The names Sam gives his dishes — Dieu Bourguignon, Domine Gumbo, Pater Stroganoff, Mock Turtle Soup — don’t begin to convey how filling and delicious they are. Believe me, Popeye, no human palate has ever known such wonders.

Dieu Bourguignon

20 lbs. meat, cubed

42 small onions, sliced

14 cups burgundy

7 cups stock

3 lbs. mushrooms, sliced

7 cloves garlic

Marinate meat in wine and stock for 4 hours. Remove meat, reserve marinade. Brown onions in 3 heavy skillets, remove and reserve. Brown meat in same skillets. Add marinade, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer 2 hours. Return onions to skillets, add mushrooms, garlic cloves, and simmer, covered, 1 hour more. Serves 35.

For all this, the poor steward frets about our nutrition. He’s been trying everything he can think of, extracting selenium, iodine, and other minerals from the Gibraltar Sea and mixing them into the recipes, but it’s not enough. “All we’re really getting is fat and protein,” he tells me. “Folks recovering from a famine need Vitamin C, sir. They need Vitamin A, the B-complex, calcium, potassium…”

“Maybe we could mine His liver,” I suggest.

“Thought of that. To get there, you’d have to cut through eighty-five yards of the toughest flesh on the planet, a three-week dig at least.”

There hasn’t been an outbreak of scurvy on an American merchant ship since 1903, Popeye, but that happy fact may be about to change.

When the dinner bell finally rang — a low blast from the Valparaíso’s foghorn, like a shofar heralding Rosh Hashanah — Neil Weisinger took a long, hard look at his hands. He barely recognized them. Blisters speckled his palms like clutches of tiny red eggs. A white callus covered the root of each finger.

He jabbed his spade into the wet sand, seized his Bugs Bunny lunch box, and sat down. His back ached. His arms throbbed. All around him, sweaty deckies opened their various boxes and buckets and removed their McNuggets, Quarter Pounders, and Filets-o-Fish, devouring them with piggish zeal. They were proud of themselves. They deserved to be. In a mere four and a half days they’d dismantled a three-hundred-thousand-ton mountain and brought the world’s largest oil tanker back down to sea level.

Neil glanced toward the cove. The setting sun sparkled in their cargo’s starboard eye. Mist cloaked the archipelago of His toes. Languidly the tide rolled in, soughing beneath the Valparaíso’s hull and splashing against her keel. He imagined the moon as a kind of loving mother, gently drawing a blanket of surf across the island’s southern shore, and he continued to imagine this tender scene as, picking up his lunch box, he began his bold little march away from the ship.

Slipping a hand into his pants pocket, Neil ran his finger along the grooved edge of his grandfather’s Ben-Gurion medal. At any moment, he knew, his courage might desert him. Nerves shot, he would return and join his mates in fleeing this wretched place. But he kept on walking, past the crimson dunes and the 55-gallon drums, the rusting Volvos and the rotting Goodyear tires, following the shrouded shoreline.

Ahead, a classic Mediterranean fig tree stood perched on a sandy knoll, and the instant Neil saw the fruited branches he resolved to venture no farther. This was it — his own private Burning Bush, the place where he would at last encounter YHWH’s unknowable essence, the vantage from which he would finally behold the God of the four A.M. watch. He ascended the knoll and caressed the trunk. Cold, coarse, hard. A rock. His fingertips continued exploring. Branches, bark, leaves, fruit: rock, all of it — a tree become stone, like Lot’s wife turned to salt. No matter. The thing would serve its purpose.

A man said, “Astonishing.”

Neil spun around. Father Thomas stood beside him, dressed in black jeans and a yellow windbreaker, sweat dribbling from beneath his Panama hat.

“What happened to it?” Neil asked.

“The Gibraltar Sea’s full of minerals — that’s how Pollingsbee’s been seasoning our meals. I suspect they petrified the fibers.”

Neil peeled off his fishnet shirt and, mopping his brow, looked south. The moon was performing its hydraulic miracle, flooding the cove with tidewater and levitating the tanker inch by inch. “Can you keep a secret, Father? When the Val leaves tonight, I’ll be standing by this fig tree.”

“You aren’t coming with us?” Father Thomas frowned, tangling his bushy eyebrows.

“It’s what a Christian would call an act of contrition.”

“Leo Zook was dead before you took out your knife,” the priest protested. “And with Joe Spicer — self-defense, right?”

“There’s a picture in my head, Father, a scene I keep playing over and over. I’m in number two center tank, and all that’s needed is for me to reach out and open Zook’s oxygen valve. A simple twist of the wrist, that’s all.” Neil hugged the immortal trunk. “If only I could go back and do it…”

“Your brain was full of hydrocarbon gas. It was wrecking your judgment.”

“Maybe.”

“You couldn’t think straight.”

“A man died.”

“If you stay here, you’ll die.”

Neil plucked a stone fig. “Maybe so, maybe not.”

“Of course you’ll die. You can’t eat that thing, and we’re taking God with us.”

“You really think our cargo is God?”

“Difficult question. Let’s discuss it on the ship.”

“Ever since I can remember, my Aunt Sarah’s been saying I’m trapped inside myself — ‘Neil the hermit, hauling his private cave around with him wherever he goes’ — and now I’m really going to become one, a hermit just like…”

“No.”

“…like Rabbi Shimon.”

“Who?”

“Shimon bar Yochai. At the end of the second century, Rabbi Shimon climbed into a hole in the ground and stayed there, and what do you think finally happened to him?”

“He starved to death.”

“He partook of the Creator’s unknowable essence. He encountered En Sof.”

“You mean he saw God?”

“He saw God. The true, formless, nameless God, the God of the four A.M. watch, not King Kong out there.”

“For all we know, this crazy island might suddenly sink back where it came from.” Father Thomas doffed his Panama hat and raked a withered hand through his hair. “Chaos is … chaotic. You’d drown like a rat.”

Neil walked his fingers along the stone bark. “If He forgives me, He’ll deliver me.”

“An action like this — it’s irresponsible, Neil. There are people back home who care about you.”

“My parents are dead.”

“What about your friends? Your relatives?”

“I have no friends. My aunts can’t stand me. I adored my grandfather, but he died — what? — six years ago.”

The priest harvested a rock. He tossed it into the air, caught it, tossed it, caught it. “I’ll be honest,” he said at last. “This En Sof of yours — I want to know it too, I really do.” He put his hat back on, snugging the brim all the way to his eyebrows. “Sometimes I think my church made a fatal error, turning God into a man. I love Christ, truly, but He’s too easily imagined.”

“Then I’ve got your blessing?”

“Not my blessing, no. But…”

“What?”

“If this is what your conscience demands…”

Sighing, Father Thomas extended his right arm. Neil reached out. Their bruised fingers intertwined. Their battered palms connected.

“Good-bye, Able Seaman Weisinger. Good-bye and good luck.”

Neil sat down beside the immortal trunk. “God be with you, Father Thomas.”

Turning, the priest descended the knoll and marched back toward the whispering surf.

Two hours later, Neil had not moved. The night wind cooled his face. Stars peeked through the fog like candles shining behind frosted windows. Moonlight spilled down, glazing the breakers, transforming the dunes into mounds of sparkling gems.