Only Begotten Daughter (24 page)

The bus driver appeared, popped the hatch, and began dragging out the luggage. The most important item in Phoebe’s suitcase wasn’t her liquor cabinet or dynamite but her camcorder. Cinema-vérité sex—how could she lose? Staged fornication was such a bore. What people wanted, the focus of their primal curiosity, was the genuine article—an actual policewoman boffing her husband, an authentic delivery boy doing it with his girlfriend; every step of the process, each probe and clutch and caress.

As the passengers paired themselves with their suitcases, a trim, fiftyish black man came toward Phoebe, a fedora snugged down past his eyebrows, gold rings stacked on his fingers. “New in town?” he asked, grinning spectacularly. “I’m Cecil.” He tipped his fedora and thrust his hands into his lavender three-piece suit. “Got a place to stay?”

Phoebe retrieved her suitcase. “You look like somebody I knew once. You a marine biologist by any chance?”

“A what?”

“Marine biologist.”

“Not exactly, though there’s definitely a biological side to what I do.”

“You never donated to the Preservation Institute?”

“What’s that, a religion?”

“Forget it.”

The stranger picked up her suitcase. “You’ve got gorgeous eyes, sister. I could start you at three hundred a week. Escort profession. Come home with me, babes.”

Frost formed in Phoebe’s heart. Escort profession—hah. “I
have
a career, thank you.” She yanked the suitcase away from the pimp. “I’m in the entertainment business.”

“Me too.” The pimp winked lasciviously.

“Video’s my trade. Buzz off.”

“I just wanted to—”

“I said buzz off.”

She entered the Port Authority, rode the escalator up one flight, and waded into the dense screeching streets where she planned to make her fortune.

But first she needed a drink.

Between the din of the media and the crowd’s unceasing voice—a polyphonic howl such as wolves might make disgorging broken glass—Julie could not sleep. Throughout the night, newspaper people and TV crews kept arriving, and by dawn they were camped out all over the lawn, occupying it like a hostile army.
Atlantic City Press
reporters bellowed across the acid moat using bullhorns, demanding to interview the woman who’d saved their town. Video cameras leered at Angel’s Eye from out of cherry pickers. A helicopter labeled WACX-Radio buzzed the tower, its rotor so unnerving that Julie had no choice but to cloak her home in a dense mantle of mist.

She sought to distract herself with television, but there were so many Sheila stories it was like looking in a mirror. On Channel 9 a statuesque woman swathed in blond hair stood on the edge of the freshly carved moat, surrounded by the dead living, a tower of fog in the background. “Who’s inside the cloud?” she asked the camera. “A magician, some say. The Virgin Mary, others claim.” A microphone hovered near the reporter’s lips like an all-day sucker. “But no rumor is more persistent than the one that brought these people to Brigantine Point. For them, Atlantic City’s mysterious benefactor is none other than Sheila, daughter of God.” The reporter winked. “Tracy Swenson, Channel 11 Action News, Brigantine.”

At dusk Julie removed the fog, peeling it away like a label from one of Phoebe’s rum bottles.
Pain
cruised the horizon like a shark patrolling its feeding ground.

Dress right, Julie told herself. Melanie’s kimono would not befit the memorable exit on which her safe passage was predicated. She put on Melanie’s suede boots, crammed herself into Georgina’s prom dress. Nor could she leave her face untouched—a few minutes with Georgina’s makeup, and her eyes widened, her scar vanished, her lips became rose petals.

She stepped onto the walkway. A thousand eager stares drilled into her heart. Cheers pounded her flesh. Climbing atop the railing, she balanced on the metal bar like an aerialist. She flung her arms apart, enshrouded herself with light—a full-body halo pulsing outward from her head and trunk like a rainbow on fire—and jumped.

At first it seemed the crowd’s astonished whoops were buoying her up, but no, this was her heritage at work, whizzing her across the darkening sky like a sentient comet. “Look!” “She’s flying!” “Sheila!” “Stay!” “Mary!” “Flying!” “Sheila!” She looped the loop. She spiraled around the lighthouse as if decorating a maypole, then zoomed over the bay toward the waiting schooner. The cool air frizzed her hair, billowed her dress, caressed her naked arms. Flying was better than swimming beneath Absecon Inlet. Flying was better than sex.

She landed in the crow’s nest, startling a drowsy vulture and breaking one of its eggs. The damp, sinewy rigging squeaked and groaned as, hand under hand, she climbed down. To freedom. To safety. To a reality no baby bank aborter or crusade victim could ever invade. Clouds of unknowing and shadows of quantum doubt rolled in from the north, enveloping the schooner like black veils, catching on her spars, clinging to her masts.

Julie stepped onto the foredeck. Three coal-eyed angels looked up from their labors—they were fixing a hole in a flesh-sail, suturing it closed with needle and thread—and applauded. Anthrax, stationed in the cockpit, placed a clawed hand to his lips and blew her a kiss.

Resolutely she marched through Wyvern’s oak-paneled cabin and into the salon beyond, her pace slowed by the gummy yolk on her boots. The devil stood by the settee. “Welcome aboard,” he said, brushing her arm. A red carnation hung on the lapel of his white dinner jacket like a brilliant wound.

“I made the right decision,” Julie asserted, voice quavering.

“Nobody with our talents can abide the earth for long,” Wyvern corroborated. “Such a vale of unrealistic expectations. The bastards just grind you.”

She glanced at the table, swathed in immaculate linen. A bottle of champagne poked from an ice bucket like the periscope of an Arctic submarine.

Two place settings. “Who’s coming to dinner?” she asked.

“You are. Lentil soup and bean curds. Hope you don’t mind—I’m a vegetarian.”

“Oh?”

“It’s irresistible—the screams of the carrots as I dice them, the agonized beets convulsing in my mouth. Hungry?”

“Famished.”

“The voyage will pass quickly. There’s much to talk about and more to see. I look forward to your companionship, Julie. Please call me Andrew.” He offered a succinct, gentlemanly bow. “Yours is the first stateroom on the left. My angels have laid out an evening gown. That prom dress is all wrong—white is your color.”

She followed Wyvern onto the foredeck. “Raise anchor!” he called in a soaring, bell-like voice. Julie looked toward the lighthouse. Would she ever miss it? She wished she’d brought a souvenir—a Smile Shop T-shirt, Pop’s manuscript, her “Heaven Help You” scrapbook.

Slowly
Pain’s
anchor crawled over the transom, salt water rolling off its spikes, seaweed swaying from its chain. Issuing a series of liquid grunts, the creature curled up by the windlass, closed its rat-red eyes, and went to sleep.

“Dinner’s at eight,” said the devil.

Pain
surged under Julie’s feet. The sails expanded like huge puffy cheeks. Wyvern’s angels must have been eating ambrosia, their intestinal winds were so heady and sweet. The city’s ruined silhouette receded—dark skeletal girders that had once framed the Golden Nugget, the Tropicana, the Atlantis …

A white gown, Wyvern had said. He was going to dress her in white. She hadn’t felt this good in a long, long time.

W
AVE-TOSSED, ANGEL-POWERED
, His Satanic Majesty’s ship
Pain
blew across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and from there to the gloomy and indeterminate seas beyond. Julie stayed below, away from the spray that scratched her eyeballs, the air that filled her lungs like raw cotton.

The devil knew how to live.
Pain’s
cabins were air-conditioned. Its library was a cornucopia of gilded volumes redolent of oiled leather and wisdom:
The City of God, Summa Theologica, Das Kapital
—all Satan’s favorites. Every night at eight, Anthrax brought her a dinner menu, and Julie would check off pepperoni pizza or, on alternate evenings, something more sophisticated: stuffed lambchops, breast of peacock. Once she ordered the “musical entertainment,” subsequently dining to a violin concert performed by twenty dead preschoolers whose plane had exploded during a demonstration tour of the Suzuki method.

“Happy?” the devil asked. His metamorphosis was simultaneously startling and banal. Horns poked blatantly from his forehead. Overlapping scales covered his body like slate tiles. His nose had doubled in size, its nostrils wide and gaping like the bores of a shotgun.

“Happy,” said Julie emphatically. She stared through a porthole into the fibrous mist. Nausea pressed its rude thumb against her stomach. “You bet your tail I’m happy.” Tail: true. His coccyx, no longer a mere vestige, was growing an inch every day.

Happy? What she really felt was disconnected, standing here in a white evening gown and conversing with Satan himself in the galley of a hellhound schooner. Hard to believe she’d once been a Girl Scout, played point guard for the Brigantine High Tigerettes, or had a love affair with the
Midnight Moon’s
managing editor.

“I should have shipped with you long ago,” she told the devil.

The glutinous days accumulated, congealing into weeks, lumping into months. Bricks of black lustrous coal filled the sky, at first hovering individually, then fusing into an endless arch. Yet night did not descend, for the vault reflected the glow of a thousand burning islands, bathing Pain’s course in a rosy and perpetual dusk.

Good intentions, Julie learned, were among the more innocuous commodities paving the road to hell. The sea lanes threading the archipelago were dark sewery channels choked with dead tuna, while the islands themselves suggested humpback whales stitched together by Victor Frankenstein. The predictability of Wyvern’s operation depressed her: one hears from earliest childhood that in hell the convicted dead receive atrocious punishments, and that was exactly what each island offered. Training her binoculars on a plateau, she saw over a dozen naked men chained Prometheuslike to huge rocks; crazed panthers ripped open their bellies, hauling their soppy intestines down the slopes like kittens unraveling yarn. On the shores of the adjacent island, a long line of sinners stood buried up to their necks, their exposed heads resting atop the sand like beachballs; shell-crackers fixed in their claws, ravenous lobsters crawled out of the surf, breached the skulls, and, buttering the exposed brains, feasted. On other islands Julie beheld the damned drawn and quartered. Skinned alive. Broken on racks, impaled on stakes, drilled to pieces by hornets. And always the pain was infinite, always the victim would find his mangled flesh restored and the torment beginning again. Contrary to Dante Alighieri’s inspiration, hell’s motto was not,
ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER IN
but merely, so
WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

Intervene? Save them? Whenever the idea reared its head, she had only to recall the hydralike nature of eternal damnation: the moment one agony ended, another instantly bloomed; Julie’s powers—abracadabra, your skull is whole, alakazam, your wound is mended—meant nothing here. Besides, as the devil had told her in the beacon room, these souls were guilty. On earth, saints suffered along with sinners; not so in hell. Wyvern’s world might be endlessly gruesome and impossibly brutal, but it was strangely, uniquely just.

Just? So said the devil, so said the theologians, and yet the closer
Pain
got to her destination, the further she seemed to drift from reason. Day by day, the categories of iniquity grew ever more arbitrary and excessive. Julie could understand why there was an Island of Atheists. Ditto the Island of Adulterers, the Island of Occultists, the Island of Tax Dodgers. Depending on one’s upbringing, the precincts reserved for Unitarians, Abortionists, Socialists, Nuclear Strategists, and Sexual Deviates made sense. But why the Island of Irish Catholics? The Island of Scotch Presbyterians? Christian Scientists, Methodists, Baptists?

“This offends me,” she said, thrusting a navigational chart before Wyvern and pointing to the Island of Mormons.

The devil’s tail, a kind of rubbery harpoon, looped upward. He grabbed the barbed end. “Throughout history, admission to hell has depended on but one criterion.” He gave the Island of Mormons an affectionate pat. “You must belong to a group some other group believes is heading there.”

“That’s perverse.”

“It’s also the law. Doesn’t matter if you’re an embezzler, a slave trader, or Hermann Goering himself—you can elude my domain if nobody ever imagined you in it.”

“How terribly unfair.”

“Of course it’s unfair. Who do you think’s running the universe, Eleanor Roosevelt?” Wyvern kissed his tail, sucked on the barbs. “Quantum realities don’t have checks and balances. There’s no cosmic ACLU out there.”

“You’re lying.”

“Not in this case. The truth’s too delicious.”

“I can’t imagine a Methodist doing anything particularly damning. Why would—?”

“Like all Protestants, Methodists abandoned the True Church. Only through the Apostolic Succession can a person partake of Christ’s continued spiritual presence on earth. This is basic stuff, Julie.”

“Catholics, then. They remained faithful to—”

“Are you serious? With their Mariolatry, Trinity, purgatory, indulgences? How unbiblical can you get?”

“My father was a good man, and he—”

“The
Jews?
Give me a break, Julie. The
Jews?
They don’t even accept God’s son as their redeemer, much less practice Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Let’s not even discuss the Jews.”

“All right—I give up. Who got saved?”

Wyvern reached under one of his shoulder scales, lifting out an errant earwig. “Heaven’s not a crowded place.”

“So I gather. A million?”

“Cold.”

“Fewer?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ten thousand?”

“Lower.”

“One thousand?”

“Such an optimist.” Wyvern snapped his fingers, crushing the earwig. “Four.”