But could natural processes alone account for this destruction, or had God, too, had a hand in it? Was this another of those wicked cities the Almighty had elected to eradicate personally, sister to Babylon, kin to Gomorrah?

Ringed by fluted columns, a vast public building loomed over the priest, its gaping bronze doors carved with bas-relief images of the island’s four reigning deities. He climbed the steps, entered the vaulted foyer, and started down the mud-carpeted hallway beyond. The music, louder now, assaulted his brain. Moving past the rooms, he imagined he was wandering through one of those hands-on museums to which upscale parents liked to drag their children, though here the exhibits were strictly for adults. One space, to judge from the mosaics, had been an opium den. Another, a masturbation booth, frescoed with antediluvian centerfolds. There was a cubicle for pederasty. For bestiality. Sadomasochism. Necrophilia. Incest. Obsession after obsession, perversion upon perversion, a Museum of Unnatural History.

The hall turned a corner, opening onto a flagstone courtyard bordered by airy arcades and packed with the Valparaíso deserters, most of them naked. Such an astonishing range of skin tones, thought Thomas: ivory, pink, bronze, saffron, fawn, flaxen, dun, cocoa, sorrel, umber, ochre, maple sugar. It was like gazing upon a jar of mixed nuts, or a Whitman’s Sampler. Many of the sailors had painted themselves, sketching sinuous arrows and coiled serpents on their bodies with mashed grapes, the juices running down their limbs like purple sweat. Wall to wall, the courtyard vibrated with a combination binge, bacchanal, orgy, brawl, and disco tourney, with many revelers participating in all five possibilities — drinking, eating, fornicating, fighting, dancing — simultaneously. Marijuana smoke mingled with the fog. Strobelights brightened the dusk. Along the southern arcade, Ralph Mungo and James Echohawk dueled with the decorative cutlasses they’d stolen from the wardroom, while a few yards away eight men stood in a circle, each plugged into another, a carousel of sodomy.

Crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles littered the ground. Scores of spent condoms lay about like an infestation of giant planaria, a fact from which Thomas drew a modicum of hope: if the revelers were sane enough to worry about pregnancy and AIDS, they might be sane enough to ponder the categorical imperative. Arms undulated, hips shimmied, breasts swayed, penises swung — the sybaritic aerobics of Anno Postdomini One.

“Hiya, Tommy!” Neil Weisinger strode over, an unlit cigarette parked in his mouth, gleefully ripping a barbecued chicken in two. “Didn’t expect to see you here!” he said drunkenly.

“That music…”

“Scorched Earth, from Sweden. The album’s called Chemotherapy. You should see their stage act. They read entrails.”

Dominating the courtyard was a polished obsidian banquet table, its surface supporting not only four enormous hams and two sides of beef but a diesel generator, a CD player, and an RCA Colortrak-5000 video projector spraying concupiscent images on a white bedsheet hanging wraithlike inside the northern arcade. Thomas had never seen Bob Guccione’s notorious Caligula, but he guessed that’s what the movie was. The camera dollied along the main deck of a Roman trireme on which nearly everyone was rutting.

“Helluva party, huh?” said Weisinger, waving half the bisected chicken in Thomas’s face. The air reeked of semen, tobacco, alcohol, vomit, and pot. “Want some dinner?”

“No.”

“Go ahead. Eat.”

“I said no.”

The kid displayed a bottle of Lцwenbrau. “Beer?”

“Neil, I saw you in the amphitheater Tuesday.”

“I really nailed Spicer, didn’t I? Got him like some nervy goyische cowboy roping a steer.”

“An immoral act, Neil. Tell me you understand that.”

“This looks like just another Lцwenbrau bottle,” said Weisinger, “but it’s much, much more than that. Washed up on the beach yesterday. Inside was a message. Ask me what message.”

“Neil…”

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“What message?”

“ ‘Thou shalt have whatever other gods thou feels like,’ it said. ‘Thou shalt covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ Sure you don’t wanna beer?”

“No.”

“ ‘Thou shalt bugger thy neighbor’s ass’.”

Everywhere Thomas looked, food was being squandered on a grand scale. Huge untended caldrons sat atop driftwood fires, rapidly reducing entire wheels of cheddar, Muenster, and Swiss to an inedible tar. Five sailors from the engine crew and five from the deck crew battled it out with what seemed like the Valparaíso’s entire stock of fresh eggs. Charlie Horrocks, Isabel Bostwick, Bud Ramsey, and Juanita Torres ripped the lids off vacuum-packed cans and merrily showered themselves with clam chowder, vegetable soup, baked beans, chocolate topping, and butterscotch sauce. They licked each other like mother cats grooming their young, the residue spilling down their flesh and disappearing amid the flagstones.

Weaving through the tangle of bodies, Thomas made his way to the banquet table. He studied the metal plate on the generator:

7500 WATTS, I20/240 VOLTS, SINGLE-PHASE, FOUR-STROKE, WATER-COOLED, 1800 RPMS, 13.2 HP — the only piece of rational discourse in the entire museum. The music was at a fever pitch, handsaws dying of cancer. He shut off the CD player.

“What’d ya do that for?” wailed Dolores Hay cox.

“Turn it back on!” screamed Stubby Barnes.

“You must listen to me!” Thomas leaned toward the Color-trak-5000, currently projecting Malcolm McDowell working his greased fist into a wincing man’s anus, and pushed EJECT.

“Put the movie back on!”

“Start the music!”

“Fuck you!”

“Caligula!”

“Listen to me!” Thomas insisted.

“Scorched Earth!”

“Caligula!”

“Scorched Earth!”

“Caligula!”

“You’re using the corpse as an excuse!” the priest shouted. “Schopenhauer was wrong! A Godless world is not ipso facto meaningless!”

The food came from every point of the compass — barrages of boiled potatoes, salvos of Italian bread, cannonades of grapefruit. A large, scabrous coconut grazed Thomas’s left cheek. A pomegranate smashed into his shoulder. Eggs and tomatoes exploded against his chest.

“There’s a Kantian moral law within!”

Someone restarted Caligula. Under the persuasion of a Roman senator’s wife’s tongue, a large erect penis not belonging to the senator released its milky contents like a volcano spewing lava. Thomas rubbed his eyes. The erupting organ stayed with him, hovering in his mind like a flashbulb afterimage as he fled the Museum of Unnatural History.

“Immanuel Kant!” cried the despairing priest, rushing through the city streets. He reached under his Fermilab shirt and squeezed his crucifix, as if to mash Christ and Cross into a single object. “Immanuel, Immanuel, where are you?”