Towing Jehovah

Within twenty minutes, he felt warmer, but his mood remained bleak as ever. A woman’s form appeared, swathed in steam. Charlotte Corday, he mused, come to stab Marat — he’d always adored Jacques-Louis David’s painting — but instead of a dagger she wielded only a digital thermometer.

“Hello, Oliver. Good to see you.”

“Cassandra?”

“They want me to take your temperature,” she said, piercing the veil of mist.

“Listen, honey, I tried my darnedest. I really, really tried.”

Bending beside the tub, she placed a quick, noncommittal kiss on his cheek. “I know you did,” she said in a gratuitously condescending tone. Her face was gaunt, her demeanor cowed and diffident, and no doubt he appeared equally defeated to her. And yet, as she stood over him, pressing the tiny green button on the thermometer, he thought she’d never looked more beautiful.

“I tried my darnedest,” he said again. “You gotta understand — I had no idea Spruance was pla

“I’ll be blunt,” said Cassie, easing the device between his lips. “I never really believed you’d hired the right people.” The remark wounded Oliver — so severely that he almost bit off the thermometer bulb. (Jesus Christ, what did she expect on such short notice, the U.S. Seventh Fleet?) A faint ringing reached his ears, like the sound of a mouse’s alarm clock. Cassie removed the thermometer and squinted at the little numerals. “Ninety-eight point two. Close enough. We’ll let you walk around now.”

“I tried my darnedest. Really.”

“You don’t need to keep saying that.”

“Where’s God?”

“Adrift,” she replied, handing Oliver a white terry-cloth bathrobe and a beach towel imprinted with the Carpco stegosaurus. “He went east, I think. Quite possibly He’s unsinkable. Oliver, we have to talk. Meet me in the snack bar.”

“I love you, Cassandra.”

“I know,” she said evenly — ominously — and, whirling around, vanished into the mist.

As Oliver climbed out of the rewarming tub, a dizzying depression overcame him. He felt landlocked, marooned in the Age of Reason, and, meanwhile, way out to sea, nudging the horizon, there was his Cassandra, sailing into the post-Enlightenment, post-Christian, post-theistic future, moving farther and farther from him with each passing minute.

He dried off and, throwing on the bathrobe, limped through the ranks of dazed war reenactors, half of them sitting in re-warming tubs, the rest lying in bed. A ragged row of stitches ran down McClusky’s left cheek. A turban of bandages sat atop Lieutenant Beeson’s head. Burns dotted Lance Sharp’s chest like abstract-expressionist tattoos. He pitied these eighteen men their snapped bones, their torn flesh, but he also felt betrayed by them. They should have made much bigger holes in God. They simply should have.

When Oliver first encountered the sorry spectacle of Albert Flume, he understood as never before what it meant for a man to lose his arms. Leg loss was a different matter. Leg loss was Captain Ahab, Long John Silver — a whole gallery of romantic heroes. But a man without arms simply looked like a mistake.

Pembroke stood by the bed, his forehead a mass of bruises, a gauze patch over his right eye. “This is all your fault,” he told Oliver, gesturing toward his mutilated partner.

The impresario’s arrogance stu

Flume stared at the ceiling and winced. Spirals of linen covered his stumps, giving the starkly truncated limbs the appearance of baseball bats whose handgrips had been wrapped in adhesive tape.

“You said there wouldn’t be any screening vessels,” whined Pembroke.

“You want a villain, Sidney?” asked Oliver, beating back his impulse to scream. “Try your buddy Spruance. Spruance and his Op Plan 29-67. Try that fool McClusky over there — he should’ve blown retreat the instant the Maracaibo showed up. Try yourself.”

“Maracaibo, not ‘the’ Maracaibo.”

“People around here are mumbling about lawsuits, extradition, manslaughter indictments,” said Oliver. “I think we’re in a lot of trouble, all of us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There weren’t any lawsuits after Midway.” Drawing a plastic comb from his bathrobe, Pembroke tidied up his friend’s thick blond hair. “Jeez, I wish I could help you, Alby. I wish I could make Frances Langford appear right now and cheer you up.”

“What’ll happen to me?” moaned Flume.

“Nothing but the best therapy for you, buddy. You’ll get wonderful mechanical arms — you know, like Harold Russell had.”

“Harold Russell?” said Oliver.

“That double amputee who went into the movies,” said Pembroke. “Ever see The Best Years of Our Lives?”

“No.”

“Swell picture. Russell got an Oscar.”

“I’ll pay the bills,” said Oliver, lightly brushing Flume’s left stump. “No matter what those wonderful mechanical arms cost, I’ll pay.”

“I don’t want wonderful mechanical arms,” mumbled Flume. “Russell had to sell his Oscar.”

“True,” sighed Pembroke.

“Real arms.”

“Hey, buddy, we’re go

“I don’t want a Guadalcanal.”

“No?” said Pembroke.

“I don’t want a Guadalcanal, or an Arde

“I understand.”

“Arms.”

Sure.

“I keep trying to move my hands.”

“Naturally.”

“I can’t move ’em.”

“I know, Alby.”

“I wa

“Right.”

“Pitch pe

“Or course.”

Time to leave, the Enlightenment League’s president thought as Albert Flume voiced his wish to snap his fingers and twiddle his thumbs. Time to find Cassandra, Oliver decided as the armless impresario articulated his desire to wear a wristwatch, knit samplers, play with a yo-yo, raise the flag for Hudson High, and masturbate. Time to get on with the rest of what Oliver suspected was going to be a crushingly dull and utterly meaningless life.

A loaded bedpan, Thomas Ockham concluded, was a hopeless commodity. No fantasy could redeem it. Every time he bore one across the Maracaibo’ s sick bay, he started out pretending it was a chalice, a ciborium, or the Holy Grail itself, but by the time he reached the bathroom he was carrying a bowl of turds. And so it happened that, when Tullio Di Luca demanded an emergency meeting to discuss the fate of the Corpus Dei, the priest was more than happy to forsake his duties and head for the elevator.

The Valparaíso group — Van Horne, Rafferty, Haycox, O’Co

“In my brief association with your father, I came to admire his seamanship and courage,” said Di Luca, assuming the head of the table. “Your grief must be overwhelming.”

“Not yet,” grunted Van Horne. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Wincing at the captain’s candor, Thomas seated himself beside Lia

Why had God died?

Why?

“The Vatican has a proposition for you,” said Di Luca to Van Horne. “We are not certain why you absconded last week, but the Holy Father, a most generous man, is prepared to ignore your insubordination if you will take over the Maracaibo, subsequently doing as Rome wishes.”