Only Begotten Daughter (38 page)

Billy placed one hand on the convert’s shoulder, the other against the small of his back. Scripture was crystal clear about baptism. The whole body must go under, one, two, three—death, burial, resurrection—none of this fey papist business of sprinkling a person’s head. “We descend with Christ in the likeness of his death.” Billy bent the man, immersed him, held him under. “We’re raised to walk in a new way of life.” Billy brought the convert up, the bright waters rolling down his ebony face like tears of joy.

“Hallelujah!” shouted the convert, simultaneously coughing and laughing. No Satan Island for him.

The crowd echoed, “Hallelujah!”

Minute followed minute, conversion begat conversion, and suddenly Billy’s commandant was before him, waist deep in the canal, a plump woman at his side. Jewish, Billy sensed. Fortyish, half homely, half voluptuous, brown skin, fungus-green eyes, a turban of dense black hair spilling from her scalp and across her forehead.

Billy asked, “Is this …?”

“I think so,” Peter Scortia replied.

She lacked a hand. From the right sleeve of her parka a grinning suture emerged. A fitting irregularity, Billy thought, for everything about this woman was sinistral: left, demented, malevolent, wrong.

“Tell me your name,” Billy demanded.

Teeth clacking like castanets, mouth slung at a contemptuous angle, the one-handed woman came forward. “Julie Katz. And you’re Reverend Milk.”

Odd: the waters were causing her no pain. The holy river should be scalding the Antichrist; it should be boiling the meat off her bones.

“Some call you Sheila of the
Moon,
” Billy asserted.

“My pen name.”

Odd: as thoroughly as Billy probed her frame, his phantom eye could find no locusts scuttling along her ribs, no scorpions in her heart.

He channeled the full force of God’s will into his left eye, swelling its vessels, countering the woman’s terrible gaze. “Do you know why you’ve been arrested?”

“Hard to say. There’s something inevitable about it, don’t you think? Jesus tried to warn me.”

“Christ talks to you?”

“Sometimes. Yes. Brother to sister.”

Billy took a loud swallow of air. “You believe you’re the Lord Jesus’ sister?”

“I believe it because it’s true. I suppose that makes me a blasphemer?”

“I suppose it makes you something much worse, Sheila of the
Moon.
” The interview was giving Billy no pleasure. For the first time in years, his phantom eye was tingling, an itch that couldn’t be scratched. “It makes you—”

A sign! A stark unequivocal sign! Just as the Holy Spirit had visited the Savior’s baptism in the form of a dove, so did a New Jersey sea gull now soar into view, its course sure, purpose certain. Billy’s phantom eye grew hot, a molten marble seething in his head. How clearly God speaks, he thought as the gull released a large black-and-white pudding. How lucid the language of heaven.

The sign splatted against the woman’s brow and crept down her cheek. “Damn,” she said, wiping her face with her glove.

“Children of the Lamb—behold!” Billy addressed the Tree of Life. “The Antichrist’s reign has ended! Spring will come to New Jerusalem, and with it our redeemer!”

Only: the waters hadn’t burned her.

Except: he’d seen no locusts on her bones.

The tree erupted in cheers so thunderous a dozen golden apples fell into the canal.

Thank God for the courts, thought Billy, thank God for the Inquisition. The learned judges would answer the riddle once and for all. Sheila of the
Moon:
venially guilty or mortally guilty, simple atheist or very Antichrist, mere foul-mouthed Jew or eternal scourge of God?

It was one trial, Billy vowed, his son would not miss.

Satan is seasick. Leaning over
Pain’s
starboard rail, he coughs into the watery border where the Straits of Dirac meet the Pacific Ocean.

The vomitus arrives in a great tide, as if from a horn of liquid plenty. Andrew Wyvern disgorges the eight tons of soybeans he pirated and swallowed before they could relieve the 1997 Sudanese famine. The devil regurgitates the river’s worth of fresh-frozen plasma he’s been keeping from Canada’s hemophiliacs. He spews out a thousand vials of hijacked interferon originally intended for a Peking cancer clinic. He upchucks the mountain of nickels and dimes collected last Halloween by California schoolchildren on behalf of UNICEF.

“What ails you?” asks Anthrax, surveying the archipelago of puke.

“Katz,” Wyvern mutters, mouth burning with beneficence. What uncanny umbilicus now binds him to his enemy, what infernal thread? That woman with her smarmy lines,
Let him among you who is without sin
… Her pretentious moves: holding the vigilantes at bay with a wad of pebbles, cradling her friend’s vomit, seizing her friend’s dynamite, giving out soup. Katz with her Corning insulation.

“What about her?”

“The bitch has been busy.”

“But she got caught.” Spawned by a leprous tongue, rolling past rotten teeth, Anthrax’s tones are nonetheless soothing. “Milk will put her in the Circus.”

“Not necessarily. Not without some encouragement from us. How long till we’re in Jersey?”

“A month. Relax, sir. She hasn’t got a prayer.”

“In my experience,” Wyvern explains, drawing his hand across his seared and pulpy lips, “you can never rely on Christianity. I was positive they’d torture Galileo to death, absolutely certain. Remember my bet with Augustine?”

“You lost quite a lot as I recall.”

“A trillion lira, Anthrax. A cool trillion.”

The New Jersey National Dungeon was a kind of underground wasp’s nest, a conglomeration of passageways and cells imprisoning its population less through stone than through confusion: the illogic of its twists, the perversity of its turns. Bars of psychic chaos bound the prisoners. Shackles of entropy held them fast.

It was, on balance, a modern place. It belonged to its century. Argon lighting, solar heating, centralized air conditioning. Crystal-eyed androids tore out the papists’ fingernails. Computerized racks elongated the homosexuals’ bodies. Fusion reactors heated the tongs that seared the Uncertaintists until they renounced their ignorance and begged admittance to the True Church. Only at the bottommost stratum, the level where they placed Julie Katz, did a certain medievalism prevail.

Every day her cell—Cell 19—seemed to shrink, its wet walls pressing closer and closer as if wired to the haunted brain of Edgar Allan Poe. She knew her companions by name. Bix Rat, that mobile ball of fur. Phoebe Rat, skinny and assertive, her nose ever twitching. And the runty one, wide-eyed, his pelt like a kitten’s: according to Julie’s calculations the birth had happened last week, Little Murry Sparks, barging out of Phoebe, squalling and gurgling.

Even as Julie drew into herself, she sensed her fame spreading throughout the republic. Hour after hour, Jersey’s cable-television screens crackled with Sheila stories. For over four months, the good news had commanded the front page of the
New Jerusalem Times,
SHEILA CAPTURED … SHEILA IMPRISONED … TRIAL IMMINENT … SECOND COMING CERTAIN
. Church bells pealed in celebration; Inquisition patrol boats fired their cannons in joy.
TRIAL IMMINENT
: an old story, Julie realized—Christ before Pilate, Joan before the French priests. Burn, heretic, burn. She dreamed each night of drowning in blood; she awoke drenched in sweat, her straw pallet smelling like Absecon Inlet. Her fear was like the cranberry bog in which she’d awakened after her depotheosis, a bed of stinking slime. She suffered headaches, stomachaches, spastic bowels.

Keys clattering like a slot machine paying off in the vanished Tropicana, Oliver Horrocks entered. Julie did not hate her jailor. She almost liked him. He was a former “Heaven Help You” reader whose Revelationism was much shakier than his employers suspected. He simply couldn’t decide about Julie, on some days holding her responsible for all of Jersey’s ills, from its bread lines to its failed Parousia, on other days smuggling her Tastykake Krumpets.

“Ugh,” Oliver Horrocks said, noticing the convocation of rats. “Here we are, the cleanest city on earth, and … rats. They dug too deep, that’s the problem. You put your dungeon this low, you get rats.” He was a kind of male crone, bent and birdish, his thin face laced with blood vessels. “Whoever you are, you don’t deserve rats. Let’s go.”

Julie’s phantom thumb itched. “Go where?”

“Not supposed to tell you.” He leaned toward her as if to keep the vermin from hearing and, brushing the sleeve of her zebra-striped pajamas, whispered, “I will say this. They’d rather convert you than burn you. These aren’t
bad
people I work for. Talk to them. They’ll listen.”

Together they ascended, following the corkscrew staircases, the raked tunnels, the wildly tilted passageways, every wall wrinkled and damp like an esophagus, at last breaking into the dazzling day.

Although Jesus had only once in his life asked why God had forsaken him, Julie now found herself voicing the question over and over, mumbling it as she and Horrocks walked gold-plated avenues jammed with merry children, whispering it as they crossed the sacred river, circumvented the Pool of Siloam, and passed a row of trim little boutiques. Immaculate streets, antiseptic sidewalks, pristine gutters: Billy Milk had done what the Mafia could not. His regime had scrubbed Atlantic City clean, lifted the old harlot’s face, killed her fleas. In the spotless front window of the New Jerusalem Toy Store, a pretty teenage girl arranged a Pro-Life Talking Embryo, a Sodom and Gomorrah Playset, and a display rack of Melanie Markson’s books. At one time, Julie realized, Smitty’s Smile Shop had occupied this same location. It was as if the store had been reincarnated on a higher plane; no squirting carnations or pornographic salt shakers here, not a single whoopie cushion.

They crossed Parousia Plaza and entered a building resembling an immense cinder block, then followed a hallway hung with tapestries depicting what Julie took to be great moments in biblical jurisprudence. Elijah beheading the prophets of Baal … Gideon shredding the elders of Succoth … the children who mocked Elisha being torn apart by bears … Jael nailing Sisera’s head to the ground with a tent peg.

The courtroom was a stark white cube reminiscent of the detox chamber where she’d brought Phoebe a year earlier. Along one wall, three urpastors in dark blue business suits sat behind a polished breccia bench. In the opposite corner, a dais supported a pair of leather chairs whose conservatively dressed occupants—gray three-piece suits, narrow black ties—were manifestly blood relations. Father and son, Julie mused, grandpastor and archshepherd, Pilate—she smiled feebly—and co-Pilate. The juxtaposition struck her as ghoulish. Ah, that pathetic little hop from youth to senility, so quick. Youth? No, beyond his boyish freckles and lustrous red curls, Billy Milk’s offspring was not young. My age, she thought. Older. Older and, if not wiser, then certainly wearier, for the more she studied him, the more narcissistically wasted he seemed, the more an epicure of his own decay.

“You may begin,” Billy Milk said, nodding toward the judges.

Love your enemies, her brother had reportedly taught. An impossible ambition, self-contradictory and insane. Julie felt but one emotion toward this man, this criminal who had slaughtered Boardwalk tourists and killed her Aunt Georgina: raw, unalloyed loathing.

“I am Urpastor Phelps,” the middle judge announced in a paternal, almost kindly tone as he tidied up the dozens of news clippings cluttering the bench. He was athletic and handsome, tanned by the Jersey sun, bright blond hair sprouting from his head like a halo. “To my left, Urpastor Dupree. To my right, Urpastor Martin. Please stand before us, Sheila of the
Moon.
”

“My name is Julie Katz.”

Urpastor Dupree asked, “But are you the author of these advice columns, this ‘Heaven Help You’ series?” His round, ruddy face was so pocked by acne it might have been sculpted from a sponge.

They’d rather convert you than burn you, her jailor had insisted. They aren’t bad people, Horrocks believed. “I wrote them,” she confessed.

“What was your purpose in creating ‘Heaven Help You’?” Urpastor Martin inquired. A gaunt, twitchy man, forever knitting his fingers together.

“To topple the empire of nostalgia.”

“Topple the
what,
ma’am?”

“Empire of nostalgia.” What could she do now but explain herself as lucidly as possible? What other course was open? If the ambiguities added up to a crime, so be it. “I wanted people to start embracing the future. But that was sixteen years ago—now my goals aren’t nearly so lofty. Lately I’d settle for getting through the day without screaming.”

“Weren’t you also aiming to found the Church of Uncertainty?” asked Urpastor Martin.

“No.”

“But it got founded.”

“I did not intend to start a church.”

“So the error lies in those who came after you? In the Uncertaintist ministers and their congregations?”

“I can hardly blame them. You find meaning in this world, you seize upon it. People will take whatever deities they can get. Everybody has that need. I have it.”

A soft smile crinkled Urpastor Dupree’s acne. “Are you, as your followers believe, the daughter of God?”

“I suppose so. All right. Yes.” How uncanny, the gentleness of their probes. She’d expected an inquisition, not a dispassionate quiz. “In this instance, however, I believe we’re talking about a rather contemporary God. Outside the universe, know what I mean? Beyond the paradigms of both science and religion.”

A pang of envy shot through Julie as Urpastor Martin poured sugar from a bullet-shaped dispenser into a coffee mug. She hadn’t tasted coffee in weeks. “Assuming you are correct”—Urpastor Martin stirred the coffee with a gleaming silver spoon—“and God is unknowable, does that mean he didn’t make heaven and earth? He didn’t bring forth life?”

“In this century, better models for creation are available.”

“But Miss Katz, if God has given the world a person such as yourself, then surely he has given us everything else—the birds in the trees, the worms in the ground, the very sun. Isn’t that the truth of it?”