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.”