James Morrow - Only Begotten Daughter

PART ONE
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Signs and Wonders

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1
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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.

The abandoned lighthouse on Brigantine Point that Murray had taken over, claiming it for his own as a hermit might claim a cave, was called Angel’s Eye. It was wholly obsolete, which he preferred; as a sexually inactive bachelor living in the highly eroticized culture of late twentieth-century America, Murray felt somewhat obsolete himself. During its heyday, the kerosene-fueled lamp of Angel’s Eye had escorted over ten thousand vessels safely past Brigantine Shoals. But now Murray’s lighthouse was fired up only when he felt like it, while the business of preventing shipwreck passed to the United States Coast Guard’s new electric beacon on Absecon Island.

Murray knew all about Angel’s Eye, its glory and also its shame. He knew of the stormy July night in 1866 when the kerosene ran out, so that the British brig William Rose, bearing a cargo of tea and fireworks from China, had smashed to pieces on the rocks. He knew of the foggy March morning in 1897 when the main wick disintegrated, with dire consequences for Lucy II, a private pleasure yacht owned by the Philadelphia ball-bearing tycoon Alexander Strickland. On the anniversaries of these disasters, Murray always enacted a commemoration, climbing the tower stairs and, at the precise moment when William Rose or Lucy II had pulled within view of Angel’s Eye, lighting the lamp. He was a devout believer in the second chance. To the man who asked, “What’s the point of closing the barn door after the horse has been stolen?” Murray would answer, “The point is that the door is now closed.”

At the time of his child’s conception, Murray’s sex life revolved exclusively around a combination sperm bank and research center known as the Preservation Institute. Its scientists were doing a longitudinal study: how do a man’s reproductive cells change as he ages? Murray, broke, signed up without hesitation. Every month, he drove to this famous foundation, housed in three stories of weatherworn brick overlooking Great Egg Bay, where the receptionist, Mrs. Kriebel, would issue him a sterilized herring jar and escort him upstairs to a room papered with Playboy centerfolds and pornographic letters mailed to Penthouse by its own staff.

Not only did the Preservation Institute harvest and scrutinize the seed of ordinary citizens, it also froze that of Nobel Prize laureates, making their heritable traits available for home experiments in eugenics. As it happened, thousands of women had been waiting for this product to come on the market. Nobel sperm was cheap, reliable, and simple to use. After acquiring a turkey baster, you injected yourself with the rare fluid—the crème de la crème, as it were—and nine months later out burst a genius. The laureates received nothing for their donations beyond the satisfaction of upgrading the human gene pool. Murray Katz—retail clerk, involuntary celibate, Newark Community College dropout—received thirty dollars a shot.

And then one afternoon a message arrived—a telegram, for like most hermits, Murray had no phone.

Contaminated. The word, so obviously a euphemism for diseased, made a cold puddle in his bowels. Cancer, no doubt. His semen was riddled with malignant cells, STOP: indeed, STOP: you’re dead. He got behind the wheel of his decrepit Saab and headed over Brigantine Bridge into Atlantic City.

When Murray Jacob Katz was ten years old, he’d begun wondering whether he was permitted to believe in heaven, as were his various Christian friends. Jews believed so many impressive and dramatic things, it seemed only logical to regard death as less permanent than one might conclude from, say, coming across a stone-stiff cat in a Newark sewer. “Pop, do we have heaven?” he’d asked on the day he discovered the cat. “You want to know a Jew’s idea of heaven?” his father had replied, looking up from his Maimonides. “It’s an endless succession of long winter nights on which we get paid a fair wage to sit in a warm room and read all the books ever written.” Phil Katz was an intense, shriveled man with a defective aorta; in a month his heart would seize up like an overburdened automobile engine. “Not just the famous ones, no, every book, the stuff nobody gets around to reading, forgotten plays, novels by people you never heard of. However, I profoundly doubt such a place exists.”

Decades later, after Pop was dead and Murray’s life had been relocated to Atlantic City, he began transforming his immediate environment, making it characteristic of heaven. The whole glorious span of Dewey’s decimal system soon filled the lighthouse, book after book spiraling up the tower walls like threads of DNA, delivering intellectual matter to Murray’s mammalian cortex and wondrous smells to the reptilian regions below—the gluey tang of a library discard, the crisp plebeian aroma of a yard-sale paperback, the pungent mustiness of a thrift-store encyclopedia. When the place became too crowded, Murray simply built an addition, a kind of circular cottage surrounding the lighthouse much as three hundred noisy, enraged, and well-dressed Christians were now surrounding the Preservation Institute.

Three hundred, no exaggeration, brandishing placards and chanting “It’s a sin!” Even the seaward side was covered; a flotilla of yachts lay at anchor just offshore, protest banners fluttering from their masts: PROCREATION IS SACRED…SATAN WAS A TEST-TUBE BABY…A GOOD PARENT IS A MARRIED PARENT. Murray crossed the sandy lawn using the cautious, inoffensive gait any prudent Jew might adopt under the circumstances, AND THE LORD STRUCK DOWN ONAN, declared the placard of a gaunt old gentleman with the tight, reverent carriage of a praying mantis, GOD LOVES LESBIANS, GOD HATES LESBIANISM, proclaimed a large-eared adolescent who could have starred in the life of Franz Kafka. Murray studied his goal, a ring of sawhorse-shaped barricades manned by a dozen security guards anxiously stroking their semiautomatic rifles. Protestors pawed Murray’s coat. “Please keep your sperm,” urged a pale, toothsome woman whose placard read, ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION = ETERNAL DAMNATION.

As Murray passed the barricades, a hand emerged from the mob and trapped his shoulder. He turned. A leather patch masked the protester’s right eye. To fight God’s battles, God had equipped him with massive arms, a body like a Stonehenge megalith, and a riveting glint in his good eye. “So what will your spilled seed get you, brother? Thirty dollars? You’re being underpaid. Judas got silver. Resist. Resist.”

“As a matter of fact, my last donation wasn’t acceptable,” said Murray. “I think I’m out of a job.”

“Tell those people in there it’s wrong—a sin. Will you do that? We’re not here to condemn them. We’re all sinners. I’m a sinner.” With a sudden flourish the protester flipped back his eyepatch. “When a man takes out his own eye, that’s a sin.”

Murray shuddered. What had he expected, a glass orb, a fused lid? Certainly not this open pit, dark and jagged like the sickness he imagined gnawing at his gonads. “A sin.” He wrested free. “I’ll tell them.”

Shivering with apprehension, Murray entered the Institute and crossed the glossy marble floor, moving past a great clock-face with hands like harpoons, past spherical lamps poised on wrought-iron stands, at last reaching Mrs. Kriebel’s desk.

“I’ll tell Dr. Frostig you’re here,” she said curtly, arranging her collection jars in a tidy grid. She was a stylish woman, decorated with clothes and cosmetics whose names Murray didn’t know.

“Not my department.” Mrs. Kriebel pointed across the lobby to a sharply angled woman with a vivid, hawkish face. “You can wait with Five Twenty-eight over there.”

The lobby suggested the parlor of a first-class bordello. Abloom with ferns, Greek vases anchored the four corners of a sumptuous Persian rug. On the upholstered walls, set within gold frames, oil portraits of deceased Nobel-winning donors glowered at the mere mortals who surveyed them. Well, well, thought Murray, perusing the faces, we’re going to have Keynesian economics in the next century whether we want it or not. And a new generation of astrophysicists writing bad science fiction.

Glancing away from a dead secretary of state, Five Twenty-eight offered Murray an ardent smile. Black turtleneck jersey, straight raven hair, scruffy brown bomber jacket, eye shadow the iridescent green of Absecon Inlet: she looked like a fifties beatnik, mysteriously transplanted to the age of sperm banks. “I don’t care whether I get a girl or a boy,” she said abruptly. “Makes no difference. Everybody thinks dykes hate boys. Not true.”

Murray surveyed the lesbian’s offbeat prettiness, her spidery frame. “Was it hard picking the father?”

“Don’t remind me.” Together they ambled to the next portrait, a Swedish brain surgeon. “For the longest time I was into the idea of either a painter or a flute player. The arts are my big love, you see, but with science you’ve got a more reliable income, so in the end I settled on a marine biologist—a black man, they tell me, one of their own staff. Mathematicians were in the picture for a while, but then they ran out. Actually, there was one. A Capricorn. No way. Let me guess—you look like a Jewish novelist, if you don’t mind my saying so. I considered having one of those, but then I started reading their stuff, and it seemed kind of dirty to me, and I decided I didn’t want that kind of karma in the house. You a novelist?”

“Hermeneutics of the Ordinary.” Upon turning forty, Murray had resolved not only to collect obscure and profound books, but to write one as well. Within six months he had three hundred pages of ragged manuscript and a great title.

“Hermeneutics. Interpretation.” Through his employment at Atlantic City Photorama, where he collected exposed film and doled out prints and slides, Murray had discovered that snapshots afford unique access to the human psyche. A lawyer photographs his teenage daughter: why the provocative low angle? A stock broker photographs his house: why does he stand so far away, why this hunger for context? Snapshots were an undeciphered language, and Murray was determined to crack the code; his book would be the Rosetta stone of home photography, the Talmud of the Instamatic. “It’s about my experiences serving Photorama customers.”

“Oh, yeah—I’ve seen that place,” said the lesbian. “Tell me, is it true people are always shooting each other screwing?”

“It gets even stranger. We have this real estate agent who does nothing but animals who’ve been…well, squashed.”

“So you can really get into human nature by seeing what everyone brings to Photorama? I’d never thought of that. Heavy.”

Murray smiled. His book might have a readership after all. “I also run that lighthouse on Brigantine Point.”

“Georgina Sparks.” She gave him a jaunty handshake. “Tell me honestly, do I strike you as insane? It’s insane to try raising a kid alone, everybody says, especially if you’re a dyke. I was living with my lover and, matter of fact, we split up over the whole idea. I’m real big on babies. Laurie thinks they’re grotesque.”

“You’re not insane.” She was insane, he thought. “Isn’t ‘dyke’ an offensive word?”

“If you said it, Murray Katz”—Georgina grinned slyly—“I’d kick your teeth in.”

A rhythmic clacking intruded, Mrs. Kriebel’s heels striking marble. She held out an insulated test tube with the numerals 147 etched on its shaft.

“Oh, wow!” Georgina seized the tube, pressing it against her chest. “Know what this is, Mur? It’s my baby!”

“Maybe I should’ve held out for a mathematician.” Georgina eyed the tube with mock suspicion. “Little Pisces mathematician tooling around the apartment, chewing on her calculator? Cute, huh?”

The elevator door opened to reveal a pudgy man in a lab coat. He motioned Murray over with quick, urgent gestures, as if he’d just found a pair of desirable seats at the movies. “You made the right choice,” Murray told Georgina as he started away.

“Marine biology’s a fine career,” he called after the mother-to-be and stepped into the elevator.

The door thumped closed. The elevator ascended, gravity grabbing at the Big Mac in Murray’s stomach.

“What we’ve essentially got here,” said Gabriel Frostig, medical director of the Preservation Institute, “is an egg identification problem.”

“Human egg. Ovum.” Dr. Frostig guided Murray into a cramped and dingy lab packed with technological bric-a-brac. “We’re hoping you’ll tell us where it came from.”

Dominating the dissection table, chortling merrily like a machine for making some particularly loose and messy variety of candy, was the most peculiar contraption Murray had ever seen. At its heart lay a bell jar, the glass so pure and gleaming that tapping it would, Murray imagined, produce not a simple bong but a fugue. A battery-powered pump, a rubber bellows, and three glass bottles sat on a wooden platform, encircling the jar like gifts spread around some gentile’s Christmas tree. “What’s that?”

One bottle was empty, the second contained what looked like blood, the third a fluid suggesting milk. “And you’re keeping it in a, er…?”

Murray peered through the glass. A large wet slab of protoplasm—it looked like a flounder wearing a silk scarf—filled the jar. Clear plastic tubes flowed into the soft flesh from all directions. “A what?”

“Artificial uterus,” Frostig explained, “prototype stage. We weren’t planning to gestate any human embryos for at least five years. It’s been strictly a mouse and frog operation around here. But when Karnstein spotted your blastocyte, we said to ourselves, all right…” The doctor squinted and grimaced, as if examining an ominous biopsy drawn from his own body. “Besides, we thought maybe you expected us to let it die, so you could go running to the newspapers—am I right?—telling ’em how we like to butcher embryos.” He jabbed his index finger contemptuously toward the front lawn. “You one of those Revelationists, Mr. Katz?”

“No. Jewish.” Murray cocked an ear to the protesters’ chants, a sound like enraged surf. “And I’ve never run to a newspaper in my life.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, are you saying there’s a baby growing in that thing?”

Murray pressed closer. The glass widened his face, making his already considerable jaw look like a sugar bowl.

“No, don’t go looking,” said the doctor. “We’re talking about a cell cluster no bigger than a pinhead.”

“Yours and somebody else’s. You didn’t by any chance introduce an ovum into your sample?”

“How could I do that? I’m no biologist. I don’t even know very many women.”

“A dead end. We figured as much.” Frostig opened the top drawer of his filing cabinet, grabbing a stack of printed forms, carbon paper sandwiched between them like slices of black cheese. “In any event, we need your signature on this embryo release. We weren’t born yesterday—we know people form weird attachments in this world. Last weekend I spent about twenty hours convincing a surrogate mother to hand a newborn over to its parents.”

A baby, thought Murray as he took the embryo release. Someone had given him a baby. He’d feared it was cancer, and instead it was a baby. “If I sign, does that mean I—?”

“Forfeit all claims to the cluster. Not that you have any. Far as the law’s concerned, it’s just another sperm donation.” Frostig pulled a fountain pen from his coat as if unsheathing a dagger. “But that egg’s a real wild card—inverse parthenogenesis, we’re calling it at the moment. On the whole it never happens. So for the protection of all concerned…”

“Inverse partheno…what?” An unprecedented situation, Murray thought, and what accompanied it seemed equally unprecedented, a strange amalgam of confusion, fear, and the treacly warmth he reflexively felt around puppies.

“In conventional parthenogenesis, an ovum undergoes meiosis without fertilization. Aberrant, but well documented. Here we’re talking sperm development without an ovum.” Frostig ran his fingers along the tube connecting blood to womb, checking for kinks. “Frankly, it’s got us spooked.”

Murray examined the embryo release, dense with meaningless print. Did he in fact want a baby? Wouldn’t a baby pull his books off the shelves? Where did you get their clothes?

He signed. Georgina Sparks’s lover had called it right. Babies were grotesque.

“We usually carry frogs to the second trimester,” said Frostig, snatching up the embryo release and depositing it on his desk, “a bit longer with the mice. The really key data doesn’t come till we sacrifice them.”

“Ectogenesis machines are still very crude. Next year we might, just might, bring a cat to term.” Frostig guided Murray toward the door, pausing to retrieve a sterilized herring jar from the clutter. “Do you mind? As long as you’re here, Karnstein would like another donation.”

As Murray entered the donation room, a reverie enveloped him, a soft maelstrom of cribs, stuffed animals, and strange nonexistent children’s books by his favorite authors. What the hell kind of children’s book would Kafka have written? (“Gregor Samsa was having a really yucky morning…”) He stared at Miss October for 1968. Meiosis was obviously the last thing on her mind.

Sacrifice. They were going to kill his embryo. Kill? No, too harsh a word. At the Preservation Institute they did science, that was all.

They were going to butcher his only baby girl with a scalpel. They were going to tear her cell from cell.

Dr. Frostig’s staff had probably left. The decision was actually quite simple: if the lab were locked, he’d go home. If not, he wouldn’t.

He crossed the hall, twisted the knob. The door swung open. What was he going to do with a baby? Twilight leaked through the lab’s high, solitary window. The liquid thumpings of the glass womb synchronized with Murray’s heartbeats. He flipped on the light, picked up the wooden platform and its contents, and staggered back into the hall. A baby. He was holding a damn baby in his arms.

Slipping into the donation room, he set the machine beneath the furry crotch of Miss June for 1972. Best to wait until the Revelationists were gone. If mere artificial insemination were sinful by their standards, inverse parthenogenesis would give them cat fits.

He checked the plastic tubes for kinks, just as Frostig had done. What made him think he could get away with this? Wasn’t he the first person they’d come looking for? A good thing his cell cluster was too young to see the dozens of naked women surrounding her. All those breasts, they’d put her in a tizzy.

The door squealed open. Murray shuddered and jumped. His heart seemed to rotate on its axis.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said a tall black donor with a rakish mustache. Sauntering forward, he pulled a herring jar from his sports coat “Thought the place was empty.”

“That’s all right.” Feebly Murray attempted to cover his crime, sidling toward the stolen womb and standing before it in a posture he hoped was at once protective and nonchalant. “I’m finished.”

“With all those grants they keep getting”—the donor grinned slyly—“you’d think they could put some black chicks in here.” He pointed to the womb. “Are the fancy ones just for white folks? All I ever get is a herring jar.”

“I’m Donor One Forty-seven.” The black man clasped Murray’s hand and shook vigorously. “Actually I wear several hats around here. Up on the third floor I’m Marcus Bass.”

One Forty-seven. Murray had heard that name before. “You’re a marine biologist, aren’t you?”

“No, buddy, no—don’t tell me anything about her.” Dr. Bass gestured as if shooing a fly. “A man can’t trust himself with that sort of knowledge. You start trying to find your kid—just to see what he looks like, right?—and you end up doing everybody harm.”

Murray sighed sharply, exhaling a mixture of disappointment and relief. So: his caper was over; he might have smuggled his embryo past an ordinary donor but not past a clam expert. It was all right, really. Fatherhood was nothing but work. “Then you know this is really an—?”

“Ectogenesis machine, prototype stage.” Dr. Bass offered an ambiguous wink. “Frostig would be awfully upset if it disappeared.”

“I just wanted to be with it for a while. This time they’ve got a human embryo inside. The egg’s a mystery, but the seed came from me. Inverse partheno…you know.”

“You’re Katz, aren’t you?” That wink again, mischievous, subversive, followed by a friendly squeeze on the shoulder. “Quite a dilemma, huh? Know what I’d do in your socks, Mr. Katz? I’d pick up this womb and walk out the front door.”

“Stole it? Let’s work on our vocabulary, man. You’re borrowing it. For nine months, period. Don’t worry, nobody’ll take it away from you.” Marcus Bass gesticulated as if setting up his words on a movie marquee. “‘Sperm Bank Seizes Dad’s Embryo.’ Frostig would kill to avoid that kind of publicity. He’d kill.”

Heartburn seared Murray’s chest cavity. Sperm bank seizes dad’s embryo: he could actually get away with it.

Had Marcus Bass used a different word—father or dad—Murray would not have been moved. “With inverse parthenogenesis, there’s no mother,” said Murray. Till the day he died, Phil Katz was Pop. “I’d have to do everything myself.”

“I’ll tell you my personal experience. Before it actually happens, you never realize being a pop is what you always wanted.” Marcus Bass pulled out his wallet and unsnapped the fanfold photographs. Four small grinning faces tumbled into view. “A little boy is the greatest thing in the world. Alex, Henry, Ray, and Marcus Junior. They can all swim.”

Dropping to his knees, Marcus Bass caressed the pump. “See this cardiovascular device here? Make sure it stays connected to the battery. Ordinary room air oxygenates the blood, so keep the entire unit in a warm, well-ventilated place, and don’t let anything block this intake valve.”

“Every thirty days these liquids should be replenished. This bottle takes regular infant formula, but for this one you need whole blood.”

“Where do you think?” Gently Marcus Bass punched Murray’s arm. “From the father, that’s where. Just hang around your local fire station—make friends with the paramedics, okay? When the time comes, slip ’em a twenty and they’ll gladly stick their transfusion needle in you.”

“This third bottle receives waste products and should be flushed clean when full. Baby’s first dirty diaper, kind of…”

“Hospital? No man, the supermarket. I prefer Similac.” Marcus Bass tickled the glass womb with a kitchy-koo finger. “You mix it with water.”

When Dr. Bass smiled, Murray had a sudden flash of a two-year-old sitting astride her pop, the horse.

The Reverend Billy Milk, chief pastor of the First Ocean City Church of Saint John’s Vision, reached inside his sheepskin coat and caressed his steel detonator. God’s wrath was sticky and cold, like an ice-cube tray just removed from the freezer.

Dusk washed across the Institute grounds, bleeding the colors from his flock’s protest signs, turning them from angry shouts into moans of discontent. A soft rain fell. Billy looked at his watch. Five o’clock: the demonstration permit had expired. He nodded to his acolyte, Wayne Ackerman the insurance wizard, who in turn signaled the others, and the righteous host disintegrated into a hundred separate suburbanites drifting through the December mist.

Ever since gouging out his right eye, Billy Milk had been burdened with the ocular equivalent of a phantom limb. Just as amputees endured pain and itch in their missing legs, so did Billy endure visions in his missing eye. For six months straight the phantom organ had been showing him God’s wishes concerning the Preservation Institute. The jagged flames and billowing smoke. The cracked rafters and broken bricks. The rivers of boiling semen rushing from the shattered foundation.

Ambling past their leader, Billy’s flock acknowledged him with discouraged nods and exhausted smiles. A lonely enterprise, this business of being against evil. To see the moral shape of things, to say this is right but that is wrong, was a habit long out of fashion in the United States of America, land of terminal relativism. But wait, brothers and sisters. Have patience. In the next morning’s Atlantic City Press, Billy’s congregation would finally be reading some good news.

Planting the bomb had been harrowing, but since when was God’s will an undertaking for the timid? Billy didn’t mind telling the receptionist he was a donor—sin happens in the soul, not the tongue—but then came that awful room papered with naked women and obscene letters. The bomb fit neatly under the middle pillow of the couch, right below Miss April for 1970. In what kind of society was it easier to find a full-color photograph of a woman’s private parts than a Bible? A diseased society, to be sure. Only the Parousia could cure it—Christ’s Second Coming, his thousand-year sojourn in the New Jerusalem.

Rain drumming against his eyepatch, Billy strode down the wharf and peered, Godlike, into his flock’s little worlds. Cabin cruisers were paradoxical, wholly private when at sea yet here with their sterns backed into port they baldly displayed a thousand intimacies—Oreo cookie package on the table, paperback Frank Sinatra biography on the bunk, Instamatic camera atop the refrigerator. Reaching Pentecost, her white hull shining like the ramparts of the New Jerusalem, Billy scrambled aboard, steadying himself on the three-hundred-dollar marlin rod he’d fixed to the transom. What did it mean to have great wealth? It meant you owned a yacht and a big house. It meant your church was the largest building in Ocean City. It meant…nothing.

The Lord tested Revelationists more severely than he did other believers. If a Revelationist’s pregnant wife died delivering a premature baby, the ordeal did not end there. No, for Billy’s infant son had been subsequently placed in an incubator, where the supplementary oxygen had choked the undeveloped blood vessels in his eyes; his son had been scarred by air. When Billy first heard that one-day-old Timothy would never see, he had reeled with the incredulity and outrage of Job, puncturing the delivery room’s plasterboard wall with his bare fist, penetrating all the way to the nursery itself.

No sooner had he entered the cabin when dear old Mrs. Foster sashayed over, waving a supermarket tabloid called Midnight Moon in his face. “The coming thing,” she exclaimed, pointing to an article about a British zoo that trained pets for visually impaired children. In the accompanying photograph, a harnessed chimpanzee led a blind girl across a playground. “By the time Timothy’s three, he’ll be ready for a seeing-eye ape,” she insisted. A smile spread across her flat face, its skin brown and crinkled like a used tea bag. “Orangutans are the cheapest, but the chimps are smarter and easier to care for.”

“I appreciate your concern,” said Billy impatiently, “but this isn’t for Christian children.” Mrs. Foster was a good nurse, a devout Revelationist, but she lacked discretion.

“Yes. Do that.” Billy stalked off, certain the Lord would forgive him his snappishness with Mrs. Foster. He hadn’t seen Timothy since lunch.

Creeping into the forward stateroom, he approached the little berth. Two-year-olds slept so cleanly, not like men with their snores and tossings, their foul dreams. Gently, he brushed Timothy’s blanket, his stuffed bunny, his diapered rump pushing up from the mattress like a cabbage. What a wonderfully squishy world the Lord had made. If only Barbara…but she was seeing it, she was.

Bending over the berth, Billy kissed his son’s nape. A mere seventy years or so, and Timothy’s tribulation would be over. There was no blindness in heaven. Eternity knew nothing of retrolental fibroplasia.

He went to the wheelhouse and took the broken binoculars from their place between his Bible and his nautical charts. During a temper tantrum, Timothy had shattered the lens in the left-hand barrel. Billy turned the binoculars upside down, aligning its functional eye with his own, and focused on the Institute, cloaked in drizzle and fog. A light burned in a second-floor window. A late worker, most likely. Billy shut his good eye and propped his forehead against the binoculars. So: there would be a boundary to cross after all, that terrible seam along which the laws of God and the ordinances of men parted like halves of the Red Sea. A Revelationist always knew which waves to ride, however turbulent and high.

He yanked the detonator from his sheepskin coat. On both sides of the wharf, his congregation’s yachts churned across the darkening bay.

Over a year had passed since Billy had tried making his deal with God. It had seemed so reasonable, so symmetrical. I’ll destroy one of my eyes, God, and then you’ll give Timothy back one of his. That’s all I ask, an eye for an eye.

Billy had violated himself with Timothy’s christening spoon. Infection followed, then surgery. Afterward, Billy had decided against a glass eye. He preferred the feeling of a hole inside himself, a gap reifying the incompleteness of his faith.

But God was not to be trifled with. God did not make deals. The heavenly father, offended, had given the earthly father a second, well-deserved cross to bear, a phantom eye spelling out the exact duties of a believer. Smite this sperm bank, Billy Milk, remove it from my creation, even if…

Like a seraph’s silent whisper the radio command leapt from the wheelhouse to the Institute. The explosion was thunderous and majestic, filling the night with blast-wave overpressures and, if Billy heard correctly, appreciative cheers from heaven. His phantom eye showed him the glorious fruits of it, the Playboy centerfolds and Penthouse letters bursting into flame, the tainted semen turning to steam. The building’s hot guts, its pipes, cables, ducts, and girders, rained down as nameless smoldering shapes.

The thorns that grew on the path of righteousness did not cut a Revelationist’s feet only; no, sometimes they sliced his brow, and sometimes they slashed through his eyepatch and lodged in his brain. Billy determined to inspect the rubble not from guilt—a crusade was not a crime—but only because after you enacted God’s will, you were obliged to redeem whoever inhabited the aftermath.

The burning clinic pulsed hotly against his smooth-shaven cheeks as he marched down the wharf and jumped onto the sand. He removed his sheepskin coat, resting it on his shoulder like a soft cross. Ashes swarmed everywhere, a million airborne holes.

The black man was upright, encircled by charred fragments of wall rising from the beach like grave markers. His posture was most peculiar. Had he been pounded into the ground? Either that, or…

The apocryphal climax of Daniel blazed across Billy’s inner vision. The two lustful elders falsely accusing Susanna of lying with a young lover…their treachery unmasked…Daniel demanding they be cut in two.

A sharp section of wall had struck the black man’s abdomen, bisecting him and simultaneously pinching the wound shut, sealing his torso as if it were a piece of ravioli. “Are you a donor?” Billy asked. What terrible things God’s servants were called upon to behold. “‘For even now the angel hath received the sentence of God to cut thee in two,’” Billy quoted somberly. People were wrong about angels. Angels were not androgynous choirmasters with lutes and wings. Angels spread judgment and doom.

“Gahhh…” The man’s jaw flapped up and down like a grouper’s. A strained articulation, but it definitely sounded like yes.

“Were you contributing, brother?” The smoke sucked tears from Billy’s good eye. The fire bellowed like the Red Dragon of the Revelation.

“Urggg…” The sinner surveyed his divided self with a combination of horror and incredulity. He was losing only a little blood: a surprisingly neat mutilation. He nodded.

The donor was opening up now. Relief blossomed on his face as the heavy bleeding started. Sinful flesh on the outside, and now his sinful colon spilled forth, now his sinful liver. Had he found Jesus? It seemed so—Billy could feel it: the donor had lost his seed and gained his soul.

A foulness clawed the air as the saved man’s bowels gave up their contents, and suddenly he was dead.

Marcus Bass was right, Murray decided as he piloted his Saab down Ventnor Avenue—you didn’t know you wanted certain things until they became yours. His cell cluster slept beside him, her ectogenesis machine constrained by a seat belt. He whistled a Fiddler on the Roof medley. Matchmaker, matchmaker. If I were a rich man. He slapped his palm joyfully against the steering wheel. Inverse parthenogenesis did wonderful things for you; it hit you like music, like an idea, like a kiss from God.

Rain spritzed out of the sky. Murray turned on the wipers. The blades sketched ugly muddy streaks on the windshield. He didn’t care. The glorious day kept rushing at him, bright memories refracted through the bell jar of his newfound fatherhood. Regular infant formula, is that what Dr. Bass had said? Yes, yes, all it could eat, a hundred meals a day for a ravenous placenta.

As he entered Margate, an explosion shattered the dusk. He pulled over, stopping by a boarded-up drugstore. Had his cell cluster heard the blast? Was she frightened? He got out. A red glow filled the seaward sky like a misplaced sunset. Undoubtedly this disaster mattered to someone, to lots of people, but not to him, not to a man with an embryo.

Driving away, Murray patted the jar. The glass vibrated with the comforting thumps of the oxygenation process. Hush, little girl. Don’t be afraid. Pop’s here.

He maneuvered through the bleak urban battlefield called Atlantic City, then headed over the bridge. Across the inlet lay the northern arm of the famous Boardwalk, at one time a prestigious site for vacations, but then had come jet travel and cosmopolitanism, and the wealthy had begun summering on the Riviera. There was talk now of resurrecting the place through Las Vegas-style casinos. Legalized gambling, people said, would save Atlantic City.

Lured by the full moon, waves grabbed at the rocks along Brigantine Point, as if trying to gain purchase. Harsh winds wrapped around Murray’s lighthouse, peeling a shingle from the cottage roof, hurling it across the bay. Hunching over his embryo to shield her from the rain, he ran into the cottage and set the womb beside his propane-gas heater.

Fatherhood changes you for the better, Murray realized. In the old days, he’d always climbed the tower at a measured pace, but now he took the steps two at a time. And this too was his embryo’s doing: filling the tank to the brim, raising the clockwork lens, and igniting the four concentric wicks—Baruch atah Adonai elohanu melech ha-olam…“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has taught us the way of holiness through the Mitzvot, and enjoined upon us the kindling of the Sabbath light.” Always the flame bedazzled him. How like a living creature it was, a high-strung pet sharing his habitat, barely tolerating his presence. He wound the lens motor and, as the cut-glass prisms threw twirling spiderwebs on the floor, looked south. A fire raged somewhere near the Preservation Institute.

Heart pounding, he descended to the cottage and got his embryo, bringing her up the helix of stairs and setting her before the beacon’s nourishing warmth. As the fifty-pound lead piston glided downward, forcing kerosene into the wick chamber, the glow filled the whole room and turned the jar into a golden ark. It would be tough having a baby around. How would he know when to start feeding her? When to stop? More wick. The beam shot from the tower. He tracked the light as it passed over the bay, skewering fog, melding with stars; look here, the light said to all the ships at sea, look at me, Murray the hermit and his beautiful embryo. See: inverse parthenogenesis has come to Atlantic City, and I thought you all should know.

Piloting his cabin cruiser away from the burning sperm bank, Billy Milk watched as God calmed the bay and sucked the storm clouds up into heaven. Pentecost retreated under a clear sky. The northern shore shimmered with the fall of the Preservation Institute. All across the peninsula, fire sirens screamed—machines in pain, technology judged and punished.

Somebody had turned on the old Brigantine Lighthouse. An empty gesture—the Coast Guard beacon on Absecon Island had ten times the intensity and range. Yet the Brigantine lamp burned brightly, a candle blazing upon an altar of rock.

The December stars were like the lights of a great city. Rome, Damascus, Antioch. But the greatest city of them all had been foretold in the Book of Revelation. The New Jerusalem, whose glow was like a jasper stone’s.

What did it mean to have great wealth? It meant you could obtain things. A yacht, a mansion, a church, perhaps even…a city? Yes. Quite so. A city. Between his publishing royalties and his seminar profits, his stocks and his real estate, Billy could actually build the New Jerusalem. Not as a bargaining chip—God did not make deals…but surely Jesus would be more inclined to return if proper accommodations awaited him, a metropolis shaped to biblical specifications. The thought stunned Billy. Might he actually trigger the Second Coming?

Slowly, ever so slowly, his phantom eye painted the New Jerusalem across the speckled sky, the seven bejeweled foundations, the twelve gates of pearl, the sparkling river in which Christ would baptize the entire world. Tonight Billy had merely saved a sinner and purged a clinic, but one day…one day he would raise up God’s city and lure down God’s son! Oh, yes, he could practically hear the Savior’s booming voice, feel his fiery breath, see his torn feet walking golden streets commissioned by Billy himself!

Phantom eyes cannot be closed, and cities cannot rise until their sites are cleared. What ground might prove holy enough? A once wicked place, a place whose raw festering sins had been cauterized by Jehovah’s hot sword?

A battle was coming, then. Babylon besieged and sacked. Billy’s brain shook with it, the smoke of her burning, the cries of her slain citizens. Your typical denominational Protestant could never face it. Every Sunday millions of them sat in their pews staring at Bibles, refusing to confront the final book, but there it was, in every tepid little Episcopalian and Methodist church: the Revelation to Saint John, that compendium of apocalypse and slaughter, of blood-robed armies marching on Babylon, of sinners cast into the lake of fire and crushed in the winepress of the wrath of God. But Billy’s Revelationists could face it. Oh, yes, oh, yes…

Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city, for in one hour is thy judgment come!

The Brigantine beacon flared brighter than ever as Billy brought Pentecost about and headed for the open sea.

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2
♦	♦	♦

Because the mere presence of his embryo brought Murray great joy, he decided to keep her in his bedroom, right on the dresser next to the Instamatic photo of Pop and him riding the now defunct merry-go-round on Steel Pier. Every evening, the minute he got home from Photorama, he would dash up to the glass womb with the eagerness of a twelve-year-old boy visiting his electric trains. Staring at his developing baby through her amniotic sac felt like an invasion of her privacy—but did not parenthood of any kind ultimately invade its object’s privacy? And so he watched, a voyeur of ontogeny.

From Stephen Lambert’s Evolution in Action, Murray had learned ontogeny did not really “recapitulate phylogeny,” that is, there was no appearance in utero of adult forms from other phyla. Nevertheless, his embryo had a sense of history about her. If only Pop could have been there. Look, Phil Katz would have said, just look at my little tsatske growing up. See, she’s a herring. Now a turtle. About now we should have…I was right, Murray, an anthropoid ape! Hey, she’s a disc jockey already. What’s the next stage? A Neanderthal, I should imagine. Yep, right on schedule. Look, a high-school dropout, we’ve got. A lawyer, Mur. She gets better all the time. And now—am I right?—yes, she’s finished. All done. A Jew.

Unfortunately, Angel’s Eye was a conspicuous and alluring installation, forever attracting bored teenagers from town and nosy adults from the Brigantine Yacht Club. Whenever he was away, serving Photorama customers or running to the Stop and Shop for a stack of Swanson frozen TV dinners, Murray was haunted by images of goonish intruders peering through his bedroom window, plotting to steal the strange machine on the dresser.

He decided she’d be safer in his laundry room, and so one frigid February morning he drove to Children’s Universe and purchased a hundred-and-fifty-dollar crib, the Malibu Natural Babybunk, complete with hardwood endboards, a mobile of plastic geese imported from Sweden, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s highest rating. After assembling the crib and the mobile, he set the machine on the mattress, then wedged the whole affair between the washer and the drying rack. He felt better. He’d done right. His baby would mature in a secluded and tropical world, its soapy air warmed by the sultry pulse of his electric heater as it dried his clothes and bedding.

As it happened, the day Murray relocated the machine was also the day Georgina Sparks came lumbering up the path to Angel’s Eye, laden with a U.S. Army backpack, dressed in a baggy yellow T-shirt asserting that MEN HAVE UTERUS ENVY, and pushing a rusted and spavined bicycle. At first he didn’t recognize her. Only after focusing on her pregnancy, which bulked before her like an ectogenesis machine, did he recall the friendly lesbian from the Preservation Institute.

“See?” she said, proudly extending her occupied womb. “I brought it off. Five months down, four to go, and then—pop!—my very own marine biologist.”

“You look great,” he said admiringly. She did: the second trimester, with its bright complexion and ripe contours.

“You weren’t kidding, you really run this thing.” Georgina spun toward the lighthouse tower, making her long raven hair swirl. “How very phallic. Can I watch you fire it up?”

“Tonight we’ll commemorate the wreck of the Preservation Institute. You ask me, it was those Revelationist idiots who bombed the place. Hey, wow—you’ve got your own private ocean here.” Murray followed as Georgina wheeled her bike past the tower and headed for the point. “Weird, isn’t it?” she said. “If I’d tried picking up my semen a day later, it would’ve been blasted halfway across South Jersey, and I wouldn’t be having this particular baby. Which to my mind raises all sorts of cosmic questions, such as how did you end up being the person you are instead of, I don’t know, some turkey who got killed in the Franco-Prussian War?”

Murray grabbed the bike seat, jerking Georgina to a halt. “Somebody blew up the Institute?”

She removed her backpack and pulled out a tattered newspaper clipping. “I could tell you’re a person who doesn’t keep track of the outside world. Here…”

BABY BANK ABORTED, ran the headline. “Longport, New Jersey,” Murray read. “Police report that a homemade bomb has destroyed a sperm bank here, killing a forty-one-year-old marine biologist and leveling…”

Was his reaction at all reasonable? Had the bomb in fact been meant for his embryo?

He kept reading. The First Ocean City Church of Saint John’s Vision was cited as a possible suspect, but an indictment seemed unlikely, the case against the protesters being entirely circumstantial. Dr. Gabriel Frostig, interviewed, praised the University of Pennsylvania for offering the Institute a new home, then went on to lament that a valuable piece of technology, the world’s only prototype ectogenesis machine, had been vaporized by the explosion.

Vaporized. Good news, Murray realized. Five months ago he’d stolen a glass womb, now suddenly he was just another bookworm with a locked laundry room. Off the hook. Saved. Except he couldn’t enjoy it. BABY BANK ABORTED. Somebody was out to get his child…

He read on. Shock and outrage welled up in him. The murdered biologist of paragraph one was Marcus Bass. He checked and rechecked. Yes, Marcus Bass, whose four boys, sandwiched in his wallet, could all swim.

“Dinner,” he croaked. Would any good be served by telling Georgina her fetus’s father was dead?

No. None at all. “You want to stay for dinner? I have spaghetti but no wine.”

“I don’t drink these days.” Georgina patted her biologist. “The pregnancy.”

That night he made them an entirely dreadful meal, the spaghetti so overcooked it broke under its own weight, the salad soggy and self-contradictory, part Greek, part tuna. Georgina liked it, or so she said, and subsequently there were other dinners, two or three every week. In Murray, she’d clearly found the ideal audience—for her pregnancy, for her crazy interventionist theories of child-rearing (every baby a latent genius), for her grandiose questions about human existence. She was a non-practicing Catholic and a dabbler in feminist paganism. She was a dreamer and a pragmatist, a hardheaded mystic who used numerology to find her perpetually misplaced keys and pyramidology to keep her Swiss Army knife sharp. She covered her bases. For Georgina Sparks, a brilliant child was at once something you calculated into existence through preschool stimulation and something you allowed to happen through cosmic openness. Don’t attempt parenthood before placing both cognitive psychology and the Spirit of Absolute Being in your camp.

After each dinner, Murray, Georgina, and Murray’s cat Spinoza would sit on the lighthouse walkway watching sailboats and Revelationist cabin cruisers glide across the bay.

“I have a present for you,” she said one evening as the fading sun marbled the sky with reds and purples. She opened her backpack and removed a set of novelty condoms from Smitty’s Smile Shop, the Boardwalk emporium she managed, their wrappers emblazoned with portraits of famous discredited clerics: William Ashley Sunday, Charles Edward Coughlin—collect all twenty-six. Murray was touched. Once, before he even knew Georgina, he’d bought a pornographic candle at Smitty’s, a birthday gift for Pop, who collected such things. Georgina’s life was measured out in paraffin penises, whoopie cushions, latex dog vomit, and windup chattering teeth. She spoke often of getting into real estate. The town was changing, she would note. The casinos were coming. “You got a girlfriend?”

“I know the feeling.” Georgina stood up, her pregnancy eclipsing the moon. She was in her seventh month, Murray in his eighth. “I was nuts about Laurie, I really was—but, Jesus, so noncosmic. I mean, get dinner on the table at six o’clock or the world will end.”

Murray contemplated an Aimee Semple McPherson condom. “In college I slept with quite a few dental hygiene majors. What I really want these days is a child.”

“You think it would be wrong for me to adopt a baby, raising it all by myself and everything?”

Murray started toward the tower stairs. Good old Georgina. “In my laundry room there’s something that’ll interest you.”

Surrounded by glass, tethered to bottles, sitting fast asleep in her crib, Murray’s fetus looked less like a baby-in-progress than like one of the toys she would play with once she arrived.

The glow of the naked light bulb bounced off the bell jar, speckling the fetus’s head with stars. Such a face, Murray thought, all flushed and puffy like an overripe plum. “What does it look like?”

“Correct.” Murray tapped the nearest bottle, abrim with his own blood. “My fetus.” He’d followed Marcus Bass’s instructions exactly, dropping by Brigantine Fire Station No. 2 several times a week and eventually earning sufficient trust among the three paramedics—Rodney Balthazar, Herb Melchior, Freddie Caspar—not only to avail himself of their transfusion rig but to be included in their poker game. “Female.”

“Alive and developing. I stole it the day we met.” The oxygen pump chugged soothingly. “The semen was mine—nobody knows where the ovum came from. Inverse parthenogenesis.”

Instantly Georgina’s dormant Catholicism awoke. Crossing herself, she whispered “Mother of God” and, quavering with awe, approached the crib. “Wow—I knew God had eggs, I just knew it.” She grasped the teething rail and took a deep Yogic breath. “You know what we’re looking at? We’re looking at one of those times when God herself comes barging into human history and gets things cracking.”

“Not God God, I mean GOD God. The God beyond God.” Georgina splayed her fingers, ticking off her pantheon. “The Spirit of Absolute Being, the World Mother, the Wisdom Goddess, the Overmind, the Primal Hermaphrodite.”

“Listen, there’s no way to account for an event like this without bringing in God. This child has a mission. This girl has been sent!”

“No, there are other explanations, Georgina. A God hypothesis is going too far.”

“Growing a baby in your jism—in a bell jar—you think that’s not going far? You’ve already gone far, Mur.” Georgina wobbled pregnantly around the room, pounding piles of dirty laundry. “A virgin conception—sensational! Ever see The Greatest Story Ever Told? Jewish people probably didn’t catch it. John Wayne’s the centurion, right, and he gets up on the Mount of Skulls and he says, ‘Truly this man was the son of God.’ The son—and now the other shoe has dropped. Just sensational!”

“We’ve got to tell the world about this! We’ve got to telegram the Pope! First the son, now the daughter! Get it?”

Now the daughter. God’s daughter. Murray cringed. He didn’t believe in God, but he didn’t believe some joker had put an egg in his donation either. “The Pope? The Pope? I don’t want to tell anybody, I’m sorry I even told you. Baby bank aborted—remember? Whatever’s going on, somebody almost killed her. Already she has enemies. Enemies, Georgina.”

As she usually did about this time of day, the fetus woke up, yawned, and flailed her stubby arms.

“Hmm,” said Georgina at last, absently harvesting socks from the drying rack and pairing them up. “Mur, you’re absolutely right—the Mount of Skulls and all that. Jesus Christ’s very own sister would certainly have to watch her step, at least till she figured out her mission.”

Murray’s heartburn returned, a fire-breathing worm in his windpipe. “She’s not Jesus’ sister.”

“Half sister.” Georgina slammed her palm on the washer, startling the fetus. “Hey, friend, your little advent is safe with me. As far as I’m concerned, she’s just the kid down the street, she’s never even heard of God. Got a name picked out?”

On the morning of Murray’s fourth day at Newark Senior High she’d suddenly appeared on his bus, Julie Dearing, wealthy and spoiled—a Protestant princess, Pop would have called her—with a face so gorgeous it could have started a broken clock and a body that should not have been permitted. She had dropped her geography book in the aisle. Murray had picked it up. The relationship never got any deeper.

“Julie.” Murray pointed to his fetus’s opulent black hair. “Her name’s Julie.”

“Nice. You know, you’ve got a golden opportunity here, with Julie out in the open like this. You can begin her preschool education. Talk to her through the glass, Mur. Play music. Show her some flash cards.”

“Yeah. Pictures of presidents. Alphabet letters. And fix up this place, will you? It looks like an outhouse. I want to see animals on these walls. Bright colors. This mobile’s a step in the right direction.”

“Sure,” said Murray. “Gotcha. Animals.” A smile appeared on Julie’s face—ethereal, there and not there, like a cat weaving through the dusk. What enormous potential for intermittent happiness the world offered, he thought. Aberrant or not, this was the child that was his, no other, this one, whether she came from a cabbage patch, the Overmind, or the brow of Zeus. His. “I’m scared, Georgina. Baby bank aborted. I want her to have a life.”

Bong, bong, bong, came the glassy cadence from the laundry room, like a crystalline clock tolling the hour. They were dining by candlelight, all the electricity between Brigantine and Margate having succumbed to a thunderstorm. Georgina looked up from her plate and smiled, a noose of spaghetti dangling from her mouth. “Something is on the wing,” she said. The storm was blowing out to sea; the world seemed scrubbed, the air squeaky clean. “Wing of angel.” Georgina the neo-Catholic. “Wing of phoenix.” Georgina the pagan priestess.

Tree branches ticked against the kitchen window. Murray retrieved the Coleman lantern from the pantry and ignited the two testicle-shaped mantles. Georgina’s swollen belly, so tense and electric beneath her artsy tie-dye smock, bumped against him as together they marched to the laundry room.

And there she was, caught in the Coleman’s roaring glow, an aborning baby, battering the glass with her tight little fist. Her sac had ripped, filling the jar to belly depth with amniotic fluid. Hard-edged shadows played across her resolute face. Condensed breath drifted through the machine, so that Julie’s efforts to enter the earth suggested the mute gyrations of a creature in a dream. A fissure appeared, then a fretwork of cracks.

“Julie, no!” Murray lurched forward. The jar exploded like a teapot under a hammer, glass fragments hailing against the washer, the amniotic fluid gushing onto the mattress. “Julie!”

He lifted his wet, squalling baby from the broken womb, and, sliding her over the teething rail, held her to his breast, her cut leaking onto his white wool sweater. The more blood he saw, the happier he felt. His child had a heart. A real heart, like any other baby’s, not a ghostly spark, not a supernatural vibration, but a pumping lump of flesh. She was a child, an incipient person, somebody you could take to an ice-cream parlor or a Nets game.

The umbilical cord, he saw, still joined her navel to the placenta. She was not entirely born. But now here came Georgina, Swiss Army knife in hand, cutting the funiculus and tying it off with the dexterity of a boatswain.

“We did it, Mur. A natural childbirth.” She yanked a pillow case from the drying rack and pressed a corner against Julie’s snake-shaped gash. “Nice Julie, sweet Julie.” The baby’s squalling subsided into a series of hiccuplike pouts. “It’s just a scratch, Julie, honey.”

Murray felt embarrassed to be crying this much, but there he was, awash in the arrival of his firstborn. Hefting the dense wriggling bundle, he realized mass was an art form, it could approach perfection: Julie’s every gram was correct.

“Hello,” he rasped, as if she’d just called him up on the telephone. His hugs should have fractured a bone or two, but love, he sensed, had a high tensile strength; the harder he squeezed, the calmer the creature became. “Hello, hello.”

“You’ll need a pediatrician,” said Georgina. “I’ll tell Dr. Spalos to expect your call.”

“So she can get a driver’s license and stuff. Don’t worry, I’ve been through all this with my midwife. In the absence of an attending physician, there’s a form you fill out. Mail it to Trenton, Office of Vital Records, along with the filing fee. Three bucks.”

He looked at Julie. Her wound had stopped flowing; the blood on her cheeks was dry. When he pressed his face toward hers, the air rushing from her lungs pushed her mouth into a facsimile of joy.

Georgina’s marine biologist arrived exactly thirty days after Murray’s alleged deity—a female marine biologist, her skin the color of espresso beans, a wiry and spirited little bastard who, Murray argued, looked exactly like Montgomery Clift. Together the new parents went to the registrar in the Great Egg Township Department of Health and obtained the necessary filing forms.

That a Spirit of Absolute Being or a World Mother or a Primal Hermaphrodite may have influenced Julie’s conception did not stop Murray from worrying about his parenting abilities. Her runny nose, for example. Dr. Spalos kept saying she’d outgrow it. But when? Then there was the milk question. The two dozen parenting books Murray had exhumed at garage sales and flea markets were unanimous in censuring mothers who didn’t breastfeed. Every time Murray mixed up a new batch of Similac he read the label, wishing the ingredients sounded more like food and less like the formula for Tupperware.

On clear nights, he and Georgina always fed their infants on the lighthouse walkway.

“Not a chance of it, Mur.” Georgina transferred Phoebe from one nipple to the other. “Julie was sent. The age of cosmic harmony and synergistic convergence is just around the corner.”

“You’re guessing.” Murray started Julie on a second bottle. What an earnest little sucker she was. Her slurpy rhythms synchronized with the incoming tide. “Nobody knows where that egg came from.”

Whenever Georgina dreamed up some bizarre new project for fattening Phoebe’s brain cells—a carnival, a street fair, a Bicentennial parade—Murray and Julie went along. “They’re putting up a casino on Arkansas Avenue,” Georgina would say. “I think the girls should see what girders and jackhammers and all that shit look like, don’t you?” And so they were off to the Boardwalk, watching a great iron ball swoop through the sky like a BB from heaven and bash down the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in preparation for Caesar’s Palace. Or: “Trains, Mur! Noise, smells, movement, adventures starting—trains have it all!” And so they drove to Murray’s hometown of Newark and toured the terminal, letting their infants soak up the presumably enriching chaos.

The Primal Hermaphrodite—whoever—did not spare Murray the dark side of parenthood. Julie’s dirty diapers were no more appealing than any other baby’s, her ear infections no less frequent, her cries in the night no less piercing and unfair. Often he felt as if his life had been stolen from him. Hermeneutics of the Ordinary was a lost cause, not one sentence added since Julie’s birth. Day-care helped, saved Murray’s sanity in fact—Farmer Brown’s Garden, the best in the business, according to Georgina, who sent Phoebe there three afternoons a week—though the women who ran the place made him uneasy. They were all swooners and gushers, and of course the Katz child, so cute and precocious, gave them plenty to swoon and gush about.

Precocious. Murray couldn’t deny it. Only five days after her birth, Julie had rolled over in her crib. By Yom Kippur she was tooling around the cottage on hands and knees. She uttered her first word, Pop, at a mere twenty weeks. By eight months she could walk upright, spine straight, left arm swinging back as the right leg went forward, an achievement that proved particularly disturbing to Murray when in the middle of her second year he noticed that among the several media on which she walked—sand, eel grass, the cottage floor—was the Atlantic Ocean.

It was really happening. They’d come for their evening swim, and now, damn, there she was, skipping across Absecon Inlet.

“Julie, no!” He ran to the shore and waded into the shallows. A show-off he could handle, even a prodigy. “Don’t do that.” But not this crap.

She stopped. The water sparkled in the fading sunlight. Murray squinted across the bay. What a marvelous little package she was, standing there with the retreating tide lapping at her shins.

She dove off the bay’s surface and into its depths. Within seconds she reached the shallows, toddling toward him on the weedy bottom. A bit on the chunky side, he realized. Julie was a fast girl with a cookie.

Perhaps he’d imagined it all. Perhaps the aberration lay not in Julie but in the water—an extra infusion of salt, causing super-buoyancy. Still, considering the stakes, considering the baby bank aborters and the Mount of Skulls, even the suggestion of water-walking was intolerable.

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling softly. “I’ll be good, Pop,” his daughter promised.

“I believe there was a lot of salt in the bay this morning,” he hastened to add.

“Don’t kid yourself, Mur. We’re experiencing a major incarnation here. Water-walking? Really? Sensational!” Georgina sucked a pasta strand through the O of her lips. “Let’s do the Philly Zoo tomorrow.”

“I’m not a zoo person.” Murray shook the Parmesan cheese, the clumps rattling around like pebbles in a maraca.

But the zoo went perfectly. Murray identified all the animals for Julie, naming them like Adam, and as she repeated each name in her reedy voice he realized he hadn’t known it was possible to love anyone this much, no one had informed him. A regular girl, he told himself. A fast developer, sure. A water-walker, possibly. But at bottom just a regular little girl.

Later, they went to Fairmount Park for a picnic supper of hot dogs and Georgina’s health salad. “Look at us,” said his friend as evening seeped across the grass, bringing fireflies and cricket songs. “The all-American family. Who’d ever know it’s a hermit, a bastard, a dyke, and a deity? Who’d even—?”

Astonishment cut Georgina off. Julie had tuned in the fireflies, organizing them into constellations. “Go over there,” she said, and the insects made a loop-the-loop. “Twist,” and they formed long gossamer strands, braiding themselves into an airborne tapestry.

Murray’s bowels tightened. Phoebe squealed with delight: a two-year-old female Montgomery Clift, laughing merrily.

“Well, would you look at that!” Georgina squeezed her roll, launching a hunk of wiener into the air. “Absolutely cosmic! Wow!”

“They’re only lightning bugs.” Murray whimpered like a beaten dog. “I should make her stop.”

Julie taught the insects to synchronize their flashes, then grouped them into letters: A, B, C, D…

Georgina scowled. “This reminds me. Er, I don’t want to presume, but…” She grew uncharacteristically shy. “You sure you’re educating Julie properly?”

“Well, it seems only logical to me that Jesus Christ’s sister should be brought up Catholic.”

“Catholic. It served me well enough in my early years. I’ll probably enroll Phoebe in a catechism class.”

“That remains to be seen. Anyway, Julie would probably do best being brought up Catholic. Either that or Protestant—I’m not prejudiced, though it’s a duller religion. Get her in touch with her roots, know what I mean? Put up a Christmas tree. Hide Easter eggs. Kids need roots.”

Offended? Yes, he was. And yet, the next day on his lunch hour, he undertook to explore the terra incognita called Jesus, venturing across town to the Truth and Light Bookstore on Ohio Avenue. God’s putative progeny, he felt, he feared, could tell him something about his Julie.

“May I help you?” asked the clerk, a wispy, elderly woman who reminded Murray of pressed flowers. “Are you one of those Jews?”

“Reverend Milk says that, as the Second Coming gets nearer”—the woman unleashed an iridescent smile—“all you people will start converting to Christianity.”

“That remains to be seen.” Above Murray’s head a painting loomed, a mob of pilgrims swarming over a cross-shaped bridge and sweeping toward a golden, mountainous, fortresslike city captioned The New Jerusalem. “Listen, should I buy an entire Bible, or can I purchase the Jesus material separately?”

Jesus was everywhere. Jesus books, Jesus tracts, Jesus posters, Jesus place mats, coffee mugs, board games, T-shirts, phonograph records, videocassettes. Murray pulled a New Testament from the shelf.

“A King James translation?” The clerk flashed The Good News for Modern Man. “You’ll have an easier time with this one.”

King James. Last month, at Herb Melchior’s yard sale, Murray had unearthed a biography of England’s most literary monarch since Alfred the Great. King James I of England was solid ground, a place to get one’s footing before the leap into Jesus. “No, I’ll take James. How much?”

“To tell you the truth, we’re going out of business. Landlord won’t renew our lease. Know what Resorts International is giving him for this place? Eight hundred thousand dollars. Can you believe it?”

That night Murray plumbed the Gospels. He did not belong here—it felt like going through somebody else’s laundry, like driving somebody else’s car—yet he persisted, turning up one disquieting moment after another.

He found an attempt on the infant’s life: And Herod sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem and all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.

Murray closed his King James. This paradoxical personality whose life was synonymous with his mission, this passive-aggressive prophet who’d gotten himself tortured to death before his thirty-third birthday, this Jew who, despite his subsequent rematerialization, never saw his poor bewildered parents again—was Julie really this man’s half sister?

No, no, Georgina and the New Testament aside, the whole notion was preposterous.

And, indeed, for many months afterward, nothing remotely supernatural happened in southeastern New Jersey.

Like most members of his species, Spinoza the cat was boastful of his hunting prowess—aren’t you proud of me, isn’t it great being on top of a food chain?—but whereas inland cats stalked mice and squirrels, Spinoza specialized in the bounty of the sea. “What’s that?” demanded Julie, age four, as Spinoza dashed into the cottage one frigid February afternoon, a half-dead something in his jaws.

“A crab,” Murray explained. Spinoza carried the carcass to the fireplace as if intending to roast it and dropped it upside down on the hearth. “It’s dead.”

Pinning the crab’s corpse under his paw, Spinoza chewed on a leg. “Get away!” Murray shouted, and the cat, spooked, shaped himself into an oblong of fur and scurried off, leaving the inverted corpse to warm by the fire.

Fist crammed with crayons, Julie ran to the hearth. “I don’t want it to be dead.”

A crab leg twitched like a thistle in the wind. Giggling, Julie tickled the creature with her purple crayon. Soon all eight legs were in motion, rowing back and forth.

But the crab had regained the earth. It stuck out a great claw and levered itself upright. Instinctively, Murray turned. Spinoza was cranking himself down like a catapult’s arm, making ready to pounce. Murray scooped up the cat and held him wriggling and hissing against his sweater.

With uncanny speed the crab scuttled forward and, as Julie opened the door, jumped onto the front porch, Spinoza howling all the while, enraged by this sudden reversal of the natural order.

The parade—crab, little girl, man with cat—marched down the jetty. After ascending the highest rock, the crab pushed off with all eight legs and dove into the bay.

“Don’t ever do that again!” Murray yelled. Spinoza wrested free and, running to the water, began pacing the shore and meowing maniacally. “You hear me?” And Herod sent forth and slew all the children… What a hateful face Julie wore, all pleased and beaming, cocksure, catproud. “Not ever!”

They recoiled simultaneously. He’d never done such a thing before, smacking her cheek like that. Her skin reddened, the blotch growing like spilled tomato juice.

“No more of this—this stuff, Julie. No more water-walking, no more firefly alphabets, none of it. They’re just waiting for you to do things like this, they’re just waiting.”

“Why’d you hit me?” Her tears ran in all directions, detoured by her nose.

“Take me away?” Julie rubbed her cheek as if nursing a toothache. “Take me away?”

He moved forward, offering whatever of himself she might choose to smack. She pounded on his chest, and the transition to hugging happened quickly, like a change of figures in a waltz.

“She doesn’t even whisper to me. I listen, but she doesn’t talk. It’s not fair.”

God didn’t talk. The best news he’d heard since Gabriel Frostig announced his embryo. “Look, Julie, it’s good she doesn’t talk. God asks her children to do crazy things. It’s good she doesn’t whisper. Understand?”

A profound weariness pressed upon Murray. “Yes. Right. His friends. It’s good God doesn’t whisper.”

Exhaustion—and what else moved through him as they stood silently together on the jetty? A justifiable self-pity, he decided. Other fathers worried about getting their girls off drugs. Out of jail. Into Princeton. But Murray Jacob Katz alone had to keep his daughter from ending up on that infamous hill where all those who could fix dead crabs were eventually sent.

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3
♦	♦	♦

In the beginning your mother created the heavens and the earth. “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place,” your mother had said.

Deeper, still deeper, you spiral toward the bay floor, baptizing yourself in the great gathered sea called the Atlantic, heading for your underwater cave and its secret petting zoo. Bubbles tickle your cheeks. Currents comb your hair. Joyously you take a big bite of oxygen from Absecon Inlet—the one miracle you’ve managed to talk Pop into letting you keep.

“What if I fall in the bay with a rock tied to me?” you asked him. “Can I breathe the water?”

Your father frowned so fiercely his eyebrows met. “Well, I suppose you’d have to. However, Julie, it’s very unlikely you’d ever fall in the bay with a rock tied to you.”

“If I can breathe water instead of drowning, can I sometimes do it for fun? Oh, please, Pop, I need to see what’s down there.”

For an entire minute he said nothing. Then: “Would it be like holding your breath?”

So you won. You could give yourself gills. As for your other powers, bringing crabs to life and such, Pop remained unbending: you must never use them. The rule is a part of you, slap-carved on your cheek just as the Jewish God had etched the Law on stone.

“I won’t even think about fixing them. Not Ronnie Trimble either, who’s always in this wheelchair.”

You touch bottom. Cool sand gushes between your toes. A gloomy eel, thick and rubbery like a live sausage, bumps your stomach, nipping at the Care Bear bathing suit Pop got you for your birthday.

You loved turning ten, except your mother didn’t send anything, not even a lousy card. Phoebe gave you a sweater with cats prowling all over it. Aunt Georgina showed up with a bunch of neat stuff from the Smile Shop: a squirting carnation, sunglasses with windshield wipers on the lenses, a hat outfitted with a can holder and a plastic straw so you could drink a Coke while riding your bike.

Twisting your body like a seal, you swim into the cave. You hate being chunky—your shape resembles a zucchini and you want to be a carrot. Phoebe is a carrot.

Your petting zoo creeps and wriggles over, eager for strokes and tickles. Casually you tune in their soft thoughts. The flounder is hungry. The starfish wants to have babies. The lobster is frightened in some strange lobstery way.

A year ago, you and Pop sat together on the couch, flipping through a book of famous paintings. In your favorite, “The Birth of Venus,” a woman with long hair the color of Tastykake Pumpkin Pie filling stood on a giant scallop shell. You decided this was how your mother would arrive. Here on the bottom of Absecon Inlet, a giant scallop shell would open and God would climb out, swimming to the surface and asking people, “Do you know where my little girl lives? Julie Katz?” “Oh, yes, she’s waiting for you. Go to the lighthouse on Brigantine Point.” Every night before you fall asleep, the same scene passes behind your eyelids: God appearing at the cottage doorway in a white dress, soaked, dripping, her hair tied back with ribbons of seaweed. “Julie?” “Mom?” “Julie!” “Mom!” Then your mother and father get married, and you all live together in your lighthouse above the petting zoo.

Whiteness flashes on the cave floor. You reach down, poke it with your fingertips. Something hard, buried. You brush the sand away. The more you uncover, you hope, the more there will be to uncover, until at last the scallop’s shell is revealed, and it will open, and out will come…

But no. Not a door to heaven but a naked white face, the kind people bring out at Halloween. An eyeless stare, a lipless grin. You keep digging. It’s all here, every spooky bone. You shiver. Maybe this is a sailor from one of those wrecks Pop is always talking about, somebody who went down with the William Rose or the Lucy II. You squeeze his hand—so rough and hard, like coral. You squeeze tighter. Tighter…

Things have to stay dead. They’re waiting for you to do miracles. If you do miracles, they’ll take you away.

Returning is always tricky. You can’t swim straight up. If the lifeguard spots a little kid out that deep, he’ll go nuts. Instead you cruise along the floor, watching till you see the swimmers’ legs dangling down like the roots of water lilies.

Rising, you break the surface and feel the bright, pounding air on your face. Tourists swarm along the Boardwalk, hopping from casino to casino. At the bottom of the bay, the sun is like somebody else’s mother watching over you—quiet, gentle, never strict—but up here it’s hot and fierce, the way some people think of God. What good is it having God for a mother if she never sends you a birthday card? Why has God stuck you in this place, this filthy old Atlantic City where the grownups spend all their time playing games? It isn’t fair. Phoebe has a mother. Everybody does.

You squint at the dazzling sun and wonder whether, at that moment, God is peering over the edge of heaven and noticing how terrifically her kid can swim.

Before they could graduate fourth grade, Julie and her classmates all had to write essays entitled “My Best Friend.” The problem, of course, was how to talk about Phoebe without landing them both in trouble. “The thing I most enjoy about having Phoebe Sparks for a best friend,” Julie began, “is that she’s a lot of fun to be with.”

Thanks to Phoebe, Julie was growing up skilled at throwing rocks through the windows of Atlantic City’s vacant hotels and sneaking into the swimming pools of its inhabited ones. Within a single month, Phoebe had taught Julie how to smoke cigarettes, spray graffiti on boxcars, fly alphabet kites that spelled out dirty words, and stand on a railroad bridge and launch an arc of pee into the air just like a boy.

“My best friend and I like to sell Girl Scout cookies together,” Julie continued her essay.

The props that figured in so much of their mischief came from Smitty’s Smile Shop. It was a rare evening when Aunt Georgina, who knew how a mother should behave, did not bring home a joy buzzer, fart spray, or something equally fine. “Half orphans like us, we’re always spoiled,” Phoebe noted as Julie beheld her treasures, which Phoebe kept in a saddlebag slung over the wooden stallion they’d stolen from the wrecked merry-go-round on Steel Pier.

“We get what we want. That’s because our parents know they should’ve married somebody.”

“You ever think your father will show up, Phoebe? You know, come walking through the front door one night in time for dinner?”

“I think it all the time. He’s a marine biologist, Mom says. Very smart and brilliant.” Phoebe dredged up a string of firecrackers. “It’s weird, I never saw his picture or anything, but I can still imagine him standing here in his marine uniform, looking through his microscope.”

“Know what I think?” Julie fished out the rubber turd they liked to stick in slot-machine payoff boxes. The machine’s pooping! they would scream, which always drew a crowd. “I think your mother and my father should get married.”

Phoebe freed a firecracker from the pack and stuck it in her mouth like a Marlboro. “Can’t ever happen.”

“Hopscotch and jump rope are a few of the many games my best friend Phoebe and I play together,” Julie wrote.

Two days before her tenth birthday, Phoebe decided to throw herself “an early party, just you and me, Katz,” at the abandoned Deauville Hotel, whose crumbling remains adjoined the slick new casino called Dante’s.

The sunken door on St. James Avenue was only slightly ajar, but skinny Phoebe had no trouble slipping around it. Once inside, she gave the door a hard kick, making a gap so wide both Julie and her A & P grocery bag fit through easily.

The basement was dark and soggy. It smelled like a diaper pail. Phoebe led the way up a groaning staircase to a restaurant called Aku-Aku. Broken glass speckled the floor; grubby white cloths covered the tables; dust lay everywhere like newly fallen snow. Phoebe clunked her mother’s army backpack on the nearest table and pulled out six aluminum cans yoked together with plastic. Julie’s stomach flip-flopped. This wasn’t Coke.

“Free.” Phoebe pulled up a dusty chair and sat. “When you’re a thief, stuff is free.” The mural across the room showed a frowning stone idol rising amid a cluster of palm trees on a South Seas island. Blue waters lapped against sands as clean and white as artificial sweetener. “Let’s go there sometime.” Phoebe peeled off two Buds. “We can’t spend our whole lives in this yucko city.” She ripped open her beer, jamming the circular tab onto her little finger like a ring.

“Good idea,” said Julie. The idol’s eyes were crescent-shaped, like half-moons on the doors of two adjacent outhouses. Its thick lips were puckered in a perfect circle.

Phoebe guzzled half the can. “Bud’s the best, Katz, and that’s the truth. Bud’s the best.” Burping with satisfaction, she dragged her wrist across her foamy smile.

Julie opened her A & P grocery bag and drew out the rest of their feast—a box of pretzels, a bag of chocolate-chip cookies, a big bottle of Diet coke, and four waxily wrapped packages of Tastykake Krumpets.

“Excellent selections. Truly excellent.” Phoebe polished off her beer in three greedy gulps. “Hey, know how I’m feeling right now? Know how? I’m feeling how it feels to be drunk. Try some, kid. Come in here with me.”

Julie pulled the tab from her Bud and took a mouthful. She shuddered. Ants in spiked heels danced on her tongue. Wincing, she swallowed. “Yech.”

“This is the life, eh?” Phoebe laughed like a roomful of morons and tore open her second Bud. “Hey, now that I’m drunk, I can tell you just how weird I think you are, how totally and completely weird. You’re weird, Katz.”

“Last night I heard our parents talking about your godhead. What’s your godhead?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t, though it probably had something to do with her mother.

The Tastykake Krumpets came three to a package: three wondrous bricks of sponge cake mortared together with butterscotch icing. Phoebe ate an entire set in one stupendous bite, washing them down with beer. “Bud’s so good,” she said weakly, limping toward the wall like somebody walking barefoot on a hot sidewalk. “Let’s save those other Krumpets for later.”

“I’m going to be sick.” A dopey smile crossed Phoebe’s face, and she threw up on the South Seas mural.

Julie jumped to her feet. The stone idol wore a beard of puke. “Gosh, Phoebe—you okay?” The restaurant already smelled so bad that Phoebe’s vomit made no difference.

“The beer’s too damn warm, that’s the problem.” Phoebe pulled a tattered cloth from the nearest table and wiped her mouth. “Never drink beer when it’s warm. Now you know.”

Julie wanted to go home, but Phoebe insisted the party had barely begun. Together they explored the Deauville’s upper floors, wandering the rubble-strewn hallways, swallowing dust, inhaling mildew. They shouted “Asshole!” and “Pissface!” into the elevator shafts, giggling at the dirty echoes.

“Let’s split up,” said Phoebe. Standing on one thin brown leg, leaning toward the empty shaft, she looked like a pair of scissors. “You take the high road.”

“More of an adventure that way. Whoever finds the neatest stuff gets to eat the other Krumpets.”

“I don’t know. Something real neat. Meet me in the lobby in half an hour. Bring something neat.”

The rooms were all the same. Glass fragments. Ratty carpets. Bare mattresses, their springs breaking through the stuffing like a complex fracture or some other gross example from the Girl Scouts’ first-aid handbook. The hotel, Julie decided, was like one of Pop’s wrecked ships, William Rose or Lucy II, tossed up on shore. Maybe she’d been wrong about God’s arrival. It could happen as easily on land as underwater. God might even appear in a hotel room—a spray of divine light rushing from a shower nozzle, shaping itself into a mother.

Julie visited the bathrooms, testing them. All the showers were dead. Whenever she flushed a toilet, a great moan arose, as if the Deauville could no longer perform even the simplest functions without pain.

Room 319. She looked in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were as turquoise as Somers Bay; her dark hair was long and wild like the fur on the Wererat of Transylvania suit Aunt Georgina had made Phoebe for Halloween. (Phoebe always went trick-or-treating in the casinos, bringing home scads of quarters.) Her chin was chubby, her forehead bore a thin scar, and her nose, while nicely shaped, turned up slightly, as if she’d been punched by an elf. Her best feature was her skin, which had the smooth brownish gloss of a caramel apple.

She left 319 and went to the gym—at least, that’s what it must have been. Sunbeams slanted through the glass ceiling, igniting the dust specks that swarmed around the parallel bars and broken trapeze. Rings hung down like nooses. Across the room, beyond a shattered wall, lay an empty swimming pool, big as a dinosaur’s grave.

Near the deep end, a man sat on a plastic lounge chair, the kind people brought to the beach.

“Hello.” His friendly voice bounced all over the room. He wore a red terrycloth bathrobe and an equally red swimming suit. Black-lensed sunglasses masked his eyes. “Welcome to my casino.” One hand gripped a glass of iced tea, the other a book. “Don’t be afraid.”

“You must be lost, mister.” If he came toward her, she could easily get away: there was a whole swimming pool between them. “The casino’s next door.”

“That’s the old Dante’s. We’re expanding. Once we knock this hotel down, we’ll have the biggest damn operation on the Boardwalk.” The man’s tongue shot into his tea and curled around an ice cube, drawing it into his mouth. “It’s not easy running a casino, child, so many details—separate accounts for mobsters, bogus fill slips, falsified markers. Silly to pay more taxes than we have to, eh?” He snapped the book shut and pulled a small silver box from his bathrobe pocket. “You may call me Andrew Wyvern. My other names are legion. You’re Julie Katz, aren’t you?”

“From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it. Come here, sweetheart. I have something special for you.”

A delicious warmth rushed over Julie, as if all her petting zoo creatures were rubbing against her. Her mother! He knew her mother! “What message?”

Julie climbed into the shallow end. Rotten wrestling mats filled the pool; cracks and fungus wove through the tiles. She scurried up the far ladder. Mr. Wyvern had a queer sweet smell, like oranges soaked in honey. “What does she look like?” Julie asked. “Is she pretty?”

“Oh, yes, very pretty.” He drummed his large, popcornlike knuckles against the book. Strange title: Malleus Maleficarum. “She’s just the way you imagine her.”

“You got it.” Mr. Wyvern flipped open the silver box. One side was filled with cigarettes, the other was a mirror.

“You’re right. Disgusting habit.” He rubbed the warts on his knuckles. “It stunts my growths.” Sunlight shot across the mirror, and then a peppery mist appeared, like static on a television screen. The mist parted, and there stood a boy in a bathing suit, looking lost and frightened. “Study this boy’s face. One day you’ll meet him.”

“Yes, Julie. Totally blind. The doctors couldn’t cure him. But you could.”

“Yes, I know, and your father’s very smart. However, in this one case, we must make an exception. ‘Ask Julie to cure Timothy’—your mother’s exact words.”

“My mother said that?” It seemed as if the beer were back, scuttling along her tongue and into her throat. “But they’ll take me away.”

“Your mother’s best friend wouldn’t lie to you.” Mr. Wyvern smiled. His teeth looked like shiny new pennies. “One more thing. Don’t tell your father about our little meeting. You know how frantic he can get.” The cigarette case clacked shut. “Don’t forget—the boy’s name is Timothy. Watch for him. Our special secret.”

Julie blinked. Gone. The man, his book, tea, cigarette case—replaced by a wispy white cloud drifting above the lounge chair.

“Mr. Wyvern?” Maybe she’d been dreaming. “Mr. Wyvern?” A soft wind, nothing more.

Julie dashed across the gym and down the stairs, her heart pounding like a basketball being dribbled.

“This amazing thing just happened! I met somebody who knows my mom!” Her friend, Julie noticed, had a bundle of fat red sticks tucked under her arm. “Hey, what’re those?”

“What do you think? Dynamite, Katz, as in kaboom. It’s all over the place. They must be planning to zap this building tomorrow.”

“Dante’s Casino is taking over,” Julie explained. “You’d better return them.”

“Return them? You crazy?” Phoebe slipped the dynamite into the army backpack. “So, how about it? Do I win the Krumpets? You find any neat stuff?”

“Not really.” A ghost. A magic cigarette case. A message from heaven. “No.”

“Look, I’ll give you one of the Krumpets anyway. Maybe we’ll even try some more beer.”

“Because of Phoebe, I got my first taste of pink lemonade,” Julie concluded her fourth-grade essay. “All in all, a person couldn’t ask for a better best friend than Phoebe Sparks.”

Andrew Wyvern baits his hook with a Lumbricus latus, the twenty-four-foot worm hell’s surgeons routinely implant in the intestines of the damned, and tosses his line off Steel Pier. Halfway across Absecon Inlet, the Atlantic caresses his schooner, lifting it up and down on its hawser like a mother rocking her baby. The line tenses, the bobber goes under. Wyvern yanks on the rod, savoring the lovely pizzicato of the hook tearing through the fish’s cheek.

But he is not happy. Everywhere he looks, Christianity is in decline. It no longer burns Giordano Bruno for saying the earth moves past the sun, or Michael Servetus for saying blood moves through the lungs. The slaughter of the Aztecs is a mute memory, the fight against smallpox inoculation a vanished dream, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum a forgotten joke, the Malleus Maleficarum out of print. From pole to pole, Christians are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Just last week, Wyvern heard a Baptist minister say it was wrong to kill.

True, the sect called Revelationism holds some promise, but the devil doesn’t trust it. “Revelationism,” he tells the snagged fish, “is a flash in the pantheon.” No, there must be a new religion, a faith as apocalyptic as Christianity, fierce as Islam, repressive as Hinduism, smug as Buddhism. There must be a church of Julie Katz.

With a sudden tug Wyvern pulls his catch from the water—a hammerhead shark, seaweed trailing from its mouth like dental floss. The walleyed monster thuds onto the pier and flops around as if being pan-broiled.

Unfortunately, God’s daughter is not by nature a proselytizer. Indeed, if her meddling father gets his way, she’ll simply live out her life, never going public. So the plan must be clever, each separate trap—Timothy Milk’s ruined eyes, Beverly Fisk’s purple gown, Bix Constantine’s supermarket tabloid—deployed with cunning and finesse, lest Wyvern’s fondly imagined church remain mired in the future like a Lumbricus inhabiting a sinner’s gut.

Glowing with hope, burning with dreams, the devil pets the shark, enjoying its sandpaper flesh against his palm. Too bad he’s a vegetarian. Shark meat, he has heard, is delicious.

Before becoming a center for gluttony, drinking, and carousing, a place for courting venereal disease and sitting at green felt tables despairing that your next card may put you over twenty-one, Atlantic City was famous as a health spa, a kind of saltwater Lourdes, and in the summer of Julie’s eleventh year it seemed the place had grown nostalgic for its virtuous past. The sun gave off a lubricious warmth that seeped into the gamblers’ bones and made them sleep soundly through the night. Salt-laced breezes wafted into its beneficiaries’ noses and throats, healing inflamed tonsils and curing sinusitis.

Every morning after breakfast, Julie and Phoebe would pedal down to Absecon Beach, their bike baskets jammed with plastic buckets and aluminum lunch boxes, and spend the day constructing elaborate sand castles, complete with battlements made of oyster shells, moats guarded by killer scallops, and secret chambers where fiddler crabs scuttled about like outer-space creatures plotting court intrigues on a distant planet. Such enterprise did not represent a return to innocence. The point, always, was for Queen Zenobia and the Green Enchantress—such were Julie’s and Phoebe’s secret identities—to blow the castles up. Not crudely, not abruptly; this was not a job for Phoebe’s dynamite. Each castle must fall in stages, piece by piece, spire by spire, as if under siege from an army of lobsters equipped with nineteenth-century artillery. Aunt Georgina supplied the necessary technology—the firecrackers, sky rockets, Roman candles, and cherry bombs, unsold items from the illegal fireworks inventory that made the Fourth of July as important to Smitty’s Smile Shop as Christmas was to a toy store.

Julie targeted a buzz bomb to sail over the west rampart of Castle Boadicea—Aunt Georgina had suggested they name their constructions after great women warriors—and hit the main tower. “Chimpanzee? Where?”

But already Phoebe was off, running toward the decaying remains of Central Pier.

An old black woman in a nurse’s uniform lay snoozing on a deck chair, her crinkled body shaded by a red beach umbrella to which a chimpanzee—Phoebe was right, an actual goddamn chimpanzee—was tied by a leather leash. Were the chimp to panic, Julie realized, it would pull the umbrella down like Samson wrecking the Temple of Dagon. (You’re Jewish, Pop told her whenever they finished reading a Bible story. You should know these things.) Arriving on the scene, Phoebe let the chimp sniff her butt and legs, then sniffed him in the same places. She turned to the chimp’s companion, a kid about their age sitting exactly where the shadow of the umbrella met the sunstruck sand: his white body seemed split, half dark, half light. Fuzzy smiles appeared on his face as he talked with Phoebe and pressed his hands into the wet sand. He was blind.

Julie’s intestines kinked up. Blind as Samson. Blind as a rock. Blind as the boy in Andrew Wyvern’s mirror.

Now Phoebe was heading back, chimp following, blind boy in tow like a water skier.

“We can’t play with the monkey,” Phoebe explained, reaching the castle. The chimp smelled like used socks. His fur was matted, his eyes wet and yellow. “He’s on duty,” said Phoebe. “He’s a seeing-eye monkey. This kid comes with him.”

The sand inside Julie’s bathing suit nipped her rear like fleas. No miracles, Pop kept saying. They’d take her away.

“An ape, not a monkey,” the boy insisted. His hair was the color of boiled carrots. Freckles spattered his round face. Sunken and forever twitching, his eyes were like newborn gerbils living in his head. “A chimpanzee.”

Cure him, Mr. Wyvern had said. Your mother wants you to. Your mother whose best friend would never lie to you…

“Arnold?” said Julie. “I thought it was Timothy.” Not the right blind boy? She was off the hook?

“We’re about to blow up a castle,” Phoebe announced proudly. “Roman candles, cherry bombs.”

“Wish I could see fireworks,” said Timothy. “They sound so strange, all fat and mad.”

No miracles. Her mother wanted Timothy to see. They’d take her away. Her mother wanted…if Timothy got his new eyes, would her mother finally show up? Descend from heaven on a shining cloud, her arms jammed with strange and wonderful birthday presents for Julie from every planet in the universe?

A miracle, Julie knew, took more than thinking. You needed objects. Stuff. To resurrect a dead crab, you poked him with your crayons. To cure the blind…

She removed a plug of sand from the main tower and, spitting on it, pushed it against the boy’s left eyelid. Arnold squealed. Timothy drew back. “Hold still!” The boy froze. A soft buzz traveled out of her fingertips and looped around the dead eye.

“Fixing him.” Her pulse doubled, her palms grew damp. “I think.” She pried another plug of sand out of Castle Boadicea and started on the right eye. “Hold still!”

Julie stepped back, studying the boy as if she’d just finished molding him out of Play-Doh. He brushed the wet sand away, running his fingertips over his eyelids. His hair burned with reflected sunlight. He blinked.

Timothy’s eyelids fluttered like hummingbird wings. “What’s going on?” he repeated, teeth chattering.

Arnold, frightened, forced himself between the girls, his fur warm and twitchy against Julie’s bare legs. The boy’s milky gaze traveled back and forth: girl, ape, girl. Nothing showed in his face, not a crumb of understanding. Girl, ape, girl. I’ve failed, thought Julie. Girl, ape, girl. For better or worse, I’ve—

“Who’s Arnold?” Timothy thrust his index finger toward Phoebe. “You’re not, are you? You’re a girl, right?”

“Damn straight,” said Phoebe, dancing crazily like a windup bear from her mom’s store. “God, Julie, you did it! You actually did it! God!” She faced Timothy and tapped his seeing-eye chimp on the head. “Here’s what a monkey looks like, kiddo. God!”

Julie took a large swallow of sea air. Between her thighs she felt an odd pleasurable quaking.

Phoebe kept dancing. “This is amazing stuff, Katz! We can make money with this! How the hell’d you do it?”

Timothy moved his palm along the plane of the Atlantic. “It’s so flat. I thought it was round.” He spun toward Julie and made a quick, cymbal-crashing gesture. “You fixed me, didn’t you?”

A sudden nausea came, hard and steady, like a gambler pumping a slot machine. No more miracles. They’d take her away. “Let me tell you something, Timothy.” She grabbed his bare, sweaty shoulders. “You blab this to anyone, I’ll make you blind again.”

Julie whirled around. She had cured him! She wasn’t Queen Zenobia, she was God’s daughter! The pleasurable throb returned: warm, wondrous shocks fluttering upward from her vagina. For all her darkness, Phoebe seemed suddenly pale. Yes, friend, God’s daughter isn’t somebody to mess with. Trip up God’s daughter, and your body becomes a sack of blisters.

“Hey, you can count on me,” Phoebe said weakly. “It’s all locked in my head and the key’s gone down the toilet.”

Julie took a matchbook from her lunch box, lit the main fuse. She faced her miracle. He’d pulled the front of his bathing trunks away and was staring into the space where his legs met. “I had to see what it looked like,” he said, letting the trunks snap against his belly.

Castle Boadicea exploded like a peacock going nuclear, sparks and flames everywhere, a beautiful sight, perfect. The main tower, implanted with firecrackers, rose two inches into the sky before collapsing. The moat, mined with Saran-wrapped cherry bombs, overspilled its banks in great waves of foam.

“Time to leave, buddy,” said Julie, hooking her finger under Phoebe’s shoulder strap.

“What else can you do?” Phoebe trembled with wonderment. “Can you make people happy?”

Dragging Arnold by his leash, Timothy ran toward Central Pier, clear-eyed and on a straight course. “Mrs. Foster, Mrs. Foster, I’ve got something to tell you!”

Julie took off, Phoebe chuffing behind. Faster and faster they ran, pell-mell across the beach, kicking up sand clouds, and now came the battered steps, now the Boardwalk, now their bikes, Julie’s footfalls echoing all the while through her bones, beating against the low chant playing over and over in her head, never again, never again, never again.

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4
♦	♦	♦

Forked tongue lashing, fangs spurting poison, a dark serpent of despair slithered through the Reverend Billy Milk as he strode down the Boardwalk. Futility, futility, all was futility and God’s shattering silence. Seven, that rhythmic digit from Revelation, seven long years since Billy had been in regular communication with heaven: the seraphs’ voices telling him that he and he alone had been elected to bring Jesus back, the white-robed hosts marching through his skull on their way to set Babylon aflame—the whole vast internal spectacle having culminated in 1984 with proof positive that the seraphs and hosts were indeed messages from Billy’s Lord, not fancies from his brain.

He’d been taking a shower. Mrs. Foster, normally so cautious and prim, pulled the plastic curtain aside, so nothing more substantial than steam now clothed Billy’s sinful flesh. “He’s got eyes!” she screamed.

Naked, Billy ran from the bathroom. It was true. Chairs, tables, spoons, the family Bible, his mother’s picture on the mantel, his father’s soapy skin—the sweet blue-eyed boy saw it all.

Eyes! His son had eyes! A boy with eyes could join Little League, see a circus, behold his father in the pulpit; he could skate and ski and ride a ten-speed bike. “Who did?”

But then had come the terrible hiatus, God’s maddening aphasia, seven years without a single sign, no corroborations from on high. Billy’s theological instincts told him Atlantic City was indeed Babylon, yet on every visit his phantom eye had remained opaque as the devil’s sweat.

He tried other cities: Miami with its drug caliphs, San Francisco with its sodomites, New York with its depraved teens murdering each other for sport. Futility, futility, all was futility. Why wouldn’t God disclose his purpose? Had Timothy’s sight been gained at the cost of Billy’s vision?

ALL HOPE EMBRACE, YE WHO ENTER IN, exhorted the flashing neon slogan running across the entrance to Dante’s. Inhaling deeply, Billy walked through the hotel lobby and into the throbbing casino. One-armed bandits and video-poker consoles lined the velvet walls of the upper circle. A huge disc labeled WHEEL OF WEALTH spun noisily, clicking off integers and hope. Convulsing bells, cascading coins, cigarette smoke sinuating through the air and wringing tears from Billy’s good eye—how could this not be Babylon?

He descended. In the second circle, smiling dealers in blood-red tuxedoes presided over blackjack. Lower still, croupiers with shamrocks on their lapels supervised the craps tables. At last Billy reached the central pit, where a great roulette wheel held a mob of overdressed gamblers in its thrall. Everyone seemed so completely at home here, as if privy to facts about the casino—where the fuse boxes were, how much the water bill ran, what sections of carpet were due for replacement—that Billy would never grasp.

New Jerusalem. New Jersey. Surely this was the proper site for God’s city. He’d even done the math. The Garden State and the State of Israel each comprised the exact same number of square miles—7,892, depending on how you drew Israel’s borders.

The ball made its choice; the roulette wheel stopped. Dispassionately the gamblers toted up their gains, their losses, setting out fresh stacks of chips like suburban matrons serving Ritz crackers.

A disembodied hand rose from the whirring wheel and floated toward him like the soul of an aborted fetus. Wriggling a pale, pulpy finger, it directed him out of the pit, up through the circles, and straight to the corner of St. James and Pacific, where a street lamp poured its icy light upon a newspaper dispenser.

Billy slipped two quarters into the slot and removed a copy of Good Times, a periodical printed on brown, withered paper. A young woman leered at him, her flesh a lurid orange, as if her photo had been shot from an early sixties color TV. “Irish,” the caption ran. Her negligee was made of Saran Wrap. “Phone 239-9999.”

And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.

A sign! At long last, a sign! For if the Great Whore of Chapter Seventeen had indeed surfaced in Atlantic City, was this not the very Babylon God wanted razed? Billy scanned the possibilities. Babs with the metallic underwear and electric red hair. Gina of the “edible pajamas,” her eyebrows trailing upward like jet-fighter exhaust. Jenny, as black and comely as the Shulamite in the Song of Songs. Beverly, with her lush blond hair, her heavy lips, her purple and red…and the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet… her purple and scarlet nightgown!

“I can squeeze you in about midnight—and I’ll bet you’re fun to squeeze in, aren’t you? Such a sexy voice you’ve got. It’s like you’re tickling me.”

Billy gasped, nearly hung up, but somehow forced himself to say, “I especially like that purple nightgown. I don’t suppose…”

“There’s something else, Beverly. I’m a minister of the Lord. This will be unusual for me, a kind of experiment.”

“I know all about it, Reverend. You folks do more experimenting than Princeton’s entire physics department.”

He arranged to meet her at the First Ocean City Church of Saint John’s Vision, for only there could he learn whether Beverly was truly the Mother of Abominations. When he drove up, she was standing on the great marble steps, her body encased in a trench coat, the shoulder crimped by her handbag strap. “Never done a church before,” she said as Billy, wincing, approached. Her photo had been too kind, lying about the wrinkles, the eyelashes like rats’ whiskers. “A crypt once, and a Ferris wheel, but never this.” She drew a lock of blond hair into her mouth and sucked on it. “I like your eyepatch. Kinky.”

Guiding Beverly into the anteroom, he flicked on the lights and pointed to the sad, stark painting—the Savior crucified, skulls heaped at his feet in a poignant parody of the gifts brought by the magi. “You know who that is?”

“Sure, Reverend.” The whore slithered out of her trench coat, and suddenly there she was, arrayed in purple and scarlet. “I wore what you wanted.”

“It’s Jesus.” Taking the card, Beverly drew out a leather case like the one in which Billy kept his cufflinks. “You want the standard package, or are we feeling—?”

“Okay.” Billy led her into the silent nave. “Believe in him, sister.” He threw the chandelier switch. Light descended. “His blood can redeem you.”

“Right.” Beverly marched down the aisle: the Antichrist’s own bride, Billy thought. “So, what’s your preference?” she asked. “The floor? A pew?” She opened her leather case, revealing five narrow bottles, each of their respective liquids a different shade of blue. “I think the altar has certain possibilities.” Approaching the front pew, she arranged the bottles in a ring as if they were birthday candles and proceeded to uncap them. “Give me your finger.”

“Finger, honey.” She pulled a needle and a thin glass tube from the case. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. I’m a pro.” Her competence was indeed dazzling. An assured jab, and a bright straw of Billy’s blood rushed into the glass tube. Carefully she released three drops into each bottle. “Don’t be offended, Reverend.” Sealing the first bottle, she held it to the chandelier light. “With all the experiments you people’ve been doing, I can’t be too cautious.” Second bottle, third, fourth…“Okay, Reverend, no condom needed—unless, of course, that’s part of the experiment.”

So far in Billy’s life, lust had been merely a temptation, but now this particular sin was taking on geometric properties, shaping itself into a proof, hardening into a sign. For who but the Whore of Babylon would act this way, pulling off her purple and scarlet nightgown and stretching out on the altar, her breasts rising toward heaven like inverted chalices? And yet the proof wouldn’t be whole until he’d followed her beckoning fingers and enacted the vileness she demanded, for who but the Mother of Abominations would force a man of God to lie with her? Gritting his teeth, he let her unfasten his belt, unzip his fly, and slide his pants and boxer shorts halfway to his knees. “Will you receive Jesus Christ?” he asked.

Whereupon their actions began glowing with salvation, her sweet smell becoming incense, her rippling white form a church, her soft loins a newborn lamb. They kissed, connected. The altar seemed to drop away, angel-borne. So many ways to christen a person, so many substances! With the Jordan, as John had done. With the Holy Ghost, as Jesus had done…

A glorious measure of baptismal liquid rushed out of Billy, making Beverly’s redemption peak. Cooing and laughing, she slid away.

“Buy it?” Perched Eve-naked on the front pew, Beverly fitted his Visa card onto her little machine.

“Let me think. Fifty bucks, okay?” Tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth, she rammed the platen across the card, printing his address on the receipt. “That brings the total to one thirty-five. Sign here, honey.”

He signed. Gladly. What a night of victory for Christ—the Whore of Babylon unmasked and redeemed, the city’s true name revealed, Billy’s mission confirmed. But a fearsome task lay ahead, he realized; somehow he must take his flock, at the moment more concerned with tax shelters and orthodontist bills than the Second Coming, and turn them into soldiers.

Timothy. It all came down to Timothy. Because of that astounding miracle, eyes where there’d been no eyes, Billy knew his will was God’s, knew he would find a way to make his church accept the eschatological necessity of incinerating the city. Yes, Dorothy Melton, with your ridiculous feather hat, you’ve been elected to the Savior’s army. And you, Albert Dupree, though you can barely keep your bowling ball out of the gutter, one day soon you’ll splash God’s wrath on Babylon. As for you, Wayne Ackerman, king of the insurance agents—yes, brother, the year 2000 will find you building the New Jerusalem, that great waterless port through which Jesus will again enter the earth.

“Have a nice night,” said Beverly, gliding into her trench coat. She packed up her chemistry set, marched back down the aisle, and set off for the Babylon called Atlantic City.

Open-eyed, clothed only in the cool waters of Absecon Inlet, you begin your descent, down, down to the petting zoo of your childhood. Casually you tune in the colloquies of the cod as they pass in silvery constellations, the cabals of the jellyfish as they flap like sinister umbrellas, but you don’t attend their thoughts for long—weightier matters crowd your mind. The precise nature of your divinity. The fourth-century Council of Nicaea. Sex.

According to one of your father’s books, the year 325 A.D. found the Roman emperor Constantine convening a council in the Asian city of Nicaea, his goal being to settle a feud then raging throughout Christendom. In crude terms: was Jesus God’s subordinate offspring, as Arius of Alexandria believed, or was he God himself, as Archdeacon Athanasius asserted? After their initial investigations, you discovered, the Council leaned toward the obvious: offspring. The epithet “son of God” appeared throughout the Gospels, along with the even humbler “son of Man.” In the second chapter of Acts, the disciple Peter called Jesus “a man approved of God.” In Matthew’s nineteenth chapter, when somebody committed the faux pas of calling Jesus “Good Master,” Jesus admonished, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

But wait. There’s a problem. The instant you bring a subdeity on the scene, you’ve blurred the line between your precious Judaic monotheism and Roman paganism. You’ve stepped backward. Thus did the council forever fix Jesus as “very God” through whom “all things were made.” The Nicene Creed was recited in churches even in 1991.

Like Jesus before you, you know you’re not God. A deity, yes, but hardly cocreator of the universe. If you stood outside Brigantine Mall chanting “Let there be light,” a few neon tubes might blink on inside K mart, but heaven would gain no stars. God’s children did not do galaxies. They did not invent species, stop time, or eliminate evil with a snap of their divine fingers. Jesus cured lepers, you often note, Jesus did not cure leprosy. Your powers have bounds, your obligations limits.

People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like? What sort of God stuffs her only daughter into a bell jar like so much pickled herring and dumps her on the earth with no clues to her mission? What sort of God continues to ignore that same daughter even after she cures a blind boy exactly as instructed? Seven whole years since the Timothy miracle, and while nobody has taken you away, no mothers have shown up either.

You will never forget the night you confessed. “Three summers ago I did something really bad. I gave a kid eyes.”

He did not slap you. He said, firmly, “We’ll get this out of your system once and for all,” and hustled you into the Saab.

Pop’s fire station buddies, you knew, used to draw out his blood for your ectogenesis machine. “Mr. Balthazar? Mr. Caspar?”

He pulled into the parking lot at Atlantic City Memorial Hospital. Mr. Melchior, you remembered, had lung cancer.

You were supposed to say yes, let’s leave, but his remark about trust had really pissed you. “No.”

The two of you rode the elevator six flights to the cancer ward. You marched past the nurses’ station, entered the hellish corridor. Trench warfare, you decided, the view behind the lines—orderlies bustling about, victims gasping on gurneys, IV bottles drooping like disembodied organs. Pain prospered everywhere, seeping through the walls, darkening the air like swarms of hornets. “Why me?” a young, spindly black man asked quite distinctly as his mother guided him toward the visitors’ lounge. “Why can’t I get warm?” He tightened his bathrobe around his tubular chest.

You steadied yourself on the open jamb. Beyond, two cancer-ridden men trembled atop their beds.

“As long as we’re here, we can also try Herb’s roommate,” said Pop. “Hodgkin’s disease.” Heart stuttering, stomach quaking, you took a small step backward. “And then, of course, there’s Room Six Nineteen. And Six Twenty. And Six Twenty-one. On Saturday we’ll drive to Philadelphia—lots of hospitals. Next week we’ll do New York.”

“Then Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta. You didn’t make the world, Julie. It’s not your responsibility to clean it up.”

Seizing your hand, Pop guided you into the visitors’ lounge. The black man’s mother had swathed him in a blanket; together they shivered and wept. “Honey, you’ve got a choice.” Your father and you flopped down on the death-scented Naugahyde. Hairless patients stared at the walls. “Take the high road, and you’ll be trapped and miserable.” On the television, a game show contestant won a trip to Spain. “Take the low, and you’ll have a life.”

White anger shot across Pop’s face. “All right, all right,” he growled, voice rising. “If you’re going to be stubborn…!” From his wallet he removed a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle like a slice of stale cheese. “Listen, Julie, I don’t want to worry you, it might not mean anything—but look, the minute I carried you out of that clinic, somebody blew the place up.”

BABY BANK ABORTED, ran the headline. “Huh? Bombed it?” Bile climbed into your throat. “You mean, they wanted to…?”

“Nobody. All I’m saying is, we can’t be too cautious. If God expected you to show yourself, she’d come out and say so.”

That was years ago, eighth grade—since which time your divinity has remained wholly under control, your urge toward intervention completely in check.

Baby bank aborted. Bombed. Blown off the face of the earth like Castle Boadicea.

Reveling in your one permitted miracle, you draw a large helping of oxygen from the bay. As a gill owner, you’ll never experience the great, glorious breath a pearl diver takes on surfacing, but you’re determined to know the rest of it, everything bone and tissue offer. If your Catholic boyfriend is right, God subscribes to a spare, unequivocal ethic: body bad, soul good; flesh false, spirit true. And so in defiance you’ve become a flesh lover. You’ve become a woman of the world. Not a hedonist like Phoebe, but an epicure: it is always in homage to flesh that you devour pepperoni pizza, drink Diet Coke, admit Roger Worth’s tongue to your mouth, and savor your own briny smell while playing basketball for the Brigantine High Tigerettes. Take that, Mother. So there, Mother.

As you swim into the cave, a small cloud of blood drifts from between your thighs, quickly stoppered by water pressure. You will give credit where due. The body in which God has marooned you is the real thing, all functions intact.

Your petting zoo is defunct. Starfish, flounder, crab, lobster—all gone. Only Amanda the sponge remains, sitting in a clump of seaweed like a melancholy pumice. Thanks to Mr. Parker’s biology class, you know she is a Microciona prolifera, common to estuaries along the North American coast.

—Dead, Amanda replies. Sickness, old age, pollution. I alone have escaped. Immortality, it’s my sole claim to fame. Hack me apart, and each piece regenerates.

Using your feet like hoes, you furrow the sandy floor, upending stones, overturning shells, uncovering…there, beside your heel, the skeleton you first spotted at age ten. Tornadoes of sand swirl upward as, with a sudden karate chop, you behead it.

You snug the skull against your chest and float toward the filtered sunlight. How you love having a body, even a blobby one; you love your caramel skin, opulent hair, slightly asymmetrical breasts, throbbing gills. Too bad, Mother. Menstrual blood encircling you like an aura, you bid Amanda good-bye, push off from the bay bottom, and ascend through a hundred feet of salt water.

Fresh water gushed from the shower nozzle, washing away the sweat of the game but not its humiliation. Julie had played well, sinking all her free throws and chalking up fifteen points, six rebounds, and seven assists. She had stolen the ball four times. Useless. The Lucky Dogs of Atlantic City High had walked all over the Brigantine Tigerettes, 69 to 51.

She shut off the water and crept out of the shower, the most miserable point guard in the entire division.

Eerie silence reigned in the locker room. At Brigantine High, defeats were not discussed. Toweling off, she rehearsed what she intended to say to Phoebe. “Yes, of course I can score anytime, sink the damn ball from midcourt if I want. Don’t tell me what to do with my life, Sparks.”

“I’m not telling you what to do with your life,” Phoebe insisted the next day. “I’m simply saying you’re an outside shooter—you wouldn’t have to get physical, nobody’d suspect anything supernatural.” They wove through the clattering cafeteria, found a table, slammed down their trays. “If the point spread stays under twelve at the Saint Basil’s game, I’ll walk away with sixty dollars. Naturally I’ll go halves with you.”

Surveying the food, Julie winced. Why did she have to work so hard at maintaining a half-decent figure while Phoebe lived on sugar and never gained a pound or grew a zit? “I’m not throwing a game just so you can make thirty dollars.”

“You throw a game when you lose it, not when you win it.” Phoebe shoved lemon meringue pie into her mouth. “Hey, you think it’s easy being your friend, Katz? You think I’m at peace about it? I mean, here you come ripping into the world like Grant took Richmond, and you’ve got these damn powers, and some sort of God exists, and I have to keep quiet. It’s driving me absolutely nuts. Mom too.”

“I am patient.” Phoebe devoured a doughnut. “Hey, did I ever ask you for help with my shitty grades? When my cousin got knocked up, did I ask you to fix it?”

Julie’s face grew hot. “There’re lots of things you never asked me to do.” She pointed across the cafeteria to Catherine Tyboch, her stocky body suspended on crutches. “You never asked me to make Tyboch walk. You never asked me to cure Lizzie’s anorexia.”

“Let’s face it, buddy, running up and down a basketball court isn’t exactly fulfilling your potential.”

Vengefully Julie forked a hunk of Phoebe’s pie and ate it. “There’s a room in my house you’ve never seen.”

“Where you and Roger hump? Hope you take precautions. Like Mom says, ‘His bird in your hand is worth two in your bush.’”

Phoebe’s genius for sex did not surprise Julie. Phoebe’s face was gorgeous, her shape lithe, her dark skin creamy and iridescent. Typically, God had given better flesh to Phoebe than to her own daughter. “Roger and I don’t do that. He worships me.”

Phoebe giggled. “Worships the water you walk on.” She ate a brownie the color of her skin. “Really, can’t you do better than Roger? I mean, isn’t he sort of boring, isn’t he sort of a prude? You’re smart, friendly, got nice boobers, and score twelve points a game. Not like me with my F in math and these acorns for tits. Why waste yourself on Roger?”

Her temple, Julie called it. Once it was the Angel’s Eye guest room, now the place that kept her sane. The project had begun modestly, nothing but a few tragic stories clipped from Time and the Atlantic City Press and pasted in a scrapbook. But soon it spread to the walls, then to the ceiling and floor, until all six inside surfaces positively dripped with humanity’s suffering, with earthquakes, droughts, floods, fires, diseases, deformities, addictions, car crashes, train wrecks, race riots, massacres, thermonuclear bomb tests.

“Impressive,” said Phoebe, surveying the collages on the afternoon following the Lucky Dogs game, “but what’s the point?”

Julie approached the altar, a former card table on which two brass candlesticks, thick and ornate as clarinets, flanked the sailor’s skull she’d recently taken from the bay. “Right before bed, I spend twenty minutes in this place. Then I can sleep.”

“You mean you simply sit here, staring at everybody’s pain? All you do is look at it?”

Julie lifted the skull, holding it as if about to make a free throw. “My mother could’ve saved this sailor. She didn’t.”

“Maybe I have mine.” Julie stretched out her arm, extended her index finger. Slowly she turned, three hundred and sixty degrees, then another rotation, another…“Look, Phoebe, it never stops. Round and round—forever!”

“You got pollution?” Phoebe caressed the scabby door, pausing atop a photo of a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums sitting in a landfill like unexploded bombs, oozing pink poison. “Oh, I see…”

“Great place to do drugs.” Phoebe’s laugh was high and uneasy, like the yip of a dog barking on command. “There’s plenty of it, I’ll give you that.”

“And not scratch the surface,” mused Phoebe. “Shit, here’s a tough one.” She punched a People magazine clipping. A four-year-old boy with spina bifida had undergone sixteen separate operations and then died. “I’ve been giving you a hard time lately.”

“My life’s no picnic.” Julie slumped to the floor, eyes locked on an Ethiopian infant’s bloated belly and matchstick legs. “Remember when we snuck into that hotel? I don’t want there to be famines or poverty, Phoebe, just beer and Tastykake and you.”

“Oh, my poor little goddess.” Dropping, Phoebe gave Julie a magnificent kiss, wet and tasty as a slice of watermelon, right on the lips. “You’re under a curse, aren’t you? You’re all torn apart.”

Phoebe, dear Phoebe: she understood. “I can’t win,” Julie moaned. “If only I could be just one way, caterpillar or butterfly, one or the other. My mother never says a word to me. I know I’m supposed to have some amazingly beautiful and earth-shaking purpose, but God won’t talk. She won’t say if there’s a heaven, or whether I’ll die, or anything.”

“You’ll always love me, won’t you?” The second kiss was even juicier than the first. “Wherever you go, you’ll take me with you?”

No local theater was showing the double bill Roger wanted to see, Ten Thousand Psychotics followed by The Garden of Unearthly Delights, so they went all the way to the Route 52 Cinema in Somers Point. It was an unusually passionate Roger who sat next to Julie, comforting her during the zombie attacks, feeling her up during the sex scenes. “He made me promise not to tell,” Phoebe had revealed earlier that day, “but I will anyway, that’s what friends are for. Sin no longer exists for Roger. God, Satan, hell—gone with the tooth fairy. In short, if you’re ready to become a girl with a past, he’s ready to give you one.”

Phoebe’s date for the evening, Lucius Bogenrief, had the complexion of strawberry yogurt and the smell and general contours of a submarine sandwich, but he also had Ramblin’ Girl, his family’s Winnebago, a kind of terrestrial yacht complete with kitchenette, bar, and private bedroom. As the four of them ambled into the lobby after the show, Lucius drew out his keys and ceremoniously presented them to Phoebe. “Your pilot for this evening is Captain Sparks.”

“Some people will give anything for a properly done blow-job,” Phoebe explained, winking. “The whole sixty-nine yards, eh?”

Roger cringed and pretended to study the poster for Ten Thousand Psychotics. Julie felt ice in her gills. Phoebe driving? The point of the evening was to experience sex, not to die.

They piled into the Winnebago, Lucius taking the passenger seat, Phoebe grasping the steering wheel as she might the handlebar on a roller coaster. Nuzzling like newborn puppies, Julie and Roger slipped behind the kitchenette table. “It’s like a clubhouse,” she noted excitedly.

Julie did not really understand Roger’s interest in her, unless his Catholic instincts told him who she was. He ran the student council, edited the school paper, and looked remarkably like the portrait of an extremely handsome Jesus hanging in Phoebe’s old catechism class. His only defect—as Phoebe would have it, his only virtue—was his fascination with the grotesque, particularly monster movies and Stephen King novels, enthusiasms Julie attributed to the way the pre-Vatican II hell, so gaudy and voluptuous in its horrors, had captured his childhood imagination.

Phoebe lifted the microphone from the dashboard. “This is your captain speaking.” Her amplified voice rattled around the van like a marble in a vase. “The party begins at midnight.”

Predictably, Ramblin’ Girl brought out the worst in Phoebe. “Christ!” Julie screamed as the Winnebago rocketed away from the Route 52 Cinema. “Not so fast!”

They plunged down Shore Road as if Phoebe had a large bet riding on her getting a speeding ticket. New Jersey rushed by—its shabby farms, grubby refineries, garish billboards exhorting you to win big at Caesar’s and the Golden Nugget. The Winnebago rattled like a treehouse in a hurricane.

That explained a lot, Julie figured. Nothing like a brush with death to make somebody a good Catholic.

“Ah, hah!” shouted Phoebe, swerving into the parking lot of Somers Point High School. It didn’t matter that none of them went here; they were all in the vast travel club called adolescence, and the parking lot was theirs, as friendly and inviting as a country inn. Phoebe guided Ramblin’ Girl toward an unlighted area, killed the motor. Julie laughed, kissed Roger’s cheek. Mangy basketball nets, twisted bicycle racks, gallowslike lamps—yes, they belonged.

Lucius and Phoebe joined them in the kitchenette, pulling bottles from the liquor cabinet. The labels fascinated Julie—Cutty Sark, Dewar’s, Beefeater—each logo dense with staid print and Anglo-Saxon dignity, as if alcohol were really a type of literary criticism and not a leading cause of traffic fatalities and brain rot. Phoebe mixed the drinks, starting with her own rum and Coke, then doing Lucius’s vodka and tonic. Julie’s affection for liquor hadn’t increased one jot since she and Phoebe had guzzled beer in the doomed Deauville, but she agreed to try a “Black Russian,” which definitely sounded like something her mother wouldn’t want her to have.

“Saw you on the court last Tuesday.” Lucius served Julie her Black Russian. “You looked good.”

“Sixty-four to thirty-one, that sucks,” said Julie, sipping. Sweet, sinful, exquisite.

“Julie can get a basket whenever she wants.” Phoebe swizzled Roger’s drink with the crazed competence of the mad scientist in Ten Thousand Psychotics. “She’s tuned in on the cosmos.”

Lucius opened the bedroom door, its back panel decorated with Playboy centerfolds. Julie pondered a certain Miss March. What an incalculable debt she owed whichever playmate had inspired the donation that was her gateway to flesh. Still, Miss March seemed pathetic. Why did males find breasts erotic, why did these mongrel solids drive them crazy? Yes, there were far too many unwanted pregnancies around Brigantine High, but certainly her mother shared some of the blame, wiring up guys’ penises like that.

Roger led her into the little boudoir and set their Black Russians on the nightstand. Lucius closed the door. Julie and Roger jumped simultaneously. What a couple of overbred dogs we are, she thought, what a pair of skittish virgins.

The Winnebago’s engine snorted to life. “Hey, what’re you doing?” Julie called.

Phoebe’s voice zagged out of the bedroom loudspeaker. “This is your captain speaking.” The van chattered and rolled. “Next stop, a deserted and romantic section of Dune Island.”

Steadying their drinks, Roger called, “Do me a favor, Phoebe.” Always so polite. “Go slowly.”

Julie wasn’t sure how much of her dizziness traced to the Winnebago’s movement, how much to the Black Russian. She drew a deep breath, sipped her drink. A private bedroom with a pornographic door. Well, well. A mattress jutting from the wall, white sheets wrapped around it, tight as drumheads. Well, well, well. Did she really want Roger inside her, pushing and stabbing? Would her chunky body suffice to make it work?

He didn’t wait for Dune Island. Like a soldier ducking machine-gun fire, he hit the mattress, pulling her down with him. His fingers were everywhere at once, massaging her blouse, tugging at her jeans.

“We’ll use this.” Roger pulled a condom from his corduroys, flashing it like a press pass. “If that’s all right.”

“I meant our relationship.” Beyond curiosity, beyond her need to provoke God, the night had to be what Aunt Georgina would call cosmic. “Do you love me, Roger?”

Good. They weren’t just satisfying their respective longings for defiance and ejaculation. This was devotion, ecstasy, mutual worship. “Attention, passengers,” crackled Phoebe. “Unfasten your seat belts and everything else you can get your hands on.”

Julie helped him remove her blouse and bra. Her heart seemed to have doubled in size. Would it be wonderful? Gross? What was she doing here? “I want to go to the stars,” she’d told Phoebe that afternoon. “First time out,” Phoebe had replied, “you won’t get past the asteroid belt.” The Winnebago’s rumblings wove through her. Her jeans and loafers melted away, so that only her underpants stood between herself and spiting God. We didn’t invent this preposterous stuff, she thought as she popped the button on Roger’s corduroys. The two of them were innocent. Everyone was innocent. The universe was a place of blameless urges and morally neutral hydraulics.

The remainder of their Black Russians splashed onto the carpet, ice cubes rolling like dice. The door burst open and Phoebe swung in, her hand locked on the knob, her dark face bleached to the color of tobacco. “Help!”

Julie extricated herself from the fleshy pile and, throwing on her blouse and jeans, followed Phoebe into the cab.

Solid mud greeted her view. Across the windshield, against the side windows: mud, a worm’s cosmos.

“She drove off the fucking bridge!” Lucius stood on the passenger seat, palms against the roof, feeling for leaks. “I can’t believe it!” Tears glistened on his zits. “Phoebe’s such an asshole!”

Again the Winnebago tilted, hurling the three of them against the passenger door. Silt oozed from the air vents. Buried alive. Sinking. The week before, twenty-five thousand Colombians had died in a mud floe, children suffocated, adults both righteous and wicked strangled by the impartial earth. Only that was merely news, another clipping for Julie’s temple.

“What’s the commotion?” Roger stumbled into the cab, hitching up his corduroys.

“Do it, Katz!” Like a sailor closing hatches on a submarine, Phoebe threw the vent levers to off.

“This girl has powers!” said Phoebe. “She’s God’s favorite daughter!”

Julie rolled her eyes heavenward. Of course she’d abandon her principles? Of course she’d be a hypocrite, rescuing Phoebe and the others while all the Herb Melchiors died of lung cancer? Of course she’d be self-centered, raising up Ramblin’ Girl while the surrounding planet bled?

No! She was better than that! “Mother,” she rasped. The Winnebago descended. “Mother, it’s in your hands.”

“My God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee,” Roger recited, dropping to his knees, “and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all—”

“Mother!” Julie’s voice made a hot breeze in her throat. “Mother, you owe me this!”

Do it? Julie hauled herself behind the steering wheel, pressing her palms against the rubbery plastic. “Mother, I’m warning you!” She whipped the wheel hard. “Mother!”

Everywhere, light, enveloping the van as if the mud had transmuted into molten gold. The wheel became a halo, the gear shift a flaming sword, the speedometer a comet. “Mother, is that you? You?” A time-twisted universe suffused the cab. Ceramic fragments congealed into teapots, blossoms imploded into buds, clocks spun north to west…and, like a mammoth breaking free of a tar pit, the Winnebago struggled upward through the tiers of gunk and silt. “Mother!” Oh, yes, no question, the Primal Hermaphrodite had arrived, peeling away New Jersey’s gravity like a farmer shucking corn. “Thank you, Mother! I love you, Mother!” Within a minute, Ramblin’ Girl had cleared the trees and was hovering above the bridge like a helicopter.

The Winnebago became a domain of unfathomable gentleness: yolks left their shells and tumbled unbroken into frying pans; sleeping babies were lowered undisturbed into cribs. With a subtle bump, the van landed on the bridge and rolled to a halt. Hysterical cheers filled the cab, kissing Julie’s eardrums.

Shivering with epiphany, Julie turned the ignition key, and in a cunning little coda to the miracle the mud-packed engine started up. “Where to?” she asked, smiling hugely.

“The beach.” Phoebe beamed with wonderment and pride. God’s daughter’s best friend. “Go left here.”

“Folks, I have no idea what just happened”—Lucius eyed his soggy crotch—“but I know I’ll be spending the rest of my life thinking about it.” He touched Julie’s elbow tentatively, as if expecting an electric shock. “I don’t suppose you could, er…”

The coarse whisper of surf filled the night as Julie drove onto the sand and parked. Rolling down the driver’s window, she let the mud flop onto her jeans. Her blood was on fire, an internal oil spill, smoking, burning. Curing some stupid blind kid was nothing compared with finally finding your mother.

“I’d like some fresh air.” Phoebe smothered Lucius with the kind of grand, sensual kiss she’d given Julie in her temple. “You would too, Lucius.”

“You nearly got us killed, Phoebe,” Lucius grunted. “It’ll take days to wash this mud off. Days.”

Quickly Lucius and Phoebe assembled their orgy—condoms, six-pack, beach blanket—and, jumping from the Winnebago, ran across the sand. The April night swallowed them. So they felt it too, Julie realized, the erotic thrill of near oblivion fused with the kick of epiphany. And Roger over there, sitting dumbfounded on the barstool, was he likewise aroused? She lurched out of the driver’s seat and dove into him, wedging herself between his legs. She was desirable, gorgeous, a deity whose mother cared!

“God’s daughter,” he replied, sweat marring his beautiful goy-Jesus face. “Phoebe said—”

And suddenly she smelled it. A piercing stench, the acrid molecules of his adoration. The evening, she realized, had ended. Very well. Fine. She could lose it some other time—this was the night God got in touch!

She stumbled to the bedroom, snatched up her bra and loafers, and returned through the fumes of reverence.

“I thought the Church might call me back,” Roger panted, tear ducts spasming with revelation, “but never this way, oh, no, never this way…” His awe was a mass of snakes, slithering over her body, driving her out of the van. “An amazing lady, the Church. Just amazing.”

She opened the passenger door and, jumping onto the beach, began reassembling herself, bra, blouse, loafers.

The night was cool and moonless. Tree frogs chirped like a thousand preschoolers testing their bicycle bells. Joyously she ran to the sea, its edge lathery with foam and horseshoe crab semen.

The sweet, spherical odor of fresh oranges reached Julie’s nostrils, and suddenly she was a ten-year-old stumbling upon a supernatural stranger in the Deauville Hotel.

Her mother’s friend stepped from behind a trembling cluster of cat-o’-nine-tails. He held a kerosene lantern aloft, its glow spreading into the channel, revealing a black brooding schooner afloat near Dune Island. “Ah, you remember me,” he said, each word a staccato pluck of his tongue. “Good.” A frock coat flowed down from his trim shoulders. The flame reddened his eyes and gilded his beard. “God?” He snorted like an asthmatic pig. “Did you say God? I’m sorry, Julie, but God had nothing to do with it. I’m the one who saved you.”

“You?” Julie’s throat grew suddenly dry. Her knees buckled, her intestines tightened. “No, God did. My mother did.”

“No!” Her collapse was instantaneous: one moment she stood, the next she lay sprawled in the wet sand, crying as hard as when Pop had slapped her for reviving the crab. “Noooo!”

“I couldn’t very well let you spend your prime years at the bottom of a salt marsh waiting for you-know-who. Sheer insanity, that.”

Taking her hand, Wyvern pulled her upright and guided her to a clump of spartina grass. He flicked a tear from her cheek.

Julie stomped the ground, as if the whole planet were a disgusting bug, stomp, squish. No doubt it was all true, no doubt she mattered more to the devil than to her own mother. “You are the devil, aren’t you?”

Wyvern made a quick bow. “Thanks to my efforts, Atlantic City will run in the black forever.”

“‘Now there was a day when the sons of God came before the Lord,’” he quoted, “‘and Satan also came among them.’ A better age, Julie. Gone forever.”

She sniffed the mucus back into her nose. “I’ve been good, I’ve been bad—nothing gets her attention. What am I supposed to do, sacrifice a goat?”

“Perhaps you should start a religion. You know—reveal your mother to the world.”

Julie pulled off her left loafer, emptied the sand. “Be honest, Mr. Wyvern—God doesn’t talk to you either. Curing that Timothy kid was your idea.”

“I’ve been called worse.” Wyvern lifted back his frock coat and removed his silver cigarette case. “We’re on our own, aren’t we, child? Two lost soul-catchers. A couple of ad-libbers.”

Wyvern flipped open the cigarette case, holding it before Julie’s teary eyes. “Virtue is of great interest to me. I was curious to see what would happen. Look…” Inside the mirror, a shadowy figure stood on a pulpit and boomed a sermon to a packed church. “Timothy’s father. You wouldn’t like him. Major fanatic. Confuses migraine headaches with God.” The preacher stalked up and down the aisle, showing his congregation what looked like a purple nightgown. “For years he worried that his visions might simply be in his mind, but then his son got those two new eyes, and now he’s really inspired. Believe me, this man will do something wicked one day.”

“Good for you.” The devil grinned. His golden teeth glittered in the lantern light.

“Of course you will. Such a heritage, sired by a good smart Jew out of God. Got a college picked out?”

“No problems? No questions? Need a recommendation?” Wyvern closed his cigarette case. “I can tell you why the universe is composed of matter and not antimatter. I can tell you why the electron has its particular charge. I can tell you—”

“Why doesn’t she care about people?” The spring air dried Julie’s tears. “Why all the diseases and earthquakes?”

With a final twist of the knob, Wyvern’s body became a gaseous haze. The dead lantern hit the beach, dug into the sand. “The Colombian mud floes?”

The red eyes vanished, leaving only the lantern and the night. “Because power corrupts,” said Wyvern’s disembodied voice. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5
♦	♦	♦

Princeton University rejected God’s daughter, but she did receive acceptances from Wesleyan, Antioch, and the University of Pennsylvania, plus notification that Vassar had placed her on its waiting list.

Although Julie favored Penn—Ivy League, big city, close to home—her father was still making ends meet by donating to the resurrected and relocated Preservation Institute, and the idea of pursuing the lofty agenda of college while he whacked off down the hall gave her considerable pause. Her quandary ended the instant Penn’s financial assistance office promised her a full-tuition scholarship coupled to a job at the university’s bookstore. She would become, like her father, a shelver of books. One week after her birthday, she and Murray loaded the Saab with the collected detritus of her ill-defined life—her basketball, CD player, curling iron, all of it—and crossed the grim and matted Delaware into Philadelphia.

College, by damn. Abandoned by her mother, saddled with divinity, but she’d gotten all the way to college.

By Halloween her gills were throbbing with desires at once romantic and lewd. Howard Lieberman, he called himself—her immediate supervisor at the bookstore as well as a biology major stationed at the Preservation Institute, where he collected sperm samples from macaques. He put her in charge of the science texts. Basic Physics, Principles of Geology, Primate Psychology, Physical Anthropology, Introduction to Astronomy. “It should be called ‘astrology,’ of course, the study of stars,” Howard explained as he showed Julie the stockroom. With his small tight lips, wire-rimmed glasses, and Kropotkin shirt, he looked like Tom Courtney as the young revolutionary Pasha Antipov in Julie’s favorite movie, Doctor Zhivago. Roger Worth had been nice, stupefyingly nice, but here was a man with a whiff of danger about him, a man who peered over precipices. “Unfortunately, ‘astrology’ got snatched up by the horoscope crowd, so we’re stuck with ‘astronomy,’ the arrangement of stars.”

“I’m really interested in this stuff.” Julie rubbed a carton labeled ELEMENTARY PARTICLES.

Howard said, “Good for you. These days most people prefer to impoverish their minds with mysticism.” Such a sensual person, intense as a violin, serious as a cat. “You’re a rare woman, Julie.”

Howard drew out his Osmiroid pen and inscribed a list on a stray scrap of computer paper. “Here are some courses you should audit.” It was the first time Julie had ever seen anybody write in calligraphy; the list looked like Scripture. “I think they’ll excite you.”

Which they did. Julie may have snuck into Quantum Mechanics 101, Astrophysics 300, and Problems in Macroevolution to please Howard, but she stayed in each class for the sake of her soul.

What Julie found through science was not so much an atheist universe as one from which God, after the act of creation, had reluctantly but necessarily excluded herself. The universe was stuff. Energy, particles, time, gravity, electromagnetism, space: stuff all. So how could a being of spirit enter a wholly physical domain? She couldn’t. The God of physics was obliged to inhabit only the unknown, the universe beyond the universe, a place the human mind would never reach before everything expired in heat-death and whimpering hydrogen. The God of physics might smuggle an occasional egg or spermatozoon into the Milky Way, but not her incorporeal essence. She could bring forth children, but never herself.

Science even explained the evident actuality of supernatural dimensions—of heaven, limbo, purgatory, and the fiery franchises of Andrew Wyvern. The so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics practically demanded a belief in inaccessible alternative realities. “A myriad contradictory worlds,” lectured Professor Jerome Delacato, “forever splitting off from each other like branches on a tree, so that, somewhere out there, I am presently giving a lecture explaining how the many-worlds hypothesis cannot possibly be true.”

For all this, Julie’s rage remained. As she sat in ivy-speckled College Hall, writing down Delacato’s wild theories, her flesh quivered with disgust. A mother ought to get in touch. Even if the rift between them were as wide as the cosmos, God should still try to heal it.

“The observable universe is ten billion light-years in size, correct?” she asked Howard. “Or, as Dirac observed, ten followed by forty zeros times as large as a subatomic particle. But look, the ratio of the gravitational force between a proton and an electron is also ten followed by forty zeros. That implies a designer, I think. Maybe even a caring, personal God.”

He examined her with a mix of irritation and pity. He sucked his lips inward. “No, it simply means the cosmos happens to be that size right now.”

“I have strong reason to believe God exists.” Julie suppressed a smirk. Her sexy, perfect boss didn’t know everything.

“Look, Julie, these matters are best discussed over food and drink. These matters are best discussed in restaurants. You like Greek food?”

So they became a couple. It was dumb and lovely. Boyfriend, girlfriend, holding hands. Off to the movies, the Rodin Museum, the Franklin Institute, the Academy of Music. An atheist Jewish biologist—Pop was sure to approve, no goy-meets-girl jokes of the sort he’d made the time she brought Roger Worth home.

Explaining the universe in Greek restaurants, Howard exuded a boundless passion. “What most people don’t realize is that something unprecedented has entered the world. Bang—science—and suddenly a proposition is true because it’s true, Julie, not because its adherents have the biggest churches or the grandest inquisitors or the most weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.” His eyes paced their sockets like caged animals. “Earth orbits the sun. Microbes cause disease. The kidney is a filter. The heart is a pump.” His voice built to a crescendo, making heads turn. “At long last, Julie, we can know things!”

They took a chance on the Southwark Experimental Theater and, after two hours of watching mediocre actors talk to household appliances, retreated to Howard’s apartment, a space as disheveled as he. His posters of Einstein, Darwin, and Galileo were crookedly mounted on dispirited loops of masking tape. His clothes lay everywhere in amorphous piles. Rings of dried coffee pocked the top of his computer monitor.

They picnicked on the floor, amid widowed socks and back issues of Scientific American.

This time, Julie knew, she would make it work. “Howard, did the universe have a beginning?” she asked, fondling his hand.

“I believe so.” He leaned over and pressed his lips against hers—nothing like Phoebe’s masterful kisses, but sufficient to get things rolling. “I’m no steady-stater.”

“Didn’t think you were.” She opened her mouth. Their tongues connected like two randy eels.

“The common misconception is that the big bang occurred at a point inside space, like an explosion here on earth.” Howard giggled lustily. “Rather, it filled the whole of space, it was space.”

She stretched out on the floor, carrying him down with her, still feasting on his tongue. His erection poked her thigh. “There’s a condom in my purse.”

He reached inside a nearby running shoe, pulling out a set of Trojans strung together like lollipops. “Don’t bother.”

Buttons, zippers, buckles, catches, and hooks melted under their eager fingers. “I’ve never done this before,” Julie confessed as the surrounding chaos gobbled up their clothes. “Not entirely.”

Howard’s quick scientific fingers and nimble truth-telling tongue were everywhere, probing her tissues, prodding her bones, molding lovely flowing shapes within her. The mesh of black hair on his chest looked like Andromeda. “After the bang, space kept expanding, like a balloon or a rubber sheet.” He unwrapped his condom and unfurled it down his circumcised expansion, all the while touching her, bringing forth delicious vibrations.

She shuddered, every blessed cell. Her bones glowed. Her spinal cord became a rope of hot gelatin lacing her vertebrae. Gritting her teeth in pleasure, she jammed her palms against the floor and floated away on her own liquid self.

At last she touched shore. Her eyes sprang fully open, and she beheld Howard’s rickety bookshelves. The New Physics, she read. P-h-y-s-i-c-s. A coil of radiant energy shot from the word, flooding into her skull like a sunbeam passing through glass. She closed her eyes. Her dendrites danced. Her synapses sparkled.

“No privileged vantage point,” Howard elaborated. She guided the ballooning universe toward her, laughing as it pried her apart. “Thus, we must abandon”—he pressed ahead with steady, metronomic thrusts, writing calligraphic poems on her vaginal walls—“any idea of galaxies in flight.”

Cell Biology! Analytic Chemistry! Geophysics! Phylogenesis! Comparative Anatomy! Electricity sang through Julie’s blood, the surge of observable data, the erotic rush of experimentally verifiable knowledge. Could it be? Her coming had something to do with science? She’d been sent to preach a gospel of empirical truth?

“In the macropicture”—Howard panted like a German shepherd—“the stars float at rest, separating from each other only as space itself”—a low, primal wail—“grows!” He spasmed within her, and Julie pictured countless galaxies, printed on his condom, moving apart as the universe filled with his seed.

“Everybody thinks he’s being oh-so-deep when he says science doesn’t have all the answers.”

Done. All of it. Virginity gone, flesh ratified, mother spited, mission discovered—the gospel of empirical truth! Yes! Oh, yes!

“Science does have all the answers,” said Howard, withdrawing. “The problem is that we don’t have all the science.”

Murray breathed. The pains persisted, screeching through his arms and chest, making jagged humps on the oscilloscope. How tightly woven was the world, he thought. The scope ran on coal-generated electricity; at some specific moment, then, a West Virginia miner had pried up the very bituminous lump now enabling whoever occupied the nurses’ station to confirm Mr. Katz as still among the living.

“Hopeless,” he moaned, squeezing the crunchy sheets. He was strung up like a marionette: catheter, IV tube, a tangle of wires pasted to his chest. His clogged heart bleeped at him. When the monitor’s pulsings stopped, he wondered, would he notice the silence, or would he be dead by then? “Like father, like son.”

“Horse manure.” Georgina tugged a strand of her graying beatnik hair. He tried to read his future in her tics: the more nervous Georgina, the closer oblivion. “Just breathe. It’s gotten me out of all sorts of jams.” He channeled air through the back of his throat. The humps on the scope crested, the pains faded. “Julie’s on her way.”

Julie, he mused. Dear, burdened Julie. How nearly normal she seemed, how relatively sane. “We’ve done all right by her, haven’t we?”

“She’s still the kid down the street,” said Murray. “Her enemies haven’t a clue.”

“Never thought we’d get through her childhood. She and Phoebe sowed a lot of oats.”

“Of course girls have oats. I had oats.” Georgina flipped on the TV; a Revelationist preacher announced that thirty cases of diabetes were currently vanishing in Trenton. “I can’t say it’s been easy keeping quiet. I wake up every day wanting to scream out the whole thing. But I don’t. I bite my tongue. That’s how much I love you.”

The last, lingering pain died in Murray’s chest. “You really love me? You aren’t just being nice to me because my kid’s connected to…whatever? The Primal Hermaphrodite.”

“Will you do it anyway?” He changed channels: a tidal wave had just washed all of civilization from a Philippine island. “I mean it, Georgina. Let’s get married. You wouldn’t have to give up women. You could bring them home.”

“Aw, that’s sweet—but I’m afraid Phoebe’s the only sexual generalist in the family.” Navajo bracelets jangled on Georgina’s wrist as she extended her index finger and traced the scribble on the scope. “Hey, look, if I ever get oriented the other way, you’ll be the first guy I’ll look up, promise. Meanwhile, it’s better just to be friends, right?”

His heart purred. Friendship was the tough one: true. Georgina drove him crazy at times—all her wild gypsy ideas about pyramid power and the souls of rainbows—yet she was the best thing in his life besides his daughter; he would never trade Georgina’s friendship for a wife. “I hope Julie gets married,” he said.

He checked the scope—a perfectly placid sea, cardiac waves rising and falling. He smiled. Julie’s wedding, exquisite thought. Would his grandchildren be free of godhead? Was divinity a recessive trait?

The curtain slid back and there she was, surely no more than seven pounds overweight, bearing a grand explosion of chrysanthemums. “Contraband,” she said with forced cheer, setting the vase on the nightstand. “They don’t allow these things in intensive care, foul up the air or something.” As Julie’s gaze strayed to the half-dozen suction cups leeching on his chest, her face grew so white her forehead scar almost vanished. “Hey, you’re looking good.” Her voice was fissured. She kissed his cheek. “How’s it going?”

Tears hung on Julie’s eyelids, her large lips drooped sharply. “I know what you’re thinking—this is how your father went.” A tear fell. “They know a lot more about hearts these days. They really do. The heart is a pump.”

“A new one, kid. Forget about launching the age of cosmic harmony. Forget synergistic convergence. Just give your pop a new heart.”

As Georgina backed out of intensive care, the television spoke of terrorists releasing hand grenades aboard a Greek cruise ship.

Georgina, you’re asking too much, was what she’d wanted to say, Murray guessed. He stared at her forehead, the scar emerging as her color returned. He didn’t doubt that Julie could cure him, nor that he wanted her to: the idea of oblivion filled him with an anger so intense his saliva boiled. How dare oblivion come and blot out his thoughts, his daughter, his best friend, his books?

But no. It was asking too much. She must stay off the high road. Once she started intervening, it would never stop—a new heart, a second new heart, an AIDS victim delivered, a cyclone forestalled, a mud slide retracted, a revolution resolved, and soon her enemies would be at her doorstep.

“Hey, if I confess to you,” he asked, “does that make this my deathbed?”

“He was in the old Preservation Institute when it blew up. Marcus Bass. He convinced me to steal you—your machine.”

“No point. Poor guy had four kids. Boys. I sent ’em baseball cards sometimes.” Oh, how he’d love to see Marcus Bass again—see him, hug him, thank him for making him realize he needed an embryo. “Honey, has God ever told you what happens after death?”

“You’re not going to die.” Julie curled her fingers into tight lumpy balls. “You have to finish Hermeneutics of the Ordinary.”

“My mother’s outside the universe, Pop—the God of physics, I’m sure of it.” Absently Julie spun the TV dial. The Road Runner beep-beeped across the screen. “We both know what we’re thinking, huh? Georgina said—”

“I hate that Road Runner thing.” He glowered at the TV. “Ants in his feathers.” The God of physics? Julie’s mother a mere equation, the fuse that had touched off the big bang? That explained a lot, he figured. “The answer’s no. I’ll get out of this the hard way.”

“Think it through. You can fix up my heart for now, but how will you take the stress and the fat away—fix up the whole world? Hearts aside, maybe it’ll be a brain aneurysm next time, or kidney failure, or Alzheimer’s.”

A spectacular nurse entered, a kind of Miss November with clothes on—aggressively busty, fine slutty lips—and deposited a pill on his tongue. “Visiting hours are over.”

“My kid,” he said, drinking down the pill. How dare oblivion come and blot out the world’s nurses?

“Good for you.” The nurse offered Julie a sunshine smile. “Those flowers can’t stay.”

A smooth vascular tide rolled across the scope. He felt a nap coming on. “Go have a life.”

“On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City,” Phoebe Sparks sang as a nasty March wind propelled her past Steel Pier’s dead merry-go-round, “we will walk in a dream.” Her old Girl Scout canteen rapped against her side like a child trying to get her attention. “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and cream.” Broken and decayed, the piers were like a seedy version of the Acropolis—relics rimming the city, remnants of an earlier, nobler, more eminent age. They were also, Phoebe had learned, good places to spend one’s lunch hour: plenty of privacy.

She uncapped the canteen, raised the spout to her lips. Mom didn’t mind an occasional beer, but serious liquor was out. There were times, though, when only Bacardi rum could make the world feel right, rum the wonder drug.

Licking Bacardi from her lips, Phoebe recapped the canteen. “Catch anything?”

He turned. A Caucasian. Not her father, then. It was never her father. “Hooked a barracuda last week, but they aren’t biting today.” The fisherman was bearded and handsome, his muscular torso filling a red turtleneck sweater. “How are you, Miss Sparks?”

The stranger grinned. His teeth were bright, bent, and slimy, like pearls made by a depraved oyster. “I was in the Deauville Hotel when you found that dynamite. Julie and I talked.”

“Andrew’s the name. Wyvern.” He reeled in his barren hook, began disassembling his rod. “I’ll be frank with you. I’m worried about poor old Julie.”

“She’s not a happy camper,” Phoebe agreed. She didn’t like this Andrew Wyvern. He had the sleazy air of a casino pit boss. “Divinity’s no joke, I gather. You always feel like you’re not doing enough.”

“Never touch it. Did you know you have a crucial role to play in Julie’s life?”

Wyvern picked up his fishing gear and, grinning luminously, started toward the Boardwalk. “You’re intending to give her some newspaper clippings,” he prophesied abruptly. “For Hanukkah. For her temple.”

“Yeah. And on her birthday too.” Against her better judgment, she followed Wyvern to the carousel. “How’d you figure that out?”

“Certainly you mean well. You aim to tell her she’s not obliged to end the world’s pain, there’s just too much of it. Fine.” Wyvern climbed atop a splintery, termite-infested lion. He smelled of honeyed oranges and guile. A pit boss? No, somebody even worse, Phoebe sensed. “But the thing could backfire,” he warned. “If we’re not careful, she’ll become obsessed, bent on repairing every little leak in the planet. Once she’s on that course, she’ll go mad.”

“I used to believe that. Not anymore. Fact is, I want her damn temple to backfire, I want her to feel obliged.” Phoebe mounted a moldering unicorn held together with nails, bolts, and fiberglass patches. “Katz should be out helping people—curing diseases, making food appear in Ethiopia, ending the civil war in Turkey. She should be out…beating the devil.” The devil? Yes, it was he, surely. Phoebe uncapped the canteen, gulped; the magic fluid fortified her, a moat of rum surrounding her heart. A sensible girl would dismount and run now, she realized. She jammed her boots deeper into the stirrups. Sensible girls never got to rag the devil.

“Julie can’t be bothered with earthly ephemera,” Wyvern persisted. “Her mission is much higher.”

“Julie was sent to start a religion. It’s the only way she’ll know peace.”

“Know what I think, Mr. Wyvern?” Phoebe slid off her unicorn and, shielded by inebriation, staggered back onto the pier. “I think you’re so full of shit you’ve got roses growing out your ass.”

The devil’s lips quivered like angry slugs. “If you knew who I am, you wouldn’t—”

Wyvern squeezed the lion’s reins until his hand went white. Slowly, relentlessly, like a crumbling corpse twitching to life in one of Roger Worth’s zombie movies, the carousel began to turn. Faster now. And faster still, spewing out dark, palpable winds like a spinning jenny making thread. “You’re a poor friend to Julie!” Wyvern called from the core of the tornado. Music slashed the air, a screeching rendition of “The Washington Post March” played on the carousel’s steam organ.

“Screw you, mister!” The winds tugged Phoebe’s wiry hair. Caught in the gusts, paper trash scudded along the pier like tumbleweeds in a ghost town.

“A terrible friend!” Twenty-four wooden animals, back from the grave, galloping in homage to the glory that was Steel Pier, the grandeur that was Atlantic City. Flies and locusts flew from the stampede like bullets. A squadron of bats zoomed out, each with a human face—men, women, children, their flesh sucked dry, drained of hope. “Julie deserves better!”

Slowly, like a child’s top succumbing to gravity, the carousel ground to a halt. Wyvern was gone, his lion riderless.

Alone on the pier, Phoebe gasped and shivered and, after taking a bracing swallow of Girl Scout rum, quietly resolved that—one day—somehow—she would make Julie Katz fulfill her potential.

“The heart is a pump,” Julie wrote in her diary the day after she and Howard Lieberman broke up, “weak and fickle as any other machine, and sometimes an embolism of indifference stops affection’s flow.”

The affair had ended as abruptly as it had begun. They were in his apartment, eating breakfast in bed—they’d been shacking up since April—when suddenly Howard was babbling about their presumed upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands, laying out his plans as if that were the place she most wanted to visit.

“Why would I want to go there?” Julie asked, daubing cream cheese on a bagel.

“Why? Why? It’s the Jerusalem of Biology, that’s why.” Howard slid her nightgown upward and kissed her belly button, the tough nutlike stub that had once plugged her into God. “It’s the Holy City of Natural Science. At Galapagos, the mind frees itself from the illusion of divine guidance.”

“I’m saying I don’t want to go to the Galapagos Islands with you.” She bit into her bagel. “I’m saying I don’t…want to.”

At which point Howard had flown into a rage, accusing her of everything from laziness to vampirism. She’d exploited him, he asserted. Pretended to care while sinking her fangs into his intellect, drinking his mind. “Know what you said right before I asked you out? You said you believed in God.”

“I do believe in God. I’m sorry, Howard, but I couldn’t take a whole summer of hearing you whine about creationism.”

Whereupon Julie had risen from the bed, pushed her cheese-coated bagel against Howard’s forehead—it stuck like the mark of a buffoonish Cain—and, after throwing on her clothes, fled the apartment and marched down Spruce Street to the University Museum, where she spent the afternoon contemplating embalmed Egyptians.

The next day she hauled her junk out of Howard’s place and returned to Angel’s Eye, home now to Phoebe and Georgina, whose landlord, a Revelationist, had booted them out of their Ventnor Heights apartment upon sensing the pluralism of their sexual inclinations. Good old Phoebe, good old Georgina. What formidable nurses they made, Georgina especially, forever mixing up bizarre potions to strengthen Pop’s heart, forever feeding him the robust vegetables she’d somehow coaxed from the sandy soil.

Julie bought a diary, writing in it obsessively, hopeful that by projecting her mind, movielike, onto the creamy paper, she might glimpse who she was.

Her temple proved the ideal writer’s den, a monk’s cell complete with Smile Shop candles. Odd how Phoebe was always updating the place. Odder still how the images no longer soothed Julie reliably. It seemed as if her conscience were becoming raw and friable; her superego felt ready to bleed. As each new apartheid victim or traffic fatality appeared, she grew ever more certain that Phoebe wanted the images to cut both ways: Katz, you have nothing to do with this; Katz, you have everything to do with this.

“God didn’t send me to perform a lot of flashy tricks,” Julie insisted to her diary. “If Phoebe can’t see that, too bad. Besides, she drinks too much.”

Indeed, there was simply no point in taking Phoebe seriously these days. They now occupied two entirely different planes: Julie the Ivy Leaguer and nascent prophet of empiricism, Phoebe the high-school dropout and joke-shop clerk. What did Phoebe know of the Chandrasekhar limit? Of Planck’s constant, Seyfert galaxies, Hilbert spaces? Poor girl. She should get out of South Jersey and learn about the universe. Perhaps, as Howard had tutored Julie, she should now tutor Phoebe, infusing her with the thrill of cosmogenesis.

Howard. Ah, yes, Howard. “In his relentless crusade, Howard missed something,” Julie wrote. “Quantum mechanics and general relativity do not explain the universe, they portray it, as did Aristotle’s crystalline spheres and Newton’s clockwork planets.” She reread the paragraph. Howard missed, she’d written, not misses. So: it was truly over, she’d exiled him to the past tense. Fine. Good riddance. “Howard took the model for the reality,” she continued, “the metaphor for the meat. An authentic cosmic explorer, I believe, gleans a tacit moral from ΔχΔρ≥h/4π, Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty relation. At the heart of all truth lies a radiant cloud of unknowing, a glorious nugget of doubt, a shining core of impermanence.”

Pop entered. Each day he seemed to get a bit smaller, a bit more stooped. Life followed the statisticians’ famous bell-shaped curve: you grew, you peaked, you ungrew. His outlook, too, was shrinking. He’d simply drifted in, brought by the wind.

“Whatever form my ministry takes,” Julie wrote, “I shall forge only a covenant of uncertainty. I shall declare only a kingdom of impermanence.” She shut her diary violently, as if crushing a stray spider in its leaves.

“I’m lighting the beacon,” said Pop, cinching the sash of his awful tartan robe. “Exercise is good for cardiac patients.”

“Which is it?” she inquired through locked teeth. With age, his eccentricities had become decidedly less charming. “Lucy II?”

“The tragedy of my species,” Julie wrote, “is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history’s rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise, some alleged golden…”

She paused. Pop was climbing to the beacon. Exercise was good for cardiac patients, but…a hundred and twenty-six stairs?

Above all, Pop’s stare: frozen, upside down, twice normal size. Julie hadn’t seen a gaze so extreme since that Timothy kid got his eyes. He lay on the third loop of the staircase, hands pressed against his chest as if trying to massage his own frozen heart back to life.

Girl Scout camp, 1985. Take the cardiopulmonary resuscitation class, earn the merit badge. She slammed his chest, exhaled into his lungs. Such a grotesquely detailed corpse he made—the black hair flourishing in his nostrils, the gaping pores of his cheeks. Slam, slam, slam, breath. Slam, slam, slam, breath. When she was eleven, he’d started bringing home snapshots from Photorama, and they would set them out on the kitchen table. The women with emotional problems, those who photographed dismembered mannequins or teddy bears buried neck deep in mud, were automatically disqualified, ditto those candidates whose developed film revealed lovers, husbands, or hordes of offspring. Slam, slam, slam, breath. “How about her, Julie?” “Kind of grumpy-looking.” “Here’s a pretty one.” “Nah.” Slam, slam, slam, breath. Nothing came of it. Of the dozen or so women they found appealing, not one had been willing to commit to Pop. Slam, slam, slam, breath. And yet he was so sincere about it, so well meaning: yes, he’d wanted a companion for himself, but mostly he’d wanted a stepmother for his child.

Gradually her instincts, her maternal heritage, claimed her. Resting her palm atop his sternum, she made his heart go thump. And why not? Nobody would see her intervene, no baby bank aborters would ever know. Thump again. And thump. And—

Think it through, he’d told her. True resurrection was no childhood game, no simple matter of goading a dead crab with your crayons. Repair the heart, obviously. And by now his central nervous system was gone, blood-starved, a jumble of unraveled synapses, a stew of desiccated dendrites. Fix all that too.

Then what? Clean all the crust out of the veins and arteries? Yes, only it just started up again, didn’t it? Pop was right: at some point you had to remake the world, at some point you had to be God.

And yet—she must try. Thump. And thump. And thump and suddenly something came into being, a creation half Pop, half not, a palsied parody of life, blinking fitfully.

A shrill, watery whistle shot from her father’s mouth, as if he had the Steel Pier steam organ for lungs. And then, for the second time that evening, he died.

So instead of resurrection, instead of Lazarus II, there was merely this tearful climb to the beacon room. Go have a life. Very well—she would. She hadn’t been sent to contradict death; rebirth was not her business. She would eschew the rearview mirror, lock on the road ahead, live in her own time.

The matches, she knew, were in a tin box under the lamp. Raising the lens, she wound the clockwork motor. Enough kerosene? He always kept the tank full, didn’t he?

She struck a match, twisted the knob. The central wick rose like a cobra from a basket, meeting the little flame and catching. “Hello there, William Rose,” she gasped, the words falling from her lips like rotten teeth. “This time…you’ll…make it.” She restored the lens. The lead piston descended, squeezing kerosene into the wick chamber.

Somewhere beyond the blur of her tears, the beacon glowed brightly, she was sure of it.

And now came her penance, the agony that all who fail their fathers must endure. Did you see our lamp, old ship? Reaching out blindly with her right hand, she wrapped it tightly around the hot mantle. Impossible pain—uncanny, unprecedented pain—yet she held on till she smelled burnt flesh, screaming till she felt her throat might rip. Did you find your way home? Weeping, she pulled her smoking, blistered, martyred palm away. Did you?

By some miracle she got through the rest of the day and its obscene details. Calling the undertaker. Calling the undertaker a second time when he failed to show up. (He had confused Brigantine Point with Brigantine Quay.) Hauling herself down to Atlantic City Memorial, where they greased and bandaged her hand, put her on antibiotics, and admonished her to avoid kerosene lamps. The notification list was not long—Phoebe, Georgina, and, from the fire station, Freddie Caspar and Rodney Balthazar, Herb Melchior having died six years earlier of lung cancer.

“The dumb bunny wanted to marry me,” Georgina sobbed over the phone. “Sounds like the premise of a bad TV show, huh? That’s right, Bernie, this aging bookworm and his dyke friend move in together. He doesn’t expect her to give up women, though secretly he’s jealous, and they’ve got these two kids, and…you mean you just let him die? You didn’t do anything?”

“Try again! Run over to the fucking funeral parlor this very minute and raise him up! This very minute!”

Julie’s stomach became a well of ice water. Her burned palm itched ferociously. “I’m supposed to have a life, Georgina—that was his big goal.”

For an entire minute Georgina grieved, so much weeping that Julie imagined tears dripping from the receiver and splashing onto the phone-booth floor.

“Listen, Julie, we’ve got to do this right. I think we’re supposed to rip our clothes, and then we sit on these little stools till next Monday. Hey, I’d be happy to do that, honey. For him, I’d put my ass to sleep for a week.”

In the end they simply had him cremated. The small, solemn procession—Julie, Phoebe, Georgina—carried the urn across the lighthouse lawn and down the length of the jetty. After Julie said Kaddish, Georgina took out a peanut-butter jar filled with a second set of ashes, specially prepared by incinerating Pop’s copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Phoebe opened the urn and dumped in the contents of the jar, mixing everything together with a kitchen knife, merging Murray Katz with his favorite book.

“I always liked him,” Phoebe said, closing the urn and passing it to Julie. “He was the kind of dad I’d have wanted for myself, even if he thought I was a bad influence on you.”

“You were a bad influence on me.” With her burned hand Julie uncapped the urn, glancing briefly at the dark ethereal flecks of her father. “Oh, Pop…”

Phoebe and Georgina melted into the dusk, leaving Julie alone with the monotonous and unfeeling surf. Was it a proper funeral? Had the un-Jewish procedure of cremation offended him? “Too late now,” she muttered as she tore her black dress—tore it, and tore it again, and again, until she stood naked on the rocks. She snugged the urn under her breasts and climbed into the sea.

Her gills throbbed, wringing oxygen from the bay. Endless gallons, but they couldn’t dilute her acid tears or wash away her guilt. Two decades jacketed in flesh, during which time she hadn’t done the vast damaged planet one atom of good.

She touched bottom and quickly buried the urn. The Adventures of Huckleberry Katz.

In the beginning was the Word, but now God’s vocabulary was growing. The first Word was an English noun, savior, but the second would be a French verb, savoir, to know: at long last, Julie, Howard used to tell her, we can know things. Three more years of college, and then she’d buy a word processor (no, Word processor) and publish her covenant of uncertainty, declare her kingdom of impermanence, topple the empire of nostalgia—teach the truth of the heart. The heart was a pump? Yes, true enough, provided one meant: at the present moment in history, pump is the best metaphor we have for what a heart is.

And the kidney was a filter. Earth orbited the sun. Microbes caused disease. Yes! The time of her ministry was at hand. She would take neither the high road nor the low, but a byway of her own devising; she would beam her message onto every television screen in creation, etch it onto every phonograph record, smear it across every printed page. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end there would be a million words, ten million words, a hundred million words, all authored by the only begotten daughter of God herself.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5