Only Begotten Daughter (5 page)

Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city, for in one hour is thy judgment come!

The Brigantine beacon flared brighter than ever as Billy brought
Pentecost
about and headed for the open sea.

B
ECAUSE THE MERE PRESENCE
of his embryo brought Murray great joy, he decided to keep her in his bedroom, right on the dresser next to the Instamatic photo of Pop and him riding the now defunct merry-go-round on Steel Pier. Every evening, the minute he got home from Photorama, he would dash up to the glass womb with the eagerness of a twelve-year-old boy visiting his electric trains. Staring at his developing baby through her amniotic sac felt like an invasion of her privacy—but did not parenthood of any kind ultimately invade its object’s privacy? And so he watched, a voyeur of ontogeny.

From Stephen Lambert’s
Evolution in Action,
Murray had learned ontogeny did not really “recapitulate phylogeny,” that is, there was no appearance
in utero
of adult forms from other phyla. Nevertheless, his embryo had a sense of history about her. If only Pop could have been there. Look, Phil Katz would have said, just look at my little
tsatske
growing up. See, she’s a herring. Now a turtle. About now we should have … I was right, Murray, an anthropoid ape! Hey, she’s a disc jockey already. What’s the next stage? A Neanderthal, I should imagine. Yep, right on schedule. Look, a high-school dropout, we’ve got. A lawyer, Mur. She gets better all the time. And now—am I right?—yes, she’s finished. All done. A Jew.

Unfortunately, Angel’s Eye was a conspicuous and alluring installation, forever attracting bored teenagers from town and nosy adults from the Brigantine Yacht Club. Whenever he was away, serving Photorama customers or running to the Stop and Shop for a stack of Swanson frozen TV dinners, Murray was haunted by images of goonish intruders peering through his bedroom window, plotting to steal the strange machine on the dresser.

He decided she’d be safer in his laundry room, and so one frigid February morning he drove to Children’s Universe and purchased a hundred-and-fifty-dollar crib, the Malibu Natural Babybunk, complete with hardwood endboards, a mobile of plastic geese imported from Sweden, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s highest rating. After assembling the crib and the mobile, he set the machine on the mattress, then wedged the whole affair between the washer and the drying rack. He felt better. He’d done right. His baby would mature in a secluded and tropical world, its soapy air warmed by the sultry pulse of his electric heater as it dried his clothes and bedding.

As it happened, the day Murray relocated the machine was also the day Georgina Sparks came lumbering up the path to Angel’s Eye, laden with a U.S. Army backpack, dressed in a baggy yellow T-shirt asserting that
MEN HAVE UTERUS ENVY
, and pushing a rusted and spavined bicycle. At first he didn’t recognize her. Only after focusing on her pregnancy, which bulked before her like an ectogenesis machine, did he recall the friendly lesbian from the Preservation Institute.

“See?” she said, proudly extending her occupied womb. “I brought it off. Five months down, four to go, and then—pop!—my very own marine biologist.”

“You look great,” he said admiringly. She did: the second trimester, with its bright complexion and ripe contours.

“You weren’t kidding, you really run this thing.” Georgina spun toward the lighthouse tower, making her long raven hair swirl. “How very phallic. Can I watch you fire it up?”

“I use it only to commemorate wrecks.”

“Tonight we’ll commemorate the wreck of the Preservation Institute. You ask me, it was those Revelationist idiots who bombed the place. Hey, wow—you’ve got your own private ocean here.” Murray followed as Georgina wheeled her bike past the tower and headed for the point. “Weird, isn’t it?” she said. “If I’d tried picking up my semen a day later, it would’ve been blasted halfway across South Jersey, and I wouldn’t be having this particular baby. Which to my mind raises all sorts of cosmic questions, such as how did you end up being the person you are instead of, I don’t know, some turkey who got killed in the Franco-Prussian War?”

Murray grabbed the bike seat, jerking Georgina to a halt. “Somebody blew up the Institute?”

She removed her backpack and pulled out a tattered newspaper clipping. “I could tell you’re a person who doesn’t keep track of the outside world. Here …”
BABY BANK ABORTED
, ran the headline. “Longport, New Jersey,” Murray read. “Police report that a homemade bomb has destroyed a sperm bank here, killing a forty-one-year-old marine biologist and leveling …”

A cloud of hot gas drifted up Murray’s esophagus.

Was his reaction at all reasonable? Had the bomb in fact been meant for his embryo?

He kept reading. The First Ocean City Church of Saint John’s Vision was cited as a possible suspect, but an indictment seemed unlikely, the case against the protesters being entirely circumstantial. Dr. Gabriel Frostig, interviewed, praised the University of Pennsylvania for offering the Institute a new home, then went on to lament that a valuable piece of technology, the world’s only prototype ectogenesis machine, had been vaporized by the explosion.

Vaporized. Good news, Murray realized. Five months ago he’d stolen a glass womb, now suddenly he was just another bookworm with a locked laundry room. Off the hook. Saved. Except he couldn’t enjoy it.
BABY BANK ABORTED
. Somebody was out to get his child …

No, a silly notion. Self-centered and paranoid.

He read on. Shock and outrage welled up in him. The murdered biologist of paragraph one was Marcus Bass. He checked and rechecked. Yes, Marcus Bass, whose four boys, sandwiched in his wallet, could all swim.

“Dinner,” he croaked. Would any good be served by telling Georgina her fetus’s father was dead?

“Huh?”

No. None at all. “You want to stay for dinner? I have spaghetti but no wine.”

“I don’t drink these days.” Georgina patted her biologist. “The pregnancy.”

That night he made them an entirely dreadful meal, the spaghetti so overcooked it broke under its own weight, the salad soggy and self-contradictory, part Greek, part tuna. Georgina liked it, or so she said, and subsequently there were other dinners, two or three every week. In Murray, she’d clearly found the ideal audience—for her pregnancy, for her crazy interventionist theories of child-rearing (every baby a latent genius), for her grandiose questions about human existence. She was a non-practicing Catholic and a dabbler in feminist paganism. She was a dreamer and a pragmatist, a hardheaded mystic who used numerology to find her perpetually misplaced keys and pyramidology to keep her Swiss Army knife sharp. She covered her bases. For Georgina Sparks, a brilliant child was at once something you calculated into existence through preschool stimulation and something you allowed to happen through cosmic openness. Don’t attempt parenthood before placing both cognitive psychology and the Spirit of Absolute Being in your camp.

After each dinner, Murray, Georgina, and Murray’s cat Spinoza would sit on the lighthouse walkway watching sailboats and Revelationist cabin cruisers glide across the bay.

“I have a present for you,” she said one evening as the fading sun marbled the sky with reds and purples. She opened her backpack and removed a set of novelty condoms from Smitty’s Smile Shop, the Boardwalk emporium she managed, their wrappers emblazoned with portraits of famous discredited clerics: William Ashley Sunday, Charles Edward Coughlin—collect all twenty-six. Murray was touched. Once, before he even knew Georgina, he’d bought a pornographic candle at Smitty’s, a birthday gift for Pop, who collected such things. Georgina’s life was measured out in paraffin penises, whoopie cushions, latex dog vomit, and windup chattering teeth. She spoke often of getting into real estate. The town was changing, she would note. The casinos were coming. “You got a girlfriend?”

“I’m not very successful with women,” Murray confessed.

“I know the feeling.” Georgina stood up, her pregnancy eclipsing the moon. She was in her seventh month, Murray in his eighth. “I was nuts about Laurie, I really was—but, Jesus, so noncosmic. I mean, get dinner on the table at six o’clock or the world will end.”

Murray contemplated an Aimee Semple McPherson condom. “In college I slept with quite a few dental hygiene majors. What I really want these days is a child.”

Georgina scowled. “A child? You want a child?
You?
”

“You think it would be wrong for me to adopt a baby, raising it all by myself and everything?”

“Wrong? Wrong? I think it would be
wonderful.
”

Murray started toward the tower stairs. Good old Georgina. “In my laundry room there’s something that’ll interest you.”

“I’ve seen plenty of dirty laundry in my time, Mur.”

“You haven’t seen this.”

They descended.

Surrounded by glass, tethered to bottles, sitting fast asleep in her crib, Murray’s fetus looked less like a baby-in-progress than like one of the toys she would play with once she arrived.

“What on earth is
that?
”

The glow of the naked light bulb bounced off the bell jar, speckling the fetus’s head with stars. Such a face, Murray thought, all flushed and puffy like an overripe plum. “What does it look like?”

“A goddamn fetus.”

“Correct.” Murray tapped the nearest bottle, abrim with his own blood. “
My
fetus.” He’d followed Marcus Bass’s instructions exactly, dropping by Brigantine Fire Station No. 2 several times a week and eventually earning sufficient trust among the three paramedics—Rodney Balthazar, Herb Melchior, Freddie Caspar—not only to avail himself of their transfusion rig but to be included in their poker game. “Female.”

“But where’d you
get
it?” Georgina asked.

“The Institute.”

“And it’s alive?”

“Alive and developing. I stole it the day we met.” The oxygen pump chugged soothingly. “The semen was mine—nobody knows where the ovum came from. Inverse parthenogenesis.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“One of my sperm began meiosis without an egg.”

“It did?”

“An egg of indeterminate origin, at least.”

Instantly Georgina’s dormant Catholicism awoke. Crossing herself, she whispered “Mother of God” and, quavering with awe, approached the crib. “Wow—I knew God had eggs, I just k
new
it.” She grasped the teething rail and took a deep Yogic breath. “You know what we’re looking at? We’re looking at one of those times when God herself comes barging into human history and gets things cracking.”

“God?” Murray spun the Swedish mobile. “You say God?”

“Not
God
God, I mean GOD God. The God beyond God.” Georgina splayed her fingers, ticking off her pantheon. “The Spirit of Absolute Being, the World Mother, the Wisdom Goddess, the Overmind, the Primal Hermaphrodite.”

Murray said, “I don’t even believe in God.”

“Listen, there’s no way to account for an event like this without bringing in God. This child has a mission. This girl has been
sent
!”

“No, there are other explanations, Georgina. A God hypothesis is going too far.”

“Growing a baby in your jism—in a bell jar—you think that’s not going far? You’ve already gone
far,
Mur.” Georgina wobbled pregnantly around the room, pounding piles of dirty laundry. “A virgin conception—sensational! Ever see
The Greatest Story Ever Told?
Jewish people probably didn’t catch it. John Wayne’s the centurion, right, and he gets up on the Mount of Skulls and he says, ‘Truly this man was the son of God.’ The son—and now the
other
shoe has dropped. Just sensational!”

“Some joker put an egg in my donation, that’s all.”

“We’ve got to tell the world about this! We’ve got to telegram the Pope! First the son, now the daughter! Get it?”

Now the daughter. God’s daughter. Murray cringed. He didn’t believe in God, but he didn’t believe some joker had put an egg in his donation either. “The Pope? The
Pope?
I don’t want to tell
anybody,
I’m sorry I even told
you.
Baby bank aborted—remember? Whatever’s going on, somebody almost killed her. Already she has enemies. Enemies, Georgina.”

His friend stopped pacing; she sat down in his laundry basket.

As she usually did about this time of day, the fetus woke up, yawned, and flailed her stubby arms.

“Hmm,” said Georgina at last, absently harvesting socks from the drying rack and pairing them up. “Mur, you’re absolutely right—the Mount of Skulls and all that. Jesus Christ’s very own sister would certainly have to watch her step, at least till she figured out her mission.”

Murray’s heartburn returned, a fire-breathing worm in his windpipe. “She’s not Jesus’ sister.”

“Half sister.” Georgina slammed her palm on the washer, startling the fetus. “Hey, friend, your little advent is safe with me. As far as I’m concerned, she’s just the kid down the street, she’s never even
heard
of God. Got a name picked out?”

“Name?”

On the morning of Murray’s fourth day at Newark Senior High she’d suddenly appeared on his bus, Julie Dearing, wealthy and spoiled—a Protestant princess, Pop would have called her—with a face so gorgeous it could have started a broken clock and a body that should not have been permitted. She had dropped her geography book in the aisle. Murray had picked it up. The relationship never got any deeper.

“Julie.” Murray pointed to his fetus’s opulent black hair. “Her name’s Julie.”

“Nice. You know, you’ve got a golden opportunity here, with Julie out in the open like this. You can begin her preschool education. Talk to her through the glass, Mur. Play music. Show her some flash cards.”

“Flash cards?”

“Yeah. Pictures of presidents. Alphabet letters. And fix up this place, will you? It looks like an outhouse. I want to see animals on these walls. Bright colors. This mobile’s a step in the right direction.”

“Sure,” said Murray. “Gotcha. Animals.” A smile appeared on Julie’s face—ethereal, there and not there, like a cat weaving through the dusk. What enormous potential for intermittent happiness the world offered, he thought. Aberrant or not,
this
was the child that was his, no other, this one, whether she came from a cabbage patch, the Overmind, or the brow of Zeus. His. “I’m scared, Georgina. Baby bank aborted. I want her to have a life.”