He pulled the Handicam’s trigger, preserving God’s sightless gaze and grinning rictus on half-inch videotape. “I plan to organize my thoughts tonight and send them to Rome. In my gut I feel it was an empathic death. He died from a bad case of the twentieth century.”
Miriam offered a nod of assent. “We’ve killed Him a hundred million times in recent memory, haven’t we? And we never even bothered to hide the bodies.”
What a supple, sensuous mind, he thought. “ ‘Hide the bodies,’ ” he echoed. “Would it be all right if I quoted you in my fax to Cardinal Di Luca?”
“I’d be flattered,” the nun said, smiling spectacularly. Like God, she had perfect teeth: no surprise, really, the poverty of Carmelites being strictly genteel, poverty with a dental plan.
Scrambling out of the passenger seat, Miriam circumvented the tarry surface of a blackhead and ambled confidently to his side. Her getup, he admitted — pith helmet, dungarees, safari jacket sealed tightly with bone buttons — aroused in him a certain prurience. All during his youth, Thomas had harbored a vague notion that, lifting the edge of a nun’s habit, you’d find nothing there. How wrong he’d been. The denim clung to her hips, thighs, and calves, outlining her like the drifting snow into which the dying Claude Rains had fallen at the climax of The Invisible Man.
“ ‘The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances,’ ” she said, reciting a famous passage from Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. “ ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you; We have killed Him — you and I. We are all His murderers.’ ”
“ ‘But how was this done?’ ” said Thomas, continuing the passage. They couldn’t get away from Nietzsche today: Zarathustra on the tape deck, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft on their tongues. “ ‘How were we able to drink up the sea?’ ” He shut off the Handicam. “ ‘Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’ ”
They returned to the Wrangler, drove down the western nasal slope, and improvised a path through the whiskers of the left cheek. On its fringes, the beard had become a kind of fishing net, a vast natural web the seafaring apostles might have envied, jammed with entangled groupers, porpoises, and marlin. The Wrangler bucked and lurched but stayed on course, looping steadily eastward into the mustache.
Twin caverns rose before them, the great yawning tunnels through which their cargo had once breathed and sneezed.
“To be honest” — Miriam stared into the moist depths — “I’m learning more than I care to.”
“Quite so,” said Thomas, grimacing. Marshes of mucus, boulders of dried snot, nose hairs the size of obelisks: this was not the Lord God of Hosts they’d grown up with. “But we can’t leave yet.” He swung the steering wheel hard over and, putting the Wrangler in reverse, eased the rear bumper against the high escarpment running between upper lip and right nostril. Leaning out the window, he wiped the sea spray from the rearview mirror, a saucer-sized disk jutting into space on rusted aluminum struts. “A test,” he explained.
“I suppose there’s always hope.”
“Always,” Thomas muttered without conviction.
Together they studied the glass, watching it with the same rapt intensity of the prophet Daniel beholding MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN materialize upon the wall. The merest cloud would have satisfied them — the slightest smudge, the feeblest hint of fog.
Nothing. The surface remained mockingly clear, obscenely pristine. God, the mirror said, was dead.
Miriam took Thomas’s hand, pressing it so firmly between her palms that the blood crowded into his fingertips. “Then, of course, there’s the toughest question of all.”
Yes?
“Now that we know He’s gone, really gone, making no judgments, preparing no punishments, now that we truly know these things” — the nun offered a diffident little grin — “why should we fear to sin?”
July 26.
Latitude: 25°8'N. Longitude: 20°30'E. Course: 358. Speed: 6 lousy knots. We’re rounding the great bulge of northwest Africa, tracing in reverse those audacious voyages of exploration Prince Henry the Navigator dispatched from Portugal beginning in 1455. If dear old Dad was Christopher Columbus in a previous life, perhaps I used to be Prince Henry. When the benighted monarch died, his friends stripped him down and found he was wearing a hair shirt.
My plan is amazingly clever. Ready, Popeye? I’m going to blow the ballast. All of it: the 60,000 tons we picked up in New York Harbor, the 15,000 (so far) with which we’ve been compensating for spent bunker fuel. And then — here’s the brilliant part — we’re going to trim the Val with His blood.
Think of it. One simple, standard pumping operation, no longer than 5 hours, and we’ll have reduced our towing load by 15 percent. According to Crock O’Connor, we can run both engines at a steady 85 rpm’s after that, maybe even 90.
Count on Father Ockham to object.
“After we blow the ballast, we’ll be at the corpse’s mercy,” he asserted, ever the physics professor. “A strong wind, and the thing could drag us a hundred miles off course.”
“It’ll be like a transfusion,” I explained. “As the water goes shooting out of the ballast tanks, the blood’ll come pouring into the cargo tanks. We’ll remain in trim the whole time.”
“You mean you’re going to drain our Creator’s liquid essence into those filthy cargo tanks?”
I figured I should tell him the truth, even though I could see where he was heading. “Yes, Thomas, that’s one way to put it.”
“We’ll have to clear it with Rome.”
“No, we won’t.”
“Yes, we will.”
The Vatican got back to us in less than an hour.
“The synod has reached a consensus,” said somebody named Tullio Cardinal Di Luca. “Under no circumstances may His blood be defiled with secular oil. Before the transfusion, you must scrub the cargo tanks thoroughly.”
“Scrub them?” I moaned. “That’ll take two days!”
“Then we’d better start right now,” said the padre, simultaneously smiling and frowning.
Eat more yogurt, Neil Weisinger’s physician had advised him upon appraising the cramps, diarrhea, and general misery that had settled in his gut shortly after his twentieth birthday. Yogurt, Dr. Cinsavich had explained, would increase his acidophilus count and aid his digestion. Until that moment, Neil hadn’t even realized that his intestines housed bacteria, much less that the bugs performed a welfare function. And so he tried the yogurt cure, and while it didn’t work (he was in fact suffering from lactose intolerance, a condition he eventually conquered by abstaining from dairy products), he nevertheless came away with an intense respect for his internal ecosystem.
Four years after his visit to Dr. Cinsavich, as Neil climbed into number two center tank aboard the SS Carpco Valparaíso, he found himself identifying fiercely with the microbial proletariat teeming inside him. It was germs’ work, this thankless and malodorous business of scouring the ship’s innards, preparing them to receive God’s blood. Although the washing machine had done a good job, pulverizing the largest tarballs and flushing them away, there was still a considerable residue to harvest, gluey blobs of asphalt clinging to the ladders and catwalks like immense wads of discarded chewing gum. Gradually he descended — hand under hand, Leo Zook by his side — below the hawsepipes and the Plimsoll line, past the churning surface of the sea, deeper, ever deeper, into the hull. They scrubbed as they went, scooping up the gunk with their ladles and plopping it into a huge steel mucking bucket dangling beside them on a chain. Whenever the bucket became full, they broadcast the news via walkie-talkie to Eddie Wheatstone on the weather deck, and he winched the load aloft.
Grandfather Moshe, no doubt, would have found redemption in this drudgery. The old man actually liked crude oil. “Oil’s a fluid fossil,” he’d once lectured his ten-year-old grandson as they stood on the Baltimore docks watching a supertanker glide across the horizon. “Memories of the Permian, messages from the Cretaceous, crushed and cooked and turned to jam. That ship’s a pail of history, Neil. That ship carries liquid dinosaurs.”