"James Morrow - Towing Jehovah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)

everything rightтАФGod 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 pink. His once-bright
feathers emitted a sallow, sickly aura, as if infested with aging fireflies.
Tiny scarlet veins entwined his eyeballs. "The entire heavenly host is dying.
Such is the depth of our sorrow."
"You spoke of my ship."
"The corpse must be salvaged. Salvaged, towed, and entombed. Of all
vessels on earth, only the Carpco Valpara├нso is equal to the task."
"The Val's a cripple."
"They refloated her last week. She's in Connecticut at the moment,
taking up most of the National Steel Shipyard, awaiting whatever new
fittings you believe the job will require."
Anthony stared at his forearm, flexing and unflexing the muscle,
making his tattooed mermaid do a series of bumps and grinds.
"God's body . . ."
"Precisely," said Raphael.
"I would imagine it's large."
"Two miles fore to aft."
"Face up?"
"Yes. He's smiling, oddly enough. Rigor mortis, we suspect, or perhaps
He elected to assume the expression before passing away."
The captain fixed on the altarpiece, noting the life-giving milk
streaming from the Virgin's right breast. Two miles? Two goddamn
miles? "Then I guess we'll be reading about it in tomorrow's Times, huh?"
"Unlikely. He's too dense to catch the attention of weather satellites,
and He's giving off so much heat He registers on long-range radar as
nothing but a queer-looking patch of fog." As the angel guided Anthony
into the foyer, his tears started up again. "We can't let Him rot. We can't
leave Him to the predators and worms."
"God doesn't have a body. God doesn't die."
"God has a bodyтАФand for reasons wholly obscure to us, that body has
expired." Raphael's tears kept coming, as if connected to a source as
fecund as the Trans-Texas Pipeline. "Bear Him north. Let the Arctic freeze
Him. Bury His remains." From the counter he snatched up a brochure
promoting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its cover emblazoned with
Piero della Francesca's Discovery and Proving of the True Cross. "A
gigantic iceberg lies above Svalbard, permanently pinned against the
upper shores of Kvitoya. Nobody goes there. We've hollowed it out: portal,
passageways, crypt. You merely have to haul Him inside." The angel
plucked a feather from his left wing, eased it toward his eye, and wet the
nib with a silver tear. Flipping over the brochure, he began writing on the
back in luminous salt water. "Latitude: eighty degrees, six minutes, north.
Longitude: thirty-four degrees . . ."