“Maybe,” said Miriam evenly. “Could be,” she added without emotion. “Sure. Right. I want my belief back, Tom. I want to feel that old-time religion again.”
Yanking the emergency brake with one hand, Thomas gave his friend’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze with the other. “I suppose we could try believing in a God synonymous with something beyond this corpse — a God outside God. But Gabriel didn’t allow us that option. He was a good Catholic, my angel. He understood the ultimate indivisibility of body and spirit.”
The priest climbed out of the cab, laying his palm on the hot steel hood. A Wrangler’s engine, a Homo sapiens sapiens, a Supreme Being — in each case, the soul of the thing could not be abstracted from the thing itself. Just as Einstein had demonstrated the fundamental equivalence of matter and energy, so did Thomas’s church teach the fundamental equivalence of existence and essence. There was no ghost in the machine.
Pulling his Handicam from the rear compartment, the priest pivoted toward the great glassy lake of their cargo’s left eye. Both irises were a vibrant cyan, the luxurious hue of unoxygenated blood. (And God said, “Let me have Scandinavian eyes.”) He put the camera on STANDBY. Gradually the scene painted itself across the viewfinder screen: a frightened deckie on predator patrol, bazooka at the ready, standing by the shore of the watery cornea as he scanned the sky for Cameroon vultures. Beyond lay His great frozen smile, each visible tooth sparkling like a sun-struck glacier.
Teeth, eyes, hands, gonads — so much to contemplate, and yet Thomas also found himself pondering those parts presently hidden from view. Did the hair swirl clockwise, like a human’s? Were the palms callused? Were the molars configured in a manner suggesting a particular diet? (Given the popularity of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, it was unlikely He’d been a vegetarian.) Anything remarkable about the buttocks evoked so enigmatically in Exodus 33:23?
“Then, of course,” called Miriam above Also Sprach Zara-thustra, “there’s the question of why. Any theories, Tom?”
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.”