Oliver’s love letters, with their mawkish poems illustrated by pornographic sketches, had never truly touched Cassie, but these words cut to her core. Decoding them, she’d experienced something primal, the same variety of awe that Darwin, Galileo, and a handful of others must have felt upon realizing they were shaping the course of intellectual history. True, the particulars were troubling: despite her affection for all things theatrical, she did not like placing reason’s fate in the hands of any organization that would call itself Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society. (These men did not sound like the saviors of secular humanism; they sounded like a couple of lunatics.) What Cassie found so moving was Oliver’s rationality, the fact that he’d correctly interpreted the body as a menace and immediately swung into action. His insistence on security struck her as particularly astute. Intuitively he’d sensed that if the Vatican got wind of an impending attack, they’d either reroute the mission or erect defenses the Reenactment Society could never hope to penetrate. “This will be my only communique,” he’d written near the end.
Expect air stride at 68°11'N, 2°35'W, 150 miles east of launch point, Jan Mayen Island. In restaging Midway, planes will sever tow chains, breach target, and send our troubles to bottom of Mohns Trench…
Leaning over the rail, she accorded the fax the same treatment she’d inflicted on the blisteringly negative review the Village Voice had given her play about Jephthah, the warrior in the Book of Judges who immolated his own daughter by way of keeping a bargain with God. “Authentic satire is to puerile sniggering as a firecracker is to a soda cracker, a distinction to which a young author named Cassie Fowler is evidently oblivious…”
Good old Oliver. He’d always stuck by her — hadn’t he? — even when she was a struggling playwright and he a leftist ne’er-do-well painting grim urban landscapes while waiting for his trust fund to kick in. There she’d be, sitting in the basement of some Broome Street saloon or Avenue D hockshop, one of those scuzzy roach reserves that had the nerve to call themselves off-Broadway theaters (any farther off, and she’d have been in Queens), watching a disastrous rehearsal of Runkleberg or God Without Tears, and suddenly Oliver would appear, even if it was three A.M., bringing her black coffee and sweet rolls, telling her she was the Lower East Side Jonathan Swift.
No sooner had Cassie tossed the bits of paper into the Portugal Current than Anthony Van Horne himself descended into the lookout post, dressed in his tattered Mets baseball jacket and John Deere visor cap. A spasm of guilt shot through her. This man had saved her life, and here she was, plotting to abort his mission.
“You’re in luck, sailor — I’m taking over your watch,” Van Horne told Ralph Mungo. A large purple bruise, frosted with glory grease, spread outward from the old AB’s right eye. “That okay with you?”
“Aye-aye, sir.” Saluting, grinning, Mungo threw his cigarette butt overboard and scooted up the ladder.
“Stargazing?” the captain asked Cassie.
“Something like that.” Raising the Thermos to her lips, she took a big swallow of jamoke. It was the fifth time she’d run into him here. She suspected she was being pursued — a flattering thought, but the last thing she needed just then was her adversary developing a crush on her. “I’ve decided to rename the constellations.” She pointed heavenward. “It’s time for a wholly American mythology, don’t you think? Look, there’s the Myth of the Family. There’s Equality. There’s One Nation Under God with Liberty and Justice for All.”
“You hate our cargo, don’t you?”
Cassie nodded. “That’s why I hang out here — the farthest I can get from Him without ending up in the water. And what about you, Captain? Do you hate our cargo?”
“I never knew Him.” The captain yawned; the reflex took hold of him, rippling through his face and shoulders. “I only know it’s good to be at sea again.”
“You’re exhausted, sir.”
“We’ve been trying to siphon His blood into the tanks — a way to get us moving faster — but His neck won’t accept the chicksans.” Another elaborate yawn. “The worst of it’s… I’m not sure what word to use. The anarchy, Cassie. Notice that AB’s black eye? He got it in a brawl. It’s been a week of fistfights, attempted rapes, possibly even a murder. I’ve had to put three men in the brig.”
An odd combination of dread and annoyance crept over Cassie. “Murder? Jesus. Who died?”
“Deckie named Zook — he got gassed in a cargo bay. Ockham says we’re in thrall to the corpse. Not the corpse itself, the Idea of the Corpse. With God out of the picture, people have lost their main reason to be moral. They can’t help experimenting with sin.
As she always did in the presence of intellectually untenable arguments, Cassie thrust her left hand into her pocket and pinched her inner thigh through the fabric. “Can’t help it? Gimme a break, Anthony. The whole thing’s an alibi. A clever alibi, but an alibi. These sailors of yours — want my opinion? They’re seizing on the carcass to rationalize their crimes. God’s death is so convenient.”
“I think it goes deeper than that.” Reaching into his baseball jacket, Anthony produced a sheet of beige paper covered with smeary black characters, and for one awful instant Cassie imagined he meant to confront her with a copy of Oliver’s communique. “Do me a favor, Doc. Read this. It’s from my father.”
The letter was handwritten on Exxon Shipping stationery: a cramped, feathery scrawl that struck her as oddly feminine.
Dear Anthony: You say you want to visit, but that’s not a very good idea. Tiffany gets easily flustered by guests, and you probably intend to bring up a lot of old grievances, like the…
“This seems awfully personal.”
“Just read it.”
…parrot business. My idea of a relaxing retirement — can you believe it? — includes not having my firstborn dropping by and screaming at me. Don’t think I wasn’t pleasantly surprised to receive your letter. You’re a good sailor, son. Flappable, but good. You deserved to get the Val back, though I can’t imagine what the Vatican needs with a ULCC. Hauling holy water, are you? Love, Dad.
“So, what do you make of it?” asked Anthony.
“Who’s Tiffany?”
“My stepmother. Major airhead. What’s he telling me?”
A humbling sense of her own parochialism crept over Cassie. So far in her life, the worst burdens she’d had to bear were rotten reviews in the Voice and deadhead students in her classes, nothing remotely comparable to a hostile father, an unbreachable neck, or a supertanker crew lapsing into vice. “I’m no psychologist… but when he says you have grievances against him, maybe he’s really saying he has grievances against you.”
“Of course he has grievances against me. I dishonored him at Matagorda Bay. I dragged the family name through an oil slick.”
“What’s this ‘parrot business’?”
Anthony snorted, grimaced, and put on his mirrorshades.
“For my tenth birthday, Dad brought back a scarlet macaw from Guatemala.”
“Order Psittaciformes. Family Psittaddae.”