Towing Jehovah Read Free

tankers, and gimcrack oil-spill contingency plan (a scheme Judge Lucius Percy quickly dubbed "the greatest work of maritime fiction since Moby-Dick. Even as the legal system was vindicating Anthony, his bosses were arranging their revenge. They told him he would never command a supertanker again, a prophecy they proceeded to fulfill by persuading the Coast Guard to rescind his license. Within one year Anthony went from the six-figure salary of a ship's master to the paltry income of those human marginalia who haunt the New York docks taking whatever work they can get. He unloaded cargo until his hands became mottled with calluses. He tied up bulk carriers and Ro-Ros. He repaired rigging, spliced mooring lines, painted bollards, and cleaned out ballast tanks.
    And he took showers. Hundreds of them. The morning after the spill, Anthony checked into Port Lavaca's only Holiday Inn and stood beneath the steaming water for nearly an hour. The oil wouldn't come off. After dinner he tried again. The oil remained. Before bed, another shower. Useless. Endless oil, eleven million gallons, a petroleum tumor spreading into the depths of his flesh. Before the year ended, Anthony Van Horne was showering four times a day, seven days a week. "You left the bridge," a voice would rasp in his ear as the water drummed against his chest.
    Two officers must be on the bridge at all times . . .
    "You left the bridge . . ."
    "You left the bridge," said the angel Raphael, wiping his silver tears with the hem of his silken sleeve.
    "I left the bridge," Anthony agreed.
    "I don't weep because you left the bridge. Beaches and egrets mean nothing to me these days."
    "You weep because"—he gulped—"God is dead." The words felt impossibly odd on Anthony's tongue, as if he were suddenly speaking Senegalese. "How can God be dead? How can God have a body?"
    "How can He not?"
    "Isn't He . . . immaterial?"
    "Bodies are immaterial, essentially. Any physicist will tell you as much." Groaning softly, Raphael aimed his left wing toward the Late Gothic Hall and took off, flying in the halting, stumbling manner of a damaged moth. As Anthony followed, he noticed that the angel was disintegrating. Feathers drifted through the air like the residue of a pillow fight.
    "Insubstantial stuff, matter," Raphael continued, hovering. "Quirky. Quarky. It's barely there. Ask Father Ockham."
    Alighting amid the medieval treasures, the creature took Anthony's hand—those cold fingers again, like mooring lines dipped in the Weddell Sea—and led him to an anonymous Italian Renaissance altarpiece in the southeast corner.
    "Religion's become too abstract of late. God as spirit, light, love—forget that neo-Platonic twaddle. God's a Person, Anthony. He made you in His own image, Genesis 1:26. He has a nose, Genesis 8:20. Buttocks, Exodus 33:23. He gets excrement on His feet, Deuteronomy 23:14."
    "But aren't those just ... ?"
    "What?"
    "You know. Metaphors."
    "Everything's a metaphor. Meanwhile, His toenails are growing, an inevitable phenomenon with corpses." Raphael pointed to the altarpiece, which according to its caption depicted Christ and the Virgin Mary kneeling before God, interceding on behalf of a prominent Florentine family. "Your artists have always known what they were doing. Michelangelo Buonarroti goes to paint the Creation of Adam, and a year later there's God Himself on the Sistine Chapel—an old man with a beard, perfect. Or take William Blake, diligently illustrating Job, getting everything right—God the Father, ancient of days. Or consider the evidence before you . . ." And indeed, Anthony realized, here was God, peering out of the altarpiece: a bearded patriarch, at once serene and severe, loving and fierce. But no. This was madness. Raphael Azarias was a fraud, a con man, a certifiable paranoid.
    "You're molting."
    "I'm dying," the angel corrected Anthony. Indeed. His halo, previously as red as the Texaco logo, now flickered an anemic