Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  She blinked. Yes. Him. Her old boyfriend, sheathed in sweat, speckled with blisters, naked as when they’d last made love. He still had his wire-rimmed glasses, his tight lips. “Howard?” His skin was like an ancient linoleum floor, entire hunks broken away. A corona of pain surrounded his entire being. “Howard Lieberman?”

  Pausing, he lowered the wheelbarrow. “Julie? That really you? Julie Katz?” His voice vibrated as though he were speaking through an electric fan.

  She nodded, brushing sulfur from her hoop skirt. “What happened to you?”

  “Shipwrecked,” Howard moaned. Sparks danced around him like flies encircling a carcass. “Coming home from the Galapagos Islands.” The sparks blew into his chest, bouncing off his asbestos shingle. October 3, 1997—11:18 A.M., a date that according to her watch was a mere forty-eight hours away.

  “What’s that tag, Howard?”

  “You don’t have one?” He sounded alarmed.

  “I’m not dead.”

  “Really?”

  Julie nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Is that why you have clothes on?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “But why did you—?”

  “I couldn’t stand the earth.”

  “You came voluntarily?”

  “There’s something in my family history you don’t know about.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m tuned in on the cosmos, Howard. I’m one of your quantum aberrations.”

  He appeared on the point of responding to this assertion, but instead said, “If you want to know about the tags, come back in two days.” Pressing the shingle to his lips, he kissed it fervently, as if it were Newton’s favorite prism or a toy magnet once owned by Einstein.

  “At 11:18?”

  “Earlier. Takes an hour to get there.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to work, sinner!” an angel screamed.

  The lash uncoiled instantly, like a frogs tongue snaring a dragonfly. Howard’s knees buckled; he pitched forward across his wheelbarrow. Again the angel struck, and again, the thong slitting Howard’s back like Aunt Georgina opening a carton of joy buzzers. Sparks landed in his wounds, making his fresh blood sizzle.

  Julie backed off, spun around. Come back in two days—a trap? It sounded like one. She’d come back, and Howard would ask her to employ the pull she evidently enjoyed here. He’d drop to his boiled knees, clasp his scarred hands together, and beg her to get him a reprieve.

  She hurried home, screened A Night at the Opera, and swam twenty laps along the bottom of her pool. She had a life now, she told herself, far more so than in her Atlantic City days. An enviable situation, a hermit’s cave with room service. She owed Howard Lieberman nothing.

  Two days later she arrived at the pig-iron river in time to see her old boyfriend flash his shingle to the chief overseer, a pasty-faced angel with an AK-41 assault rifle slung over his shoulder. Possessed by a wild and primal expectation, Howard barely acknowledged her. The angel nodded, and Howard took off, skipping down a highway of sulfur, singing a medley of Beatles songs, his rendition of “Octopus’s Garden” flowing seamlessly into his “Let It Be.”

  God alone knew what three years of hauling iron had done to Howard, how many cracks in his bones, how many aneurysms in his heart. Yet whenever he stumbled and fell, he immediately picked himself up and continued, limping eagerly across the death-shadowed valleys and burning hills. Nothing discouraged him, not hell’s acid snow, bird-sized mosquitoes, or storm-trooper angels, on whom his shingle acted as a kind of amulet, charming them into letting him pass.

  “You still think science has all the answers?” Julie asked, struggling to keep up. “You still think the problem is that we don’t have all the science?”

  “Of course I do,” said Howard. “Look at this place, Julie—incomprehensible, absurd. Obviously we don’t have all the science.”

  But for the absence of narrow-gauge railroad tracks, the cave might have been yet another hadean iron mine. A golden glow pulsed from its mouth, haloing the dozens of naked humans waiting to enter. Their collective stench burned Julie’s nostrils as Howard took his place at the end of the line. She decided to pull rank; she abandoned Howard and walked straight to the entrance, where a fragile-looking Japanese man labeled 10:58 waited anxiously. “Next!” a male voice called from the gloom, and the Japanese man rushed into the cave as if he’d just snatched up the baton at a relay race. Julie looked at her watch. 10:58 on the dot. 10:59, a redheaded teenage boy, whose face was a mass of acne and sulfur burns, moved into place. Sixty seconds later, the Japanese man emerged, shingle gone, wearing the most contented smile Julie had ever seen.

  She crossed the threshold.

  The stone room was sparsely furnished—horizontal granite slab, kerosene lantern sitting on a stalagmite, canvas director’s chair supporting a black-bearded, thirtyish man. A narrow stream, its waters bright and burbling, cut across the floor like a vein of silver ore. “Next!” the bearded man cried as Julie melted into the shadows. The boy named 10:59 collapsed on the slab, whereupon the bearded man performed a quick ritual, dipping a hollow gourd into the stream and sprinkling half the measure on the young prisoner’s head.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?” The water-giver held the remaining measure to 10:59’s desiccated lips.

  “My name’s Julie Katz.”

  “Ah, the famous Julie Katz,” the water-giver said cryptically, locking his dark shining eyes on her. A strong Semitic nose, a wide intelligent brow—quite a handsome fellow, really, marred only by the garish holes in his ankles and wrists. “Your arrival is all we’ve been hearing about lately.”

  The noise of the slurping boy reverberated off the granite walls. “I thought you were in Buenos Aires,” said Julie.

  “Who told you that?” demanded God’s son, removing 10:59’s shingle and tossing it into the inky darkness.

  “Satan.”

  “He lies.” Jesus helped 10:59 off the slab, guided him toward the cave entrance. “Not always, but often.” Her brother’s leather sandals were scuffed, cracked, and, in the case of the left, strapless. Burn holes speckled his robe. “I’m dead. How could I be—where did you say?”

  “Buenos Aires.”

  “Nope. Dead. Nailed to a cross.” Jesus poked an index finger into his violated wrist. “So how’d they kill you?”

  “I’m not dead.” Why did everyone think her dead?

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  The snappishness in his voice was unwarranted, she felt. “I wasn’t happy in Jersey. I couldn’t figure out my purpose.”

  “And you thought hell would be nicer?” Bending by the stream, Jesus filled his ladle. “You call this foresight, girl? Next!”

  Such a comedian, and she could do without the sexism. “I had no freedom up there. Everybody was out to get me. I’m not a girl.”

  A skinny, creased old man threw himself on the slab.

  “Where’s Buenos Aires anyway?” Jesus asked.

  “Argentina.”

  “In Asia Minor?”

  “South America.”

  “I’m very busy,” said Jesus curtly, dousing the old man. Rude, she thought. He was definitely being rude. “Whatever brought you to hell,” said her brother, “you won’t find it in this sorry little room.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Then leave, why don’t you?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, my well-dressed little sister, I know who you are, and I have nothing to say to you.” Jesus sighed—a low, long, symphonic sound compacting weariness and impatience. “Please go away, daughter of God.”

  Maybe she’d caught him on a bad day. Maybe he was really a warm and tender fellow. She doubted it. This man who had somehow abstracted himself from history, exempted his character from judgment, this man in whose name the world had built cathedrals and burned down cities, this man, her brother, was a shmuck.

  Walking home through the
sulfurous mist, she wondered where Jesus’ operation stood in the general scheme of things. Was it wholly clandestine, a one-man resistance movement? No, the prisoners displayed their shingles publicly, didn’t they? More likely her brother’s charity was like the black market in Russia, a tolerated subversion, unofficially sanctioned.

  She’d never been more grateful for her mansion—its resuscitating shower, Anthrax’s expert cooking, her film collection. So Jesus was giving out water. So big deal. It reminded her of Pop turning on his lighthouse for ships that had already sunk. Pathetic.

  But God’s son wouldn’t leave. Ladle in hand, he hovered within her, lodged in her thoughts as she napped by the hearth, fixed in her imagination as she ate pepperoni pizza. Retiring to her canopied bed, she spent the night thrashing atop her silk sheets and eiderdown mattress.

  By morning he had won. Dashing into her cavernous kitchen, she yanked out all one hundred drawers and overturned them on the floor. The silvery clatter brought Anthrax running. “Sorry,” she said, noting his bewildered face. “You thought I was a thief?”

  Anthrax shook his head. “Hell is a low-crime district.”

  “Do we have a ladle?”

  “A what?”

  “Ladle—I just want a ladle,” she replied sternly, kicking the glittery mountain of utensils. “Do we have a goddamn ladle or don’t we?”

  Anthrax opened a cabinet above the stove. What he drew out lacked the organic romance of Jesus’ gourd—it was an aluminum cup with a black plastic handle, barely suitable for serving punch at a junior prom—but it would do. She ordered Anthrax to hire her a coach, and by noon she was back at the cave, pushing past the line of thirsty dead people, her jeans and sweatshirt coated with sulfur specks. A little girl with blond ringlets lay on the slab. Seated in his director’s chair, Jesus looked up, his lustrous stare fusing with hers.

  “Is this the right answer?” she asked, displaying the shabby ladle.

  “You know it is,” Jesus replied smoothly, patting the little girl’s head and smiling.

  Julie dipped the ladle into the stream, doused the child, and offered her a drink. She lapped it up eagerly, beaming a prodigious smile into Julie’s face.

  “Welcome,” God’s son told his sister.

  CHAPTER 11

  ♦

  ♦

  ♦

  Sister and brother, side by side, day after day, comforting the damned. It was like tending a garden, Julie decided, like watering flower beds of flesh. They divided the labor, Jesus cooling the bodies, Julie dispensing the drinks. He had the most wonderful hands, two featherless birds forever aloft on sleek, graceful wings. As he moved them, air whistled through the holes in his wrists.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he insisted.

  She did. All of it. Her test-tube conception. Her temple of pain. Her orgasmic encounter with empirical truth. Pop’s heart attacks. Her Moon column, her remote-control miracles, the burning of Atlantic City, Phoebe’s desertion of Angel’s Eye.

  When she was done, Jesus simply looked at her in stupefaction, eyes wide as a lemur’s, jaw hanging open like a hungry seal’s.

  “I’m glad you put out the fire,” he said at last.

  “It wasn’t easy.” Julie wanted to cry. How tawdry and small her story sounded, how bereft of grandeur—how noncosmic, as Aunt Georgina would say.

  “And I’m most impressed with this science business. The courage to disprove your convictions, quite amazing.”

  “Historically unprecedented,” she groaned, catching a tear in her ladle.

  “It was a good message to preach. I’d even rank it near love. But…”

  He fixed her with a stare so bright she had to close her eyes. “Yes?” she whispered hoarsely.

  Splaying his fingers, Jesus ticked off his displeasures. “Giving your father that half-assed resurrection, doing those noncommittal interventions, running away from those people on the beach, rejecting the mob outside your lighthouse, abandoning your alcoholic friend—it’s not what this family stands for, Julie, not for a minute. Next!”

  Face speckled with sweat, an Asian woman entered the cave.

  A twinge of belligerence moved along Julie’s spine. “Okay, okay, but maybe you aren’t exactly God either. Didn’t you leave lots of cripples and lepers and blind beggars behind?”

  “Not without regret.”

  “But you left them.”

  “Look, divinity’s a confusing condition, no doubt about it. A curse.” Those burning eyes again: Julie thought of ten-year-old Phoebe channeling sunlight through her magnifying glass, frying ants on the sidewalk. “But we can’t use it as an excuse. We can’t just paste a lot of gruesome news stories on our bedroom walls and wait it out.”

  She had never felt worse. Her gills gasped, her eyes swam. “I’ve been an idiot.”

  His demeanor took a sudden swing—accuser to comforter, supreme judge to angel of mercy. “What’s done is done.” He eased the Asian woman onto the slab, doused her. “I sometimes feel my life doesn’t add up to much either.”

  The confession was so distracting Julie accidentally dropped her ladle. “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I reread the Gospels last night,” Julie’s dead brother explained as she refilled her ladle and held it to the prisoner’s lips. “Not exactly my authorized biographies,” he said. “Still, Mark gets the chronology right, and Matthew does a good job with the speeches. In John, of course, we have all that peculiar light-versus-dark imagery—a Gnostic influence, I suspect—and I don’t care for the anti-Semitism. But even there, my essential ambition comes across.” Jesus helped the Asian woman to her feet. “I wanted to be a Hebrew messiah, right? Drive out the Romans, restore the Davidic throne, found a nation of the spiritually transformed. The kingdom of God, I called it.”

  “Sometimes the kingdom of heaven,” noted Julie, removing the woman’s shingle.

  “Paradise now, overseen by a benevolent Jewish monarchy.” Drawing a Bible from his robe, Jesus turned to Matthew. “Anyway, there I was, a deity, a blood descendant of God’s, and I still couldn’t bring it off. ‘Verily I say to you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.’ Well, the generation passed, didn’t it?” As the Asian woman left the cave, Jesus placed a perforated wrist on his heart, comforting himself. “I’m happy about what I taught, though, most of it. Next!”

  “‘If somebody asks for your tunic, give him your cloak as well,’” Julie quoted.

  “Still sounds good to me.”

  A new customer entered, a man with a goiter the size of a cantaloupe. “Wait a minute.” Julie eased the prisoner’s aching flesh onto the slab. “Are you saying you don’t know about your Church?”

  “My what?” Jesus doused the goitrous man.

  “Don’t the damned ever mention your Church?”

  “By the time I see them, they’re too numb for conversation.” Again Jesus cracked his Bible. “You mean this thing here in Acts, the Jerusalem Church? Is that still around?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t think so, not after I stood everybody up. Peter, James, John—they all expected me to return posthaste. ‘The end is at hand,’ Peter says here. And John: ‘Thereby we know it is the last time.’ But the dead don’t come back, do they? They don’t leave hell.”

  “The Jerusalem Church faded away.” Julie gave the goitrous man a drink, removed his shingle. “But there was another, a gentile Church.”

  “‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’ That’s in Matthew, I think. How could there be a gentile Church?”

  “Paul…”

  “Paul? Some terrific stuff about love, as I recall.” Jesus flipped toward the back of his Bible. “Paul started a church?”

  “You really don’t know what happened up there?” Julie dipped her ladle into the stream. “You don’t know you became the center of Western civilization?”

  “I did?”

&nb
sp; “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “There are Christians in every corner of the globe.”

  Jesus helped the goitrous man off the slab and escorted him out of the cave. “There are who?”

  “Christians. The people who worship you. The ones who call you Christ.”

  “Worship me? Please…” Jesus scratched his forehead with his ladle. “‘Christ—that’s Greek, isn’t it? An anointed one, a king. Next!”

  “By ‘Christ,’ most people mean a savior. They mean God become flesh.”

  “Odd translation.” As Jesus refilled his ladle, a woman entered whose hair was singed down to her scalp, giving her the appearance of a chemotherapy patient. “What else do Christics teach?”

  “That, by following you, a person obtains remission from original sin. You don’t know this?”

  “Original sin? When did I ever talk about that?” Jesus wet the hairless woman. “Ethics was my big concern. Read the Bible.” His birdish hands wove through the air, landing smoothly atop his King James version. “Original sin? Are you serious?”

  “Your death atoned for Adam’s guilt.”

  “Oh, come on,” Jesus snickered. “That’s paganism, Julie. You’re talking Attis, Dionysus, Osiris—the sacrificial god whose suffering redeems his followers. Every town had one in those days. Where was Paul from?”

  “Tarsus.”

  “I dropped by Tarsus once,” said Jesus, leafing through the epistles. “The local god was Baal-Taraz, I believe.” He pressed the open Bible against his chest like a poultice. “Good heavens, is that what I became? Another propitiation deity?”

  “I hate to be the one telling you this.” Julie ministered to the hairless woman.

  “So the gentiles won the day? Is that why John’s book talks about eternal life instead of the kingdom? Did Christicism become an eternal-life religion?”

  “Accept Jesus as your personal redeemer,” Julie corroborated, “and you’ll be resuscitated after you die and taken up into the clouds.”

  “The clouds? No, ‘Thy kingdom come on earth’ remember? And look at my parables, all those gritty metaphors—the kingdom is yeast, Julie, it’s a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, a landowner hiring workers for his vineyard…”