by James Morrow
She faced the sea. Tourists rushed into the tide, hoping to soothe their burns. Other survivors carried their loved ones’ corpses to the beach, setting them on the sand so they might mourn uninterrupted before more judgment arrived. Directly ahead, the truncated hulk of Central Pier shimmered in the August sun. And suddenly there it was, rising above the wharf, reaching for the clouds. Her stuff.
“Julie!”
A fat man waddled out of the smoke, ripping away his white cotton shirt as if to free himself from the heat’s insistent grip. Soot streaked his ballooning flesh. His sweat shone like fresh varnish.
“I can’t believe it,” Bix rasped. “These fanatics with their gasoline, and people are dying, and I went to Caesar’s and nobody even listened. How come you never told me about him?”
“Who?”
“The yachtsman. Did he hump you?”
Anger stunned her. Atlantic City burning, her anonymity on the line, and the traitor dared to be jealous. “I’m Jesus Christ’s sister!” She spat the words in his face. “Of course the devil’s going to be interested in me!”
“Don’t start on that—not now!”
“Get out. Go east along Pacific, it’s clear all the way to the inlet.”
She headed toward the pier—toward her stuff—and the foolish walrus followed: through the crumbling archway, around the huge plaster mermaid, past the ceramic sea horses heralding the abandoned aquarium.
“Listen, Julie, you’ve got to stop this daughter of God shit! You’re going to get hurt!”
“Leave me alone!”
She broke into the sunlight, her gaze lifting along the steel spire to the doughnut-shaped observatory. According to Pop’s book on amusement parks, Frederick A. Picard had dubbed his creation the Space Tower, but Julie did not have to leave her planet today, merely gain a divine perspective. Her gills shivered. She vibrated with godhead. Oh, yes, she was ready! Reverend Milk’s army might have its gas, its trimmers, its strategy, its righteousness, but Julie Katz had her genes.
Although the counterweight had long since vanished, she had no trouble bringing the observatory under her control. No shepherd’s staff required, no flamboyant gestures—a mere nod cracked the rust and set the cabin in motion.
“What in hell—?” Bix’s wet face glowed with astonishment.
She grinned. “You bet, baby doll. Your eyes don’t lie.” Metallic squeals filled the air as the observatory slid down the tower.
“Are you doing that?” gasped the traitor, staring dumbfounded at the anomaly.
“I am God and gravity and quantum mechanics. I am the girl from the ectogenesis machine.”
“You’re making it happen?” His eyes quavered like poached eggs, his bare chest trembled. “Don’t do this to me, Julie, I won’t allow it! You can’t have powers!”
“I have powers, sweetheart.”
“Stop it, Julie!” Bix shook his fist as if strangling a snake. “The universe has to make some kind of sense! Don’t do this to me!”
She ran to the grounded observatory, leaving him alone on the pier, quaking with mystified outrage. The interior was chaos—rotting cushions, a million splinters of glass. No matter, she wouldn’t be entering anyway. Intervention on this scale must happen in the open. The Red Sea had split by day, Jesus had raised Lazarus before a crowd.
She climbed to the roof and stomped her foot. As the observatory began rising, slowly, steadily, it seemed at first that the tower was moving instead, like a gargantuan hypodermic needle plunging through New Jersey to draw the planet’s blood. Higher she ascended, and higher. She became her stomach, the rest of her flesh a mere vestige, orbiting around last night’s gourmet spaghetti. The hot smoky air whizzed across her face. Sea gulls drifted by, ash-speckled.
Her life lay before her. To the south, Longport, site of her conception. To the north, Brigantine Point and Angel’s Eye. She picked out Absecon Inlet, her elementary school, the Moon offices, the swamp near Dune Island where the Winnebago sank.
The southern half of Atlantic City was now one vast firestorm—a burning, outsized Monopoly board. Even as she watched, spores of flame blew across the passage and took root in Chelsea Heights and Ventnor. With luck, she could still save Margate and Longport, not to mention the upper horn of the city, from the inlet to the bayside casinos.
The sun publicized her advent, wrapping the tower in ribbons of light, cloaking her body in golden robes. Already the traumatized survivors on the beach had spotted her. A forest sprouted: raised arms, pointing fingers. Who could she be? Who was that strange, luminous woman in the sky?
The ocean was hers, a spectacular legacy, mother to daughter, Here you are, Julie, take it, my wet masterpiece. “Bring on the waves!” she screamed as a crowd collected at the base of the tower. The ocean trembled and seethed. “Waves!” Burning thimbles encased her fingertips. “Waves!”
“Waves!” echoed the dazed multitudes below.
And there were waves. Julie conducted the Atlantic like a symphony. Her hands moved and the water obeyed, swelling majestically, eager for commands. Godhead rose in her loins. “Waves!” she cried. It was all gushing out now, her bottled-up divinity, pouring from her nose as blood, her nipples as milk, her gills as lymph, her vagina as the slippery fluids of sex. And, lo, Sheila took the high road. Her phantom fingers seized the largest wave, sculpting it into a great phallic spout, and now the spout arched toward shore, sweeping the Revelationists off the Boardwalk. And she did flush the fevered hosts into the back streets. “Waves!” Gasoline jugs floated away, hedge trimmers sank in the divine flood. Julie’s brain sparkled and spasmed as on the night Howard took her virginity. The high road, the high road!
As she lifted her hands toward the sun, the ocean yielded up great cords of water—long tubular rivers that Julie proceeded to tie around the casinos like rope. She wrapped the Tropicana. She trussed the Atlantis. Harrah’s. Caesar’s. Strangled, the fires died. And the casinos were extinguished, and Sheila saw that it was good.
She fixed on the city—flaming Chelsea Heights, smoldering Ventnor. Under divine mandate, a second spout emerged and reached toward the holocaust. Like a butcher slicing a sausage, Julie cut the spout into cylinders, deploying them upright in a circle from Albany Avenue to the West Canal. The liquid dikes shone like mountains of silver, quivered like mesas of gelatin. Eels and flounders leapt from the vertical tide. Thus spake Sheila.
The crowd shouted: “Mary!”
They cried: “Ave Maria!” and “Queen of heaven!”
The watery ramparts fell, smothering the inferno in a mesh of overlapping tides.
Just like that. Finis.
“Hail Mary!” “Ave Maria!” “She’s come!”
Finis? Julie squinted toward Venice Park. Fresh troops: Milk’s army had an entire second column. Down Absecon Boulevard they marched, over five hundred crusaders bound for the bay-side casinos, their white flak jackets glowing in the morning sun.
Bring on the column, she thought. Bring on a dozen. Bring on Pharaoh’s chariots and Rommel’s Panzers and the Strategic Air Command’s warheads.
I am she.
It is she, Billy thought as he waded across the swollen and unholy river Atlantic Avenue had become. Sheila of the Midnight Moon, the beast herself, the very Antichrist, chewing her way out of the Dragon’s putrid egg.
A gas jug drifted past. Billy reached into the cold flood, retrieved it. Empty, drained of wrath, and to such little effect. Why wasn’t the fall of Babylon going better, why this damnable intervention? The initial assault had been sheer perfection, the Golden Nugget catching fire like straw, whereupon the inferno had grown increasingly mighty, engulfing everything from the Tropicana to the Sands. And when God willed that the tourists be cut down, Billy’s army had acquitted itself bravely, turning on their hedge trimmers and slicing with all the piety of Christ’s soldiers taking Jerusalem in 1099.
But now came this woman, this Dragon’s spawn, dousing the flames, sealing up the only portal by which Jesus
might return.
Billy faced the Boardwalk. Dante’s, intact. Resorts International, untouched. The mighty Showboat, not a scratch.
Dorylaeum, he thought. At Dorylaeum, too, the day had seemed lost…until the second half of the army arrived, the troops of Lorraine and Provence, overcoming the enemy’s numerical advantage with better horses and tougher armor. It was all up to Timothy. Even now the boy was probably attacking the bayside casinos, throwing Jehovah’s incandescent sweat on Harrah’s and Trump Castle, rekindling the holocaust that would drive out the beast forever.
Drenched head to toe, burly Joshua Tuckerman waded toward Billy, the wet sleeves of his lumberjack shirt hanging from his arms like Spanish moss. Each of the Savior’s soldiers had a different reason for joining the crusade, each had his own unique and inspiring story to tell. In Joshua’s case, he’d decided to enlist upon learning he was dying of pancreatic cancer. “I was supposed to do Dante’s,” Joshua gasped. “All this water. I don’t understand.”
“Steady, brother,” Billy commanded. “Timothy will soon be here.” His eyepatch trembled. “The flames that were quenched shall rise again!”
“Really? Your boy has that much gas?”
Together they headed north on Tennessee, slogging past the black stinking remnants of the Baltic Avenue apartments. The water seemed lower. Lower? Could it be? Did his corporeal eye deceive him? No, the flood was receding, the sea slipping back into place. It had all been foretold, Billy realized. Revelation 12:15. And the Serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood… But all ends well, oh, yes, brothers and sisters, the flood absorbed in 12:17, Babylon thrown down in 14:8, the beast imprisoned in 19:20.
Strange—no smoke on the western horizon, not a wisp. Had Ernie Winslow of Venice Park Texaco failed to open up two hours early as promised? Was Timothy unable to fill his vials? Billy broke into a run.
Trump Castle loomed up, gloating in its wholeness, no sign of fire anywhere. Beyond he saw Harrah’s, corrupt and complete.
Defeat lay on Timothy’s freckled face like a death mask as he led his five hundred away from the bayside casinos. Gamblers and whoremongers motored down the boulevard, bisecting the column with their mocking Ferraris and cruel Porsches. What monstrous delight they took in honking at Timothy and the retreating troops, what obscene pleasure suffused their cries of “Hey, Holy Joe!” and “Look out, God-freaks!” How quickly their smugness would vanish when they saw the city’s other side—the gutted casinos, collapsed Boardwalk, bleeding idolaters!
Father and son met at the McKinley Avenue intersection. “The gas station—was that the problem?” Billy asked.
The boy seemed confused. “Huh?”
“The place was closed? You couldn’t fill up?”
“No, Dad.” Timothy’s hedge trimmer was gone. His jug hung from his hand like a penitent’s weight. “Plenty of gas. No problem.”
“What then?”
“Between Venice Park and the island…” The boy stooped sharply, as if balancing the Dragon’s egg on his shoulders. “Somewhere in there, the gasoline…well, the gas…” Like Christ offering a thirsty stranger a gourd of water, Timothy gave Billy the jug. “Take a sip, Dad.”
“No, Timothy. It’s God’s wrath.”
“Drink.”
Billy opened the jug, poured a small measure into the cap—odd color, no hydrocarbon smell—and tested the fluid with his tongue.
Bland. Smooth.
White.
The Savior had once changed water into wine. And Sheila had…
“What is it?” Billy demanded.
“Milk,” said his son.
“Milk?”
“Skim, I think.”
“You know what we’d better do, Reverend?” said Joshua Tuckerman. “We’d better get back to the beach before all heck breaks loose.”
What kind of deity am I, wondered Julie as, dizzy with exhaustion, rapturous with power, she swayed back and forth on the observatory roof. A deity of love, or of wrath? Love was wonderful, but with wrath you could do special effects. Part of her wanted to channel the floodwaters against this crazed and ridiculous army, drowning them like the rats they were, washing that trayfnyak Milk into the sea. But ultimately a person must seek her better self. Somehow her brother had stayed the course without once bloodying his hands, a rare feat for a prophet, and she would do the same, letting Milk’s brigands go, no, helping them go. She objectified her decision on her forearm, sweeping the sweat away with her thumb. As above, so below; the flood fell, giving Milk’s shattered hosts a dry path to the beach.
Not until the retreat was well under way, with the first scraggly knot of crusaders piled into their rafts and fighting past the surf, did temptation return, beating through Julie’s flesh. Break them, smash them, crush them, an eye for a Mosaic eye. What a spectacle she could stage for the wretches on the beach, what a climax, raising up the Revelationists’ yachts a thousand feet, dropping them from the sky like stricken airplanes.
No. Not today. Another time perhaps. Pressing her palms toward the ocean, she bid the observatory descend. And upon the noon hour Sheila rested.
As Julie climbed onto the pier, cries of recognition battered her aching flesh. “Hey, the Moon lady!” “Like in her picture!” “It’s her!” “Sheila!” Dazed, she moved down the ramp, the crowd parting like water before the prow of a ship. By the time she touched the sand they had coalesced into a single creature, adulation personified, awe given flesh.
Viewed from the tower, the misery on the shore had seemed ordered, comprehensible. But down here all was chaos, stunned gamblers milling around, corpses strewn about like beached fish. Her brain buzzed, her eyes glazed over. Slowly she stumbled forward, safe inside the bubble of her divinity. The groans of hedge-trimmer victims mingled randomly with the weeping of orphaned children. Flesh quivered everywhere, scorched muscles, bleeding gobbets. She tripped over an adolescent boy, his upper leg a charred log.
Was she still supposed to help this pathetic species? Did her obligations encompass the whole damn beach, move into the city with its heaps of the burned and maimed, then across the state, and finally…everywhere? She had no ultimate salvation for these people, no means of curing their mortality and melding them with God, but she did have her two bare hands; she could throw herself into a healing frenzy, sewing torn tissue with her fingertips, soothing burns with her spittle, knitting bones with her laser stare…
And then it came, the same odor Roger Worth had exuded the night the Winnebago flew, the stench of worship, razoring into her brain. Gasping, she doubled over and hit the sand. Pop was so right. Take the high road and she’d be shackled forever, a slave to adoration and praise.
Phoebe. Phoebe, who had ignited her self-confidence, taught her to take risks. Phoebe: sitting in the cleansed temple, waiting to be freed from the imprisoning spell of Bacardi rum. But for Phoebe, would she have even dared move against Milk’s army? She surveyed the expectant multitudes. There would always be expectant multitudes, always. The fight that mattered lay back at Angel’s Eye.
Cries of “No!” and “Please!” hovered in Julie’s ears like malicious wasps as she hobbled across the sand and tumbled into the surf. The Atlantic slid over her, and the shouts grew muffled and unreal. Damn them. Wasn’t it enough that she’d put out the fire? How many lives had she saved by doing that? Five thousand? Ten? Ever deepening, the sea pressed against her skull, ending the din, and she set her course for Angel’s Eye, alone with her wrath and the soft steady flapping of her gills.
CHAPTER 9
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Eyes jellied with seawater, body tattooed with goose bumps, Julie ran along the jetty. The rescue of her best friend—what better denouement to her great intervention? Bring on the bottles, she’d smash every one, she’d pulverize them and build castles from the sand. Bring on the Bacardi bat, the Gordon’s boar, the Courvoisier Napoleon, the Beefeater. Give her Old Grand-Dad, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Johnny Walker, t
he whole besotted crew. “Phoebe!” she yelled, barging through the front door. No answer. “Phoebe! Phoebe!” Pop’s books soaked up her shouts.
She stumbled into the kitchen, the frigid Atlantic guttering down her arms, puddling on the linoleum. Empty. “Phoebe?” The laundry room: only the washer, the drying rack, the cob-webbed remains of her crib. “Phoebe?” She peeked into the temple. Aunt Georgina sat on her daughter’s bed, staring at the bare walls like a schizophrenic. “Hi.”
“Oh…you.” Georgina pulled her narrow, hatchetlike face into a sneer. “Our local incarnation.” On her lap lay a piece of computer paper, embroidered with sprocket holes. “I’ve been hearing fire engines all morning.”
“Some arsonists attacked the city, but I stopped them. Where’s Phoebe? I came to cure her.”
“I figured as much.” Georgina thrust the paper into Julie’s dripping fingers. “This was on the kitchen table.”
Phoebe’s unmistakable handwriting, all loops and tangles.
DEAR SHEILA: My friend and housemate, who happens to be God’s daughter, has just come out of the closet. She believes I drink too much, and any day now she’s probably going to start messing with my metabolism. Should I leave a note behind, Sheila, or simply let her find me gone?—WONDERING IN ATLANTIC CITY
“Gone?” Julie grimaced. Her gills trembled.
“Cleared out half her clothes. See for yourself.”
“Damn.” Julie glanced toward the altar. No missile complex, no dynamite; she’d even taken that. Dear Wondering: Wait.
Georgina cinched the belt on her karate suit. “Why’d you tell her you were going public? Don’t you know alcoholics fear recovery more than death? Phoebe must’ve panicked.”
“Hey, I did you a big favor today.” As Julie sat on the edge of the bed, Georgina rose reciprocally, like a seesaw partner. “I saved your shop. When your aunt’s shop’s on fire, you do something.”
