gulf and northward to the oil-thirsty cities of the coast. The tide was ripe, the sky was clear, and the harbor pilot, Rodrigo Lopez, had just guided them through the Nueces Narrows without a scratch.

"You won't hit any icebergs tonight," Lopez had joked, "but look out for the drug runners—they navigate worse than Greeks." The pilot jabbed his index finger toward a vague smear on the twelve-mile radar scope. "That might be one now."

As Lopez climbed into his launch and set out for Port Lavaca, a migraine flared in Anthony's skull. He'd experienced worse— attacks that had dropped him to his knees and shattered the world into naming fragments of stained glass—but this was still a killer.

"You don't look well, sir." Buzzy Longchamps, the chronically jolly chief mate, strode onto the bridge to begin his watch. "Seasick?" he asked with a snorty laugh.

"Let's just get out of here." Anthony clamped his temples between his thumb and middle finger. "All ahead full. Eighty rpm's."

"All ahead full," echoed Longchamps. He moved the twin joysticks forward. "Speedy delivery," he said, lighting a Lucky Strike.

"Speedy delivery," Anthony agreed. "Ten degrees left rudder."

"Ten degrees left," echoed the able-bodied seaman at the wheel.

"Steady," said Anthony.

"Steady," said the AB.

Ambling up to the twelve-mile radar, the chief mate touched the amorphous target. "What's that?"

"Wooden hull, I suspect, probably out of Barranquilla," said Anthony. "I don't think she's carrying coffee beans."

Longchamps laughed, the Lucky Strike bobbing between his lips. "Stu and I can manage up here." The mate tapped repeatedly on the able seaman's shoulder, as if translating his own words into Morse code.

"Right, Stu?"

"You bet," said the AB.

Anthony's brain was aflame. His eyes were ready to melt.
In the presence of any navigational or
meteorological hazard, two officers must be on the bridge at all times:
so ran one of the few truly unambiguous sentences in the
Carpco Manual.

"We're only two miles from open water," said the mate. "A twenty-degree turn, and we're outta harm's way."

Longchamps snapped up the walkie-talkie and told Kate Rucker, the AB standing lookout in the bow, to keep her eyes peeled for a rogue freighter.

"You sure you can handle this?" Anthony asked the mate.

"Chocolate cake."

And so Anthony Van Horne left the bridge—the last time he would do so as an employee of Caribbean Petroleum.

Nameless as a wild duck, the mahogany steamer came out of the night at thirty knots, loaded to her gunwales with raw cocaine. No running lights. Dark wheelhouse. By the time Able Seaman Rucker screamed her warning into the walkie-talkie, the steamer was barely a quarter mile away. Up on the bridge, Buzzy Longchamps cried, "Hard right!" and the helmsman responded instantly, thereby setting the tanker on a direct course for Bolivar Reef.

Lying in his bunk, prostrate with pain, Anthony felt the
Valparaíso
tremble and lurch. Instantly he rolled to his feet, and before he was in the corridor the obscene odor of loose oil reached his nose. He rode the elevator to the weather deck, ran outside, and sprinted down the central catwalk, high above the writhing tangle of pipes and valves. Fumes swirled everywhere, sweeping past the kingposts in palpable clouds and spilling over the sides like absconding ghosts. Anthony's eyes watered, his throat burned, his sinuses grew raw and bloody.