Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  “A pearl of great price,” said the woman on the slab.

  “Right. We’re not talking clouds here.” Jesus’ beautiful hands soared, wrist holes singing. “I mean, how can you bring about Utopia with one eye cocked on eternity?” His hands fell. “Oh, now I get it—that’s how they accommodated my not returning, yes? They shifted the reunion to some netherworld.”

  “Evidently.” Julie removed the bald sinner’s shingle.

  “What chutzpah.”

  “While we’re at it,” gasped the prisoner, “maybe you could settle a major controversy. Does the wafer literally turn into your flesh and bones?”

  “Does the what do what?” said Jesus.

  “The Eucharist,” Julie explained. “The wafer becomes your body, the wine becomes your blood”—her voice trailed off: how, exactly, would he feel about the next step?—“and then, well…”

  “And then?”

  “And then we eat you,” said the bald woman.

  “You what?” said Jesus.

  “Eat you.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “No, the whole thing has a real, mysterious poetry,” the bald woman hastened to add. “Through the Eucharist, we partake of your life and substance. Go to Mass sometime. You’ll see.”

  “I think I’ll pass on that one,” said God’s son. “Next!”

  Lunch became Julie’s favorite part of the day. She and her brother would close up the cave for an hour and, slipping past the dazed prisoners, retire atop a cliff overlooking hell’s largest foundry.

  Often they talked of science. “Teach me about evolution,” Jesus would say. “About the benzene ring, black holes, Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation.” His curiosity was prodigious. Julie’s account of a universe stretching far beyond the prophets’ visions, the epic tapestry of clustered galaxies, the inspiring violence of pulsars throbbing and collapsed stars gulping down light, all of it migrating outward in the wake of the big bang—such theories captivated Jesus no less than the ambiguities raised by the Good Samaritan or the Barren Fig Tree.

  “Of course,” noted Julie after her lecture on gravity, “these models will be revised as more information comes to light, facts like my advent and the actuality of hell—but that’s the beauty of science. It’s self-correcting. It welcomes new data.”

  “If Einstein is right, then space is an endless rubbery cloak,” Jesus enthused, fanning out his tattered robe. “Large masses indent it, causing passing objects to follow the natural depression.”

  Julie opened the picnic basket and handed her brother a chicken-salad sandwich. “Einstein said that, when science is operating at peak, you can hear God thinking.”

  “One day that smart Jew will show up here.”

  “God?”

  “Einstein.” Jesus pried the pickles out of his sandwich and tossed them over the cliff. “I want to meet her.”

  “God?”

  “God.”

  God. So, the name had at last been evoked, the festering wound lanced, the family skeleton rattled.

  “What can I say?” Jesus shrugged. “Obviously our progenitor is hard to figure. Maybe Einstein could hear God thinking, but I can’t.”

  Once again it surged up, the full flood of her resentment, the rage of the abandoned child. “Put me in charge of the universe, and my first act will be to arrest my mother for criminal neglect.”

  “That’s pretty harsh, Julie.”

  “Easy for you to say. God cared about you. You got gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I got whoopie cushions and latex dog vomit.”

  “But if we’re really talking about the God of physics, some unknowable prime mover, we can hardly presume to judge her.” Jesus consumed his sandwich in six equal bites. “Maybe God wants to intervene directly, only that would mean tearing apart timespace and destroying the physical universe. So she sends us instead.”

  “I figured that out back in college.” Julie chomped into a half-moon of watermelon. “I’m still resentful. It doesn’t matter how inaccessible my mother is, she shouldn’t let this place exist.”

  “Hell is Wyvern’s domain, not God’s.”

  “Let her tear timespace apart! Let her!” Julie choked on her own scream. “Anything to end all this suffering!”

  “The matter’s being taken care of,” said Jesus evenly.

  “Huh?” The matter’s being taken care of: so much eschatology in so few words. “What?”

  “I said—”

  “That blast furnace down there looks pretty sturdy to me.”

  Jesus’ hands fluttered. “This water we’re giving out…remember the marriage at Cana, when the water became wine?”

  Julie pointed to an adolescent male wheeling pig iron out of the foundry. “It’s really wine?”

  “No, an anesthetic. My own recipe. From what you’ve told me about chemistry, I believe it’s an opium derivative, akin to morphine.”

  “Morphine? We’re giving them morphine?”

  God’s son bit the meaty cap off a banana. “It lodges in the prisoner’s brain for weeks, delivering him to sweet oblivion—a real death this time, no resurrections in hell. Right before losing consciousness, he throws himself into the Lake of Fire and vaporizes.”

  “And Wyvern thinks it’s just water?”

  Jesus nodded. “It amuses him to see us wasting our time. ‘Putting band-aids on eviscerations,’ he calls it.”

  “No wonder they look so happy when they leave. You should’ve told me.”

  “When you believed it was water, did you doubt it was worth dispensing?”

  “Are you kidding? ‘Let’s go to hell and have our skin burned off, because, by damn, we’ll all get a free glass of water!’ Of course I doubted.”

  “But you kept coming. Day after day.”

  “I kept coming,” Julie snorted.

  “How irrational.”

  “They were hot.”

  “Correct.”

  “Thirsty.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Rejected.”

  Jesus’ beard blossomed into a grin. “Rabbi Hillel couldn’t have put it better.” He leaned forward and lovingly massaged Julie’s back. “I’ll make a Jew of you yet, daughter of God,” he whispered, placing a soft kiss on her cheek.

  Julie Katz would never say the fifteen years she spent in hell giving designer morphine to the damned were the best of her life, but they did boast a beatific simplicity and a ritual purposefulness that would, she believed, eventually occasion the fondest of memories. She felt the flesh aging on her frame. Blue veins rose in her hands and thighs. Her hair acquired a silver streak, as if she’d survived an electrocution. Her teeth got looser, her gums softer, blood thicker, bones brittler.

  Often, stretching out her arm to offer a prisoner morphine, she would imagine the ladle puncturing the quantum barrier like a knife slicing a veil, giving her access to the planet she’d forsaken. She longed for Bix’s enigmatic affections—he wasn’t a traitor, she realized; her own pigheadedness had doomed “Heaven Help You.” And Phoebe. Dear, anguished Phoebe. Oh, Mother, let her be prospering. Let her be sober. Give her the Oscar for Best Cinéma-Vérité Erotic Film.

  Without her dead brother at her side, distracting her from the moans of the damned and the pangs of her regrets, Julie would have gone mad. When happy, he sang psalms in his sonorous tenor voice. When tired or annoyed, he did not hesitate to call their malodorous clients skunks. He chided his own tendency toward bombast and sweeping generalizations. Jesus of Nazareth, Julie decided, was a mensh.

  “Next!”

  The man entered the cave pushing a wheelbarrow.

  A small man: lighthouse keeper, Photorama clerk. Sweet Lord, his ashes had been reconstituted—sweet Lord, it was he!

  Julie dropped her ladle. “Pop! Pop!”

  “Julie?”

  His barrow was the type the damned used for removing the endless excreta of the furnaces, though right now it held not pig iron but a person, a handsome black man with a rakish mustac
he. Quite essential, this barrow, for the passenger’s entire body ended abruptly at his waist.

  “Julie!” Murray lowered the barrow handles. Scar tissue stippled his rotund belly. His beard was singed and knotted. The brown, withered organ from which half her chromosomes had issued dangled like an overripe pear. “It’s really you!”

  They hugged for a full, silent minute. Laced with sucrose, a thousand tears flowed from her turquoise eyes. “The devil told me you were in heaven.”

  “He lies.”

  “Not always,” said Jesus, “but often.”

  “Were you murdered, honey?” Murray asked in a coarse whisper. “Your enemies got you?”

  “I’m not dead,” said Julie.

  “Not dead?”

  “I thought I’d be happier here.”

  “You did?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Are you happier?”

  “I miss Phoebe. And this guy Bix. But in many ways, yeah, I’m happier.”

  She could tell he found this bizarre, though instead of protesting he offered only a quick diffident smile and placed a respectful hand on Jesus’ shoulder. “Rabbi, it’s a privilege meeting you. I read the Gospels once. Maybe you could answer a few questions. ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword…’”

  Jesus coughed. “We’re a little tight for time.”

  “Oh, Pop, I’m sorry I didn’t give you a real resurrection,” said Julie. Taking her father’s forearm, she felt the agony coursing through his flesh. “You should’ve let me bring you back.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t say. Life is confusing. Death is confusing. Everything is.”

  “I hope the cremation didn’t offend you.”

  “It’s all in the past.” Murray tapped a blistered finger on the legless man’s shoulder. “Julie, I’d like you to meet someone. Any idea who this is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s Phoebe’s father. The sperm donor.”

  Leaning over the edge of the barrow, the torso extended a soft hand, and Julie shook it. “Marcus Bass,” he said in rounded, bell-like tones.

  She inhaled sharply. Phoebe’s father! “I’m Julie.” God, if only he and Phoebe might meet somehow—surely Marcus could talk her out of that next bottle of Bacardi, and the one after that.

  “You first,” said Pop, tilting Marcus toward the slab.

  “No, man,” said the torso. “You.”

  “You’ve been here much longer,” Murray argued.

  Marcus broke his friend’s grip. “I insist.”

  As Murray climbed onto the slab, Jesus doused him with a full measure. Julie pressed her ladle against her father’s lips, resting his head in the crook of her arm. He swallowed the sacred oblivion. For how many months had he nursed her a half-dozen times a day from a plastic bottle full of infant formula? Drink deep, she thought. Drink it all, Pop.

  “Tell Marcus about his daughter,” said Murray.

  “Would I be proud of Phoebe?” Marcus asked.

  “She tried to be my conscience,” said Julie, removing Pop’s shingle. His chest sparkled, coated with a soup of morphine, pus, and sweat. “A thankless job, I now realize. I loved her very much.”

  “Excuse me.” Jesus pointed to the portion of Marcus that wasn’t there. “You have a daughter?”

  “There used to be more of me,” said Marcus wistfully.

  “Wyvern mutilated you?”

  “No, man. Some crazy reverend.”

  “Billy Milk, as far as we can figure,” said Murray.

  Julie shivered like the charred victims to whom she ministered. Milk, Milk, would she never escape that bastard? She should’ve drowned him when she’d had the chance.

  “I guess Phoebe’s about…what, thirty-eight?” asked Marcus. “What does she do? Did she ever marry?”

  “I think she went into the film business,” said Julie. “She’s the footloose sort.”

  “Wild, you mean? Spirited?”

  Chuckling, Murray rose from the slab. “That’s Phoebe all right. Always had a slingshot in her back pocket. Looked like a tail.”

  “I was that way,” said Marcus. “Once I burned down my parents’ garage. Building a moon rocket.”

  “I worry about her drinking,” said Julie.

  It’d just slipped out. Julie winced, gasped. Damn. Now the man would never enter nothingness in peace.

  “She, uh, she”—a deep moan left Marcus, the low of a despairing ox—“drinks? Not a complete surprise, really. Her aunts were both alkies. The disease runs in families.”

  Together Jesus and Murray lifted the black man’s top half and set it on the slab.

  “Funny, I never met Phoebe”—Marcus smiled as the splash of morphine arrived—“but I still feel like she’s my little girl.” His face fell. “Does she drink a lot, Julie?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve been here a long time. Phoebe was always proud of you. She knew all about your career.”

  “I just hope nobody sends her to a psychiatrist. That’s one thing I learned from dealing with my sisters—sending an alcoholic to a shrink makes about as much sense as sending a heart patient to a poet.” Marcus sandwiched Julie’s scarred hand between his palms. “You were a good friend to her, weren’t you?”

  “I tried to be.” She gave the man his morphine. “It’s a shame I’m stuck down here.”

  “I thought you weren’t dead.”

  “I’m afraid we’re running behind schedule,” sighed Jesus.

  Furtively, deliberately, Julie whacked the ladle against her knee, sending a blast of pain through her whole being. She wasn’t dead. Not remotely. Yet here she was…

  “Say, I don’t suppose Georgina has shown up yet,” said Murray. “It’d be great to see her again. I was always sort of in love with her.”

  “I imagine she’s still alive,” said Julie. “Oh, Pop…” They came together in a sudden snap, human planets discovering each other, love’s gravity. Her father’s substance was thin and failing, yet it still managed, as always, to do the work of two parents’ flesh. “I love you, Pop.”

  “My head’s come loose,” said Murray. Slowly their embrace dissolved. “Spinning like a dreidel. I love you, Julie.”

  “The drug,” Jesus explained.

  “Pain’s fading,” gasped Murray, eyes dancing in his circular face. “It’s really fading. Incredible.”

  “They died,” said Marcus as Murray deposited him in the barrow.

  “Who?” said Julie.

  “My sisters. Bottle killed ’em.”

  “Next!” said God’s son.

  “Sholem aleichem, Pop,” Julie whispered.

  “Aleichem sholem,” he replied softly.

  Murray lifted the wooden handles and started away, forming what she knew would be her final view of him, a picture she would cultivate until entropy knocked on the door: a small, hunched old Jew trundling toward a cave entrance, shlepping a wheelbarrow in which rode the remains of the man who’d convinced her now and forever that she didn’t belong with the dead.

  “You really have to go?” Jesus asked.

  Julie, silent, let her gaze wander over the cliff toward the iron foundry. They were making their last lunch together as special as possible: pepperoni pizza, cold chicken, Blue Nun wine, knishes. “I guess I’ll always be a New Jersey girl,” she said at last, tearing a pizza slice free. “Now I see why Pop kept lighting the beacon. It’s good to have a second chance. This time around I’ll get it right. End hunger, reverse the greenhouse effect, restore the Brazilian rain forest, destroy nuclear arsenals—you’ll see.”

  “You won’t do any of those things,” said Jesus calmly, popping a knish into his mouth.

  “Yes, I will.” She bit into the slice of pizza.

  “Wyvern would never put up with it.” Jesus jabbed the wine cork, twisting the handle on the steel screw. “Don’t expect to leave here with your godhead intact.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  A staccato burp issued from the bottle as
Jesus yanked out the cork. “No more divinity, Julie.”

  A disc of pepperoni came free in her mouth, the spices gnawing her tongue. No more divinity? Godhead gone?

  She felt torn, fractured, as if God’s fingers were reaching into her soul, breaking it like an egg. True, she had never deduced what her powers were for, but they were still hers, and on those few times she had exercised them—the dead crab, Timothy’s eyes, the deliverance of Atlantic City—the rapture had lingered for days. “I’ve always been a deity,” she protested. “It’s who I am.”

  “Then you’ll stay, right? Please stay.”

  Stay, such a seductive word. But no. She wasn’t dead. “It’s who I am,” she echoed, “but I can do better.”

  Jesus smiled, sniffing the impaled cork. “Spoken like my true sister. You’re very precious to me.”

  “What do we use for glasses?”

  Jesus pulled their scruffy ladles from the picnic basket. “When you die, I’ll get you a shingle with an early date.” He filled the ladles with Blue Nun. “I won’t have you in pain.” Resting his palm against her cheek, he raised his wine in a toast. “L’chayim.”

  “L’chayim.”

  They clanked their ladles together and drank.

  The city of Carcinoma was a byzantine metropolis strung along a chain of active volcanoes, a conglomeration of crooked ramparts and twisted spires, its innumerable government buildings so dark and amorphous they might have been clots of lava spewed from the craters. A full-scale eruption was in progress when the coach bearing Julie pulled through the main gate, its portals flanked by two titanic copies of the Winged Victory, their heads replaced by stone skulls. Sparks drifted through the central forum like fireflies; smoke blanketed the sky. Angels and demons stood on the cement pavement and marble stairways, jaws tilted upward, mouths open, catching hot cinders on their serpentine tongues: food from above, hadean manna.

  Piloted by Anthrax, the coach rolled beyond the range of the eruption, gliding past street vendors displaying carts of vintage carrion, racing through a public garden whose plaques commemorated great moments in evil—the evolution of cholera, the Dred Scott decision, the slaughter of a hundred thousand Nanking civilians by the Japanese—and stopping before Wyvern’s palace. Julie stepped out, placing her ratty sneaker on the ash-speckled plaza. Fenced by iron spears, the palace suggested a kind of upended labyrinth supporting priapic towers and voluptuous balconies. An apelike angel leaned out of the guardhouse and, recognizing Anthrax, informed him that Lord Wyvern was doing his Sunday gardening.