A man said, “Astonishing.”
Neil spun around. Father Thomas stood beside him, dressed in black jeans and a yellow windbreaker, sweat dribbling from beneath his Panama hat.
“What happened to it?” Neil asked.
“The Gibraltar Sea’s full of minerals — that’s how Pollingsbee’s been seasoning our meals. I suspect they petrified the fibers.”
Neil peeled off his fishnet shirt and, mopping his brow, looked south. The moon was performing its hydraulic miracle, flooding the cove with tidewater and levitating the tanker inch by inch. “Can you keep a secret, Father? When the Val leaves tonight, I’ll be standing by this fig tree.”
“You aren’t coming with us?” Father Thomas frowned, tangling his bushy eyebrows.
“It’s what a Christian would call an act of contrition.”
“Leo Zook was dead before you took out your knife,” the priest protested. “And with Joe Spicer — self-defense, right?”
“There’s a picture in my head, Father, a scene I keep playing over and over. I’m in number two center tank, and all that’s needed is for me to reach out and open Zook’s oxygen valve. A simple twist of the wrist, that’s all.” Neil hugged the immortal trunk. “If only I could go back and do it…”
“Your brain was full of hydrocarbon gas. It was wrecking your judgment.”
“Maybe.”
“You couldn’t think straight.”
“A man died.”
“If you stay here, you’ll die.”
Neil plucked a stone fig. “Maybe so, maybe not.”
“Of course you’ll die. You can’t eat that thing, and we’re taking God with us.”
“You really think our cargo is God?”
“Difficult question. Let’s discuss it on the ship.”
“Ever since I can remember, my Aunt Sarah’s been saying I’m trapped inside myself — ‘Neil the hermit, hauling his private cave around with him wherever he goes’ — and now I’m really going to become one, a hermit just like…”
“No.”
“…like Rabbi Shimon.”
“Who?”
“Shimon bar Yochai. At the end of the second century, Rabbi Shimon climbed into a hole in the ground and stayed there, and what do you think finally happened to him?”
“He starved to death.”
“He partook of the Creator’s unknowable essence. He encountered En Sof.”
“You mean he saw God?”
“He saw God. The true, formless, nameless God, the God of the four A.M. watch, not King Kong out there.”
“For all we know, this crazy island might suddenly sink back where it came from.” Father Thomas doffed his Panama hat and raked a withered hand through his hair. “Chaos is … chaotic. You’d drown like a rat.”
Neil walked his fingers along the stone bark. “If He forgives me, He’ll deliver me.”
“An action like this — it’s irresponsible, Neil. There are people back home who care about you.”
“My parents are dead.”
“What about your friends? Your relatives?”
“I have no friends. My aunts can’t stand me. I adored my grandfather, but he died — what? — six years ago.”
The priest harvested a rock. He tossed it into the air, caught it, tossed it, caught it. “I’ll be honest,” he said at last. “This En Sof of yours — I want to know it too, I really do.” He put his hat back on, snugging the brim all the way to his eyebrows. “Sometimes I think my church made a fatal error, turning God into a man. I love Christ, truly, but He’s too easily imagined.”
“Then I’ve got your blessing?”
“Not my blessing, no. But…”
“What?”
“If this is what your conscience demands…”
Sighing, Father Thomas extended his right arm. Neil reached out. Their bruised fingers intertwined. Their battered palms connected.
“Good-bye, Able Seaman Weisinger. Good-bye and good luck.”
Neil sat down beside the immortal trunk. “God be with you, Father Thomas.”
Turning, the priest descended the knoll and marched back toward the whispering surf.
Two hours later, Neil had not moved. The night wind cooled his face. Stars peeked through the fog like candles shining behind frosted windows. Moonlight spilled down, glazing the breakers, transforming the dunes into mounds of sparkling gems.
Lunch box in hand, Neil climbed the tree, progressing branch by branch, as if scaling a mainmast. As he settled into a high crook, both of the Valparaíso’s engines started up, their hisses and chugs echoing across Van Horne Island, and within minutes she was sailing out of the harbor. The tow chains tightened, their links grinding together like the wisdom teeth of some immense insomniac dragon. The ship kept moving, all ahead full. Panic seized the AB. It was not too late. He could still give himself a reprieve, charging down to the beach and screaming for the tanker to stop. If worse came to worst, he could even try swimming after her.
His stomach muscles spasmed. His digestive juices burbled. Drawing out his Ben-Gurion medal, he rubbed his thumb across the old man’s profile. There, that was better, yes, yes. Any day now, any hour now, the tree would grow warm — warmer — hot — begin smoking — catch fire.
And it would not be consumed.
Neil Weisinger opened his Bugs Bunny lunch box, removed a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and ate it very, very slowly.
Part Three
EDEN
ON THE SECOND OF September, at 0945 hours, the Carpco Valparaíso steamed free of the fog. The vibrant, piercing clarity of the world — the sparkle of the North Atlantic, the azure glow of the sky, the brilliant white feathers of the passing petrels — made Thomas Ockham weep with joy. This was how the blind beggar must have felt when, told by Christ to visit the Pool of Siloam and wash the muddy spittle from his eyes, he suddenly found he could see.
At 1055 Lianne Bliss’s fax machine kicked in, spewing out what Thomas took to be the latest in a series of hysterical transmissions from Rome, this one distinguished primarily by its being the first to get through. Why had Ockham cut off communication? the Vatican wanted to know. Where was the ship? How was the Corpus Dei? Good questions, legitimate questions, but Thomas was reluctant to reply. While the sudden upwelling of a lost pagan civilization was hardly something he could have anticipated or prevented, he sensed that Rome would nevertheless find some way to blame him — for Van Horne Island, the intolerable delay, their cargo’s dissolution, everything.
At first neither Thomas nor anyone else on board realized how radically the corpse had soured. Their innocence remained intact as late as September 4, when the tanker crossed the 42nd parallel, the latitude of Naples. Then the wind shifted. It was a stench that went beyond mere olfaction. After burrowing into everyone’s nostrils and sinuses, the fumes next sought out the remaining senses, wringing tears from the sailors’ eyes, burning their tongues, scouring their skin. Some deckies even claimed to hear the terrible odor, wailing across the sea like the voices of the sirens enticing Ulysses’s crew to its doom. Whenever a party of stewards crossed over in the Juan Fernandez to harvest edible fillets from amid the burgeoning rot, they had to take Dragen rigs along, breathing bottled air.
Ironically, the softening of the flesh meant that Van Horne was finally able to get his chicksans into a carotid artery: a pathetic gesture at this point, but Thomas understood the captain’s need to make it. On September 5, at 1415, Charlie Horrocks and his pump-room gang began the great transfusion. Although they’d never sucked cargo on the run before, in less than six hours Horrocks’s men had managed to shoot eighty-five thousand gallons of salt water out of the ballast tanks and into the sea while simultaneously channeling as much blood into the Valparaíso’s cargo bays.