Only Begotten Daughter (9 page)

“Hey, Katz, it’s a chimpanzee! An actual goddamn chimpanzee!”

Julie targeted a buzz bomb to sail over the west rampart of Castle Boadicea—Aunt Georgina had suggested they name their constructions after great women warriors—and hit the main tower. “Chimpanzee? Where?”

But already Phoebe was off, running toward the decaying remains of Central Pier.

An old black woman in a nurse’s uniform lay snoozing on a deck chair, her crinkled body shaded by a red beach umbrella to which a chimpanzee—Phoebe was right, an actual goddamn chimpanzee—was tied by a leather leash. Were the chimp to panic, Julie realized, it would pull the umbrella down like Samson wrecking the Temple of Dagon. (You’re Jewish, Pop told her whenever they finished reading a Bible story. You should know these things.) Arriving on the scene, Phoebe let the chimp sniff her butt and legs, then sniffed him in the same places. She turned to the chimp’s companion, a kid about their age sitting exactly where the shadow of the umbrella met the sunstruck sand: his white body seemed split, half dark, half light. Fuzzy smiles appeared on his face as he talked with Phoebe and pressed his hands into the wet sand. He was blind.

Julie’s intestines kinked up. Blind as Samson. Blind as a rock. Blind as the boy in Andrew Wyvern’s mirror.

Now Phoebe was heading back, chimp following, blind boy in tow like a water skier.

“We can’t play with the monkey,” Phoebe explained, reaching the castle. The chimp smelled like used socks. His fur was matted, his eyes wet and yellow. “He’s on duty,” said Phoebe. “He’s a seeing-eye monkey. This kid comes with him.”

The sand inside Julie’s bathing suit nipped her rear like fleas. No miracles, Pop kept saying. They’d take her away.

“An
ape,
not a monkey,” the boy insisted. His hair was the color of boiled carrots. Freckles spattered his round face. Sunken and forever twitching, his eyes were like newborn gerbils living in his head. “A chimpanzee.”

Cure him, Mr. Wyvern had said. Your mother wants you to. Your mother whose best friend would never lie to you …

“Sorry,” said Phoebe. “Julie, this is Arnold.”

“Arnold?” said Julie. “I thought it was Timothy.” Not the right blind boy? She was off the hook?

“
I’m
Timothy,” he said. “My
chimp’s
Arnold.”

The ape stank. The sun was sickeningly hot.

“How’d you know his name was Timothy?” asked Phoebe.

“Yeah—how?” asked Timothy.

“Lucky guess.”

“We’re about to blow up a castle,” Phoebe announced proudly. “Roman candles, cherry bombs.”

“Wish I could see fireworks,” said Timothy. “They sound so strange, all fat and mad.”

No miracles. Her mother wanted Timothy to see. They’d take her away. Her mother wanted … if Timothy got his new eyes, would her mother finally show up? Descend from heaven on a shining cloud, her arms jammed with strange and wonderful birthday presents for Julie from every planet in the universe?

Julie glanced toward Central Pier. The nurse still slept.

A miracle, Julie knew, took more than thinking. You needed objects.
Stuff.
To resurrect a dead crab, you poked him with your crayons. To cure the blind …

She removed a plug of sand from the main tower and, spitting on it, pushed it against the boy’s left eyelid. Arnold squealed. Timothy drew back. “Hold still!” The boy froze. A soft buzz traveled out of her fingertips and looped around the dead eye.

“What’re you doing?” Phoebe asked.

“Fixing him.” Her pulse doubled, her palms grew damp. “I think.” She pried another plug of sand out of Castle Boadicea and started on the right eye. “Hold still!”

“You’re
what?
” said Phoebe.

Julie stepped back, studying the boy as if she’d just finished molding him out of Play-Doh. He brushed the wet sand away, running his fingertips over his eyelids. His hair burned with reflected sunlight. He blinked.

“I can do things sometimes,” said Julie.

“What’s going on?” Timothy shivered in the August heat.

“Do things?” Phoebe snickered.

Timothy’s eyelids fluttered like hummingbird wings. “What’s going on?” he repeated, teeth chattering.

Arnold, frightened, forced himself between the girls, his fur warm and twitchy against Julie’s bare legs. The boy’s milky gaze traveled back and forth: girl, ape, girl. Nothing showed in his face, not a crumb of understanding. Girl, ape, girl. I’ve failed, thought Julie. Girl, ape, girl. For better or worse, I’ve—

“Which one of you’s Arnold?”

“Huh?” said Phoebe.

“Who’s Arnold?” Timothy thrust his index finger toward Phoebe. “You’re not, are you? You’re a
girl,
right?”

“Damn straight,” said Phoebe, dancing crazily like a windup bear from her mom’s store. “God, Julie, you did it! You actually did it! God!” She faced Timothy and tapped his seeing-eye chimp on the head. “Here’s what a monkey looks like, kiddo. God!”

“Ape.”

Julie took a large swallow of sea air. Between her thighs she felt an odd pleasurable quaking.

Phoebe kept dancing. “This is amazing stuff, Katz! We can make money with this! How the hell’d you
do
it?”

“I have powers,” said Julie.

“Powers?” said Phoebe. “From where?”

“God.”

“Could I get some?”

“I’m God’s daughter.”

“What?”

“Her daughter.”

“God’s? God’s? I always knew you were nuts, but …
God’s?
”

“God’s.”

Timothy moved his palm along the plane of the Atlantic. “It’s so
flat.
I thought it was round.” He spun toward Julie and made a quick, cymbal-crashing gesture. “
You
fixed me, didn’t you?”

A sudden nausea came, hard and steady, like a gambler pumping a slot machine. No more miracles. They’d take her away. “Let me tell you something, Timothy.” She grabbed his bare, sweaty shoulders. “You blab this to anyone, I’ll make you blind again.”

The boy stumbled backward. “Don’t! Please!”

“Say you’ll never blab!”

“I’ll never blab!”

“Say it again!”

“I’ll never blab! Never, never, never!”

Julie whirled around. She had cured him! She wasn’t Queen Zenobia, she was God’s daughter! The pleasurable throb returned: warm, wondrous shocks fluttering upward from her vagina. For all her darkness, Phoebe seemed suddenly pale. Yes, friend, God’s daughter isn’t somebody to mess with. Trip up God’s daughter, and your body becomes a sack of blisters.

“Hey, you can count on me,” Phoebe said weakly. “It’s all locked in my head and the key’s gone down the toilet.”

“Good.”

Julie took a matchbook from her lunch box, lit the main fuse. She faced her miracle. He’d pulled the front of his bathing trunks away and was staring into the space where his legs met. “I had to see what it looked like,” he said, letting the trunks snap against his belly.

Castle Boadicea exploded like a peacock going nuclear, sparks and flames everywhere, a beautiful sight, perfect. The main tower, implanted with firecrackers, rose two inches into the sky before collapsing. The moat, mined with Saran-wrapped cherry bombs, overspilled its banks in great waves of foam.

Phoebe whooped and cheered.

Arnold ran around in circles, issuing high, nervous, birdish chirps.

Timothy cried, “Oh, wow!”

The nurse woke up and screamed.

“Time to leave, buddy,” said Julie, hooking her finger under Phoebe’s shoulder strap.

“Wow!” said Timothy.

“What
else
can you do?” Phoebe trembled with wonderment. “Can you make people happy?”

Dragging Arnold by his leash, Timothy ran toward Central Pier, clear-eyed and on a straight course. “Mrs. Foster, Mrs. Foster, I’ve got something to tell you!”

Again the nurse screamed.

“Mrs. Foster!”

Julie took off, Phoebe chuffing behind. Faster and faster they ran, pell-mell across the beach, kicking up sand clouds, and now came the battered steps, now the Boardwalk, now their bikes, Julie’s footfalls echoing all the while through her bones, beating against the low chant playing over and over in her head,
never again, never again, never again.

F
ORKED TONGUE LASHING, FANGS
spurting poison, a dark serpent of despair slithered through the Reverend Billy Milk as he strode down the Boardwalk. Futility, futility, all was futility and God’s shattering silence. Seven, that rhythmic digit from Revelation, seven long years since Billy had been in regular communication with heaven: the seraphs’ voices telling him that he and he alone had been elected to bring Jesus back, the white-robed hosts marching through his skull on their way to set Babylon aflame—the whole vast internal spectacle having culminated in 1984 with proof positive that the seraphs and hosts were indeed messages from Billy’s Lord, not fancies from his brain.

He’d been taking a shower. Mrs. Foster, normally so cautious and prim, pulled the plastic curtain aside, so nothing more substantial than steam now clothed Billy’s sinful flesh. “He’s got eyes!” she screamed.

“Eyes? Who?”

“Timothy! Two eyes!”

“What do you mean?”

“Eyes!”

Naked, Billy ran from the bathroom. It was true. Chairs, tables, spoons, the family Bible, his mother’s picture on the mantel, his father’s soapy skin—the sweet blue-eyed boy saw it all.

“Timothy! What happened?”

“They gave me eyes!”

Eyes! His son had eyes! A boy with eyes could join Little League, see a circus, behold his father in the pulpit; he could skate and ski and ride a ten-speed bike. “Who did?”

“The angels! The angels gave me eyes!”

But then had come the terrible hiatus, God’s maddening aphasia, seven years without a single sign, no corroborations from on high. Billy’s theological instincts told him Atlantic City was indeed Babylon, yet on every visit his phantom eye had remained opaque as the devil’s sweat.

He tried other cities: Miami with its drug caliphs, San Francisco with its sodomites, New York with its depraved teens murdering each other for sport. Futility, futility, all was futility. Why wouldn’t God disclose his purpose? Had Timothy’s sight been gained at the cost of Billy’s vision?

ALL HOPE EMBRACE, YE WHO ENTER IN
, exhorted the flashing neon slogan running across the entrance to Dante’s. Inhaling deeply, Billy walked through the hotel lobby and into the throbbing casino. One-armed bandits and video-poker consoles lined the velvet walls of the upper circle. A huge disc labeled
WHEEL OF WEALTH
spun noisily, clicking off integers and hope. Convulsing bells, cascading coins, cigarette smoke sinuating through the air and wringing tears from Billy’s good eye—how could this not be Babylon?

He descended. In the second circle, smiling dealers in blood-red tuxedoes presided over blackjack. Lower still, croupiers with shamrocks on their lapels supervised the craps tables. At last Billy reached the central pit, where a great roulette wheel held a mob of overdressed gamblers in its thrall. Everyone seemed so completely at home here, as if privy to facts about the casino—where the fuse boxes were, how much the water bill ran, what sections of carpet were due for replacement—that Billy would never grasp.

New Jerusalem. New Jersey. Surely this was the proper site for God’s city. He’d even done the math. The Garden State and the State of Israel each comprised the exact same number of square miles—7,892, depending on how you drew Israel’s borders.

The ball made its choice; the roulette wheel stopped. Dispassionately the gamblers toted up their gains, their losses, setting out fresh stacks of chips like suburban matrons serving Ritz crackers.

And then it happened. After years of dormancy, Billy’s eye kicked in.

A disembodied hand rose from the whirring wheel and floated toward him like the soul of an aborted fetus. Wriggling a pale, pulpy finger, it directed him out of the pit, up through the circles, and straight to the corner of St. James and Pacific, where a street lamp poured its icy light upon a newspaper dispenser.

Billy slipped two quarters into the slot and removed a copy of
Good Times,
a periodical printed on brown, withered paper. A young woman leered at him, her flesh a lurid orange, as if her photo had been shot from an early sixties color TV. “Irish,” the caption ran. Her negligee was made of Saran Wrap. “Phone 239-9999.”

And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.

A sign! At long last, a sign! For if the Great Whore of Chapter Seventeen had indeed surfaced in Atlantic City, was this not the very Babylon God wanted razed? Billy scanned the possibilities. Babs with the metallic underwear and electric red hair. Gina of the “edible pajamas,” her eyebrows trailing upward like jet-fighter exhaust. Jenny, as black and comely as the Shulamite in the Song of Songs. Beverly, with her lush blond hair, her heavy lips, her purple and red …
and the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet …
her purple and scarlet nightgown!

The hand led Billy to a phone booth and punched up Beverly’s number.

“Hello?” A wet, simmering voice.

“I admire your picture,” Billy told her.

“What’s your name?”

“Billy.”

“Shall we make an appointment, Billy?”

“Tonight if possible.”

“I can squeeze you in about midnight—and I’ll bet you’re fun to squeeze in, aren’t you? Such a sexy voice you’ve got. It’s like you’re tickling me.”

Billy gasped, nearly hung up, but somehow forced himself to say, “I especially like that purple nightgown. I don’t suppose …”

“You want me to wear it?”

“Please.”

“Sure, honey.”

“There’s something else, Beverly. I’m a minister of the Lord. This will be unusual for me, a kind of experiment.”

“I know all about it, Reverend. You folks do more experimenting than Princeton’s entire physics department.”

He arranged to meet her at the First Ocean City Church of Saint John’s Vision, for only there could he learn whether Beverly was truly the Mother of Abominations. When he drove up, she was standing on the great marble steps, her body encased in a trench coat, the shoulder crimped by her handbag strap. “Never done a church before,” she said as Billy, wincing, approached. Her photo had been too kind, lying about the wrinkles, the eyelashes like rats’ whiskers. “A crypt once, and a Ferris wheel, but never this.” She drew a lock of blond hair into her mouth and sucked on it. “I like your eyepatch. Kinky.”