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.

So Weisinger had called it right. Anyone, even Miriam, could find the freedom that travels in God’s wake. “No luck,” Thomas replied nervously, lifting his palm from the cavity’s floor. A loud glunk escaped his throat. “I don’t f-feel a thing.”

“What we’re really talking about, of course,” said Miriam, sucking in a deep breath, “is Gnosticism.” Her clothes — dungarees, khaki work shirt, underwear, all of it — lay puddled at her feet. Stepping uncertainly forward, she called to mind Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her seashell, a humanoid and endlessly desirable scallop.

“True.” Sweat circled Thomas’s neck. He popped open his saturated collar. “We’re praying our cargo will t-turn out to be the D-Demiurge,” he continued, unbuttoning his black shirt.

“We’re hoping it’s not God at all.”

“Except Gnosticism’s a heresy,” the priest noted, climbing out of his Levi’s. “No, worse than a heresy: it’s depressing. It reduces us to st-stifled spirits trapped in evil flesh.”

A furious drumming poured from the Wrangler’s speakers.

“The Dance of the Seven Veils,” Miriam explained nervously, wiggling her epic hips. Wendy and Wanda were on the move, flouncing in hypnotic oscillations. “The trumpets and trombones speak up next, and then it becomes a waltz. Have you ever waltzed naked in God’s navel, Tom?”

The priest removed his shirt and Jockey shorts. “Never.”

Trumpets shrieked, trombones bleated, a lone tuba blared. At first Thomas simply watched, wearing nothing but his bifocals. He imagined he was Herod Antipas, beholding the impossibly sensual dance that, in a paroxysm of pedophilia, he’d commissioned from his nubile stepdaughter, Salome, never guessing that her price would be John the Baptist’s head. And Miriam’s movements were indeed sensual — not lewd, not lascivious, but sensual, like the Song of Solomon, or Bathsheba’s ablutions, or the Magdalene washing the Lord’s dusty feet.

Taking his friend’s hand, he encircled her fine, substantive waist. They waltzed: awkwardly at first, clownishly, in fact, but then some buried engram took over, some latent feeling for rhythm and form, and he guided her across the rubbery floor with bold, sweeping strides. The strange fog hung everywhere, blankets of mist wrapping their spinning bodies in a thick, delicious warmth. Something stirred in his mothballed loins. No erection followed. No lust consumed him. He was glad. This dance went deeper than loins, well beyond lust, back to some ancient, presexual existence they shared with sponges and amoebas.

“Nobody’s watching,” noted Miriam.

Their bodies pressed tightly together, like hands clasped in prayer. “We’re alone,” Thomas corroborated. So true, so pathetically true; they were orphans in Anno Postdomini One, beyond good and evil. It was like living inside a naughty joke. How much fun do priests have? Nun. He felt soiled, wicked, damned, ecstatic.

A tremor caressed their bare feet.

“The High Court’s adjourned,” said Miriam.

A second tremor, twice the intensity of the first.

“The bench has been eaten by worms.”

A fearsome quaking shook the navel.

They separated, throwing their arms out for balance. Confusion swept through Thomas. Resurrection? Their dancing was so sinful it had roused God from His coma?

“What’s happening?” gasped Miriam.

Typhoon? Tidal wave? “I don’t know. But I think this is the wrong place to be right now.”

They dressed hurriedly and incompletely, Thomas pausing briefly to observe an act he’d never seen before, the odd yogic posture by which a woman snaps on her brassiere. The flesh beneath their feet jiggled like a field of aspic. Explosions rattled the air. Spray splashed into the gorge. It seemed as if the entire Corpus Dei were aquiver, seized by some posthumous epileptic fit.

Shoes and socks in hand, they dashed back to the Wrangler, climbed inside, and, silencing Salome, zoomed away.

“Whirlpool?” asked Miriam.

“Possibly.”

“Waterspout?”

“Could be.”

Gunning the engine, Thomas guided the Wrangler to the surface of the belly and, heedless of the blinding fog, started along the midriff. Veering east, he stopped. The Juan Fernandez, thank heaven, was where they’d left her, tied to the rubber wharf Rafferty had moored to the starboard armpit shortly before the tow began. Abandoning the Wrangler, they climbed down the Jacob’s ladder, crawled on hands and knees across the rolling pier, and vaulted into the launch.

“How do you feel?” Thomas asked, settling behind the steering wheel.

“Guilty.” Miriam cast off. “We sinned, didn’t we? We gazed upon each other’s nakedness.”

“We sinned,” he agreed, twisting the ignition key. The engine turned over and held. “You’re beautiful, Miriam.”

“So are you.”

He brought the Juan Fernandez about and, opening the throttle all the way, piloted her across the submerged elbow. The passage along the cheek was choppy and treacherous, and it took them nearly fifteen minutes to gain open water. Dead ahead lay the supertanker, deckhouse shrouded in fog, hull pitching and rocking as if making passionate love to the sea.