Only Begotten Daughter (20 page)

“You’re saying God gets overwhelmed?”

“Exactly.” Slap, a six of diamonds for Julie.

“Liar. You don’t know any more about God than I do.”

Slap, the dealer’s down card. “Very well—but just as my deceptions are obvious to you, then so are my descents into integrity. ‘Come sailing in my schooner tonight—no harm will befall you,’ says the devil. ‘He’s telling the truth,’ notes Julie Katz.”

“Schooner?” It would be crazy to accept a card now, but she did. Slap, a queen of spades. Bust. “Tonight?”

“A crusade is coming.” As Wyvern gestured over her king of clubs, the flesh melted from both its heads, leaving only skulls and eyeballs. “You must intervene.”

“I intervene all the time.” Her king’s eyes blinked. “Read my column.”

“Your column’s dead, Julie—didn’t they tell you? It’s all holy water over the damned.”

“True, true,” she moaned. As her king drew his sword from behind his crown, the adjacent queen cringed, trapped by the geometry of her universe, armed with only a flower.

“I greatly admired ‘Heaven Help You’—read it every week.” Wyvern collected her bet. “Once I even wrote to you. I was that shy Lutheran minister in Denver whose congregation misunderstood him.” The devil pointed to Julie’s cards. “Still, there are situations in which the sword is mightier than the pen.” The king slashed, making the queen’s upper head tip back like the lid of a cigarette lighter. Blood leaked from the wedge; the flower turned black and fell from the queen’s hand. “Tomorrow a thousand such deaths could occur. Ten thousand. Did you know that when the eleventh-century crusaders took Jerusalem, they ran through the city disemboweling the citizens, hoping to find swallowed coins?”

“
I
wasn’t there.” Julie bet sixty dollars.

“You should’ve been.” Wyvern pushed her bet aside. “A short voyage down the coast, that’s all. I’ll have you home before dawn.”

“I’m not responsible for this crusade you’re talking about.”

“Then what
are
you responsible for?”

“Hard to say.”

“Pain.”

“What?”

“My schooner is called
Pain.
”

The queen’s upper head rolled onto the green felt. Laughing a small depraved laugh, the king slashed again, neatly decapitating the queen’s lower self.

“Impressive ship,” said Julie as the devil led her along Steel Pier, its rusted remains stretching into the Atlantic like the back of a decaying sea serpent.
Pain,
a huge three-master with sails suggesting a bat’s wrinkled and membranous wings, lay moored to the dock by a live python.

“I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Wyvern gestured proudly toward the hull. “Newly painted with the bile of ten thousand unbaptized children. Her spars are made from the bones of massacred Armenians. Her ropes are woven from the hair of Salem’s witches. Her jib is Jewish skin. People give me all my best ideas, Julie. Like you, I can never count on your mother for inspiration. Bubonic plague is as creative as she ever got.”

He helped her onto the foredeck, where dark, stooped figures scurried about like beetles responding to the loss of their rock. “Say hello to Anthrax,” he urged, indicating the cockpit with a quick nod. The helmsman was fat, bristled, and plated, like something resulting from the love of a boar for an armadillo.

“Hello.” She felt schizoid, half her psyche planted in South Jersey, half in whatever quantum alternative objectified the devil and his brood.

Anthrax smiled at her and tipped an imaginary hat.

Foul breezes arose as the demons cast off. “From my angels,” Wyvern explained. “They spread their buttocks, and the rectal zephyrs fill our sails.”

Pain
headed south, cruising past the casino-hotels—bright Bally’s, lurid Caesar’s, the mighty Atlantis, the epic Golden Nugget. The moon hung over the city like a white cork.

Gradually Julie’s anxiety yielded to an odd inner buoyancy. She laughed. A swift boat, a major ocean—a person could just pick up and go, couldn’t she? Anywhere. Sunny Spain, exotic Thailand, Howard Lieberman’s beloved Galapagos Islands, that South Seas paradise she and Phoebe had seen in the Deauville.

“You were barking up the wrong tree,” Wyvern informed her. As the schooner blew into Great Egg Harbor, Anthrax kicked the anchor—evidently some species of sea urchin. Dragging its chain behind it, the great pulsing ball of spikes crawled across the deck and flopped over the side. “You wanted the masses to embrace reason and science. It will never happen. They can’t join in—there’s no point of entry for them.”

“Science is beautiful,” said Julie.

“You think I don’t know that?” Wyvern opened the cockpit locker and, drawing out a brass telescope, eased the instrument against Julie’s eye. “Some of my favorite things are scientific—nuclear bombs, Zyklon B, eugenics.” He showed her how to focus. “The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.”

A blur hedged with moonlight. Then, as Julie turned the focus knob: a solemn mob of well over two thousand men and women, dressed in bleached flak jackets and earnestly clutching red plastic gasoline jugs and battery-powered Black and Decker hedge trimmers. “The dark side of the American spirit,” said Wyvern. “Specifically, a Revelationist marina. The parking lot.” Juke shifted the scope, settling on a half-dozen pickup trucks, each bearing a large enamel bathtub. Two elaborately muscled men, hands sheathed in thick black rubber, approached the nearest tub, lifted out an enormous tuna—yes, good God, a sleek, wriggling, gasping tuna—and carried it over to a bowl-shaped barbecue grill. “Why a fish?” Wyvern anticipated. “Most venerable of Christian symbols. Fuse the initials of
Iesos Christos Theou Yios Soter,
and you get
Ichthys,
Greek for fish.”

Shift, focus. A tall, middle-aged man—balding, smooth-shaven, one eye molten, the other covered with leather—stabbed the fish with a scaling knife. The blade ran a true course from trunk to anal fin, a letter
V
in its wake. Thick maroon blood dripped through the grate and, filling the barbecue grill, splashed over the sides. Shift, focus. A young redheaded man set a gold shaving basin beneath the grill and opened the flue, thus releasing a column of liquid Jesus. “‘And they have washed their robes,’” Wyvern quoted, “‘and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’” Cupping his hands, the young man reached into the overflowing basin and drew out a full measure. His mouth flew open to release a fevered prayer. “Death to the Antichrist!” said Wyvern, dubbing in the young man’s voice as he smashed the fleshy ladle against his chest. The folds of his flak jacket channeled the blood, giving him an external circulatory system.

“Death to the Antichrist!” echoed the congregation.

“Antichrist?” said Julie. “What do they mean?”

The devil pulled his cigarette case from his overcoat and flipped back the lid, catching moonlight in the mirror. “These people have a full schedule tomorrow, a prophecy to fulfill—the fall of Babylon. Ever read the Bible?”

“Babylon? In Mesopotamia?”

“New Jersey.”

Shift, focus. The congregation passed the basin around as if it were a collection plate, each crusader retaining it long enough to smear himself with Jesus. “Damn,” she hissed.

“They’re planning to burn it,” said the devil.

“The marina?”

“Atlantic City.” Wyvern removed a cigarette, eyeing it with a mixture of revulsion and desire. “I really
must
stop smoking.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Smoking?”

“Burning Atlantic City.”

“Precisely.”

“You’re lying.”

“Not at the moment.”

“Burn a whole city? Why?”

“To trigger the Parousia, of course, Christ’s inevitable return.” As Wyvern snapped his fingers, a small flame rose from his thumb. “First they’ll tie up the fire department with a diversionary attack on Baltic Avenue, then they’ll strike the casinos.” He lit the cigarette, blew out his thumb. “Some of them aren’t convinced a holocaust is necessary, but their pastor, Billy Milk—the one with the eyepatch—he’s the most interesting thing in their lives, so they give him the benefit of the doubt. A remarkable man. With enemies like Billy Milk, the devil doesn’t need friends.”

Shift, focus. A Coast Guard cutter lay at the end of the wharf. Julie’s heart bounded like a happy puppy. Oh, glorious, blessed Coast Guard, such brave men, always prepared to prevent crusades. How authoritative the seven uniformed officers looked as, armed with semiautomatic rifles, they disembarked and started down the wharf.

Hands glistening with the by-products of sacrifice, Reverend Milk marched out to greet them, a mob of Revelationists close behind, somberly gripping their gasoline jugs and their Black and Decker hedge trimmers.

Wyvern puffed on his cigarette. “‘And I heard a great voice saying: Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.’”

The Revelationists and the officers exchanged loud, intemperate shouts. Thank God for those guns, Julie thought. This was law, order: the United States Coast Guard.

The gas jugs moved in precise crimson arcs. Nobody got off a shot. One instant the officers were berating Milk’s mob, the next they were saturated, the next they were men made of fire, flailing about like marionettes operated by epileptics.

“‘And power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.’”

Julie’s scream trailed into a long, sustained moan. The poignant thing was the victims’ disorientation, the way they sought to save themselves by jumping into the ocean but could instead only stagger blindly around the pier, spewing gray smoke, shedding red embers, randomly firing their rifles.

Shift, focus. The pilot house. A pale, baby-faced captain held the microphone of his ship-to-shore radio, his lips frozen like a tetanus victim’s. Not one word left his mouth.

Now came the avenging angels, turning on their hedge trimmers and hauling the pilot on deck.

“‘Behold the Son of Man,’” the devil quoted as the Revelationists fell upon the pilot, trimming him brutally, clipping him to death, “‘and in his hand a sharp sickle.’”

Julie wept caustic tears. The officers collapsed on the dock, smoldering sacks of cooked flesh.

Wyvern stroked her burned palm. “‘Because of your abominations I shall do with you what I have never yet done. Therefore fathers will eat their sons’—this is God talking, Julie—‘and sons will eat their fathers, and any of you who survive I shall scatter to the winds.’” The devil sighed with admiration. “Oh, but I wish
I’d
said that.”

“Get me out of here.”

“You’re not going to intervene?” The cutter was aflame now, glowing brilliantly above the harbor and in reflection below it.

“I … I …” The snake on her forehead shuddered and writhed. “Have to … think about it …”

“Think? Think? How can you
think?
Everybody wants you to intervene. Even God wants you to intervene.”

“You said I’d be back before dawn.”

“I expected better of you, Julie.”

“Take me home.”

“A bargain is a bargain.” Wyvern shrugged. “Just remember this: I’ll always be around when you need me, which is more than you can say for your mother.”

The flaming Coast Guard officers clung to Julie’s eyes like flashbulb afterimages as she stepped from
Pain’s
dinghy and climbed to the top of the jetty. Dawn seeped across the sky, molding shapes from the gloom—pine trees, lighthouse tower, cottage. In the temple a lamp burned, glowing through the pain-papered windows. Phoebe, most likely, drinking or adding exhibits or both.

Julie faced west. University of Pennsylvania: her father’s sperm samples, sitting in their frosty test tubes.

“They’re on the march, Pop!” she screamed.

She hoped he was in heaven. She hoped it had a library.

“Some interventions can’t be
helped
!”

Surely he could see that.

In the bathroom, Julie stripped off Georgina’s prom dress and turned on the shower. The Revelationists had performed their ablutions, now it was her turn; a person must fight purity with purity. The flaming officers were everywhere. Their bones filled the soap dish. Their skin hung from the curtain rod, their blood poured from the nozzle.

She washed, threw on Melanie’s peach kimono, and entered the temple. Phoebe sat beside the altar, cutting an oil spill from
Mother Jones.
“Hi, Katz. Up early, aren’t we?”

“Never went to bed.” In a single spasm Julie snatched away the
Mother Jones
and ripped it in half. “You’re about to get what you always wanted.”

“A woman of action?” Phoebe asked uncertainly.

“The high road,” said Julie, nodding.

“I thought you didn’t want us looking to heaven for answers.”

“They dress in blood, Phoebe. They
kill
people.”

“Who?”

“Billy Milk’s arsonists.”

“Arsonists? There goes the neighborhood.” Phoebe lit the altar candles. “You mean you’ve finally outgrown this place?”

“I suppose.”

“Time to start living in your own skin? Time to start beating the devil?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

Phoebe’s sweeping gesture encompassed the entire room. “So it’s all obsolete, huh?”

“Obsolete. Right. Help me.”

They hugged, and then it began, their violent excavation, suffering ripped from the walls in great ragged sheets like lizard skins, layer after layer of war refugees, flood victims, AIDS patients, earthquake casualties. They dismantled the flaming doll-house. Destroyed the lava-smothered village. Threw the crashed jetliner into the wastebasket. Back to the walls; within a half hour they’d reached the original stratum—its floes and famines, epidemics and revolutions, jihads and foreclosures, chemical dumps and despair.

“Big day coming up, huh?” Phoebe peeled away a Nicaraguan adolescent whose arms were made of rubber and steel.

“Yeah, and you’re going to wait it out, buddy.” Julie pulled down a ten-year-old heroin addict. “I’m serious—follow me with your damn camera and I’ll throw it in the ocean.”

“Sure, Katz,” said Phoebe with a skewed smile. Only the altar remained untouched—its anonymous sailor’s skull, its cluster of dynamite disguised as nuclear missiles, its burning, penis-shaped candles from the Smile Shop. “Anything you say.”