Towing Jehovah

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.

From out of the darkness, a sailor shouted, “Holy shit!”

Descending the amidships stairway, Anthony dashed across the weather deck and leaned over the starboard rail. A searchlight swept the scene, the whole stinking hell of it — the black water, the ruptured hull, the thick, viscous oil gushing from the breach. Eventually Anthony would learn how close they’d come to foundering that night; he would learn how Bolivar Reef had lacerated the Val like a can opener cutting the lid off a cocker spaniel’s dinner. But just then he knew only the fumes — and the stench — and the peculiar lucidity that attends a man’s awareness that he is experiencing the worst moment of his life.

To Caribbean Petroleum, it hardly mattered whether the Val was lost or saved that night. An eighty-million-dollar supertanker was chopped liver compared with the four and a half billion Carpco was ultimately obliged to pay out in damage awards, lawyers’ fees, lobbyists’ salaries, bribes to Texas shrimpers, cleanup efforts that did more harm than good, and a vigorous campaign to restore the corporation’s image. The brilliant series of televised messages that Carpco commissioned from Hollywood’s rock-video mills, each new spot trivializing the death of Matagorda Bay more shamelessly than its predecessor, went ridiculously over budget, so eager was the company to get them on the air. “Unless you look long and hard, you probably won’t notice her beauty mark is missing,” the narrator of spot number twelve intoned over a retouched photograph of Marilyn Monroe. “Similarly, if you study a map of the Texas coast…”

Anthony Van Horne gripped the rail, stared at the pooling oil, and wept. Had he known what was coming, he might simply have stayed there, transfixed by the future: the five hundred miles of blackened beaches; the sixteen hundred acres of despoiled shrimp beds; the permanent blinding of three hundred and twenty-five manatees; the oily suffocation of over four thousand sea turtles and pilot whales; the lethal marination of sixty thousand blue herons, roseate spoonbills, glossy ibises, and snowy egrets. Instead he went up to the wheelhouse, where the first words out of Buzzy Longchamp’s mouth were, “Sir, I think we’re in a peck of trouble.”

Ten months later, a grand jury exonerated Anthony of all the charges the state of Texas had leveled against him: negligence, incompetence, abandoning the bridge. An unfortunate verdict. For if the captain wasn’t guilty, then somebody else had to be, somebody named Caribbean Petroleum — Carpco, with its understaffed ships, overworked crews, steadfast refusal to build double-hulled tankers, and gimcrack oil-spill contingency plan (a scheme Judge Lucius Percy quickly dubbed “the greatest work of maritime fiction since Moby-Dick. Even as the legal system was vindicating Anthony, his bosses were arranging their revenge. They told him he would never command a supertanker again, a prophecy they proceeded to fulfill by persuading the Coast Guard to rescind his license. Within one year Anthony went from the six-figure salary of a ship’s master to the paltry income of those human marginalia who haunt the New York docks taking whatever work they can get. He unloaded cargo until his hands became mottled with calluses. He tied up bulk carriers and Ro-Ros. He repaired rigging, spliced mooring lines, painted bollards, and cleaned out ballast tanks.

And he took showers. Hundreds of them. The morning after the spill, Anthony checked into Port Lavaca’s only Holiday Inn and stood beneath the steaming water for nearly an hour. The oil wouldn’t come off. After dinner he tried again. The oil remained. Before bed, another shower. Useless. Endless oil, eleven million gallons, a petroleum tumor spreading into the depths of his flesh. Before the year ended, Anthony Van Horne was showering four times a day, seven days a week. “You left the bridge,” a voice would rasp in his ear as the water drummed against his chest.

Two officers must be on the bridge at all times…

“You left the bridge…”

“You left the bridge,” said the angel Raphael, wiping his silver tears with the hem of his silken sleeve.

“I left the bridge,” Anthony agreed.

“I don’t weep because you left the bridge. Beaches and egrets mean nothing to me these days.”

“You weep because” — he gulped — “God is dead.” The words felt impossibly odd on Anthony’s tongue, as if he were suddenly speaking Senegalese. “How can God be dead? How can God have a body?”

“How can He not?”

“Isn’t He… immaterial?”

“Bodies are immaterial, essentially. Any physicist will tell you as much.”

Groaning softly, Raphael aimed his left wing toward the Late Gothic Hall and took off, flying in the halting, stumbling manner of a damaged moth. As Anthony followed, he noticed that the angel was disintegrating. Feathers drifted through the air like the residue of a pillow fight.

“Insubstantial stuff, matter,” Raphael continued, hovering. “Quirky. Quarky. It’s barely there. Ask Father Ockham.”

Alighting amid the medieval treasures, the creature took Anthony’s hand — those cold fingers again, like mooring lines dipped in the Weddell Sea — and led him to an anonymous Italian Renaissance altarpiece in the southeast corner.

“Religion’s become too abstract of late. God as spirit, light, love — forget that neo-Platonic twaddle. God’s a Person, Anthony. He made you in His own image, Genesis 1:26. He has a nose, Genesis 8:20. Buttocks, Exodus 33:23. He gets excrement on His feet, Deuteronomy 23:14.”

“But aren’t those just … ?”

“What?”

“You know. Metaphors.”

“Everything’s a metaphor. Meanwhile, His toenails are growing, an inevitable phenomenon with corpses.” Raphael pointed to the altarpiece, which according to its caption depicted Christ and the Virgin Mary kneeling before God, interceding on behalf of a prominent Florentine family. “Your artists have always known what they were doing. Michelangelo Buonarroti goes to paint the Creation of Adam, and a year later there’s God Himself on the Sistine Chapel — an old man with a beard, perfect. Or take William Blake, diligently illustrating Job, getting everything right — God the Father, ancient of days. Or consider the evidence before you…” And indeed, Anthony realized, here was God, peering out of the altarpiece: a bearded patriarch, at once serene and severe, loving and fierce.

But no. This was madness. Raphael Azarias was a fraud, a con man, a certifiable paranoid.

“You’re molting.”

“I’m dying,” the angel corrected Anthony. Indeed. His halo, previously as red as the Texaco logo, now flickered an anemic pink. His once-bright feathers emitted a sallow, sickly aura, as if infested with aging fireflies. Tiny scarlet veins entwined his eyeballs. “The entire heavenly host is dying. Such is the depth of our sorrow.”

“You spoke of my ship.”

“The corpse must be salvaged. Salvaged, towed, and entombed. Of all vessels on earth, only the Carpco Valparaíso is equal to the task.”

“The Val’s a cripple.”

“They refloated her last week. She’s in Connecticut at the moment, taking up most of the National Steel Shipyard, awaiting whatever new fittings you believe the job will require.”

Anthony stared at his forearm, flexing and unflexing the muscle, making his tattooed mermaid do a series of bumps and grinds.

“God’s body…”

“Precisely,” said Raphael.

“I would imagine it’s large.”

“Two miles fore to aft.”

“Face up?”

“Yes. He’s smiling, oddly enough. Rigor mortis, we suspect, or perhaps He elected to assume the expression before passing away.”

The captain fixed on the altarpiece, noting the life-giving milk streaming from the Virgin’s right breast. Two miles? Two goddamn miles? “Then I guess we’ll be reading about it in tomorrow’s Times, huh?”

“Unlikely. He’s too dense to catch the attention of weather satellites, and He’s giving off so much heat He registers on long-range radar as nothing but a queer-looking patch of fog.” As the angel guided Anthony into the foyer, his tears started up again. “We can’t let Him rot. We can’t leave Him to the predators and worms.”

“God doesn’t have a body. God doesn’t die.”

“God has a body — and for reasons wholly obscure to us, that body has expired.” Raphael’s tears kept coming, as if connected to a source as fecund as the Trans-Texas Pipeline. “Bear Him north. Let the Arctic freeze Him. Bury His remains.” From the counter he snatched up a brochure promoting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its cover emblazoned with Piero della Francesca’s Discovery and Proving of the True Cross. “A gigantic iceberg lies above Svalbard, permanently pinned against the upper shores of Kvitoya. Nobody goes there. We’ve hollowed it out: portal, passageways, crypt. You merely have to haul Him inside.” The angel plucked a feather from his left wing, eased it toward his eye, and wet the nib with a silver tear. Flipping over the brochure, he began writing on the back in luminous salt water. “Latitude: eighty degrees, six minutes, north. Longitude: thirty-four degrees…”

“You’re talking to the wrong man, Mr. Azarias. You want a tugboat skipper, not a tanker captain.”

“We want a tanker captain. We want you.” Raphael’s feather continued moving, spewing out characters so bright and fiery they made Anthony squint. “Your new license is in the mail. It’s from the Brazilian Coast Guard.” As if posting a letter, the angel slid the brochure under the captain’s left arm. “The minute the Valparaíso’s been fitted for a tow, Carpco will send her on a shakedown cruise to New York.”

“Carpco? Oh, no, not those bastards again, not them.”

“Of course not them. Your ship’s been chartered by an outside agent.”

“Honest captains don’t sail unregistered vessels.”

“Oh, you’ll get a flag all right: a Vatican banner, God’s own colors.” A coughing fit possessed the angel, sending tears and feathers into the sultry air. “He hit the Atlantic at zero by zero degrees, where the equator meets the prime meridian. Begin your search there. Quite likely He’s drifted — east, I’d guess, caught in the Guinea Current — so you might find Him near the island of S гo Tomй, but then again, with God, who knows?” Shedding feathers all the way, Raphael hobbled out of the foyer and toward the Cuxa Cloister, Anthony right behind. “You’ll receive a generous salary. Father Ockham is well funded.”

“Otto Merrick might be right for a job like this. I think he’s still with Atlantic-Richfield.”

“You’ll be getting your ship back,” the angel snapped, steadying himself on the fountain. He breathed raggedly, wheez-ingly, as if through shredded lungs. “Your ship — and something more…”

Halo sputtering, tears flowing, the angel tossed his quill pen into the pool. A tableau appeared, painted in saturated reds and muddy greens reminiscent of early color television: six immobile figures seated around a dining-room table.

“Recognize it?”

“Hmmm…”

Thanksgiving Day, 1990, four months after the spill. They’d all gathered at his father’s apartment in Paterson. Christopher Van Horne presided at the far end of the table, overbearing and elegant, dressed in a white woolen suit. To his left: wife number three, a loud, skinny, self-pitying woman named Tiffany. To his right: the old man’s best friend from the Sea Scouts, Frank Kolby, an unimaginative and sycophantic Bostonian. Anthony sat opposite his father, bracketed on one side by his hefty sister, Susan, a New Orleans catfish farmer, and on the other by his then-current girlfriend, Lucy McDade, a short, attractive steward from the Exxon Bangor. Every detail was right: the cheroot in Dad’s mouth, the Ronson cigarette lighter in his hand, the blue ceramic gravy boat resting beside his plate of mashed potatoes and dark meat.

The figures twitched, breathed, began to eat. Peering into the Cuxa pool, Anthony realized, to his considerable horror, what was coming next.

“Hey, look,” said the old man, dropping the Ronson lighter into the gravy, “it’s the Valparaíso.” The lighter oriented itself vertically — striker wheel down, butane well up — but stayed afloat.

“Froggy, take it easy,” said Tiffany.

“Dad, don’t do this,” said Susan.

Anthony’s father lifted the cigarette lighter from the boat. As the greasy brown gravy ran down his fingers, he took out his Swiss Army knife and cut through the lighter’s plastic casing. Oily butane dripped onto the linen tablecloth. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, the Val’s sprung a leak!” He plopped the lighter back into the boat, laughing as the butane oozed into the gravy. “Somebody must’ve run her into a reef! Those poor seabirds!”

“Froggy, please” wailed Tiffany.

“Them pilot whales ain’t got a chance,” said Frank Kolby, releasing a boorish guffaw.

“Do you suppose the captain could’ve left the bridge?” asked Dad with mock puzzlement.

“I think you’ve made your point,” said Susan.

The old man leaned toward Lucy McDade as if about to deal her a playing card. “This sailor lad of yours left the bridge. I’ll bet he got one of those headaches of his and, pfftt, he took off, and now all the egrets and herons are dying. You know what your boyfriend’s problem is, pretty Lucy? He thinks the oily bird catches the worm!”

Tiffany burst into giggles.

Lucy turned red.

Kolby sniggered.

Susan got up to leave.

“Bastard,” said Anthony’s alter ego.

“Bastard,” echoed the observer Anthony.

“Gravy, anyone?” said Christopher Van Horne, lifting the boat from its saucer. “What’s the matter, folks — are you afraid?”

“I’m not afraid.” Kolby seized the boat, pouring polluted gravy onto his mashed potatoes.

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” seethed Susan, stalking out of the room.

Kolby shoveled a glop of potato into his mouth. “Tastes like—”

The scene froze.

The figures dissolved.

Only the waterborne feather remained.

“That was the worst part of Matagorda Bay, wasn’t it?” said Raphael. “Worse than the hate mail from the environmentalists and the death threats from the shrimpers — the worst part was what your father did to you that night.”

“The humiliation…”

“No,” said the angel pointedly. “Not the humiliation. The brute candor of it all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Four months after the wreck of the Val, somebody was finally telling you a truth the state of Texas had denied.”

“What truth?”

“You’re guilty, Anthony Van Horne.”

“I’ve never claimed otherwise.”

“Guilty,” Raphael repeated, slamming his fist into his palm like a judge wielding a gavel. “But beyond guilt lies redemption, or so the story goes.” The angel slipped his fingers beneath the feathers of his left wing and relieved himself of an itch. “After completing the mission, you will seek out your father.”

“Dad?”

The angel nodded. “Your aloof, capricious, unhappy father. You will tell him you got the job done. And then — this I promise — then you will receive the absolution you deserve.”

“I don’t want his absolution.”

“His absolution,” said Raphael, “is the only one that counts. Blood is thicker than oil, Captain. The man’s hooks are in you.”

“I can absolve myself,” Anthony insisted.

“You’ve tried that. Showers don’t do it. The Cuxa fountain doesn’t do it. You’ll never be free of Matagorda Bay, the oil will never leave you, until Christopher Van Horne looks you in the eye and says, ‘Son, I’m proud of you. You bore Him to His tomb.’ ”

A sudden coldness swept through the Cuxa Cloister. Goose bumps grew on Anthony’s naked skin like barnacles colonizing a tanker’s hull. Crouching over the pool, he fished out the drifting feather. What did he know of God? Maybe God did have blood, bile, and the rest of it; maybe He could die. Anthony’s Sunday school teachers, promoters of a faith so vague and generic it was impossible to imagine anyone rebelling against it (there are no lapsed Wilmington Presbyterians), had never even raised such possibilities. Who could say whether God had a body?

“Dad and I haven’t spoken since Christmas.” Anthony drew the soft, wet feather across his lips. “Last I heard, he and Tiffany were in Spain.”

“Then that’s where you’ll find him.”

Raphael staggered forward, extended his chilly palms, and collapsed into the captain’s arms. The angel was surprisingly heavy, oddly meaty. How strange was the universe. Stranger than Anthony had ever imagined.

“Bury Him…”

The captain studied the spangled sky. He thought of his favorite sextant, the one his sister had given him upon his graduation from New York Maritime College, a flawless facsimile of the wondrous instrument with which, nearly two centuries earlier, Nathaniel Bowditch had corrected and emended all the world’s maps. And the thing worked, too, picking out Polaris in an instant, filtering the brilliance of Venus, sifting banded Jupiter from the clouds. Anthony never sailed without it.

“I own a precise and beautiful sextant,” Anthony told Raphael. “You never know when your computer’ll break down,” the captain added. “You never know when you’ll have to steer by the stars,” said the master of the Valparaíso, whereupon the angel smiled softly and drew his last breath.

The moon assumed an uncanny whiteness, riding the sky like God’s own skull, as, shortly before dawn, Anthony hauled Raphael Azarias’s stiffening body west across Fort Tryon Park, lowered it over the embankment, and flung it facedown into the cool, polluted waters of the Hudson River.

PRIEST

THOMAS WICKLIFF OCKHAM, a good man, a man who loved God, ideas, vintage movies, and his brothers in the Society of Jesus, wove through the crowded Seventh Avenue local, carefully maneuvering his attache case amid the congestion of pelvises and rumps. On the far wall a map beckoned, an intricate network of multicolored lines, like the veined and bleeding palm of some cubistic Christ. Reaching it, he began to plot his course. He would get off at Forty-second Street. Take the N-train south to Union Square. Walk east on Fourteenth. Find Captain Anthony Van Horne of the Brazilian Merchant Marine, sail away on the SS Carpco Valparaíso, and lay an impossible corpse to rest.

He sat down between a wrinkled Korean man holding a potted cactus on his lap and an attractive black woman in a ballooning maternity dress. To Thomas Ockham, S.J., the New York subway system offered a foretaste of the Kingdom: Asians rubbing shoulders with Africans, Hispanics with Arabs, Gentiles with Jews, all boundaries gone, all demarcations erased, all men appended to the Universal and Invisible Church, the Mystical Body of Christ — though if the half-dozen glossy photographs in Thomas’s attache case told the truth, of course, there was no Kingdom, no Mystical Body, God and His various dimensions being dead.

Italy had been different. In Italy everyone had looked the same. They had all looked Italian…

The Church faces a grave crisis: thus began the Holy See’s cryptic plea, an official Vatican missive sliding from the fax machine in the mailroom of Fordham University’s physics department. But what sort of crisis? Spiritual? Political? Financial? The missive didn’t say. Severe, obviously — severe enough for the See to insist that Thomas cancel his classes for the week and catch the midnight flight to Rome.

Hiring a cab at the aeroporto, he’d told the driver to take him straight to the Gesu. To be a Jesuit in Rome and not receive communion at the Society’s mother church was like being a physicist in Bern and not visiting the patent office. And, indeed, during his last trip to Geneva’s Conseil Europeen pour la Recherch й Nucleaire, Thomas had taken a day off and made the appropriate pilgrimage north, eventually kneeling before the very rosewood desk at which Albert Einstein had penned the great paper of 1903, The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, that divinely inspired wedding of light to matter, matter to space, space to time.

So Thomas drank the blood, consumed the flesh, and set off for the Hotel Ritz-Reggia. A half-hour later, he stood in the sumptuous lobby shaking hands with Tullio Cardinal Di Luca, the Vatican’s Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.

Monsignor Di Luca was not forthcoming. Phlegmatic as the moon, and no less pocked and dreary, he invited Thomas to dinner in the Ritz-Reggia’s elegant ristorante, where their conversation never went beyond Thomas’s writings, most especially The Mechanics of Grace, his revolutionary reconciliation of post-Newtonian physics with the Eucharist. When Thomas looked Di Luca directly in the eye and asked him about the “grave crisis,” the cardinale replied that their audience with the Holy Father would occur at nine A.M. sharp.

Twelve hours later, the bewildered priest strolled out of his hotel, crossed the courtyard of San Damasco, and presented himself to a plumed maestro di camera in the sun-washed antechamber of the Vatican Palace. Di Luca appeared instantly, as dour in the morning light as under the Ritz-Reggia’s chandeliers, accompanied by the spry, elfin, red-capped Eugenio Cardinal Orselli, the Vatican’s renowned Secretary of State. Side by side, the clerics marched through the double door to the papal study, Thomas pausing briefly to admire the Swiss Guard with their glistening steel pikes. Rome had it right, he decided. The Holy See was indeed at war, forever taking the field against all those who would reduce human beings to mere ambitious apes, to lucky chunks of protoplasm, to singularly clever and complex machines.

Armed with a crozier, draped in an ermine cape, Pope Innocent XIV shuffled forward, one gloved and bejeweled hand extended, the other steadying a beehive-shaped tiara that rested on his head like an electric dryer cooking a suburban matron’s hairdo. The old man’s love of ostentation, Thomas knew, had occasioned debate both within the Vatican and without, but it was generally agreed that, as the first North American ever to assume the Chair of Peter, he had a right to all the trimmings.

“We shall be honest,” said Innocent XIV, born Jean-Jacques LeClerc. His face was fat, round, and extraordinarily beautiful, like a jack-o’-lantern carved by Donatello. “You weren’t anyone’s first choice.”

A Canadian pope, mused Thomas as, steadying his bifocals, he kissed the Fisherman’s Ring. And before that, the Supreme Pontiff had been Portuguese. Before that, Polish. The Northern Hemisphere was getting to be the place where any boy could grow up to be Vicar of Christ.

“The archangels regard you as rather too intellectual,” said Monsignor Di Luca. “But when the Bishop of Prague turned us down, I convinced them you were the man for the job.”

“The archangels?” said Thomas, surprised that a papal secretary should harbor such a medieval turn of mind. Was Di Luca a biblical literalist? A fool? How many pinheads can dance on the floor of the Vatican?

“Raphael, Michael, Chamuel, Adabiel, Haniel, Zaphiel, and Gabriel,” the beautiful Pope elaborated. “Or has Fordham University done away with those particular entities?” A sneer flitted across Monsignor Di Luca’s face.

“Those of us who labor in the subatomic netherworld,” said Thomas, “soon learn that angels are no less plausible than electrons.” Tremors of chagrin passed through him. Not two days in Rome, and already he was telling them what they wanted to hear.

The Holy Father smiled broadly, dimpling his plump cheeks. “Very good, Professor Ockham. It was in fact your scientific speculations that inspired us to send for you. We have read not only The Mechanics of Grace but also Superstrings and Salvation.”

“You possess a tough mind,” said Cardinal Orselli. “You have proven you can hold your own against Modernism.”

“Let us ascend,” said the Pope.

They rode the elevator five floors to the Vatican Screening Room, a sepulchral facility complete with digital sound, velvet seats, and hardware capable of projecting everything from laserdiscs to magic-lantern slides but most commonly used, Orselli explained, for Cecil B. DeMille retrospectives and midnight revivals of The Bells of St. Mary’s. As the clerics sank into the lush upholstery, a short and tormented-looking young man entered, a stethoscope swaying from his neck, the surname CARMINATI stitched in red to his white vestment. Accompanying the physician was a sickly, shivering, gray-haired creature who, beyond his other unsettling accouterments (halo, harp, phosphorescent robe), sported a magnificent pair of feathered wings growing from his shoulder blades. Something nontrivial was in the air, Thomas sensed. Something that couldn’t be further from Cecil B. DeMille and Bing Crosby.

“Every time he makes his presentation” — Cardinal Orselli gestured toward the haloed man and released an elaborate sigh — “we become more convinced.”

“Glad you’re here, Ockham,” said the creature in the sort of thin, scratchy voice Thomas associated with early-thirties gangster movies. His skin was astonishingly white, beyond Caucasian genes, beyond albinism even; he seemed molded from snow. “I’m told you are at once devout” — he stood on his toes — “and smart.” Whereupon, to Thomas’s utter amazement, the haloed man flapped his wings, rose six feet in the air, and stayed there. “Time is of the essence,” he said, circling the screening room with an awkwardness reminiscent of Orville Wright puddle-jumping across Kitty Hawk.

“Good Lord,” said Thomas.

The haloed man landed before the red proscenium curtains. Steadying himself on the young physician, he set his harp on the lectern and twiddled a pair of console knobs. The curtains parted; the room darkened; a cone of bright light spread outward from the projection booth, striking the beaded screen.

“The Corpus Dei,” said the creature matter-of-factly as a 35mm color slide flashed before the priest’s eyes. “God’s dead body.”

Thomas squinted, but the image — a large, humanoid object adrift on a bile-dark sea — remained blurry. “What did you say?”

The next slide clicked into place: same subject, a closer but equally fuzzy view. “God’s dead body,” the haloed man insisted.

“Can you focus it any better?”

“No.” The man ran through three more unsatisfactory shots of the enigmatic mass. “I took them myself, with a Leica.”

“He has corroborating evidence,” said Cardinal Orselli.

“An electrocardiogram as flat as a flounder,” the creature explained.

As the last slide vanished, the projector lamp again flooded the screen with its pristine radiance.

“Is this some sort of a joke?” Thomas asked. What else could it be? In a civilization where tabloid art directors routinely forged photos of Bigfoot and UFO pilots, it would take more than a few slides of a foggy something-or-other to transform Thomas’s interior image of God along such radically anthropomorphic lines.

Except that his knees were rattling.

Sweat was collecting in his palms.

He stared at the rug, contemplating its thick, sound-absorbent fibers, and when he looked up the angel’s eyes riveted him: golden eyes, sparkling and electric, like miniature Van de Graaff generators spewing out slivers of lightning.

“Dead?” Thomas rasped.

“Dead.”

“Cause?”

“Total mystery. We haven’t a clue.”

“Are you… Raphael?”

“Raphael’s in New York City, tracking down Anthony Van Horne — yes, Captain Anthony Van Horne, the man who turned Matagorda Bay to licorice.”

As the angel brought up the house lights, Thomas saw that he was coming unglued. Silvery hairs floated down from his scalp. His wings exfoliated like a Mexican roof shedding tiles. “And the others?”

“Adabiel and Haniel passed away yesterday,” said the angel, retrieving his harp from the lectern. “Terminal empathy. Michael’s fading fast, Chamuel’s not long for this world, Zaphiel’s on his deathbed…”

“That leaves Gabriel.”

The angel plucked his harp.

“In short, Father Ockham,” said Monsignor Di Luca, as if he’d just finished explaining a great deal, when in fact he’d explained nothing, “we want you on the ship. We want you on the Carpco Valparaíso.”

“The only Ultra Large Crude Carrier ever chartered by the Vatican,” the Holy Father elaborated. “A sullied vessel, to be sure, but none other is equal to the task — or so Gabriel tells us.”

“What task?” asked Thomas.

“Salvaging the Corpus Dei.” Bright tears spilled down Gabriel’s fissured cheeks. Luminous mucus leaked from his nostrils. “Protecting Him from those” — the angel cast a quick glance toward Di Luca — “who would exploit His condition for their own ends. Giving Him a decent burial.”

“Once the body’s in Arctic waters,” Orselli explained, “the putrefaction will stop.”

“We have prepared a place,” said Gabriel, listlessly picking out the Dies Irae on his instrument. “An iceberg tomb adjoining Kvitoya.”

“And all the while, you’ll be on the navigation bridge,” said Di Luca, laying a red-gloved hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Our sole liaison, keeping Van Horne on his appointed path. The man’s no Catholic, you see. He’s barely a Christian.”

“The ship’s manifest will list you as a PAC — a Person in Addition to Crew,” said Orselli. “In reality you’ll be the most important man on the voyage.”

“Let me be explicit.” Gabriel fixed his electric eyes directly on Innocent XIV. “We want an honorable interment, nothing more. No stunts, Holiness. None of your billion-dollar funerals, no priceless sculpture on the tomb, no carving Him up for relics.”

“We understand,” said the Pope.

“I’m not sure you do. You run a tenacious organization, gentlemen. We’re afraid you don’t know when to quit.”

“You can trust us,” said Di Luca.

Curling his left wing into a semicircle, Gabriel brushed Thomas’s cheek with the tip. “I envy you, Professor. Unlike me, you’ll have time to figure out why this awful event happened. I’m convinced that, if you apply the full measure of your Jesuit intellect to the problem, pondering it night and day as the Valparaíso plies the North Atlantic, you’re bound to hit upon the solution.”

“Through reason alone?” said Thomas.

“Through reason alone. I can practically guarantee it. Give yourself till journey’s end, and the answer to the riddle will suddenly—”

A harsh, guttural groan. Dr. Carminati rushed over and, opening the angel’s robe, pressed the stethoscope against his milk-white bosom. Whimpering softly, Innocent XIV brought his right hand to his lips and sucked the velvet fingertips.

Gabriel sank into the nearest seat, his halo darkening until it came to resemble a lei of dead flowers.

“Pardon, Holiness” — the physician popped the stethoscope out of his ears — “but we should return him to the infirmary now.

“Go with God,” said the Pope, raising his moistened hand, rotating it sideways, and etching an invisible cross in the air.

“Remember,” said the angel, “no stunts.”

The young doctor looped his arm around Gabriel’s shoulder and, like a dutiful son guiding his dying father down the hallway of a cancer ward, escorted him out of the room.

Thomas studied the barren screen. God’s dead body? God had a body? What were the cosmological implications of this astonishing claim? Was He truly gone, or had His spirit merely vacated some gratuitous husk? (Gabriel’s grief suggested there was no putting a happy face on the situation.) Did heaven still exist? (Since the afterlife consisted essentially in God’s eternal presence, then the answer was logically no, but surely the question merited further study.) What of the Son and the Ghost? (Assuming Catholic theology counted for anything, then these Persons were inert now too, the Trinity being ipso facto indivisible, but, again, the issue manifestly deserved the attentions of a synod or perhaps even a Vatican Council.)

He turned to the other clerics. “There are problems here.”

“A secret consistory has been in session since Tuesday,” said the Pope, nodding. “The entire College of Cardinals, burning the midnight oil. We’re tackling the full spectrum: the possible causes of death, the chances of resuscitation, the future of the Church…”

“We’d like your answer now, Father Ockham,” said Di Luca. “The Valparaíso weighs anchor in just five days.”

Thomas took a deep breath, enjoying the rich, savory hypocrisy of the moment. Historically, Rome had tended to regard her Jesuits as expendable, something between a nuisance and a threat. Ah, but now that the chips were down, to whom did the Vatican turn? To the faithful, unflappable warriors of Ignatius Loyola, that’s who.

“May I keep this?” Thomas lifted a stray feather from the floor.

“Very well,” said Innocent XIV.

Thomas’s gaze wandered back and forth between the Pope and the feather. “One item on your agenda confuses me.”

“Do you accept?” demanded Di Luca.

“What item?” asked the Pope.

The feather exuded a feeble glow, like a burning candle fashioned from the tallow of some lost, forsaken lamb.

“Resuscitation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come in, Father Ockham.”

“Call me Thomas.”

“Wanna beer?”

“ Sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tell me about the crew.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“I’m… sorry,” said Thomas.

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

“You mustn’t hate yourself, Anthony.”

“An engineer?”

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

“A bos’n?”

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

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

Thomas treated himself to a hearty swallow of Old Milwaukee. “Hard to say. Close to seven million tons, I’d guess.” The enjoyment of cold beer was probably the closest he ever came to sinning — beer, and the pride he took in seeing himself footnoted in The Journal of Experimental Physics — beer, footnotes, and the viscous oblations that followed his occasional purchase of a Playboy. “Captain, how do you see this voyage of ours?”

“Huh?”

“What’s our purpose?”

Van Horne flopped into his ruptured couch. “We’re giving Him a decent burial.”

“Your angel say anything about resuscitation?”

“Nope.”

Thomas closed his eyes, as if he were about to offer his undergraduates some particularly difficult and disconcerting idea, like strange attractors or the many-worlds hypothesis. “The Catholic Church is not an institution that readily abandons hope. Her position is this: while the divine heart has evidently stopped beating, the divine nervous system may still boast a few healthy cells. In short, the Holy Father proposes we apply the science of cryonics to this crisis. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“We should get God on ice before His brain dies?”

“Precisely. Personally, I believe the Pope’s being far too optimistic.”

An uncanny but entirely reasonable gleam overcame Van Horne, the inevitable luminescence of a man who’s been given the opportunity to save the universe. “But if he’s not being too optimistic,” said the captain, a mild tremor in his voice, “how much time … ?”

“The Vatican computer wants us to cross the Arctic Circle no later than the eighteenth of August.”

Van Horne chugged down the rest of his beer. “Damn, I wish we had the Val now. I’d leave with the morning tide, crew or no.

“Your ship arrived in New York Harbor last night.”

The captain slammed the empty bottle onto the AT T spool. “She’s here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Don’t know why. Sorry.” Thomas collected the photos and slipped them back into his Bible. He knew perfectly well why. It was a matter of power and control, a matter of convincing this strange, oil-haunted man that Holy Mother Church, not Anthony Van Horne, was running the show. “Pier Eighty-eight…”

In a flurry of movement the captain pulled on a pair of mirrorshades and a John Deere fits-all visor cap. “Excuse me, Padre. I gotta go visit my ship.”

“It’s awfully late.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because the SS Carpco Valparaíso is currently under Vatican jurisdiction” — Thomas offered the scowling captain a long, meandering smile — “and no one, not even you, can board her without my permission.”

In his life and travels Anthony Van Horne had seen the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, and his ex-fiancйe Janet Yost without her clothes on, but he’d never beheld a sight so beautiful as the rehabilitated Carpco Valparaíso riding high and empty in the moonlit waters off Pier 88. He gasped. Until that exact and magical moment, he’d not fully believed this mission was real. But there she was, all right, the canny old Val herself, tied to the wharf by a half-dozen Dacron lines, dominating New York Harbor with all the stark disproportionality of a rowboat sitting in a bathtub.

In certain rare moments, Anthony thought he understood the general antipathy toward Ultra Large Crude Carriers. Such a ship had no sheer, no gentle ascending slope to her contours. She had no rake, none of the subtle angling of mast and funnel by which traditional cargo vessels paid homage to the Age of Sail. With her crushing tonnage and broad beam, a ULCC didn’t ride the waves; she ground them down. Gross ships, monstrous ships — but that was precisely the point, he felt: their fearsome majesty, their ponderous glamour, the way they plied the planet like yachts designed to provide vacation crudes for rhinoceroses. To command a ULCC — to walk its decks and feel it vibrating beneath you, amplifying your flesh and blood — was a grand and defiant gesture, like pissing on a king, or having your own international terrorist organization, or keeping a thermonuclear warhead in your garage.

They went out to her in a launch named the Juan Fernandez, piloted by a member of the Vatican Secret Service, a bearish sergeant with frazzled white hair and a Colt .45 snugged against his armpit. Lights blazed on every floor of the aft superstructure, its seven levels culminating in a congestion of antennas, smokestacks, masts, and flags. Anthony wasn’t sure which of the present banners troubled him more — the keys-and-tiara symbol of the Vatican or the famous stegosaurus logo of Caribbean Petroleum. He resolved to have Marbles Rafferty strike the Carpco colors first thing.

As the launch glided past the Valparaíso’s stern, Anthony grabbed the Jacob’s ladder and began his ascent to the weather deck, Father Ockham right behind. He had to say one thing for this control-freak priest: the man had nerve. Ockham climbed up the ship’s side with perfect aplomb, one hand on his attachй case, the other on the rungs, as if he’d been scaling rope ladders all his life.

The retrofitted towing rig rose sharply against the Jersey City skyline: two mighty windlasses bolted to the afterdeck like a pair of gigantic player-piano rolls, wound not with ordinary mooring lines but with heavy-duty chains, their links as large as inner tubes. At the end of each chain lay a massive kedge anchor, twenty tons of iron, an anchor to hook a whale, tether a continent, moor the moon.

“You’re looking at some fancy footwork.” Ockham opened his attach й case and drew out a gridded pink checklist clamped to a Masonite clipboard. “Anchors brought down by rail from Canada, motors flown over from Germany, capstans imported from Belgium. The Japanese gave us a great deal on the chains — underbid USX by ten percent.”

“You put this stuff out on bid ?”

“The Church is not a profit-making institution, Anthony, but she knows the value of a dollar.”

Boarding the elevator, they rose three stories to the steward’s deck. The main galley was aswarm. Eager, robust, competent-looking women in blue jeans and khaki work shirts bustled through the great stainless-steel kitchen, filling the freezers and refrigerators with provisions: tubs of ice cream, wheels of cheese, planks of ham, sides of beef, sacks of Cheerios, barrels of milk, pools of salad oil sealed in 55-gallon drums like so much Texas crude. A propane-fueled Toyota forklift truck chugged past, its orange body peppered with rust, its prongs supporting a paddock piled high with crates of fresh eggs.

“Who the hell are these people?” asked Anthony.

“Vatican longshoremen,” Ockham explained.

“They look like women to me.”

“They’re Carmelites.”

“Who?”

“Carmelite nuns.”

In the center of the kitchen stood portly Sam Follingsbee, dressed in a white apron and supervising the chaos like a cop directing traffic. Catching sight of his visitors, the steward waddled over and tipped his big, floppy cream puff of a hat.

“Thanks for the recommendation, sir.” Follingsbee clasped his captain’s hand. “I needed this ship, I really did.” Swinging his formidable belly toward the priest, he asked, “Father Ockham, right?” Ockham nodded. “Father, I’m puzzled — how come a crummy Carpco voyage rates the services of all these lovely sisters, not to mention yourself?”

“This isn’t a Carpco voyage,” said Ockham.

“So what’s the deal?”

“Once we’re at sea, things will become clearer.” The priest drummed his bony fingers on the checklist. “Now I’ll ask a question. On Friday I put in a requisition for one thousand communion wafers. They look a bit like poker chips…”

Follingsbee chuckled. “I know what they look like, Father — you’re talkin’ to an ex-altar boy. Not to worry. We got all them hosts in freezer number six — couldn’t be safer. Will you be celebratin’ Mass every day?”

“Naturally.”

“I’ll be there,” said Follingsbee, starting back into the heart of the hubbub. “Well, maybe not every day.” His eye caught a Carmelite maneuvering a wheel of cheddar across the floor like a child playing with a hoop. “Hey, Sister, carry that thing — don’t fuckin’ roll it!”

The forklift truck pulled up, and a plump, ruddy nun climbed down from behind the wheel, a string of smoked sausages hanging about her neck like a yoke. Her step struck Anthony as remarkably lively, a sashay, really, if nuns sashayed. Evidently she moved to the beat of whatever private concert was pouring from the Sony Walkman strapped to her waist.

“Tom!” The nun ripped off her headphones. “Tom Ockham!”

“Miriam, darling! How wonderful! I didn’t know they’d recruited you!” The priest threw his arms around the nun and planted a sprightly kiss on her cheek. “Get my letter?”

“I did, Tom. Oddest words I ever read. And yet, somehow, I sensed they were true.”

“All true,” said the priest. “Rome, Gabriel, the slides, the EKG…”

“A bad business.”

“The worst.”

“There’s no hope?”

“You know me, the eternal pessimist.”

Anthony massaged his beard. The banter between Ockham and Sister Miriam bewildered him. It seemed a conversation less between a priest and a nun than between two passй movie actors encountering each other on a Hollywood set twenty years after their amicable divorce.

“Darling, meet Anthony Van Horne — the planet’s greatest living sailor, or so the angels believed,” said Ockham. “Miriam and I go back a long way,” he told the captain. “At Loyola they’re still using a textbook we wrote in the early seventies, Introduction to Theodicy.”

“What’s theodicy?” asked Anthony.

“Hard to explain.”

“Sounds like idiocy.”

“Much of it is.”

“Theodicy means reconciling God’s goodness with the world’s evils.” Sister Miriam snapped off a smoked sausage and took a bite. “Dinner,” she explained, chewing slowly. “Captain, I want to come along.”

“Along where?”

“On the voyage.”

“Bad idea.”

“It’s a splendid idea,” said the priest. He gestured toward the sausages. “Would you mind? I haven’t eaten all day.”

“One PAC is enough,” said Anthony.

Miriam snapped off a second sausage and handed it to Ockham.

“Let me put it this way.” The priest nudged Anthony with his clipboard. “The Holy Father was never entirely sold on you. It’s not too late for him to hire another captain.”

The first insidious stirrings of a migraine crept through Anthony’s brain. He rubbed his temples. “All right, Padre. Fine. But she won’t like the work. All you do is chip rust and paint what’s underneath.”

“Sounds dreadful,” said the nun. “I’ll take it.”

“See you in church tomorrow?” said Ockham, squeezing Miriam’s hand. “Saint Patrick’s Cathedral — 0800 hours, as we say in the Merchant Marine.”

“Sure thing.”

Sister Miriam put on her headphones and returned to her forklift.

“Okay, so our galley’s in good shape,” said Anthony as he and Ockham approached the elevator, “but what about the rest? The antipredator materiel?”

“We loaded six crates of Dupont shark repellent this morning,” said Ockham, devouring his sausage, “along with fifteen T-62 bazookas” — he glanced at his checklist — “and twenty WP-17 Toshiba exploding-harpoon guns.”

“Backup turbine?”

“Arrives tomorrow.”

They went up to level seven, the bridge. The place seemed untouched, frozen, as if some historical society were preserving the Carpco Valparaíso for tourism, the newest exhibit in the Museum of Environmental Disasters. Even the Bushnell binoculars occupied their customary spot in the canvas bin beside the twelve-mile radar.

“Bulkhead reinforcement beams?”

“In the fo’c’sle hold,” Ockham replied.

“Emergency prop?”

“Look down — you’ll see it lashed to the weather deck.”

“I didn’t like that crap you pulled back there, threatening me…”

“I didn’t like it either. Let’s try to be friends, okay?”

Saying nothing, Anthony grasped the helm, curling his palms around the cold steel disc. He smiled. In his past lay a dead mother, a mercurial father, a broken engagement, and eleven million gallons of spilled oil. His future promised little beyond old age, chronic migraines, futile showers, and a voyage that smacked of madness.

But at that precise moment, standing on the bridge of his ship and contemplating his emergency screw propeller, Anthony Van Horne was a happy man.

In the soggy, sweltering center of Jersey City, a twenty-six-year-old orphan named Neil Weisinger shouldered his seabag, climbed eight flights to the top of the Nimrod Building, and entered the New York Hall of the National Maritime Union. Over three dozen ABs and ordinaries jammed the dusty room, sitting nervously on folding chairs, gear wedged between their legs, half of them puffing on cigarettes, each sailor hoping for a berth on the only ship scheduled to dock that month, the SS Argo Lykes. Neil groaned. So much competition. The instant he’d finished his last voyage (a dry-cargo jaunt on the Stella Lykes, through the Canal to Auckland and back), he’d done as every able-bodied seaman does on disembarking — run straight down to the nearest union hall to get his shipping card stamped with the exact date and time. Nine months and fourteen days later, the card had acquired considerable seniority, but it still wasn’t a killer.

Neil pulled the card from his wallet — he liked his ID photo immensely, the way the harsh glare of the strobe had made his black eyes sparkle and his cherubic face look angular and austere — and tossed the laminated rectangle into a shoe box duct-taped to the wall below a poster reading SHIP AMERICAN: IT COSTS NO MORE. Reaching into the box, he flipped through his rivals. Bad news. A Rastafarian with nineteen more days on shore than Neil. A fellow Jew named Daniel Rosenberg with eleven. A Chinese woman, An-mei Jong, with six. Damn.

He sat down beneath an open window, a thick layer of Jersey grime spread across its panes like peanut butter on a saltine. You never knew, of course. Miracles happened. A tramp tanker might arrive from the Persian Gulf. The dispatcher might post an in-port relief job, or one of those short trips up the Hudson nobody wanted unless he was as broke as Neil. A crew of methane-breathing Neptunians might land in Journal Square, their helmsman dead from an oxygen overdose, and sign him up on the spot.

“Ever had any close calls?” A tense voice, slightly laryngitic. Neil turned. Outside the window, a sailor lounged on the fire escape — a muscular, freckled, auburn-haired young man in a red polo shirt and tattered black beret, his seabag serving as a pillow. “I mean, really close?”

“Not me, no. Once, in Philly, I saw an AB come in with this card three hundred and sixty-four days old.”

“Sweating?”

“Like a stoker. When the sheet went up, the guy actually pissed his pants.”

“He get a berth?”

Neil nodded. “Twelve and a half minutes before his card would’ve rolled over.”

“The Lord was lookin’ out for him.” The freckled sailor slipped a tiny gold chain from beneath his polo shirt, glancing at the attached cross like the White Rabbit consulting his pocket watch.

Neil winced. This wasn’t the first time he’d encountered a Jesus aficionado. As a rule, he didn’t mind them. Once at sea, they were usually diligent as hell, cleaning toilets and chipping rust without a whimper, but their agenda made him nervous. Often as not, the conversation got around to the precarious position of Neil’s immortal soul. On the Stella, for example, a Seventh Day Adventist had somberly advised Neil that he could spare himself “the trouble of Armageddon” by accepting Jesus then and there.

“What’re you doin’ on the fire escape?”

“It’s cooler out here,” said the freckled sailor, unwrapping a package of Bazooka bubblegum. He scanned the comic strip and chortled, then popped the pink lozenge into his mouth. “I’m Neil Weisinger.”

“Leo Zook.”

Drawing his plastic Bugs Bunny lunch box from his seabag, Neil climbed through the window. He’d always been a great admirer of Bugs. The rabbit was a loner, and liked it. No friends. No family. Smart, resourceful, rejected by the outside world. There was something rather Jewish about Bugs Bunny.

“Hey, Leo, I saw three killer cards in the box, and none of ’em belongs to you.” The fire escape seemed no cooler than the hall, but the view was spectacular, a clear vista stretching all the way from midtown to the Statue of Liberty. “Why don’t you leave?”

“The Lord told me I’d be getting a ship today.” From the zippered compartment of his seabag, Zook retrieved a tattered booklet titled Close Encounters with Jesus Christ, the author being one Hyman Levkowitz. “You might find this interesting,” he said, pressing the tract into Neil’s palm. “It’s by a cantor who found salvation.”

Neil opened his lunch box, removed a green apple, and began to munch. He beat back a sneer. God was a perfectly fine idea. Indeed, before realizing he belonged on ships, Neil had spent two years across the river at Yeshiva University, studying Jewish history and toying with the idea of becoming a rabbi. But Neil’s God was not the patient, accessible, direct-dial deity on whom Leo Zook evidently predicated his life. Neil’s was the God he’d found by going to sea, the radiant En Sof who lay somewhere below the deepest mid-Atlantic trench and beyond the highest navigational star, the God of the four A.M. watch.

“Do yourself a favor — read it through,” said Zook. “I can’t recommend eternal life highly enough.”

At that moment, Neil would have preferred almost anyone else’s company. An encyclopedia salesman’s. An Arab’s. Whatever their other foibles, his Arab mates never tried to convert him. Usually they just ignored him, though sometimes they actually became his friends — particularly when, during prayers, he helped them stay pointed toward Mecca while the ship made a turn. Neil always brought a magnetically-corrected compass to sea for expressly this purpose.

A pear-shaped woman with the demeanor of a fishwife waddled out of the office and headed for the board.

“Soup’s on!” the dispatcher cried as Neil and Zook scrambled back into the hall. She jerked two thumbtacks from her mouth as if they were loose teeth and pinned a job sheet to the cork.

•OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS

COMPANY: Lykes Brothers

SHIP: SS Argo Lykes

LOCATED: Pier 86

SAILS: 1500 Friday

RUN: West Coast South America

JOBS: Able Seaman: 2

TIME: 120-day rotary

RELIEVING: J. Pierce, F. Pellegrino

REASON: Time up

“All right,” said the dispatcher, “who’s got ’em?”

“Nobody here be beatin’ ten month plus fifteen day, eh?” said the Rastafarian.

“The other one’s mine,” said Daniel Rosenberg.

The dispatcher checked her watch. “Assuming no killer card shows up in the next six seconds” — she winked at the winners — “they’re all yours. Step into the office, fellas.”

Gradually the mob dispersed, forty disappointed men and women ambling morosely back to their seats. Eight sailors collected their cards and, conceding defeat, left. The dreamers and the desperate sat down to wait.

“The Lord will come through,” said Zook.

Neil slumped onto the nearest folding chair. Why didn’t he just admit it — he had no career, he was a failure. Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.

As a boy, Neil had never tired of hearing Grandfather Moshe recount his maritime adventures, wondrous tales of battling pirates on Ecuadorian rivers, transporting hippopotami to French zoos, playing cat-and-mouse with Nazi submarines in the North Atlantic, and, most impressive of all, helping to smuggle fifteen hundred displaced Jews past the British blockade and into Palestine on the Hatifyah, one of the dozen rogue freighters secretly leased by the Aliyah Bet. Four decades later, Chief Mate Moshe Weisinger had opened his mail to find a token of appreciation from the Israeli government: a bronze medal bearing the face of David Ben-Gurion in bas-relief. When Grandfather Moshe died, Neil inherited the medal. He always kept it in his right pants pocket, something to clutch in moments of stress.

The door to the hall swung open, and a wrinkled, lanky man wearing a black shirt and Roman collar entered, slapping a job sheet into the dispatcher’s palm.

“Call this right away.”

The dispatcher tacked up the priest’s sheet directly over the Argo Lyfes notice. “Okay, you packet rats,” she said, turning to the hopeful sailors, “we’ve got this tramp tanker over at Pier Eighty-eight, and it looks like they’re startin’ from scratch.”

•OFFSHORE SHIPPING JOBS•

COMPANY: Carpco Shipping

SHIP: SS Carpco Valparaíso

LOCATED: Pier 88

SAILS: 1700 Thursday

RUN: Svalbard, Arctic Ocean

JOBS: Able Seaman: 18

Ordinary Seaman: 12

Food Handler: 2

TIME: 90-day rotary

RELIEVING: Not applicable

REASON: Not applicable

Grunts of dismay resounded through the union hall. Rumors swarmed like sea gulls feasting on a landfill. The Valparaíso, the infamous Valparaíso, the tainted, broken, bedeviled Valparaíso. Hadn’t she been sold to the Japanese and converted into a toxic-waste carrier? Sunk in a Tomahawk missile test?

“Does this mean we’re all hired?” asked a blobby man with bad teeth and five o’clock shadow.

“Every one of you,” said the priest. “Not only that but you can figure on more overtime than you’ve ever pulled down in your lives. My name is Thomas Ockham, Society of Jesus, and we’ll be spending the next three months together.”

And then, as if he thought the U.S. Merchant Marine were a branch of the military, the priest saluted, made an abrupt about-face, and marched out of the room.

“I told you the Lord would come through,” said Zook, licking a mustache of perspiration from his upper lip.

An eerie silence descended, settling into the dust, clinging to the cigarette smoke. The Lord had come through, mused Neil. Either the Lord or Caribbean Petroleum. Neil wouldn’t be ferrying any Jews to Haifa or hippos to Le Havre this trip, he wouldn’t be dodging any Nazi subs, but at least he had a job.

“Jesus hasn’t let me down yet,” the Evangelical went on.

A job — and yet…

“Christ never lets anybody down.”

A ship like the Valparaíso should not be resurrected, Neil believed, and if she were resurrected, a smart AB would look elsewhere for work.

“You know, mates, this seems kinda creepy to me,” said a buxom Puerto Rican woman in a tight Menudo T-shirt. “Why’re we shippin’ out with a priest?”

“Yeah, and why on the fucking Titanic?” asked a leathery old sailor with I LOVE BRENDA tattooed on the back of his hand.

“I’ll tell you something else,” said the blobby man. “I been to Svalbard on a bulk carrier once, and I can say for an absolute fact you won’t find one solitary drop of crude up there. What’re we takin’ on, walrus piss?”

“Well, it’s great to have a ship,” said willowy An-mei Jong with forced enthusiasm.

“Oh, for sure,” said Brenda’s lover with artificial cheer.

Reaching into his right pants pocket, Neil squeezed his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal. “Let’s go sign up,” he said, when in fact his impulse was to bolt from the room, find some unemployed sailor roaming the Eleventh Avenue docks, and give the poor bastard his berth.

STORM

FOR THE AVERAGE sea captain, handing one’s ship over to a harbor pilot was a wrenching experience, an ordeal of displacement not unlike that endured by a husband finding an alien brand of condom in his wife’s purse. But Anthony Van Horne was not the average sea captain. Harbor pilots didn’t make the rules, he reasoned; the National Transportation Safety Board did. And so when a battered New York Port Authority launch tied up alongside the Carpco Valparaíso at 1735 hours on the evening of her scheduled departure, Anthony was quite prepared to be civil.

Then he recognized the pilot.

Frank Kolby. Unctuous old Frank Kolby, the idiot who’d laughed so uproariously on seeing Anthony’s father reenact the wreck of the Val in a gravy boat.

“Hello, Frank.”

“Hiya, Anthony.” The pilot stepped into the wheelhouse and pulled off his black waterproof leggings. “I heard it was you on the bridge.” He wore a blue three-piece suit, well tailored and neatly pressed, as if trying to pass himself off as other than what he was, a glorified parking-lot attendant. “They spliced the Val together real good, didn’t they?”

“I expect she’ll last another voyage,” said Anthony, slipping on his mirrorshades.

The tugboats tooted their readiness. Kolby dropped his leggings next to the compass binnacle, then reached toward the control console and snatched up the walkie-talkie. “Raise anchors!”

Groaning, gushing steam, the fo’c’sle windlasses rotated, slowly drawing two algae-coated chains from the river. On the forward TV monitor Anthony watched globs of dark silt slide from the starboard anchor like Jell-O from a fork and plop into the Hudson. For an instant he imagined he saw Raphael Azarias’s corpse wrapped around the flukes, but then he realized it was only an angel-shaped hunk of mud.

“Cast off!”

Snugging his John Deere visor cap down to his eyebrows, Anthony opened the starboard door and strode across the bridge wing. All along Pier 88, stevedores in torn plimsolls and ratty T-shirts scurried about, untying Dacron lines from bollards, setting the tanker free. Sea gulls wheeled across the setting sun, squawking their endless disapproval of the world. A half-dozen tugs converged from all directions, whistles shrieking madly as their crews tossed thick, shaggy ropes to the ABs stationed on the Val’s weather deck.

Anthony inhaled a generous helping of harbor air — his last chance, before shoving off, to savor this unique mix of bunker oil, bilge water, raw sewage, dead fish, and gull guano — and stepped back inside.

“Slow ahead,” said Kolby. “Twenty rpm’s.”

“Slow ahead.” Chief Mate Marbles Rafferty — a mournful black sailor in his early forties, lean and tightly wound, a kind of human sheepshank — eased the dual joysticks forward.

Gently, cautiously, like a team of seeing-eye tuna guiding a blind whale home, the tugs began the simultaneously gross and balletic business of hauling the Valparaíso down the river and pointing her into Upper New York Bay.

“Right ten degrees,” said Kolby.

“Right ten,” echoed the AB at the helm, Karl Jaworski, a paunchy sailor who carried the designation able-bodied seaman into the deepest reaches of euphemism. Eyes locked on the rudder indicator, Jaworski gave the wheel a lethargic twist.

“Half ahead,” said Kolby.

“Half ahead,” said Rafferty, advancing the throttles.

The Valparaíso coasted smoothly over three hundred westbound commuters stuck in the Holland Tunnel’s regular six P.M. traffic jam.

“Is it true Dad and his wife are in Spain?” Anthony asked the pilot.

“Yep,” said Kolby. “Town called Valladolid.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Christopher Columbus died there.”

Anthony suppressed a smirk. But of course. Where else would the old man drag himself at the end of his life but to the site of his idol’s passing?

“Know how I can reach him?”

As the pilot pulled a computerized Sanyo Life Organizer from his vest, Anthony flashed on the previous Thanksgiving: Kolby eating a helping of mashed potatoes saturated with giblet gravy and lighter fluid.

“I got his fax number.”

Anthony grabbed a Chevron ballpoint and an American Practical Navigator from atop the Marisat computer. “Shoot,” he said, opening the book.

Why did his father identify so fiercely with Columbus? Reincarnation? If so, then the spirit that occupied Christopher Van Horne was surely not the visionary, inspired Columbus who’d discovered the New World. It was the demented, arthritic Columbus of the subsequent voyages — the Columbus who’d kept a gibbet permanently installed on the taffrail of his ship so he could hang mutineers, deserters, grumblers, and all those who publicly doubted they’d reached the Indies.

“Dial 011-34-28 …”

Anthony transcribed the number across a diagram of the Little Dipper, filling the bowl with digits.

“Away with the tugs!” bellowed Kolby.

As the World Trade Center loomed up, its promontories rising into the dusk like bollards meant to moor some unimaginably humongous ship, a disquieting thought possessed Anthony. This seventy-year-old Sea Scout, this asshole friend of his icebox father, was within two hundred yards of hanging them up on the shoals.

“Come right ten degrees!” cried Anthony.

“I was about to say that,” Kolby snapped.

“Right ten,” echoed Jaworski.

“Dead slow!” said Anthony.

“And that,” said Kolby.

“Dead slow,” echoed Rafferty.

“Stern tugs gone,” came the bos’n’s report, rasping out of the walkie-talkie.

“You gotta be a little sharper, Frank.” Anthony gave the pilot a condescending wink. “When the Val’s riding this light, she takes her sweet time turning.”

“Forward tugs gone,” said the bos’n.

“Steady,” said Anthony.

“Steady,” said Jaworski.

The tugs spun north, let out a high, raunchy series of farewell toots, and steamed back up the Hudson like an ensemble of seagoing calliopes.

“Wake up the pump room,” said Kolby, plucking the intercom mike from the console and handing it to the chief mate. “Time we took on some ballast.”

“Don’t do it, Marbles,” said Anthony.

“I need ballast to steer,” Kolby protested.

“Look at the fathometer, for Christ’s sake. Our barnacles can stick their peckers in the bottom.”

“This is my harbor, Anthony. I know how deep it is.”

“No ballast, Frank.”

The pilot reddened and fumed. “It appears I’m no longer needed up here, am I?”

“Appears that way.”

“Who’s your tailor, Frank?” asked Rafferty, deadpan. “I’d like to be buried in a suit like that.”

“Fuck you,” said the pilot. “Fuck the lot of you.”

Anthony tore the walkie-talkie from Kolby’s hand. “Lower starboard accommodation ladder,” he instructed the bos’n. “We’re dropping our pilot in ten minutes.”

“Once the Coast Guard hears about this,” said Kolby, quivering with rage as he climbed back into his leggings, “it won’t be a week before you lose your master’s license all over again.”

“Put your complaint in Portuguese,” said the captain. The Statue of Liberty glided past, tirelessly lifting her lamp. “My license comes from Brazil.”

“Brazil?”

“It’s in South America, Frank,” said Anthony, hustling the pilot out of the wheelhouse. “You’ll never get there.”

By 1835 Kolby was in the harbor launch, speeding back toward Pier 88.

At 1845 the Valparaíso began drinking Upper New York Bay, sucking its tides into her ballast tanks.

At 1910 Anthony’s radio officer came onto the bridge: Lianne Bliss — “Sparks,” as per hallowed maritime tradition — the bony little hippie vegetarian Ockham had dug up on Wednesday at the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots. “Jay Island’s on the phone.” For someone so petite, Sparks had an astonishingly resonant voice, as if she were speaking from the bottom of an empty cargo bay. “They wanna know what we’re up to.”

Anthony ducked into the radio shack, thumbing the transceiver mike to ON. “Calling Jay Island Coast Guard Station…”

“Go ahead. Over.”

“Carpco Valparaíso here, bound in ballast for Lagos, Nigeria, to take on two hundred thousand barrels of crude oil. Over.”

“Roger, Valparaíso. Be advised of Tropical Depression Number Six — Hurricane Beatrice — currently blowing west from Cape Verde.”

“Gotcha, Jay Island. Out.”

At 1934 the Valparaíso slid across the ethereal line separating Lower New York Bay from the North Atlantic Ocean. Twenty minutes later, Second Mate Spicer — Big Joe Spicer, the only sailor on board who seemed scaled to the tanker herself — entered the wheelhouse to relieve Rafferty.

“Lay me a course for Sa г Tomй,” Anthony ordered Spicer. Grabbing the Exxon coffee Thermos and his ceramic Carpco mug, the captain poured himself the first of what he expected would be about five hundred cups of thick black jamoke. “I want us there in two weeks.”

“I overheard the Coast Guard mention a hurricane,” said Rafferty.

“Forget the damn hurricane. This is the Carpco Valparaíso, not some proctologist’s sailboat. If it starts to rain, we’ll turn on the windshield wipers.”

“Can O’Connor give us a steady eighteen knots?” asked Spicer.

“I expect so.”

“Then we’ll be in the Gulf of Guinea by the tenth.” The second mate advanced the joysticks, notch by notch. “All ahead full?”

The captain looked south, scanning the ranks of gray, glassy swells, the eternally shifting terrain of the sea. And so it begins, he thought, the great race, Anthony Van Horne versus brain death, decay, and the Devil’s own sharks.

“All ahead full!”

July 2.

Latitude: 37°7’N. Longitude: 58°10’W. Course: 094. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 810 nautical miles. A gentle breeze, no. 3 on the Beaufort scale, wafts across our weather deck.

I wanted a real diary, but there wasn’t time to visit a stationery store, so instead I ran down to Thrift Drug and got you. According to your cover, you’re an “Official Popeye the Sailor Spiral-Bound Notebook, copyright © 1959 King Features Syndicate.” When I look into your wizened face, Popeye, I know you’re a man I can trust.

On this day in 1816, the French frigate Medusa went aground off the west coast of Africa — so says my Manner’s Pocket Companion. “Of the 147 who escaped on a raft, most were murdered by their mates and either thrown overboard or eaten. Only 15 survived.”

I think we can do better than that. For a company cobbled together at the last minute, they seem like a pretty smart bunch. Big Joe Spicer brought his own sextant aboard, always a good sign in a navigator. Dolores Haycox, the zaftig third mate, passed the surprise quiz I gave her without a hiccup. (I had her calculate her distance from a hypothetical bold shore based on the interval between a ship’s foghorn blast and the echo.) Marbles Rafferty, the gloomy first officer, is a particularly poetic choice for this mission — his great-grandfather was owned by a family of Florida Keys salvage masters, those vainglorious 19th-century sailors who were, Ockham informs me, “immortalized by John Wayne and Raymond Massey in Reap the Wild Wind.”

I already knew Sam Follingsbee was a brilliant cook, but tonight’s fried chicken was indistinguishable from Colonel Sanders’s secret recipes, both Original and Extra Crispy. An odd talent, this genius for mediocrity. Crock O’Connor, the chief engineer, is the sort of affable Alabama yarn spinner who claims he invented the twist-off bottle cap but receives no royalties thanks to the knavery of an unscrupulous patent attorney. He’s been giving us our 18 knots, so who am I to call him a liar? Lou Chickering, the blond and handsome first assistant engineer — our very own Billy Budd — is a stage actor from Philly who once tried to make it on Broadway and now spends his off-hours organizing talent shows in the deckies’ recreation room. His specialty is Shakespeare, and even our illiterates were beguiled by his performance last night of Ariel’s song from The Tempest. (“Full fathom five thy father lies…”) Bud Ramsey, the second engineer, is a pornography collector, beer connoisseur, and seven-card-stud fanatic. It’s refreshing, I think, when a man wears his vices on his sleeve. And backing us up: 38 gratefully employed sailors — 23 men and 15 women — scattered among our decks, galleys, engine rooms, and cargo-control stations. I enjoy browsing through their resumйs. We’ve got a minor-league center fielder on board (Albany Bullets), a former clown (Hunt Brothers Circus), an ex-con (armed robbery), a spot-welder, an auto assembly-line worker, a Revlon saleslady, an Army corporal, a dog trainer, a Chinese math teacher (junior high), a taxi driver, three Desert Storm vets, and a full-blooded Lakota Sioux named James Echohawk.

A great mass of spilled oil — one of those “floating particulate petroleum residues” — has coagulated off Cameroon: that’s the story I’ve been feeding anybody who asks. When Carpco realized the Vatican had gotten wind of the disaster, they offered the Pope a deal: keep Greenpeace and the U.N. off our backs, and we’ll remove the asphalt posthaste. And we won’t just sink it, either. We’ll tow it to shore, chop it up, and refine the fragments into free oil for burgeoning African industries. Great, said Rome, but we’re sending Father Ockham to supervise.

So: a secret operation, get it, men? Hush-hush, understand? That’s why we don’t signal passing ships, turn on our running lights, or let anybody phone home.

“Okay, but why so damn fast?” Crock O’Connor wants to know. “We’re practicing to be the first supertanker ever to win the America’s Cup?”

“The asphalt’s a menace to navigation,” I explain. “The sooner we get there, the better.”

“Last night I left my empty orange-juice glass on the table,” the man persists, “and the damn thing scooted right up to the edge and fell, singing all the way. We’re vibrating, Captain. We’re gonna crack the fucking hull.”

He’s right, actually. Run your ULCC in a straight line at 18 knots with empty cargo bays, and before long you’ll start flapping apart like a ’57 Chevy.

There are ways to soothe a shivering ship without losing too much time. I’m using every trick in the book: changing speed briefly, altering course slightly, shutting down entirely for a minute or two and coasting — anything to break the rhythm of the waves hitting our stem. So far it’s working. So far we’re still in one piece.

At dawn the sea turtles came.

Hundreds of them, Popeye, swimming through my dreams, their shells glistening with Texas crude. Then the snowy egrets arrived, black as crows, then the roseate spoonbills, the blue herons…

I awoke in a sweat. I took a shower, dried off, read Act I of The Tempest — Prospero raising the storm and drawing the royal ship to his enchanted island, Miranda falling hopelessly in love with the castaway prince Ferdinand — and drank a glass of warm milk. At 0800 I finally got back to sleep.

The urge to pray was intense, but Cassie Fowler, who at age forty-one knew better than to believe in God, had so far managed to resist. There are no atheists in foxholes: a clever maxim, she felt — deft, wry, and appealing. And she was determined to prove it wrong.

For over fifteen hot, wretched, thirsty hours Cassie had endured her aquatic foxhole, a rubber dinghy adrift in the North Atlantic, and in all that time she’d been true to herself, never asking God for assistance. Cassie was a woman of integrity — a woman who’d spent the first decade of her adulthood writing antireligious, money-losing off-Broadway plays (the sorts of satires the critics termed “biting” when authored by a male and “strident” if by a female) — a woman who, having devoted most of her thirties to acquiring a Ph.D. in biology, had elected to teach at dull, hidebound Tarrytown Community College, a place where the students were unlikely to form positive opinions about either feminism or evolution without her intervention, and where she was free to conduct oddball little experiments (her initial finding being that, given the opportunity, the male Norway rat exhibits instincts toward its young every bit as nurturing as the female) without pressure to pull down a grant or publish her results.

Were Cassie’s situation any less desperate, it would have been comic, in a Samuel Beckett sort of way. Maneuvering the dinghy with a Ping-Pong paddle. Bailing it out with an Elvis Presley memorial drinking cup. Sheltering her bikini-clad body with a Betty Boop beach towel. “Help,” she gasped into the transceiver mike, furiously working the generator crank. “Please, somebody… heading east… last known latitude, two degrees north… last known longitude, thirty-seven west… help me.” No answer. Not one word. She might as well be praying.

To the east, she knew, lay Saint Paul’s Rocks, a tiny volcanic archipelago strung along the equator. The Rocks promised little — a chance to gather her strength, a reprieve from the endless bailing — but at this point a meaningless destination was better than none at all.

An authentic reenactment of Charles Darwin’s historic voyage undertaken on an exact replica of his ship: what a marvelous concept for a cruise, she’d thought on reading the brochure, a kind of Club Med vacation for rationalists. All during the flight to England, Cassie had imagined herself reporting back to her friends in the Central Park West Enlightenment League, proudly projecting her 35mm color slides of the Galapagos Islands’ native finches and lizards (she was planning to shoot over fifty rolls of film), descendants of the very beasts from whose anatomies Darwin had inferred that Creation traced not to the hand of God Almighty but to something far more interesting — and she’d continued to indulge in such cheerful fantasies when, on June 12, the Beagle II left the Cornish port of Charlestown, her twenty-four berths jammed with an unlikely assortment of biology professors, armchair naturalists, and spoiled college dropouts being deported by their exasperated parents. The itinerary devised by Maritime Adventures, Incorporated, had the Beagle II following Darwin’s precise route, with the exception of an about-face at Joas Pessoa so they might avail themselves of the Panama Canal and save seven months. Once they’d explored the Galapagos, a jetliner out of Guayaquil would take them back to England.

They never got past the equator. Hurricane Beatrice did not merely sink the Beagle II, it tore her apart like one of Cassie’s sophomores dissecting a dogfish. As the ship went down, Cassie found herself alone on a frigid sea, clinging to a spar and clutching her Betty Boop towel, bitterly absorbing the fact that among the stratagems by which Maritime Adventures kept its Galapagos package under a thousand dollars per person was the elimination of life rafts, life jackets, and backup batteries for the shortwave radio. Only through a miracle of chance did she manage to fish a hand-cranked transceiver from the flotsam and haul herself aboard the Beagle’s errant dinghy.

“Heading east… last known latitude, two north… last known longitude, thirty-seven west… help, somebody.”

Inexorably, maliciously, the sun came up: her one-eyed enemy, a predator as dangerous as any shark. The Betty Boop towel protected her from the rays, but her thirst soon became intolerable. The temptation to dip her Elvis cup into the ocean and drink was nearly overwhelming, though as a biologist she knew that would be fatal. Consume a pint of sea water, and along with those ten cubic inches of pure H2O she would also ingest a quantity of salt far beyond what her body required. Take a second helping, and her kidneys would now have enough H2O to process the salt in pint number one, but not enough to process the salt in pint number two. Drink a third pint — and so on, and so on, never getting ahead of the game. Inevitably her kidneys would turn imperialistic, stealing water from her other tissues. She would dry up, become febrile, die.

“Help me,” Cassie moaned, painfully rotating the transceiver crank. “Last known latitude, two north… longitude, thirty-seven west… water… water …” I shall not cry out to God, she vowed. I shall not pray for deliverance.

And suddenly they appeared, Saint Paul’s Rocks, six granite spires rising from the equator like aquatic stalactites, their peaks frosted with heaping mounds of seabird droppings. Briefly she savored the peculiar poetry of the moment. On February 12, 1832, the original Beagle had anchored here. At least I’ll go out in Darwin’s shadow, she mused. At least I’ve followed him to the end.

By dusk Cassie had made a landfall, maneuvering the dinghy against the lee side of the islet. Transceiver in hand, Betty Boop towel flung over her shoulder, she dragged herself up the highest spire, the jagged pumice tearing her palms and scouring her knees. An ice-cold can of Diet Coke hovered just out of reach; a frosty pitcher of lemonade beckoned from a neighboring crag; a frigid geyser of Hawaiian Punch spewed heavenward from a tide pool. Reaching the summit, she stood up, the towel spilling down her back like a monarch’s cape. It was all hers, the whole dreadful little archipelego. Her Royal Highness Cassie Fowler, Empress of Guano.

The wayfarers swooped down, squadron after squadron, brazen cormorants perching on her shoulders, bold gannets pecking at her hair. For all her terror and misery, she found herself wishing her students could see these birds; she was prepared to lecture about the Sulidae family in general and the blue-footed booby in particular. The blue-foot was a bird with a vision. While its red-shod cousin laid its eggs in a conventional nest built near the top of a tree, the blue-foot employed a picture of a nest, an elegant abstraction it created by squirting a ring of guano on the ground. Cassie loved the blue-footed booby, not only for its politics (the males did their fair share of sitting on the eggs and caring for the chicks) but also because here was a creature for whom the distinctions between life, art, and shit were less obvious than commonly supposed.

On all sides, the grim Darwinian rhythms played out: crabs eating plankton, gannets devouring crabs, big fish preying on little fish, an eternal orgy of killing, feasting, digesting, eliminating. Never before had Cassie felt so connected to brute evolutionary truth. Here was Nature, real Nature, red in claw, white in ca-ca, stripped of all Rousseauistic sentiment, rhapsodic as a cold sore, romantic as a yeast infection.

With the last of her strength she shooed the birds away, then squatted, Joblike, amid the guano. Ironically, Cassie’s personal favorite among her plays, Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera, was a freewheeling sequel to Job. Two thousand years after being tortured, browbeaten, and bought off by God, the hero returns to the dung heap for a rematch.

Her tongue was a stone. She was too dry to weep. I shall not succumb to faith, she swore, staring across the vast, faceless sea. There are no atheists in foxholes. “Help,” Cassie rasped, cranking the transceiver. “Please. Help. The Beagle is a stupid name for a ship,” she groaned. “Beagles are dogs, not ships. Help. Please, God, it’s me,” muttered the lapsed Darwinist. “It’s Cassie Fowler. Saint Paul’s Rocks. Beagles are dogs. Please, God, help me.”

July 4.

Our fair republic’s birthday. Latitude: 20°9’N. Longitude: 37°15’W. Course: 170. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 1106 nautical miles.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Jehovah himself had sent that hurricane. Not only did we survive, we got carried 184 miles at 40 knots, and now we’re almost a day ahead of schedule.

A loaded tanker probably could’ve smashed those rollers apart, but we actually had to ride them — full speed ahead in the troughs, dead slow along the crests. There was so much foam, the waves turned pure white, as if the sea herself had died.

We had a good man at the helm, a moon-faced Jersey kid named Neil Weisinger, and somehow we bullied our way through, but only after a Marisat dome cracked in two and a starboard kingpost got torn out by the roots. Not to mention 4 lifeboats blown overboard, 15 shattered windows in the deckhouse, 2 broken arms, 1 sprained ankle.

On a normal voyage, whenever the crew gets drunk and rowdy, I can usually scare them into sobriety by waving a flare pistol around. But on this trip, if things go as I expect, we’ll eventually be arming the deckies with those damn antipredator weapons. I’m nervous, Popeye. A potted sailor and a T-62 bazooka are a bad combination.

It doesn’t matter that alcoholic beverages are forbidden in the U.S. Merchant Marine. We’re not a dry ship — this I know. Judging from past experience, I’d guess we left port with about 30 cases of contraband beer and 65 bottles of hidden liquor. Rum is especially popular, I’ve noticed over the years. Pirate fantasies, I think. I myself keep 4 bottles of mescal in the chart room, secluded under Madagascar.

To date we’ve had only one minor setback. The Vatican was supposed to send us the cream of its film collection, but either the reels never arrived or those Carmelites forgot to load them, and the only picture that actually made it on board is a 16mm pan-and-scan print of The Ten Commandments. So we’ve got this fancy theater and just one movie to run in it. It’s a pretty awful flick, and I suspect we’ll be chucking tomatoes at the screen long about the tenth showing.

There are 4 or 5 VCRs kicking around, and dozens of cassettes with titles like Babs Boffs Boston. We’ve even got the notorious Caligula. But such fare tends to leave about a third of the men and nearly all the women cold.

Whenever I slip Raphael’s feather from my sea chest and stare at it, the same questions run through my mind. Did my angel speak the truth? Is Dad really the one who can wash away the oil? Or was Raphael just making absolutely sure I’d accept the mission?

In any event, I’m figuring to return from the Arctic by way of Spain. I’ll dock in Cadiz, give the crew shore leave, and hop on the first bus to Valladolid.

“I did it,” I’ll tell him. “I got the job done.”

Although zero by zero degrees still lay half an ocean away, Thomas Ockham nevertheless found himself grappling night and day with the eschatological implications of a Corpus Dei. Beyond the information Rome explicitly requested — course, speed, position, estimated date of rendezvous — his daily faxes contained as much speculative theology as he thought the cardinals could stand.

“At first blush, Eminence,” he wrote to Di Luca on the Fourth of July, “the death of God is a scandalous and enervating notion. But do you remember the riches certain thinkers mined from this vein in the late fifties and early sixties? I’m thinking in particular of Roger Milton’s Post Mortem Dei, Gabriel Vahanian’s Culture of the Post-Christian Era, and Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God. True, these men had no actual body on their hands (nor do we, as of yet). I sense, however, that if we look beyond our immediate angst, we may find some surprises. In an odd way, this whole business is a ringing vindication of Judeo-Christianity (if I may use that mongrel and oxymoronic term), proof that we’ve been on to something all these centuries. From a robust theothanatology, I daresay, some surprising spiritual insights may emerge.”

Truth to tell, Thomas did not believe these brave words. Truth to tell, the idea of a robust theothanatology depressed him to the point of paralysis. A dark and violent country lay beyond the Corpus Dei, the old priest felt in his heart — a landfall toward which Ultra Large Crude Carriers sailed only at their peril.

“Dear Professor Ockham,” Di Luca wrote back on July 5, “at the moment we are not interested in Martin Buber or any other atheist egghead. We are interested in Anthony Van Horne. Did the angels pick the right man? Does the crew respect him? Was his decision to dive into Hurricane Beatrice wise or was it rash?”

In drafting his answer, Thomas addressed Di Luca’s concerns as forthrightly as he could. “Our captain knows his ropes, but I sometimes fear his zeal will jeopardize the mission. He’s obsessed with the OMNIVAC’s deadline. Yesterday we entered a new time zone, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that he ordered the clocks set forward…”

Thomas typed the reply on his portable Smith-Corona — the same antique on which he’d written The Mechanics of Grace. He signed his name with an angel feather dipped in India ink, then carried the letter up to the wheelhouse.

It was 1700, an hour into the second mate’s watch. From the very first, Big Joe Spicer had struck Thomas as the smartest officer aboard the Valparaíso, excluding Van Horne himself. Certainly he was the only officer who brought books to the bridge — real books, not collections of cat cartoons or paperback novels about telekinetic children.

“Good afternoon, Joe.”

“Hi there, Father.” Rotating ninety degrees in his swivel chair, the hulking navigator flashed a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. “Ever read this?”

“I assign it in Cosmology 412,” said Thomas, glancing nervously at the AB on duty, Leo Zook. The day before, he and the Evangelical had engaged in a brief, unsatisfactory argument about Charles Darwin, Zook being against evolution, Thomas pointing out its fundamental plausibility.

“If I understand this stuff,” said Spicer, drumming his knuckles on A Brief History of Time, “God’s out of a job.”

“Perhaps,” said Thomas.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Zook.

“In the Stephen Hawking universe,” said Spicer, pivoting toward the Evangelical, “there’s nothing for God to do.”

“Then Stephen Hawking is wrong,” said Zook.

“What would you know about it? You ever even heard of the Big Bang?”

“In the beginning was the Word.”

Thomas couldn’t decide whether Zook truly wished to discuss A Brief History of Time or whether he was irritating Spicer merely to relieve his boredom, the ship being on autopilot just then.

Declining the bait, the navigator turned back to Thomas. “Celebrating Mass today?”

“Fifteen hundred hours.”

“I’ll be there.”

Good, the priest thought — you, Follingsbee, Sister Miriam, Karl Jaworski, and nobody else. The sparsest parish this side of the prime meridian.

As Thomas started toward the radio shack, wondering which profited the world more — the rhapsodic atheism of a Hawking or the unshakable faith of a Zook — he nearly collided with Lianne Bliss. Eyes darting, she dashed up to the navigator, swiveling him like a barber aiming a customer at a mirror.

“Joe, call the boss!”

“Why?”

“Call him! SOS!”

Six minutes later Van Horne was on the bridge, hearing how a Hurricane Beatrice survivor named Cassie Fowler had evidently landed a rubber dinghy on Saint Paul’s Rocks.

“Could be a trap,” said the captain to Bliss. Fresh water dripped from his hair and beard, residue of an interrupted shower. “You didn’t break radio silence, did you?”

“No. Not that I didn’t want to. What do you mean, a trap?”

Saying nothing, Van Horne marched to the twelve-mile radar and stared intently at the target: a flock of migrating boobies, Thomas suspected. “Get on the horn, Sparks,” ordered the captain. “Tell the world we’re the Arco Fairbanks, due south of the Canaries. Whoever reports in, give ’em Fowler’s coordinates.”

“Is it necessary to lie?” asked Thomas.

“Every order I give is necessary. Otherwise I wouldn’t give it.”

“May I call the woman?” asked Bliss, starting back into the shack.

Van Horne ran his index finger around the radar screen, encircling the birds. “Tell her help is on the way. Period.”

At sundown Bliss returned to the bridge and offered her report. The Valparaíso was evidently the only ship within three hundred miles of Saint Paul’s Rocks. She’d contacted a dozen ports from Trinidad to Rio, and among those few Coast Guard officers and International Red Cross workers who understood her frantic mix of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, not one commanded a plane or chopper with enough fuel capacity to get halfway across the Atlantic and back.

“What did Fowler say when you called her?” asked Thomas.

“She wanted to know if I was an angel.”

“What did you tell her?”

Bliss shot an angry scowl toward Van Horne. “I told her I wasn’t authorized to answer.”

Setting A Brief History of Time atop the Marisat terminal, Spicer strode to the helm and snapped off the autopilot. “Course two-seven-three, right?”

“No,” said Van Horne. “We’re holding.”

“Holding?” said Zook, grabbing the wheel.

“You’re joking,” said Spicer.

“I can’t throw twenty-four hours away, Joe. That’s everything we gained from Beatrice. Put us back on iron mike.”

Thomas bit down, his molars clamping the soft flesh of his inner cheeks. Never before had he faced such a dilemma. Did the Christian course lie west, along the equator, or southeast, toward God? How many divine brain cells equaled a single human castaway? A million? A thousand? Ten? Two? His skepticism regarding the OMNIVAC’s prediction did little to relieve his anxiety. Even one salvaged neuron might eventually prove so scientifically and spiritually valuable it would start to seem worth a dozen castaways — two dozen castaways — three dozen — four — the lives of all the castaways since Jonah.

Except that Jonah had been delivered, hadn’t he?

The whale had vomited him out.

“Captain, you must bring us about,” said Thomas.

Snatching up the bridge binoculars, Van Horne issued an angry snort. “What?”

“I’m telling you to bring us about. Turn the Val around and point her toward Saint Paul’s Rocks.”

“You seem to have forgotten who’s commanding this operation.”

“And you seem to have forgotten who’s paying for it. Don’t imagine you can’t be replaced, sir. If the cardinals hear you neglected an obvious Christian duty, they won’t hesitate to airlift in a new skipper.”

“I think we should talk in my cabin.”

“I think we should bring the ship about.”

Van Horne raised the binoculars and, inverting them, looked at Thomas through the wrong ends, as if by diminishing the priest’s size he could also diminish his authority.

“Joe.”

“Sir?”

“I want you to plot us a new course.”

“Destination?”

Mouth hardening, eyes narrowing, Van Horne slid the binoculars into their canvas bin. “That guano farm in the middle of the Atlantic.”

“Good,” said Thomas. “Very good,” he added, wondering how, exactly, he would justify this detour to Di Luca, Orselli, and Pope Innocent XIV. “Believe me, Anthony, acts of compassion are the only epitaph He wants.”

DIRGE

WHEN CASSIE FOWLER awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?

It was, of course, a pious place. A small ceramic Christ with blue eyes and cherry red lips hung bleeding on the far wall. A gaunt, rawboned priest hovered by her pillow. At the foot of her bed a large man loomed, his gray beard and broken nose evoking every Old Testament prophet she’d ever taught herself to mistrust.

“You’re looking much better.” The priest rested his palm against her blistered cheek. “I’m afraid there’s no physician on board, but our chief mate believes you’re suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion combined with dehydration and a bad sunburn. We’ve been buttering you with Noxzema.”

Gradually, like cotton candy dissolving in a child’s mouth, the fog evaporated from Cassie’s mind. On board, he’d said. Chief mate, he’d said.

“I’m on a ship?”

The priest gestured toward the prophet. “The SS Valparaíso, under the command of Captain Anthony Van Horne. Call me Father Thomas.”

Memories came. Maritime Adventures… Beagle II … Hurricane Beatrice… Saint Paul’s Rocks. “The famous Valparaíso? The oil-spill Valparaíso?”

“The Carpco Valparaíso,” said the captain frostily.

As Cassie sat up, the medicinal stench of camphor filled her nostrils. Pain shot through her shoulders and thighs: the terrible bite of the equatorial sun, her red skin screaming beneath its coating of Noxzema. Good God, she was alive, a winner, a golden girl, a beater of the odds. “How come I’m not thirsty?”

“When you weren’t babbling your brains out,” said the priest, “you consumed nearly a gallon of fresh water.”

The captain stepped into the light, holding out a tangerine. He was better looking than she’d initially supposed, with a Byronesque forehead and the sort of sorrowful, vulnerable virility commonly found in male soap-opera stars on their way down.

“Hungry?”

“Famished.” Receiving the tangerine, Cassie worked her thumb into its north pole, then began peeling it. “Did I really babble?”

“Quite a bit,” said Van Horne.

“About what?”

“Norway rats. Your father died of emphysema. In your youth you wrote plays. Oliver — your boyfriend, we presume — fancies himself a painter.”

Cassie grunted, half from astonishment, half from annoyance. “Fancies himself a painter,” she corroborated.

“You’re not sure you want to marry him.”

“Well, who’s ever sure?”

The captain shrugged.

She broke off a quadrisphere of tangerine and chewed. The pulp tasted sweet, wet, crisp — alive. She savored the word, the holy vocable. Alive, alive.

“Alive,” she said aloud, and even before the second syllable passed her lips, she felt her exhilaration slipping away. “Thirty-three passengers,” she muttered, her voice at once mournful and bitter. “Ten sailors…”

Father Thomas nodded empathically. His eyebrows, she noticed, extended onto the bridge of his nose, meshing like two gray caterpillars in the act of kissing. “It’s tragic,” he said.

“God killed them with His hurricane,” she said.

“God had nothing to do with it.”

“Actually I agree with you, though for reasons quite different from yours.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” said the priest cryptically.

Cassie finished her tangerine. In her irreverent sequel to Job, the hero’s mistress kept repeating a line from the original, over and over. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

“This your cabin?” she asked, pointing to the ceramic Christ.

“Was. I’ve moved.”

“You forgot your crucifix.”

“I left it here on purpose,” said Father Thomas without elaboration.

“Excuse my ignorance,” said Cassie, “but do oil tankers normally carry clergy?”

“This isn’t a normal voyage, Dr. Fowler.” The priest’s eyes grew wide and wild, darting every which way like bees who’d lost track of their hive. “Abnormal, in fact.”

“Once our mission’s accomplished,” said the captain, “we’ll ferry you back to the States.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“For the next nine weeks,” said Van Horne, “you’ll be our guest.”

Cassie scowled, her broiled body hardening with confusion and anger. “Nine weeks? Nine weeks? No, folks, I start teaching at the end of August.”

“Sorry.”

“Send for a helicopter, okay?” Slowly, like some heroic, evolution-minded fish hauling itself onto dry land, she rose from the berth, and only after her feet touched the green shag carpet did she bother to wonder whether she was clothed. “Do you understand?” Looking down, she saw that someone had swapped her bikini for a kimono printed with zodiac signs. Glued by Noxzema, the silk stuck to her skin in large amorphous patches. “I want you to charter me an International Red Cross helicopter, the sooner the better.”

“I’m not authorized to report our position to the International Red Cross,” said Van Horne.

“Please — my mother, she’ll go nuts,” Cassie protested, not knowing whether to sound desperate or furious. “Oliver, too. Please…”

“We’ll allow you one brief message home.”

An old scenario, and Cassie hated it, the patriarchy wielding its power. Yeah, lady, I think we might eventually get around to fixing your reduction gear, as if you knew what the hell a reduction gear is. “Where’s the phone?”

Blue veins bulged from Van Horne’s brow. “We’re not offering you a phone, Dr. Fowler. The Valparaíso isn’t some farmhouse you stumbled into after getting a flat tire.”

“So what are you offering me?”

“All communication goes through our radio shack up on the bridge.”

A spasm of sunburn pain tore through Cassie’s neck and back as she followed Father Thomas down a gleaming mahogany corridor and into the sudden claustrophobia of an elevator car. She closed her eyes and grimaced.

“Who’s Runkleberg?” the priest asked as they ascended.

“I babbled about Runkleberg? I haven’t thought of him in years.”

“Another boyfriend?”

“A character in one of my plays. Runkleberg’s my twentieth-century Abraham. One fine morning he’s out watering his roses, and he hears God’s voice telling him to sacrifice his son.”

“Does he obey?”

“His wife intervenes.”

“How?”

“She castrates him with his hedge clippers, and he bleeds to death.”

The priest gulped audibly. The elevator halted on the seventh floor.

“Biology and theater” — he guided them down another glossy corridor — “the two disciplines aren’t normally pursued by the same person.”

“Father, I simply can’t stay on this boat.”

“But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the biologist and the dramatist have much in common.”

“Not for nine weeks. I have to clean up my office, prepare my lectures…”

“Explorers, right? The biologist seeks to discover Nature’s laws, the dramatist her truths.”

“Nine weeks is out of the question. I’ll die of boredom.”

The Valparaíso’s radio shack was a congestion of transceivers, keyboards, fax machines, and telex terminals threaded together by coaxial cables. In the middle of the mess lounged a slender young woman with carrot-colored hair and skin the complexion of provolone. Cassie smiled, grateful for the two metal buttons pinned to the radio officer’s red camisole: a clenched fist sprouting from the medical symbol for Woman, and the motto MEN HAVE UTERUS ENVY. Only the officer’s pendant, a quartz crystal housed in silver, gave Cassie pause, but she had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds — crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca — her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.

“I like your buttons.”

“You look good in my kimono,” said the radio officer in a voice so deep it might have come from someone twice her size.

“She gets one telegram, Sparks,” said Father Thomas, backing out of the shack. “Twenty-five words to her mother — period. Nothing about a ship called the Valparaíso.”

“Roger.” The woman stretched out her bare arm, its biceps decorated with a tattoo of a svelte sea goddess riding the waves like a surfboard passenger. “Lianne Bliss, Sagittarius. I’m the one who picked up your SOS.”

The biologist shook Lianne BJiss’s hand, slick with equatorial sweat. “I’m Cassie Fowler.”

“I know. You’ve had quite an adventure, Cassie Fowler. You drew the Death card, then Fate reversed it.”

“Huh?”

“Tarot talk.”

“ ’Fraid I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“You don’t believe in Oliver either.”

“Jesus.”

“There are no private lives on a supertanker, Cassie. The sooner you learn that, the better. Okay, so the boy’s got a bankroll, but I still think you should drop him. He sounds like a popinjay.”

“Oliver sends back the wine,” Cassie admitted, frowning.

“I gather he plans to be the next Van Gogh.”

“Much too sane. A Sunday painter at best… I’m alive, aren’t I, Lianne? Incredible.”

“You’re alive, sweetie.”

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Extending her index finger, Cassie fiddled with a disembodied telegraph key, absently tapping out gibberish. “Now that all my secrets have been revealed, what about yours? Do you hate your job?”

“I love my job. I get to eavesdrop on the whole damn planet. On a clear night I might tune in a Tokyo businessman and his mistress having cellular-phone sex, a couple of ham-radio drug dealers planning an opium drop in Hong Kong, some neo-Nazis ranting to each other on their CBs in Berlin. I can pipe everything through to the deckies’ quarters, and you know what they really want? Baseball from the States! What a waste. If I ever hear another Yankees game, I’ll puke.” She lifted a blue Carpco pencil to her mouth and licked the point. “So — what do we tell Mom?”

The radio shack, Cassie decided, would make a great set for a play. She imagined a one-act satire laid entirely in heaven’s central communications complex, God working the dials, bypassing the screams of pain and the cries for help as He attempts to pick up Yankee Stadium.

Closing her eyes, she brought her mother into focus: Rebecca Fowler of Hollis, New Hampshire, a cheerful and energetic Unitarian minister whose iconoclasm ran so deep it shocked even her own congregation. BEAGLE II SUNK BY HURRICANE… I’M SOLE SURVIVOR… PLEASE TELL OLIVER…

Her thoughts drifted. Mission, Anthony Van Horne had said, a ship with a mission — and from the peculiar countenance Father Thomas had assumed back in his cabin, it was the most portentous mission since Saul of Tarsus had suffered an epileptic seizure and called it Christianity.

“I gather this isn’t a regular voyage.”

Lianne tugged on her UTERUS ENVY button. “It’s a goddamn cover-up, Cassie. Evidently Holy Mother Church has detected some huge tarball coagulating off Africa, but she’s promised to keep the matter quiet if Carpco ropes the sucker in and gives it to charity. Personally, I think the whole arrangement stinks.”

“I’m a charter member of the Central Park West Enlightenment League,” said Cassie with a knowing nod, as if it went without saying that any charter member of the Central Park West Enlightenment League needn’t be instructed in the defects of Holy Mother Church. “A vital organization, I believe, a real bulwark” — she pointed to Lianne’s pendant — “though you wouldn’t like our opinion of those things.”

“Small tits?”

“Magic crystals.”

“It got rid of my herpes.”

“I doubt that.”

“You have a better explanation?”

“The placebo effect.”

“Know what, Cassie Fowler? You should spend more time on ships. Standing lookout in the bow, with the ocean roaring all around you and the entire universe spread over your head — well, you just know there’s some sort of eternal presence out there.”

“An old man with a beard?” said Cassie, suppressing a sneer.

“Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.”

July 12.

Two days ago we reached our destination, 0°0’N, 0°0’E, 600 miles off the coast of Gabon. Both scopes remained clear, and I should’ve expected as much — Raphael told me the body’s been drifting.

I guess I was hoping we’d find something.

Our search pattern is an ever-expanding spiral, south to north, west to east, north to south, east to west, south to north, a course that should bring us within sight of Sao Tome by Tuesday. We’re weaving a net in the sea, Popeye. Big gaps. But then again: big fish.

Crock O’Connor’s still giving me my 18 knots, which means we’ll hit the equator twice more before midnight.

That Cassie Fowler hates me, I can tell. No doubt she’s one of those. Tree huggers, bug lovers, squid kissers — I can spot them a mile away, people for whom a polluter like Anthony Van Horne deserves to be eaten alive by ferrets. But I must say this: she’s an appealing lady, voluptuous as old Lorelei here on my arm, with frizzy black hair and one of those long, horsy faces that look comical one minute, beautiful the next. I’ve decided to put her to work — scraping rust, maybe scrubbing a John or two. On the Carpco Valparaíso there are no free riders.

At dinner I issued a standing order. “Call me the minute anything odd shows on either scope, night or day.” To which Joe Spicer replied, suspiciously, “All this fuss over a lousy hunk of asphalt.”

We’re not a happy ship, Popeye. The crew’s fed up. They’re sick of steaming in circles and seeing The Ten Commandments and wondering what I’m hiding from them.

Every time we cross 0° north, Spicer drops a penny on the equator.

“For luck,” he says.

“We’ll need it,” I tell him.

“Captain, this is strange…”

Anthony recognized his navigator’s voice, crackling out of the intercom speaker: his navigator’s voice, and more — the same mix of incredulity and fear with which First Mate Buzzy Longchamps had delivered his verdict, Sir, I think we’re in a peck of trouble, the night the Val slammed into Bolivar Reef.

He lurched toward the wall-mounted intercom, tearing at the sheets, clawing his way through his insomniac’s daze. “Strange?” he mumbled, pressing the switch. “What’s strange?”

“Sorry to wake you,” said Big Joe Spicer, “but we’ve got ourselves a target.”

Climbing out of his bunk, Anthony picked a tiny grain of sand from his eye and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, then glanced around for his shoes. He was otherwise fully dressed, right down to his ratty pea jacket and canvas Mets cap. Ever since reaching zero-by-zero, he’d stripped his life of irrelevancies, eating sporadically, sleeping in his clothes, letting his beard grow wild. For seventy-two hours, his mind had known only the hunt.

He grabbed his Carpco mug, shoved his knobby feet into his tennis shoes, and, without bothering to lace them, sprinted to the elevator.

A soft glow lit the bridge: radar scopes, collision-avoidance system, Marisat terminal, clock. It was 0247. Spicer stood hunched over the twelve-mile radar, fiddling with the rain-snow clutter control. “Captain, I’ve seen my brother-in-law’s laserdisc of Deep Throat and just about every episode of Green Acres, and I swear to you” — he pointed to the target — “that’s gotta be the weirdest thing ever to show on a cathode-ray tube.”

“Fog bank?”

“That’s what it looked like on the fifty-mile scope, but no more. This sucker’s got bulk.”

“Sгo Tomй?”

“I checked our position three times. S гo Tomй’s fifteen miles in the opposite direction.”

“The asphalt?”

“Much too big.”

Anthony made a fist. His chest tightened. The mermaid on his forearm grew tense. “Steady,” he told the AB at the helm, the brawny Lakota Sioux, James Echohawk.

“Steady,” said Echohawk.

Anthony locked his bleary eyes on the scope. The screen displayed a long jagged blob, momentous as a shadow on a lung X-ray. Fuzzy, shapeless — and yet he knew exactly Whose electronically graven image he was beholding.

“So what is it?” asked Spicer.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Anthony grasped the throttles, dropping both screws to sixty-five rpm’s. He hadn’t pushed his ship past the recommended speeds and driven her through Hurricane Beatrice just so they could smash into their cargo and sink. “I’ll stand the rest of your watch for you, Joe. Go grab some sleep.”

The second mate looked into his captain’s eyes. Silent signals traveled between the men. The last time an officer had left the bridge of the Valparaíso, eleven million gallons of oil had poured into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Thanks, Captain,” said Spicer, joining Anthony at the console, “but I think I’ll stick around.”

“How’s Follingsbee’s coffee tonight?” Anthony asked the helmsman. “Strong enough?”

“You could prime a kingpost with it, sir,” said Echohawk.

“Let’s drop her another notch, Joe. Sixty rpm’s.”

“Aye. Sixty.”

Anthony seized the Exxon thermos, splashing jamoke into the stained interior of his Carpco mug. “Come left ten degrees,” he said, eyes locked on the radar. “Steady up on zero-seven-five.”

“Zero-seven-five,” Echohawk replied.

“Glass falling,” said Spicer, fixing on the barometer. “Down to nine-nine-six.”

Lifting the bridge binoculars from their bin, Anthony gazed through the grimy, rain-beaded windshield toward the horizon. Glass falling: quite so. Lightning flashed, dropping from heaven like a crooked gangway, illuminating a hundred thousand white-caps. Fat gray clouds hung in the northern sky like acromegalic sheep.

“Fifty-five rpm’s.”

“Fifty-five.”

Anthony gulped his coffee. Hot, marvelously hot, but not enough to thaw his bowels. “Joe, I want you to place a call to Father Ockham’s quarters,” he ordered, pulling back the door to the starboard wing. The storm rushed in, spattering his face, twisting the fringes of his beard. “Tell him to transport his ass up here on the double.”

“It’s three A.M., sir.”

“He wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Anthony, starting out of the wheelhouse.

“Glass still falling!” the second mate shouted after him. “Nine-eight-seven!”

The instant Anthony stepped into the turbulent night, the odor hit him, roiling across the bridge wing. Sharp and gravid, oddly sweet, not so much the stink of death as the fragrance of transformation: leaves festering in damp gutters, jack-o’-lanterns wrinkling on suburban doorsteps, bananas softening inside their leathery black peels. “Fifty rpm’s, Joe!” he screamed through the open door.

“Fifty, sir!”

Then came the sound, thick and layered, a kind of choral moan hovering above the drone of the engines and the roar of the Atlantic. Anthony raised the binoculars. A long, brilliant trident of electricity speared the sea. Another ten minutes, he figured, certainly no more than fifteen, and they’d have visual contact…

“That sound,” said Father Ockham, pulling on his Panama hat and buttoning his black vinyl raincoat as he hurried onto the wing.

“Odd, isn’t it?”

Sad.

“What do you suppose… ?”

“A dirge.”

“Huh?”

Even as Ockham repeated the word, a lightning bolt revealed the truth of it. Dirge, oh, yes. In the sudden brightness Anthony saw the mourners, flopping and rolling over the boiling sea, swarming across the churning sky. Pods of bereaved narwhals to starboard, herds of bereft rorquals to port, flocks of orphaned cormorants above. Flash, and more species still, herring gulls, great skuas, fulmars, shearwaters, petrels, prions, puffins, leopard seals, ringed seals, harbor seals, belugas, manatees — multitudes upon multitudes, most of them hundreds of miles from habitat and home, their voices rising in preternatural grief, a blend of every seaborne lung and aquatic larynx God had ever placed on earth.

“Come right ten degrees!”

“Right ten!”

“Forty-five rpm’s!”

“Forty-five!”

Miraculously, each tongue kept its identity even as it joined the general lament. Closing his eyes, Anthony grasped the rail and listened, awed by the bottlenose dolphins’ whistled elegies, the sea lions’ throaty orations, and the low coarse keening of a thousand frigate birds.

“The smell,” said the priest. “It’s rather…”

“Fruity?”

“Exactly. He hasn’t started to turn.”

Anthony opened his eyes. “Joe, forty rpm’s!”

“Forty, sir!”

Flash, a massive something, bearing zero-one-five.

Flash, a series of tall rounded forms, all aspiring to heaven.

Flash, the forms again, like mountains spread along a seacoast, each higher than the next.

“You saw that?”

“I saw,” said the priest.

“And… ?”

Ockharn, shivering, slipped a Sony Handicam from his raincoat pocket. “I think it’s the toes.”

“The what?”

“Toes. I just lost a small wager. Sister Miriam believed He’d be supine” — Ockham choked up — “whereas I assumed…”

“Supine,” Anthony echoed. “He’s smiling, Raphael told me. You in trouble, Thomas?”

The priest tried sighting through the Handicam’s viewfinder, but he was trembling too badly to connect eye with eyecup. Rain and tears spilled down his face in equal measure. “I’ll get over it.”

“You aren’t gonna faint, are you?”

“I said I’ll get over it.” On his second attempt, Ockham managed to elevate the Handicam and fire off a quick burst of tape. “It’s rather poetic, seeing the toes first. The word has special meaning in my field. T-O-E: Theory of Everything.”

“Everything?”

“We’re looking for one, we cosmologists.” The priest panned across the phalanxes of mourners. “At the moment, we’ve got TOE equations that work on the submicroscopic level, but nothing that” — his voice splintered — “handles gravity too. It’s so horrible.”

“Not having a TOE?”

“Not having a heavenly Father.”

Another celestial explosion. Yes, Anthony decided, no question: ten pale and craggy toes, stiff with rigor mortis, arching into the gloomy sky like onion domes crowning a Byzantine city.

“Dead slow!”

“Dead slow!”

“Wish I could help you,” said Anthony.

“Just try to understand.” The priest returned the Handicam to his raincoat pocket and pulled off his bifocals. “Try to understand,” he said again, wiping the lenses with his sleeve. “Try,” groaned Father Thomas Ockham, calling above the storm, the sea, and the mad, ragged music of the wake.

In the old days, Neil Weisinger mused, merchant ships had galley slaves: thieves and murderers who died chained to their oars. Today they had able-bodied seamen: fools and dupes who keeled over gripping their pneumatic Black and Decker needle guns. Chip and paint, chip and paint, all you did was chip and paint. Even on so extraordinary a voyage as this — a voyage on which a huge pulpy island lay off your starboard quarter, tirelessly attended by moaning whales and squawking birds — you got no relief from chipping, no respite from painting.

Neil was on the fo’c’sle deck, chipping rust off a samson post, when a voice screeched out of the PA system, overpowering the noise of his needle gun and penetrating the rubber plugs in his ears. “Ship’s-com-pan-y!” cried Marbles Rafferty, the gun’s racket fracturing his words into syllables. “Now-hear-this! All-hands-re-port-to-off-i-cers’-ward-room-at-six-teen-fif-teen-hours!”

Neil killed the gun, popped the earplugs.

“Repeat: all hands report…”

Ever since Neil’s Aunt Sarah had come to him at Yeshiva and insisted that he stop wallowing in grief — it had been over five years, she pointed out, since his parents’ deaths — the AB had labored to avoid self-pity. Life is intrinsically tragic, his aunt had lectured him. It’s time you got used to it.

“…sixteen-fifteen hours.”

But there were moments, such as now, when self-pity seemed the only appropriate emotion. 1615 hours: right after he got off duty. He’d been planning to spend the break in his cabin, reading a Star Trek novel and nursing a contraband Budweiser.

Dipping his wire brush into the HCL bottle, Neil lifted the acid-soaked bristles free and began basting the corroded post. Dialogue drifted through his mind, verbal gems from The Ten Commandments. “Beauty is but a curse to our women…” “So let it be written, so let it be done…” “The people have been plagued by thirst! They’ve been plagued by frogs, by lice, by flies, by sickness, by boils! They can endure no more!” The Val had left New York with only one movie in her hold, but at least it was a good one.

It took him over twenty minutes to wash up. Despite his earplugs, goggles, mask, cap, and jumpsuit, the rust had gotten through, clinging to his hair like red dandruff, covering his chest like metallic eczema, and so he was the last sailor to arrive.

He’d never been on level five before. Twentieth-century ABs got invited to their officers’ wardrooms about as often as fourteenth-century Jews got invited to the Alhambra. Billiard table, crystal chandeliers, teakwood paneling, Oriental rug, silver coffee urn, mahogany bar … so this was his bosses’ tawdry little secret: spend your watches mixing with the mob, pretending you’re just another packet rat, then slip away to the Waldorf-Astoria for a cocktail. As far as Neil could tell, everyone on board was there (officers, deckies, priest, even that castaway, Cassie Fowler, red and peeling but on the whole looking far healthier than when they’d pulled her off Saint Paul’s Rocks), with the exceptions of Lou Chickering, probably down in the engine flat, and Big Joe Spicer, doubtless on the bridge making sure they didn’t collide with the island.

Van Horne stood atop the mahogany bar, outfitted in his dress blues, the sobriety of the dark serge intermittently relieved by brass buttons and gold piping. “Well, sailors, we’ve all seen it, we’ve all smelled it,” he told the assembled company. “Believe me, there’s never been such a corpse before, none so large, none so important.”

Third Mate Dolores Haycox shifted her weight from one tree-stump leg to the other. “A corpse, sir? You say it’s a corpse?”

A corpse? thought Neil.

“A corpse,” said Van Horne. “Now — any guesses?”

“A whale?” ventured gnomish little Charlie Horrocks, the pumpman.

“No whale could be that huge, could it?”

“I suppose not,” said Horrocks.

“A dinosaur?” offered Isabel Bostwick, an Amazonian wiper with buck teeth and a buzz cut.

“You’re not thinking on the right scale.”

“An outer-space alien?” said the alcoholic bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, his face so ravaged by acne it looked like a used archery target.

“No. Not an outer-space alien — not exactly. Our friend Father Thomas has a theory for you.”

Slowly, with great dignity, the priest walked in a wide loop, circling the company, corralling them with his stride. “How many of you believe in God?”

Rumblings of surprise filled the wardroom, echoing off the teakwood. Leo Zook’s hand shot up. Cassie Fowler burst into giggles.

“Depends on what you mean by God,” said Lianne Bliss.

“Don’t analyze, just answer.”

One by one, the sailors reached skyward, fingers wiggling, arms swaying, until the wardroom came to resemble a garden of anemones. Neil joined the consensus. Why not? Didn’t he have his enigmatic something-or-other, his En Sof, his God of the four A.M. watch? He counted a mere half-dozen atheists: Fowler, Wheatstone, Bostwick, a corpulent demac named Stubby Barnes, a spidery black pastry chef named Willie Pindar, and Ralph Mungo, the decrepit guy from the union hall with the I LOVE BRENDA tattoo — and of these six only Fowler seemed confident, going so far as to thrust both hands into the pockets of her khaki shorts.

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” said Leo Zook, “maker of heaven and earth, and in His only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord…”

The priest cleared his throat, his Adam’s apple bumping against his Roman collar. “Keep your hand up if you think that God is essentially a spirit — an invisible, formless spirit.”

Not one hand dropped.

“Okay. Now. Keep your hand up if you think that, when all is said and done, our Creator is quite a bit like a person — a powerful, stupendous, gigantic person, complete with bones, muscles…”

The vast majority of arms descended, Neil’s among them. Spirit and flesh: God couldn’t be both. He wondered about the three sailors whose arms remained aloft.

“Now you’re talking about Jesus Christ,” said Zook, his hand fluttering about like a drunken hummingbird.

“No,” said the priest. “I’m not talking about Jesus Christ.”

A falling sensation overcame Neil. Reaching into his jeans, he squeezed the bronze medal his grandfather had received for smuggling refugees to the nascent nation of Israel. “Wait a minute, Father, sir. Are you saying… ?” Gulping, he repeated himself. “Are you saying… ?”

“Yes. I am.”

Whereupon Father Thomas lifted a gleaming white ball from the billiard table, tossed it straight up, caught it, and proceeded to relate the most grotesque and disorienting story Neil had heard since learning that the Datsun containing his parents had fallen between the spans of an open drawbridge in Woods Hole, Cape Cod, and vanished beneath the mud. Among its assorted absurdities, the priest’s tale included not only a dead deity and a prescient computer, but also weeping angels, confused cardinals, mourning narwhals, and a hollowed-out iceberg jammed against the island of Kvitoya.

As soon as he was finished, Dolores Haycox jabbed her thick index finger toward Van Horne. “You told us it was asphalt,” she whined. “Asphalt, you said.”

“I lied,” the captain admitted.

From the middle of the crowd, the squat and wan chief engineer, Crock O’Connor, piped up. “I’d like to say something,” he drawled, wiping his oily hands on his Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Steam burns dappled his cheeks and arms. “I’d like to say that, in all my thirty years at sea, I never heard such a pile of pasteurized, homogenized, cold-filtered horseshit.”

The priest’s voice remained measured and calm. “You may be correct, Mr. O’Connor. But then how are we to interpret the evidence currently floating off our starboard quarter?”

“A snare set by Satan,” Zook replied instantly. “He’s testing our faith.”

“A UFO made of flesh,” said Chief Steward Sam Follingsbee.

“The Loch Ness Monster,” said Karl Jaworski.

“One of them government biology experiments,” said Ralph Mungo, “gotten way outta hand.”

“I’ll bet it’s just rubber,” said James Echohawk.

“Yeah,” said Willie Pindar. “Rubber and fiberglass and such…”

“Okay, maybe a deity,” said Bud Ramsey, the chicken-necked, weasel-faced second assistant engineer, “but certainly not God Himself.”

Silence settled over the wardroom, heavy as a kedge anchor, thick as North Sea fog.

The sailors of the Valparaíso looked at each other, slowly, with pained eyes.

God’s dead body.

Oh, yes.

“But is He really gone?” asked Horrocks in a high, gelded voice. “Totally and completely gone?”

“The OMNIVAC predicted a few surviving neurons,” said Father Thomas, “but I believe it’s working with faulty data. Still, each of us has the right to entertain his own private hopes.”

“Why doesn’t the sky turn black?” demanded Jaworski. “Why doesn’t the sea dry up and the sun blink out? Why aren’t the mountains crumbling, forests toppling over, stars falling from heaven?”

“Evidently we’re living in a noncontingent, Newtonian sort of universe,” Father Thomas replied. “The clock continues ticking even after the Clockmaker departs.”

“Okay, okay, but what’s the reason for His death?” asked O’Connor. “There’s gotta be a reason.”

“At the moment, the mystery of our Creator’s passing is as dense as the mystery of His advent. Gabriel urged me to keep thinking about the problem. He believed that, by journey’s end, the answer would become clear.”

What followed was a theological free-for-all, the only time, Neil surmised, that a supertanker’s entire crew had engaged in a marathon discussion of something other than professional sports. Dinnertime came and went. The new moon rose. The sailors grew schizoid, a company of Jekyll-and-Hydes, their bouts of Weltschmerz alternating with fresh denials (a CIA plot, a sea serpent, an inflatable dummy, a movie prop), then back to Weltschmerz, then more denials still (communism’s last gasp, the Colossus of Rhodes emerging from the seabed, a distraction concocted by the Trilateral Commission, a faз ade concealing something truly bizarre). Neil’s own reactions bewildered him. He was not sad — how could he be sad? Losing this particular Supreme Being was like losing some relative you barely knew, the shadowy Uncle Ezra who gave you a fifty-dollar bill at your bar mitzvah and forthwith disappeared. What Neil experienced just then was freedom. He’d never believed in the stern, bearded God of Abraham, yet in some paradoxical way he’d always felt accountable to that nonexistent deity’s laws. But now YHWH wasn’t watching. Now the rules no longer applied.

“Guess what, sailors?” Van Horne jumped from the mahogany bar to the Oriental rug. “I’m canceling all duties for the next twenty-four hours. No chipping, no painting — and you won’t lose one red cent in pay.” Never before in nautical history, Neil speculated, had such an announcement failed to provoke a single cheer. “From this moment until 2200,” said the captain, “Father Thomas and Sister Miriam will be available in their cabins for private consultations. And tomorrow — well, tomorrow we start doing what’s expected of us, right? How about it? Are we merchant mariners? Are we ready to move the goods? Can you give me an aye on that?”

About a third of the deckies, Neil among them, sang out with a choked and hesitant “Aye.”

“Are we ready to lay our Creator in a faraway Arctic tomb?” asked Van Horne. “Let me hear you. Aye!”

This time over half the room joined in. “Aye!”

A high, watery howl arose, shooting from Zook’s mouth like vomitus. The Evangelical dropped to his knees, clasping his hands in fear and supplication, shivering violently. To Neil he looked like a man enduring the monstrously conscious moment that follows hara-kiri: a man beholding his own steaming bowels.

Father Thomas sprinted over, helped the distraught AB to his feet, and guided him out of the wardroom. The priest’s compassion impressed Neil, and yet he sensed that such gestures alone would not save the Valparaíso from the terrible freedom to which she was about to hitch herself. Inevitably the climax of The Ten Commandments flashed through his brain: Moses hurling the Tablets of the Law to the ground and thus depriving the Israelites of their moral compass, leaving them uncertain where God stood on adultery, theft, and murder.

“Ship’s company — dismissed!”

Then said Jesus unto His disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me.”

Amen, thought Thomas Ockham as, wrapped in the tight rubbery privacy of his wetsuit, he made his way beneath the Gulf of Guinea. Except that the Cross in this instance was a huge kedge anchor, the Via Dolorosa an unmarked channel between the Valparaíso’s keel and the Corpus Dei. Although a PADI-certified diver, Thomas hadn’t been underwater in over fifteen years — not since joining Jacques Cousteau on his celebrated descent into the submarine crater of the volcano that destroyed the ancient Greek civilization of Thera — and he didn’t feel entirely sure of himself. But, then, who could feel entirely sure of himself while seeking to affix a thirty-foot, twenty-ton anchor to his Creator?

The dozen divers who constituted Team A had distributed themselves evenly along the kedge: Marbles Rafferty at the crown, Charlie Horrocks on the left fluke, Thomas on the right, James Echohawk and Eddie Wheatstone handling the shank, the others holding up the stock, the ring, and the first five links of the chain. Sixty yards to the south, Joe Spicer’s Team B was presumably keeping pace, bearing their own kedge, but a curtain of bubbles and murk prevented Thomas from knowing for sure.

Arms raised, palms turned upward, the twelve men worked their flippers, carrying the anchor over their heads like Iroquois portaging a gargantuan war canoe. Within twenty minutes the divine pate, slightly balding, appeared. Thomas lifted his wrist, checked his depth gauge. Fifty-four feet, just right: their buoyancy compensators were inflated sufficiently to counterweight the anchor but were not so full as to float the divers above their target. Local inhabitants drifted by — a giant grouper, a pea-green sawfish, a school of croakers — either grieving in silence or keening below the threshold of Thomas’s hearing, for the only sounds he perceived were his own bubbly breaths and the occasional clang of an oxygen tank hitting the kedge.

Wriggling to the left, the divers swam past a great swaying carpet of hair and aligned themselves with His ear. At Rafferty’s signal, each man reached down and switched on the searchlight strapped to his utility belt. The beams played across the ear’s numerous folds and crannies, painting deep curved shadows along the feature known as Darwin’s tubercle. Thomas shuddered. In the case of Homo sapiens sapiens, at least, Darwin’s tubercle was considered a prime argument for evolutionary theory: the manifest vestige of a prick-eared ancestor. What in the world did it mean for God Himself to be sporting these cartilaginous mounds?

They finned their way through the concha and into the external auditory meatus. Queasiness spread through the priest. Should they really be doing this? Did they truly have the right? Stalactites of calcified wax hung from the roof of the ear canal. Life clung to its walls: clusters of sargasso, a bumper crop of sea cucumbers. Thomas’s left flipper brushed an echinoderm, a five-pointed Asterias rubens floating through the cavern like some forsaken Star of Bethlehem.

It had taken the priest all morning to convince Crock O’Connor and the rest of the engine-flat crew that opening God’s tympanic membranes would not be sacrilegious — heaven wanted this tow, Thomas had insisted, displaying Gabriel’s feather — and now the fruits of their efforts loomed before him. Fashioned with pickaxes, ice choppers, and waterproof chain saws, the ragged slit ran vertically for fifty feet, like the entrance to a circus tent straight from the grandest dreams of P. T. Barnum.

As the dozen men bore their burden through the violated drum, Thomas’s awe became complete. God’s own ear, the very organ through which He’d heard Himself say, “Let there be light,” the exact apparatus through which the Big Bang’s aftershock had reached His brain. Again Rafferty signaled, and the divers thrashed their flippers vigorously, stirring up tornadoes of bubbles and maelstroms of sloughed cells. Inch by inch, the anchor ascended, rising past the undulating cilia that lined the membrane’s inner surface, finally coming to rest against the huge and delicate bones of the middle ear. Malleus, incus, stapes, Thomas recited to himself as the searchlights struck the massive triad. Hammer, anvil, stirrup.

Another sign from Rafferty. Team A moved with a single mind, guiding the anchor’s right fluke over the long, firm process of the anvil, binding the Valparaíso to God.

Now: the moment of truth. Rafferty pushed off, gliding free of the kedge and gesturing for the others to do likewise. Thomas — everyone — dropped away. The anchor swung back and forth on the anvil, its great steel ring oscillating like the pendulum of some stupendous Newtonian clock, but the ligaments held, and the bone did not break. The twelve men applauded themselves, slapping their neoprene gloves together in a soundless, slow-motion ovation.

Rafferty saluted the priest. Thomas reciprocated. Flush with success, he hugged the chain and, like Theseus reeling in his thread, began following this sure and certain path back to the ship.

Christ was smirking. Cassie was certain of it. Now that she looked carefully, she saw that the face on Father Thomas’s crucifix wore an expression of utter self-satisfaction. And why not? Jesus had been right all along, hadn’t He? The world had indeed been fashioned by an anthropomorphic Father.

Father, not Mother: that was the rub. Somehow, against all odds, the patriarchs who’d penned the Bible had intuited the truth of things. Theirs was the gender the universe folly endorsed. Womankind was a mere shadow of the prototype.

Around and around Cassie paced the cabin, wearing a ragged path in the green shag carpet.

Naturally she wanted to explain the body away. Naturally she’d be delighted if any of the crew’s paranoid fantasies — CIA plot, Trilateralist conspiracy, whatever — could be proven correct.

But she couldn’t deny her instincts: as soon as the priest had named the thing, she’d experienced eerie intimations of its authenticity. And even if it were a hoax, she reasoned, the world’s innumerable boobs and know-nothings, should they learn of its existence, would accept and exploit it anyway, just as they’d accepted and exploited the Shroud of Turin, the hallucinations of Saint Bernadette, and a thousand such idiocies in the face of thorough refutation. So, whether reality or fabrication, truth or illusion, Anthony Van Horne’s cargo threatened to usher in the New Dark Ages as surely as the Manhattan Project had ushered in the Epoch of the Bomb.

Cassie wrung her hands, callus grinding against callus, by-products of the hours she’d spent chipping rust off the athwart-ships catwalk.

Okay, it was dead, a step in the right direction. But that fact alone, she believed, while of undoubted relevance to people like Father Thomas and Able Seaman Zook, did not remove the danger. A corpse was far too easy a thing to rationalize. Christianity had been doing it for two thousand years. The Lord’s intangible essence, the phallocrats and misogynists would say, His infinite mind and eternal spirit, were as viable as ever.

Inevitably, she thought of her favorite moment from her irascible retelling of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: the scene in which Runkleberg’s wife, Melva, smears her hands with her own menstrual flow. “I shall guard my son’s blood with my own,” Melva vows. “Somehow, some way — no matter what it takes — I shall keep this monstrous thing from happening.”

Slowly, methodically, Cassie removed the crucifix from the bulkhead and, taking hold of the brad, worked it free.

Gritting her teeth, she pushed the tiny spike into her thumb.

“Ow…”

As she withdrew the nail, a large red pearl appeared. She entered the bathroom, stood before the mirror, and began to paint, left cheek, left jaw, chin, right jaw, right cheek, pausing periodically to squeeze out more blood. By the time clotting occurred, a thick, smeary line ran around Cassie’s face, as if she were wearing a mask of herself.

Somehow, some way — no matter what it took — she would send the God of Western Patriarchy to the bottom of the sea.

Now, only now, standing on the starboard wing with the wind howling, the sea roaring, and the great corpse bobbing behind him — only now did it occur to Anthony that the tow might not work. Their cargo was big, bigger than he’d ever imagined. Assuming the anchors held, the chains remained whole, the boilers stayed in one piece, and the windlasses didn’t rip loose and fly into the ocean — assuming all these things, the sheer drag might still prove too much for the Val to handle.

Lifting the walkie-talkie to his lips, he tweaked the channel selector and tuned in the engine flat.

“Van Horne here. We got steam on deck?”

“Enough to make a pig sweat,” said Crock O’Connor.

“We’re gonna try for eighty rpm’s, Crock. Can we do it without busting a gut?”

“Only one way to find out, sir.”

Anthony turned toward the wheelhouse, waving to the quartermaster and giving Marbles Rafferty a thumbs-up. So far the first mate had acquitted himself brilliantly at the console, keeping the carcass directly astern and two thousand yards away, perfectly pacing the Val with her cargo’s three-knot drift. (Too bad Operation Jehovah was a secret, for this was exactly the sort of venture that might earn Rafferty the coveted paper declaring him “Master of United States Steam or Motor Vessels of Any Gross Tons upon Oceans.”) The kid at the helm knew his stuff, too: Neil Weisinger, the same AB who’d performed so splendidly during Hurricane Beatrice. But even with Sinbad the Sailor manning the throttles and Horatio J. Hornblower holding the wheel, winching in this particular load would still be, Anthony knew, the trickiest maneuver of his career.

Pivoting to stern, the captain surveyed the windlasses: two gargantuan cylinders twenty feet in diameter, like bass drums built to pace the music of the spheres. A mile beyond rose God’s balding cranium, His white mane glinting in the morning sun, each hair as thick as a transatlantic cable.

The mourners had all left. Perhaps they’d completed their duties — “swimming shivah” as Weisinger liked to put it — but more probably it was the ship that had driven them away. At some level, Anthony believed, they knew the whole story: the Matagorda Bay tragedy and what it had done to their brothers and sisters. They couldn’t stand to be in the same ocean with the Carpco Valparaíso.

He lifted the Bushnells and focused. The water was astonishingly clear — he could even see His submerged ears, the anchor chains spilling from their interiors like silver pus. Twenty-four hours earlier, Rafferty had taken an exploration party over in the Juan Fernandez. After sailing into the placid cove bounded by the lee biceps and the corresponding bosom, they’d managed to lash an inflatable wharf in place, using armpit hairs as bollards, then rappel up the great cliff of flesh. Hiking across the chest, walking around on the sternum, the chief mate and his team had heard nothing they could honestly call heartbeats. Anthony hadn’t expected they would. And yet he remained cautiously optimistic: cardiovascular stasis wasn’t the same thing as brain death. Who could deny that a neuron or two might be perking away under that fifteen-foot-thick skull?

The captain changed channels, broadcasting to the men by the windlasses. “Ready on the afterdeck?”

The assistant engineers plucked the walkie-talkies from their belts. “Port windlass ready,” said Lou Chickering in his actor’s baritone.

“Starboard windlass ready,” said Bud Ramsey.

“Release devil’s claws,” said Anthony.

Both engineers sprang into action.

“Port claw released.”

“Starboard claw released.”

“Engage wildcats,” the captain ordered.

“Port cat in.”

“Starboard in.”

“Kill brakes.”

“Port brake gone.”

“Starboard gone.”

Anthony raised his forearm to his mouth and gave dear Lorelei a kiss. “Okay, boys — let’s reel Him in.”

“Port motor on,” said Chickering.

“Starboard on,” said Ramsey.

Spewing black smoke, belching hot steam, the wildcats began to turn, raveling up the great steel chains. One by one, the links rose out of the sea, dripping foam and spitting spray. They slithered through the chocks, arched over the devil’s claws, and dropped into the whelps like skee-balls scoring points.

“I need lead lengths, gentlemen. Call ’em out.”

“Two thousand yards on the port chain,” said Chickering.

“Two thousand on the starboard,” said Ramsey.

“Marbles, let’s get under way! Forty rpm’s, if you please!”

“Aye! Forty!”

“Fifteen hundred on the port chain!”

“Fifteen hundred on the starboard!”

Anthony and the chief mate had been up all night poring over Rafferty’s U.S. Navy Salvor’s Handbook. With a tow this prodigious, a gap of more than eleven hundred yards would render the Val unsteerable. But a short leash, under nine hundred yards, could mean trouble too: if she suddenly slowed for any reason — a snapped shaft, a blown boiler — the cargo would plow into her stern through sheer momentum.

“Fifty rpm’s!” Anthony ordered.

“Fifty!” said Rafferty.

“Speed?”

“Six knots!”

“Steady, Weisinger!” Anthony told the quartermaster.

“Steady!” the AB echoed.

The chains kept coming, over the windlasses and through the hatches, filling the cavernous steel lockers like performing cobras returning to their wicker baskets after a hard day’s work.

“One thousand yards on the port chain!”

“One thousand on the starboard!”

“Speed?”

“Seven knots!”

“Brakes!” screamed Anthony into the walkie-talkie.

“Port brake on!”

“Starboard on!”

“Sixty rpm’s!”

Sixty!

Both windlasses stopped instantly, screeching and smoking as they showered the afterdeck with bright orange sparks.

“Disengage wildcats!”

“Port cat gone!”

“Starboard gone!”

“Hook claws!”

“Port claw hooked!”

“Starboard hooked!”

Something was wrong. The carcass’s speed had doubled, eight knots at least. Briefly Anthony imagined some supernatural jolt galvanizing the divine nervous system, though the real explanation, he suspected, lay in a sudden conjunction of the Guinea Current and the Southeast Trades. He lowered the binoculars. The Corpus Dei surged forward, crushingly, inexorably, spindrift flying from its crown as it bore down on the tanker like some primordial torpedo.

The prudent tactic was obvious: unlock the cats, free the chains, hard right rudder, full speed ahead.

But Anthony hadn’t been hired to play it safe. He’d been hired to bring God north, and while he didn’t relish the thought of presiding over the Valparaíso’s second collision in two years, either this damn rig worked or it didn’t. “Marbles, eighty rpm’s!”

“Eighty?”

“Eighty!”

“Eighty!” said the mate.

“Speed?”

“Nine knots!”

Nine, good: faster, surely, than the oncoming corpse. He studied the chains. No slack! No slack, and the ship was moving! “Quartermaster, ten degrees left rudder!” Lifting the binoculars, laughing into the wind, the captain studied His vast shining brow. “Course three-five-zero!”

“Three-five-zero!” said Weisinger.

Anthony pivoted toward the bow. “All engines ahead full!” he shouted to Rafferty, and they were off — off like some grandiose water-skiing act, off like some demented rendition of Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy, off like some absurdist advertisement for Boys Town, USA, the angelic youngster bearing his crippled brother on his back (He ain’t heavy, Father, He’s my Creator) — off, towing Jehovah.