“Yes.”
“Cripes.”
“Knowing full well His angels would die of empathy?” asked Van Horne.
“That’s how much He loved the world,” said Thomas. “He willed Himself out of existence, simultaneously giving us ponderous proof of the fact.”
“So where’s His suicide note?” asked Fowler.
“Maybe He never wrote one. Maybe it’s inscribed on His body in some arcane fashion.” Thomas loaded his fork with counterfeit calamari in black bean sauce. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I, for one, am quite moved by our Creator’s selflessness.”
“And I, for one, think you’re way out on a limb,” said Di Luca, eyes narrowing. “Could you tell us exactly how you arrived at this bizarre conclusion?”
“Jesuitical deduction,” Thomas replied, “combined with a crucial fact I learned this afternoon from Michael.”
“What fact?”
“God never asked to be buried. The archangels acted completely on their own. They looked down, saw His body, and with the last of their strength they built Him a tomb.”
“Pretty meager data,” said Di Luca, “for such a lofty hypothesis.”
Van Horne tore into his ersatz Hunan chicken. “When you radioed me from the Regina, you said you knew what our next move should be.”
“Our duty is clear — at least, I think it is,” said Thomas. “After supper, we must bring the Maracaibo about and go back to Svalbard. We’ll re-enter the tomb, hook ourselves up to the body again, and take it on a grand tour.”
“On a what?” said Di Luca.
“Grand tour.”
“The hell we will,” said Fowler.
“Have you lost your mind?” said Di Luca.
“We’ll visit every major Western port, corpse in tow,” Thomas insisted, rising from the table. “If the Maracaibo can’t handle the load, we’ll press other tankers into service en route. The news will travel ahead of us. We can count on CNN. Okay, sure, initially the public will react with denial, terror, grief, everything we observed on the Val when we told the sailors the score, and, yes, as the Idea of the Corpse takes hold there may be an epidemic of anomie such as occurred on Van Horne Island — though, of course, as the captain here explained to Tullio in the wardroom, that was primarily an effect of prolonged and intimate contact with the body — but in any case the categorical imperative will soon kick in, and after that euphoria will follow. Are you seeing this, people? Can you picture the excited mobs charging through the streets of Lisbon, Marseilles, Athens, Naples, and New York, thronging onto the docks, eager for a peek? The human race has been waiting for such an hour. They may not know it, but they’ve been waiting. Bands will play. Flags will fly. Vendors will hawk hot dogs, popcorn, T-shirts, pennants, bumper stickers, souvenir programs. ‘We’re free!’ everyone will shout. ‘Today we are grown men, today we are grown women — the universe is ours!’ ”
Thomas sat down and quietly loaded a flaky pancake with pseudo mu shu pork.
Fowler snorted.
Van Horne sighed.
“I must say, Professor,” said Di Luca, “that is quite the most ridiculous proposal I have ever heard in my life.”
Despite Thomas’s profound lack of respect for Di Luca, the cardinal’s rejection hurt, cutting into him like the negative review The Christian Century had given The Mechanics of Grace.
Have I reasoned incorrectly? he wondered.
“I want to know what the rest of you think. I promised myself I wouldn’t pursue this plan unless a majority at this table tonight favored it.”
“I’ll tell you my opinion,” said Fowler. “If humankind ever learns en masse that God Almighty can no longer fog a mirror, they won’t feel like rushing out and climbing mountains — they’ll feel like crawling into holes and dying.”
“Well put, Dr. Fowler,” said Di Luca.
“And I also think, as I’ve been saying all along — I also think that, once they return to daylight, they’ll institute a theocracy so stifling and misogynistic it will make medieval Spain look like the Phil Donahue show.”
Thomas bit through an egg roll, pointing the stump toward Sister Miriam. “That’s two votes against my proposal and one vote — my own — for it.”
The nun patted her lips with a white linen napkin. “Goodness, Tom, it was so blasted much trouble laying Him to rest. The idea of undoing our efforts — it’s a bit overwhelming.” She wrapped the napkin tightly around her hand, as if bandaging a wounded palm. “But the more I think about it, the more I realize we probably have a responsibility to share the Corpus Dei with the rest of humankind. It’s what He wanted, right?”
“That’s two for, two against,” said Thomas. “It’s up to you, Captain.”
“If you vote yes,” said Fowler, “I’ll never speak to you again.”
For an entire minute, Van Horne said nothing. He sat silently before his egg noodles, absently combing the pale yellow strands with his fork. Thomas fancied he could see the workings of the captain’s brain, the throb and flash of his five billion neurons.
“I think…”
“Yes?”
“…that I would like to sleep on it.”
September 30.
Night. A starless sky. A 10-knot wind from the east.
So the angels lied to us. No, they didn’t lie, exactly. They trod beyond the truth; they permitted their grief to obscure God’s will. And if Raphael was overstating the case for an entombment, maybe he was overstating a few other notions as well — like my father being the man to absolve me.
When angels dissemble, Popeye, whom can you trust?
We’re steaming round and round the Hebrides, and my mind’s moving in circles too. I can see both sides, and it’s making me insane. If I give the padre his grand tour, it won’t be for personal gain. “Exhume Him,” Cassie tells me, “and I’ll walk out of your life forever.”
And yet I wonder if Ockham and Sister Miriam aren’t right.
I wonder if we don’t owe our species the truth.
I wonder if hearing the bad news might not be the best thing that’s ever happened to Homo sapiens sapiens.
For the first four years they lived like peasants in the cramped cottage Cassie had been renting in Irvington, but after they struck it rich they decided to indulge themselves and move into the city. Despite their newfound wealth, Cassie held onto her job, doggedly explicating natural selection and other unsettling ideas for the God-fearing students of Tarrytown Community College while Anthony stayed home and took care of little Stevie. Best to play it safe, they decided. Their money might run out sooner than expected.
Being a parent in Manhattan was a sobering and faintly absurd undertaking. Police sirens sabotaged naps. Air pollution aggravated colds. To make sure Stevie got home safely from Montessori each afternoon, Anthony and Cassie had to hire a Korean martial-arts instructor as his escort. Still, they would have had it no other way. The spacious fourth-floor walk-up they’d acquired on the Upper East Side included full roof rights, and after Stevie was asleep they would snuggle together on their beach recliners, stare at the grimy sky, and imagine they were lying on the fo’c’sle deck of the late Valparaíso.
Their fortune traced to an unlikely source. Shortly after landing back in Manhattan, Anthony got the idea of showing his private papers to Father Ockham, who in turn delivered them to Joanne Margolis, the eccentric literary agent who handled the priest’s cosmology books. Margolis forthwith pronounced Anthony’s journal “the finest surrealistic sea adventure ever written,” showed it to an editor at the Naval Institute Press, and secured a modest advance of three thousand dollars. No one ever imagined so strange a book becoming a New York Times best-seller, but within six months of publication The Gospel According to Popeye had miraculously beaten the odds.
At first Anthony and Cassie feared the bulk of the royalties would go toward lawyers’ fees and court costs, but then it became clear that neither the United States Attorney General nor the Norwegian government had any interest in prosecuting what appeared to be less a criminal case than an instance of fantasy role-playing gone horribly awry. The families of the three dead actors were infuriated by this inertia (Carny Otis’s widow journeyed all the way to Oslo in an effort to move the wheels of justice), and their rage persisted until the Vatican Secretary of State intervened. Having hired the impetuous Christopher Van Horne in the first place, Eugenic Cardinal Orselli naturally regarded it as his moral duty to recompense the bereaved. Each next of kin received a tax-free gift of three and a half million dollars. By the summer of ’99, the whole messy affair of Midway Redux no longer haunted the Van Horne-Fowler household.