The hall turned a corner, opening onto a flagstone courtyard bordered by airy arcades and packed with the Valparaíso deserters, most of them naked. Such an astonishing range of skin tones, thought Thomas: ivory, pink, bronze, saffron, fawn, flaxen, dun, cocoa, sorrel, umber, ochre, maple sugar. It was like gazing upon a jar of mixed nuts, or a Whitman’s Sampler. Many of the sailors had painted themselves, sketching sinuous arrows and coiled serpents on their bodies with mashed grapes, the juices running down their limbs like purple sweat. Wall to wall, the courtyard vibrated with a combination binge, bacchanal, orgy, brawl, and disco tourney, with many revelers participating in all five possibilities — drinking, eating, fornicating, fighting, dancing — simultaneously. Marijuana smoke mingled with the fog. Strobelights brightened the dusk. Along the southern arcade, Ralph Mungo and James Echohawk dueled with the decorative cutlasses they’d stolen from the wardroom, while a few yards away eight men stood in a circle, each plugged into another, a carousel of sodomy.
Crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles littered the ground. Scores of spent condoms lay about like an infestation of giant planaria, a fact from which Thomas drew a modicum of hope: if the revelers were sane enough to worry about pregnancy and AIDS, they might be sane enough to ponder the categorical imperative. Arms undulated, hips shimmied, breasts swayed, penises swung — the sybaritic aerobics of Anno Postdomini One.
“Hiya, Tommy!” Neil Weisinger strode over, an unlit cigarette parked in his mouth, gleefully ripping a barbecued chicken in two. “Didn’t expect to see you here!” he said drunkenly.
“That music…”
“Scorched Earth, from Sweden. The album’s called Chemotherapy. You should see their stage act. They read entrails.”
Dominating the courtyard was a polished obsidian banquet table, its surface supporting not only four enormous hams and two sides of beef but a diesel generator, a CD player, and an RCA Colortrak-5000 video projector spraying concupiscent images on a white bedsheet hanging wraithlike inside the northern arcade. Thomas had never seen Bob Guccione’s notorious Caligula, but he guessed that’s what the movie was. The camera dollied along the main deck of a Roman trireme on which nearly everyone was rutting.
“Helluva party, huh?” said Weisinger, waving half the bisected chicken in Thomas’s face. The air reeked of semen, tobacco, alcohol, vomit, and pot. “Want some dinner?”
“No.”
“Go ahead. Eat.”
“I said no.”
The kid displayed a bottle of Lцwenbrau. “Beer?”
“Neil, I saw you in the amphitheater Tuesday.”
“I really nailed Spicer, didn’t I? Got him like some nervy goyische cowboy roping a steer.”
“An immoral act, Neil. Tell me you understand that.”
“This looks like just another Lцwenbrau bottle,” said Weisinger, “but it’s much, much more than that. Washed up on the beach yesterday. Inside was a message. Ask me what message.”
“Neil…”
“Go ahead. Ask.”
“What message?”
“ ‘Thou shalt have whatever other gods thou feels like,’ it said. ‘Thou shalt covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ Sure you don’t wanna beer?”
“No.”
“ ‘Thou shalt bugger thy neighbor’s ass’.”
Everywhere Thomas looked, food was being squandered on a grand scale. Huge untended caldrons sat atop driftwood fires, rapidly reducing entire wheels of cheddar, Muenster, and Swiss to an inedible tar. Five sailors from the engine crew and five from the deck crew battled it out with what seemed like the Valparaíso’s entire stock of fresh eggs. Charlie Horrocks, Isabel Bostwick, Bud Ramsey, and Juanita Torres ripped the lids off vacuum-packed cans and merrily showered themselves with clam chowder, vegetable soup, baked beans, chocolate topping, and butterscotch sauce. They licked each other like mother cats grooming their young, the residue spilling down their flesh and disappearing amid the flagstones.
Weaving through the tangle of bodies, Thomas made his way to the banquet table. He studied the metal plate on the generator:
7500 WATTS, I20/240 VOLTS, SINGLE-PHASE, FOUR-STROKE, WATER-COOLED, 1800 RPMS, 13.2 HP — the only piece of rational discourse in the entire museum. The music was at a fever pitch, handsaws dying of cancer. He shut off the CD player.
“What’d ya do that for?” wailed Dolores Hay cox.
“Turn it back on!” screamed Stubby Barnes.
“You must listen to me!” Thomas leaned toward the Color-trak-5000, currently projecting Malcolm McDowell working his greased fist into a wincing man’s anus, and pushed EJECT.
“Put the movie back on!”
“Start the music!”
“Fuck you!”
“Caligula!”
“Listen to me!” Thomas insisted.
“Scorched Earth!”
“Caligula!”
“Scorched Earth!”
“Caligula!”
“You’re using the corpse as an excuse!” the priest shouted. “Schopenhauer was wrong! A Godless world is not ipso facto meaningless!”
The food came from every point of the compass — barrages of boiled potatoes, salvos of Italian bread, cannonades of grapefruit. A large, scabrous coconut grazed Thomas’s left cheek. A pomegranate smashed into his shoulder. Eggs and tomatoes exploded against his chest.
“There’s a Kantian moral law within!”
Someone restarted Caligula. Under the persuasion of a Roman senator’s wife’s tongue, a large erect penis not belonging to the senator released its milky contents like a volcano spewing lava. Thomas rubbed his eyes. The erupting organ stayed with him, hovering in his mind like a flashbulb afterimage as he fled the Museum of Unnatural History.
“Immanuel Kant!” cried the despairing priest, rushing through the city streets. He reached under his Fermilab shirt and squeezed his crucifix, as if to mash Christ and Cross into a single object. “Immanuel, Immanuel, where are you?”
FAMINE
VIEWED THROUGH THE frosted window of the twin-engine Cessna, Jan Mayen Island appeared to Oliver Shostak as one of his favorite objects in the world, the white lace French brassiere he’d given Cassie for her thirtieth birthday. Corresponding to the cups were two symmetrical blobs, Lower Mayen and Upper Mayen, masses of mountainous terrain connected by a natural granite bridge. Raising his field glasses, he ran his gaze along the Upper Mayen coastline until he reached Eylandt Fjord, a groove so raw and ragged it suggested the aftermath of a bungled tooth extraction.
“There it is!” Oliver called above the engines’ roar. “There’s Point Luck!” he shouted, giving the bay the name by which Pembroke and Flume insisted it be called.
“Where?” asked Barclay Cabot and Winston Hawke in unison.
“There — to the east!”
“No, that’s Eylandt Fjord!” corrected the Cessna’s pilot, a weatherbeaten Trondheim native named Oswald Jorsalafar.
No, thought Oliver — Point Luck: that hallowed piece of the Pacific northwest of Midway Island where, on June 4, 1942, three American aircraft carriers had lain in wait to ambush the Japanese Imperial Navy.
He panned the field glasses back and forth. No sign of the Enterprise, but he wasn’t surprised. Only by Pembroke and Flume’s best-case scenario would they have already made the crossing from Cape Cod to the Arctic Ocean. Most likely they were still south of Greenland.
Jan Mayen’s sole airstrip lay along the eastern fringe of its only settlement, a scientific-research station grandiosely named Ibsen City. As the Cessna touched down, the prop wash set up a tornado of snow, ice, volcanic ash, and empty Frydenlund beer bottles. Oliver paid Jorsalafar, tipped him generously, and, shouldering his backpack, joined the magician and the Marxist on the cold march west.
In the pallid rays of the midnight sun, Ibsen City stood revealed as a collection of rusting Quonset huts and dilapidated clapboard houses, each set on a gravel foundation lest it sink into the illusory ground called permafrost. Reaching the central square, Oliver, Barclay, and Winston made for the Hedda Gabler Inn, a split-level motel grafted onto a tavern fashioned from a corrugated-aluminum airplane hangar. A neon sign reading SUN-DOG SALOON flashed in the tavern window, a beacon on the tundra.