Every evening, beginning around 1800 hours, Cassie Fowler drinks coffee in the forward lookout post. I’ve pretended to bump into her three times already. I think she’s catching on.
To what uncharted places did your passion for Olive Oyl take you, Popeye? Did you ever imagine lying with her on the fo’c’sle deck at the height of a monsoon, making furious love as the hot rain slicked your naked bodies? Did your creators ever animate such a moment for you, just to give you the thrill?
When the deckies think I’m not looking, they plunder the Corpus Dei, scraping off bits and pieces from the hairs, pimples, warts, and moles, then mixing them with potable water to make a kind of ointment.
“What’s it for?” I ask Ockham.
“Whatever ails them,” he replies.
An-mei Jong, the padre explains, swallows the stuff by the spoonful, hoping to relieve her asthma. Karl Jaworski rubs it on his arthritic joints. Ralph Mungo sticks it on an old Korean War wound that keeps acting up. Juanita Torres uses it for menstrual cramps.
“Does it help?” I ask Ockham.
“They say it does. These things are so subjective. Cassie Fowler calls it the placebo effect. The deckies call it glory grease.”
If I smear some glory grease on my forehead, Popeye, will the migraines go away?
“Shark off the starboard knee! Repeat: shark off the starboard kneel”
Neil Weisinger rose from his bed of holy flesh, set his WP-17 exploding-harpoon gun upright inside a kneecap pore, and pressed the SEND button on his Matsushita walkie-talkie. The heat was unbearable, as if the Guinea Current were about to boil. Had he not slathered his neck and shoulders with glory grease, they would surely have blistered by now. “Course?” he radioed the bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, currently on lookout.
“Zero-zero-two.”
In his dozen or so voyages as a merchant mariner, Neil had performed many hateful duties, but none so hateful as predator patrol. While washing toilets was degrading, cleaning ballast tanks disgusting, and chipping rust tedious beyond words, at least these jobs entailed no immediate threat to life and limb. Twice already, he’d taken the elevator up to the chief mate’s quarters, determined to lodge a formal complaint, but on both occasions his courage had deserted him at the last minute.
Clipping the Matsushita to his utility belt, right next to the WP-17’s transmitter, Neil raised his field glasses to his eyes and looked east. From his present station he couldn’t see Eddie — too much distance, too much mist — but he knew the bos’n was there all right, standing on the lee side of a starboard toe and surveying the choppy bay created by God’s half-submerged legs. He hit SEND. “Bearing?”
“Zero-four-six. He’s a twenty-footer, Neil! I’ve never seen so many teeth in one mouth before!”
Lifting the harpoon gun from its pore, Neil marched across the wrinkled, spongy beach that stretched for sixty yards from His knee to the ocean. Water reared up, a high spuming wall eternally created and re-created as the great patella cut its way through the Atlantic. “Operation Jehovah,” the captain was forever calling this peculiar tow, evidently unaware that for a Jew like Neil the word Jehovah was vaguely offensive, the secret and unspeakable YHWH contaminated with secular vowels.
He scanned the churning rollers. Eddie was right: a twenty-foot hammerhead shark, swimming coastwise like some huge organic mallet bred to nail the divine coffin shut. Balancing the WP-17 on his shoulder, Neil cupped the telescopic sight against his eye and plucked the walkie-talkie from his belt.
“Speed?”
“Twelve knots.”
“We aren’t required to do this,” Neil informed the bos’n. “I’ll bet you anything it’s against union rules. We simply aren’t required. Range?”
“Sixteen yards.”
Curious, he mused, how each predator had staked out its own culinary territory. From on high came the Cameroon vultures, swooping down like degenerate angels as they laid claim to the corneas and tear ducts. From below came the Liberian sea snakes, ruthlessly devouring the succulent meat of the buttocks. The surface belonged to the sharks — vicious makos, malicious blues, crazed hammerheads — nibbling away at the soft bearded cheeks and picking at the tender webbing between the fingers. And, indeed, the instant Neil drew a bead on the hammerhead, it turned abruptly and swam west, fully intending to bite the hand that made it.
He tracked the shark via the telescopic sight, aligning the crosshairs with the hammerhead’s cartilaginous hump as he looped his finger around the trigger. He squeezed. With a sudden throaty explosion the harpoon leapt from the muzzle. Rocketing across the sea, it struck the surprised animal in the brow and burrowed into its brain.
Neil took a large swallow of moist African air. Poor beast — it didn’t deserve this, it had committed no sin. Even as the shark spun sixty degrees and headed straight for the knee, the AB felt nothing toward it save pity.
“Throw the switch, buddy!”
“Roger, Eddie!”
“Throw it!”
Singing with pain, spouting blood, the shark hurled itself on the fleshy shore, raging so furiously that Neil half expected it to sprout legs and come crawling after him. He clasped the harpoon gun against his fishnet shirt, reached toward the transmitter on his utility belt, and threw the switch.
“Run!” cried Eddie. “Run, for Christ’s sake!”
Neil turned, sprinting across the squishy terrain. Seconds later he heard the warhead explode, the awful grunt of TNT crushing live tissue and vaporizing fresh blood. He looked back. The shock wave was wet and red, a bright sloshy blossom filling the sky with bulbous lumps of brain.
“You okay, buddy? You aren’t hurt, are you?”
As Neil mounted the kneecap, the debris came down, a glutinous rain of shark thoughts, all the hammerhead’s dead hopes and shattered dreams, spattering the AB’s jeans and shirt.
“I swear, I’m goin’ straight to Rafferty!” he wailed. “I’m gonna stick this harpoon gun right smack in his face and tell him I didn’t sign on for this shit!”
“Settle down, Neil.”
The hammerhead’s blood smelled like burning hair. “My grandfather never had to blow up sharks!”
“In thirty-five minutes we’re outta here.”
“If Rafferty won’t take me off this stupid duty, I’m gonna harpoon him! I’m not kiddin’! Bang, right between the eyes!”
“Think how good that shower’s gonna feel.”
And the truly strange thing, Neil realized, throbbing with freedom — the strange, astonishing, terrifying thing — was that he wasn’t kidding.
“There’s no more God, Eddie! Don’t you get it? No God, no rules, no eyes on us!”
“Think about Follingsbee’s Chicken McNuggets. I’ll even slip you one of my Budweisers.”
Neil propped his gun against the shaft of a particularly thick hair, leaned toward the barrel, and, wetting his sun-baked lips, kissed the hot, vibrant metal. “No eyes on us…”
It was appropriate, Oliver Shostak felt, that the Central Park West Enlightenment League followed only a loose approximation ofRobert’s Rules of Order, for neither rules nor order had anything to do with the organization’s raison d’ кtre. People didn’t understand that. Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chuckle-head, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions — the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth, or reading the fax from the SS Carpco Valparaíso currently residing in his vest pocket.
“Let’s get started,” he said, signaling to the attractive young Juilliard student playing the harpsichord on the far side of the room. She lifted her hands from the keyboard; the music stopped in midmeasure, Mozart’s deliciously intricate Fantasia in D Minor. No gavel, of course. No table, no minutes, no agenda. The eighteen members sat in an informal circle, submerged in the splendor of soft recamier couches and lush velvet divans.