“Yeah. Beautiful bird. She arrived speaking Spanish. ‘Vaya con Dios.’ ‘Que pasa?’ I tried teaching her ‘See you later, alligator,’ but it didn’t stick. I named her Rainbow. So, four months later, what does Dad do? He decides Rainbow’s costing us too much in parrot food and vet bills, and she’s noisy besides, messy too, so he drives me and the bird across town to a pet store, and he goes up to the counter, and he says, ‘If anybody comes in and wants this miserable beast, I’ll split the take with you, fifty-fifty.’ ”
“How mean.”
“There’s a pattern here, actually. I’m eleven — okay? — and the thing I most want for Christmas is a Revell plastic model kit of the USS Constitution, one to the forty-second scale, two hundred and thirty separate pieces, real canvas for the sails. Dad buys me the kit all right, but he won’t let me put it together. He says I’ll screw it up.”
“So he does it himself?”
“Yeah, and here’s the weird part. He gets some glass blower in Wilmington to seal up my ship in a big blue water-cooler bottle. So I can’t touch it, right? I can’t hold the Constitution or play with it. It isn’t really mine.” Anthony took back the fax, wadded it up, and stuffed the ball in his jacket. “The problem is that I need the bastard.”
“No, you don’t.”
“He’s the one who can wash the oil away.”
“Matagorda Bay?”
“Yeah. I won’t be free till Dad looks right at me and says, ‘Good job, Anthony. You laid His bones to rest.’ ”
“Oh, come on.”
“I got it straight from Raphael’s lips.”
“I don’t care whose lips you got it from.” A completely irrational theory, Cassie decided as she drained the last of her jamoke. “It doesn’t add up.” The breeze turned nasty, clawing at her cheeks, biting her fingers. She pulled the zipper tab of Lianne’s windbreaker as high as it would go. “I need some of Follingsbee’s hot cocoa.”
The captain cocked his head. Aries lay reflected in both lenses of his mirrorshades. “Birds fly through my dreams.”
“Birds? Parrots, you mean?”
“Egrets, herons, ibises — dripping oil. I take showers, but it doesn’t help. Only my father… you understand?”
“No. I don’t. But even if I did… well, what if your dad regards absolution as just another present? What if he gives you a clear conscience and then — bang — he takes that away too?”
“He wouldn’t.”
“The man who sent you that fax” — Cassie indicated the bulge in Anthony’s jacket — “is not a man you can trust.” She started up the ladder, retreating not so much from the cold as from this confused, frightening, peculiarly alluring man, this captain who dreamed of oiled egrets. “Know something, sir? When we get back to New York, I’m going to buy you a scarlet macaw.”
“I’d like that, Doc.”
“Know something else?” She paused on the topmost rung. “It’s perfectly okay to hate our cargo. It’s really quite okay.”
August 3.
On this day in 1924, my Mariner’s Pocket Companion notes, “Joseph Conrad, author of Lord Jim, Typhoon, and other classics of the sea, died in Bishopsbourne, England.”
I’ll start with the good news. For reasons best known to themselves, the predators have thrown in the towel. When it comes to the vultures and snakes, my guess is that we’ve sailed too far beyond their territories. As for the sharks — well, who knows what goes on in those antique minds?
This morning I had Rafferty gather up all the antipredator materiel, remove the shells and charges, and secure the empty weapons in the fo’c’sle hold. We no longer need the stuff, and in the present anarchic atmosphere I can easily imagine the deckies making murderous use of a harpoon gun or a bazooka.
Once again we tried screwing chicksans into His right carotid artery, and once again we failed, but that’s not the really bad news.
The fights and thefts continue, but that’s not the really bad news either.
The really bad news is the weather.
Dead reckoning places us 50 miles south of the Azores. It’s hard to know for sure, because the Marisat signals aren’t getting through, and we can’t see more than 20 yards in any direction. Fog I can deal with, but this is something else, a stew so thick it’s blinded both our radars. Forget the sextants.
An hour ago I explained our options to Ockham. Either we break radio silence and ask the Portuguese Coast Guard where the hell we are, or we slow to a crawl to avoid ramming into the Azores.
“You mean like four knots?”
“I mean like three knots.”
“At that speed, we won’t beat the deadline,” noted the padre.
“Correct.”
“His neurons will die.”
“Yeah, if He’s got any left.”
“What’s your preference?” Ockham wanted to know.
“Raphael never mentioned neurons,” I replied.
“Neither did Gabriel. You want us to slow down?”
“No, I want us to save His brain.”
“So do I, Anthony. So do I.”
At 1355 we broke radio silence. In our hearts we both knew it wouldn’t work. The damn fog devoured everything we put out: shortwave broadcasts, CB signals, fax transmissions.
Got to go, Popeye. Got to drop us back to 10 rpm’s. My present migraine is the worst ever, despite generous applications of glory grease. It’s like my brain is dying, cell by cell by cell, shutting down along with His.
Again, the music of Strauss — Salome this time, a hundred operatic voices filling the Jeep Wrangler’s cab as Thomas drove into the soggy depths of the navel. The route was dangerous, an ever-narrowing gyre cloaked in glutinous fog, but the Wrangler cleaved to the path, carrying Jesuit and Carmelite through the omphalogical terrain like a burro bearing tourists into the Grand Canyon.
The trip, he would admit, was an act of desperation, a last-ditch effort to discredit the body in question, for only by invalidating the corpse per se could he hope to invalidate the Idea of the Corpse and thus — perhaps — end the plague now raging aboard the Valparaíso. At first blush, of course, their cargo’s navel held no more teleological meaning than its warts (“Let there be a bellybutton,” and there was a bellybutton), and yet something about this particular feature, with its clear implications of a previous generation, had aroused in Thomas an uncharacteristic optimism. Did a navel not herald a Creator’s Creator? Did it not bespeak a God before God?
Within minutes they were at the bottom, a half-acre of flesh mottled with chunks of coral, swatches of algae, and an occasional dead crab. Thomas rotated the ignition key, shutting off the engine along with Salome. He inhaled. The fog filled his lungs like steam rising from a Mesozoic swamp. In a move the priest found perplexing, Sister Miriam leaned over and aggressively rotated the ignition key, restoring Salome to life.
He unhooked his seat belt, climbed out of the cab, and made his way across the damp, briny basin. Dropping to his knees, he ran his palm along the epidermis, searching for some clue that an umbilicus had once towered, sequoialike, from this spot — evidence of a proto-Deity, sign of a pre-Creator, proof of an unimaginable placenta floating through the Milky Way like an emission nebula.
Nothing. Zero. Not a nub.
He’d expected as much. And yet he persisted, massaging the terrain as if attempting some eschatological variety of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.
“Any luck?”
Until that moment, he hadn’t realized Miriam was beside him.
Or naked.
What astonished him was how detailed she was, how wonderfully particularized. The blue veins spidering across her breasts, the wiry twists and turns of her pubic hairs, the cyclopean gaze of her navel, the tampon string dangling between her legs like a fuse. Her pimples. Her freckles. Her birthmarks, pores, and scabs. This wasn’t Miss November. This was a woman.