by James Morrow
“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.
CHAPTER 4
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Forked 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.”
Guiding Beverly into the anteroom, he flicked on the lights and pointed to the sad, stark painting—the Savior crucified, skulls heaped at his feet in a poignant parody of the gifts brought by the magi. “You know who that is?”
“Sure, Reverend.” The whore slithered out of her trench coat, and suddenly there she was, arrayed in purple and scarlet. “I wore what you wanted.”
“I appreciate that. Tell me who it is.”
“Will this be American Express, MasterCharge, or Visa?”
“Visa.” Billy slid the credit card from his wallet. “Who is it?”
“It’s Jesus.” Taking the card, Beverly drew out a leather case like the one in which Billy kept his cufflinks. “You want the standard package, or are we feeling—?”
“The standard. Do you know why he’s on that cross?”
“Uh-huh. Eighty-five dollars, okay?”
“Okay.” Billy led her into the silent nave. “Believe in him, sister.” He threw the chandelier switch. Light descended. “His blood can redeem you.”
“Right.” Beverly marched down the aisle: the Antichrist’s own bride, Billy thought. “So, what’s your preference?” she asked. “The floor? A pew?” She opened her leather case, revealing five narrow bottles, each of their respective liquids a different shade of blue. “I think the altar has certain possibilities.” Approaching the front pew, she arranged the bottles in a ring as if they were birthday candles and proceeded to uncap them. “Give me your finger.”
“Huh?”
“Finger, honey.” She pulled a needle and a thin glass tube from the case. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. I’m a pro.” Her competence was indeed dazzling. An assured jab, and a bright straw of Billy’s blood rushed into the glass tube. Carefully she released three drops into each bottle. “Don’t be offended, Reverend.” Sealing the first bottle, she held it to the chandelier light. “With all the experiments you people’ve been doing, I can’t be too cautious.” Second bottle, third, fourth…“Okay, Reverend, no condom needed—unless, of course, that’s part of the experiment.”
So far in Billy’s life, lust had been merely a temptation, but now this particular sin was taking on geometric properties, shaping itself into a proof, hardening into a sign. For who but the Whore of Babylon would act this way, pulling off her purple and scarlet nightgown and stretching out on the altar, her breasts rising toward heaven like inverted chalices? And yet the proof wouldn’t be whole until he’d followed her beckoning fingers and enacted the vileness she demanded, for who but the Mother of Abominations would force a man of God to lie with her? Gritting his teeth, he let her unfasten his belt, unzip his fly, and slide his pants and boxer shorts halfway to his knees. “Will you receive Jesus Christ?” he asked.
“Sure. Whatever you’ve got.”
“You will?”
“Definitely.”
Whereupon their actions began glowing with salvation, her sweet smell becoming incense, her rippling white form a church, her soft loins a newborn lamb. They kissed, connected. The altar seemed to drop away, angel-borne. So many ways to christen a person, so many substances! With the Jordan, as John had done. With the Holy Ghost, as Jesus had done…
A glorious measure of baptismal liquid rushed out of Billy, making Beverly’s redemption peak. Cooing and laughing, she slid away.
“I’d like to buy it,” said Billy.
“Buy it?” Perched Eve-naked on the front pew, Beverly fitted his Visa card onto her little machine.
“Your nightgown.”
“Let me think. Fifty bucks, okay?” Tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth, she rammed the platen across the card, printing his address on the receipt. “That brings the total to one thirty-five. Sign here, honey.”
He signed. Gladly. What a night of victory for Christ—the Whore of Babylon unmasked and redeemed, the city’s true name revealed, Billy’s mission confirmed. But a fearsome task lay ahead, he realized; somehow he must take his flock, at the moment more concerned with tax shelters and orthodontist bills than the Second Coming, and turn them into soldiers.
Timothy. It all came down to Timothy. Because of that astounding miracle, eyes where there’d been no eyes, Billy knew his will was God’s, knew he would find a way to make his church accept the eschatological necessity of incinerating the city. Yes, Dorothy Melton, with your ridiculous feather hat, you’ve been elected to the Savior’s army. And you, Albert Dupree, though you can barely keep your bowling ball out of the gutter, one day soon you’ll splash God’s wrath on Babylon. As for you, Wayne Ackerman, king of the insurance agents—yes, brother, the year 2000 will find you building the New Jerusalem, that great waterless port t
hrough which Jesus will again enter the earth.
“Have a nice night,” said Beverly, gliding into her trench coat. She packed up her chemistry set, marched back down the aisle, and set off for the Babylon called Atlantic City.
Open-eyed, clothed only in the cool waters of Absecon Inlet, you begin your descent, down, down to the petting zoo of your childhood. Casually you tune in the colloquies of the cod as they pass in silvery constellations, the cabals of the jellyfish as they flap like sinister umbrellas, but you don’t attend their thoughts for long—weightier matters crowd your mind. The precise nature of your divinity. The fourth-century Council of Nicaea. Sex.
It is 1991, and the world has little use for seventeen-year-old virgins.
According to one of your father’s books, the year 325 A.D. found the Roman emperor Constantine convening a council in the Asian city of Nicaea, his goal being to settle a feud then raging throughout Christendom. In crude terms: was Jesus God’s subordinate offspring, as Arius of Alexandria believed, or was he God himself, as Archdeacon Athanasius asserted? After their initial investigations, you discovered, the Council leaned toward the obvious: offspring. The epithet “son of God” appeared throughout the Gospels, along with the even humbler “son of Man.” In the second chapter of Acts, the disciple Peter called Jesus “a man approved of God.” In Matthew’s nineteenth chapter, when somebody committed the faux pas of calling Jesus “Good Master,” Jesus admonished, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”
But wait. There’s a problem. The instant you bring a subdeity on the scene, you’ve blurred the line between your precious Judaic monotheism and Roman paganism. You’ve stepped backward. Thus did the council forever fix Jesus as “very God” through whom “all things were made.” The Nicene Creed was recited in churches even in 1991.
Like Jesus before you, you know you’re not God. A deity, yes, but hardly cocreator of the universe. If you stood outside Brigantine Mall chanting “Let there be light,” a few neon tubes might blink on inside K mart, but heaven would gain no stars. God’s children did not do galaxies. They did not invent species, stop time, or eliminate evil with a snap of their divine fingers. Jesus cured lepers, you often note, Jesus did not cure leprosy. Your powers have bounds, your obligations limits.
