Only Begotten Daughter (25 page)

“Four?”

“There are four people in heaven.” The devil’s diaphanous eyelids began a snide descent. “Enoch and Elijah, for starters. I couldn’t do anything about that—it’s in Scripture. Then there’s Saint Peter, of course. And, finally, Murray Katz.”

“Pop? He was a Jew.”

“Yes, but consider his connections. Of all beings in the cosmos, he alone was selected to gestate God’s daughter.”

Julie rolled up the obscene chart. Pop was saved, great, but how could so many others be lost? Her seasickness worsened, a thousand delinquent ants defacing her stomach walls with graffiti. “This is horribly depressing, Andrew. It robs earthly existence of all meaning.”

“
Au contraire,
Julie. The fact of damnation
gives
earthly existence its meaning. Enjoy life while you’ve got it, right? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you make a quantum leap.”

“Gandhi?” she suggested weakly.

“A Hindu.”

“Martin Luther King?”

“His sex life.”

“Saint Paul?”

“The feminists wanted his ass.”

“The Madonna?”

“A rock star.”

“No,
the
Madonna.”

“A Catholic.”

“Jesus?”

“The last time I saw Jesus, he was working in some hospice in Buenos Aires. I think we should count Jesus as missing in action.”

Friday, August 15, 1997.
First the firebergs appeared, great hummocks of floating, flaming ice. Then the sea monsters surfaced, pulpy masses of gray flesh with tentacles and redundant eyes, their dorsal fins cutting into the sky like jibs as they accompanied
Pain
toward the central continent.

“Rough drafts,” Wyvern explained, pointing across the windblown deck to their malformed and forsaken escorts. “No wonder your mother got it together in only six days—she’d already
made
her mistakes.”

Initially the continent seemed to Julie nothing but a black, burning ingot glowing in the distance, but then it grew, showing sheer cliffs and incandescent hills. Dining on the sea monsters, Wyvern’s angels acquired sufficient fuel to blow
Pain
into the harbor at fifty knots. Hell, by God. For better or worse, she’d gotten all the way to hell.

The anchor limped across the deck and hurled itself over the side.

The Port of Hell vibrated with activity, rumbled with hubbub, buzzed like an asylum for insane bees. It belched and bellowed and smoked. Dozens of barges and freighters crisscrossed the harbor, looping around marker buoys outfitted with pealing bells and clanging gongs, a carillon more suited, Julie felt, to a New England village on a Sunday morning than hell on a Friday afternoon. Vast loading cranes stood against the anthracite sky, their high steel towers bobbing like the necks of brontosaurs as they plucked semitrailers from moored ships.

“What are you importing?” Julie asked.

“What do you
think?
”

Even as Wyvern spoke, howls of despair—Catholic despair, Protestant despair, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist—shot from the semitrailers.

The central pier was a peninsula of black fissured granite swarming with bat-winged angels, scaled fiends, and piggish imps. “Hail Lucifer!” the sycophants shouted. A huge welcoming party sailed forth, scores of demons packed into swan boats and outrigger canoes. “Hosanna!” they cried, tossing bright yellow leis onto
Pain’s
foredeck. Cheers boomed across the harbor as Wyvern saluted. Banners unfurled along the maze of wharfs.

WELCOME JULIE!

AVE KATZ!

HAIL DAUGHTER OF GOD!

“Think you could blow them a kiss or two?” asked Wyvern. “They’d get off on it.”

A coach clattered down the central pier, drawn by a team of four white horses.

“I’m going to enjoy this place,” said Julie, her voice toneless. She blew three small, pinched kisses toward shore. Enjoy hell? Could that be remotely true? Did any coordinates exist in or out of reality that she could ever call home?

Anthrax rowed them to shore through a blizzard of confetti and rose petals, and they climbed into the velvet-upholstered coach. The driver, a demon whose physiognomy melded a weasel’s leer with a toad’s complexion, cracked his whip above the horses’ heads.

And they were off, speeding over deserts of burning sulfur and through forests whose trees were the fleshless hands of gigantic skeletons. They rattled across rainbows of rock arcing over gorges filled with writhing piles of the damned. They circumvented vast lunarian craters formed, Wyvern asserted, by the impact of falling angels.

Within the hour a marble palace swung into view, its slender towers soaring into the smoky air like the masts of some fantastic frigate. Pennants flew from the parapets, snapping in the hot hadean breeze. A portcullis hung in the main gate like a leopard’s upper jaw.

“The foundation stones once pressed witches to death,” Wyvern explained as the coach rolled into the courtyard. With a ceremonial flourish, the driver opened the door and Wyvern stepped out. “We wash the carpets with orphans’ tears,” said the devil. “The mosaic floors are inlaid with the teeth of starved Ethiopians.”

He extended his scaly arm. Julie jumped down, inhaling the foggy, clotted ambience of her new home, an odor suggesting cabbage cooked in molten asphalt.

“Visit me in the capital whenever you like,” Wyvern said.

“Hell has a capital?”

“Of course hell has a capital. You think we’re a bunch of anarchists? You think I’m not up to my ass in politics and bureaucracy? Thank God for computers—that’s all I can say.”

Hell was not perfect, but it was paradise compared with New Jersey. She had a life now. She was free. No more insults from Georgina. No more fights with Bix, hunts for Phoebe’s liquor, or battered wretches crowding around her house. Her every wish became Anthrax’s command. When she spoke fondly of diving into Absecon Inlet, the obliging demon constructed a swimming pool in the basement, heated by natural sulfur. When she mentioned her lack of a wardrobe, he loaded her closets with the previous year’s fashions. “I used to enjoy movies,” she told him, and immediately he located a 35mm projector plus a ceiling-high tower of Busby Berkeley musicals and Marx Brothers comedies.

The melancholy started slowly, subtly, like a cold spawned by a diffident virus. Where was Phoebe now? Hollywood, Julie speculated, nailing down her dreams of cinema-vérité eroticism, snarfling up lines of cocaine from her desk on the Paramount lot. And Bix. She hoped he missed her—the
real
her, not the intervener who’d so confused and angered him the day Billy Milk’s army came to town. Would they have eventually married? She suspected so; they meshed in so many ways, their skepticism, their chubbiness. She imagined herself pregnant with Bix’s child, a sweet, round rationalist sprouting in her womb.

Feverish with longing, numb with boredom, Julie decided to explore.

On the central continent, she learned, everything was basic and direct: fire. Fire had it all. Fire, which strips away the derma, the nervous system’s armor, leaving the victim clothed in pain. Climbing hell’s ragged peaks in her silk blouse and peasant skirt, Julie witnessed angels tying prisoners to tree trunks and burning them alive. The next day, descending into hell’s glowing canyons in her safari jacket and designer jeans, she saw the damned cooked in swamps of boiling diarrhea. Horribly, the multitudes never became more than the sum of their selves—particular women with personal hair styles, particular men of varying physiognomies, even particular fetuses, each with its own smell, an amalgam of pain and original sin. If only she could help them. But no, pointless—snap, your burns are temporarily healed, clap, your blisters are momentarily gone: so what? She had but two hands and one godhead—two hands and one godhead against the whole of perdition.

As far as Julie could discern, hell’s major industry was iron smelting. Driven by the angels’ whips, the naked men and women coalesced into teams. For some prisoners, damnation meant hollowing out hell’s mountains with pickaxes and loading the ore into hopper cars. For others, it meant pushing the cars along narrow-gauge railroad tracks. For others, it meant feeding limestone and coke to the blast furnaces: limestone that seared the prisoners’ skin, coke that ate their lungs. A final team drew slag and molten metal from the hearths, then carried the pig iron by wheelbarrow to a seething, swirling river and dumped it over the banks, whereupon it dissolved and began the slow but relentless process of soaking back into the continent, ready to be reclaimed, a perfect circle.

And always the heat, forcing water from the prisoners’ flesh like a winepress squeezing grapes. In hell, people sliced their wrists and guzzled the blood, anything to feel wetness on their tongues. In hell, a father would shoot his firstborn for a jigger of piss.

On close inspection, the label worn by each damned soul proved to be a thick asbestos shingle secured about his neck by a gold chain.
March 23, 1998
—
7:48 P.M.,
said the shingle on a young Philippine woman who was perpetually scalded in five-hundred-degree chicken fat. On an old Swedish man clothed in white-hot barbed wire,
May 8, 1999
—
6:11
P.M
.
On an Hispanic child rushing down an electrified sliding board,
April 11, 2049
—20:35
PM
.
Death certificates? wondered Julie. At this moment I entered hell? No, all these dates still lay in the future, a truth that made the prisoners’ idolatry—the way they would periodically lift the shingles to their blistered lips and kiss them—a total mystery. The future, she felt, was the last thing these people should worship.

Everybody damned? Could that really be? Only Enoch, Elijah, Saint Peter, and Pop had gained the quantum reality called heaven? In her most despondent moments Julie sensed it was all absurdly true. Everybody damned—even Howard Lieberman over there, pushing a wheelbarrow along the steamy banks of the great pig-iron river.

She blinked. Yes. Him. Her old boyfriend, sheathed in sweat, speckled with blisters, naked as when they’d last made love. He still had his wire-rimmed glasses, his tight lips. “Howard?” His skin was like an ancient linoleum floor, entire hunks broken away. A corona of pain surrounded his entire being. “Howard Lieberman?”

Pausing, he lowered the wheelbarrow. “Julie? That really you? Julie Katz?” His voice vibrated as though he were speaking through an electric fan.

She nodded, brushing sulfur from her hoop skirt. “What happened to you?”

“Shipwrecked,” Howard moaned. Sparks danced around him like flies encircling a carcass. “Coming home from the Galapagos Islands.” The sparks blew into his chest, bouncing off his asbestos shingle.
October
3,
1997
—
11:18
AM
., a date that according to her watch was a mere forty-eight hours away.

“What’s that tag, Howard?”

“You don’t have one?” He sounded alarmed.

“I’m not dead.”

“Really?”

Julie nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Is that why you have clothes on?”

“Well, yes.”

“But why did you—?”

“I couldn’t stand the earth.”

“You came
voluntarily?
”

“There’s something in my family history you don’t know about.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m tuned in on the cosmos, Howard. I’m one of your quantum aberrations.”

He appeared on the point of responding to this assertion, but instead said, “If you want to know about the tags, come back in two days.” Pressing the shingle to his lips, he kissed it fervently, as if it were Newton’s favorite prism or a toy magnet once owned by Einstein.

“At 11:18?”

“Earlier. Takes an hour to get there.”

“Where?”

“Back to work, sinner!” an angel screamed.

The lash uncoiled instantly, like a frogs tongue snaring a dragonfly. Howard’s knees buckled; he pitched forward across his wheelbarrow. Again the angel struck, and again, the thong slitting Howard’s back like Aunt Georgina opening a carton of joy buzzers. Sparks landed in his wounds, making his fresh blood sizzle.

Julie backed off, spun around. Come back in two days—a trap? It sounded like one. She’d come back, and Howard would ask her to employ the pull she evidently enjoyed here. He’d drop to his boiled knees, clasp his scarred hands together, and beg her to get him a reprieve.

She hurried home, screened
A Night at the Opera,
and swam twenty laps along the bottom of her pool. She had a life now, she told herself, far more so than in her Atlantic City days. An enviable situation, a hermit’s cave with room service. She owed Howard Lieberman nothing.

Two days later she arrived at the pig-iron river in time to see her old boyfriend flash his shingle to the chief overseer, a pasty-faced angel with an AK-41 assault rifle slung over his shoulder. Possessed by a wild and primal expectation, Howard barely acknowledged her. The angel nodded, and Howard took off, skipping down a highway of sulfur, singing a medley of Beatles songs, his rendition of “Octopus’s Garden” flowing seamlessly into his “Let It Be.”

God alone knew what three years of hauling iron had done to Howard, how many cracks in his bones, how many aneurysms in his heart. Yet whenever he stumbled and fell, he immediately picked himself up and continued, limping eagerly across the death-shadowed valleys and burning hills. Nothing discouraged him, not hell’s acid snow, bird-sized mosquitoes, or storm-trooper angels, on whom his shingle acted as a kind of amulet, charming them into letting him pass.

“You still think science has all the answers?” Julie asked, struggling to keep up. “You still think the problem is that we don’t have all the science?”

“Of course I do,” said Howard. “Look at this place, Julie—incomprehensible, absurd.
Obviously
we don’t have all the science.”

But for the absence of narrow-gauge railroad tracks, the cave might have been yet another hadean iron mine. A golden glow pulsed from its mouth, haloing the dozens of naked humans waiting to enter. Their collective stench burned Julie’s nostrils as Howard took his place at the end of the line. She decided to pull rank; she abandoned Howard and walked straight to the entrance, where a fragile-looking Japanese man labeled 10:58 waited anxiously. “Next!” a male voice called from the gloom, and the Japanese man rushed into the cave as if he’d just snatched up the baton at a relay race. Julie looked at her watch. 10:58 on the dot. 10:59, a redheaded teenage boy, whose face was a mass of acne and sulfur burns, moved into place. Sixty seconds later, the Japanese man emerged, shingle gone, wearing the most contented smile Julie had ever seen.