Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  “Phoebe! Phoebe!”

  “Katz? Katz?!”

  “Phoebe!”

  “Julie Katz?” She can’t believe it. “Julie Katz! Julie Katz!!”

  She bolts toward you like a dog being released from a kennel, and suddenly you’re melting into each other, bones fusing, skin knitting, your blood a single organ pouring through shared flesh.

  “Oh, Katz, Katz, Julie Goddamn Katz, how the hell’d you do it?”

  “Do it?”

  “You came back!” Phoebe smiles like an angel on cocaine.

  “I came back. Don’t let it get around.”

  “How?”

  “There are several competing explanations.”

  Phoebe surveys your perforated arms, skewered feet, ravaged head. “Oh, God, honey, what a mess they made of you.” She flashes her gorgeous Montgomery Clift teeth. “Listen. Good news. I ran into Andrew Wyvern, and he’s in even worse shape than you. More good news—I didn’t kill Milk, but he’s dead just the same. Your mother zapped him with lightning.”

  “Lightning?”

  “Divine justice.”

  “Secular coincidence.”

  “No, buddy.” Phoebe places her hands defiantly on her hips. “God.”

  “God is a sponge.”

  “A what?”

  “A sponge.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The data are provocative.”

  “A sponge?”

  “Let’s go home, Phoebe. Let’s go play with the baby.”

  On the first day of September, 1974, a child was born to Murray Jacob Katz, a celibate Jewish recluse living across the bay from Atlantic City, New Jersey, an island metropolis then famous for its hotels, its boardwalk, its Miss America Pageant, and its seminal role in the invention of Monopoly. Forty years later, the woman that the child had become walked away from New Jersey forever.

  Julie studied the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, her gaze lifting past the rivets bubbling from the girders, past the braided steel cords hitched like strings on a harp only an angel could play, past the stately sweep of the main cables, past the sky and the sun. So where was God—up there polishing her arsenal of lightning bolts, or in Absecon Inlet, sucking water through her dermal pores, straining out nutrients for her tissues and spicules?

  She fixed on the path before her. WELCOME TO FLESH, the signpost said, UNCERTAINTY ZONE AHEAD. Yes, for another thirty or forty years, it was all hers again, the scarred forehead, pillaged womb, stumpy right arm—just as she wanted.

  And this was only the beginning, Julie thought, for under the transforming power of the moment Vine Street did not end in the City of Brotherly Love but flowed like a river, ever westward. This morning she and Phoebe would get out of Camden, next month they’d all leave Philadelphia—she, Phoebe, Bix, Irene, Little Murray—then Pennsylvania, then Ohio, mile upon mile, moving against the planet’s spin, the sun always at their backs as they passed through Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and perhaps even the South Seas island they’d discovered in the Deauville.

  Her best friend loved her. Her husband loved her. She had powers. She could clothe the naked, feed the starving, water the thirsty, insulate the freezing. Then there was this child-hunger business. Would Little Murray satisfy her, or would she and Bix adopt? This too: she wanted a job. Julie the high-school physics teacher, Julie the advice columnist. Or maybe she’d get a doctoral degree. Dr. Katz, the fighting middle-aged theology professor.

  Forty: not too late to start her deferred but promising life.

  Julie Katz looped an arm around her best friend, who promptly gave her a wry wink and a quick kiss on the cheek, and together they crossed the warty old bridge and entered the world.

  James Morrow is the author of three previous books including This Is the Way the World Ends (cited by the BBC as the best SF novel of 1987) and countless short stories.

  He lives with his wife, Jean, and their two children in State College, Pennsylvania.