Towing Jehovah (13 page)

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 of
Robert's Rules of Order,
for neither rules nor order had anything to do with the organization's raison d'être. 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.