Lunch box in hand, Neil climbed the tree, progressing branch by branch, as if scaling a mainmast. As he settled into a high crook, both of the Valparaíso’s engines started up, their hisses and chugs echoing across Van Horne Island, and within minutes she was sailing out of the harbor. The tow chains tightened, their links grinding together like the wisdom teeth of some immense insomniac dragon. The ship kept moving, all ahead full. Panic seized the AB. It was not too late. He could still give himself a reprieve, charging down to the beach and screaming for the tanker to stop. If worse came to worst, he could even try swimming after her.
His stomach muscles spasmed. His digestive juices burbled. Drawing out his Ben-Gurion medal, he rubbed his thumb across the old man’s profile. There, that was better, yes, yes. Any day now, any hour now, the tree would grow warm — warmer — hot — begin smoking — catch fire.
And it would not be consumed.
Neil Weisinger opened his Bugs Bunny lunch box, removed a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and ate it very, very slowly.
Part Three
EDEN
ON THE SECOND OF September, at 0945 hours, the Carpco Valparaíso steamed free of the fog. The vibrant, piercing clarity of the world — the sparkle of the North Atlantic, the azure glow of the sky, the brilliant white feathers of the passing petrels — made Thomas Ockham weep with joy. This was how the blind beggar must have felt when, told by Christ to visit the Pool of Siloam and wash the muddy spittle from his eyes, he suddenly found he could see.
At 1055 Lianne Bliss’s fax machine kicked in, spewing out what Thomas took to be the latest in a series of hysterical transmissions from Rome, this one distinguished primarily by its being the first to get through. Why had Ockham cut off communication? the Vatican wanted to know. Where was the ship? How was the Corpus Dei? Good questions, legitimate questions, but Thomas was reluctant to reply. While the sudden upwelling of a lost pagan civilization was hardly something he could have anticipated or prevented, he sensed that Rome would nevertheless find some way to blame him — for Van Horne Island, the intolerable delay, their cargo’s dissolution, everything.
At first neither Thomas nor anyone else on board realized how radically the corpse had soured. Their innocence remained intact as late as September 4, when the tanker crossed the 42nd parallel, the latitude of Naples. Then the wind shifted. It was a stench that went beyond mere olfaction. After burrowing into everyone’s nostrils and sinuses, the fumes next sought out the remaining senses, wringing tears from the sailors’ eyes, burning their tongues, scouring their skin. Some deckies even claimed to hear the terrible odor, wailing across the sea like the voices of the sirens enticing Ulysses’s crew to its doom. Whenever a party of stewards crossed over in the Juan Fernandez to harvest edible fillets from amid the burgeoning rot, they had to take Dragen rigs along, breathing bottled air.
Ironically, the softening of the flesh meant that Van Horne was finally able to get his chicksans into a carotid artery: a pathetic gesture at this point, but Thomas understood the captain’s need to make it. On September 5, at 1415, Charlie Horrocks and his pump-room gang began the great transfusion. Although they’d never sucked cargo on the run before, in less than six hours Horrocks’s men had managed to shoot eighty-five thousand gallons of salt water out of the ballast tanks and into the sea while simultaneously channeling as much blood into the Valparaíso’s cargo bays.
And it worked. From the very first, the ship began running at a steady nine knots, a third faster than at any time since the start of the tow.
The officers kept their watches faithfully. The deckies chipped and painted conscientiously. The stewards collected fillets dutifully. But only when the sailors started responding to their obligations with their customary grumpiness, only when the Val’s companionways began ringing with profane complaints and hair-raising curses, did Thomas grow confident that normalcy had returned to the ship.
“It’s over,” he told Sister Miriam. “It’s finally over. Thank God for Immanuel Kant.”
“Thank God for God,” she replied tartly, biting into a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
As Labor Day dawned, cold and overcast, the priest saw that he could no longer deny, either to himself or to Rome, how woefully behind schedule Operation Jehovah had fallen. Indeed, their cargo was now so malodorous that he wondered, half seriously, if this sign of their misadventure could have spread eastward across the ocean, all the way to the gates of the Vatican. His fax was frank and detailed. They were two thousand miles from the Arctic Circle. The ship had gone aground on an uncharted Gibraltar Sea island (37 north, 16 west), trapping them on a mountain of rust for twenty-six days. During this interval, not only had the ethical relativism seeded by the Idea of the Corpse blossomed into total chaos, but putrefaction and neurological disorganization had doubtless befallen the body itself. Yes, the Kantian categorical imperative was now keeping everyone in line, and, yes, the captain’s transfusion scheme had boosted their speed significantly, but neither of these happy facts could begin to compensate for the hiatus on the island. Only when it came to the famine did Thomas censor himself, declining to specify the source of their salvation. Pope Innocent XIV, he felt, was not yet ready for Sam Follingsbee’s recipe for Dieu Bourguignon.
The synod took only one day to absorb, debate, and act upon the bad news. On September 8, at 1315, Di Luca’s reply poured forth.
Dear Professor Ockham:
What can we say? Van Horne has failed, you have failed, Operation Jehovah has failed. The Holy Father is devastated beyond words. According to the OMNIVAC-2000, not only is the divine mind now lost, the concomitant flesh has been corrupted too. By the time the freezing process begins, the degeneration will be so profound as to dishonor Him Whose remains we were elected to salvage. At this point, clearly, a different strategy is indicated.
We have decided to suffuse the Corpus Dei with a liquid preservative, a procedure the OMNIVAC believes will go smoothly, Van Horne having already siphoned off 18 percent of the blood.
Toward this end, Rome has chartered a second ULCC, the SS Carpco Maracaibo, filling her hold with formaldehyde in the port of Palermo and dispatching her west across the Mediterranean. The Maracaibo’s officers and crew have been advised they’re on a mission to commandeer a prop from a planned motion picture of unconscionably pornographic content, thereby forestalling production. We don’t need your friend Immanuel Kant to tell us such a ploy is morally ambiguous, but we feel the body’s true identity is already known to far too many individuals.
Upon receiving this message, you shall direct Van Horne to come about and revisit the island on which he bestowed his surname, there to rendezvous with the Maracaibo. I shall be on board, ready to supervise the formaldehyde injections and subsequent conveyance of the body to its final resting place.
Sincerely,
Tullio Di Luca,
Msgr. Secretary of Extraordinary
Ecclesiastical Affairs
Beyond the rude and uninformed finger pointing of the first paragraph, this letter actually pleased Thomas. Wonder of wonders: it looked as if he’d be getting a second chance to argue Neil Weisinger out of his suicidal penance, a matter that had been weighing on him ever since they’d left Van Horne Island. No less appealing was the thought of dumping the whole sordid, smelly business of Operation Jehovah into Di Luca’s lap. At the moment Thomas wanted nothing more than to go home, settle into his musty Fordham office (how he missed the place, its miniature Foucault pendulum, framed fractal photographs, bust of Aquinas), and start teaching a new semester of Chaos 101.