Not Wanted on the Voyage

Noah rebukes Japeth for his obvious lust for Hannah and is bewildered that Shem doesn’t seem to notice or care about it. Shem dismisses his concerns, referring Japeth as “a child.” Shem has noticed Noah’s attention to his wife, however, though he wisely does not mention that fact. In response to Shem’s categorization of his brother, Noah sneers that Japeth is a married man. Noah strikes Japeth twice in the back with the butt of his sword, drawing blood—an action which is characterized as wholly unnecessary. He orders Japeth to stand out in the rain and asks Shem pointed questions about his sexual history with Hannah before deciding that it is time to “force” the finalization of Japeth’s marriage.

On the lower decks, Mrs. Noyes is still injured from Shem’s kicks, but is growing fond of Lucy and curious about how the queenly woman is able to produce so many items from only one trousseau trunk. She also finds a sense of kinship with the animals who, much like her, find their so-called salvation to be a prison. She muses that Noah and Japeth’s cruelty stems from fear, as all cruelty does. When Shem arrives to take Emma upstairs, Mrs. Noyes is sad to note the contrast between his clean appearance and her own—the divide between the upper deck and the lower is demonstrated in their hygiene and affect. To her concern, Shem tells his mother that all Noah thinks about is sex, and specifically “other people’s,” before taking Emma up to meet his father.

On the upper deck, Shem is wary of his father as he presents Emma. When asked, she says she thinks she is 12, but Noah insists she must surely be at least 13 and certainly not a child anymore, in any case. He orders Hannah to take Emma for a bath and treat her with almond oil. Hannah dutifully bathes Emma and burns her clothes before oiling her body down and dressing her in a white shift. When presented to Noah, Emma notes that he has gone back to referring to her as a child, rather than an adult. He forces her to lift her shift, baring her genitals to him. He assaults her with his finger, making her cry out in pain and fall against the wall. Neither Dr. Noyes nor Hannah react to her agony. Noah decides that surely the tightness of her vaginal passage was the key factor that prevented the consummation of her marriage to Japeth. Dr. Noyes uses the unicorn’s horn to mutilate Emma’s genitals, supposedly in an attempt to make her body more accessible for his son. When Japeth returns, he draws his sword, but Noah responds with his usual technique—confusing Japeth by standing still, then shifting the blame for the horrific scene he has just encountered to Mrs. Noyes, for having not done the mutilation herself earlier. Confused, Japeth cuts off the unicorn’s horn, killing the already dying creature.

Hannah is troubled by the worries that her baby is dead and the pain and bleeding she is subjected to, as well as her concerns about going mad without being able to speak to any other women. However, she recognizes that she has thrown her lot in with Mr. Noyes/Noah for better or worse and is committed to surviving at any cost. In light of her mutilation, Emma tells Hannah that she does not want to live. Hannah responds by urging her to dismiss her own wants as immaterial so that she can guarantee her own survival through serving Japeth.

Noah’s erratic behavior takes on its usual narcissistic pattern: he turns something he had done wrong into something sacred and unquestionable. Since the unicorn had been one of Yaweh’s favorite creatures (a fact Noah had conveniently overlooked in using it for genital mutilation, despite the abundance of knives in the Armoury), he decides to turn the killing into a ritual so as to placate Yaweh, “wherever he may be” (271). Since the death of the unicorn was directly caused by his own decision to involve it in the mutilation, Noah decides “a holy purpose must be manufactured for its death” (271). Plagued by intrusive thoughts, he desperately invents a ritual of grinding the horn into dust, mixing it into mead, combining it with the blood of Emma’s wound, and having Japeth and Emma drink it. He calls it “The Ritual Ceremony of the Holy Phallus, in Remembrance of Yaweh’s Holy Beast, the Sacred Unicorn” (273). Desperately, Noah tries to pray to God, but does not know how. Yaweh will still not answer him.

Japeth returns the corpse of the unicorn and announces that Emma would not return but was “one of (them) now” (276). Lucy holds the dead unicorn in her arms and assures that vengeance will be taken on its behalf. She laments, in front of a curious husband and mother-in-law, that they are not in her home, where she could simply touch it with her fingers and bid it rise due to the holy ground. Lucy explains that they have to remember it as alive in order to allow it to live “before its death, where life is constant” (280). She takes off her gloves—at which point Mrs. Noyes realizes she’s an angel—and brings the unicorn back to life, if only for a moment.

Later, Lucy takes off her wig and makeup, then grows to a larger size and puts on her bronze feather robe as she regales Mottyl with the story of how she had left her home of “merciless light” (282). She had heard a rumor of another world with deserts and snow, instead of dull, predictably fair weather, and set off in the hopes of finding such a place, and people with whom she could argue. She expresses anger that life could only be restored in the world she’s left. She declares that all things magical and wonderful in the world had been drowned as the tungsten candle—which should have burned forever—burns out. Lucy then announces that she is starting a rumor of a new world, “somewhere where darkness and light are reconciled,” and that she intends to go there (283). As she walks away, Mrs. Noyes stops her and states that they want to go with her, wherever she is going, even if it takes 1,000 years. Lucy says that she has finally begun to understand the meaning of her sign as infinity.