Two ushers, who look like they’d played football twenty years before, have come to the far end of the aisle behind the rear pews and stand waiting for a signal from the rector, who looks at Cage with a sympathetic expression. One of the ushers suddenly turns and hurries down a staircase at the back of the nave into the undercroft. Across the aisle, one row back, a woman and her three children are craning their necks and looking at me as if I’m about to leap up myself. I shrug and raise my palms. The family all avert their eyes simultaneously.
“How many of you have read
Moby-Dick
? Surely all of you know that Captain Ahab set sail from the harbor down the street in pursuit of the white whale. I’ve been rereading Melville’s masterpiece recently.” Cage is using his southern senator’s voice. “Many of the chapters are themselves sermons of a sort. But there is an actual sermon in the book preached by the ancient black cook to sharks that are in a feeding frenzy on the carcass of a whale lashed to the side of their vessel.” He suddenly switches into a black dialect: “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.”
A handful of people laugh.
“Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbor’s mout, I say.”
There’s more laughter, even from Father Farlow. Sylvia is laughing hard, clutching her arms around her concave belly.
Cage switches back to the orator’s voice: “Now, if you take the whale to be the world and the blubber wealth, Melville seems to be saying that we should not be so grasping in our pursuit of wealth. Now, most of the people I know, most of the lawyers and bankers and builders I’ve met on the island, and most of the professionals who visit from New York or Boston don’t go to church. Many of their children have no idea what goes on in church. They have only a vague notion of God.” Cage points his finger at me and holds it in the air. “My own brother calls himself a humanist. I had to drag him in here with me today. Bet he wishes he hadn’t come, huh, Harper? My own brother, the son of a . . . bishop. But I digress. The point is that here, in the last days of the twentieth century, the blubber itself—wealth—has become the religion.
Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbor’s mout, I say!
”
The congregation erupts as loud as the laugh track on a sitcom. Sylvia’s laughter turns into coughing.
“Now, I know that I am preaching to the converted, though no doubt even some of us believers are suffering from a powerful attraction to the blubber, and you blubbermongers should look deep in your hearts, but what concerns me is how we can make our neighbors outside the church aware of the dangers of blubber. In anthropological terms man is no longer a
Homo habilis
, handyman, the Toolmaker.
Homo sapiens
has become the Toy Buyer. For men pursue blubber in order to buy toys, more toys, and more toys.” Cage pauses and looks at the back of the church where the usher who disappeared is starting up the aisle with a policeman. “Fellow-critters, dere is a shark swimmin’ tow’d me as I speak. I hab yet to conclude da homilie this morning but it high time to heave off.” He leaps down from the pulpit, dodges past Father Farlow, and dashes toward the side of the church.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t take to the idea of tackling him in church. I just sort of freeze. Cage reaches a stained-glass window, which is round like a portal and open, swung on hinges in the middle so the glass is parallel to the ground, with a breeze passing above and below it. Cage springs up and pulls his head and shoulders through the space at the bottom of the window.
A hundred hushed voices are murmuring behind me.
Sylvia clutches my arm.
Father Farlow is saying something from the pulpit.
Watching Cage wiggle his butt through the hole, I think of Nick telling me the story of when Papa taught them the word
buttocks
. Cage and Nick were about four or five and getting into one of the big Ford LTD station wagons. Papa had said, Sit still and don’t let your buttocks leave the seat, and the little boys fell to the ground, rolling with laughter. In the car Cage kept repeating, Buttocks, and Nick kept howling with laughter.
“Sir?”
I turn and the policeman is leaning over the armrest of the pew.
“Yes.” I should stand up but I’m still stunned.
“I’d like a word with you two,” the usher says over the cop’s shoulder.
“Sure.” We get up. Father Farlow smiles kindly from the pulpit. I wave and smile weakly and follow the usher toward the back of the church, everyone staring at us from both sides, the policeman walking behind me as if I might make a run for it.
The usher leads us down to the undercroft, a basement with a linoleum floor and a table set with a big coffee brewer and plates of cookies. Sylvia pulls a cigarette out of a small purse. “You can’t smoke here,” the usher says.
Sylvia sticks the unlit cigarette between her lips.
“That cowboy who was hijacking the pulpit is your brother?” The cop takes out a little notepad. His name tag says
Officer Henderson
. He writes down my name, phone number, and address. Upstairs the congregation is singing.
“Where does your brother live?”
“Right now he’s house-sitting out in Cisco. I can’t remember the name of the street.”
“You can do better than that,” the cop says. “If you want us to be nice, you should cooperate.”
“There’s a bunch of boats in the front yard. But I’m not sure where he’ll be next week.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Is he drunk or high on something?” Henderson watches me with eyes that show no sympathy.
“Cage hasn’t been the same since our brother died.” My voice is thick. “Um, in a car accident two years ago today.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Go easy, Ed,” the usher says.
“Well.” I glance at Sylvia, who gives me a look like I’ve already ratted them out.
She takes the cigarette from her mouth, then puts it back.
“He’s been hitting the bottle pretty hard.”
“If you’re any kind of brother, you’ll bring him in to the station before we find him. He’ll probably get off with a warning.” Henderson points his pen at me. “If we have to go looking for him, it won’t be no Sunday school.”
I
t’s night. Only a faint glow of moonlight through the windows. Is it closer to dusk or dawn? I hear her breathing beside me in bed. She is here but I feel no connection to her, as if she doesn’t know me, that we are two apes who happen to be lying beside each other by arbitrary selection. I can’t remember getting in bed. I stare up at the ceiling, try to reach back a few hours, but there is only darkness and the sound of a car on the road. Darkness in the room. Darkness in my head. Why do I get these gaps? Drugs? asked that little, frightened woman at the Nantucket health service when I told her I had racing thoughts and couldn’t sleep and I thought that people looked at me as if I didn’t belong on the island. No, I hadn’t been doing any drugs. She looked more confused than I was and scared of me. I think it was my leather jacket and my earring and long hair. I hadn’t done any drugs for months until I walked out of her office.
The psychologists I’ve met are clueless anyway. I was so depressed at Vanderbilt that I started sleeping all day. I couldn’t face the classrooms filled by fumes from the erasable markers they used to cover the walls with graphs. Remembering the fumes gives me a headache. Mankind was born in the forests of Africa and not meant to dwell in concrete and cardboard towers with a random selection of humanity breathing chemical fumes. There I was, burning up my parents’ money, going in debt to be a cog in a machine, preparing for a life in an office, my head cracking every time I smelled the fumes. The Vanderbilt counselors were buffoons. They thought I should ride it out. I should never have been there. My grades steadily declined, then fell off a cliff. Toward the end I was unraveling. Stayed in my apartment for two weeks and made soup for myself and read an Elvis biography and thought I was watching the hair fall out of my head every time I looked in the mirror and no one at school even asked where I was. For an international marketing class we had to get a partner or a group of people to do a presentation. I got together with another misfit, a guy from China, and we did this thing on selling crematoriums because they had so many people over there who were dying. Macabre. He used to sell them. I got up in front of the class and couldn’t remember what I was saying. We were supposed to be addressing the class as if we were addressing the board of directors of a company to ask for money to do marketing R&D. I had all these prepared notes in front of me and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t organize my thoughts. I finally just put my notes down and said, Look, all I really want is forty dollars from the board so I can buy this directory of international business. The class started howling and the professor reached in his pocket and pulled out two twenties. In front of this whole big group of people. Everybody was laughing at me.
A cold wind stirs the curtains. I stand up to close the window and gaze at the moon. I can remember Vanderbilt a year and a half ago, I can remember two weeks ago, but I can’t remember where I was this morning. I try and try but I only see the graphs on the walls and smell the dizzying fumes.
Where was I this morning?
I scream silently. I walk barefoot around the room looking for a clock and the ticking draws me to a heap of clothes and I find it under them. Eight-thirty. It’s only just night. Why were we sleeping? I’m wide awake now. I pick up my pants and find something in my pocket, the bulletin from St. Paul’s, and I remember the morning with relief—like discovering your location after wandering around lost in the woods for hours.
I laugh and Sylvia mumbles from the bed. From the church I’d run right back here. We’d started tripping around three in the morning, seven hours before the service. I haven’t slept much the last month, only a few hours a night, and I was exhausted and crawled right back in bed and slept for eight hours. Now I’m refreshed. Ready to rip. Lock and load.
“What are you laughing at?” Sylvia sits up, the sheets sliding down to her belly, revealing her teardrop breasts.
“My sermon.” I crawl beside her. “I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe the Holy Ghost.”
Sylvia smiles. “It was impressive.”
I kiss her breasts for a long time. She arches her back. I wrap one arm around her thin waist, pull our bodies together. We seem to melt into each other. I trace my tongue down her belly, along the blades of her hips until she is grinding her ass slowly.
“Fuck me,” she says.
I slide inside her, get up on my toes so my pelvis is pressing against her clitoris.
“I love your cock.”
“I love being inside you.”
Her breathing grows heavier. She lifts her head and licks my chest. I’m getting too excited, so I picture the waves lapping the shore, skidding back to sea, and rolling back to the beach until she is breathing fast, yelling, “Kill me. Kill me. Oh, kill me!”
I rise up on my arms, drive myself in and out of her, watching her face tense. Then she moans and her body goes slack, her eyes roll up so only white shows through the slits of her lids. A woman’s face is most beautiful immediately after coming, flushed and soft, radiant. I watch the flickering transformation, then pull her legs up in the air, her knees behind her head, and hammer my flanks between her thighs, borne on a furious rush, a wind howling up a mountainside, the promise of reaching a new summit, the ultimate peak, a union of souls, and then I come and the climax is a cruel swindle as I fall, down, down, down into blackness, utterly alone. It is the disenchantment that makes a man rush out of a woman’s bedroom as if fleeing the scene of a crime.
“That was wonderful,” Sylvia says, her eyes open and focused, the ephemeral beauty gone.
“Yeah, it was great,” I say, rolling onto my back. “I’m hungry.”
Sylvia pulls the sheet up and closes her eyes. I get up, pull on some clothes, and go downstairs. Outside the front windows, Harper is riding up on his bicycle. I go out on the porch. “Hey, Harpo.”
“You finally woke up.” He comes through the gate. Halfway across the yard he stops and looks at all the boats, shakes his head. “How do you feel?”
“Like I could run a marathon.”
Harper comes to the edge of the porch. “Listen, Cage, I think we ought to go to the police station. That cop said if you went in to talk, you’d get off with a slap on the wrist, but it’d be worse if they came after you.”
“Why?”
“Disturbing the peace. Public drunkenness. I don’t know.” Harper seems uncomfortable, like he feels guilty. “The cop called me this afternoon and said that those checks you’ve been bouncing have caught up with you.”
“I’m not going to any damn police station.” The idea terrifies me. What if they give me a drug test? They might railroad me into a rehab program right off the island and blow all my plans apart. “I’ll cover those checks if I can just keep working.”
A squad car rolls out of the darkness in front of the yard.
I walk quickly inside, run up the stairs, and grab my passport—never leave home without it—and a stash of cash in my sock drawer. Sylvia rouses for a few seconds, squints at me, and rolls over. I kiss her on the back of the neck and tell her I love her but she doesn’t stir, so I fly out of the room and down the back stairs four at a time, my feet just barely touching the edges, and run out the back.
A cop is standing in the yard a few feet from the door in the moonlight.
“Hi.” I slow down as if I’m just coming out for a stroll. Just beyond his reach I dash to his side. He lunges and tackles me. I hit the ground with a heavy thump that knocks the wind out of me and I see little bursts of color. As the air comes back in my lungs, I try to squirm away from him and he says, “Hold still, asswipe.”