Only Begotten Daughter (15 page)

Girl Scout camp, 1985. Take the cardiopulmonary resuscitation class, earn the merit badge. She slammed his chest, exhaled into his lungs. Such a grotesquely detailed corpse he made—the black hair flourishing in his nostrils, the gaping pores of his cheeks.
Slam, slam, slam, breath. Slam, slam, slam, breath.
When she was eleven, he’d started bringing home snapshots from Photorama, and they would set them out on the kitchen table. The women with emotional problems, those who photographed dismembered mannequins or teddy bears buried neck deep in mud, were automatically disqualified, ditto those candidates whose developed film revealed lovers, husbands, or hordes of offspring.
Slam, slam, slam, breath.
“How about her, Julie?” “Kind of grumpy-looking.” “Here’s a pretty one.” “Nah.”
Slam, slam, slam, breath.
Nothing came of it. Of the dozen or so women they found appealing, not one had been willing to commit to Pop.
Slam, slam, slam, breath.
And yet he was so sincere about it, so well meaning: yes, he’d wanted a companion for himself, but mostly he’d wanted a stepmother for his child.

Gradually her instincts, her maternal heritage, claimed her. Resting her palm atop his sternum, she made his heart go
thump.
And why not? Nobody would see her intervene, no baby bank aborters would ever know.
Thump
again. And
thump.
And—

Think it through,
he’d told her. True resurrection was no childhood game, no simple matter of goading a dead crab with your crayons. Repair the heart, obviously. And by now his central nervous system was gone, blood-starved, a jumble of unraveled synapses, a stew of desiccated dendrites. Fix all that too.

Then what? Clean all the crust out of the veins and arteries? Yes, only it just started up again, didn’t it? Pop was right: at some point you had to remake the world, at some point you had to be God.

And yet—she must try.
Thump.
And
thump.
And
thump
and suddenly something came into being, a creation half Pop, half not, a palsied parody of life, blinking fitfully.

“Ga-ga-ga-ga,” her creation rasped.

“Pop? Yes, Pop? What?”

“Ga-ga-ga-go.
Go.
”

“Go? Go where?”

“A l-life.”

“Life?”

“G-goh-have …”

A shrill, watery whistle shot from her father’s mouth, as if he had the Steel Pier steam organ for lungs. And then, for the second time that evening, he died.

“Pop! Pop!”

No pulse. No breath.

“Pop!”

Pupils fixed and dilated.

So instead of resurrection, instead of Lazarus II, there was merely this tearful climb to the beacon room.
Go have a life.
Very well—she would. She hadn’t been sent to contradict death; rebirth was not her business. She would eschew the rearview mirror, lock on the road ahead, live in her own time.

The matches, she knew, were in a tin box under the lamp. Raising the lens, she wound the clockwork motor. Enough kerosene? He always kept the tank full, didn’t he?

She struck a match, twisted the knob. The central wick rose like a cobra from a basket, meeting the little flame and catching. “Hello there,
William Rose,
” she gasped, the words falling from her lips like rotten teeth. “This time … you’ll … make it.” She restored the lens. The lead piston descended, squeezing kerosene into the wick chamber.

Somewhere beyond the blur of her tears, the beacon glowed brightly, she was sure of it.

And now came her penance, the agony that all who fail their fathers must endure.
Did you see our lamp, old ship?
Reaching out blindly with her right hand, she wrapped it tightly around the hot mantle. Impossible pain—uncanny, unprecedented pain—yet she held on till she smelled burnt flesh, screaming till she felt her throat might rip.
Did you find your way home?
Weeping, she pulled her smoking, blistered, martyred palm away.
Did you?

By some miracle she got through the rest of the day and its obscene details. Calling the undertaker. Calling the undertaker a second time when he failed to show up. (He had confused Brigantine Point with Brigantine Quay.) Hauling herself down to Atlantic City Memorial, where they greased and bandaged her hand, put her on antibiotics, and admonished her to avoid kerosene lamps. The notification list was not long—Phoebe, Georgina, and, from the fire station, Freddie Caspar and Rodney Balthazar, Herb Melchior having died six years earlier of lung cancer.

“The dumb bunny wanted to marry me,” Georgina sobbed over the phone. “Sounds like the premise of a bad TV show, huh? That’s right, Bernie, this aging bookworm and his dyke friend move in together. He doesn’t expect her to give up women, though secretly he’s jealous, and they’ve got these two kids, and … you mean you just let him
die?
You didn’t
do
anything?”

“I tried.”

“Try again! Run over to the fucking funeral parlor this very minute and raise him up! This very minute!”

“He wouldn’t want it.”

“
I
want it.
You
want it.”

Julie’s stomach became a well of ice water. Her burned palm itched ferociously. “I’m supposed to have a life, Georgina—that was his big goal.”

For an entire minute Georgina grieved, so much weeping that Julie imagined tears dripping from the receiver and splashing onto the phone-booth floor.

“Listen, Julie, we’ve got to do this right. I think we’re supposed to rip our clothes, and then we sit on these little stools till next Monday. Hey, I’d be happy to do that, honey. For him, I’d put my ass to sleep for a week.”

“I don’t think that’s for Pop.”

“We’ve got to do
something.
How are you, baby?”

“Lonely. An orphan.”

In the end they simply had him cremated. The small, solemn procession—Julie, Phoebe, Georgina—carried the urn across the lighthouse lawn and down the length of the jetty. After Julie said Kaddish, Georgina took out a peanut-butter jar filled with a second set of ashes, specially prepared by incinerating Pop’s copy of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Phoebe opened the urn and dumped in the contents of the jar, mixing everything together with a kitchen knife, merging Murray Katz with his favorite book.

“I always liked him,” Phoebe said, closing the urn and passing it to Julie. “He was the kind of dad I’d have wanted for myself, even if he thought I was a bad influence on you.”

“You
were
a bad influence on me.” With her burned hand Julie uncapped the urn, glancing briefly at the dark ethereal flecks of her father. “Oh, Pop …”

Phoebe and Georgina melted into the dusk, leaving Julie alone with the monotonous and unfeeling surf. Was it a proper funeral? Had the un-Jewish procedure of cremation offended him? “Too late now,” she muttered as she tore her black dress—tore it, and tore it again, and again, until she stood naked on the rocks. She snugged the urn under her breasts and climbed into the sea.

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

Her gills throbbed, wringing oxygen from the bay. Endless gallons, but they couldn’t dilute her acid tears or wash away her guilt. Two decades jacketed in flesh, during which time she hadn’t done the vast damaged planet one atom of good.

She touched bottom and quickly buried the urn.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Katz.

In the beginning was the Word, but now God’s vocabulary was growing. The first Word was an English noun,
savior,
but the second would be a French verb,
savoir,
to know: at long last, Julie, Howard used to tell her, we can
know
things. Three more years of college, and then she’d buy a word processor (no, Word processor) and publish her covenant of uncertainty, declare her kingdom of impermanence, topple the empire of nostalgia—teach the truth of the heart. The heart was a pump? Yes, true enough, provided one meant: at the present moment in history, pump is the best metaphor we have for what a heart is.

She tamped down the grave with her foot, raising dust devils of sand.

And the kidney was a filter. Earth orbited the sun. Microbes caused disease. Yes! The time of her ministry was at hand. She would take neither the high road nor the low, but a byway of her own devising; she would beam her message onto every television screen in creation, etch it onto every phonograph record, smear it across every printed page. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end there would be a million words, ten million words, a hundred million words, all authored by the only begotten daughter of God herself.

B
IX CONSTANTINE—MOROSE, FAT,
and frank—had always seen the world as it was and not as people wished it would be.

While still a preschooler, he pondered the ways children’s books depicted the relationship between humans and farm animals, soon sensing the disparity between these cheery visions and the proteinaceous facts appearing nightly on his plate. Shortly after he started first grade, Bix’s mother told him dew-drops were elf tears, and he told her she was full of dog-doo. That evening his father spanked him, and Bix always suspected his real crime was not his surliness but his refusal to love a lie.

With adolescence his vision enlarged. God? Santa Claus for grownups. Love? A euphemism for resignation. Marriage? The first symptom of death.

On the morning of July 13, 1996, Bix Constantine discovered something even worse than walking to work through the dense sleaze of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk: doing so knowing you’re about to be fired. Nobody knew why the
Midnight Moon
was losing the great supermarket-tabloid race. Not Bix, not his staff, not Tony Biacco, the former Mafia chieftain who owned the paper. “Folks, we’re going to have to pull the plug,” Tony had been saying at least once a week for the past two years. Plug-pulling was a familiar motif around the
Midnight Moon
,
COMA WIFE WAKES AFTER HUBBY PULLS PLUG. ALSO, MANIAC STALKS COMA WARD PULLING PLUGS. AND “DON’T PULL MY PLUG!” COMA GIRL TELLS MOM THROUGH PSYCHIC.

Bix ambled past the Tropicana and bought a cup of coffee from a vendor outside the Golden Nugget, its threshold pillared and glittery like a fundamentalist’s heaven.
Tonight: Neil Sedaka,
screamed the billboards.
Next Week: Vic Damone and Diahann Carroll.
Who could possibly care?

When he was ten, his father had dragged him to a celebration here. The Casino Gaming Referendum had just passed, and the Boardwalk was overrun by chorus girls and brass bands. Clowns bustled up and down the piers, giving out balloons. “It’s not going to succeed,” little Bix had told his father. “The mob will move in and ruin it,” he’d elaborated. His father had scowled. “The mob moves in and ruins everything. Don’t you ever
read,
Dad?”

Slurping Styrofoam-flavored coffee, Bix listed onto Sovereign Avenue. A derelict was piled up at the Arctic intersection, shrouded in wine vapors. Graffiti coated the city. The stray dogs had it on their flanks.

Why was the
Moon
dying? Weren’t its extraterrestrials every bit as perverted as the
World Bugle’s,
its abominable snowmen as randy as the
National Comet’s?
Had not Bix’s surrealistic surgical procedures, pregnant great-grandmothers, Siamese quadruplets, and celebrities’ ghosts set new standards for the entire industry? Yes, yes, yes, and yes—and yet the stark fact remained that Tony had arranged an emergency lunch for the entire staff, a perfect occasion to solicit their resignations.

Arriving at 1475 Arctic Avenue, he approached the open elevator shaft—the car lay inert and broken at the bottom like a sunken ship—and tossed his coffee cup into the square chasm. Hauling his bulk up the moldering staircase, he disembarked on the third floor, where Madge Bronston, the paper’s chronically smiling receptionist, told him “a pigheaded young woman” had just invaded his office.

“I think she’s here about a job,” Madge explained.

“Good. I could use one.”

“I tried kicking her out, believe me. A stubborn gal.”

As Bix opened his monogrammed door, his visitor—chunky, caramel skin, early twenties—spun away from his mounted collection of UFO photos, flashing him a grin of considerable sensuality. “I’ve always wanted to visit Pluto,” she said in a South Jersey accent. “Mars sounds dull, Saturn’s a lot of gas, but Pluto …” Her hand came toward him like a fluttering bird, and without meaning to he reached out and captured it. “I’m Julie Katz. You must be Mr. Constantine.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her white sundress dazzled him, and her lips were of the succulent sort that inspired Muslims to veil their women. Glancing higher, Bix encountered a cute upturned nose, turquoise eyes, and a crop of unruly black hair.

So this was how it began: the pangs of libido, and then would come the first date, the courtship, the disingenuous nuptial vows, the snot-clogged children, the reciprocal illusion of permanence, the extramarital affairs (most of them his, but she would doubtless get in a few retaliatory screws), and, inevitably, the divorce. “I’m afraid this operation’s headed for the sewer, Miss Katz.” Bix strode to his King Coffee machine, which by some miracle Madge had remembered to turn on, and filled his inscribed mug:
I have come to the conclusion that one can be of no use to another person
—
Paul Cezanne.
“There’s no job here for you.”

The intruder tapped a flying saucer with her long, miter-shaped fingernail. “You a believer?”

“The door’s over this way, young lady.”

“Tell me if you’re a believer. Do UFOs exist?”

He swallowed coffee, quite possibly the only decent thing in the world. “Ten thousand encounters to date, and still nobody’s walked away with a single alien cootie or paper clip. You don’t
want
to work for us. We’re the most heavily censored paper this side of
Pravda.
” True enough, Bix thought. Even more than Soviet journalism, irrationality and mawkishness had to follow a party line. The man who died on the operating table and was subsequently revived could speak only of light and angels, and if it were gray or frightening you wouldn’t be reading about it in the checkout line. “Time to go.”