by James Morrow
His mood swung, a sudden jagged screech. “Shut up,” she whispered, pressing him to her arid right breast, the larger one. “Your problems are just beginning.” It was not death that terrified her but, more prosaically, the nails. She feared for her flesh, its coming pain.
Pop’s son shut up. His gums were spirited and wet, munching on her pajamas like a flounder taking bait, stiffening her nipple. The corporals pretended not to notice. Julie hated them. They were astonishingly handsome, impossibly clean-shaven: men with cauterized whiskers.
Little Murray stopped sucking and smiled.
“Six minutes.”
Julie veered toward the cylindrical door, set the baby prone on the floor, and dropped to his level like a child flattening herself alongside her dollhouse, making it the measure of all things. What should one say to babies, what did they want to know about? “Well, first of all, there’s your mother,” said Julie. “A little flaky, but I think she’s starting to be happy. Then there was your father—also a bit nuts, but I know you would’ve liked him. Your grandfather Marcus was a great biologist. Your grandmother Georgina was somebody I sinned against…”
“Five minutes.”
Phoebe approached, pajama tops soppy with milk. “You okay?”
“No.” Julie forced a smile. “I like my brother.”
“Thought you would. Hey, Katz, guess what—I’ve figured out your purpose.” A tear sat in Phoebe’s left eye like a pearl in oyster flesh. She flipped open the nursing bra and gently lifted her son from the floor. “Here’s your purpose, right? This guy. Little Murray. If you hadn’t dragged his mother off a couple of battlefields, he’d still be living in a test tube.”
Rising, Julie kissed her brother’s nappy head. Good old Phoebe, never at a loss for bizarre ideas. “My purpose, huh? Why? Is he a deity too?”
“No.” Phoebe grinned. “He’s a baby.”
“And he’s my purpose?”
“I think so.”
“Sounds rather…”
“Ordinary? Exactly, Katz. You were sent to be ordinary.” Extending her tongue, Phoebe snagged the tear as it fell from her cheek. “Someday I’ll write your biography. The gospel according to me. How God’s daughter gained her soul by giving up her divinity.”
“Four minutes.”
And now here was Bix, waddling toward her.
Julie’s stump tingled. Her phantom fingers seized Bix’s pajama lapel, and he leaned into her like a wino grabbing a street lamp. They hugged more tightly than they ever had before; they crushed each other like colliding cars. Her libido blazed to life. She smiled, impressed by the party-crashing shamelessness of sex, its willingness to show up anywhere—a funeral, a sermon, a final farewell. This was the way to go out, all right, thumbing your labia at the cosmos.
“You were a good wife,” he said.
“You were a good husband,” she said.
Their embrace dissolved.
Throat swelling like a broken ankle, Julie sidled toward her best friend. “Good-bye, Green Enchantress.”
“Two minutes.”
“I can’t stand this.” Tears bubbled out of Phoebe as if from a medicine dropper.
“I said, ‘Good-bye, Green Enchantress.’”
“I’m going crazy. Good-bye, Queen Zenobia. God, I hate this. Hate it, hate it…”
Slowly Phoebe melded with her, exuding an unfathomable mix of tenderness and eroticism, until the three of them—nursing baby, fecund bisexual, former deity—became a tight knot of bone and tissue, Little Murray trapped like a ship’s bumper between the hull of his mother and the dock of his sister, and for a fleeting instant Julie was not afraid.
Brother and sister, Little Murray and Julie Katz, side by side, swimming through her petting zoo—so went the dream the policemen shattered when they barged into Cell 19, six of the usual smooth-jawed corporals, stroking the grips of their Mausers. Horrocks entered next, snipping at the air with a pair of steel scissors.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Snip, snip. “I’m no barber, but…”
“Barber?” she groaned, rising from her straw pallet. She yawned. Slowly the world seeped into her. She slammed her palm protectively against her braids, always her best feature, still long and wild like Phoebe’s old Wererat of Transylvania costume, still black and glossy like bundles of licorice.
“Let’s get it over with,” said Horrocks.
He made no pretense of finesse, attacking her hair like a selfish and stupid child cutting the twine from a Christmas package. The disembodied tresses floated to the floor like raven feathers, mingling with the damp straw. Her cranium grew progressively cooler. She pictured her gawky naked ears, her exposed S-scar; she imagined jagged tufts of hair sticking out randomly from her scalp. Thank God no mirrors were permitted in the New Jersey National Dungeon. She never wanted to see herself again.
“Done,” her jailor said.
The policemen guided her upward through the maze of stairs and corridors, Horrocks in the lead, unlocking doors, raising gates, opening the vertical Via Dolorosa.
“You’re supposed to take a shower,” he said. “You’re supposed to start out clean.”
He prodded her into the ladies’ room, its walls gridded like drafting paper, the pattern marred where here and there tiles had fallen away like snapshots unglued from a photo album. A brand-new pair of zebra-striped pajamas drooped over the illustrated, three-panel Chinese screen standing between sink and shower. Julie stepped behind the mural—reviving Lazarus, stilling the waters, transforming the wine—and stripped. For the first time in her life, she was her ideal weight, a hundred thirty. There was no diet like terror.
She spent a full half hour scrubbing the dungeon’s gunk from her body. The water ricocheted off her firm thighs, her milkless breasts, her scorched-earth head.
Dressing, she delivered herself to Horrocks and the police, who escorted her out of the dungeon and into the golden city. Citizens jammed the sidewalks of Eternity Place, men in white silk suits, women in pale yellow dresses, children in lederhosen and Bermuda shorts. Everyone seemed tense and confused, uncertain what to make of her; they’d never seen an antichrist before. Should they revel in Jesus’ imminent return, or curse his enemy’s flesh? For every low Wyvernian sssss, Julie heard a hosanna or a shout of joy. Perhaps they should even…love her? Ambiguous.
A tomato sailed out of the crowd and exploded against her shoulder. The police reacted instantly, spinning around, drawing their Mausers, but already more rot was in the air—stinking egg, mushy cantaloupe, soggy head of lettuce—a barrage of garbage, slamming into her fresh pajamas. When had she asked to be God’s daughter? What sort of mother would allow this?
The crowd dispersed, breaking apart like a melting iceberg, and the death march continued, across the Advent Avenue intersection and past the Pool of Siloam, its sunbright waters reflecting the Tomas de Torquemada Memorial Arena with the clarity and fidelity of a mirror, doubling it, inviting Julie to project her inner life into the Rorschachian symmetry. What do you see, daughter of God? I see two arenas. I see two marble quoits, two lifebuoys from Pain, two doughnuts made of bleached dogshit.
Horrocks guided her through the narrow prisoners’ gate and into the holding area, a gloomy granite dugout filled with about twenty criminals and heretics hunched on picnic benches. Beyond, an iron-toothed portcullis opened onto the execution field, a kind of landlocked beach, its rolling sands dotted with chunks of charred kindling. A dozen chopping blocks sat amid the dunes like tree stumps.
“Moon rising,” a serene, aristocratic-looking prisoner greeted Julie.
“Moon rising,” echoed another prisoner, a leathery old woman in ill-fitting pajamas.
“There are none so blind as those who see angels,” Julie sneered in reply, dropping her thirty-nine-year-old ass onto the nearest bench. “None so deaf as those who hear gods,” she added. The garbage had soaked through her pajamas, moistening her dark skin. “Screw the Moon.”
“If you’re not an Uncertain
tist, what brings you here?” asked the old woman.
“Murder?” asked the aristocrat. “Adultery?”
“Bad genes,” said Julie.
The tiers were packed, thousands of spectators waving pennants, focusing binoculars, buying hot dogs, perusing program books. At the far end of the field, a colossal statue of Saint John the Divine—legs splayed, hand gripping a quill pen—held aloft a thirty-foot television monitor while, higher still, banks of floodlights stood poised to illuminate the next nighttime performance. SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE CIRCUS OF JOY, proclaimed the video screen, the title gradually dissolving into the famous angel-with-sword logo.
Between Saint John’s legs a massive wooden gate opened and out marched a brass band, their white uniforms glowing in the South Jersey sun as they played “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” in 4/4 time, tubas bellowing, trombones blaring, drums thundering. A procession of motorized floats followed, bearing inflated rubber statues depicting what Julie, peering through the fog of her dread, took to be glimpses of the Millennium: lambs nuzzling lions, angels strumming mandolins and lyres, frisky multiracial children gamboling across grassy hills, a smiling middle-class couple harvesting beets and turnips from a pest-free vegetable garden.
“Sheila?” A familiar voice, dry and withered. “Sheila, is that you?”
Julie turned. Eyes wrapped in red veins, jowls slick with tears, Melanie Markson smiled.
“Melanie?” Good God: Melanie.
“Oh, Sheila, they’ve been hitting you. And your hair, they took your hair.”
Hair, thought Julie. Hair, hand, ovaries. “Why are you…?”
“My last book,” Melanie replied. “Full of errors, they said.”
“Was it?”
“I don’t know. You never got to America, huh?”
“I got there. Phoebe has a baby.”
“Really? A baby? Who’s the father?”
“My father.”
“I remember that terrific thing he wrote about snapshots. I thought your father was dead.”
“His sperm aren’t.”
“‘Something of the Ordinary.’”
“Hermeneutics.”
“Right. A baby, that’s wonderful. Sheila, can you…?”
“Sorry, Melanie. I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“I’m scared, Sheila.”
The parade circled the arena twice and vanished beneath Saint John, whereupon the portcullis climbed groaningly upward. A thickset, overdressed man—red dinner jacket, red pleated cummerbund, white top hat—swaggered into the holding area and tapped a dozen prisoners, Melanie included, on their forearms with his riding crop. He raised a silver whistle to his lips and out came a sharp metallic shriek. “Get moving, folks,” he said. “Right now, please.”
ACT ONE: THY SWORD SHALL COMFORT ME, declared the video screen.
In the field below, an executioner with bounteous blond hair, wearing a white jumpsuit and red canvas gloves, strutted amid the chopping blocks. A chain saw sat on his shoulder like a beloved but mentally defective little brother. Julie shut her eyes. The portcullis dropped closed. She could feel her fear—feel it coiled around her spine like a snake entwining a caduceus. I don’t want to die, Mother. I absolutely don’t.
On the monitor, Melanie Markson knelt as if in prayer, her pumpkin-colored hair flowing over the chopping block like a tablecloth. “No!” Julie screamed as the executioner pulled the starter cord on his chain saw. “For God’s sake, no!” The motor kicked in. “Stop it!” The chain saw descended, grinding into Melanie’s naked neck and swiftly severing nerve and bone—a deft move earning the executioner a standing ovation. “No! No!” The skillful camera operator caught it all, panning precisely as Melanie’s head dropped free, turned over twice, and settled into a low dune like a cherry atop a mound of whipped cream. “No! No!”
For the next forty minutes, heads rolled and Julie wept, her sobs made inaudible by the chainsaw’s roar. Her tears were large, hot, and no longer for herself alone. She wept for Melanie. For Georgina. For Marcus Bass, for the slaughtered Boardwalk tourists, for every person who’d ever died for what somebody else believed in. When at last the act was over, a rawboned young man in a harlequin costume—black mask, diamond-patterned tights—trundled across the field collecting the heads and dropping them into his wheelbarrow. Julie pounded the bench with her stump. She rammed her bare heel into the dirt.
Intermission. As the harlequin wheeled the heads off the field—he looked like a farmer transporting a load of cabbages—a team of roustabouts in Torquemada Memorial Arena sweatshirts lined the hippodrome with upright ladders.
ACT TWO: HIS LIGHT BURNS FOREVER, said the monitor.
The man in the white top hat strode into the holding area and blew his whistle, whereupon the remaining prisoners rose from their benches like schoolchildren participating in a fire drill and started onto the field. “Not you,” he told Julie, his lips and nostrils quivering with contempt. But of course, she thought—Sheila of the Moon is a headliner, Sheila gets her own separate act.
In a series of elegantly composed longshots, a half-dozen harlequins chained the heretics to the ladders and buried them to their knees in kindling.
Zoom in: straw, twigs, logs, gin bottles, cocaine spoons, zotz needles, feminist manifestos, Kurt Vonnegut novels, back issues of Groin, Wet, and Ms., videocassettes of Swedish Nuns and Bonnie Boffs the Vienna Boys Choir, nude snapshots of the sort Pop’s nuttier customers used to bring to Photorama—piles of sin, stacks of iniquity, heaps of vice, dams engineered by leftist, druggie, prurient beavers.
Cut to: a line of trumpeters bleating out three sharp ascending notes.
Cut to: the grandpastor himself, Milk the holy arsonist, eye glassy, hands writhing around each other.
Cut to: the blond executioner, weaving among the ladders, lighting the pyres with a gleaming red flamethrower, spirals of fire gushing from the barrel.
The director covered the subsequent holocaust through tight close-ups. Mouths flew open and out rolled smoke and sparks, syllables of incineration. Faces writhed like beached eels. Thighs blackened, eyes exploded, hair ignited, muscles melted. The heat pounded Julie’s shorn head. The air vibrated with screams. Bulbous and obscene vapors drifted over the arena.
Second intermission. The roustabouts carried aluminum pails filled with water—drafts from the sacred river, a subtitle explained—across the field and hurled the blessed liquid onto the flaming pyres, dousing them as emphatically as Julie had doused Atlantic City. Unchaining the hot bones, the roustabouts bore them away in rubber body bags.
ACT THREE: AN ANTICRUCIFIXION FOR AN ANTICHRIST.
This was it, then. No way out.
Alone on her bench, Julie shivered and moaned, suddenly aware that her bladder had split off from her brain. The warm pee dribbled down her thigh.
A hay wagon appeared beneath the portcullis, driven by the man in the white top hat and harnessed to a mangy, spavined donkey. “Get in, please,” he commanded. “Antichrist Jew,” he muttered under his breath.
“When I feel like it,” Julie said, wrapping the words in spit. The donkey brayed. Her soggy pajamas grew cool.
“Get in, Queen of the Jews.”
Julie watched the monitor. A huge mechanism appeared, gliding between Saint John’s legs, a thing at once frivolous and sinister, familiar and grotesque. Not just any merry-go-round, she realized, but an Atlantic City native, the famous Steel Pier carousel, a creation from which she and Phoebe had once stolen a wooden stallion. Whether any such animals remained, Julie couldn’t tell, for the carousel had been boarded up like a condemned building, the entire span from cornice to platform sealed with a checkerboard of black and white plywood panels, giving the huge antique the look of a bass drum lying on its side. Round and round went the carousel, round and round to the rhythm of the Wurlitzer steam organ bleating out “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.”
Two men in prison pajamas lay nailed to separate white panels. Two men, spinning, bleedin
g, crucified.
Laughing, Julie climbed into the wagon and sat on the sweet straw. The driver flicked his riding crop, producing a snap like a gunshot, and the wagon rolled forward, bouncing her up and down as if she were riding the stolen stallion of her youth. Laughing: for it was all quite hilarious, wasn’t it, she finally saw the humor. She thought of the communications course she’d taken in her sophomore year, Crosscurrents in Popular Culture, the idiot professor finding Christ symbols in everything from Superman comics to Elvis. Tell me, Dr. Sheffield, when a woman gets nailed to the Steel Pier carousel, does that by any chance make her a Christ symbol?
The driver reined up within three yards of the mechanism, and immediately a quartet of black-masked harlequins scrambled into the wagon like tarantulas invading a banana boat. Their stares seemed to reach beyond that slice of the spectrum available to human vision: burning, hate-filled stares, looks meant to kill. Laughing, she turned away. The crucified men swept past, their blood patterning the plywood—river systems, root systems, nervous systems—half dead, half alive, once, twice, a third time, a bearded stocky man and a gnomish balding man, nose like a walnut, so close she could have touched their steel nails, licked their sweat. Now the blond executioner came aboard, cradling what looked like an amalgam of bicycle pump and power drill. Not a bicycle pump, of course, not a power drill: an electronic nailgun, a modern-day malleus maleficarum, state-of-the-art, for it was 2013, wasn’t it, the future had arrived, supplanting hammer, supplanting iron spikes.
Julie laughed. The carousel slowed.
“Stand up!” the executioner screamed above the steam organ’s bellow.
Laughing, Julie stood up.
The carousel stopped, framing her against a white panel, the bearded prisoner to her left, the gnomish one to her right.
“Lift your arms!”
Laughing, Julie lifted her arms. The harlequins held her fast against the wood. Plywood splinters pushed through her pajamas, pricking her skin. Hefting his nailgun, the executioner pressed the muzzle into her left palm. No laughter this time, no laughs left, no chuckles or giggles. “No!” Within and without, she shuddered; her bones vibrated, spleen rattled, liver trembled, pancreas shook. “Don’t! No!” This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t—
