Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  College, by damn. Abandoned by her mother, saddled with divinity, but she’d gotten all the way to college.

  By Halloween her gills were throbbing with desires at once romantic and lewd. Howard Lieberman, he called himself—her immediate supervisor at the bookstore as well as a biology major stationed at the Preservation Institute, where he collected sperm samples from macaques. He put her in charge of the science texts. Basic Physics, Principles of Geology, Primate Psychology, Physical Anthropology, Introduction to Astronomy. “It should be called ‘astrology,’ of course, the study of stars,” Howard explained as he showed Julie the stockroom. With his small tight lips, wire-rimmed glasses, and Kropotkin shirt, he looked like Tom Courtney as the young revolutionary Pasha Antipov in Julie’s favorite movie, Doctor Zhivago. Roger Worth had been nice, stupefyingly nice, but here was a man with a whiff of danger about him, a man who peered over precipices. “Unfortunately, ‘astrology’ got snatched up by the horoscope crowd, so we’re stuck with ‘astronomy,’ the arrangement of stars.”

  “I’m really interested in this stuff.” Julie rubbed a carton labeled ELEMENTARY PARTICLES.

  “Physics?”

  “Physics, biology, stars, everything.”

  Howard said, “Good for you. These days most people prefer to impoverish their minds with mysticism.” Such a sensual person, intense as a violin, serious as a cat. “You’re a rare woman, Julie.”

  “My mother’s a mechanical engineer,” she said.

  Howard drew out his Osmiroid pen and inscribed a list on a stray scrap of computer paper. “Here are some courses you should audit.” It was the first time Julie had ever seen anybody write in calligraphy; the list looked like Scripture. “I think they’ll excite you.”

  Which they did. Julie may have snuck into Quantum Mechanics 101, Astrophysics 300, and Problems in Macroevolution to please Howard, but she stayed in each class for the sake of her soul.

  What Julie found through science was not so much an atheist universe as one from which God, after the act of creation, had reluctantly but necessarily excluded herself. The universe was stuff. Energy, particles, time, gravity, electromagnetism, space: stuff all. So how could a being of spirit enter a wholly physical domain? She couldn’t. The God of physics was obliged to inhabit only the unknown, the universe beyond the universe, a place the human mind would never reach before everything expired in heat-death and whimpering hydrogen. The God of physics might smuggle an occasional egg or spermatozoon into the Milky Way, but not her incorporeal essence. She could bring forth children, but never herself.

  Science even explained the evident actuality of supernatural dimensions—of heaven, limbo, purgatory, and the fiery franchises of Andrew Wyvern. The so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics practically demanded a belief in inaccessible alternative realities. “A myriad contradictory worlds,” lectured Professor Jerome Delacato, “forever splitting off from each other like branches on a tree, so that, somewhere out there, I am presently giving a lecture explaining how the many-worlds hypothesis cannot possibly be true.”

  For all this, Julie’s rage remained. As she sat in ivy-speckled College Hall, writing down Delacato’s wild theories, her flesh quivered with disgust. A mother ought to get in touch. Even if the rift between them were as wide as the cosmos, God should still try to heal it.

  “The observable universe is ten billion light-years in size, correct?” she asked Howard. “Or, as Dirac observed, ten followed by forty zeros times as large as a subatomic particle. But look, the ratio of the gravitational force between a proton and an electron is also ten followed by forty zeros. That implies a designer, I think. Maybe even a caring, personal God.”

  He examined her with a mix of irritation and pity. He sucked his lips inward. “No, it simply means the cosmos happens to be that size right now.”

  “I have strong reason to believe God exists.” Julie suppressed a smirk. Her sexy, perfect boss didn’t know everything.

  “Look, Julie, these matters are best discussed over food and drink. These matters are best discussed in restaurants. You like Greek food?”

  “I love it.” She couldn’t stand Greek food. “I go crazy over it.”

  So they became a couple. It was dumb and lovely. Boyfriend, girlfriend, holding hands. Off to the movies, the Rodin Museum, the Franklin Institute, the Academy of Music. An atheist Jewish biologist—Pop was sure to approve, no goy-meets-girl jokes of the sort he’d made the time she brought Roger Worth home.

  Explaining the universe in Greek restaurants, Howard exuded a boundless passion. “What most people don’t realize is that something unprecedented has entered the world. Bang—science—and suddenly a proposition is true because it’s true, Julie, not because its adherents have the biggest churches or the grandest inquisitors or the most weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.” His eyes paced their sockets like caged animals. “Earth orbits the sun. Microbes cause disease. The kidney is a filter. The heart is a pump.” His voice built to a crescendo, making heads turn. “At long last, Julie, we can know things!”

  They took a chance on the Southwark Experimental Theater and, after two hours of watching mediocre actors talk to household appliances, retreated to Howard’s apartment, a space as disheveled as he. His posters of Einstein, Darwin, and Galileo were crookedly mounted on dispirited loops of masking tape. His clothes lay everywhere in amorphous piles. Rings of dried coffee pocked the top of his computer monitor.

  “Want a beer?”

  “Coffee,” said Julie. “And I’m hungry, to tell you the truth.”

  “I’ve got a microwave pizza.”

  “My favorite.”

  They picnicked on the floor, amid widowed socks and back issues of Scientific American.

  This time, Julie knew, she would make it work. “Howard, did the universe have a beginning?” she asked, fondling his hand.

  “I believe so.” He leaned over and pressed his lips against hers—nothing like Phoebe’s masterful kisses, but sufficient to get things rolling. “I’m no steady-stater.”

  “Didn’t think you were.” She opened her mouth. Their tongues connected like two randy eels.

  “The common misconception is that the big bang occurred at a point inside space, like an explosion here on earth.” Howard giggled lustily. “Rather, it filled the whole of space, it was space.”

  She stretched out on the floor, carrying him down with her, still feasting on his tongue. His erection poked her thigh. “There’s a condom in my purse.”

  He reached inside a nearby running shoe, pulling out a set of Trojans strung together like lollipops. “Don’t bother.”

  Buttons, zippers, buckles, catches, and hooks melted under their eager fingers. “I’ve never done this before,” Julie confessed as the surrounding chaos gobbled up their clothes. “Not entirely.”

  Howard’s quick scientific fingers and nimble truth-telling tongue were everywhere, probing her tissues, prodding her bones, molding lovely flowing shapes within her. The mesh of black hair on his chest looked like Andromeda. “After the bang, space kept expanding, like a balloon or a rubber sheet.” He unwrapped his condom and unfurled it down his circumcised expansion, all the while touching her, bringing forth delicious vibrations.

  “Rubber,” Julie echoed, groaning.

  “Note that the movement is both isotropic and homogeneous.”

  She shuddered, every blessed cell. Her bones glowed. Her spinal cord became a rope of hot gelatin lacing her vertebrae. Gritting her teeth in pleasure, she jammed her palms against the floor and floated away on her own liquid self.

  “To wit, the known cosmos has no center.” Howard climbed on top.

  At last she touched shore. Her eyes sprang fully open, and she beheld Howard’s rickety bookshelves. The New Physics, she read. P-h-y-s-i-c-s. A coil of radiant energy shot from the word, flooding into her skull like a sunbeam passing through glass. She closed her eyes. Her dendrites danced. Her synapses sparkled.

  “No pri
vileged vantage point,” Howard elaborated. She guided the ballooning universe toward her, laughing as it pried her apart. “Thus, we must abandon”—he pressed ahead with steady, metronomic thrusts, writing calligraphic poems on her vaginal walls—“any idea of galaxies in flight.”

  Cell Biology! Analytic Chemistry! Geophysics! Phylogenesis! Comparative Anatomy! Electricity sang through Julie’s blood, the surge of observable data, the erotic rush of experimentally verifiable knowledge. Could it be? Her coming had something to do with science? She’d been sent to preach a gospel of empirical truth?

  “In the macropicture”—Howard panted like a German shepherd—“the stars float at rest, separating from each other only as space itself”—a low, primal wail—“grows!” He spasmed within her, and Julie pictured countless galaxies, printed on his condom, moving apart as the universe filled with his seed.

  She asked, “Do you believe science has all the answers?”

  “Huh?”

  “Science. Does it have all the answers?”

  “Everybody thinks he’s being oh-so-deep when he says science doesn’t have all the answers.”

  Done. All of it. Virginity gone, flesh ratified, mother spited, mission discovered—the gospel of empirical truth! Yes! Oh, yes!

  “Science does have all the answers,” said Howard, withdrawing. “The problem is that we don’t have all the science.”

  “Breathe,” Georgina told him.

  Murray breathed. The pains persisted, screeching through his arms and chest, making jagged humps on the oscilloscope. How tightly woven was the world, he thought. The scope ran on coal-generated electricity; at some specific moment, then, a West Virginia miner had pried up the very bituminous lump now enabling whoever occupied the nurses’ station to confirm Mr. Katz as still among the living.

  “Hopeless,” he moaned, squeezing the crunchy sheets. He was strung up like a marionette: catheter, IV tube, a tangle of wires pasted to his chest. His clogged heart bleeped at him. When the monitor’s pulsings stopped, he wondered, would he notice the silence, or would he be dead by then? “Like father, like son.”

  “Horse manure.” Georgina tugged a strand of her graying beatnik hair. He tried to read his future in her tics: the more nervous Georgina, the closer oblivion. “Just breathe. It’s gotten me out of all sorts of jams.” He channeled air through the back of his throat. The humps on the scope crested, the pains faded. “Julie’s on her way.”

  Julie, he mused. Dear, burdened Julie. How nearly normal she seemed, how relatively sane. “We’ve done all right by her, haven’t we?”

  “Aces,” said Georgina.

  “She’s still the kid down the street,” said Murray. “Her enemies haven’t a clue.”

  “Never thought we’d get through her childhood. She and Phoebe sowed a lot of oats.”

  “Do girls have oats?”

  “Of course girls have oats. I had oats.” Georgina flipped on the TV; a Revelationist preacher announced that thirty cases of diabetes were currently vanishing in Trenton. “I can’t say it’s been easy keeping quiet. I wake up every day wanting to scream out the whole thing. But I don’t. I bite my tongue. That’s how much I love you.”

  The last, lingering pain died in Murray’s chest. “You really love me? You aren’t just being nice to me because my kid’s connected to…whatever? The Primal Hermaphrodite.”

  “If I weren’t a lesbo, Mur, I’d marry you.”

  “You would? You’d marry me?”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “Will you do it anyway?” He changed channels: a tidal wave had just washed all of civilization from a Philippine island. “I mean it, Georgina. Let’s get married. You wouldn’t have to give up women. You could bring them home.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet—but I’m afraid Phoebe’s the only sexual generalist in the family.” Navajo bracelets jangled on Georgina’s wrist as she extended her index finger and traced the scribble on the scope. “Hey, look, if I ever get oriented the other way, you’ll be the first guy I’ll look up, promise. Meanwhile, it’s better just to be friends, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Anybody can get married, Mur. Friendship is the tough one.”

  His heart purred. Friendship was the tough one: true. Georgina drove him crazy at times—all her wild gypsy ideas about pyramid power and the souls of rainbows—yet she was the best thing in his life besides his daughter; he would never trade Georgina’s friendship for a wife. “I hope Julie gets married,” he said.

  “You’ll dance at her wedding.”

  He checked the scope—a perfectly placid sea, cardiac waves rising and falling. He smiled. Julie’s wedding, exquisite thought. Would his grandchildren be free of godhead? Was divinity a recessive trait?

  The curtain slid back and there she was, surely no more than seven pounds overweight, bearing a grand explosion of chrysanthemums. “Contraband,” she said with forced cheer, setting the vase on the nightstand. “They don’t allow these things in intensive care, foul up the air or something.” As Julie’s gaze strayed to the half-dozen suction cups leeching on his chest, her face grew so white her forehead scar almost vanished. “Hey, you’re looking good.” Her voice was fissured. She kissed his cheek. “How’s it going?”

  “I get tired now and then. An occasional pain.”

  Tears hung on Julie’s eyelids, her large lips drooped sharply. “I know what you’re thinking—this is how your father went.” A tear fell. “They know a lot more about hearts these days. They really do. The heart is a pump.”

  “Give him a new one,” said Georgina firmly.

  Again Julie blanched. “Huh?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Georgina,” Julie whispered, turning the name into an admonishment.

  “I won’t tell anybody—Girl Scout’s honor.”

  “Georgina, you’re asking…”

  “A new one, kid. Forget about launching the age of cosmic harmony. Forget synergistic convergence. Just give your pop a new heart.”

  As Georgina backed out of intensive care, the television spoke of terrorists releasing hand grenades aboard a Greek cruise ship.

  Georgina, you’re asking too much, was what she’d wanted to say, Murray guessed. He stared at her forehead, the scar emerging as her color returned. He didn’t doubt that Julie could cure him, nor that he wanted her to: the idea of oblivion filled him with an anger so intense his saliva boiled. How dare oblivion come and blot out his thoughts, his daughter, his best friend, his books?

  But no. It was asking too much. She must stay off the high road. Once she started intervening, it would never stop—a new heart, a second new heart, an AIDS victim delivered, a cyclone forestalled, a mud slide retracted, a revolution resolved, and soon her enemies would be at her doorstep.

  “Hey, if I confess to you,” he asked, “does that make this my deathbed?”

  “No way.”

  “I never told anybody, but…I met Phoebe’s father once.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Julie grimaced. “Dead?”

  “He was in the old Preservation Institute when it blew up. Marcus Bass. He convinced me to steal you—your machine.”

  “Phoebe keeps imagining she’ll find him.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Should I tell her?”

  “No point. Poor guy had four kids. Boys. I sent ’em baseball cards sometimes.” Oh, how he’d love to see Marcus Bass again—see him, hug him, thank him for making him realize he needed an embryo. “Honey, has God ever told you what happens after death?”

  “You’re not going to die.” Julie curled her fingers into tight lumpy balls. “You have to finish Hermeneutics of the Ordinary.”

  “But has she ever told you?”

  “My mother’s outside the universe, Pop—the God of physics, I’m sure of it.” Absently Julie spun the TV dial. The Road Runner beep-beeped across the screen. “We both know what we’re thinking, huh? Georgina said—”
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  “I hate that Road Runner thing.” He glowered at the TV. “Ants in his feathers.” The God of physics? Julie’s mother a mere equation, the fuse that had touched off the big bang? That explained a lot, he figured. “The answer’s no. I’ll get out of this the hard way.”

  She brushed his wired chest. “If I just made a few new cells…”

  “Think it through. You can fix up my heart for now, but how will you take the stress and the fat away—fix up the whole world? Hearts aside, maybe it’ll be a brain aneurysm next time, or kidney failure, or Alzheimer’s.”

  “I can’t let you die.”

  A spectacular nurse entered, a kind of Miss November with clothes on—aggressively busty, fine slutty lips—and deposited a pill on his tongue. “Visiting hours are over.”

  “My kid,” he said, drinking down the pill. How dare oblivion come and blot out the world’s nurses?

  “Good for you.” The nurse offered Julie a sunshine smile. “Those flowers can’t stay.”

  Again Julie kissed his cheek. “All right, Pop. You win.”

  A smooth vascular tide rolled across the scope. He felt a nap coming on. “Go have a life.”

  “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City,” Phoebe Sparks sang as a nasty March wind propelled her past Steel Pier’s dead merry-go-round, “we will walk in a dream.” Her old Girl Scout canteen rapped against her side like a child trying to get her attention. “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and cream.” Broken and decayed, the piers were like a seedy version of the Acropolis—relics rimming the city, remnants of an earlier, nobler, more eminent age. They were also, Phoebe had learned, good places to spend one’s lunch hour: plenty of privacy.

  She uncapped the canteen, raised the spout to her lips. Mom didn’t mind an occasional beer, but serious liquor was out. There were times, though, when only Bacardi rum could make the world feel right, rum the wonder drug.

  A man was fishing off the end of the pier.

  Licking Bacardi from her lips, Phoebe recapped the canteen. “Catch anything?”

  He turned. A Caucasian. Not her father, then. It was never her father. “Hooked a barracuda last week, but they aren’t biting today.” The fisherman was bearded and handsome, his muscular torso filling a red turtleneck sweater. “How are you, Miss Sparks?”