“Evidence?” said Pamela. “How can there be evidence?”
“She proposes that we fly to Senegal, charter a helicopter, and reconnoiter the Valparaíso’s cargo.”
“Why, oh, why, are you wasting our time like this?” Winston Hawke, an intense, nervous little man for whom the collapse of Soviet communism merely heralded the True Revolution to come, sprang to his feet. “The Baptists are taking over,” cried the Marxist, “the yokels are on the march, the yahoos are at the gates, and you’re giving us a lot of shit about a supertanker!”
“Let me make a motion,” said Oliver. “I move that we dispatch a task force to Dakar before sundown tomorrow.”
“I can’t believe you’re serious,” said owlish Rainsford Fitch, a computer programmer who spent his nights hunched over his Macintosh SE-30, working out complicated mathematical disproofs of God’s existence.
“Neither can I,” said Oliver. “Would anyone like to second the motion?”
The League’s treasurer, matronly Meredith Lodge, an IRS functionary whose lifelong ambition was to deliver a tax bill to the Mormon Church, popped open her ledger book. “Is this really the sort of enterprise we should be spending our money on?”
“I’ll pay for everything.” Oliver polished off his brandy. “Plane fares, helicopter rentals…”
“Pray tell,” said Barclay, making no effort to stifle his smirk, “did the late Jehovah bequeath anything to His creatures?”
“I said, ‘Would anyone like to second the motion?’ ”
“Ah, but of course He did,” Barclay persisted. “We’ve all heard of God’s will!” Appreciative guffaws rippled through the lounge. “I do hope He left me something nice. The Colorado River, maybe, or perhaps a small planet in Andromeda, or else—”
“Second the motion,” interrupted Pamela, flashing a sturdy smile. “And while I’m at it, let me volunteer to head up the task force. I mean, what’s the big deal, friends? What are we afraid of? We all know the Valparaíso isn’t towing God.”
Thank goodness for off-road vehicles, thought Thomas Ockham as, dropping the Jeep Wrangler into first gear, he guided it up the wrinkled, spongy slope of the forehead. An ordinary car — his Honda Civic, for example — would have been defeated by now, hung up on a pimple or mired in a pore. It all sounded like an announcement you’d see emblazoned outside some rundown Evangelical church in Memphis. TODAY’S SERMON: IT TAKES FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE TO REALLY KNOW THE LORD.
Lifting his hand from the gearshift lever, he accidentally brushed Sister Miriam’s left thigh.
Initially she hadn’t wanted to come along. “I’m not prepared to meet Him that way,” she’d said, but then Thomas had pointed out that, if they were ever going to get beyond their grief, they would first have to confront the corpse directly, pimples, pores, moles, warts, and all. “The logic of the open casket,” as he’d put it.
Struggling against a headwind, the corpse was riding low this morning, so low that the CB radio reports arriving from the torso sentries spoke of waves breaking against the nipples and a tidal pool swirling in the navel. To wit, the Wrangler wouldn’t be making the full trip today — down the jaw, over the Adam’s apple, across the chest and belly. Just as well. Forty-eight hours earlier Thomas had traveled the entire length, pausing briefly atop the abdomen to behold the great veiny cylinder floating between the legs (a truly unnerving sight, the scrotal sac undulating like the gasbag of some unimaginable blimp), and he was loath to repeat the experience with Miriam. It wasn’t just that the sharks had wrought such terrible destruction, stripping off the foreskin like a gang of sadistic mohels. Even if in good shape, God’s penis would still rank high among those vistas a priest and a nun could not comfortably share.
They crested the brow and started downward, bound for the deep, windswept gorge from which the great nose grew.
Technically, of course, His gonads made no sense; they might even be marshaled to dispute the corpse’s authenticity. But such an objection, Thomas felt, smacked of hubris. If their Creator had once wanted (for whatever reasons) to reshape Himself in the image of His products, He’d have gone ahead and done so. “Let there be a penis,” and there would be a penis. Indeed, the more Thomas thought about it, the more inevitable the appendage became. A God without a penis would be a limited God, a God to whom some possibility had been closed, hence not God at all. In a way it was rather noble of Him to have endorsed this most controversial of organs. Inevitably Thomas thought of Paul’s beautiful First Letter to the Corinthians: “And those members of the body which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor…”
The Wrangler was ascending again, conquering the proboscis at five miles per hour. Miriam jammed one of her audiocassettes into the tape deck, realized she’d loaded it upside down, tried again. She pushed PLAY. Instantly the bombastic opening of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra erupted from the speakers, a fanfare popularized by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the great eschatological movie she and Thomas had seen twenty-four years earlier on what the secular world would have termed a date.
While the genitalia held an intrinsic fascination for the priest, the things the Val’s cargo lacked likewise engaged his curiosity. There was no dirt under the fingernails, for example, no clay of Creation — more evidence for calling the corpse counterfeit, although the scouring action of the sea offered an equally likely explanation. The wrists exhibited no crucifixion marks: an instance of divine self-healing, Thomas surmised, although a Unitarian might legitimately seize upon this circumstance to rail against conventional Christianity’s obsession with the Trinity. The flesh displayed none of the scorching that would normally result from a plunge through the earth’s atmosphere; it was as if the carcass hadn’t “fallen” in the literal sense but had materialized instead — or maybe He’d been alive during His descent, willfully exempting Himself from friction and allowing Himself to perish only upon hitting the Gulf of Guinea.
As they reached the summit, Miriam said, “It’s a paradox, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“How the fact of God steals away our faith in God.”
Thomas killed the engine, then rotated the ignition key forward a notch so the cassette would keep playing. “The literalness of all this is most depressing, I’ll grant you. But it’s important to sense the mystery behind the meat. What is flesh, really? What is matter? Do we know? We don’t. In its own way, carrion is as numinous as the Host.”
“Maybe,” said Miriam evenly. “Could be,” she added without emotion. “Sure. Right. I want my belief back, Tom. I want to feel that old-time religion again.”
Yanking the emergency brake with one hand, Thomas gave his friend’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze with the other. “I suppose we could try believing in a God synonymous with something beyond this corpse — a God outside God. But Gabriel didn’t allow us that option. He was a good Catholic, my angel. He understood the ultimate indivisibility of body and spirit.”
The priest climbed out of the cab, laying his palm on the hot steel hood. A Wrangler’s engine, a Homo sapiens sapiens, a Supreme Being — in each case, the soul of the thing could not be abstracted from the thing itself. Just as Einstein had demonstrated the fundamental equivalence of matter and energy, so did Thomas’s church teach the fundamental equivalence of existence and essence. There was no ghost in the machine.
Pulling his Handicam from the rear compartment, the priest pivoted toward the great glassy lake of their cargo’s left eye. Both irises were a vibrant cyan, the luxurious hue of unoxygenated blood. (And God said, “Let me have Scandinavian eyes.”) He put the camera on STANDBY. Gradually the scene painted itself across the viewfinder screen: a frightened deckie on predator patrol, bazooka at the ready, standing by the shore of the watery cornea as he scanned the sky for Cameroon vultures. Beyond lay His great frozen smile, each visible tooth sparkling like a sun-struck glacier.