The Val’s wounds were ugly and deep. The lower half of her rudder was bent about ten degrees. Her keel was serrated like a carving knife. Her port shaft had sprung loose, and the propeller itself stood upright in a dune like the blades of a sinking windmill. Heavy damage, no question, but not so heavy that a smart skipper couldn’t compensate through some astute maneuvers and a few tricks of the trade. It all came down to the hull, the ship’s one truly vital organ. Anthony stared at the barnacle-encrusted plates; he rubbed them with his fingers, brushed them with his feather. A ragged seam ran for sixty yards along the starboard side like a surgical scar, evidence of her fateful encounter with Bolivar Reef, but the weld looked unscathed — indeed, the entire hull looked whole. Assuming they could in fact manage to dig the tanker loose, she would almost certainly float.
He stepped back. Like the Ark come to rest on Ararat, the tanker sat atop a mountain of sand, mud, coral, stones, and shells. The Vatican flag hung limply on its halyard. The tow chains drooped impotently off the stern, hit the dunes, and trailed away into the sea. Slipping on his mirrorshades, Anthony scanned the cove, hoping their cargo had miraculously drifted into the shallows, but he saw nothing except jagged rocks and clots of fibrous fog.
He drew the compass from his canvas knapsack, oriented himself, and marched north.
The farther Anthony went, the more obvious it became that Van Horne Island had lain beneath a major deep-sea dump site. Ascending from the ocean floor, the island had brought with it the trash of half a continent. This was Italy’s garbage can, England’s dustbin, Germany’s cesspool, France’s chamber pot.
Cupping a palm over his mouth and nose, he rushed past a huge mound of chemical waste, hundreds of 55-gallon drums stacked up in a kind of post-industrial Aztec pyramid. A mile beyond lay the remains of over a thousand automobiles, their gutted chassis piled side by side like skeletons flanking the promenade of a charnel house. Next came the appliances: blenders, toasters, refrigerators, ranges, microwaves, dishwashers — all randomly discarded yet collectively forming an oddly coherent setting, a backdrop for some post-theistic sitcom featuring an aging and demented Donna Reed brooding alone in her kitchen, plotting to poison her family.
Dusk descended, stealing the island’s warmth and turning its red sands black. Anthony zipped up his jacket, drew the bottle of Monte Alban from his knapsack, and, taking a long, hot swallow, pressed on.
An hour later, he found himself among the gods.
Four, to be exact: four granite idols over fifteen feet high, each commanding a different corner of a muddy flagstone plaza. Anthony gasped. Strange enough that Van Horne Island even existed, much less that the place had once hosted a human community — the Atlantic’s answer, perhaps, to that cheerless tribe that had made its home on Easter Island. To the north rose the graven image of a plump imbiber, lifting a goatskin container high above his parted lips and releasing a torrent of wine. To the east a fat-cheeked glutton, his belly the size of a wrecking ball, attempted to ingest an entire live boar in one grand gulp. To the south a goggle-eyed opium eater wolfed down a bouquet of poppies. To the west a sodomy aficionado, possessed of an erection so enormous he appeared to be riding a seesaw, made ready to copulate with a female manatee. Wandering among the idols, Anthony felt as if he’d been transported into the past, back to a time when the major sins were celebrated — no, not celebrated, exactly: it was more as if sin hadn’t been invented yet, and people simply did as their drives demanded, not worrying too much about any hypothetical Supreme Being’s opinion of such behaviors. The gods of Van Horne Island made no laws, passed no sentences, asked for no sympathy.
As night settled over the pantheon, Anthony switched on his flashlight. In the center of the plaza a ponderous marble slab rested atop the disembodied forepaws of a stone lion. The captain sprayed his flashlight beam across the altar’s surface. Mud. Crushed oyster shells. A grouper skeleton. Blood gutters.
Beyond, a high free-standing wall displayed a series of lurid instructional friezes. It was, Anthony realized, a kind of user’s guide to the altar, including the best way to position the victim, the proper angle at which to insert the knife, and the correct method for scooping out the contents of a human abdomen.
According to the friezes, the island’s gods were connoisseurs of entrails. Once lifted from their sloshy abodes, the duodena, jejuna, and ilea had evidently been transferred to clay tureens and set before the idols like steaming bowls of linguine. A jagged, star-shaped fragment from one such tureen lay at Anthony’s feet. He stomped on it with a mixture of fear and disgust, as if squashing a roach. Thus far on the voyage he’d failed to work up much affection for their cargo, that sour old smiler, that grinning judge, but Judeo-Christian monotheism suddenly seemed to him a major step forward.
Weariness crept through the captain’s bones. Drawing out his Monte Alban, he took a big gulp, then swept the trash from the slab and climbed on top. Another gulp. He stretched out, lay down. Another. In Anno Postdomini One, a man could drink as much as he pleased.
Anthony yawned. His eyelids drooped. Lemuria, Pan, Mu, Dis, Atlantis: to be a merchant sailor was to have heard of a dozen lost worlds. Going by the Val’s position alone — north of the Madeiras, east of the Azores, just beyond the Pillars of Hercules — Atlantis was the most likely candidate, but he knew it would take more than mere geography to make him rename his father’s island.
He awoke to the sound of a shout — a booming cry of “Anthony!” — and for an instant he thought the drunkard, glutton, opium eater, or sodomite had come to life and was calling to him. Sunlight suffused the temple, its hot rays slashing through the fog. He unbuttoned his pea jacket.
“Anthony! Anthony!”
Rising from the slab, he realized he was hearing Ockham’s professorial voice. “Padre!”
Dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Panama hat, the priest stood panting in the sodomite’s shadow. He looked dazed, shell-shocked, as might any man of his vocation beholding the gritty particulars of bestiality.
“We were on the corpse when the earbones snapped,” said Ockham. “Most terrible noise I ever heard, the crack of doom. Somehow we made our way to the Juan Fernandez.”
“Thomas, I’m happy to see you,” said Anthony, touching the priest’s arm with the empty Monte Alban bottle. With decadence rampant among the crew and stone gods rising from the seabed, it was good to be with someone who’d heard of the Sermon on the Mount. “Everything’s falling apart, and there you are, a port in a storm.”
“Yesterday I danced naked in God’s navel.”
Anthony shuddered and gulped. “Oh?”
“With Sister Miriam.” The priest seized the neck of his sweatshirt and peeled the sticky cotton from his chest. “A slip. The Idea of the Corpse. I’m in control now. Really.”
“Father, what’s going on? This island makes no sense.”
“Miriam and I discussed the problem over dinner.”
“Come up with anything?”
“Yeah, but it’s pretty wild. Ready? I don’t suppose you keep up with so-called chaos theory …”
“I don’t.”
“…but one of its key concepts is the ‘strange attractor,’ the phenomenon that evidently underlies turbulence and other seemingly random events. As the Val and her cargo traveled north, they may have generated a unique variety of turbulence, and the body — this is just a guess — the body became a strange attractor. Now, here’s the crux. The old, pagan order would be particularly energized by an attractor of this sort. Understand? As the Corpus Dei passed overhead, this world was naturally drawn to it, eager to assert itself once again. You follow me?”