Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  She glanced at the table, swathed in immaculate linen. A bottle of champagne poked from an ice bucket like the periscope of an Arctic submarine.

  Two place settings. “Who’s coming to dinner?” she asked.

  “You are. Lentil soup and bean curds. Hope you don’t mind—I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s irresistible—the screams of the carrots as I dice them, the agonized beets convulsing in my mouth. Hungry?”

  “Famished.”

  “The voyage will pass quickly. There’s much to talk about and more to see. I look forward to your companionship, Julie. Please call me Andrew.” He offered a succinct, gentlemanly bow. “Yours is the first stateroom on the left. My angels have laid out an evening gown. That prom dress is all wrong—white is your color.”

  She followed Wyvern onto the foredeck. “Raise anchor!” he called in a soaring, bell-like voice. Julie looked toward the lighthouse. Would she ever miss it? She wished she’d brought a souvenir—a Smile Shop T-shirt, Pop’s manuscript, her “Heaven Help You” scrapbook.

  Slowly Pain’s anchor crawled over the transom, salt water rolling off its spikes, seaweed swaying from its chain. Issuing a series of liquid grunts, the creature curled up by the windlass, closed its rat-red eyes, and went to sleep.

  “Dinner’s at eight,” said the devil.

  Pain surged under Julie’s feet. The sails expanded like huge puffy cheeks. Wyvern’s angels must have been eating ambrosia, their intestinal winds were so heady and sweet. The city’s ruined silhouette receded—dark skeletal girders that had once framed the Golden Nugget, the Tropicana, the Atlantis…

  A white gown, Wyvern had said. He was going to dress her in white. She hadn’t felt this good in a long, long time.

  CHAPTER 10

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  Wave-tossed, angel-powered, His Satanic Majesty’s ship Pain blew across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and from there to the gloomy and indeterminate seas beyond. Julie stayed below, away from the spray that scratched her eyeballs, the air that filled her lungs like raw cotton.

  The devil knew how to live. Pain’s cabins were air-conditioned. Its library was a cornucopia of gilded volumes redolent of oiled leather and wisdom: The City of God, Summa Theologica, Das Kapital—all Satan’s favorites. Every night at eight, Anthrax brought her a dinner menu, and Julie would check off pepperoni pizza or, on alternate evenings, something more sophisticated: stuffed lambchops, breast of peacock. Once she ordered the “musical entertainment,” subsequently dining to a violin concert performed by twenty dead preschoolers whose plane had exploded during a demonstration tour of the Suzuki method.

  “Happy?” the devil asked. His metamorphosis was simultaneously startling and banal. Horns poked blatantly from his forehead. Overlapping scales covered his body like slate tiles. His nose had doubled in size, its nostrils wide and gaping like the bores of a shotgun.

  “Happy,” said Julie emphatically. She stared through a porthole into the fibrous mist. Nausea pressed its rude thumb against her stomach. “You bet your tail I’m happy.” Tail: true. His coccyx, no longer a mere vestige, was growing an inch every day.

  Happy? What she really felt was disconnected, standing here in a white evening gown and conversing with Satan himself in the galley of a hellhound schooner. Hard to believe she’d once been a Girl Scout, played point guard for the Brigantine High Tigerettes, or had a love affair with the Midnight Moon’s managing editor.

  “I should have shipped with you long ago,” she told the devil.

  The glutinous days accumulated, congealing into weeks, lumping into months. Bricks of black lustrous coal filled the sky, at first hovering individually, then fusing into an endless arch. Yet night did not descend, for the vault reflected the glow of a thousand burning islands, bathing Pain’s course in a rosy and perpetual dusk.

  Good intentions, Julie learned, were among the more innocuous commodities paving the road to hell. The sea lanes threading the archipelago were dark sewery channels choked with dead tuna, while the islands themselves suggested humpback whales stitched together by Victor Frankenstein. The predictability of Wyvern’s operation depressed her: one hears from earliest childhood that in hell the convicted dead receive atrocious punishments, and that was exactly what each island offered. Training her binoculars on a plateau, she saw over a dozen naked men chained Prometheuslike to huge rocks; crazed panthers ripped open their bellies, hauling their soppy intestines down the slopes like kittens unraveling yarn. On the shores of the adjacent island, a long line of sinners stood buried up to their necks, their exposed heads resting atop the sand like beachballs; shell-crackers fixed in their claws, ravenous lobsters crawled out of the surf, breached the skulls, and, buttering the exposed brains, feasted. On other islands Julie beheld the damned drawn and quartered. Skinned alive. Broken on racks, impaled on stakes, drilled to pieces by hornets. And always the pain was infinite, always the victim would find his mangled flesh restored and the torment beginning again. Contrary to Dante Alighieri’s inspiration, hell’s motto was not, ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER IN but merely, so WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

  Intervene? Save them? Whenever the idea reared its head, she had only to recall the hydralike nature of eternal damnation: the moment one agony ended, another instantly bloomed; Julie’s powers—abracadabra, your skull is whole, alakazam, your wound is mended—meant nothing here. Besides, as the devil had told her in the beacon room, these souls were guilty. On earth, saints suffered along with sinners; not so in hell. Wyvern’s world might be endlessly gruesome and impossibly brutal, but it was strangely, uniquely just.

  Just? So said the devil, so said the theologians, and yet the closer Pain got to her destination, the further she seemed to drift from reason. Day by day, the categories of iniquity grew ever more arbitrary and excessive. Julie could understand why there was an Island of Atheists. Ditto the Island of Adulterers, the Island of Occultists, the Island of Tax Dodgers. Depending on one’s upbringing, the precincts reserved for Unitarians, Abortionists, Socialists, Nuclear Strategists, and Sexual Deviates made sense. But why the Island of Irish Catholics? The Island of Scotch Presbyterians? Christian Scientists, Methodists, Baptists?

  “This offends me,” she said, thrusting a navigational chart before Wyvern and pointing to the Island of Mormons.

  The devil’s tail, a kind of rubbery harpoon, looped upward. He grabbed the barbed end. “Throughout history, admission to hell has depended on but one criterion.” He gave the Island of Mormons an affectionate pat. “You must belong to a group some other group believes is heading there.”

  “That’s perverse.”

  “It’s also the law. Doesn’t matter if you’re an embezzler, a slave trader, or Hermann Goering himself—you can elude my domain if nobody ever imagined you in it.”

  “How terribly unfair.”

  “Of course it’s unfair. Who do you think’s running the universe, Eleanor Roosevelt?” Wyvern kissed his tail, sucked on the barbs. “Quantum realities don’t have checks and balances. There’s no cosmic ACLU out there.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Not in this case. The truth’s too delicious.”

  “I can’t imagine a Methodist doing anything particularly damning. Why would—?”

  “Like all Protestants, Methodists abandoned the True Church. Only through the Apostolic Succession can a person partake of Christ’s continued spiritual presence on earth. This is basic stuff, Julie.”

  “Catholics, then. They remained faithful to—”

  “Are you serious? With their Mariolatry, Trinity, purgatory, indulgences? How unbiblical can you get?”

  “My father was a good man, and he—”

  “The Jews? Give me a break, Julie. The Jews? They don’t even accept God’s son as their redeemer, much less practice Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Let’s not even discuss the Jews.”

  “All right—I give up. Who got saved?”

  Wyvern rea
ched under one of his shoulder scales, lifting out an errant earwig. “Heaven’s not a crowded place.”

  “So I gather. A million?”

  “Cold.”

  “Fewer?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Ten thousand?”

  “Lower.”

  “One thousand?”

  “Such an optimist.” Wyvern snapped his fingers, crushing the earwig. “Four.”

  “Four?”

  “There are four people in heaven.” The devil’s diaphanous eyelids began a snide descent. “Enoch and Elijah, for starters. I couldn’t do anything about that—it’s in Scripture. Then there’s Saint Peter, of course. And, finally, Murray Katz.”

  “Pop? He was a Jew.”

  “Yes, but consider his connections. Of all beings in the cosmos, he alone was selected to gestate God’s daughter.”

  Julie rolled up the obscene chart. Pop was saved, great, but how could so many others be lost? Her seasickness worsened, a thousand delinquent ants defacing her stomach walls with graffiti. “This is horribly depressing, Andrew. It robs earthly existence of all meaning.”

  “Au contraire, Julie. The fact of damnation gives earthly existence its meaning. Enjoy life while you’ve got it, right? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you make a quantum leap.”

  “Gandhi?” she suggested weakly.

  “A Hindu.”

  “Martin Luther King?”

  “His sex life.”

  “Saint Paul?”

  “The feminists wanted his ass.”

  “The Madonna?”

  “A rock star.”

  “No, the Madonna.”

  “A Catholic.”

  “Jesus?”

  “The last time I saw Jesus, he was working in some hospice in Buenos Aires. I think we should count Jesus as missing in action.”

  Friday, August 15, 1997. First the firebergs appeared, great hummocks of floating, flaming ice. Then the sea monsters surfaced, pulpy masses of gray flesh with tentacles and redundant eyes, their dorsal fins cutting into the sky like jibs as they accompanied Pain toward the central continent.

  “Rough drafts,” Wyvern explained, pointing across the windblown deck to their malformed and forsaken escorts. “No wonder your mother got it together in only six days—she’d already made her mistakes.”

  Initially the continent seemed to Julie nothing but a black, burning ingot glowing in the distance, but then it grew, showing sheer cliffs and incandescent hills. Dining on the sea monsters, Wyvern’s angels acquired sufficient fuel to blow Pain into the harbor at fifty knots. Hell, by God. For better or worse, she’d gotten all the way to hell.

  The anchor limped across the deck and hurled itself over the side.

  The Port of Hell vibrated with activity, rumbled with hubbub, buzzed like an asylum for insane bees. It belched and bellowed and smoked. Dozens of barges and freighters crisscrossed the harbor, looping around marker buoys outfitted with pealing bells and clanging gongs, a carillon more suited, Julie felt, to a New England village on a Sunday morning than hell on a Friday afternoon. Vast loading cranes stood against the anthracite sky, their high steel towers bobbing like the necks of brontosaurs as they plucked semitrailers from moored ships.

  “What are you importing?” Julie asked.

  “What do you think?”

  Even as Wyvern spoke, howls of despair—Catholic despair, Protestant despair, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist—shot from the semitrailers.

  The central pier was a peninsula of black fissured granite swarming with bat-winged angels, scaled fiends, and piggish imps. “Hail Lucifer!” the sycophants shouted. A huge welcoming party sailed forth, scores of demons packed into swan boats and outrigger canoes. “Hosanna!” they cried, tossing bright yellow leis onto Pain’s foredeck. Cheers boomed across the harbor as Wyvern saluted. Banners unfurled along the maze of wharfs.

  WELCOME JULIE!

  AVE KATZ!

  HAIL DAUGHTER OF GOD!

  “Think you could blow them a kiss or two?” asked Wyvern. “They’d get off on it.”

  A coach clattered down the central pier, drawn by a team of four white horses.

  “I’m going to enjoy this place,” said Julie, her voice toneless. She blew three small, pinched kisses toward shore. Enjoy hell? Could that be remotely true? Did any coordinates exist in or out of reality that she could ever call home?

  Anthrax rowed them to shore through a blizzard of confetti and rose petals, and they climbed into the velvet-upholstered coach. The driver, a demon whose physiognomy melded a weasel’s leer with a toad’s complexion, cracked his whip above the horses’ heads.

  And they were off, speeding over deserts of burning sulfur and through forests whose trees were the fleshless hands of gigantic skeletons. They rattled across rainbows of rock arcing over gorges filled with writhing piles of the damned. They circumvented vast lunarian craters formed, Wyvern asserted, by the impact of falling angels.

  Within the hour a marble palace swung into view, its slender towers soaring into the smoky air like the masts of some fantastic frigate. Pennants flew from the parapets, snapping in the hot hadean breeze. A portcullis hung in the main gate like a leopard’s upper jaw.

  “The foundation stones once pressed witches to death,” Wyvern explained as the coach rolled into the courtyard. With a ceremonial flourish, the driver opened the door and Wyvern stepped out. “We wash the carpets with orphans’ tears,” said the devil. “The mosaic floors are inlaid with the teeth of starved Ethiopians.”

  He extended his scaly arm. Julie jumped down, inhaling the foggy, clotted ambience of her new home, an odor suggesting cabbage cooked in molten asphalt.

  “Visit me in the capital whenever you like,” Wyvern said.

  “Hell has a capital?”

  “Of course hell has a capital. You think we’re a bunch of anarchists? You think I’m not up to my ass in politics and bureaucracy? Thank God for computers—that’s all I can say.”

  Hell was not perfect, but it was paradise compared with New Jersey. She had a life now. She was free. No more insults from Georgina. No more fights with Bix, hunts for Phoebe’s liquor, or battered wretches crowding around her house. Her every wish became Anthrax’s command. When she spoke fondly of diving into Absecon Inlet, the obliging demon constructed a swimming pool in the basement, heated by natural sulfur. When she mentioned her lack of a wardrobe, he loaded her closets with the previous year’s fashions. “I used to enjoy movies,” she told him, and immediately he located a 35mm projector plus a ceiling-high tower of Busby Berkeley musicals and Marx Brothers comedies.

  The melancholy started slowly, subtly, like a cold spawned by a diffident virus. Where was Phoebe now? Hollywood, Julie speculated, nailing down her dreams of cinéma-vérité eroticism, snarfling up lines of cocaine from her desk on the Paramount lot. And Bix. She hoped he missed her—the real her, not the intervener who’d so confused and angered him the day Billy Milk’s army came to town. Would they have eventually married? She suspected so; they meshed in so many ways, their skepticism, their chubbiness. She imagined herself pregnant with Bix’s child, a sweet, round rationalist sprouting in her womb.

  Feverish with longing, numb with boredom, Julie decided to explore.

  On the central continent, she learned, everything was basic and direct: fire. Fire had it all. Fire, which strips away the derma, the nervous system’s armor, leaving the victim clothed in pain. Climbing hell’s ragged peaks in her silk blouse and peasant skirt, Julie witnessed angels tying prisoners to tree trunks and burning them alive. The next day, descending into hell’s glowing canyons in her safari jacket and designer jeans, she saw the damned cooked in swamps of boiling diarrhea. Horribly, the multitudes never became more than the sum of their selves—particular women with personal hair styles, particular men of varying physiognomies, even particular fetuses, each with its own smell, an amalgam of pain and original sin. If only she could help them. But no, pointless—snap, your burns are temporaril
y healed, clap, your blisters are momentarily gone: so what? She had but two hands and one godhead—two hands and one godhead against the whole of perdition.

  As far as Julie could discern, hell’s major industry was iron smelting. Driven by the angels’ whips, the naked men and women coalesced into teams. For some prisoners, damnation meant hollowing out hell’s mountains with pickaxes and loading the ore into hopper cars. For others, it meant pushing the cars along narrow-gauge railroad tracks. For others, it meant feeding limestone and coke to the blast furnaces: limestone that seared the prisoners’ skin, coke that ate their lungs. A final team drew slag and molten metal from the hearths, then carried the pig iron by wheelbarrow to a seething, swirling river and dumped it over the banks, whereupon it dissolved and began the slow but relentless process of soaking back into the continent, ready to be reclaimed, a perfect circle.

  And always the heat, forcing water from the prisoners’ flesh like a winepress squeezing grapes. In hell, people sliced their wrists and guzzled the blood, anything to feel wetness on their tongues. In hell, a father would shoot his firstborn for a jigger of piss.

  On close inspection, the label worn by each damned soul proved to be a thick asbestos shingle secured about his neck by a gold chain. March 23, 1998—7:48 P.M., said the shingle on a young Philippine woman who was perpetually scalded in five-hundred-degree chicken fat. On an old Swedish man clothed in white-hot barbed wire, May 8, 1999—6:11 P.M. On an Hispanic child rushing down an electrified sliding board, April 11, 2049—10:35 P.M. Death certificates? wondered Julie. At this moment I entered hell? No, all these dates still lay in the future, a truth that made the prisoners’ idolatry—the way they would periodically lift the shingles to their blistered lips and kiss them—a total mystery. The future, she felt, was the last thing these people should worship.

  Everybody damned? Could that really be? Only Enoch, Elijah, Saint Peter, and Pop had gained the quantum reality called heaven? In her most despondent moments Julie sensed it was all absurdly true. Everybody damned—even Howard Lieberman over there, pushing a wheelbarrow along the steamy banks of the great pig-iron river.