God's Grace Read Free

blackened seaweed in lakes of sludge.

    The oceanographic schooner, its lightning-split mast draped in fallen sails, drifted close to volcanic shores as Cohn slept the heavyhearted sleep of the dead. It sailed away from the soaking land before he woke.
    He awoke mourning human being, human existence, all the lives lost. He listed everyone he could remember, and the names of those he did not know whose names he had heard. He mourned civilization, goodness, daring, joy; and all that man had done well.
    Cohn was enraged with God Who had destroyed His own dream. The war was man’s; the Flood, God’s. Cohn heard thunder when he thought of God and sometimes hid.
    The sky was old—how often had the earth changed as the same sky looked on? Never had there been so much space in space. He had never been so desolate.
    Cohn diligently pasted stamps in albums, recalling nations lost; he pitched darts at a red-and-white target in the games room. He read till his eyes were blobs of glue stuck to words. He listened to records on his father the rabbi’s portable phonograph. He kept, so to speak, going.
    The boat’s engines had ceased throbbing; there was no electricity. It seemed useless to attempt to activate the rusty generator aboard; but there was bottled gas to cook with in the galley.
    On good days Cohn told himself stories, saying the Lord would let him live if he spoke the right words. Or lived the right life. But how was that possible without another human life around? Only God and he “contending,” Cohn attempting to evade His difficult nature?
    (Thunder groaning, Cohn hiding.)

    No way of outdoing the Lord Who had invented Himself into being. The God of beginnings; He wanted to begin, therefore had begun. Spontaneous combustion? Beginnings were far up the line from First Causes. Therefore where had God begun?
    Who was He? You had to see His face to say in Whose image man had been fashioned; and no one could. Moses, who had come close, saw Him through fog and flame. Or from a cleft in a huge rock where the Lord had placed him. And God, approaching the rock in his own light, covered the cleft with His hand, until He had passed by, then removed His hand and Moses clearly saw the Lord’s endless back.
    Shall I someday see His face? God seemed to feel the need to talk to men. He needed worship, and even faithless men had hungered to worship Him.
    Cohn added up columns of random figures. He began and tore up a notebook journal. He trotted back and forth, for exercise, along the 152-foot deck, hurdling obstacles, the fallen mast, yards of canvas sail, instruments of observation, hauling, drilling; tons of thick ropes covered with seaweed, barnacles, starfish, sea detritus; Cohn, despite his small size and slightly bowed legs, had once been an athlete in Staten Island High School.
    The radio was dead. He talked to himself. He missed the human voice.
    “What can one expect in this life of desolation ?”
    —More life?
    “To be alive alone forever ?”
    —It takes one rib to make an Eve.

    “Do you see yourself as Adam?”
    —If the job is open.
    Wherever they were it rarely rained. The heavy rains had served, and were gone; the present weather was dry, the flood subsiding; but not Cohn’s anger at the destruction God had wrought. Why does human life mean so little to Him? Because He hadn’t lived it? If Jesus had, why didn’t he tell Him about it? Cohn thought he would bring Them to the bar of justice if he could.
    (Terrible thundering; he hid for days.)
    Drinking water was short. Part of the storage tankful had leaked into the sea, adding to the ocean water. To the bitter salt sea. Food was plentiful but he ate without appetite.
    Cohn, proficient in reading geological and biological time in the microfossilized cores drilled out of the ocean floor, could barely read the visible stars. He did not know how to navigate, and could only guess where in the wet world he was; nor could he steer Rebekah Q , though he diligently