James Morrow - Only Begotten Daughter

PART TWO
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Atlantic City Messiah

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6
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Bix Constantine—morose, fat, and frank—had always seen the world as it was and not as people wished it would be.

While still a preschooler, he pondered the ways children’s books depicted the relationship between humans and farm animals, soon sensing the disparity between these cheery visions and the proteinaceous facts appearing nightly on his plate. Shortly after he started first grade, Bix’s mother told him dew-drops were elf tears, and he told her she was full of dog-doo. That evening his father spanked him, and Bix always suspected his real crime was not his surliness but his refusal to love a lie.

With adolescence his vision enlarged. God? Santa Claus for grownups. Love? A euphemism for resignation. Marriage? The first symptom of death.

On the morning of July 13, 1996, Bix Constantine discovered something even worse than walking to work through the dense sleaze of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk: doing so knowing you’re about to be fired. Nobody knew why the Midnight Moon was losing the great supermarket-tabloid race. Not Bix, not his staff, not Tony Biacco, the former Mafia chieftain who owned the paper. “Folks, we’re going to have to pull the plug,” Tony had been saying at least once a week for the past two years. Plug-pulling was a familiar motif around the Midnight Moon, COMA WIFE WAKES AFTER HUBBY PULLS PLUG. ALSO, MANIAC STALKS COMA WARD PULLING PLUGS. AND “DON’T PULL MY PLUG!” COMA GIRL TELLS MOM THROUGH PSYCHIC.

Bix ambled past the Tropicana and bought a cup of coffee from a vendor outside the Golden Nugget, its threshold pillared and glittery like a fundamentalist’s heaven. Tonight: Neil Sedaka, screamed the billboards. Next Week: Vic Damone and Diahann Carroll. Who could possibly care?

When he was ten, his father had dragged him to a celebration here. The Casino Gaming Referendum had just passed, and the Boardwalk was overrun by chorus girls and brass bands. Clowns bustled up and down the piers, giving out balloons. “It’s not going to succeed,” little Bix had told his father. “The mob will move in and ruin it,” he’d elaborated. His father had scowled. “The mob moves in and ruins everything. Don’t you ever read, Dad?”

Slurping Styrofoam-flavored coffee, Bix listed onto Sovereign Avenue. A derelict was piled up at the Arctic intersection, shrouded in wine vapors. Graffiti coated the city. The stray dogs had it on their flanks.

Why was the Moon dying? Weren’t its extraterrestrials every bit as perverted as the World Bugle’s, its abominable snowmen as randy as the National Comet’s? Had not Bix’s surrealistic surgical procedures, pregnant great-grandmothers, Siamese quadruplets, and celebrities’ ghosts set new standards for the entire industry? Yes, yes, yes, and yes—and yet the stark fact remained that Tony had arranged an emergency lunch for the entire staff, a perfect occasion to solicit their resignations.

Arriving at 1475 Arctic Avenue, he approached the open elevator shaft—the car lay inert and broken at the bottom like a sunken ship—and tossed his coffee cup into the square chasm. Hauling his bulk up the moldering staircase, he disembarked on the third floor, where Madge Bronston, the paper’s chronically smiling receptionist, told him “a pigheaded young woman” had just invaded his office.

As Bix opened his monogrammed door, his visitor—chunky, caramel skin, early twenties—spun away from his mounted collection of UFO photos, flashing him a grin of considerable sensuality. “I’ve always wanted to visit Pluto,” she said in a South Jersey accent. “Mars sounds dull, Saturn’s a lot of gas, but Pluto…” Her hand came toward him like a fluttering bird, and without meaning to he reached out and captured it. “I’m Julie Katz. You must be Mr. Constantine.”

Her white sundress dazzled him, and her lips were of the succulent sort that inspired Muslims to veil their women. Glancing higher, Bix encountered a cute upturned nose, turquoise eyes, and a crop of unruly black hair.

So this was how it began: the pangs of libido, and then would come the first date, the courtship, the disingenuous nuptial vows, the snot-clogged children, the reciprocal illusion of permanence, the extramarital affairs (most of them his, but she would doubtless get in a few retaliatory screws), and, inevitably, the divorce. “I’m afraid this operation’s headed for the sewer, Miss Katz.” Bix strode to his King Coffee machine, which by some miracle Madge had remembered to turn on, and filled his inscribed mug: I have come to the conclusion that one can be of no use to another person—Paul Cezanne. “There’s no job here for you.”

The intruder tapped a flying saucer with her long, miter-shaped fingernail. “You a believer?”

He swallowed coffee, quite possibly the only decent thing in the world. “Ten thousand encounters to date, and still nobody’s walked away with a single alien cootie or paper clip. You don’t want to work for us. We’re the most heavily censored paper this side of Pravda.” True enough, Bix thought. Even more than Soviet journalism, irrationality and mawkishness had to follow a party line. The man who died on the operating table and was subsequently revived could speak only of light and angels, and if it were gray or frightening you wouldn’t be reading about it in the checkout line. “Time to go.”

She marched forward and presented him with a manila envelope. Coarse white tissue covered her right palm like a wad of chewing gum. “Read this.”

“My column—the preamble, actually. I can’t give advice till I’ve stated my principles.”

“Mine’ll be different—a kind of covenant. I want to rescue the masses from nostalgia, and yours is one of the few papers they read.”

“I could always take my message to Scientific American or The Skeptical Inquirer, but why preach to the converted?” That lascivious smile again. “My brother Jesus made a big mistake. He didn’t leave any writings behind.”

“Jesus’ sister, eh?” Bix drained his coffee. Jesus’ sister: that, at least, was a new one. “On Mary’s side?”

“God’s.” She gave his shoulder a patronizing squeeze. “It’s hard to accept. I barely do myself.”

Bix had spent most of his adult life dealing with self-appointed saints and saviors. With faith healers, fortune tellers, crystal gazers, spirit channelers. With people who took their vacations on Venus and their sabbaticals on the astral plane. Now came a woman with the grandest claim of all, yet she bore about as much resemblance to the average visionary as an interim report did to an orgasm.

“Used to be.” Bix refilled his mug. “Then one day—you want to hear about it?”

“One day I picked up my cousin’s new baby and realized how at any moment this pathetic, innocent creature might die in a car crash or get leukemia, and in that moment of revelation, my Road to Damascus, I went the whole way to atheism.”

Of all things: she laughed. A spontaneous display of amused assent. “Hey, if I weren’t divine,” she said, “I’d probably be an atheist too.” In a gesture he found both erotic and endearing, Julie Katz wrapped her hands around his coffee mug and, leaving it in his grasp, lifted the rim to her abundant lips and sipped. “It’s certainly the more logical choice.”

I’m in love, Bix thought. He opened the manila envelope and lifted out a one-page letter stapled to a black-and-white photo of its author.

What did Bix think? He thought Julie Katz had dug up the basement of the Moon building and found a chest of Spanish doubloons. This wasn’t ESP or the Loch Ness monster or the boy who filled the bathtub with piranha thinking them goldfish until they ate Gramps—this was genuine lunacy, this was playing to win. The ailing tabloid would either rise on Julie Katz’s dementia or she would bury it forever.

“This put-down of healing and immortality should go. Our readers are into those things.”

“The Age of Reason is also over. This is the Age of Nonsense. We have a policy.”

“Do you want a column or not?” She pushed back her hair, uncovering a thin, S-shaped scar. “I imagine the World Bugle would be interested.”

“Look, it doesn’t really matter what I think. Mr. Biacco has final say on any new feature.”

Predictably, she declined his request for her phone number, promising instead to call on Tuesday. His eyes remained rooted on her as she brushed past Madge Bronston and started down the hall, and seconds later he was bent over the Moon’s persnickety Xerox machine, rapidly reproducing her letter. That lush mouth, that luxurious hair. Why were the mad so singularly sensual?

Tony kicked off the lunch meeting exactly as Bix knew he would, noting that “a corpse’s corpuscles have better circulation than we do.” But today he went further. The time, Tony asserted, had truly, finally, irrevocably come to pull the plug.

“Let’s try this first.” Bix opened his briefcase. Within a minute each rat aboard the sinking ship called Midnight Moon was reading a copy of Julie Katz’s letter.

“Crazy or not, I say give her a chance.” He had to see her again, Bix realized. Had to. “Look at it this way. The Bugle’s got that happy fascist Orton March and his outrageous editorials, the Comet seems to know exactly which movie stars’ penises people want to read about, but the Moon and only the Moon will have the living, breathing words of God’s other child.”

“Okay, okay, but she’s not up to speed yet,” said Tony. “I assume you’ll cut this crap about our bewildering century?”

“That was my first instinct. I’m beginning to think it gives her a certain authenticity.”

“It’s not us. It’s not the Moon.” Tony combed his graying hair with his withered fingers. “I want her to reveal what heaven’s like, okay, Bix? Then have her try a few low-key predictions.”

“Hey, now that the concept’s nailed down, why do we need this girl at all?” asked Mike Alonzo, the paper’s science editor (DEAD ASTRONAUTS BUILD CITY ON VENUS). “Why not just have Kendra McCandless write it?”

Kendra’s very name made Bix grimace. Kendra McCandless, the paper’s freelance astrologer, astral tripper, ecstasy monger, and goofball. “Nah, with Kendra all you get’s a lot of secrets-of-the-universe stuff. Transcendence as usual. With Julie Katz you get…I don’t know. Something else.”

“We can offer three hundred per column,” said Tony. “You think she’ll sign for that?”

“‘Letters to Sheila’?” suggested Paul Quattrone, the paper’s financial reporter (TOP PSYCHICS PREDICT MARKET UPTURN).

“‘Sheila’s Corner’?” offered Sally Ormsby, the film critic (NEW ELVIS FLICK RECOVERED FROM UFO CRASH).

“‘Notes from the Netherworld’?” ventured Lou Pincus, the sports editor (DEVIL CULT USES HUMAN HEAD FOR HOCKEY PUCK).

“‘Advice from the Afterlife’?” hazarded Vicki Maldonado, whose beat was burned children and the Bermuda Triangle.

“Hold on,” said Tony. “This is hardball, people. This is Jesus Christ’s sister. We’ll be printing the stuff everybody wants to know.”

“The girl’s column will be called—now get this—‘Heaven Help You.’”

“To be perfectly frank,” Bix told Julie over the phone after she’d been at it for three months, “this isn’t quite the column we had in mind.”

“It’s got to be more spiritual. Tony wants Sheila to tell people how they can tap their hidden psychic powers and tune in the rhythms of the cosmos.”

“It’s bullshit.” She wished she hadn’t called him. “It’s Georgina Sparks bullshit.”

“It sells papers. Look, friend, you’re not exactly a runaway smash. A one-point-two percent rise in circulation, that’s all. And no more talk about God being deranged, okay? Those people lost a son, for Christ’s sake.”

The operator said, “Please deposit thirty cents for the next three minutes.”

“I came to wake up the world,” said Julie. Time to install a home phone, she decided. She had a job; she could afford it. “Not coo it to sleep.”

“We just want you to work harder on the spiritual end,” said Bix. “Is that asking so much?”

“How about dinner next week? A lobster dinner, then we’ll go hear Vic Damone at the Tropicana.”

“This is my ministry happening now, boss. It’s not a time for personal pleasure. Bye.”

A ministry! Three hundred a week and a ministry! True, the launching of “Heaven Help You” had been marred by editorial tamperings. As someone who profoundly doubted the accessibility of heaven, Julie resented the title—almost as much as she resented the halo they airbrushed onto her photo. Equally distressing was the lurid kick-off story, GOD’S DAUGHTER LANDS IN AMERICA, its inaccurate text illustrated with an equally inaccurate sketch of the ectogenesis machine (miscaptioned echogenesis machine). But: a ministry, a ministry, three hundred a week and a ministry!

With each letter she received, each wretch she helped, Julie felt a measure of remorse leach through her flesh and vanish. This was exactly the right vocation for her, the glorious middle road, modest enough to confound her enemies, grand enough to assuage her godhead. Indeed, when Phoebe asked to move into Julie’s temple—it was twice the size of her own bedroom—Julie immediately said “of course,” for she had no more need of temples, no more convulsions of conscience, no more free-floating guilt. “Tear down the clippings if you want.”

Dark Phoebe, Phoebe the troglodyte. Predictably, instead of stripping the temple bare, Phoebe continued to upgrade it, carrying it into the third dimension: a diorama of a jetliner crashing, a dollhouse consumed by paper flames, a plaster volcano spewing cotton fumes on an HO-scale plastic village, the cluster of nuclear-tipped missiles she’d created by gluing cardboard stabilizers to her stolen dynamite from the Deauville. “Why bother?” asked Julie one December afternoon as Phoebe scissored a baby’s corpse from Time. The cover story concerned the recent epidemic of child abuse.

“Because you still need this place. You haven’t figured out what it’s really saying.”

“Like hell I need it.” Julie followed Phoebe into the temple. “I have a ministry now. I’m out in the world.”

“An advice column isn’t a ministry. A word processor isn’t the world.” Phoebe slapped rubber cement on the clipping and centered it above her bed. “This is the world—parents wrecking their own babies.”

“Last week I printed the number of the national child-abuse hotline,” Julie noted.

An occasional word of support from your best friend—was that too much to expect? Praise for a well-written paragraph or for an astute suggestion—did it never occur to Phoebe to offer any? “That quadriplegic wrote back, you know. He said I gave him the will to live.”

“These poor women write to you wanting to know about abortion, and you lecture them on Saint Augustine.”

“In each case I mail out the address of the nearest shelter for battered women.”

“You should be driving them to the nearest shelter for battered women.” The centerpiece of Phoebe’s dresser was a portable liquor cabinet containing miniature bottles, the kind given out on airplanes; they seemed to Julie like toys—today’s the day the teddy bears have their cocktail party. Approaching, Phoebe snatched up a Bacardi rum. “Look, I know we’ve been through all this,” she said. “The world’s pain is endless, this room doesn’t even begin to tell the story. But still…” She emptied the bottle into a Smile Shop DAMN I’M GOOD mug. “A column is really the best you can do? You, who could part the Red Sea and patch up the ozone layer, and instead you’re content to be just another tabloid rabbi?” She consumed the rum in three rapid sips. “If I had your talents, honey…”

Obviously Phoebe hadn’t been reading “Heaven Help You” closely, or she would have understood that divine intervention and instant cures belonged in the past. “My mother wants us to live in our own time. When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.”

Phoebe opened a second Bacardi, swilling it straight from the tiny bottle. “How do you know that’s what God wants? How do you fucking know?”

Phoebe’s rebuke filled Julie with an odd amalgam of confusion and anger. All right, sure, maybe she couldn’t say for a fact that God was smiling on the Covenant of Uncertainty. But Phoebe had no right to harass her like this. “I have a strong intuition about it.” Shivering with dismay, Julie picked up the altar skull, working her thumbs into the eye sockets. “Believe me, if I start doing miracles, the wheels of progress will slip a thousand years.”

Like a furtive urchin stealing an apple from a fruit stand, Phoebe palmed a third Bacardi. “Hey, you’re right, Katz, you don’t need this temple anymore. You’ve got a much better rationalization now.”

Julie felt her brain shake like a plum pudding. “I’ll chalk that stupid remark up to rum.”

“Maybe I’m not living in my own time, but you’re not living in your own skin.” Phoebe polished off the third bottle. “And I’m not drunk.”

Phoebe winked spitefully. “Yeah, but tomorrow I’ll be sober, Katz”—she wobbled out of the room—“and you’ll still be the deity who doesn’t help people.”

In Julie’s fibrillating mind the altar skull acquired eyeballs. Its stare was unyielding, accusing. Had it owned a tongue, she felt, it would have spoken, saying, Phoebe’s right, you know.

Remote-control miracles, Sheila—that’s the way to go. Intervention-at-a-distance—try it. You wouldn’t have to expose yourself.

Because Ruined in Newark or Anguished in Camden might be waiting to abduct Sheila and force her to perform miracles, Julie never picked up her mail at the Moon. She likewise refused to have it forwarded to Angel’s Eye: the postman might be a follower. Instead she received her letters under conditions suggesting a cocaine transaction, donning dark glasses and meeting her editor inside the moist, dismal, abandoned aquarium on Central Pier.

“Want to see a movie tonight?” Bix asked, lurching out of the shadows, the canvas mailbag teetering on his shoulder. Each week, his infatuation grew more annoying and adolescent: the brushed tit, the patted butt, the raunchy valentines he planted in her mail.

Julie upended the bag and, guided by the return addresses, divided the envelopes into two stacks: regular readers versus beneficiaries of her remote-control miracles. Barely ten percent of the letters Sheila got could be accurately termed hate mail—the people who wrote calling her a communist, a humanist, the Whore of Babylon, the Whore of Reason, the Antichrist, or the devil incarnate. Her gender had proven particularly galling—an Oklahoma City man once sent her a cigar box containing a dog’s penis (“The Bible says God is male, so you’re going to need this”)—though by far the largest subcategory of hate mail came from those who resented Sheila’s policy of no visits. Dear Sheila: My (wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, child) is (sick, addicted, insane, suicidal, dying). Please come over right away. Sheila’s form letter was curt, but it did the job. Dear Grieving: If I start making house calls, I won’t have time for anything else.

She nabbed an envelope from the first pile, slit it. “Look, Bix, this sexually molested teen in Albany says that, thanks to me, she finally got the courage to run away…and here’s Reconciled in Duluth saying that, because of ‘Heaven Help You,’ he now accepts being a dwarf. Maybe you don’t take me seriously, maybe Phoebe doesn’t, but these people do.”

“I’ve never taken anybody more seriously in my life. This is Bix Constantine talking, the Voltaire of Ventnor Heights, and you’ve got the bastard sending valentines.”

“That last one was so sweet. I’d never seen porcupines humping before.” She ripped apart a cushy envelope, and a blindingly red, home-knitted scarf fell out. Her greatest fan, that ninety-year-old grandmother in Topeka, had come through again.

“Valentines are a big step for me.” Bix rested his plump hand on her shoulder, where it remained like an affectionate parrot. “Listen, friend, Tony’s getting really itchy about the circulation figures. Let’s tear a couple of lobsters apart next Saturday and talk about some ways to boost your appeal.”

She removed the presumptuous hand. His fulsome demeanor did nothing for her, though she conceded his eternal nihilism had a certain glamor, his steadfast fatalism a definite panache. “I don’t eat seafood. When I was a kid, my friends were flounders and starfish.”

“Order steak then. The Moon’s treat.” Bix knocked on a deserted fish tank, producing a glassy bong. “Dante’s lobby at eight. Okay?”

“Sure.” He slung the gutted mailbag over his arm. “Who knows—you might even have a good time.”

As her boss waddled down the pier, Julie opened the letter from the unemployed spot welder.

“Dear Sheila: The Westinghouse refrigerator arrived on Sunday morning. There it was, standing on the back porch like a hobo looking for a handout. At first we weren’t bothered it came with no guarantee, but then we plugged it in and this weird sort of green fog came pouring out the bottom, and before we knew it our wallpaper was peeling away and our houseplants had all died, and then Emma and I both threw up for about six hours straight, plus getting the runs, and we ended up taking the thing down to the dump. Anyway, if somebody else asks you for a refrigerator, Sheila, we suggest you give them a different kind.”

Huh? Green fog? A phantom fist squeezed Julie’s windpipe. She opened the next letter.

“Dear Sheila: No doubt you meant well in fixing me up with Alex Filippone, because he really seemed like a nice man. He brought me flowers and took me to shows, and all of a sudden we were married. The trouble began when he put on the diapers and insisted I spank him with a broken canoe paddle like the bad little boy he was, because I couldn’t bring myself to do that, no way, and the next thing I know he’s run off with most of my savings, so here I am, lonely as ever, except without any money.”

Diapers? Canoe paddle? What the hell? She grew prickly with dread. No more high road, she vowed. Never again. Never.

“Dear Sheila: Obviously you worked hard at improving my face, and many parts of it truly look better now. So why am I here at the DeGrazzio Institute? Well, I suspect you got distracted when it came to my nose, Sheila, because now I have two of them, and I needn’t tell you an extra nose is not necessarily a great improvement over a burned face. I’m sure you did your best, and the surgery will probably go fine, but I wish…”

Julie moaned. She wept. She rammed her fist against the nearest fish tank, which seemed suddenly populated with Moon creatures. With ravenous piranha and Loch Ness monsters, with embryonic aliens and aquatic Bigfoots—with tears and transplanted hearts and a thousand redundant noses.

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7
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No known bone, no discrete organ, no identifiable passage for blood was home to Billy Milk’s pain. His uncertainty, like God, was everywhere at once. If only it would coalesce, as the Father had done to become the Son’s sinless tissues, so that Billy might touch some specific part of himself and, pressing the swollen doubt, make it stop hurting.

He entered the First Ocean City Church of Saint John’s Vision and methodically lined up seven candlesticks along the altar like a windbreak of golden trees. He rubbed his eyepatch. Had he truly been elected to bring down the Babylon called Atlantic City? The signs were right—his boy given sight, the Great Whore unveiled—and yet, for all the times Billy had demonstrated Timothy’s new eyes in church, for all his public displays of the Whore’s gown, his flock had remained largely unmoved. Whereas Revelation 7:4 explicitly called for 144,000, the crusade so far numbered only two hundred and nine.

Take it easy, Billy counseled himself as he lit the candles. God did not want soldiers who rushed in blindly; heaven must recruit at its own pace. Crusades were serious business, after all, matters of blood and fire, of severed heads hoisted aloft on spears to peer over medieval Antioch’s walls at Christless Turks until the skin dissolved and only the skulls remained, still staring. Wait. Have patience.

The sanctuary door opened and in strode Timothy, eyes glowing a brilliant blue, a stack of tabloid newspapers tucked under his arm. Dear Timothy, so handsome and sturdy in his white, three-piece, all-cotton suit, the best a father might ever hope to reap from the line of gullible Eve and disobedient Adam. “Something you should see here, Dad.” Timothy flopped the tabloids on the altar, BABY GIRL BORN PREGNANT, a headline proclaimed beneath the banner of the Midnight Moon.

“Just look.” Timothy opened an issue to an advice column, “Heaven Help You.” The letters, Billy noted, all addressed someone named Sheila.

Rarely had the pastor beheld blasphemies such as now assaulted his existing eye. This Sheila counseled suicide. She called God deranged. Timothy opened a second Moon (ELVIS CURED MY CANCER). Sheila was still at it, encouraging divorce, sanctioning abortions…

“Pretty ugly, huh?” Timothy reached for a third tabloid. “Know where this paper’s published?”

Billy stayed his son’s hand. “In hell?” Together they laughed. It was good to joke around, father and son. The Lord enjoyed a certain amount of humor.

Atlantic City. Atlantic City! Billy’s good eye expanded like an unchecked tumor. His skin bubbled, his heart seethed, and, slowly, steadily, he felt doubt’s worm wither and die. Where was it written that the beast of Chapter Thirteen must be male? Might not female flesh prove an apt disguise for Satan’s avatar? “Antichrist,” he muttered. An obscene entity took shape in his eye socket. “Antichrist!” he shouted. There she was, there, she with the scaly skin, the brambly hair, the eyeballs in her breasts instead of nipples. “The devil’s spawn and mistress!” He rapped on the altar, making the flames quiver like frightened sinners. Atlantic City was home to the beast herself—here, surely, was a staff for goading his flock to battle! Deus vult, they’d shout as they incinerated Babylon, stronghold of the Antichrist, Deus vult, the cry of Pope Urban II’s crusaders—God wills it. “Now we’ll get our army!” Billy led his son through the cloakroom to the church kitchen. “Now they’ll cancel their ridiculous vacations!” Even the initials fit: Anti-Christ, Atlantic City.

Billy guided his boy to the New Jersey road map on the bulletin board. Happy Motoring, it said. Exxon Corporation.

Burning a city wasn’t easy, their arson expert, Ted Rifkin, had warned. “Hit all those deserted tenements hard so you tie up the fire department, and you’ve got half a chance of pulling it off.” But Billy had demanded a different plan. “This is an attack on Babylon, Ted, not on deserted tenements.” Naturally they would strike a few—Billy had nothing against strategy. The main army, however, must go against the twelve casinos that would eventually become the twelve gates to the New Jerusalem. The Savior’s soldiers must cleanse the world of the Golden Nugget, that beam in God’s eye. Bring down the Atlantis, that fat affront to the Spirit. Burn the Sands, the Tropicana, the Claridge, Caesar’s…

“Tell me about the First Crusade,” Billy commanded his son. “Tell me about Dorylaeum.”

“A great victory,” Timothy replied, his voice edged with fervor. Many young men returned from college the duller for it, their brains blunted by unscriptural knowledge, but not Timothy. “Prince Bohemund splits his army—infantry in one camp, cavalry in the other.” Timothy’s hand chopped the air, splitting the Frankish forces. “At first the day seems lost. Qilij-Arslan’s arrows rain down, the infantry panics—dropping their weapons, falling back to their tents. A disaster. But then, suddenly, Bohemund’s cavalry rides out of nowhere, crushing the astonished bowmen!”

A letter-perfect account. Scholarly yet passionate. “We, too, shall divide our forces.” Billy drove his bamboo pointer toward the Atlantic City inset. “Leaving the marina, the armada will cruise north and land a thousand believers before the Golden Nugget.” He moved the pointer landward. “Meanwhile, having gathered in Absecon, the infantry under your command will march down the boulevard and harrow the bayside casinos.”

“Burning,” Billy echoed, the word tearing at his throat like a thorn. “Only fire can scour Babylon and purify the path of Christ’s return.”

Breathlessly Timothy walled in Atlantic City with his cupped hands. “Dorylaeum wasn’t the end.” Licking his finger, he ran a line of spittle down the Boardwalk, from the Nugget to Resorts International. “When the crusaders finally reached Jerusalem, the streets became canals of blood.”

“Sometimes God gives hard orders,” Billy explained, guiding his son back to the kitchen. “Sometimes he asks his hosts to put on breastplates of iron.” Shoulder to shoulder, they marched into the pulpit.

A tidal wave of love washed through Billy as, lifting the stack of Midnight Moons from the altar, he faced his congregation. How he loved Susan Cleary sitting there in her fern-filled hat and flowered dress. How he loved Ralph and Betty Bowersox as they admonished their five children to be quiet.

“Do they look like hosts?” Billy whispered. “I want them to look like hosts.”

ALL HOPE EMBRACE, YE WHO ENTER IN, demanded the sign over the casino entrance, the red words made gray by Julie’s sunglasses. Together they ascended the carpeted stairs—Bix in his ivory white polyester suit and artist’s-palette tie, Julie in Aunt Georgina’s old senior-prom dress—and strode into the sumptuous restaurant called Gluttony Forgiven.

What a horrible ordeal, that second set of letters, like reaching into a sock full of razor blades. The lesson was clear, she felt. Intervention-at-a-distance was impossible. Signals got crossed, distortions accumulated. Effective miracle-working meant breaching walls, laying on hands, conjoining flesh to flesh—all those showy, retrograde gestures the Covenant of Uncertainty did not permit.

After the rolls arrived, Bix handed her a rumpled piece of Moon stationery (“All the News They Don’t Want You to Know”) containing a brief, cryptic list.

1. Prayers

2. Anecdotes

3. Photo offer

“I thought Sheila might include a brief prayer every now and then. Our receptionist knows a couple of good ones. She’s a Baptist.”

“Most people are worse off than you, Julie. Give them something to hang on to.”

But: keep the thing at any cost? Compromise the Covenant of Uncertainty? Bend the mandate she’d received from God on the night she and Howard Lieberman seduced each other? (It was a true revelation, she’d decided; it wasn’t just the orgasm talking.) “Prayers have no place in a kingdom of impermanence, Bix. Neither do ‘anecdotes,’ whatever that means.”

“It wouldn’t hurt if occasionally Sheila ran an inspirational story. You know, how her crippled nephew learned to knit award-winning sweaters with a needle strapped to his chin. How her cousin fell out of his hot-air balloon to certain doom, but then he called on the Lord and—”

“I’m trying to save your ass, Julie. Now this last item—photo offer. The idea is that any reader who drops us a postcard gets an autographed picture of Sheila. Tony figures we can use the Xerox machine.”

“Why are you treating me like this? You think I want a bunch of yahoos and fanatics hanging me on their walls? I don’t.”

Slowly, silently, Julie dunked her napkin into her water goblet and began cleaning her sunglasses. “Planning to fire me?”

“I certainly should.” Bix acquired the pained look of a baby drinking beer. “The catch, as you may have guessed, is that I’m in love with you.”

Evidently Georgina had been no less skinny a teenager than she was an adult; the prom dress squeezed Julie like a corset. In love, he’d said. He didn’t just love her, he was in love, that disarming preposition, at once a confession and a trap.

Without quite knowing why, she blew him a kiss. He smiled softly, receiving her phantom lips. A bulbous nose, she mused, and his eyes sat too far apart, but he was also rather swarthy; a rugged old barn, weathered by the world’s hypocrisies. “Dear walrus,” she whispered. Howard Lieberman had never spoken of love. Roger Worth had used the word only because it was the password to her pants. But Bix, the sweetheart, seemed to mean it. “I’m touched. Truly touched.” She launched a second kiss. “Love’s an uncertain phenomenon, of course.”

After dinner they strolled along the ocean. “Constantine Pictures presents, Atlantic City: Metropolis in Transition,” Bix announced grandly. A teenage couple wandered by, hand-in-hand, exuding grim giggles. “Some come to play baccarat in the casinos, others to play pregnancy roulette under the Boardwalk.” She followed him into Ocean One Mall, where he soon discovered an everything-for-a-dollar store. He maneuvered through the bins, grabbing tacky novelties for his photography staff to turn into proofs. “‘Archaeologists Unearth Space Fetus!’” Bix enthused, picking up a rubber skull. Julie threw her head back and laughed. “‘Jesus’ Own Baby Blanket?’” Bix persisted, waving a white silk scarf. “‘Ten Top Bishops Say Yes!’”

She perused his spherical stomach. His fatness, she decided, boasted a rare candor: there is indeed too much of me, but that’s the way I am, take it or…

She did? She did. Oh, yes, God of physics, our mother who art in the Dirac sea, she did. “You heard me.”

From that point on, their relationship could be charted as an upward progression through Dante’s.

The level above Gluttony Forgiven featured a small, intimate, sinfully expensive restaurant called To Each His Own, and throughout the spring Saturday night meant overpriced spaghetti followed by the blackjack tables. Higher still, surmounting To Each His Own, were several strata of fine hotel suites—champagne vending machines, sunken bathtubs right in the room—and by early July they’d become regular guests, graduating each week to the next successive bed. Bix’s attractiveness was one of the great biological mysteries, like the curing of warts through hypnosis or the presence of fully formed spirochetes on myxotricha. His aptitude for sex was meager, he had no appreciation for science, and he required an entire bottle of tanning oil for a single afternoon at the beach.

He made her happy. Perhaps some variation on general relativity was at work here, his bulk capturing anyone passing within his field. More probably his appeal lay in his sheer acceptance of her. Whereas Howard had ended up demanding Julie’s assent to his worldview and Roger had ended up worshiping her, she could not imagine Bix doing either. Around him she felt safe, and with each passing day his swarthiness seemed sexier, his girth narrower, his pessimism more courageous.

Ever upward. The top level of Dante’s was a posh conglomeration of saunas, pools, and gymnastic equipment servicing a community of penthouses intended for high rollers and mobsters. The weekend Julie and Bix spent there—they’d saved up their salaries for months—was also the weekend Bix revealed the latest circulation figures.

“I got the news this morning,” he said, French-kissing her. “We leveled off in May.”

“And we dropped two-point-one percent in June,” Bix confessed. “I’m afraid Tony’s talking about pulling your plug.”

Dropped two-point-one. Julie felt as if something vital—her plug, her soul—had just been yanked out. “Can you appease him?”

That the lighthouse was witnessing an endless parade of Phoebe and Georgina’s girlfriends both Sapphic and Platonic, that it was becoming a kind of exclusive club—WELCOME TO ANGEL’S EYE, NO BOYS ALLOWED—did not bother Julie. Wholly feminine worlds had many virtues. You never wanted for a tampon. Copies of Ms. and bottles of hand lotion appeared as if by magic. The Super Bowl came and went unwatched, with some Angel’s Eye residents not even certain which particular sport it consecrated.

Predominant among the live-in guests was Phoebe’s lover Melanie Markson, an unpublished writer of children’s books and the only woman Julie knew to whom the word portly applied: Phoebe and Melanie, the Laurel and Hardy of Atlantic City, tootling around the casinos like retired veterans of a hundred lesbian two-reelers.

“I’ve been going over your father’s book,” Melanie told Julie the morning after Bix had disclosed the disheartening truth about the Moon’s circulation, “that Hermeneutics of the Ordinary thing. Brilliant stuff. I no longer see snapshots just on the surface.”

Julie had recently read one of Melanie’s own manuscripts, a fable about a puppy who committed justifiable patricide. Julie was impressed, though she understood why it hadn’t sold. “Wish Pop could hear you say that.”

“He wasn’t good at finishing things. Maybe you’ve noticed only half the rooms around here have doors.”

And then one day Melanie hit the jackpot, selling a series of five children’s books for a thirty-thousand-dollar advance, with a movie option from the Disney empire for twice that much. She celebrated by getting herself a fancy new computer and her beloved Phoebe a portable video rig. Bad choice, that camcorder. No child banging on a toy drum had ever been as irritating as Phoebe running around the cottage like a muckraking stringer for Cable News Network.

But Phoebe always kept the tape running, the lens gawking. “This’ll be hot stuff someday, Katz. The Dead Sea Cassettes!”

“Take it easy—I’m getting the practice I need.” Phoebe squinted into the viewfinder. “You think I plan to spend the rest of my life selling saltwater taffy and whoopie cushions? Bullshit. Soon I’ll be starting my own company. I’ve got this amazingly brilliant idea—nonpornographic adult videos. Cinéma-vérité love, how sex really looks. A sure winner.”

“You know your problem, Katz? You don’t have enough faith in people.” Phoebe zoomed in. “And now we have—taa-daa—our resident deity eating tuna on rye!” The camera lurched closer, breathing down Julie’s neck as she drank milk. “Milk, great, very symbolic. Take another swallow. Next comes—could it be? Yes, she’s actually placing the glass in the dishwasher; she’s not leaving it on the table for her friend Phoebe to deal with. We’ve seen a real miracle today, folks. Next she’ll be feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and booting the devil’s butt.”

At least Phoebe’s obnoxious hobby was keeping her busy. At least she wasn’t spending all her time drinking.

Julie had broached the issue subtly, or so she thought, taping her column on substance abuse to the temple door with a 3×5 card saying, “If you ever want to talk about this, I’d be open to it.” The next day the clipping reappeared on Julie’s computer. “If you ever want to mind your own business,” ran Phoebe’s note, “I’d be open to it.”

Every Friday afternoon, Julie and Melanie would attempt to cleanse the cottage completely. A morbid game, this business of searching out Phoebe’s little liquor bottles and flushing away their contents, a kind of perverse and mandatory Easter egg hunt conducted for the rabbit’s feces. At Angel’s Eye the damn things might turn up anywhere—the washing machine, the toilet tank, a hollowed-out dictionary. Once, when Melanie was checking the oil in her Honda, her eye wandered to the plastic container of windshield cleaning fluid. On intuition she uncapped it, dipping in her finger. Rum. A few days later, while commemorating the wreck of Lucy II, Julie noticed a curious purple cast to the flame. The beacon was running on gin.

Intervene? wondered Julie. Kick her habit? The obvious option, of course: a half-hour of pressing her fingers against Phoebe’s forehead, driving out the desire. But that way Phoebe would never learn to stand on her own two feet. That way Phoebe would never grow up. As with the rest of Phoebe’s species, Julie must not let her become dependent upon supernatural solutions, trading one addiction for another.

For all of Julie’s valiant efforts, for all the rum and gin she poured down the sink, Aunt Georgina remained dissatisfied. Georgina the whiner, the worrier. She called Julie selfish and solipsistic. She accused her of cowardice and denial, of treating symptoms instead of causes—of failing her best friend. How long, Julie wondered, before Georgina’s misplaced resentment came boiling over? How long before a major showdown?

“Cure her,” snapped her aunt. “You understand, Julie? I can’t take this anymore.” She nodded toward the bathroom, where Phoebe was loudly purging herself of the previous night’s binge. “Maybe your father didn’t want any interventions, but I do.”

Julie whipped up the French toast batter. Cure her. Intervene. It sounded so simple, so righteous, but Georgina couldn’t begin to grasp the historical and cosmological implications. “Humanity—and this includes Phoebe—will never learn self-reliance if it’s got me to bail it out.”

Phoebe’s retching reverberated through the cottage, a sound like a canvas tent being torn in half.

“Know what we should do?” said Julie. “We should go to some Al-Anon meetings, you and me.” She set a slice of bread afloat on the batter; a raft of whole wheat. “They’re for people whose kids and spouses drink too much.”

Julie laid the sopping bread on the griddle. “Look, she functions, doesn’t she? Keeps the books straight as an arrow, doesn’t bawl out the customers, never smashes up the car…”

“Fix her.” Georgina pushed a slice of bread into the batter like a sadist drowning a kitten. “Just fucking fix her.”

“You think it’s easy for me to say no? I love Phoebe, damn it—but we must consider the greater good.”

Sliding the spatula along the griddle, Julie pried up the half-cooked bread and flung it across the kitchen as if firing a catapult. “I have enemies, Georgina! They’re out to get me!” She backed away from the stove. “Eat this crap yourself—I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Same here, you little snake, which is exactly what you are, Julie Katz, a slimy, selfish snake.”

Gills gasping with frustration, ears hot with Georgina’s anger, Julie ran from the kitchen, dashed across the jetty, and dove into the soft and understanding bay.

“Sorry?” said Julie. Now what? He was dropping her for some pert little Princeton philosophy major?

“We’re twenty thousand readers shy, and that’s that. Tony wants a pet-care column instead. Mike Alonzo will write it.”

“Pet care? You’re not serious.” A hundred-degree tear rolled from Julie’s right eye. She pressed a crisp Gluttony Forgiven napkin to her nose and blew. “You should’ve fought for me. Pet care?”

So it was over. The Covenant of Uncertainty had become fish wrap and hamster litter, there was nothing left for her but confusion and guilt, nothing but Georgina’s misguided anger and God’s malicious indifference. “Be honest, Bix, you never believed in my ministry.” The tear reached her lips, and she licked. Battery acid. “You pretended to care because you had the hots for me.”

Bix crushed a roll in his fist, the crumbs spurting between his fingers. “Dammit, Julie, I’ve been running interference for you ever since you walked into my office. The entire staff thinks you’re crazy, you know.”

“Sometimes. Yes. This whole God’s daughter mystique—why do you push it so hard? You don’t have to pretend around me. I’m not one of your stupid readers.”

“Prove that you’re God’s daughter. My standards aren’t high—take the wart off my ass, fly, anything.”

One word, fraud, that was all it took, and Julie was on her feet, sprinting out of the restaurant and down the stairs to the casino floor. Traitor, traitor. I did fight for you: oh, sure, Bix. Sure. Traitorous bastard.

Such clockless worlds, these casinos. It always seemed like the same hour at Dante’s, Caesar’s, or the Nugget, always the same day—three-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, Julie decided.

Her ministry mattered. Why couldn’t Tony Biacco see that? “Heaven Help You” had forestalled dozens of suicides, divorces, wife batterings, and child beatings. Last week, a compulsive gambler had written to say that, thanks to Sheila, he’d finally kicked the blackjack habit.

Blackjack: a fine game, Julie mused, sidling toward a remote and unpatronized table. She put on her sunglasses—the dealer might be a Sheila fan—and bought a hundred dollars in chips. At least she wouldn’t have to disguise herself much longer; soon Sheila’s photo would fade from the communal memory. The dealer, a grim, slender woman who handled the cards with the professional ennui of a whore unzipping flies, glanced nervously toward the Wheel of Wealth, as if being watched, tested.

Ah, sweet mammon. Luck, or God, was with Julie, tripling her investment in ten minutes. No matter what she did—splits, doubles, insurance bets—she came out on top. She might have a failed ministry, a traitorous lover, an hysterical aunt, and a rummy friend, but tonight she’d get rich.

Darkness slid across the table, human in shape, thick and palpable as spilled ink. “Vanish,” a man said. The grim woman departed, the shadow stayed. “You picked the right table—this is where the big winners play.” The dealer’s voice conjured a vanished elegance, European aristocrats listening to Mozart. Julie didn’t look up. A dealer was a dealer.

She placed four ten-dollar chips on the table, twice her usual bet. Slap, an ace of hearts for the player, slap, a ten of spades for the dealer. Tony wanted pet advice. Dear Dr. Doolittle: My canary has stopped singing. Why?—Worried In Milwaukee.

Julie fixed on her ace. The pip, a large red heart, seemed to move. To vibrate. Throb. Lub-dub. She blinked. Lub-dub. A beating heart? Was her mind becoming unhinged?

She faced the dealer. On neither of his previous visitations had she appreciated how handsome Andrew Wyvern was. High cheeks, obsidian eyes, strong sculpted lips. His beard, gray and soft, seemed a thing more of fur than whiskers: a werewolf in bloom, shaved everywhere but his jaw. “What question?” she asked as the scent of honeyed oranges drifted into her nostrils.

“About God.” Slap, slap. A three of diamonds for the player, a down card for Wyvern. “You wanted to know why she allows evil.” His tuxedo gleamed like black marble. Julie beckoned: hit me. Slap, a ten of clubs, making her ace count low. She beckoned. Slap, a jack of diamonds, twenty-four, bust. The devil collected her bet. “I noted that power corrupts,” he said, whisking away her cards, “but there’s more to it.” Julie bet fifty dollars. Slap, slap. A king of clubs for her, a nine of spades for Wyvern. “Everybody thinks if he were God, he would do a better job. Such vanity. The math alone would defeat most of us.”

Slap, the dealer’s down card. “Very well—but just as my deceptions are obvious to you, then so are my descents into integrity. ‘Come sailing in my schooner tonight—no harm will befall you,’ says the devil. ‘He’s telling the truth,’ notes Julie Katz.”

“Schooner?” It would be crazy to accept a card now, but she did. Slap, a queen of spades. Bust. “Tonight?”

“A crusade is coming.” As Wyvern gestured over her king of clubs, the flesh melted from both its heads, leaving only skulls and eyeballs. “You must intervene.”

“I intervene all the time.” Her king’s eyes blinked. “Read my column.”

“Your column’s dead, Julie—didn’t they tell you? It’s all holy water over the damned.”

“True, true,” she moaned. As her king drew his sword from behind his crown, the adjacent queen cringed, trapped by the geometry of her universe, armed with only a flower.

“I greatly admired ‘Heaven Help You’—read it every week.” Wyvern collected her bet. “Once I even wrote to you. I was that shy Lutheran minister in Denver whose congregation misunderstood him.” The devil pointed to Julie’s cards. “Still, there are situations in which the sword is mightier than the pen.” The king slashed, making the queen’s upper head tip back like the lid of a cigarette lighter. Blood leaked from the wedge; the flower turned black and fell from the queen’s hand. “Tomorrow a thousand such deaths could occur. Ten thousand. Did you know that when the eleventh-century crusaders took Jerusalem, they ran through the city disemboweling the citizens, hoping to find swallowed coins?”

“You should’ve been.” Wyvern pushed her bet aside. “A short voyage down the coast, that’s all. I’ll have you home before dawn.”

The queen’s upper head rolled onto the green felt. Laughing a small depraved laugh, the king slashed again, neatly decapitating the queen’s lower self.

“Impressive ship,” said Julie as the devil led her along Steel Pier, its rusted remains stretching into the Atlantic like the back of a decaying sea serpent. Pain, a huge three-master with sails suggesting a bat’s wrinkled and membranous wings, lay moored to the dock by a live python.

“I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Wyvern gestured proudly toward the hull. “Newly painted with the bile of ten thousand unbaptized children. Her spars are made from the bones of massacred Armenians. Her ropes are woven from the hair of Salem’s witches. Her jib is Jewish skin. People give me all my best ideas, Julie. Like you, I can never count on your mother for inspiration. Bubonic plague is as creative as she ever got.”

He helped her onto the foredeck, where dark, stooped figures scurried about like beetles responding to the loss of their rock. “Say hello to Anthrax,” he urged, indicating the cockpit with a quick nod. The helmsman was fat, bristled, and plated, like something resulting from the love of a boar for an armadillo.

“Hello.” She felt schizoid, half her psyche planted in South Jersey, half in whatever quantum alternative objectified the devil and his brood.

Foul breezes arose as the demons cast off. “From my angels,” Wyvern explained. “They spread their buttocks, and the rectal zephyrs fill our sails.”

Pain headed south, cruising past the casino-hotels—bright Bally’s, lurid Caesar’s, the mighty Atlantis, the epic Golden Nugget. The moon hung over the city like a white cork.

Gradually Julie’s anxiety yielded to an odd inner buoyancy. She laughed. A swift boat, a major ocean—a person could just pick up and go, couldn’t she? Anywhere. Sunny Spain, exotic Thailand, Howard Lieberman’s beloved Galapagos Islands, that South Seas paradise she and Phoebe had seen in the Deauville.

“You were barking up the wrong tree,” Wyvern informed her. As the schooner blew into Great Egg Harbor, Anthrax kicked the anchor—evidently some species of sea urchin. Dragging its chain behind it, the great pulsing ball of spikes crawled across the deck and flopped over the side. “You wanted the masses to embrace reason and science. It will never happen. They can’t join in—there’s no point of entry for them.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Wyvern opened the cockpit locker and, drawing out a brass telescope, eased the instrument against Julie’s eye. “Some of my favorite things are scientific—nuclear bombs, Zyklon B, eugenics.” He showed her how to focus. “The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.”

A blur hedged with moonlight. Then, as Julie turned the focus knob: a solemn mob of well over two thousand men and women, dressed in bleached flak jackets and earnestly clutching red plastic gasoline jugs and battery-powered Black and Decker hedge trimmers. “The dark side of the American spirit,” said Wyvern. “Specifically, a Revelationist marina. The parking lot.” Juke shifted the scope, settling on a half-dozen pickup trucks, each bearing a large enamel bathtub. Two elaborately muscled men, hands sheathed in thick black rubber, approached the nearest tub, lifted out an enormous tuna—yes, good God, a sleek, wriggling, gasping tuna—and carried it over to a bowl-shaped barbecue grill. “Why a fish?” Wyvern anticipated. “Most venerable of Christian symbols. Fuse the initials of Iesos Christos Theou Yios Soter, and you get Ichthys, Greek for fish.”

Shift, focus. A tall, middle-aged man—balding, smooth-shaven, one eye molten, the other covered with leather—stabbed the fish with a scaling knife. The blade ran a true course from trunk to anal fin, a letter V in its wake. Thick maroon blood dripped through the grate and, filling the barbecue grill, splashed over the sides. Shift, focus. A young redheaded man set a gold shaving basin beneath the grill and opened the flue, thus releasing a column of liquid Jesus. “‘And they have washed their robes,’” Wyvern quoted, “‘and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’” Cupping his hands, the young man reached into the overflowing basin and drew out a full measure. His mouth flew open to release a fevered prayer. “Death to the Antichrist!” said Wyvern, dubbing in the young man’s voice as he smashed the fleshy ladle against his chest. The folds of his flak jacket channeled the blood, giving him an external circulatory system.

The devil pulled his cigarette case from his overcoat and flipped back the lid, catching moonlight in the mirror. “These people have a full schedule tomorrow, a prophecy to fulfill—the fall of Babylon. Ever read the Bible?”

Shift, focus. The congregation passed the basin around as if it were a collection plate, each crusader retaining it long enough to smear himself with Jesus. “Damn,” she hissed.

“Atlantic City.” Wyvern removed a cigarette, eyeing it with a mixture of revulsion and desire. “I really must stop smoking.”

“To trigger the Parousia, of course, Christ’s inevitable return.” As Wyvern snapped his fingers, a small flame rose from his thumb. “First they’ll tie up the fire department with a diversionary attack on Baltic Avenue, then they’ll strike the casinos.” He lit the cigarette, blew out his thumb. “Some of them aren’t convinced a holocaust is necessary, but their pastor, Billy Milk—the one with the eyepatch—he’s the most interesting thing in their lives, so they give him the benefit of the doubt. A remarkable man. With enemies like Billy Milk, the devil doesn’t need friends.”

Shift, focus. A Coast Guard cutter lay at the end of the wharf. Julie’s heart bounded like a happy puppy. Oh, glorious, blessed Coast Guard, such brave men, always prepared to prevent crusades. How authoritative the seven uniformed officers looked as, armed with semiautomatic rifles, they disembarked and started down the wharf.

Hands glistening with the by-products of sacrifice, Reverend Milk marched out to greet them, a mob of Revelationists close behind, somberly gripping their gasoline jugs and their Black and Decker hedge trimmers.

Wyvern puffed on his cigarette. “‘And I heard a great voice saying: Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.’”

The Revelationists and the officers exchanged loud, intemperate shouts. Thank God for those guns, Julie thought. This was law, order: the United States Coast Guard.

The gas jugs moved in precise crimson arcs. Nobody got off a shot. One instant the officers were berating Milk’s mob, the next they were saturated, the next they were men made of fire, flailing about like marionettes operated by epileptics.

Julie’s scream trailed into a long, sustained moan. The poignant thing was the victims’ disorientation, the way they sought to save themselves by jumping into the ocean but could instead only stagger blindly around the pier, spewing gray smoke, shedding red embers, randomly firing their rifles.

Shift, focus. The pilot house. A pale, baby-faced captain held the microphone of his ship-to-shore radio, his lips frozen like a tetanus victim’s. Not one word left his mouth.

Now came the avenging angels, turning on their hedge trimmers and hauling the pilot on deck.

“‘Behold the Son of Man,’” the devil quoted as the Revelationists fell upon the pilot, trimming him brutally, clipping him to death, “‘and in his hand a sharp sickle.’”

Julie wept caustic tears. The officers collapsed on the dock, smoldering sacks of cooked flesh.

Wyvern stroked her burned palm. “‘Because of your abominations I shall do with you what I have never yet done. Therefore fathers will eat their sons’—this is God talking, Julie—‘and sons will eat their fathers, and any of you who survive I shall scatter to the winds.’” The devil sighed with admiration. “Oh, but I wish I’d said that.”

“You’re not going to intervene?” The cutter was aflame now, glowing brilliantly above the harbor and in reflection below it.

“I…I…” The snake on her forehead shuddered and writhed. “Have to…think about it…”

“Think? Think? How can you think? Everybody wants you to intervene. Even God wants you to intervene.”

“A bargain is a bargain.” Wyvern shrugged. “Just remember this: I’ll always be around when you need me, which is more than you can say for your mother.”

The flaming Coast Guard officers clung to Julie’s eyes like flashbulb afterimages as she stepped from Pain’s dinghy and climbed to the top of the jetty. Dawn seeped across the sky, molding shapes from the gloom—pine trees, lighthouse tower, cottage. In the temple a lamp burned, glowing through the pain-papered windows. Phoebe, most likely, drinking or adding exhibits or both.

Julie faced west. University of Pennsylvania: her father’s sperm samples, sitting in their frosty test tubes.

In the bathroom, Julie stripped off Georgina’s prom dress and turned on the shower. The Revelationists had performed their ablutions, now it was her turn; a person must fight purity with purity. The flaming officers were everywhere. Their bones filled the soap dish. Their skin hung from the curtain rod, their blood poured from the nozzle.

She washed, threw on Melanie’s peach kimono, and entered the temple. Phoebe sat beside the altar, cutting an oil spill from Mother Jones. “Hi, Katz. Up early, aren’t we?”

“Never went to bed.” In a single spasm Julie snatched away the Mother Jones and ripped it in half. “You’re about to get what you always wanted.”

“Arsonists? There goes the neighborhood.” Phoebe lit the altar candles. “You mean you’ve finally outgrown this place?”

Phoebe’s sweeping gesture encompassed the entire room. “So it’s all obsolete, huh?”

They hugged, and then it began, their violent excavation, suffering ripped from the walls in great ragged sheets like lizard skins, layer after layer of war refugees, flood victims, AIDS patients, earthquake casualties. They dismantled the flaming doll-house. Destroyed the lava-smothered village. Threw the crashed jetliner into the wastebasket. Back to the walls; within a half hour they’d reached the original stratum—its floes and famines, epidemics and revolutions, jihads and foreclosures, chemical dumps and despair.

“Big day coming up, huh?” Phoebe peeled away a Nicaraguan adolescent whose arms were made of rubber and steel.

“Yeah, and you’re going to wait it out, buddy.” Julie pulled down a ten-year-old heroin addict. “I’m serious—follow me with your damn camera and I’ll throw it in the ocean.”

“Sure, Katz,” said Phoebe with a skewed smile. Only the altar remained untouched—its anonymous sailor’s skull, its cluster of dynamite disguised as nuclear missiles, its burning, penis-shaped candles from the Smile Shop. “Anything you say.”

Julie fed the apprentice junkie to a candle flame. The paper ignited, becoming a bright orange blossom, then a swarm of ashes floating around the purified temple like black moths.

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8
♦	♦	♦

Although Bix Constantine disbelieved in hell as intensely as he did in heaven, he knew what the place would be like. Hell, for Bix, was jealousy. It was failed journalists seeing their enemies receive Pulitzer Prizes. It was compulsive gamblers seeing jackpots gush from adjacent players’ slot machines and sex-starved young men seeing their friends piled high with naked cheerleaders.

Bad enough that Julie had left Dante’s with a dealer, one of those smooth, intellectual types with graying hair and an aura of smug fitness, but now things were getting even worse. The bastard had a yacht, a seagoing penthouse no doubt, moored to the ruins of Steel Pier, the word Pain spread across its transom. How carefully he’d tracked them—through the lobby, across the Boardwalk, down the wharf—at last finding a vantage point behind a wooden zebra on the moribund carousel. The outrages never stopped: when her lustful companion extended his hand, Julie took it eagerly; when he waltzed into his cabin, she stayed by his side. Within minutes the yacht was under sail, cruising south toward Ocean City. Who was he? A disciple who’d lost his heart upon seeing her picture in the paper? One of her old college professors, moonlighting in the casinos—they’d always been hot for each other, and now they were finally free to go rolling in the nautical hay?

Bix slunk away like a scolded but unrepentant dog. Where was gratitude? He’d given this bizarre and unemployable woman a job…made her a quasi-celebrity…loved her. Traitor, she’d called him. Bullshit. God Almighty couldn’t have defended that column, not the way she wrote it.

Eight-thirty P.M., with the sunlight fading fast, stars peeping through the clouds. On the Boardwalk the change of shifts occurred: spiffily dressed couples strode out of their hotels while sad, penniless daytrippers drifted woozily toward their shuttle buses; a second exodus comprised the cripples and blind beggars, whose infirmities elicited sufficient guilt and alms only in the accusatory gleam of day. Bix flipped open his wallet, cracked the seam. Fifty dollars. For acute jealousy, what was the anesthetic of choice? Lobster? Alcohol? Whores? Slot machines? He slipped into Resorts International and, obtaining two hundred quarters, watched submissively as the one-armed bandits bled them away, a hundred and fifty quarters, ninety, sixty, twenty, ten.

A small fortune gushed forth, jangling into the payoff box. Damn. He was too tired to feed that much back. Like a Wall Street milkmaid, he staggered to the change island carrying two enormous buckets, quarters slopping over the edges, and converted his jackpot to bills. Roulette would solve the problem, ah, yes, Fortuna’s wheel. “Here’s three hundred,” he grumbled to the croupier. “Six fat chips will do.” The Mafia flunky counted Bix’s wad, then fed it into a slot in the table, forcing it down with a lucite ramrod. Snapping up his six fifty-dollar chips, Bix placed them on ODD. The croupier spun the wheel, tossed the ball; it bounced among the grooves like a pebble skimming across a pond. The wheel stopped: 20. Even. Good. Bix left.

Dawn seeped through the city like the pale flashings of a million sickly fireflies. Sea gulls ruled the Boardwalk; the rich were back in their hotels. Bix walked south, scanning the ocean, gray and glassy in the pretide calm. Somewhere behind him, fire engines rolled, their sirens howling like tortured cats. No sign of Pain. He had fought for her, damn it, he wasn’t a traitor.

Bix blinked. His chins fell. It was all ludicrously true: a long rank of cabin cruisers flying religious banners—saints praying, lambs nailed to crosses—and heading for the southern casinos. Revelationists, the crucified sheep announced. The flag on the lead boat showed Jesus beheading a winged serpent. Bix attempted to laugh, failed. With their dark windows and death-white hulls, the yachts were imperially unfunny.

Pale figures scurried about the decks tossing over large bundles that, smacking the water, abruptly transmuted into motorized rafts. The Revelationists climbed in. Ten rafts. Twenty, fifty, a hundred. Two hundred rafts, dotting the smooth ocean like a vast herd of migrating sea lions. Within minutes the first wave of invaders arrived, leaping into the shallows, their bodies wrapped in white flak jackets mottled with dark blotches, their hands locked tightly around red plastic jugs and battery-powered Black and Decker hedge trimmers.

A tall, balding Revelationist wearing an eyepatch dashed up the ramp. “Down with Babylon!” he screamed, brandishing his hedge trimmer, its blade like the snout of a sawfish. “Down with Babylon!” his flock echoed. Like demented picnickers carrying an inexhaustible supply of lemonade, the invaders bore their plastic jugs across the beach and onto the Boardwalk, all the while waving their hedge trimmers in wild circles over their heads. “Down with Babylon!”

As the Revelationists charged the Golden Nugget, Bix melted into their ranks, feeling oddly immune. Their utter obliviousness, that was it. These crusaders had a divine mandate, a holy mission that shone from their eyes like sunlight glancing off snow; they would never stoop to murder a mere bystander.

Marching past the liveried doormen, the army stormed into the lobby and entered the casino, a tide of zeal flowing boldly between two guards and depositing Bix in the nearest slot-machine aisle. Did their jugs contain quarters? The Revelationists intended to play the slots till Christ came back? “Spill it,” the one-eyed shepherd said in a gravelly whisper, addressing a stout, fortyish female crusader whose flak jacket was unbuttoned sufficiently to reveal a small silver lamb nailed to a cross. “Pour out God’s wrath.”

Zonked as usual by the noise and the lights, the gamblers took no note of the incursion.

“‘And the angel poured his vial upon the seat of the beast,’” the shepherd quoted in the patient tone of a teacher prompting a fourth-grader in a Columbus Day pageant. “Pour it out, Gladys.”

With a bold sweep of his arm, the shepherd snatched Gladys’s jug and, uncapping it, splashed a clear fluid onto the carpet. The smell clawed Bix’s nostrils. Gasoline. Gasoline? Gasoline? A chain reaction of curiosity rolled across the casino. Pit bosses looked up, the slots stopped tolling, the gamblers’ chatter faded. God in heaven—gasoline!

Other vials popped open, additional wrath spilled out. Hydrocarbon fumes spread through the Nugget like the fartings of a thousand Exxon supertankers.

A counteroffensive converged, a ragtag squad of guards and Mafia strongmen. The Revelationists dispersed, soaking the blackjack aisles, baccarat bays, and video-poker stalls. Like a farmer slopping his hogs, one crusader emptied his jug into the trough of a craps table.

The shepherd pulled a cigarette lighter from his jacket. “‘And the angel poured his vial into the air’!”

“Stop!” shouted a pit boss, charging forward with a drawn pistol. Someone turned on a hedge trimmer and ran it along the pit boss’s abdomen, zipping him open. The pit boss tried to cry out, succeeded only in gurgling. His pistol hit the saturated carpet; blood spurted from his belly like agitated beer. He screamed silently, wetly; he screamed blood.

Keep going, Bix told himself as he staggered toward the lobby, don’t look back.

He looked back. The inferno surged through the casino in great waves, as if an ocean of flames had risen from its bed to engulf the helpless Nugget. So many combustibles: rugs, curtains, felt, currency, playing cards—players. A burning young man embraced a slot machine as he might a lover. An old Pakistani woman, convulsed with terror, flames fanning from her back like a peacock’s plume, flared even brighter as she tried to douse herself with a pitcher of martinis.

In the lobby, a summer shower descended as the sprinkler system cut in. Smoke flowed everywhere, nicking Bix’s eyes. Their mission evidently accomplished, the crusaders poured out of the casino, smiling, laughing, kicking over urns. Blindly Bix charged, coughing violently, each spasm jolting him like an electric shock as he opened the main door.

Air. Sunlight. A sea breeze. The Boardwalk strollers regarded him without interest, as if his panic signaled nothing more than a night of heavy losses. But now came the fire, bursting through the building, blowing out its windows, clambering up its face. And now came the crusaders, their hedge trimmers emitting coarse insectile buzzes. The tourists scattered like infantrymen caught in a strafing—to little avail, for the Revelationists were suddenly upon them, trimming lethally, screaming “Down with Babylon!” Heat whipped Bix’s face, sweat soaked his summer suit. The Golden Nugget shed people like a tree losing fruit in a storm. Panicked vacationers, many aflame, jumped from the hotel tower to the casino roof and from there to the ground, where they climbed over the Boardwalk rail and hurled themselves into the cool unburnable sea.

The army split. Three separate raiding parties charged up the Boardwalk, hedge trimmers poised, wrath at the ready. Hastily Bix performed a mental triage. The Tropicana: fated to fall. The Atlantis: it hadn’t a chance. Next came Harrah’s at Trump Plaza, then Caesar’s Palace. Harrah’s was probably doomed, but it would take them five minutes to reach Caesar’s.

He ran, Bix the unfit blob, chuffing past pizza parlors, fortune-telling booths, and Smitty’s Smile Shop. He must have seen Julius Caesar’s kitschy statue a hundred times before, but only now did he notice the fear beneath its imperial gaze; or perhaps the fear was new, the natural terror of a pagan emperor beholding hundreds of Christians gone berserk. “Everybody out!” Bix screamed, charging into the casino. “You’re in danger!”

The blackjack players turned toward him. The slot addicts looked up from their machines.

Flames bloodied the horizon as Julie drove her Datsun across Brigantine Bridge and headed into the besieged city. Fire engines jammed Baltic Avenue, red lights flashing in stroboscopic bursts. The tenements blazed brightly, an epic disaster tying up the combined Atlantic City and Ocean City fire departments just as Wyvern had foretold. The street was a mass of glistery puddles and tangled black hoses. Ladders rose from the red trucks, angling into the stricken buildings like flying buttresses. Tridents of flame and coils of smoke shot from doorways and windows. Firefighters in rubber masks and oxygen tanks lumbered about like scuba divers from hell. In the center of the chaos, the paramedic Freddie Caspar, last survivor of Pop’s poker club—Rodney Balthazar had shot himself during Passover—gave CPR to a supine woman.

She continued down South Carolina. Eyes swimming in tears, handkerchiefs pressed against their faces, a wave of terrified tourists swept past. A blowsy woman wearing Bermuda shorts and a Sally’s sweatshirt stood at the Atlantic Avenue intersection holding huge wads of charred money in her fists, the jackpot of a lifetime, now ash. A bewildered young man in a motorized wheelchair made crazed figure eights in Harrah’s parking lot like a child driving a bumper car.

Stuff. Miracles always needed stuff. She pulled over by Dante’s, got out. At least she was dressed for the heat: denim cutoffs, a Smile Shop T-shirt (START A MOVEMENT—EAT A PRUNE). The smoke was like a disease air gets, spreading outward, penetrating everywhere. Her eyes smarted, her chest heaved, her throat felt like a sack of needles. God had it so much easier. Julie’s fleshless mother could intervene all day and never once gag or weep.

Charging up the Boardwalk ramp, she started through the swarming cinders. Everything from the Nugget to the Sands was lost, a writhing cloud of jet-black smoke laced with flames. Only the district east of Tennessee—the Showboat, Resorts International, Dante’s—remained untouched, as if Wyvern had dispatched a fallen guardian angel to protect his personal casino, his earthly pied-à-terre.

The massacre was all the devil had promised. Human firebrands tumbled from the collapsing casinos. Others succumbed to the hedge trimmers—a harvest of gamblers, reaped by God’s sickles, bundled by God’s wrath. New Jersey, thought Julie, fighting incredulity and nausea, New Jersey, the Garden State.

She faced the sea. Tourists rushed into the tide, hoping to soothe their burns. Other survivors carried their loved ones’ corpses to the beach, setting them on the sand so they might mourn uninterrupted before more judgment arrived. Directly ahead, the truncated hulk of Central Pier shimmered in the August sun. And suddenly there it was, rising above the wharf, reaching for the clouds. Her stuff.

A fat man waddled out of the smoke, ripping away his white cotton shirt as if to free himself from the heat’s insistent grip. Soot streaked his ballooning flesh. His sweat shone like fresh varnish.

“I can’t believe it,” Bix rasped. “These fanatics with their gasoline, and people are dying, and I went to Caesar’s and nobody even listened. How come you never told me about him?”

Anger stunned her. Atlantic City burning, her anonymity on the line, and the traitor dared to be jealous. “I’m Jesus Christ’s sister!” She spat the words in his face. “Of course the devil’s going to be interested in me!”

She headed toward the pier—toward her stuff—and the foolish walrus followed: through the crumbling archway, around the huge plaster mermaid, past the ceramic sea horses heralding the abandoned aquarium.

“Listen, Julie, you’ve got to stop this daughter of God shit! You’re going to get hurt!”

She broke into the sunlight, her gaze lifting along the steel spire to the doughnut-shaped observatory. According to Pop’s book on amusement parks, Frederick A. Picard had dubbed his creation the Space Tower, but Julie did not have to leave her planet today, merely gain a divine perspective. Her gills shivered. She vibrated with godhead. Oh, yes, she was ready! Reverend Milk’s army might have its gas, its trimmers, its strategy, its righteousness, but Julie Katz had her genes.

Although the counterweight had long since vanished, she had no trouble bringing the observatory under her control. No shepherd’s staff required, no flamboyant gestures—a mere nod cracked the rust and set the cabin in motion.

She grinned. “You bet, baby doll. Your eyes don’t lie.” Metallic squeals filled the air as the observatory slid down the tower.

“Are you doing that?” gasped the traitor, staring dumbfounded at the anomaly.

“I am God and gravity and quantum mechanics. I am the girl from the ectogenesis machine.”

“You’re making it happen?” His eyes quavered like poached eggs, his bare chest trembled. “Don’t do this to me, Julie, I won’t allow it! You can’t have powers!”

“Stop it, Julie!” Bix shook his fist as if strangling a snake. “The universe has to make some kind of sense! Don’t do this to me!”

She ran to the grounded observatory, leaving him alone on the pier, quaking with mystified outrage. The interior was chaos—rotting cushions, a million splinters of glass. No matter, she wouldn’t be entering anyway. Intervention on this scale must happen in the open. The Red Sea had split by day, Jesus had raised Lazarus before a crowd.

She climbed to the roof and stomped her foot. As the observatory began rising, slowly, steadily, it seemed at first that the tower was moving instead, like a gargantuan hypodermic needle plunging through New Jersey to draw the planet’s blood. Higher she ascended, and higher. She became her stomach, the rest of her flesh a mere vestige, orbiting around last night’s gourmet spaghetti. The hot smoky air whizzed across her face. Sea gulls drifted by, ash-speckled.

Her life lay before her. To the south, Longport, site of her conception. To the north, Brigantine Point and Angel’s Eye. She picked out Absecon Inlet, her elementary school, the Moon offices, the swamp near Dune Island where the Winnebago sank.

The southern half of Atlantic City was now one vast firestorm—a burning, outsized Monopoly board. Even as she watched, spores of flame blew across the passage and took root in Chelsea Heights and Ventnor. With luck, she could still save Margate and Longport, not to mention the upper horn of the city, from the inlet to the bayside casinos.

The sun publicized her advent, wrapping the tower in ribbons of light, cloaking her body in golden robes. Already the traumatized survivors on the beach had spotted her. A forest sprouted: raised arms, pointing fingers. Who could she be? Who was that strange, luminous woman in the sky?

The ocean was hers, a spectacular legacy, mother to daughter, Here you are, Julie, take it, my wet masterpiece. “Bring on the waves!” she screamed as a crowd collected at the base of the tower. The ocean trembled and seethed. “Waves!” Burning thimbles encased her fingertips. “Waves!”

And there were waves. Julie conducted the Atlantic like a symphony. Her hands moved and the water obeyed, swelling majestically, eager for commands. Godhead rose in her loins. “Waves!” she cried. It was all gushing out now, her bottled-up divinity, pouring from her nose as blood, her nipples as milk, her gills as lymph, her vagina as the slippery fluids of sex. And, lo, Sheila took the high road. Her phantom fingers seized the largest wave, sculpting it into a great phallic spout, and now the spout arched toward shore, sweeping the Revelationists off the Boardwalk. And she did flush the fevered hosts into the back streets. “Waves!” Gasoline jugs floated away, hedge trimmers sank in the divine flood. Julie’s brain sparkled and spasmed as on the night Howard took her virginity. The high road, the high road!

As she lifted her hands toward the sun, the ocean yielded up great cords of water—long tubular rivers that Julie proceeded to tie around the casinos like rope. She wrapped the Tropicana. She trussed the Atlantis. Harrah’s. Caesar’s. Strangled, the fires died. And the casinos were extinguished, and Sheila saw that it was good.

She fixed on the city—flaming Chelsea Heights, smoldering Ventnor. Under divine mandate, a second spout emerged and reached toward the holocaust. Like a butcher slicing a sausage, Julie cut the spout into cylinders, deploying them upright in a circle from Albany Avenue to the West Canal. The liquid dikes shone like mountains of silver, quivered like mesas of gelatin. Eels and flounders leapt from the vertical tide. Thus spake Sheila.

The watery ramparts fell, smothering the inferno in a mesh of overlapping tides.

Finis? Julie squinted toward Venice Park. Fresh troops: Milk’s army had an entire second column. Down Absecon Boulevard they marched, over five hundred crusaders bound for the bay-side casinos, their white flak jackets glowing in the morning sun.

Bring on the column, she thought. Bring on a dozen. Bring on Pharaoh’s chariots and Rommel’s Panzers and the Strategic Air Command’s warheads.

It is she, Billy thought as he waded across the swollen and unholy river Atlantic Avenue had become. Sheila of the Midnight Moon, the beast herself, the very Antichrist, chewing her way out of the Dragon’s putrid egg.

A gas jug drifted past. Billy reached into the cold flood, retrieved it. Empty, drained of wrath, and to such little effect. Why wasn’t the fall of Babylon going better, why this damnable intervention? The initial assault had been sheer perfection, the Golden Nugget catching fire like straw, whereupon the inferno had grown increasingly mighty, engulfing everything from the Tropicana to the Sands. And when God willed that the tourists be cut down, Billy’s army had acquitted itself bravely, turning on their hedge trimmers and slicing with all the piety of Christ’s soldiers taking Jerusalem in 1099.

But now came this woman, this Dragon’s spawn, dousing the flames, sealing up the only portal by which Jesus might return.

Billy faced the Boardwalk. Dante’s, intact. Resorts International, untouched. The mighty Showboat, not a scratch.

Dorylaeum, he thought. At Dorylaeum, too, the day had seemed lost…until the second half of the army arrived, the troops of Lorraine and Provence, overcoming the enemy’s numerical advantage with better horses and tougher armor. It was all up to Timothy. Even now the boy was probably attacking the bayside casinos, throwing Jehovah’s incandescent sweat on Harrah’s and Trump Castle, rekindling the holocaust that would drive out the beast forever.

Drenched head to toe, burly Joshua Tuckerman waded toward Billy, the wet sleeves of his lumberjack shirt hanging from his arms like Spanish moss. Each of the Savior’s soldiers had a different reason for joining the crusade, each had his own unique and inspiring story to tell. In Joshua’s case, he’d decided to enlist upon learning he was dying of pancreatic cancer. “I was supposed to do Dante’s,” Joshua gasped. “All this water. I don’t understand.”

“Steady, brother,” Billy commanded. “Timothy will soon be here.” His eyepatch trembled. “The flames that were quenched shall rise again!”

Together they headed north on Tennessee, slogging past the black stinking remnants of the Baltic Avenue apartments. The water seemed lower. Lower? Could it be? Did his corporeal eye deceive him? No, the flood was receding, the sea slipping back into place. It had all been foretold, Billy realized. Revelation 12:15. And the Serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood… But all ends well, oh, yes, brothers and sisters, the flood absorbed in 12:17, Babylon thrown down in 14:8, the beast imprisoned in 19:20.

Strange—no smoke on the western horizon, not a wisp. Had Ernie Winslow of Venice Park Texaco failed to open up two hours early as promised? Was Timothy unable to fill his vials? Billy broke into a run.

Trump Castle loomed up, gloating in its wholeness, no sign of fire anywhere. Beyond he saw Harrah’s, corrupt and complete.

Defeat lay on Timothy’s freckled face like a death mask as he led his five hundred away from the bayside casinos. Gamblers and whoremongers motored down the boulevard, bisecting the column with their mocking Ferraris and cruel Porsches. What monstrous delight they took in honking at Timothy and the retreating troops, what obscene pleasure suffused their cries of “Hey, Holy Joe!” and “Look out, God-freaks!” How quickly their smugness would vanish when they saw the city’s other side—the gutted casinos, collapsed Boardwalk, bleeding idolaters!

Father and son met at the McKinley Avenue intersection. “The gas station—was that the problem?” Billy asked.

“No, Dad.” Timothy’s hedge trimmer was gone. His jug hung from his hand like a penitent’s weight. “Plenty of gas. No problem.”

“Between Venice Park and the island…” The boy stooped sharply, as if balancing the Dragon’s egg on his shoulders. “Somewhere in there, the gasoline…well, the gas…” Like Christ offering a thirsty stranger a gourd of water, Timothy gave Billy the jug. “Take a sip, Dad.”

Billy opened the jug, poured a small measure into the cap—odd color, no hydrocarbon smell—and tested the fluid with his tongue.

“You know what we’d better do, Reverend?” said Joshua Tuckerman. “We’d better get back to the beach before all heck breaks loose.”

What kind of deity am I, wondered Julie as, dizzy with exhaustion, rapturous with power, she swayed back and forth on the observatory roof. A deity of love, or of wrath? Love was wonderful, but with wrath you could do special effects. Part of her wanted to channel the floodwaters against this crazed and ridiculous army, drowning them like the rats they were, washing that trayfnyak Milk into the sea. But ultimately a person must seek her better self. Somehow her brother had stayed the course without once bloodying his hands, a rare feat for a prophet, and she would do the same, letting Milk’s brigands go, no, helping them go. She objectified her decision on her forearm, sweeping the sweat away with her thumb. As above, so below; the flood fell, giving Milk’s shattered hosts a dry path to the beach.

Not until the retreat was well under way, with the first scraggly knot of crusaders piled into their rafts and fighting past the surf, did temptation return, beating through Julie’s flesh. Break them, smash them, crush them, an eye for a Mosaic eye. What a spectacle she could stage for the wretches on the beach, what a climax, raising up the Revelationists’ yachts a thousand feet, dropping them from the sky like stricken airplanes.

No. Not today. Another time perhaps. Pressing her palms toward the ocean, she bid the observatory descend. And upon the noon hour Sheila rested.

As Julie climbed onto the pier, cries of recognition battered her aching flesh. “Hey, the Moon lady!” “Like in her picture!” “It’s her!” “Sheila!” Dazed, she moved down the ramp, the crowd parting like water before the prow of a ship. By the time she touched the sand they had coalesced into a single creature, adulation personified, awe given flesh.

Viewed from the tower, the misery on the shore had seemed ordered, comprehensible. But down here all was chaos, stunned gamblers milling around, corpses strewn about like beached fish. Her brain buzzed, her eyes glazed over. Slowly she stumbled forward, safe inside the bubble of her divinity. The groans of hedge-trimmer victims mingled randomly with the weeping of orphaned children. Flesh quivered everywhere, scorched muscles, bleeding gobbets. She tripped over an adolescent boy, his upper leg a charred log.

Was she still supposed to help this pathetic species? Did her obligations encompass the whole damn beach, move into the city with its heaps of the burned and maimed, then across the state, and finally…everywhere? She had no ultimate salvation for these people, no means of curing their mortality and melding them with God, but she did have her two bare hands; she could throw herself into a healing frenzy, sewing torn tissue with her fingertips, soothing burns with her spittle, knitting bones with her laser stare…

And then it came, the same odor Roger Worth had exuded the night the Winnebago flew, the stench of worship, razoring into her brain. Gasping, she doubled over and hit the sand. Pop was so right. Take the high road and she’d be shackled forever, a slave to adoration and praise.

Phoebe. Phoebe, who had ignited her self-confidence, taught her to take risks. Phoebe: sitting in the cleansed temple, waiting to be freed from the imprisoning spell of Bacardi rum. But for Phoebe, would she have even dared move against Milk’s army? She surveyed the expectant multitudes. There would always be expectant multitudes, always. The fight that mattered lay back at Angel’s Eye.

Cries of “No!” and “Please!” hovered in Julie’s ears like malicious wasps as she hobbled across the sand and tumbled into the surf. The Atlantic slid over her, and the shouts grew muffled and unreal. Damn them. Wasn’t it enough that she’d put out the fire? How many lives had she saved by doing that? Five thousand? Ten? Ever deepening, the sea pressed against her skull, ending the din, and she set her course for Angel’s Eye, alone with her wrath and the soft steady flapping of her gills.

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 9
♦	♦	♦

Eyes jellied with seawater, body tattooed with goose bumps, Julie ran along the jetty. The rescue of her best friend—what better denouement to her great intervention? Bring on the bottles, she’d smash every one, she’d pulverize them and build castles from the sand. Bring on the Bacardi bat, the Gordon’s boar, the Courvoisier Napoleon, the Beefeater. Give her Old Grand-Dad, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Johnny Walker, the whole besotted crew. “Phoebe!” she yelled, barging through the front door. No answer. “Phoebe! Phoebe!” Pop’s books soaked up her shouts.

She stumbled into the kitchen, the frigid Atlantic guttering down her arms, puddling on the linoleum. Empty. “Phoebe?” The laundry room: only the washer, the drying rack, the cob-webbed remains of her crib. “Phoebe?” She peeked into the temple. Aunt Georgina sat on her daughter’s bed, staring at the bare walls like a schizophrenic. “Hi.”

“Oh…you.” Georgina pulled her narrow, hatchetlike face into a sneer. “Our local incarnation.” On her lap lay a piece of computer paper, embroidered with sprocket holes. “I’ve been hearing fire engines all morning.”

“Some arsonists attacked the city, but I stopped them. Where’s Phoebe? I came to cure her.”

“I figured as much.” Georgina thrust the paper into Julie’s dripping fingers. “This was on the kitchen table.”

“Damn.” Julie glanced toward the altar. No missile complex, no dynamite; she’d even taken that. Dear Wondering: Wait.

Georgina cinched the belt on her karate suit. “Why’d you tell her you were going public? Don’t you know alcoholics fear recovery more than death? Phoebe must’ve panicked.”

“Hey, I did you a big favor today.” As Julie sat on the edge of the bed, Georgina rose reciprocally, like a seesaw partner. “I saved your shop. When your aunt’s shop’s on fire, you do something.”

“Phoebe’s life was on fire for the last six years, and you didn’t do squat.”

“The plain truth, Julie Katz”—Georgina slid the karate belt from her waist—“is that nobody knows why the hell you were born, least of all you.” She wrapped the belt around her arm like a phylactery strap. “When you cracked out of that ecto-thing, I thought a golden age was dawning. I thought you’d have some great wisdom for us. Now I see what a pig you are. Phoebe’s got the right idea—split. Without your father around, this place is death.”

Julie’s scar pulsated indignantly. “I’m death? That’s what you think? Death? If I had you for a mother, Georgina, I’d probably be a lush now too.”

Regret spasmed in Julie. Too late: the words were spoken, unretractable as a baby spilled from a glass womb.

Saying nothing, Georgina marched stiffly out of the temple. Five seconds later the front door slammed explosively, as if Queen Zenobia and the Green Enchantress had just blown up another sand castle.

In the beacon room of Angel’s Eye, Andrew Wyvern pulls the soaking wick from the lamp and jams it into his mouth. Slowly he swallows, enjoying the tang of the kerosene on his tongue, the feel of the wet threads slithering down his esophagus.

It hasn’t taken much to gain the attention of the city’s cardiacs, kidney patients, cancer casualties, welfare cases, lunatics, sociopaths, and bums. “Sheila of the Moon has revealed herself!” Wyvern had declared upon entering each hospital and flophouse, and instantly they were his, fixed in his hairy palm. “Follow me!” And they did, right to the beach, where he deftly merged them with Milk’s victims, thus fashioning his final trap: a congregation of despair, hungry for hope.

The rest went quickly—telling the multitudes he knew where Atlantic City’s savior lived, herding them across the bridge, deploying them around the lighthouse. His plan was at its peak. After years of careful calculation, he had finally made his enemy go public, finally made her sow the seeds of a church.

The devil laughs as the wick crawls into his bowels. Church, such a lovely sound, church, like the gasp of an Arab child impaled on a Frankish sword at the siege of Jerusalem. Before long Revelationism and its ilk will fade, but not to worry, for Julie Katz’s church—ah, that word again, more delicious than kerosene—her church has taken root.

The next twenty-four hours will be crucial. If things go awry, the fragile bud will fade: his enemy will slip back into obscurity or, worse, continue mucking around with reality—help for the crusade casualties, a cure for Alzheimer’s, an end to African droughts, a safe and potent insecticide, God knew what.

A spirited afternoon breeze blew through the bedroom window, cooling Julie’s sopping and exhausted flesh. Sleep took her to the Galapagos Islands. Hand in hand, she and Howard Lieberman toured the evolutionary showcase—its monster tortoises, dragonlike lizards, psychedelic birds. Howard became Bix. A shovel appeared. Her lover dug into the beach, as if looking for buried treasure. A brilliant light geysered up. Sheila, he shouted, this is wonderful. Sheila, come see. Sheila!

Many voices, a mob. Not in the dream—outside it. New Jersey, Brigantine Point, here.

She slipped into Melanie’s peach kimono and climbed the hundred and twenty-six steps to the beacon room, her nom de plume falling upon her like a succession of blows. Moving past the dormant lamp, she noticed the wick was missing: a Wyvern lamp, she decided, beaming darkness into the world.

Vibrating like conglomerated bees, the crowd surrounded the lighthouse and overran the jetty. It was as if her temple had suddenly returned to haunt her, a museum of pain converging from all directions. Wheelchairs, crutches, and dialysis machines punctuated the swarming flesh. Stretchers lay on the grass like grave mounds, their occupants strung to IV bottles hanging from aluminum poles. Disease prospered. Blindness thrived. Burned and mutilated corpses proliferated—Milk’s victims, she surmised—yet, curiously, not one of them touched the lawn, each lying instead across the arms of a parent or lover, as if resurrection were contingent upon the body literally being handed over to the divine Sheila.

Julie cringed. Here, she realized, were the villains of her life, the ones who perpetuated the empire of nostalgia. Their needs were a thousand scalpels slicing her flesh, chopping her into relics—you take the holy spleen, I want the sacred brain. Damn them. She extended her arms, scissoring them as if marionettes dangled from her fingers. The clamor tapered off. “You must live in your own time!”

“I tried that!” screamed a gaunt young man, his writhing body bound to a wheelchair by leather straps.

The crowd seemed infinite. She imagined it stretching northward along the coast—the entire Eastern Seaboard lined up, waiting for deliverance. Nobody could be expected to deal with all this, nobody. “You must look to the future!”

“Screw the future!” called a potbellied man carrying a pre-adolescent girl, her body wracked by cystic fibrosis.

A siege. That was the only word. Julie thought of the rainy Saturday afternoon they’d watched Roger Worth’s videocassette of Night of the Living Dead. Bar the door, board the windows, the zombies are coming. The living dead? No, these were the dead living, she decided. They’d never known the tomb, and yet they were inert, sapped, stunned by the innumerable failings of flesh.

Bar the door board the windows—forget it, that wouldn’t do, the crisis demanded extreme measures.

Fixing on the lawn, Julie removed the grass with her stare, shearing it away like a nurse depilating a neurosurgery patient. The dead living drew back, awed, expectant. Seized by Julie’s mind, the spit rumbled and shook. Earth upheaved, sand billowed, rocks shot from the ground like reverse-motion meteorites. The dead living scattered. Every deity is an island, Julie concluded as Angel’s Eye split off from the mainland. Like mother, like daughter: detached, distant, incommunicado.

The Atlantic gushed into the gap. With three emphatic hand claps she transmuted the surrounding sea into acid as easily as she’d turned the Revelationists’ gasoline into milk. No ordinary acid, not hydrochloric, not sulfuric—the stomach juices of the primordial goat, smoking and swirling, potent enough to gnaw the bottom off any invading vessel, the very stuff a deity might use to etch a tidal basin into a planet or carve a mountain range from a continental plate. Water to acid. Child’s play, elementary alchemy.

Her loneliness had fiber and weight. She could have determined its boiling point, measured its specific gravity. Aunt Georgina hated her; Phoebe had split; Bix was a traitor; Melanie was in Hollywood getting rich; Pop lay divided between a bunch of icy test tubes and a jar on the ocean floor. Alone.

A deep, low hiss issued from the wickless lamp. A voice rattled in its brass belly. “Let me make you an offer.”

“An old acquaintance.” The lamp’s inhabitant, a lewd red snake with poison sacs for cheeks, crawled out of the wick slot. The creature smelled of honeyed oranges. “The mob owns you, child. Your secret’s out. You can’t put yourself back in the bottle.”

“I’ve lost a great deal,” Julie confessed to the snake. “My ministry, my friends…”

“In twenty-four hours, Pain departs.” Andrew Wyvern slithered down the lamp and sinuated across the floor. “Join the voyage, child. Better to be a citizen in hell than a slave in New Jersey.”

Julie frowned, crinkling her scar. Join the voyage? Leave the comprehended cosmos? She pondered the possibility. “Hell is a long way off, Mr. Wyvern.”

“Believe me, a person with your background would receive the best treatment there, first-class accommodations. Hell has some of the finest cooks and wine-makers who ever lived. Our masseurs know the lost chords of flesh.”

Freedom…but no, no, for whatever reasons, her mother had planted her in Atlantic City. “I can’t.”

“Of course we have a waiting list. Don’t believe everything you hear about hell. Next time you run into some anti-hell propaganda, consider the source.”

“Merely because it’s our job. And remember, we persecute only the guilty, which puts us one up on most other institutions.” The serpent hissed like a dynamite fuse. “Twenty-four hours, Julie. The trains don’t run after that. Come with us. There’s nothing more you can do here.”

It was crazy to give credence to the devil. “You mean—I’ve fulfilled my purpose?”

“Be honest, Mr. Wyvern. I needn’t break with the known universe to have a life. I could go to…I don’t know. California.”

“In California they’d track you down instantly. For eleven months your picture was in every issue of the Moon.”

“But not your genes. As long as you’re on the earth, your divinity will keep leaking out. Sooner or later, all masks fall off, and then—”

A fiery drama spouted from the wickless lamp. In the center lay a small, doll-like simulacrum of Julie, nailed to a wooden cross. The doll screamed like a boiling teakettle. Shadowy homunculi stood at its feet, cheering. Cheap trick, Julie thought. Silly, unconvincing…“Shut it off!” Pinprick spots of blood fell from the doll’s wounds. “Off!”

Her arteries vibrated like plucked harp strings. For the first time ever, she felt herself heir to Pop’s heart, that vulnerable pump, so easily damaged. God had demanded propitiation deaths before, and would probably do so again.

“Do it, Julie. Save yourself.” The serpent smiled, showing fangs like fish hooks. “I promise you safe passage. One simple condition.”

“You must give the crowd something to remember you by. Make a grand exit—you owe them that.”

“Galapagos, Madagascar, Bali, Tahiti, Sri Lanka—wherever you go, you’ll spend your life looking over your shoulder. There’s pizza in hell, Julie. Movies, physics monographs, ice cream—everything you care about.” The snake slithered back into the lamp. “Remember, child, a grand exit.”

I should’ve done this years ago, Phoebe thought as the Greyhound coach plunged from the West Side’s blinding daylight into the cool, grimy shadows of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Atlantic City was nothing, an R-rated Disneyland full of losers and whores. At last she’d reached the real thing—Manhattan Island, Gotham, Big Apple, El Dorado with subways. No more waiting forever for a good movie to reach town. No more dealing with tourists and weirdos at the Smile Shop.

She’d miss Mom, of course, and she was sorry she wouldn’t be there when Melanie got back from Hollywood. But her so-called friend Katz had left her no choice. Phoebe wasn’t about to let anybody mess with her metabolism, no way. A drinking hobby wasn’t the same as alcoholism—in New York, at least, that truth would be understood.

The bus pulled into its stall, groaning and belching like a colicky rhinoceros. Okay, so Manhattan wasn’t the South Seas island she and Katz had seen in the Deauville. Still, she belonged here. Shouldering her Smile Shop tote bag (WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE TOUGH GO SHOPPING). she staggered down the aisle and stepped off the coach. New York, population nine million, and twenty more had just blown in from South Jersey. She sidled toward the luggage bay, where the passengers waited like mourners around a grave. As usual, she felt detached from such people, outside. Knowing Katz did that to you. A God existed: Phoebe had proof. The devil was loose in Atlantic City: Phoebe had ridden a merry-go-round with him. But what was the final sum? Did Julie Katz matter more than anything, or barely matter at all?

The bus driver appeared, popped the hatch, and began dragging out the luggage. The most important item in Phoebe’s suitcase wasn’t her liquor cabinet or dynamite but her camcorder. Cinéma-vérité sex—how could she lose? Staged fornication was such a bore. What people wanted, the focus of their primal curiosity, was the genuine article—an actual policewoman boffing her husband, an authentic delivery boy doing it with his girlfriend; every step of the process, each probe and clutch and caress.

As the passengers paired themselves with their suitcases, a trim, fiftyish black man came toward Phoebe, a fedora snugged down past his eyebrows, gold rings stacked on his fingers. “New in town?” he asked, grinning spectacularly. “I’m Cecil.” He tipped his fedora and thrust his hands into his lavender three-piece suit. “Got a place to stay?”

Phoebe retrieved her suitcase. “You look like somebody I knew once. You a marine biologist by any chance?”

The stranger picked up her suitcase. “You’ve got gorgeous eyes, sister. I could start you at three hundred a week. Escort profession. Come home with me, babes.”

Frost formed in Phoebe’s heart. Escort profession—hah. “I have a career, thank you.” She yanked the suitcase away from the pimp. “I’m in the entertainment business.”

She entered the Port Authority, rode the escalator up one flight, and waded into the dense screeching streets where she planned to make her fortune.

Between the din of the media and the crowd’s unceasing voice—a polyphonic howl such as wolves might make disgorging broken glass—Julie could not sleep. Throughout the night, newspaper people and TV crews kept arriving, and by dawn they were camped out all over the lawn, occupying it like a hostile army. Atlantic City Press reporters bellowed across the acid moat using bullhorns, demanding to interview the woman who’d saved their town. Video cameras leered at Angel’s Eye from out of cherry pickers. A helicopter labeled WACX-Radio buzzed the tower, its rotor so unnerving that Julie had no choice but to cloak her home in a dense mantle of mist.

She sought to distract herself with television, but there were so many Sheila stories it was like looking in a mirror. On Channel 9 a statuesque woman swathed in blond hair stood on the edge of the freshly carved moat, surrounded by the dead living, a tower of fog in the background. “Who’s inside the cloud?” she asked the camera. “A magician, some say. The Virgin Mary, others claim.” A microphone hovered near the reporter’s lips like an all-day sucker. “But no rumor is more persistent than the one that brought these people to Brigantine Point. For them, Atlantic City’s mysterious benefactor is none other than Sheila, daughter of God.” The reporter winked. “Tracy Swenson, Channel 11 Action News, Brigantine.”

At dusk Julie removed the fog, peeling it away like a label from one of Phoebe’s rum bottles. Pain cruised the horizon like a shark patrolling its feeding ground.

Dress right, Julie told herself. Melanie’s kimono would not befit the memorable exit on which her safe passage was predicated. She put on Melanie’s suede boots, crammed herself into Georgina’s prom dress. Nor could she leave her face untouched—a few minutes with Georgina’s makeup, and her eyes widened, her scar vanished, her lips became rose petals.

She stepped onto the walkway. A thousand eager stares drilled into her heart. Cheers pounded her flesh. Climbing atop the railing, she balanced on the metal bar like an aerialist. She flung her arms apart, enshrouded herself with light—a full-body halo pulsing outward from her head and trunk like a rainbow on fire—and jumped.

At first it seemed the crowd’s astonished whoops were buoying her up, but no, this was her heritage at work, whizzing her across the darkening sky like a sentient comet. “Look!” “She’s flying!” “Sheila!” “Stay!” “Mary!” “Flying!” “Sheila!” She looped the loop. She spiraled around the lighthouse as if decorating a maypole, then zoomed over the bay toward the waiting schooner. The cool air frizzed her hair, billowed her dress, caressed her naked arms. Flying was better than swimming beneath Absecon Inlet. Flying was better than sex.

She landed in the crow’s nest, startling a drowsy vulture and breaking one of its eggs. The damp, sinewy rigging squeaked and groaned as, hand under hand, she climbed down. To freedom. To safety. To a reality no baby bank aborter or crusade victim could ever invade. Clouds of unknowing and shadows of quantum doubt rolled in from the north, enveloping the schooner like black veils, catching on her spars, clinging to her masts.

Julie stepped onto the foredeck. Three coal-eyed angels looked up from their labors—they were fixing a hole in a flesh-sail, suturing it closed with needle and thread—and applauded. Anthrax, stationed in the cockpit, placed a clawed hand to his lips and blew her a kiss.

Resolutely she marched through Wyvern’s oak-paneled cabin and into the salon beyond, her pace slowed by the gummy yolk on her boots. The devil stood by the settee. “Welcome aboard,” he said, brushing her arm. A red carnation hung on the lapel of his white dinner jacket like a brilliant wound.

“Nobody with our talents can abide the earth for long,” Wyvern corroborated. “Such a vale of unrealistic expectations. The bastards just grind you.”

She glanced at the table, swathed in immaculate linen. A bottle of champagne poked from an ice bucket like the periscope of an Arctic submarine.

“You are. Lentil soup and bean curds. Hope you don’t mind—I’m a vegetarian.”

“It’s irresistible—the screams of the carrots as I dice them, the agonized beets convulsing in my mouth. Hungry?”

“The voyage will pass quickly. There’s much to talk about and more to see. I look forward to your companionship, Julie. Please call me Andrew.” He offered a succinct, gentlemanly bow. “Yours is the first stateroom on the left. My angels have laid out an evening gown. That prom dress is all wrong—white is your color.”

She followed Wyvern onto the foredeck. “Raise anchor!” he called in a soaring, bell-like voice. Julie looked toward the lighthouse. Would she ever miss it? She wished she’d brought a souvenir—a Smile Shop T-shirt, Pop’s manuscript, her “Heaven Help You” scrapbook.

Slowly Pain’s anchor crawled over the transom, salt water rolling off its spikes, seaweed swaying from its chain. Issuing a series of liquid grunts, the creature curled up by the windlass, closed its rat-red eyes, and went to sleep.

Pain surged under Julie’s feet. The sails expanded like huge puffy cheeks. Wyvern’s angels must have been eating ambrosia, their intestinal winds were so heady and sweet. The city’s ruined silhouette receded—dark skeletal girders that had once framed the Golden Nugget, the Tropicana, the Atlantis…

A white gown, Wyvern had said. He was going to dress her in white. She hadn’t felt this good in a long, long time.

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 10
♦	♦	♦

Wave-tossed, angel-powered, His Satanic Majesty’s ship Pain blew across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and from there to the gloomy and indeterminate seas beyond. Julie stayed below, away from the spray that scratched her eyeballs, the air that filled her lungs like raw cotton.

The devil knew how to live. Pain’s cabins were air-conditioned. Its library was a cornucopia of gilded volumes redolent of oiled leather and wisdom: The City of God, Summa Theologica, Das Kapital—all Satan’s favorites. Every night at eight, Anthrax brought her a dinner menu, and Julie would check off pepperoni pizza or, on alternate evenings, something more sophisticated: stuffed lambchops, breast of peacock. Once she ordered the “musical entertainment,” subsequently dining to a violin concert performed by twenty dead preschoolers whose plane had exploded during a demonstration tour of the Suzuki method.

“Happy?” the devil asked. His metamorphosis was simultaneously startling and banal. Horns poked blatantly from his forehead. Overlapping scales covered his body like slate tiles. His nose had doubled in size, its nostrils wide and gaping like the bores of a shotgun.

“Happy,” said Julie emphatically. She stared through a porthole into the fibrous mist. Nausea pressed its rude thumb against her stomach. “You bet your tail I’m happy.” Tail: true. His coccyx, no longer a mere vestige, was growing an inch every day.

Happy? What she really felt was disconnected, standing here in a white evening gown and conversing with Satan himself in the galley of a hellhound schooner. Hard to believe she’d once been a Girl Scout, played point guard for the Brigantine High Tigerettes, or had a love affair with the Midnight Moon’s managing editor.

The glutinous days accumulated, congealing into weeks, lumping into months. Bricks of black lustrous coal filled the sky, at first hovering individually, then fusing into an endless arch. Yet night did not descend, for the vault reflected the glow of a thousand burning islands, bathing Pain’s course in a rosy and perpetual dusk.

Good intentions, Julie learned, were among the more innocuous commodities paving the road to hell. The sea lanes threading the archipelago were dark sewery channels choked with dead tuna, while the islands themselves suggested humpback whales stitched together by Victor Frankenstein. The predictability of Wyvern’s operation depressed her: one hears from earliest childhood that in hell the convicted dead receive atrocious punishments, and that was exactly what each island offered. Training her binoculars on a plateau, she saw over a dozen naked men chained Prometheuslike to huge rocks; crazed panthers ripped open their bellies, hauling their soppy intestines down the slopes like kittens unraveling yarn. On the shores of the adjacent island, a long line of sinners stood buried up to their necks, their exposed heads resting atop the sand like beachballs; shell-crackers fixed in their claws, ravenous lobsters crawled out of the surf, breached the skulls, and, buttering the exposed brains, feasted. On other islands Julie beheld the damned drawn and quartered. Skinned alive. Broken on racks, impaled on stakes, drilled to pieces by hornets. And always the pain was infinite, always the victim would find his mangled flesh restored and the torment beginning again. Contrary to Dante Alighieri’s inspiration, hell’s motto was not, ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER IN but merely, so WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

Intervene? Save them? Whenever the idea reared its head, she had only to recall the hydralike nature of eternal damnation: the moment one agony ended, another instantly bloomed; Julie’s powers—abracadabra, your skull is whole, alakazam, your wound is mended—meant nothing here. Besides, as the devil had told her in the beacon room, these souls were guilty. On earth, saints suffered along with sinners; not so in hell. Wyvern’s world might be endlessly gruesome and impossibly brutal, but it was strangely, uniquely just.

Just? So said the devil, so said the theologians, and yet the closer Pain got to her destination, the further she seemed to drift from reason. Day by day, the categories of iniquity grew ever more arbitrary and excessive. Julie could understand why there was an Island of Atheists. Ditto the Island of Adulterers, the Island of Occultists, the Island of Tax Dodgers. Depending on one’s upbringing, the precincts reserved for Unitarians, Abortionists, Socialists, Nuclear Strategists, and Sexual Deviates made sense. But why the Island of Irish Catholics? The Island of Scotch Presbyterians? Christian Scientists, Methodists, Baptists?

“This offends me,” she said, thrusting a navigational chart before Wyvern and pointing to the Island of Mormons.

The devil’s tail, a kind of rubbery harpoon, looped upward. He grabbed the barbed end. “Throughout history, admission to hell has depended on but one criterion.” He gave the Island of Mormons an affectionate pat. “You must belong to a group some other group believes is heading there.”

“It’s also the law. Doesn’t matter if you’re an embezzler, a slave trader, or Hermann Goering himself—you can elude my domain if nobody ever imagined you in it.”

“Of course it’s unfair. Who do you think’s running the universe, Eleanor Roosevelt?” Wyvern kissed his tail, sucked on the barbs. “Quantum realities don’t have checks and balances. There’s no cosmic ACLU out there.”

“I can’t imagine a Methodist doing anything particularly damning. Why would—?”

“Like all Protestants, Methodists abandoned the True Church. Only through the Apostolic Succession can a person partake of Christ’s continued spiritual presence on earth. This is basic stuff, Julie.”

“Are you serious? With their Mariolatry, Trinity, purgatory, indulgences? How unbiblical can you get?”

“The Jews? Give me a break, Julie. The Jews? They don’t even accept God’s son as their redeemer, much less practice Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Let’s not even discuss the Jews.”

Wyvern reached under one of his shoulder scales, lifting out an errant earwig. “Heaven’s not a crowded place.”

“Such an optimist.” Wyvern snapped his fingers, crushing the earwig. “Four.”

“There are four people in heaven.” The devil’s diaphanous eyelids began a snide descent. “Enoch and Elijah, for starters. I couldn’t do anything about that—it’s in Scripture. Then there’s Saint Peter, of course. And, finally, Murray Katz.”

“Yes, but consider his connections. Of all beings in the cosmos, he alone was selected to gestate God’s daughter.”

Julie rolled up the obscene chart. Pop was saved, great, but how could so many others be lost? Her seasickness worsened, a thousand delinquent ants defacing her stomach walls with graffiti. “This is horribly depressing, Andrew. It robs earthly existence of all meaning.”

“Au contraire, Julie. The fact of damnation gives earthly existence its meaning. Enjoy life while you’ve got it, right? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you make a quantum leap.”

“The last time I saw Jesus, he was working in some hospice in Buenos Aires. I think we should count Jesus as missing in action.”

Friday, August 15, 1997. First the firebergs appeared, great hummocks of floating, flaming ice. Then the sea monsters surfaced, pulpy masses of gray flesh with tentacles and redundant eyes, their dorsal fins cutting into the sky like jibs as they accompanied Pain toward the central continent.

“Rough drafts,” Wyvern explained, pointing across the windblown deck to their malformed and forsaken escorts. “No wonder your mother got it together in only six days—she’d already made her mistakes.”

Initially the continent seemed to Julie nothing but a black, burning ingot glowing in the distance, but then it grew, showing sheer cliffs and incandescent hills. Dining on the sea monsters, Wyvern’s angels acquired sufficient fuel to blow Pain into the harbor at fifty knots. Hell, by God. For better or worse, she’d gotten all the way to hell.

The Port of Hell vibrated with activity, rumbled with hubbub, buzzed like an asylum for insane bees. It belched and bellowed and smoked. Dozens of barges and freighters crisscrossed the harbor, looping around marker buoys outfitted with pealing bells and clanging gongs, a carillon more suited, Julie felt, to a New England village on a Sunday morning than hell on a Friday afternoon. Vast loading cranes stood against the anthracite sky, their high steel towers bobbing like the necks of brontosaurs as they plucked semitrailers from moored ships.

Even as Wyvern spoke, howls of despair—Catholic despair, Protestant despair, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist—shot from the semitrailers.

The central pier was a peninsula of black fissured granite swarming with bat-winged angels, scaled fiends, and piggish imps. “Hail Lucifer!” the sycophants shouted. A huge welcoming party sailed forth, scores of demons packed into swan boats and outrigger canoes. “Hosanna!” they cried, tossing bright yellow leis onto Pain’s foredeck. Cheers boomed across the harbor as Wyvern saluted. Banners unfurled along the maze of wharfs.

“Think you could blow them a kiss or two?” asked Wyvern. “They’d get off on it.”

“I’m going to enjoy this place,” said Julie, her voice toneless. She blew three small, pinched kisses toward shore. Enjoy hell? Could that be remotely true? Did any coordinates exist in or out of reality that she could ever call home?

Anthrax rowed them to shore through a blizzard of confetti and rose petals, and they climbed into the velvet-upholstered coach. The driver, a demon whose physiognomy melded a weasel’s leer with a toad’s complexion, cracked his whip above the horses’ heads.

And they were off, speeding over deserts of burning sulfur and through forests whose trees were the fleshless hands of gigantic skeletons. They rattled across rainbows of rock arcing over gorges filled with writhing piles of the damned. They circumvented vast lunarian craters formed, Wyvern asserted, by the impact of falling angels.

Within the hour a marble palace swung into view, its slender towers soaring into the smoky air like the masts of some fantastic frigate. Pennants flew from the parapets, snapping in the hot hadean breeze. A portcullis hung in the main gate like a leopard’s upper jaw.

“The foundation stones once pressed witches to death,” Wyvern explained as the coach rolled into the courtyard. With a ceremonial flourish, the driver opened the door and Wyvern stepped out. “We wash the carpets with orphans’ tears,” said the devil. “The mosaic floors are inlaid with the teeth of starved Ethiopians.”

He extended his scaly arm. Julie jumped down, inhaling the foggy, clotted ambience of her new home, an odor suggesting cabbage cooked in molten asphalt.

“Of course hell has a capital. You think we’re a bunch of anarchists? You think I’m not up to my ass in politics and bureaucracy? Thank God for computers—that’s all I can say.”

Hell was not perfect, but it was paradise compared with New Jersey. She had a life now. She was free. No more insults from Georgina. No more fights with Bix, hunts for Phoebe’s liquor, or battered wretches crowding around her house. Her every wish became Anthrax’s command. When she spoke fondly of diving into Absecon Inlet, the obliging demon constructed a swimming pool in the basement, heated by natural sulfur. When she mentioned her lack of a wardrobe, he loaded her closets with the previous year’s fashions. “I used to enjoy movies,” she told him, and immediately he located a 35mm projector plus a ceiling-high tower of Busby Berkeley musicals and Marx Brothers comedies.

The melancholy started slowly, subtly, like a cold spawned by a diffident virus. Where was Phoebe now? Hollywood, Julie speculated, nailing down her dreams of cinéma-vérité eroticism, snarfling up lines of cocaine from her desk on the Paramount lot. And Bix. She hoped he missed her—the real her, not the intervener who’d so confused and angered him the day Billy Milk’s army came to town. Would they have eventually married? She suspected so; they meshed in so many ways, their skepticism, their chubbiness. She imagined herself pregnant with Bix’s child, a sweet, round rationalist sprouting in her womb.

On the central continent, she learned, everything was basic and direct: fire. Fire had it all. Fire, which strips away the derma, the nervous system’s armor, leaving the victim clothed in pain. Climbing hell’s ragged peaks in her silk blouse and peasant skirt, Julie witnessed angels tying prisoners to tree trunks and burning them alive. The next day, descending into hell’s glowing canyons in her safari jacket and designer jeans, she saw the damned cooked in swamps of boiling diarrhea. Horribly, the multitudes never became more than the sum of their selves—particular women with personal hair styles, particular men of varying physiognomies, even particular fetuses, each with its own smell, an amalgam of pain and original sin. If only she could help them. But no, pointless—snap, your burns are temporarily healed, clap, your blisters are momentarily gone: so what? She had but two hands and one godhead—two hands and one godhead against the whole of perdition.

As far as Julie could discern, hell’s major industry was iron smelting. Driven by the angels’ whips, the naked men and women coalesced into teams. For some prisoners, damnation meant hollowing out hell’s mountains with pickaxes and loading the ore into hopper cars. For others, it meant pushing the cars along narrow-gauge railroad tracks. For others, it meant feeding limestone and coke to the blast furnaces: limestone that seared the prisoners’ skin, coke that ate their lungs. A final team drew slag and molten metal from the hearths, then carried the pig iron by wheelbarrow to a seething, swirling river and dumped it over the banks, whereupon it dissolved and began the slow but relentless process of soaking back into the continent, ready to be reclaimed, a perfect circle.

And always the heat, forcing water from the prisoners’ flesh like a winepress squeezing grapes. In hell, people sliced their wrists and guzzled the blood, anything to feel wetness on their tongues. In hell, a father would shoot his firstborn for a jigger of piss.

On close inspection, the label worn by each damned soul proved to be a thick asbestos shingle secured about his neck by a gold chain. March 23, 1998—7:48 P.M., said the shingle on a young Philippine woman who was perpetually scalded in five-hundred-degree chicken fat. On an old Swedish man clothed in white-hot barbed wire, May 8, 1999—6:11 P.M. On an Hispanic child rushing down an electrified sliding board, April 11, 2049—10:35 P.M. Death certificates? wondered Julie. At this moment I entered hell? No, all these dates still lay in the future, a truth that made the prisoners’ idolatry—the way they would periodically lift the shingles to their blistered lips and kiss them—a total mystery. The future, she felt, was the last thing these people should worship.

Everybody damned? Could that really be? Only Enoch, Elijah, Saint Peter, and Pop had gained the quantum reality called heaven? In her most despondent moments Julie sensed it was all absurdly true. Everybody damned—even Howard Lieberman over there, pushing a wheelbarrow along the steamy banks of the great pig-iron river.

She blinked. Yes. Him. Her old boyfriend, sheathed in sweat, speckled with blisters, naked as when they’d last made love. He still had his wire-rimmed glasses, his tight lips. “Howard?” His skin was like an ancient linoleum floor, entire hunks broken away. A corona of pain surrounded his entire being. “Howard Lieberman?”

Pausing, he lowered the wheelbarrow. “Julie? That really you? Julie Katz?” His voice vibrated as though he were speaking through an electric fan.

“Shipwrecked,” Howard moaned. Sparks danced around him like flies encircling a carcass. “Coming home from the Galapagos Islands.” The sparks blew into his chest, bouncing off his asbestos shingle. October 3, 1997—11:18 A.M., a date that according to her watch was a mere forty-eight hours away.

“I’m tuned in on the cosmos, Howard. I’m one of your quantum aberrations.”

He appeared on the point of responding to this assertion, but instead said, “If you want to know about the tags, come back in two days.” Pressing the shingle to his lips, he kissed it fervently, as if it were Newton’s favorite prism or a toy magnet once owned by Einstein.

The lash uncoiled instantly, like a frogs tongue snaring a dragonfly. Howard’s knees buckled; he pitched forward across his wheelbarrow. Again the angel struck, and again, the thong slitting Howard’s back like Aunt Georgina opening a carton of joy buzzers. Sparks landed in his wounds, making his fresh blood sizzle.

Julie backed off, spun around. Come back in two days—a trap? It sounded like one. She’d come back, and Howard would ask her to employ the pull she evidently enjoyed here. He’d drop to his boiled knees, clasp his scarred hands together, and beg her to get him a reprieve.

She hurried home, screened A Night at the Opera, and swam twenty laps along the bottom of her pool. She had a life now, she told herself, far more so than in her Atlantic City days. An enviable situation, a hermit’s cave with room service. She owed Howard Lieberman nothing.

Two days later she arrived at the pig-iron river in time to see her old boyfriend flash his shingle to the chief overseer, a pasty-faced angel with an AK-41 assault rifle slung over his shoulder. Possessed by a wild and primal expectation, Howard barely acknowledged her. The angel nodded, and Howard took off, skipping down a highway of sulfur, singing a medley of Beatles songs, his rendition of “Octopus’s Garden” flowing seamlessly into his “Let It Be.”

God alone knew what three years of hauling iron had done to Howard, how many cracks in his bones, how many aneurysms in his heart. Yet whenever he stumbled and fell, he immediately picked himself up and continued, limping eagerly across the death-shadowed valleys and burning hills. Nothing discouraged him, not hell’s acid snow, bird-sized mosquitoes, or storm-trooper angels, on whom his shingle acted as a kind of amulet, charming them into letting him pass.

“You still think science has all the answers?” Julie asked, struggling to keep up. “You still think the problem is that we don’t have all the science?”

“Of course I do,” said Howard. “Look at this place, Julie—incomprehensible, absurd. Obviously we don’t have all the science.”

But for the absence of narrow-gauge railroad tracks, the cave might have been yet another hadean iron mine. A golden glow pulsed from its mouth, haloing the dozens of naked humans waiting to enter. Their collective stench burned Julie’s nostrils as Howard took his place at the end of the line. She decided to pull rank; she abandoned Howard and walked straight to the entrance, where a fragile-looking Japanese man labeled 10:58 waited anxiously. “Next!” a male voice called from the gloom, and the Japanese man rushed into the cave as if he’d just snatched up the baton at a relay race. Julie looked at her watch. 10:58 on the dot. 10:59, a redheaded teenage boy, whose face was a mass of acne and sulfur burns, moved into place. Sixty seconds later, the Japanese man emerged, shingle gone, wearing the most contented smile Julie had ever seen.

The stone room was sparsely furnished—horizontal granite slab, kerosene lantern sitting on a stalagmite, canvas director’s chair supporting a black-bearded, thirtyish man. A narrow stream, its waters bright and burbling, cut across the floor like a vein of silver ore. “Next!” the bearded man cried as Julie melted into the shadows. The boy named 10:59 collapsed on the slab, whereupon the bearded man performed a quick ritual, dipping a hollow gourd into the stream and sprinkling half the measure on the young prisoner’s head.

“Yes?” The water-giver held the remaining measure to 10:59’s desiccated lips.

“Ah, the famous Julie Katz,” the water-giver said cryptically, locking his dark shining eyes on her. A strong Semitic nose, a wide intelligent brow—quite a handsome fellow, really, marred only by the garish holes in his ankles and wrists. “Your arrival is all we’ve been hearing about lately.”

The noise of the slurping boy reverberated off the granite walls. “I thought you were in Buenos Aires,” said Julie.

“Who told you that?” demanded God’s son, removing 10:59’s shingle and tossing it into the inky darkness.

“He lies.” Jesus helped 10:59 off the slab, guided him toward the cave entrance. “Not always, but often.” Her brother’s leather sandals were scuffed, cracked, and, in the case of the left, strapless. Burn holes speckled his robe. “I’m dead. How could I be—where did you say?”

“Nope. Dead. Nailed to a cross.” Jesus poked an index finger into his violated wrist. “So how’d they kill you?”

The snappishness in his voice was unwarranted, she felt. “I wasn’t happy in Jersey. I couldn’t figure out my purpose.”

“And you thought hell would be nicer?” Bending by the stream, Jesus filled his ladle. “You call this foresight, girl? Next!”

Such a comedian, and she could do without the sexism. “I had no freedom up there. Everybody was out to get me. I’m not a girl.”

“I’m very busy,” said Jesus curtly, dousing the old man. Rude, she thought. He was definitely being rude. “Whatever brought you to hell,” said her brother, “you won’t find it in this sorry little room.”

“Yes, my well-dressed little sister, I know who you are, and I have nothing to say to you.” Jesus sighed—a low, long, symphonic sound compacting weariness and impatience. “Please go away, daughter of God.”

Maybe she’d caught him on a bad day. Maybe he was really a warm and tender fellow. She doubted it. This man who had somehow abstracted himself from history, exempted his character from judgment, this man in whose name the world had built cathedrals and burned down cities, this man, her brother, was a shmuck.

Walking home through the sulfurous mist, she wondered where Jesus’ operation stood in the general scheme of things. Was it wholly clandestine, a one-man resistance movement? No, the prisoners displayed their shingles publicly, didn’t they? More likely her brother’s charity was like the black market in Russia, a tolerated subversion, unofficially sanctioned.

She’d never been more grateful for her mansion—its resuscitating shower, Anthrax’s expert cooking, her film collection. So Jesus was giving out water. So big deal. It reminded her of Pop turning on his lighthouse for ships that had already sunk. Pathetic.

But God’s son wouldn’t leave. Ladle in hand, he hovered within her, lodged in her thoughts as she napped by the hearth, fixed in her imagination as she ate pepperoni pizza. Retiring to her canopied bed, she spent the night thrashing atop her silk sheets and eiderdown mattress.

By morning he had won. Dashing into her cavernous kitchen, she yanked out all one hundred drawers and overturned them on the floor. The silvery clatter brought Anthrax running. “Sorry,” she said, noting his bewildered face. “You thought I was a thief?”

“Ladle—I just want a ladle,” she replied sternly, kicking the glittery mountain of utensils. “Do we have a goddamn ladle or don’t we?”

Anthrax opened a cabinet above the stove. What he drew out lacked the organic romance of Jesus’ gourd—it was an aluminum cup with a black plastic handle, barely suitable for serving punch at a junior prom—but it would do. She ordered Anthrax to hire her a coach, and by noon she was back at the cave, pushing past the line of thirsty dead people, her jeans and sweatshirt coated with sulfur specks. A little girl with blond ringlets lay on the slab. Seated in his director’s chair, Jesus looked up, his lustrous stare fusing with hers.

“You know it is,” Jesus replied smoothly, patting the little girl’s head and smiling.

Julie dipped the ladle into the stream, doused the child, and offered her a drink. She lapped it up eagerly, beaming a prodigious smile into Julie’s face.

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 11
♦	♦	♦

Sister and brother, side by side, day after day, comforting the damned. It was like tending a garden, Julie decided, like watering flower beds of flesh. They divided the labor, Jesus cooling the bodies, Julie dispensing the drinks. He had the most wonderful hands, two featherless birds forever aloft on sleek, graceful wings. As he moved them, air whistled through the holes in his wrists.

She did. All of it. Her test-tube conception. Her temple of pain. Her orgasmic encounter with empirical truth. Pop’s heart attacks. Her Moon column, her remote-control miracles, the burning of Atlantic City, Phoebe’s desertion of Angel’s Eye.

When she was done, Jesus simply looked at her in stupefaction, eyes wide as a lemur’s, jaw hanging open like a hungry seal’s.

“It wasn’t easy.” Julie wanted to cry. How tawdry and small her story sounded, how bereft of grandeur—how noncosmic, as Aunt Georgina would say.

“And I’m most impressed with this science business. The courage to disprove your convictions, quite amazing.”

He fixed her with a stare so bright she had to close her eyes. “Yes?” she whispered hoarsely.

Splaying his fingers, Jesus ticked off his displeasures. “Giving your father that half-assed resurrection, doing those noncommittal interventions, running away from those people on the beach, rejecting the mob outside your lighthouse, abandoning your alcoholic friend—it’s not what this family stands for, Julie, not for a minute. Next!”

A twinge of belligerence moved along Julie’s spine. “Okay, okay, but maybe you aren’t exactly God either. Didn’t you leave lots of cripples and lepers and blind beggars behind?”

“Look, divinity’s a confusing condition, no doubt about it. A curse.” Those burning eyes again: Julie thought of ten-year-old Phoebe channeling sunlight through her magnifying glass, frying ants on the sidewalk. “But we can’t use it as an excuse. We can’t just paste a lot of gruesome news stories on our bedroom walls and wait it out.”

She had never felt worse. Her gills gasped, her eyes swam. “I’ve been an idiot.”

His demeanor took a sudden swing—accuser to comforter, supreme judge to angel of mercy. “What’s done is done.” He eased the Asian woman onto the slab, doused her. “I sometimes feel my life doesn’t add up to much either.”

The confession was so distracting Julie accidentally dropped her ladle. “You do?”

“I reread the Gospels last night,” Julie’s dead brother explained as she refilled her ladle and held it to the prisoner’s lips. “Not exactly my authorized biographies,” he said. “Still, Mark gets the chronology right, and Matthew does a good job with the speeches. In John, of course, we have all that peculiar light-versus-dark imagery—a Gnostic influence, I suspect—and I don’t care for the anti-Semitism. But even there, my essential ambition comes across.” Jesus helped the Asian woman to her feet. “I wanted to be a Hebrew messiah, right? Drive out the Romans, restore the Davidic throne, found a nation of the spiritually transformed. The kingdom of God, I called it.”

“Sometimes the kingdom of heaven,” noted Julie, removing the woman’s shingle.

“Paradise now, overseen by a benevolent Jewish monarchy.” Drawing a Bible from his robe, Jesus turned to Matthew. “Anyway, there I was, a deity, a blood descendant of God’s, and I still couldn’t bring it off. ‘Verily I say to you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.’ Well, the generation passed, didn’t it?” As the Asian woman left the cave, Jesus placed a perforated wrist on his heart, comforting himself. “I’m happy about what I taught, though, most of it. Next!”

“‘If somebody asks for your tunic, give him your cloak as well,’” Julie quoted.

A new customer entered, a man with a goiter the size of a cantaloupe. “Wait a minute.” Julie eased the prisoner’s aching flesh onto the slab. “Are you saying you don’t know about your Church?”

“By the time I see them, they’re too numb for conversation.” Again Jesus cracked his Bible. “You mean this thing here in Acts, the Jerusalem Church? Is that still around?”

“I wouldn’t think so, not after I stood everybody up. Peter, James, John—they all expected me to return posthaste. ‘The end is at hand,’ Peter says here. And John: ‘Thereby we know it is the last time.’ But the dead don’t come back, do they? They don’t leave hell.”

“The Jerusalem Church faded away.” Julie gave the goitrous man a drink, removed his shingle. “But there was another, a gentile Church.”

“‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’ That’s in Matthew, I think. How could there be a gentile Church?”

“Paul? Some terrific stuff about love, as I recall.” Jesus flipped toward the back of his Bible. “Paul started a church?”

“You really don’t know what happened up there?” Julie dipped her ladle into the stream. “You don’t know you became the center of Western civilization?”

Jesus helped the goitrous man off the slab and escorted him out of the cave. “There are who?”

“Worship me? Please…” Jesus scratched his forehead with his ladle. “‘Christ—that’s Greek, isn’t it? An anointed one, a king. Next!”

“Odd translation.” As Jesus refilled his ladle, a woman entered whose hair was singed down to her scalp, giving her the appearance of a chemotherapy patient. “What else do Christics teach?”

“That, by following you, a person obtains remission from original sin. You don’t know this?”

“Original sin? When did I ever talk about that?” Jesus wet the hairless woman. “Ethics was my big concern. Read the Bible.” His birdish hands wove through the air, landing smoothly atop his King James version. “Original sin? Are you serious?”

“Oh, come on,” Jesus snickered. “That’s paganism, Julie. You’re talking Attis, Dionysus, Osiris—the sacrificial god whose suffering redeems his followers. Every town had one in those days. Where was Paul from?”

“I dropped by Tarsus once,” said Jesus, leafing through the epistles. “The local god was Baal-Taraz, I believe.” He pressed the open Bible against his chest like a poultice. “Good heavens, is that what I became? Another propitiation deity?”

“I hate to be the one telling you this.” Julie ministered to the hairless woman.

“So the gentiles won the day? Is that why John’s book talks about eternal life instead of the kingdom? Did Christicism become an eternal-life religion?”

“Accept Jesus as your personal redeemer,” Julie corroborated, “and you’ll be resuscitated after you die and taken up into the clouds.”

“The clouds? No, ‘Thy kingdom come on earth’ remember? And look at my parables, all those gritty metaphors—the kingdom is yeast, Julie, it’s a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, a landowner hiring workers for his vineyard…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Andrew,” Julie called out as the demon directed her through a wooden trellis wrapped in vines resembling barbed wire. “I’ve come to visit.”

“Julie! What a superb surprise!” The devil was merrily pruning a tree laden with wormy mangoes. He waved his secateurs. “Welcome to Eden. Yes, the Eden. After the fall, we had it shipped down here.” Shooing Anthrax away, he fondled a fat tomato dangling from a spidery green plant. “To tell you the truth, I expected you much sooner.”

“I’ve been happy in hell,” Julie asserted. Breezes sinuated through the garden like small tornadoes, making the mangoes sway. The grass beneath her feet twitched with the maneuvers of ant battalions. “I’ve been useful.”

Wyvern guffawed, tipping his left horn in the general direction of Jesus’ cave. “Fifteen years running some ludicrous lemonade stand—you call that useful? Your brother was always something of a masochist, but you, I thought you had better sense.”

The devil angled his tail toward hell’s vault. “I won’t abide any more deities running around up there. You people are such wild cards.”

“Jesus told me your price.” She folded her arms across her sweatshirt in a posture of defiance. “I’m prepared to give it up.”

“Look at the bright side—look at what you’re getting.” A huge grin bisected the devil’s leathery, crimson face. “The earth, a full life, no more huddled masses cluttering up your driveway…”

Coldness climbed up Julie’s vertebrae, lodging against her neck like a guillotine blade. “I’m tough.”

“Stand still.” Wyvern’s left paw was suddenly aglow, each scale winking like a jewel. “Don’t move.”

There followed an obscene rendition of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, the devil reaching toward her, index finger erect. The hot claw touched her sweatshirt, burned through the cotton, and kept moving, splitting her flesh like a surgeon’s knife.

Wyvern leaned in close and kissed her, his lips leeching on her cheek, his breath clawing her eyes. “Love your enemies, right?” he said.

Now came his other fingers, now his whole brown and bristled paw, moving through skin and gristle, unbuckling her ribs as if they were the halves of an overcoat, driving deeper and deeper into her chest, searching, probing, and she knew this was pain, pain, the endless ripping, slashing, chopping hell of it. Within and without she bled; she felt the horrid warmth. Her teeth crashed together, a bite to grind perdition’s iron, red sparks flying from the friction, and still she kept silent, even when he continued to twist and dig as if his hand were a gravedigger’s spade, her chest a plot of earth.

After an infinity he found the thing, found her godhead and exhumed it, plucking it from its fleshy tomb and bearing it into the light of day.

Her divinity was a bird. It was a white glistery dove, now trapped in Wyvern’s paw. Blood crowned the bird’s head, glutinous fluids flecked its feathers—a perfect dove, wholly biblical, complete with an olive branch trailing from its tawny beak.

With his free hand Wyvern massaged her wound, plucking murderous germs from the weeping wreckage, making fresh tissue grow in the cavity, rank upon rank of robust cells.

“W-why that?” Groaning, drenched in pain, Julie pointed to the olive branch. Nausea spread through her stomach like a hemorrhage.

Nothing—for already a palpable darkness was flooding her brain, giving Wyvern’s voice the harsh incoherence of wind, and she heard not his words but only old memories of his words. Heal this blind boy. Save Atlantic City. Make a grand exit. Heal a boy, save a city, fly to heaven: no, that was all over now, she realized—she would never again raise up crabs or give sight to the blind, no more cities delivered, no more flying, nothing but the fire in her chest and the oncoming night and her falling flesh, falling, falling—

PART TWO

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11