Only Begotten Daughter (10 page)

Guiding Beverly into the anteroom, he flicked on the lights and pointed to the sad, stark painting—the Savior crucified, skulls heaped at his feet in a poignant parody of the gifts brought by the magi. “You know who that is?”

“Sure, Reverend.” The whore slithered out of her trench coat, and suddenly there she was, arrayed in purple and scarlet. “I wore what you wanted.”

“I appreciate that. Tell me who it is.”

“Will this be American Express, MasterCharge, or Visa?”

“Visa.” Billy slid the credit card from his wallet. “Who is it?”

“It’s Jesus.” Taking the card, Beverly drew out a leather case like the one in which Billy kept his cufflinks. “You want the standard package, or are we feeling—?”

“The standard. Do you know why he’s on that cross?”

“Uh-huh. Eighty-five dollars, okay?”

“Okay.” Billy led her into the silent nave. “Believe in him, sister.” He threw the chandelier switch. Light descended. “His blood can redeem you.”

“Right.” Beverly marched down the aisle: the Antichrist’s own bride, Billy thought. “So, what’s your preference?” she asked. “The floor? A pew?” She opened her leather case, revealing five narrow bottles, each of their respective liquids a different shade of blue. “I think the altar has certain possibilities.” Approaching the front pew, she arranged the bottles in a ring as if they were birthday candles and proceeded to uncap them. “Give me your finger.”

“Huh?”

“Finger, honey.” She pulled a needle and a thin glass tube from the case. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. I’m a pro.” Her competence was indeed dazzling. An assured jab, and a bright straw of Billy’s blood rushed into the glass tube. Carefully she released three drops into each bottle. “Don’t be offended, Reverend.” Sealing the first bottle, she held it to the chandelier light. “With all the experiments you people’ve been doing, I can’t be too cautious.” Second bottle, third, fourth … “Okay, Reverend, no condom needed—unless, of course, that’s part of the experiment.”

So far in Billy’s life, lust had been merely a temptation, but now this particular sin was taking on geometric properties, shaping itself into a proof, hardening into a sign. For who but the Whore of Babylon would act this way, pulling off her purple and scarlet nightgown and stretching out on the altar, her breasts rising toward heaven like inverted chalices? And yet the proof wouldn’t be whole until he’d followed her beckoning fingers and enacted the vileness she demanded, for who but the Mother of Abominations would force a man of God to lie with her? Gritting his teeth, he let her unfasten his belt, unzip his fly, and slide his pants and boxer shorts halfway to his knees. “Will you receive Jesus Christ?” he asked.

“Sure. Whatever you’ve got.”

“You will?”

“Definitely.”

Whereupon their actions began glowing with salvation, her sweet smell becoming incense, her rippling white form a church, her soft loins a newborn lamb. They kissed, connected. The altar seemed to drop away, angel-borne. So many ways to christen a person, so many substances! With the Jordan, as John had done. With the Holy Ghost, as Jesus had done …

A glorious measure of baptismal liquid rushed out of Billy, making Beverly’s redemption peak. Cooing and laughing, she slid away.

“I’d like to buy it,” said Billy.

“Buy it?” Perched Eve-naked on the front pew, Beverly fitted his Visa card onto her little machine.

“Your nightgown.”

“Let me think. Fifty bucks, okay?” Tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth, she rammed the platen across the card, printing his address on the receipt. “That brings the total to one thirty-five. Sign here, honey.”

He signed. Gladly. What a night of victory for Christ—the Whore of Babylon unmasked and redeemed, the city’s true name revealed, Billy’s mission confirmed. But a fearsome task lay ahead, he realized; somehow he must take his flock, at the moment more concerned with tax shelters and orthodontist bills than the Second Coming, and turn them into soldiers.

Timothy. It all came down to Timothy. Because of that astounding miracle, eyes where there’d been no eyes, Billy knew his will was God’s, knew he would find a way to make his church accept the eschatological necessity of incinerating the city. Yes, Dorothy Melton, with your ridiculous feather hat, you’ve been elected to the Savior’s army. And you, Albert Dupree, though you can barely keep your bowling ball out of the gutter, one day soon you’ll splash God’s wrath on Babylon. As for you, Wayne Ackerman, king of the insurance agents—yes, brother, the year 2000 will find you building the New Jerusalem, that great waterless port through which Jesus will again enter the earth.

“Have a nice night,” said Beverly, gliding into her trench coat. She packed up her chemistry set, marched back down the aisle, and set off for the Babylon called Atlantic City.

Open-eyed, clothed only in the cool waters of Absecon Inlet, you begin your descent, down, down to the petting zoo of your childhood. Casually you tune in the colloquies of the cod as they pass in silvery constellations, the cabals of the jellyfish as they flap like sinister umbrellas, but you don’t attend their thoughts for long—weightier matters crowd your mind. The precise nature of your divinity. The fourth-century Council of Nicaea. Sex.

It is 1991, and the world has little use for seventeen-year-old virgins.

According to one of your father’s books, the year 325
A.D
. found the Roman emperor Constantine convening a council in the Asian city of Nicaea, his goal being to settle a feud then raging throughout Christendom. In crude terms: was Jesus God’s subordinate offspring, as Arius of Alexandria believed, or was he God himself, as Archdeacon Athanasius asserted? After their initial investigations, you discovered, the Council leaned toward the obvious: offspring. The epithet “son of God” appeared throughout the Gospels, along with the even humbler “son of Man.” In the second chapter of Acts, the disciple Peter called Jesus “a man approved of God.” In Matthew’s nineteenth chapter, when somebody committed the faux pas of calling Jesus “Good Master,” Jesus admonished, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

But wait. There’s a problem. The instant you bring a subdeity on the scene, you’ve blurred the line between your precious Judaic monotheism and Roman paganism. You’ve stepped backward. Thus did the council forever fix Jesus as “very God” through whom “all things were made.” The Nicene Creed was recited in churches even in 1991.

Like Jesus before you, you know you’re not God. A deity, yes, but hardly cocreator of the universe. If you stood outside Brigantine Mall chanting “Let there be light,” a few neon tubes might blink on inside K mart, but heaven would gain no stars. God’s children did not do galaxies. They did not invent species, stop time, or eliminate evil with a snap of their divine fingers. Jesus cured lepers, you often note, Jesus did not cure leprosy. Your powers have bounds, your obligations limits.

A cuttlefish drifts by, its tentacles undulating in sleepy, antique rhythms.

People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like? What sort of God stuffs her only daughter into a bell jar like so much pickled herring and dumps her on the earth with no clues to her mission? What sort of God continues to ignore that same daughter even after she cures a blind boy exactly as instructed? Seven whole years since the Timothy miracle, and while nobody has taken you away, no mothers have shown up either.

You will never forget the night you confessed. “Three summers ago I did something really bad. I gave a kid eyes.”

“You
what?
” your father moaned, his jaw dropping open.

“God wanted me to, I thought.”

“
She
made you do it? Has
she
been talking to you?”

“It was just an idea I got. Please don’t slap me.”

He did not slap you. He said, firmly, “We’ll get this out of your system once and for all,” and hustled you into the Saab.

“Get what out of my system?”

“You’ll see.” He drove you over the bridge into Atlantic City.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll find out.”

“Where?”

“To visit my friend from the fire station.”

Pop’s fire station buddies, you knew, used to draw out his blood for your ectogenesis machine. “Mr. Balthazar? Mr. Caspar?”

“Herb Melchior. So how did it feel, fixing that boy?”

I think I had an orgasm, you wanted to say. “Pretty good.”

“I thought I could trust you.”

“You
can
trust me.”

He pulled into the parking lot at Atlantic City Memorial Hospital. Mr. Melchior, you remembered, had lung cancer.

Pop was calmer now. “We’ll leave if you want.”

You were supposed to say yes, let’s leave, but his remark about trust had really pissed you. “No.”

The two of you rode the elevator six flights to the cancer ward. You marched past the nurses’ station, entered the hellish corridor. Trench warfare, you decided, the view behind the lines—orderlies bustling about, victims gasping on gurneys, IV bottles drooping like disembodied organs. Pain prospered everywhere, seeping through the walls, darkening the air like swarms of hornets. “Why me?” a young, spindly black man asked quite distinctly as his mother guided him toward the visitors’ lounge. “Why can’t I get warm?” He tightened his bathrobe around his tubular chest.

“Pop, this is mean.”

“I know. I love you.” He led you to Room 618. “Ready to start?”

You steadied yourself on the open jamb. Beyond, two cancer-ridden men trembled atop their beds.

“As long as we’re here, we can also try Herb’s roommate,” said Pop. “Hodgkin’s disease.” Heart stuttering, stomach quaking, you took a small step backward. “And then, of course, there’s Room Six Nineteen. And Six Twenty. And Six Twenty-one. On Saturday we’ll drive to Philadelphia—lots of hospitals. Next week we’ll do New York.”

“New York?” You were adrift on an iceberg, rudderless, freezing.

“Then Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta. You didn’t make the world, Julie. It’s not your responsibility to clean it up.”

Another reverse step. “But—”

Seizing your hand, Pop guided you into the visitors’ lounge. The black man’s mother had swathed him in a blanket; together they shivered and wept. “Honey, you’ve got a choice.” Your father and you flopped down on the death-scented Naugahyde. Hairless patients stared at the walls. “Take the high road, and you’ll be trapped and miserable.” On the television, a game show contestant won a trip to Spain. “Take the low, and you’ll have a life.”

“How can it be wrong to cure people?”

White anger shot across Pop’s face. “All right, all
right,
” he growled, voice rising. “If you’re going to be stubborn …!” From his wallet he removed a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle like a slice of stale cheese. “Listen, Julie, I don’t want to worry you, it might not mean anything—but look, the minute I carried you out of that clinic, somebody blew the place up.”

BABY BANK ABORTED
, ran the headline. “Huh? Bombed it?” Bile climbed into your throat. “You mean, they wanted to …?”

“Probably just a coincidence.”

“Who’d want to kill me?”

“Nobody. All I’m saying is, we can’t be too cautious. If God expected you to show yourself, she’d come out and say so.”

That was years ago, eighth grade—since which time your divinity has remained wholly under control, your urge toward intervention completely in check.

Baby bank aborted. Bombed. Blown off the face of the earth like Castle Boadicea.

Reveling in your one permitted miracle, you draw a large helping of oxygen from the bay. As a gill owner, you’ll never experience the great, glorious breath a pearl diver takes on surfacing, but you’re determined to know the rest of it, everything bone and tissue offer. If your Catholic boyfriend is right, God subscribes to a spare, unequivocal ethic: body bad, soul good; flesh false, spirit true. And so in defiance you’ve become a flesh lover. You’ve become a woman of the world. Not a hedonist like Phoebe, but an epicure: it is always in homage to flesh that you devour pepperoni pizza, drink Diet Coke, admit Roger Worth’s tongue to your mouth, and savor your own briny smell while playing basketball for the Brigantine High Tigerettes. Take that, Mother. So there, Mother.

Flesh is the best revenge.

As you swim into the cave, a small cloud of blood drifts from between your thighs, quickly stoppered by water pressure. You will give credit where due. The body in which God has marooned you is the real thing, all functions intact.

Your petting zoo is defunct. Starfish, flounder, crab, lobster—all gone. Only Amanda the sponge remains, sitting in a clump of seaweed like a melancholy pumice. Thanks to Mr. Parker’s biology class, you know she is a
Microciona prolifera,
common to estuaries along the North American coast.

—Where’s everybody gone? you ask.

—Dead, Amanda replies. Sickness, old age, pollution. I alone have escaped. Immortality, it’s my sole claim to fame. Hack me apart, and each piece regenerates.

—I’m probably immortal too.

—You don’t look it, Julie.

—God wants me to live forever.

—Perhaps, broadcasts the sponge.

—She does.

—Maybe.

Using your feet like hoes, you furrow the sandy floor, upending stones, overturning shells, uncovering …
there,
beside your heel, the skeleton you first spotted at age ten. Tornadoes of sand swirl upward as, with a sudden karate chop, you behead it.

You snug the skull against your chest and float toward the filtered sunlight. How you love having a body, even a blobby one; you love your caramel skin, opulent hair, slightly asymmetrical breasts, throbbing gills. Too bad, Mother. Menstrual blood encircling you like an aura, you bid Amanda good-bye, push off from the bay bottom, and ascend through a hundred feet of salt water.

Fresh water gushed from the shower nozzle, washing away the sweat of the game but not its humiliation. Julie had played well, sinking all her free throws and chalking up fifteen points, six rebounds, and seven assists. She had stolen the ball four times. Useless. The Lucky Dogs of Atlantic City High had walked all over the Brigantine Tigerettes, 69 to 51.