Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  “We’ll share.” Melanie shoved an open hymnal under Julie’s nose. The performance proceeded a cappella, an austerity Julie alternately ascribed to purism and to the difficulties of getting an organ into Camden’s sewers.

  She came to place uncertainty

  And science on our shelf.

  She taught us to doubt everything

  And seek her sacred self.

  While every truth is putative

  And every faith a lie,

  We know she’ll let us praise her name

  And love her till we die.

  By the time the refrain arrived—“Despite the fact belief’s absurd, we’ll follow you, just give the word”—Julie’s entire body had become a wince, a posture she maintained during hymn seventeen, “Her Daughter’s Growing Under Glass.”

  “Ahhhhh-mennnnn,” the heretics sang, holding the note as they replaced their hymnals.

  From the sewer pipe nearest the altar, a preacher emerged. “Father Paradox,” Melanie explained.

  The man was fat. His belly arrived like an advance guard, heralding the bulk to come, huge shoulders, a surplus chin. His white cassock had settled over his body like a tarpaulin dropped on a blimp. Dear mother in heaven, sweet brother in hell: him. Bearded now, older, bespectacled, but still unquestionably him.

  “Fellow skeptics, logicians, doubters, questioners, relativists, rationalists, pragmatists, positivists, and enigmatists,” Bix announced, “today we’ll be talking about God.”

  As her former lover wrapped his stubby fingers around the lectern, Julie realized that its cylindrical contours and glassy surfaces were meant to represent an ectogenesis machine. Bix Constantine—in a pulpit? Her heart stuttered. Her brain seemed to spin in its skull.

  “Column five, verse twenty,” Bix boomed, flipping back the cover of an enormous Word of Sheila. Julie pulled the nearest Sheila from the rack. Column five, verse twenty was her answer to a young man in Toronto who’d wanted to find faith.

  Bix cleared his throat, a noise suggesting a despondent garbage disposal. “Sheila writes, ‘Over the centuries, four basic proofs of God’s existence have emerged. To be perfectly frank, none of them works.’” Snapping his Sheila shut, he yanked off his bifocals and swept them across his flock like a maestro wielding a baton. “Does she speak the truth here? Is it impossible to verify God through sheer deduction? Proof one—the ontological. In Saint Anselm’s words, ‘God is that being than which nothing greater can be conceived.’ Unfortunately, no evidence exists that, simply because the human mind can devise ideas of perfection, infinitude, and omnipotence, such qualities occupy an objective plane.”

  “Agreed!” the congregation called in unison.

  Next Bix demolished the moral argument: if God were the source of humankind’s ability to distinguish right from wrong, then believers would behave better than atheists, a postulate unsupported by history.

  “Agreed!”

  He ravaged the cosmological argument: one has no warrant to move from the innumerable causal connections within the universe to a comparable connection between the universe and some hypothetical transcendent entity.

  “Agreed!”

  He made hash of the teleological argument: from the mythic universe of the Greeks to Aristotle’s crystalline spheres to the contemporary big-bang model, all pictures of reality are wholly human in design, and it is therefore presumptuous to ascribe any of them to God.

  “Agreed!”

  “As we all know,” Bix concluded, “there is but one proof of God’s existence, and that proof is she to whom we give our confused hearts and confounded minds.” His voice rose powerfully and majestically, like a supersonic jet leaving a runway. “Sheila who revealed the God of physics and forged the Covenant of Uncertainty! Sheila who, against all logic and natural law, commanded the ocean, quenched the fire, and ascended!” He listed away from the lectern. “Thank you, bewildered brethren. Next week we’ll discuss what Sheila meant by the empire of nostalgia.”

  With a sprightliness that defied his mass, Bix disappeared into the sewer pipe from which he’d come. The thin woman resumed the pulpit and instructed the congregation to sing the morning’s final hymn, “And the Tropicana Went Out, Out, Out.”

  And Julie wondered: intervene?

  No, pointless. To debate these fools would be to beat her head against a wall as palpable as the one encompassing their church.

  So why was she rising? Why drawing in such a large breath?

  “Hey, everyone!” Julie lurched into the aisle. “It’s me. Sheila!” The Uncertaintists’ amiable chatter faded. “Yes, it’s really me—listen, folks, we’ve got to talk. I’m not divine anymore, but maybe I can help.” A hundred quizzical faces met Julie’s gaze. “To begin with, you must all get baptized before they catch you.”

  Jaws dropped. Frowns formed. Eyelids flapped in rhythmic curiosity: a congregation of owls.

  “Sheila speaks to us,” asserted a gaunt man in a ramshackle tuxedo.

  “And tells you to become martyrs?” Julie asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “No, I don’t! I absolutely don’t!”

  “Sheila cured my diabetes,” asserted a peppy old woman, her skin as wrinkled as an elephant’s.

  “Got me off zotz,” revealed a young man wearing a blue serge suit and a mildly bohemian beard.

  “Who says you’re Sheila?” demanded a pretty, thirtyish woman whose white gloves reached to her elbows.

  “Sheila wears the sun,” asserted the recovering zotz addict. “She’s a living rainbow.”

  “Sheila flies,” explained the gaunt man.

  “She’s young,” added the white-gloved woman.

  “You think God’s children don’t age? We age.” Julie waved a Sheila over her head like an island castaway signaling an ocean liner. “I wrote this stuff fifteen years ago. I’ve been in hell ever since. For Christ’s sake—”

  “Sheila went to heaven,” the elephant-skinned woman corrected her.

  The zotz addict started up the aisle, drawing the rest of the congregation with him like a magnet luring paper clips.

  “There’s no profit in being burned!” Julie called after them. “Get baptized! Please!”

  Within two minutes Julie and Melanie were alone in the nave.

  “A brick wall.” Julie threw her Sheila onto the floor.

  “I guess they have minds of their own,” said Melanie.

  Approaching the pulpit, Julie steadied herself on the ersatz ectogenesis machine. Dear walrus. Sweet whale. Yes, he might be insane, he might have gone gaga over her stunt with the Atlantic, but there was also this: she had once loved him and probably still did.

  “Wait here, Melanie.”

  Beyond the pulpit, the main pipe widened into a large, damp, algae-coated room. Julie sloshed forward through Camden’s excretions. To her left, a half-dozen narrow tunnels diverged like roots, each reeking of slug turds and the oily festering Delaware. To her right lay an efficiency apartment lit by a kerosene lamp.

  Father Paradox’s asceticism was severe: army cot, cracked mirror, sterno stove, chemical commode. The one technological touch was an offset printing press wired into an overhead cable, blatantly looting New Jersey’s electricity. Bix sat at a shabby metal desk basting the back of a “Heaven Help You” with rubber cement.

  “Hello, Bix.”

  Blinking, he grabbed his bifocals like a surprised gunfighter drawing his six-shooter. “Yes?” he muttered, dropping the glasses in place. “What’d you say?”

  “Bix—hi.”

  “I’m Father Paradox.”

  An ingenious device, bifocals, so Age-of-Reasonish. “It’s me. Your old pal Julie Katz.”

  Bix readied the clipping for printing, affixing it to a piece of shirt cardboard. Cement flowed out in languid waves. “I knew a Miss Katz once. I was never her friend.”

  Could it be? He really didn’t recognize her? “We dated,” Julie pleaded. “Spent nights together at Dante’s.”

 
“I dated…a younger person.”

  “Of course I look older. You’re no puppy yourself. You don’t remember sending me valentines? You said you loved me.”

  “I love Sheila of the Moon.”

  “You used to shtup Sheila of the Moon. That was Sheila in your bed, Bix! Her—me!”

  “No,” he rasped. Repression, she decided: the unconscionable banished to the unconscious. “No,” Bix repeated, firmer now, more snappish.

  “Listen, sweetheart, tell your flock to stop this heresy nonsense. They have to become Revelationists.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Yes. Sheila’s orders.”

  Bix pulled off the bifocals, as if blurring her image would also blur the anxiety she was causing him. “Sheila bid the sea rise up—and it did. It’s impossible, but I saw it. Nothing makes sense anymore. The good news is that God exists. The bad news is that God exists.”

  “If we put our heads together, we can probably get out of this nutty republic. Philadelphia’s only two miles away.”

  “Philadelphia?” Bix’s smirk was incredulous, as if she’d just proposed a trip to Neptune.

  “Yeah. Any of these pipes lead to the river?”

  “They’re stuffed with barbed wire.”

  “We’ll cut it.”

  Bix hammered the clipping with his fist. “Time for you to go, Miss Katz.”

  Her tears caught her by surprise. “Oh, Bix, honey, they killed Georgina. She came to all my birthday parties, and they burned her.”

  “Leave!”

  The tears rolled into her quavering mouth. Ordinary tears, profane tears, salt tears, no wrathful acids anymore, no supernatural sugars. We cry an ancient ocean, Howard Lieberman liked to point out. Powerful evidence for biological evolution, he used to explain.

  Stumbling out of Father Paradox’s apartment, she ran through the sewer pipe, past the pulpit, and straight into the dripping belly of her church.

  CHAPTER 13

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  Like a wily predator, like a hawk or shark or lioness, the urge to contact her mother had struck Julie suddenly and from behind, and she was not happy about it. She wanted no more of this grotesque comedy of futile prayers and unreciprocated shouts, of busy signals and being put on hold, enough of this maternal neglect, the aloofness of the God of physics, the indifference of the differential equation. Yet here she was, leaning against a Longport street lamp and petitioning heaven for advice.

  Can I save him, Mother? Is Bix savable? Answer me.

  In the tea-leaf whorls of the Milky Way, Julie read his fate. Another year of preaching, two perhaps, but inevitably the heretic hunters or the vigilantes would find him, no old age for Bix, no quiet nights preparing sermons by the hearth. His own public burning was the closest he’d ever get to a hearth.

  Beware the stars, Howard had always warned her. Babylonian astrology, Greek mythology, Aristotle’s crystalline spheres—the stars had occasioned more pure bullshit than the rest of reality combined. And yet, midway between Orion and the Big Dipper, floating over Melanie’s condo, she saw—thought she saw—a constellation meant for her eyes only, a tool of forged steel, waiting to cut her a path to America.

  “I’m going to intervene,” Julie declared, rushing into Melanie’s book-lined study.

  Seated at her computer, Melanie glanced up from the phosphorescent text of Ralph and Amy Learn About Catholics and grinned. “I knew you’d help us. Will you start with the Holy Palace?”

  “I need wire cutters.”

  “Throw it down stone by stone?”

  “Do you have any?”

  Melanie’s excited jowls collapsed. “Wire cutters?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.” Melanie frowned darkly. “Why?”

  “To get that preacher and me across the Delaware. He’s my friend.”

  “Black market might have wire cutters.” Melanie’s face became the quintessence of betrayal: the child seeing Santa’s beard fall off, the bride finding her husband in bed with the maid of honor. “If you really need them.”

  “I need them.”

  On Melanie’s cable-television monitor, The Monday Night Auto-da-Fé unfolded. A man in a red dinner jacket and white top hat escorted a teenage boy across a sandy field and chained him to a wooden post. “It’s a balmy night here in downtown New Jerusalem,” the offscreen commentator noted gaily, “with a tangy wind rolling in from the sea.”

  A sudden smile lifted Melanie’s pudgy cheeks. “Going to America, are you?” She whisked an antique postcard off her desk. “Look what came in today’s mail.”

  Beneath the caption, GREETINGS FROM ATLANTIC CITY, three photographs formed a triptych of frivolity: bathing beauties romping through the surf, Rex the Wonder Dog riding his aquaplane, a high-diving horse in flight. Julie turned it over. American stamps. A Philadelphia postmark. “Melanie Markson,” Julie read aloud, “Longport, New Jersey.” The handwriting was inflicted with a stammer. “Dear Melanie: How’s it going? Could you please—” Bars of black ink obscured the rest. “Yer Ever-Lovin’ Phoebe.”

  “Our mail goes through the government,” Melanie explained.

  Julie folded the postcard, bisecting the Wonder Dog as Billy Milk had bisected Marcus Bass, and stuck it in the pocket of her borrowed jeans. Yer Ever-Lovin’ Phoebe. Phoebe! In Philadelphia! “Want to come with us?”

  “Don’t think ill of me,” Melanie begged, pecking the TV screen with her glossy, perfect fingernail. “Hey, if you were your old self, a deity and everything, I’d be the first to sign up.” As the man in the top hat pulled a black cloth bag over his young prisoner’s face, the camera panned to a dozen harlequins gripping semiautomatic rifles. “May I give you some advice, Sheila? If you don’t have those powers anymore, you’re crazy to try crossing the Delaware, truly crazy. People get shot for things like that.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” said Julie.

  “Twenty-five rounds per minute,” the offscreen commentator was saying, “with a muzzle velocity of two thousand feet per second.”

  Andrew Wyvern spreads his wide, webbed, gelatinous wings and sails across hell’s bustling port, swerving past a steel crane as it lifts a semitrailer full of new arrivals off the magnificent barge John Mitchell and sets it on the dock. He seriously considers returning to Carcinoma for a relaxing afternoon of inflicting aphids and Japanese beetles on his tomatoes, but instead lands on Pain’s foredeck.

  “Where to?” asks Anthrax, saluting crisply.

  A miniature cloud of depression congeals above the devil’s head. “New Jersey. The Believers’ Republic.” Seeking relief, he counts his blessings. Venereal disease on the rise, pollution prospering, totalitarianism thriving, the Circus of Joy a perpetual sellout. Best of all, Julie Katz’s church is a glorious success, a wellspring of meaningless martyrdom.

  No good. His depression remains, black and hovering.

  “Did I ever tell you what the universe is, Anthrax?”

  “No, sir, you never did.”

  “The universe,” says Wyvern, “is a Ph.D. thesis that God was unable to successfully defend.”

  Anthrax picks his nose, impaling a boll weevil on his claw. “Didn’t you get enough of New Jersey last time? Couldn’t we do the Middle East instead? I’ve never seen the pyramids.”

  “Are we cleared for sea?”

  “Cleared for sea—yes, sir.” Anthrax pops the skewered weevil into his mouth. “Take her out?”

  “Take her out.”

  “Set course for North America?”

  “Set course for North America.”

  “Why New Jersey?” asks Anthrax.

  Wyvern grimaces so fiercely the cloud above his head spits rain. “Because the bitch still believes she has powers.”

  She thought: The heart is a pump.

  A pump…and an augur.

  No question. The closer the taxi got to the Irish Tavern, the louder Julie’s heart became, pumping premonitions, broadcasting omens
. “Pull over!” She secured the wire cutters under her belt like Queen Zenobia sheathing her sword and shoved a five-mammon bill toward the driver. “Keep the change!”

  Melanie had underwritten the expedition generously, dressing Julie in a cowhide jacket and Eurocut slacks, paying for the black-market cutters—a formidable tool, reminiscent of Wyvern’s secateurs, with rubber handles and serrated blades—and giving her a wallet filled with six hundred dollars in case she got to America and a hundred and fifty mammons in case she didn’t.

  Stomach acid fountained up Julie’s esophagus as she ran across Front Street. Her veins throbbed with the crude rhythms of a dog scratching its fleas.

  The approaching mob was single-minded, focused, its arms and legs all linked to one aim: abducting Father Paradox. Lurching away, Julie let them pass, over a dozen Revelationists giving up their lunch hours to vigilance. They whooped, whistled, catcalled, and cheered.

  Bix wore Indian moccasins and a white bathrobe with a lighthouse on the breast. His naked eyes were sunken and bleary, desperate for their bifocals. Julie melted into the mob. The majority were slick-haired, business-suited men who, when not cleansing Camden of heresy, probably sold used cars and bargain carpets. The four women were equally well groomed—real-estate agents, Julie figured.

  The vigilantes bore Bix to a vacant lot, a tract of shattered glass and broken brick, gutted automobiles hulking up from the rubble. Along the western edge rose the back wall of a hardware store, a pink stucco mass against which the vigilantes now pushed their captive. Bix’s smile was gone. He sweated in the noon sun. Afraid? Who wouldn’t be afraid? And yet at the core of his sorry posture, Julie felt, lay something else: disappointment. If I must die, at least let the Circus do it, not these amateurs. At least let me appear on The Monday Night Auto-da-Fé. At least let me adorn the New Jerusalem Expressway.

  From among the mob’s many brains, one now emerged to take charge, a cherubic man in a blue blazer. He was like a scaled-down version of Bix, soft, round, a kind of…tense Buddha? Quite so: Nick Shiner himself, the disgruntled trucker with whom she’d hitched a ride four days earlier.