“Father Thomas talked to an angel,” said Lianne defensively. “There’s obviously a cosmic necessity behind this voyage.”
“There’s a cosmic necessity behind feminism, too.”
“We shouldn’t go tampering with the cosmos, friend. We absolutely shouldn’t.”
For the rest of the day, Cassie made a point of avoiding Lianne. She had presented her case fully, outlining the ominous political implications of a male Corpus Dei. Now it was time to let the arguments sink in.
How different all this was from Cassie’s previous voyage. On the Beagle II you were periodically knocked off your feet, thrown from your bunk, plunged into nausea: you knew you were at sea. But the Valparaíso felt less like a ship than like some great metal island rooted to the ocean floor. To get any sense of motion, you had to climb down into the forward lookout post, a kind of steel patio thrust out over the water, and watch the stem plates smashing through the waves.
On the evening of July 13, Cassie stood in the bow, sipping coffee, savoring the sunset — a breathtaking spectacle to which the tubby AB on duty, Karl Jaworski, seemed oblivious — and imagining the androgynous marvels that lay perhaps two miles beneath her feet. Hippocampus guttulatus, for instance, the sea horse, whose males incubated the eggs in special ventral pouches; or groupers, all of whom began life as females (half destined to undergo a sex change at adulthood); or the wonderfully subversive lumpfish, a species whose maternal instincts resided exclusively within the fathers (it being they who oxygenated the eggs during incubation and subsequently guarded the fry). To her right, beyond the horizon, spread the wide sultry delta of the Niger River. To her left, likewise hidden by the planet’s curve, lay Ascension Island. A suffocating heat arose, clothing her in equatorial steam, and she resolved to escape to the Valparaíso’s congenial little movie theater. True, she’d seen The Ten Commandments before — most recently Oliver’s laserdisc of the 35th Anniversary Collector’s Edition — so it wouldn’t have much dramatic impact, but at the moment air-conditioning mattered more than catharsis.
She took the elevator to level three, opened the door to the theater, and plunged into the gloriously cool air.
As it happened, Cassie harbored a special affection for The Ten Commandments. Without it, she would never have written her angriest play, God Without Tears (a prophetic title, she now realized), a one-act satire on the many bowdlerizations Cecil B. DeMille and company had committed in transferring Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to the screen. She’d been particularly severe with DeMille’s unwillingness to consider the moral implications of the Ten Plagues, with his failure to record the injustices the Hebrews had suffered at their Sponsor’s hands as they wandered in the wilderness (Yahweh striking down the people who disparaged Canaan, firebombing those who complained at Hormah, sending serpents against the ones who grumbled on the road from Mount Hor, visiting a pestilence upon everybody who backslid at Peor), and with his glaring omission of the speech Moses had made to his generals following the subjugation of the Midianites: “Why have you spared the life of all the women? These were the very ones who perverted the sons of Israel! Kill all the male children! Kill also all the women who have slept with a man! Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves!” Paired with Runkleberg, God Without Tears had run for two weeks at Playwrights Horizons on West Forty-second Street, a bill that drew a rave review in Newsday, a pan in the Village Voice, and an Op-Ed letter of condemnation in the Times, written by Terence Cardinal Cooke himself.
Whatever its artistic shortcomings, DeMille’s homage to God’s omnipotence fully acknowledged the bladder’s limits. The movie had an intermission. After an hour and forty minutes, as Moses began his audience with the Burning Bush, the urge to urinate arose. Cassie decided to hold out. She couldn’t remember exactly when the hiatus came, but she knew it was imminent. Besides, she was enjoying herself, in a perverse sort of way. The urge worsened. She was about to leave in medias res — Moses heading back to Egypt with the aim of liberating his people — when the music swelled, the image faded, and the curtains closed.
Two women were ahead of her, almond-eyed Juanita Torres and asthmatic An-mei Jong, waiting to use the single-toilet ladies’ room. There she stood, mulling over her theory that the patriarchy derived in large measure from urinary flexibility, the male’s enviable ability to pee on the run, when a deep, familiar voice intruded.
“Want some?” said Lianne, extending a large, half-empty bag of popcorn. “Vegetarian style — no butter.”
Cassie grabbed a handful. “Seen this movie before?”
“My Sunday school class went in the mid-sixties, some sort of revival. ‘Beauty is but a curse to our women.’ Yech. If it weren’t for Follingsbee’s popcorn, I’d leave.”
A breach, thought Cassie. A chink in Lianne’s armor. “Watch what they do with Queen Nefretiri in Part Two.”
“I don’t like what they do with any of the women.”
“Yeah, but watch what they do with Nefretiri — DeMille and the patriarchy, watch what they do. Notice how, whenever Pharaoh commits some atrocity, chasing after the Hebrews with his chariots and so on, it’s because Nefretiri put him up to it. Same old story, right? Blame the woman. The patriarchy never sleeps, Lianne.”
“I can’t send your boyfriend a fax.”
“I understand.”
“They could take away my FCC license.”
“Right.”
“I can’t send it.”
“Of course you can’t.” Cassie took a greedy helping of Follingsbee’s popcorn. “Watch what they do with Nefretiri.”
July 16.
Latitude: 2°6’N. Longitude: 10°4’W. Course: 272. Speed: 9 knots when the Southeast Trades are with us, 3 in a headwind, 6 on average. Slow — much too slow. At this rate, we won’t cross the Arctic Circle before August 25, a full week behind schedule. More bad news. The promised predators have finally caught our scent, and at 6 knots we can’t outrun them. We’re killing a dozen sharks on nearly every watch, and almost as many Liberian sea snakes and Cameroon vultures, but they keep on coming. When I sit down to write the official chronicle of this voyage, I’ll dub these bloody days the Battle of the Guinea Current.
“Why don’t they show their Creator a little more respect,” I ask Ockham, “like the porpoises and manatees did last week?”
“Respect?”
“He made them, right? They owe Him everything.”
“In partaking of such a meal,” says Ockham, “quite possibly they are showing Him respect.”
Our afterdeck groans, our windlasses creak, our chains rattle. We sound like Halloween. God forbid a link should break. Once, when I was third mate on the Arco Bangkok, ferrying napalm into the Gulf of Thailand, I saw a towline snap in two, whip across the poop deck, and cut the bos’n in half. Poor bastard lived for a good three minutes afterward. His last words were, “What are we doing in Vietnam, anyway?”
This morning I sent Dad a fax. I told him I’ve gotten the Valparaíso back and am now working for Pope Innocent XIV. “If it’s okay with you,” I wrote, “I’ll be dropping by Valladolid on my return trip.”
The snowy egrets loathe me, Popeye. The sea turtles scream for my blood.
At least once a day, I make a point of ferrying myself over to God, picking up a bazooka or a harpoon gun, and joining the battle. It helps the crew’s morale. The work is dangerous and exhausting, but they’re acquitting themselves well. I think they see our cargo as one of those things worth fighting for, like honor or the American flag.