Only Begotten Daughter (14 page)

“No point. Poor guy had four kids. Boys. I sent ’em baseball cards sometimes.” Oh, how he’d love to see Marcus Bass again—see him, hug him, thank him for making him realize he needed an embryo. “Honey, has God ever told you what happens after death?”

“You’re not going to die.” Julie curled her fingers into tight lumpy balls. “You have to finish
Hermeneutics of the Ordinary.
”

“But has she ever told you?”

“My mother’s outside the universe, Pop—the God of physics, I’m sure of it.” Absently Julie spun the TV dial. The Road Runner
beep-beeped
across the screen. “We both know what we’re thinking, huh? Georgina said—”

“I hate that Road Runner thing.” He glowered at the TV. “Ants in his feathers.” The God of physics? Julie’s mother a mere equation, the fuse that had touched off the big bang? That explained a lot, he figured. “The answer’s
no.
I’ll get out of this the hard way.”

She brushed his wired chest. “If I just made a few new cells …”

“Think it through. You can fix up my heart for now, but how will you take the stress and the fat away—fix up the whole world? Hearts aside, maybe it’ll be a brain aneurysm next time, or kidney failure, or Alzheimer’s.”

“I can’t let you
die.
”

A spectacular nurse entered, a kind of Miss November with clothes on—aggressively busty, fine slutty lips—and deposited a pill on his tongue. “Visiting hours are over.”

“My kid,” he said, drinking down the pill. How dare oblivion come and blot out the world’s nurses?

“Good for you.” The nurse offered Julie a sunshine smile. “Those flowers can’t stay.”

Again Julie kissed his cheek. “All right, Pop. You win.”

A smooth vascular tide rolled across the scope. He felt a nap coming on. “Go have a life.”

“On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City,” Phoebe Sparks sang as a nasty March wind propelled her past Steel Pier’s dead merry-go-round, “we will walk in a dream.” Her old Girl Scout canteen rapped against her side like a child trying to get her attention. “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and cream.” Broken and decayed, the piers were like a seedy version of the Acropolis—relics rimming the city, remnants of an earlier, nobler, more eminent age. They were also, Phoebe had learned, good places to spend one’s lunch hour: plenty of privacy.

She uncapped the canteen, raised the spout to her lips. Mom didn’t mind an occasional beer, but serious liquor was out. There were times, though, when only Bacardi rum could make the world feel right, rum the wonder drug.

A man was fishing off the end of the pier.

Licking Bacardi from her lips, Phoebe recapped the canteen. “Catch anything?”

He turned. A Caucasian. Not her father, then. It was never her father. “Hooked a barracuda last week, but they aren’t biting today.” The fisherman was bearded and handsome, his muscular torso filling a red turtleneck sweater. “How are you, Miss Sparks?”

“You know me?”

The stranger grinned. His teeth were bright, bent, and slimy, like pearls made by a depraved oyster. “
I
was in the Deauville Hotel when you found that dynamite. Julie and I talked.”

“You’re that friend of her mother’s?”

“Andrew’s the name. Wyvern.” He reeled in his barren hook, began disassembling his rod. “I’ll be frank with you. I’m worried about poor old Julie.”

“She’s not a happy camper,” Phoebe agreed. She didn’t like this Andrew Wyvern. He had the sleazy air of a casino pit boss. “Divinity’s no joke, I gather. You always feel like you’re not doing enough.”

“Phoebe, sweetheart, I have something important to tell you.”

Phoebe tapped her Girl Scout canteen. “Want a drink? It’s rum.”

“Never touch it. Did you know you have a crucial role to play in Julie’s life?”

“She’s never been very big on listening to me.”

Wyvern picked up his fishing gear and, grinning luminously, started toward the Boardwalk. “You’re intending to give her some newspaper clippings,” he prophesied abruptly. “For Hanukkah. For her temple.”

“Yeah. And on her birthday too.” Against her better judgment, she followed Wyvern to the carousel. “How’d you figure that out?”

“Lucky guess.”

Lucky guesses, no doubt, came easily to Katz’s mother’s friends.

“Certainly you mean well. You aim to tell her she’s not obliged to end the world’s pain, there’s just too much of it. Fine.” Wyvern climbed atop a splintery, termite-infested lion. He smelled of honeyed oranges and guile. A pit boss? No, somebody even worse, Phoebe sensed. “But the thing could backfire,” he warned. “If we’re not careful, she’ll become obsessed, bent on repairing every little leak in the planet. Once she’s on that course, she’ll go mad.”

“I used to believe that. Not anymore. Fact is, I
want
her damn temple to backfire, I
want
her to feel obliged.” Phoebe mounted a moldering unicorn held together with nails, bolts, and fiberglass patches. “Katz should be out helping people—curing diseases, making food appear in Ethiopia, ending the civil war in Turkey. She should be out … beating the devil.” The devil? Yes, it was he, surely. Phoebe uncapped the canteen, gulped; the magic fluid fortified her, a moat of rum surrounding her heart. A sensible girl would dismount and run now, she realized. She jammed her boots deeper into the stirrups. Sensible girls never got to rag the devil.

“Julie can’t be bothered with earthly ephemera,” Wyvern persisted. “Her mission is much higher.”

“There’s this blind kid who’s not blind anymore.”

“Julie was sent to start a religion. It’s the only way she’ll know peace.”

“Your friend God’s never told her that.”

“Heaven communicates indirectly—through people like you and me.”

“And we should tell Katz to start a religion?”

“Exactly.”

“What sort of religion?”

“A big one. Apocalyptic. Like, say, Christianity.”

“Know what I think, Mr. Wyvern?” Phoebe slid off her unicorn and, shielded by inebriation, staggered back onto the pier. “I think you’re so full of shit you’ve got roses growing out your ass.”

The devil’s lips quivered like angry slugs. “If you knew who I am, you wouldn’t—”

“I
do
know who you are.”

Wyvern squeezed the lion’s reins until his hand went white. Slowly, relentlessly, like a crumbling corpse twitching to life in one of Roger Worth’s zombie movies, the carousel began to turn. Faster now. And faster still, spewing out dark, palpable winds like a spinning jenny making thread. “You’re a poor friend to Julie!” Wyvern called from the core of the tornado. Music slashed the air, a screeching rendition of “The Washington Post March” played on the carousel’s steam organ.

“Screw you, mister!” The winds tugged Phoebe’s wiry hair. Caught in the gusts, paper trash scudded along the pier like tumbleweeds in a ghost town.

“A
terrible
friend!” Twenty-four wooden animals, back from the grave, galloping in homage to the glory that was Steel Pier, the grandeur that was Atlantic City. Flies and locusts flew from the stampede like bullets. A squadron of bats zoomed out, each with a human face—men, women, children, their flesh sucked dry, drained of hope. “Julie deserves better!”

“Screw you and the pig you buggered for breakfast!”

Slowly, like a child’s top succumbing to gravity, the carousel ground to a halt. Wyvern was gone, his lion riderless.

The devil. The actual, goddamn devil.

Alone on the pier, Phoebe gasped and shivered and, after taking a bracing swallow of Girl Scout rum, quietly resolved that—one day—somehow—she would make Julie Katz fulfill her potential.

“The heart is a pump,” Julie wrote in her diary the day after she and Howard Lieberman broke up, “weak and fickle as any other machine, and sometimes an embolism of indifference stops affection’s flow.”

The affair had ended as abruptly as it had begun. They were in his apartment, eating breakfast in bed—they’d been shacking up since April—when suddenly Howard was babbling about their presumed upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands, laying out his plans as if that were the place she most wanted to visit.

“Why would I want to go
there
?” Julie asked, daubing cream cheese on a bagel.

“Why? Why? It’s the Jerusalem of Biology, that’s why.” Howard slid her nightgown upward and kissed her belly button, the tough nutlike stub that had once plugged her into God. “It’s the Holy City of Natural Science. At Galapagos, the mind frees itself from the illusion of divine guidance.”

“Gets pretty hot, I hear.”

“So does Philadelphia.” Suspicious, he reclothed her navel.

“Rains a lot too.”

“Julie, what are you
saying
?”

“I’m saying I don’t want to go to the Galapagos Islands with you.” She bit into her bagel. “I’m saying I don’t … want to.”

At which point Howard had flown into a rage, accusing her of everything from laziness to vampirism. She’d exploited him, he asserted. Pretended to care while sinking her fangs into his intellect, drinking his mind. “Know what you said right before I asked you out? You said you believed in God.”

“I
do
believe in God. I’m sorry, Howard, but I couldn’t take a whole summer of hearing you whine about creationism.”

“I
made
you, dammit. I taught you how to think.”

“To think your thoughts.”

“Without me, you’d be just another scientifically illiterate
girl.
”

Whereupon Julie had risen from the bed, pushed her cheese-coated bagel against Howard’s forehead—it stuck like the mark of a buffoonish Cain—and, after throwing on her clothes, fled the apartment and marched down Spruce Street to the University Museum, where she spent the afternoon contemplating embalmed Egyptians.

Men.

The next day she hauled her junk out of Howard’s place and returned to Angel’s Eye, home now to Phoebe and Georgina, whose landlord, a Revelationist, had booted them out of their Ventnor Heights apartment upon sensing the pluralism of their sexual inclinations. Good old Phoebe, good old Georgina. What formidable nurses they made, Georgina especially, forever mixing up bizarre potions to strengthen Pop’s heart, forever feeding him the robust vegetables she’d somehow coaxed from the sandy soil.

Julie bought a diary, writing in it obsessively, hopeful that by projecting her mind, movielike, onto the creamy paper, she might glimpse who she was.

Her temple proved the ideal writer’s den, a monk’s cell complete with Smile Shop candles. Odd how Phoebe was always updating the place. Odder still how the images no longer soothed Julie reliably. It seemed as if her conscience were becoming raw and friable; her superego felt ready to bleed. As each new apartheid victim or traffic fatality appeared, she grew ever more certain that Phoebe wanted the images to cut both ways: Katz, you have nothing to do with this; Katz, you have everything to do with this.

“God didn’t send me to perform a lot of flashy tricks,” Julie insisted to her diary. “If Phoebe can’t see that, too bad. Besides, she drinks too much.”

Indeed, there was simply no point in taking Phoebe seriously these days. They now occupied two entirely different planes: Julie the Ivy Leaguer and nascent prophet of empiricism, Phoebe the high-school dropout and joke-shop clerk. What did Phoebe know of the Chandrasekhar limit? Of Planck’s constant, Seyfert galaxies, Hilbert spaces? Poor girl. She should get out of South Jersey and learn about the universe. Perhaps, as Howard had tutored Julie, she should now tutor Phoebe, infusing her with the thrill of cosmogenesis.

Howard. Ah, yes, Howard. “In his relentless crusade, Howard missed something,” Julie wrote. “Quantum mechanics and general relativity do not explain the universe, they
portray
it, as did Aristotle’s crystalline spheres and Newton’s clockwork planets.” She reread the paragraph. Howard
missed,
she’d written, not
misses.
So: it was truly over, she’d exiled him to the past tense. Fine. Good riddance. “Howard took the model for the reality,” she continued, “the metaphor for the meat. An authentic cosmic explorer, I believe, gleans a tacit moral from ΔχΔρ≥h/4π, Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty relation. At the heart of all truth lies a radiant cloud of unknowing, a glorious nugget of doubt, a shining core of impermanence.”

Pop entered. Each day he seemed to get a bit smaller, a bit more stooped. Life followed the statisticians’ famous bell-shaped curve: you grew, you peaked, you ungrew. His outlook, too, was shrinking. He’d simply drifted in, brought by the wind.

“Whatever form my ministry takes,” Julie wrote, “I shall forge only a covenant of uncertainty. I shall declare only a kingdom of impermanence.” She shut her diary violently, as if crushing a stray spider in its leaves.

“I’m lighting the beacon,” said Pop, cinching the sash of his awful tartan robe. “Exercise is good for cardiac patients.”

“Which is it?” she inquired through locked teeth. With age, his eccentricities had become decidedly less charming.
“Lucy II?”

“
William Rose,
I think. Is this July?”

“You know it is, Pop.”

“If it’s July, it must be
William Rose.
”

“Take your Inderal yet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Your Lanoxin? Quinidine?”

“Sure, sure. And some kiwi juice from Georgina.”

He shuffled off.

“The tragedy of my species,” Julie wrote, “is that it does not live in its own time.
Homo sapiens
is locked on history’s rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise, some alleged golden …”

She paused. Pop was climbing to the beacon. Exercise was good for cardiac patients, but … a hundred and twenty-six stairs?

“The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia,” Julie wrote.

The pen fell from her hand. A hundred and twenty-six stairs.

She left without closing her diary.

Above all, Pop’s stare: frozen, upside down, twice normal size. Julie hadn’t seen a gaze so extreme since that Timothy kid got his eyes. He lay on the third loop of the staircase, hands pressed against his chest as if trying to massage his own frozen heart back to life.

She ran.