James Morrow - Only Begotten Daughter

PART THREE
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The Second Coming of Julie Katz

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 12
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No ectogenesis machine this time. No immaculate glass birth canal, no steamy soap-scented laundry room, no soft crib with plastic geese circling overhead. Just nakedness and mud. Like worms determined to devour you, the mud seeks every opening, your nose, ears, mouth, vagina. The hot afternoon sun batters you, the mud sickens you, and, oh, how you want to rise. You cannot; even the thought of movement is exhausting. Pinned on your side, pasted to the world, you stare at the mud, naming the creatures that thrive amid the spartina grass and cat-o’-nine-tails: mosquito, gnat, garter snake, snapping turtle. God’s mistakes? Satan’s masterpieces? No, this is the modern age, 2012 in fact. Darwin’s dice throws.

The sinister buzzing something you named dragonfly lands on the soft yellow object you termed lily. The veined, translucent wings stop beating. The dragonfly’s intentions, you sense, are wicked. It will not pollinate the lily; it will rape the lily, rape it with all the ferocity of Wyvern ripping out the dove of your divinity.

You pour your strength into an upward surge, crying out as the effort echoes through your violated chest. Frosted with silt, chewing on your pain, you slog toward hard ground. A cornfield spreads before you, the frail stalks vibrant with sunlight, the ripe ears encapsulated like papooses. You run, the mud drying on your bare skin and flaking away. It’s not the corn you want, but the straw man who guards it. Your plan originates in a Universal Studios horror movie Roger Worth once made you watch, a B-picture in which the Invisible Man, cast out of society, naked, shivering transparently, steals a scarecrow’s clothing lest he die of exposure.

A preadolescent girl dresses the scarecrow, hitching up its pants with a strand of clothesline. Her T-shirt bears a deliriously happy clown and the inscription, CIRCUS OF JOY. She’s freckled, skinny, and gawky; except for your nudity, this whole scene might be an old Saturday Evening Post cover. You throw an arm across your breasts, another across your pubis. The girl’s mouth becomes an egg of astonishment, and you say, “What’s the matter, kid—never saw the goddess Venus before?”

“Right.” You notice that the girl clutches a small, bald, alabaster doll—a Pro-Life Talking Embryo, according to its christening dress.

“I’m a person,” says the Pro-Life Talking Embryo. “I have thoughts and feelings.”

From under her Circus of Joy T-shirt the girl retrieves a little silver crucifix attached to a gold chain, thrusting it forward as if trying to demoralize a vampire. “You a heretic?” She releases the crucifix and lets it dangle; instead of Jesus, a Revelationist lamb is nailed to the cross. “You’d better not be a heretic, lady. The hunters, they’ll shoot you. Maybe worse.”

You wish you had your powers back so you could flatten this brat and her stupid doll with a snap of your fingers. Brushing her aside, you unbutton the scarecrow’s plaid flannel shirt. Circus of Joy—what’s that, the floor show at Caesar’s? Good news, if true. You might be near Atlantic City.

You put on the shirt. Tattered and smelling like tainted bologna, it reaches all the way to your knees—the girl’s father must be gigantic. “Where am I?”

“Uh-huh.” The girl gives her embryo a quick kiss on the fontanel. “The Believers’ Republic of New Jersey.”

You remove the pants. To steal a scarecrow’s clothing, you realize, is to steal its flesh as well. New Jersey, hooray. Phoebe and Bix are near. Your chest pain tapers into a tolerable throb. “You mean state.”

You form an instant image of Dad, a Moon-type Bigfoot with overalls and a shotgun. Lord, deliver us from the wrath of Dad. Swirling around, you rush madly through the labyrinthian cornfield. You’re thirty-eight but you’re fast, a former point guard for the Brigantine Tigerettes. Is Dad behind you already, getting you in his sights?

Heretic hunters, believers’ republics, Jersey secession…secession? Mortality, you sense, will be thornier than you’d ever imagined.

Breaking free of the cornfield, you come to a major highway. Candy wrappers and discarded seed packets cling to the signpost: ROUTE 30. You cross the macadam and stick out your thumb. A river of trash—fliptop rings, empty motor oil cans, broken 7-Up bottles, outdated Republic of New Jersey license plates—fills the gully between road and shoulder. Automobiles whiz toward the ocean, ancient rusted hulks intermixed with more futuristic models sporting silver-plating and clear plastic domes. But of course: it’s 2012, isn’t it? While you were gone, the future arrived.

A pickup truck pulls over, its passenger door decorated with a smiling angel holding aloft a flaming sword. With your loose shirt and muddy face, you look like a victim of sexual assault, and you decide this will elicit either sympathy or a rapist who gauges you an easy mark. In your mind you rehearse a move Aunt Georgina taught you, a technique that leaves the attacker writhing on the ground clutching his testicles. But no, forget it—the driver, while male, is small, agitated, and cherubic. A tense Buddha, sportily dressed. “Heading for the city?” he asks quickly.

“Been out of the country,” you reply, nodding. “Fifteen years. Is the Atlantic Ocean still down this way?”

“Sinners,” the driver answers laconically, edging into the traffic. A small, silver, crucified lamb peers mournfully from beneath his blue blazer. “Been working for the Circus almost seven years now, hauling their sinners, and they still haven’t given me a free pass. They simply don’t appreciate their employees.” He studies you with soft, teddy-bear eyes. “You’re a real mess, ma’am. What happened? Run into some heretics?”

Remembering the farm girl’s hostility, you put two and two together. To prosper in contemporary New Jersey, one must stand unequivocally against heresy. “Yes,” you lie. “They beat me up.”

“Leave me at Huron.” You recognize an old Tropicana billboard that now says, THE CIRCUS OF JOY PRESENTS: THY SWORD SHALL COMFORT ME, COMING APRIL 11TH. “I’ll walk home.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t normally tell a total stranger this, but seeing as how you’ve got a score to settle…” The driver winks mischievously. “We’ll be dealing with a heretic tomorrow night—on our own, know what I mean? They just nabbed him in Somers Point. I heard it on the CB. Interested?”

“Sure,” you say, smiling artificially. The dried mud is merciless, a million itches swarming across your skin.

“Come to the K mart parking lot. Seven-thirty—plenty of time to beat curfew. Ask for me, Nick Shiner. I’ll get you admitted. Charlie Fielding’s bringing the bricks.”

You’re not sure, but you believe Nick Shiner has just invited you to help stone somebody to death. “This brick business is new to me,” you say as Route 30 dissolves into Absecon Boulevard.

“The thing about a heretic is, once you catch him, you’d better move quickly, or they’ll take him away from you.” The silver lamb jiggles atop Nick Shiner’s chest as he gestures angrily toward the sky. “Shouldn’t they come up with an occasional free pass for a guy who’s spent seven years carting their lousy sinners around? Isn’t that the least they should do?”

“Watching the Circus on cable isn’t the same as being there,” Nick Shiner whines.

As night settles, your gaze drifts across the salt marsh. Sitting atop three tiered foundations, the metropolis looks like the upper stratum of an immense layer cake.

“New Jerusalem,” Nick Shiner corrects you. “They finished it seven years ago. It’s going to trigger the Second Coming”—he issues a weary sigh—“assuming we can process enough sinners.”

Luminous marble ramparts burn through the darkness. Instead of recreating the Nugget, the Tropicana, the Sands, Caesar’s, and the others separately, their owners have seemingly turned the whole city into one vast casino. The buildings are like garishly trimmed Christmas trees, huge conical structures dotted with silver floodlights and gold-tinted windows.

Before leaving you at the Huron intersection, Nick Shiner reminds you to come to the Somers Point K mart tomorrow night. “Don’t keep your emotions bottled up. Toss some bricks. It’ll do wonders.”

You hike across the bridge and start down Harbor Beach Boulevard, its stately townhouses smothered in fog. Speckled with rivets, spiny with gun muzzles, a steel-plated car with a sword-wielding angel on the door sits beneath a street lamp. Two policemen are changing a front tire; with their efficient gestures and green body-armor, they seem like surgeons performing some surrealistic and unfathomable operation.

The earth is cooling. Insect jazz drifts toward you from the Bonita Tideway. At last you hear the breakers, the vast Atlantic hurling itself against the continent, and you feel better. You hurry to the 44th Street Pier, so somber under the fogbound moon, and, stripping off your stolen shirt, sprint to the end of the dock and dive in. Ah, this is truly your old planet, its vast and reliable sea, closing over you like a cold quilt, scrubbing away the Tylers’ cranberry bog.

From habit, you inhale. Instantly your body convulses, offended by the briny poison you’ve offered it instead of air. So: Wyvern has truly mortalized you. Good or bad? Coughing and gagging, you struggle to the surface and scramble clumsily onto the dock. You lie on the wet planks, panting. Divinity gone, not enough left to summon a rain shower or cure a wart. Good or bad, good or bad? You pull on your shirt, rub yourself warm—studded with goose bumps, your skin feels like a raspberry—and head south along the beach. Am I ready for it? you wonder. Ready for a life without gills, no holy dove fluttering in my chest, no godhead throbbing in my bones? Am I ready for sheer flesh?

Streamers of fog encircled the moonlit shaft of Angel’s Eye. Pop’s lighthouse was like a redwood tree, Julie decided: rotund, eternal. An ironwork footbridge now coupled the mainland to the island she’d cleaved into being before her trip to hell. An Aunt Georgina project, no doubt—if you must erect a bridge, use iron, do it right. She scrambled up the rocks and, crossing the lawn, studied the windows for signs of life, but every room was as dark and dead as Billy Milk’s right eye.

Moonlight beat soundlessly against the front door, revealing the comforting grain, the familiar knotholes. Such a regular feature of her life, this door, as rhythmic as the slash separating measures of music. You came home from school and there it was, the door. You returned from a date—the door. She pushed it open.

Angel’s Eye had been gutted like a fish. Rugs, furniture, lamps—all gone. Nothing remained of the five thousand books that had ballasted her father’s life, nothing save a single volume lying near the hearth where Spinoza the cat had once deposited a dead crab. She approached, fixing on the title. Something about eternity.

A beam of sharp white light shot from the kitchen, tearing into Julie’s astonished eyes and nearly knocking her down. “Stop,” slurred a male voice. “Stop right there.” He sounded drunk. Shock and indignation crackled through Julie. How dare anyone tell her to stop—this was her father’s house. She advanced resolutely, snatching up the book. Is Your Spiritual Passport Stamped “Eternity”? by the Reverend Billy Milk, Grandpastor, New Jerusalem Church of Saint John’s Vision.

The first bullet caught the baggy elbow of Julie’s scarecrow shirt, drilling a nickel-sized hole.

She howled. She jumped. She stumbled backward and lurched into the laundry room. Her cheek felt like a second mouth in her face, chattering and cursing, spitting out blood. Her flesh quivered with outrage. This was invasion, it was rape, it was Wyvern’s malevolent paw reaching into her soul.

Crib, mobile, washer, drying rack, shattered bell jar—all her primal visions, the jumbled pieces of her advent. The crib gave her the height she needed, putting the window in reach. She climbed onto the sill, wriggled through, and dropped into a clump of eel grass. Bullets. Good Christ—bullets. Holding her slashed cheek, she charged over the iron bridge onto Ocean Drive West, her dazed mind longing for that time when she could have hurled her enemies into the bay with a flick of her wrist and slapped their bullets out of the air like fireflies.

Lurching onto Sea Spray Road, she stopped dead and, like Orpheus taking his fateful glance, looked behind her. No one—no carapaced soldiers or Revelationist crazies, no Nick Shiner vigilantes. The streets were silent. The surf purred. Moving forward, she soothed herself with Phoebe’s favorite song.

“On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, we will walk in a dream. On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and cream…”

At the Sandy Drive intersection an upright sarcophagus loomed, a sparkling glass cylinder labeled NEW JERUSALEM TELEPHONE SYSTEM. As Julie approached, the tube split open like a breakfast egg and a cloying female voice spilled into her ear. “Enter, please.”

“I want my friends! I don’t want to be shot at! I want Phoebe and Bix and Aunt Georgina!”

The future, 2012. Forget wires, mouthpieces, headphones; simply talk. “I don’t have a calling card number.”

The voice had no Phoebe Sparks in its data bank. No Georgina Sparks, no Bix Constantine. Julie inquired after herself. Nothing. Numb with frustration, she asked about Melanie Markson, and, miraculously, a Melanie Markson lived in Longport. A pause, then: Melanie’s dignified voice, asserting that of course she’d accept a collect call from Julie Katz.

“Hey, is that really you? You?” Melanie’s normally staid enunciation was joyful, gasping. “I can’t believe it. Sheila, you’ve come back!”

“I’m Julie—forget that Sheila stuff. What the hell’s going on around here? I was just at Angel’s Eye, and they tried to shoot me.”

“To your disciples that place is holy ground, so the hunters use it as bait.”

“I’m definitely one of them, Sheila. You can count on me. I’m only a Revelationist on paper.”

“The bastards stole my house!” Julie stomped her bare foot on the phone-booth floor. Her wounded cheek throbbed. Disciples? Holy ground? “I have to find Phoebe,” she insisted, staring into the blackness. Pieces of fog hung in the night air like cataracts on an aging eye. “Phoebe needs me.”

“Stay with me? I’d be honored. Have you eaten? I’ll broil you a steak. Where are you?”

“I’ll pick you up. Curfew’s not for another hour. Oh, Sheila, there’s so much you can do for us, there’s so amazingly much you can do.”

Portly as ever, Melanie had through astute applications of makeup wholly defeated the last fifteen years. Her rotund features were youthful and vivid. “So here I am,” she gushed, nervously ensnaring her fingers in her brightly dyed, pumpkin-colored hair, “talking to Sheila in my own living room.” Julie could remember when Melanie used to call the cosmetics industry a boot stamping on women’s faces everywhere. “Incredible,” said Melanie. “Just incredible.”

Smiling wearily, her stomach burbling with porterhouse steak, Julie stretched across the corpulent velvet couch. Melanie’s BMW had been classy enough, but her Longport condominium was truly spectacular, a twelve-room extravaganza reminiscent of Julie’s mansion below. “Looks like the Disney people are paying you pretty well.”

“Not the Disney people,” Melanie answered, face reddening under her makeup. “The Revelationists.” She rose from her imported Sears and Roebuck ottoman and, gliding toward a wall of books, took down a stack of oblong volumes. “Sure, this isn’t the stuff I want to be writing, but who can resist a thousand mammons for a week’s work?”

Julie wrapped herself tighter in Melanie’s white terrycloth bathrobe. The topmost book, Ralph and Amy Get Baptized, showed two adolescents immersed to their shoulders in a clear shimmering river. Underneath lay Ralph and Amy Visit Heaven. Julie flipped back the cover—the title characters scampering toward a mountainous, multiturreted city—and turned to page one.

Imagine a meadow with grasses of silk,

Imagine a river with waters of milk,

Imagine a rainbow as big as the skies,

Imagine a city where nobody dies…

“Most every kid in the country owns a set,” Melanie explained. “Rather hefty royalties, I’ll admit. Hey, listen, I’ll chuck the whole career if you want. Just say the word. Yours is the church for me, Sheila—the only one.” Contemptuously she squeezed the crucified lamb on her necklace. Her jowly face twitched with anxiety. “Okay, okay, maybe I’m not as devout as some, maybe I haven’t been hearing your voice, maybe I let those Revelationist idiots baptize me and convince me not to sleep with women and everything, but believe me, I’m with you all the way.”

“Church?” Julie tugged the gauze bandage on her cheek. “I’ve got a whole church?”

“Honestly, I’m an Uncertaintist down to my toes. Sometimes I drive clear to Camden just to hear Father Paradox. Oh, yes.”

Julie fixed on the dust jacket of My First Book About Eternal Damnation: a Satanic hare leering at a frightened bunny. “Melanie, I’m confused. Right before leaving, I drove the Revelationists into the sea. And now they’re—”

“You certainly did, Sheila, and they stayed away for months. Months. When they came back, they were a much subtler bunch—didn’t burn anything, not one building. Eventually, of course, Milk got himself elected mayor, then—”

Melanie grinned sheepishly, as if embarrassed by history’s unlikely turns. “Within a year, just about every apocalyptist east of the Mississippi was living here. It became a wholly Revelationist state—the secession was something of a formality. For a while there was talk of an invasion from across the Delaware, but after Vietnam and Nicaragua I guess the Pentagon was pretty sick of ambiguous little wars. Fact is, the U.S. State Department likes the idea of a right-wing terrorist theocracy along America’s eastern border. Keeps New York in line—they wish they’d thought of it themselves.” Melanie acquired an uncanny expression, a kind of diffident Machiavellianism, the mien of a shy country parson accepting an invitation to rule the world. “Hey, I want to suggest something. Know what tomorrow is? It’s the Sabbath—not the Jewish Sabbath, Milk’s—it’s the Sabbath, and I suggest we go to church. Your church.”

Julie wrapped her palms around her coffee mug. A wonderful little stove, but the warmth failed to reach her heart. She had a church. It was like hearing: you have cancer. And yet, and yet…she must go. It was all a mistake, she’d tell these Uncertaintists. I was tricked. Cut this heresy crap and get yourselves baptized.

“Your church needs you.” Melanie gritted her teeth and smiled. “Nobody knows who’ll be caught next.”

“I’ll go with you tomorrow, Melanie, happy to, but I can’t stop these heretic hunters. I gave up my divinity.”

“True, Melanie. No more powers.” Good or bad? “It was the only way I could get home.”

“I see,” said Melanie icily. “Fine. But once you realize what’s been going on around here, how trapped we are…”

“Your powers will come back. I know they will. Try, Sheila. You have to try.”

The traffic in Margate and Ventnor was lethargic and expensive, wave after wave of Revelationist clergy heading for work in their imported Cadillacs, Mercedes, and Lincolns. Slowly Melanie drove Julie past New Jerusalem’s gem-studded walls; past pearly gates where ten years earlier had stood the Golden Nugget and the Tropicana; past a gleaming monorail train gliding soundlessly over the ramparts, hugging the groove like a caterpillar moving along a twig. They headed west. A thirty-story building labeled ROOMS AT THE INN loomed above the salt marsh. At the entrance to the New Jerusalem Expressway, churchgoers swarmed around a mammoth cathedral that looked like a spaceship designed to ferry Renaissance princes to Alpha Centauri. A mile down the highway, nestled between two vast oil refineries, a public garden called GETHSEMANE PARK glowed under the rising sun, waiting to receive Sunday strollers.

The columns stretched for miles, an army of grim reapers dangling from power lines, telephone poles, lampposts, cattle fences, and billboards, lining both sides of the expressway like defoliated trees—skeleton after skeleton, grinning skull after grinning skull, but each bone blackened, soot-painted, as if the world had become its own photographic negative.

Crows perched on craniums and shoulder blades, pecking out marrow. Around each fleshless neck, a wooden plaque swayed like a price tag.

“Alive. In the Circus.” Melanie’s tone hovered between bitterness and resignation. “Always douse the fire before it reaches the bones,” she lectured. “Otherwise you end up with a lot of ashes, and the message gets lost.”

Julie’s heart felt uprooted, a wild muscle caroming around inside her chest. “Do Americans know about this? Does their government know? The United Nations? Somebody’s got to intervene.”

“They know,” said Melanie, nodding. “But there won’t be any interventions, Sheila, not while Trenton’s such a bulwark against socialism.”

The skeletons glided by like the resurrected dead rushing toward their Judgment Day appointments with God. “Are they all my”—the word stuck in Julie’s throat like a sliver of bone—“disciples?”

“About a third. The rest are murderers, homosexuals, zotz dealers, Jews, Catholics, and so on. Only Uncertaintists go to the stake willingly, though.”

As Melanie eased into the slow lane, the skeletons’ marathon became a more stately procession, and Julie could read the plaques. Below each victim’s name—Donald Torr, Mary Benedict, James Ryan, Linda Rabinovich, a thousand names, two thousand—a single word explained his presence. Heresy, Heresy, Adultery, Blasphemy—the convictions fused into a terse poem—Heresy, Perversion, Theft, Murder, Socialism, Coveting, Heresy, Heresy, Sodomy, False Witness, Heresy, Adultery, Zotz Dealing, Blasphemy, Heresy…

At the Hammonton exit, Melanie pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. “Something you should see…”

“Hey, things are really over the edge these days,” Julie protested. “I get it. Entirely demented. If I were still a deity, I’d put Milk out of business. I don’t need—”

Squeezing her burned palm, pouring her outrage into the gummy tissue, Julie followed Melanie to a quartet of skeletons chained to an old Trump Castle billboard. Armored in green, a chubby police corporal approached, moving past the ranks of sinners like a wolf on the prowl, crows scattering before him.

“He wants to make sure we aren’t stealing relics,” Melanie muttered. “Your followers do that sometimes.”

“Us? We’re just two old-fashioned gals on their way to a Revelationist service.”

Thanks to Melanie, they looked the part. Melanie sported a dress suggesting an immense doily, Julie a maroon silk blouse and a white dirndl skirt splashed with yellow; silver lambs hung from their necks, and they both wore what Melanie called optimal makeup: enough to suggest they valued their femininity, not so much to suggest they enjoyed it.

Pointing his assault rifle downward in a conscious gesture of hospitality, the corporal greeted them in a slow, sandpaper voice. “Morning, ladies.” He swept his arm across the black forest. “When Jesus comes, it’ll be just like this, only a million times greater. Armageddon. Amazing.”

Julie glanced at the nearest skeleton: a broad feminine pelvis, the gnawed bones sewn together with piano wire.

“Let’s go, honey.” Melanie poked Julie’s shoulder as if operating a telegraph key. “We’ll miss the sermon.”

A hole formed in the pit of Julie’s stomach, a tunnel plunging straight to hell.

Bored, the corporal drifted out of hearing range, leaving Julie free to weep and bleed and die.

Aunt Georgina’s plaque proclaimed two convictions. Perversion: no surprise. Heresy: why? Oh, God, oh, no, Georgina, no, no. Julie ran her finger along a blackened rib, revealing the whiteness beneath. Did you go out cursing them, old aunt? Did you spit in their faces? I know you did.

“I always liked her,” said Melanie. “She was a real good mother to Phoebe.”

“I’m sorry.” Melanie glanced toward the retreating corporal. “We need you. You can see that now, right?”

She tried reconstructing her honorary aunt atop the bones—the sprightly hands, narrow laughing face, quick spidery walk. But a skeleton was a house, not a home; whatever relationship this matrix bore to the vanished events called Georgina, it was too obscure to matter.

Melanie shrugged. “Didn’t see her in the Circus that day. She’d probably left Jersey years before.”

“They kept asking her to convert, and she kept saying she already had a religion—she said she worshiped the Spirit of Absolute Being. Once they even brought her to the sacred canal to try baptizing her. You know what she did?”

“She peed in it. Georgina died well, Sheila. She didn’t beg for mercy till the flames came.”

The faith and funding by which Atlantic City had been upgraded to New Jerusalem had not yet reached Camden, which still retained the blasted, bombed-out look Julie remembered from routinely crossing its southern tip on her way to college. As they approached the Walt Whitman Bridge, she looked toward America. Brick walls, watchtowers, and high spirals of barbed wire flourished along the Jersey side of the Delaware, a metallic jungle, thick and bristling like the seedy Eden that Wyvern was cultivating below.

Declining the bridge, they took the Mickle Boulevard exit and looped east into the city’s bleak, rubbled heart. Broken glass paved the streets. Dandelions sprouted everywhere, nature’s shock troops, invading the empty lots, fracturing the sidewalks. Melanie pulled over, aligning her BMW between two parking meters with cracked visors and scoliotic shafts.

“Don’t tell them who I am.” Julie grabbed Melanie’s lacy sleeve as they walked to the Front Street intersection. “I’ll reveal myself when I’m ready.” They stopped before an ancient saloon, the Irish Tavern, as tightly sealed as a crypt, with boarded-up windows and a cluster of padlocks on the door. Cold Beer to Go, said a shattered neon sign. Melanie opened the adjacent wooden gate and started into the trash-infested alley. “Promise you won’t tell,” Julie insisted.

“Promise,” Melanie mumbled. She pounded on the side door, a riveted metal slab, and called “Moon rising” in a high, urgent whisper.

Nervous eyes flickered in the diamond-shaped window, and seconds later the door opened to reveal a young woman in a billowy white dress hung with ribbons and frills. She was remarkably thin, a kind of inverse fertility doll, a totem fashioned to foster population control. “Moon rising.”

Melanie tossed Julie an anxious glance. “Moon rising,” Julie responded, stepping cautiously forward.

The thin woman led them through the murky saloon, its air stale, its furniture sheeted like corpses waiting to be autopsied. They descended the basement stairs, then the subbasement stairs, eventually landing in a cavernous room, a major intersection of Camden’s sewer system, its curving brick walls crisscrossed by ducts and cables, a network that Julie imagined shunting away the city’s undercurrents—its septic blood and unclean thoughts. A swift, malodorous creek gurgled across the floor, spanned by wooden planks on which the Uncertaintists had erected a half-dozen pews, several random chairs, and a lectern plus accompanying altar. Melanie slipped into an unoccupied pew near the back, Julie right behind. Brass candlesticks shaped like lighthouses paraded along the altar, capped by squat white candles. Behind the lectern, a banner proclaimed Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation, ΔχΔρ≥h/4πς. Two outsized paperback books rose from the rack before Julie, their white covers emblazoned with computer-generated Old English script. Passing over the Hymnal, Julie opened a Word of Sheila. Each page reproduced a “Heaven Help You” column. Her eye caught one of the few replies Aunt Georgina had liked—Sheila giving tax advice to a coven of witches in Palo Alto.

The skinny Uncertaintist who’d greeted them glided toward the altar and, turning, addressed the heretics. “Number thirty-one.” The congregation, a hundred spiffily dressed men and women, lurched forward like bus passengers reacting to a sudden stop, snatching up their hymnals.

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

She came to place uncertainty

And science on our shelf.

She taught us to doubt everything

And seek her sacred self.

While every truth is putative

And every faith a lie,

We know she’ll let us praise her name

And love her till we die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 13
♦	♦	♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bix blinked spasmodically. He reached under his bathrobe and scratched his doughy chest, right beneath the lighthouse. “I love Sheila of the Moon,” he said at last.

The crowd grumbled indignantly, yet to Julie his conviction seemed wonderfully tentative, his devotion to Sheila gloriously incomplete.

Bix seemed to think it over. “I shall receive the Kingdom of Impermanence,” he said hesitantly.

Nick Shiner plucked a fat chunk of brick from the ground. Inspired, his covigilantes bent down and, like peasants harvesting potatoes, equipped themselves—bricks, rocks, soda bottles, sections of lead pipe, bits of cinder block. To Julie the moment seemed arcane, forbidden. You saw such incidents in the movies, read about them in history books—you were never actually there for one.

“Tell us you accept the truth,” demanded Nick Shiner, massaging his brick as if making a snowball.

Julie tightened her grip on the cutters. This murder would be worse than most, there being so much of him, all that superfluous flesh to hew away, that extra span of skull to shatter.

Legs powered by instinct, resolve flowing from she-knew-not-where, Julie marched to the pink wall. What was courage? Doing what comes unnaturally, Aunt Georgina used to say.

Reaching Bix’s side, she kissed him. Smack, right on the lips, like those watermelon kisses Phoebe used to give her.

His muzzy eyes fixed on her. His mind seemed locked in ice, a glacier-sealed mammoth, but now a warmer epoch was coming, her Miocene lips. She kissed him again. How could she love this oversized nose, these dual chins, these sixty extra pounds? She did.

Julie’s heart hurled itself against her sternum: get out, they’ll kill you, run.

“I gave you a ride last week,” said Nick Shiner. “Come take a brick, lady. There’s plenty of bricks.”

Another kiss. Yes, this was surely the cure; her Miocene lips would suck the fog from his brain.

“We don’t kiss these people, lady,” said Nick Shiner. “Didn’t they beat you up? Where does kissing figure in?”

Get out? Run? No, she was free now, no more infinite potential weighing her down. She faced Nick Shiner and, stooping, snatched up a wad of pebbles embedded in cement. The disproportion was at once terrible and comic. On one side: a Camden mob brimming with bricks, stones, glass, and metal. On the other: Julie Katz armed with nothing but her brother’s best line. She debated which source to use. The King James? Revised Standard? New International? Douay? She settled on the version Max Von Sydow had spoken in one of Georgina’s favorite movies, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

“‘Let him among you who is without sin’”—Julie held the concrete glob at arm’s length, proffering it—“‘cast the first stone.’”

Julie raised her voice. “‘Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone.’”

He scowled. Julie could almost hear the sputters of rusty neurons firing in his brain. She imagined a severely retarded adolescent, a boy wholly ignorant of the sexual act, who is one day shown Playboy. A response occurs, a fully realized hard-on. So it was with Shiner, a response, an ethical erection. She’d tapped something basic here.

Shiner took a backward step. A small one, nothing to depend on for long, but still a backward step. “That’s hardly the point, lady,” he said resentfully. “The point is—”

“He called you Sheila!” Nick Shiner shouted accusingly. “He called you Sheila of the Moon!”

Together they hobbled across the lot, Bix moaning as the sharp trash cut through his moccasins. Even before Julie and Bix reached Front Street, Shiner’s gang was on the move, breathing down their necks as they entered the Irish Tavern and rushed into the sewers.

Like Jesus’ good line, the maze of tunnels bought them a reprieve. Vigilante footfalls echoed everywhere, but no bricks arrived, no bottles or cinder blocks. Leading now, Bix selected the route most likely to bring them to the river. Heat, moisture, and a primal stench fell upon Julie’s senses; heat, moisture, stench, and…a glow? A glow, a comforting radiance, beckoning.

Their entwined fingers tightened. Like an expanding iris, the glow grew from pinprick to hole to gateway of light.

“Will you make it disappear?” Bix asked as they reached a plug of barbed wire the size of a forsythia bush.

“No powers, Bix. I meant it.” Julie pulled out the cutters. “I use these instead.”

She scissored madly. The barbs tore her Eurocut slacks, snagged her cowhide jacket, bit her thighs. She felt like a baby performing its own cesarean section, knifing its way into the world. The river loomed up. Swarming with gulls, a garbage scow rumbled south toward the ocean. Julie stretched into the daylight and surveyed the drop—ten feet, no more than twelve. A Philadelphia police cruiser glided noiselessly under the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

“We’ve got to go in there!” Julie pointed to the languid currents, dark and bubbly like coagulated Pepsi.

A brick spiraled past Julie’s brow. She turned. Raising their pitching arms, the vigilantes released a volley. Rocks ricocheted off the cylindrical walls. A half-full ketchup bottle sailed over the severed wires, exploding at Bix’s feet like a blood bomb.

They embraced as they fell, holding fast to each other even as they smashed into the river. The Delaware snapped shut. Down, down they plunged, a baptism of sludge, the water growing ever colder, denser, fouler. Oh, glorious cesspool, she thought, wellspring of avant-garde diseases, laboratory for state-of-the-art carcinogens, surely no vigilantes would follow.

The scow cruised toward them, its entourage of gulls hovering and screeching, pecking at the cargo like dilettante vultures. “There!” Julie sputtered. Whichever force had sent the scow, God or luck or Heisenbergian uncertainty, had thought of everything, including the mooring line trailing from the stern. “Grab on!”

A minute of frenzied splashing brought the rope in reach. Bix went first, scaling the hull with a fevered and wholly uncharacteristic dexterity. Together they flopped over the transom and tumbled into the blessed mush.

“Look, honey.” Spitting out the Delaware, Julie pulled Melanie’s wallet from her pocket. Burning nails lay imbedded in her kneecap. “Six hundred bucks.” She slipped out a hundred-dollar bill, saturated but functional. “We won’t starve.”

“My favorite.” They crept toward each other, pushing through heaped refuse and thick walls of fetor. Meeting, they hugged passionately, bobbing up and down on a beach of coffee grounds. “Tomorrow we’ll do the zoo.”

“My parents were married,” said Bix. “I truly believe it made life less horrible for them.”

She let herself relax, enjoying the pungent, vital moment, the sultry garbage, growling river, outraged gulls, domestic fantasies—a baby flashed through her mind, lolling groggily against her chest, milk leaking from its rosebud mouth—and above all the throb of the scow as it bore them toward the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and freedom.

The Reverend Billy Milk—mayor of New Jerusalem, grandpastor of the Revelationist Church, executive producer of the Circus of Joy, and chairman of the New Jersey Inquisition—shuffled morosely onto the west balcony of the Holy Palace and surveyed the city below. In his good eye the sun blazed hotly, ricocheting off the shining walls and soaring towers, but as usual the truth lay in his phantom eye, by which account a satanic frost descended, sealing the twelve gates, freezing the sacred river, and killing the Tree of Life.

Disgrace, rasped the ocean. Ignominy, taunted the wind. Gas lines, bread lines, coal lines, powdered milk lines, and then, when you finally got to the head of a line, inflation. In Billy Milk’s republic it took a sack of currency to buy a sack of flour. Disgrace, ignominy. The mining of Raritan Bay and the patrolling of the Hudson River were costing the Trenton junta eighty-five thousand mammons a day, a bill the American Congress was no longer willing to foot. Disgrace, ignominy, inflation, debt, and, worst of all, no Second Coming. Yes, the Circus was keeping people’s minds off the shortages, but what did that matter when its purpose remained unrealized? Billy bit his inner cheeks, bringing the pain he deserved. Blood washed over his teeth. How many more sinners must the Circus process before the Parousia? How many more must the flames punish, the bullets chastise, the arrows devour, the swords consume?

Then there was his son. Archshepherd Timothy: devout, bright-eyed, God-fearing—and something else, something difficult to name. Zeal was a fine impulse, a godly emotion, but…“Our Savior won’t return unless his people have known suffering,” Timothy insisted whenever he snuffed a candle with his palm. “An archshepherd cannot be a stranger to penance,” he would explain as he shoved hat pins under his fingernails or loaded his boots with broken glass.

A tear rolled down Billy’s gullied face. God takes your wife and gives you a son. You do your best—the check to the diaper service every second Friday, endless hours in the supermarket buying Similac and Gerber Strained Sweet Potatoes and calibrated spoons for shunting Septra down his throat in hopes of knocking out his latest ear infection, a thousand trips to playgrounds and day-care centers and strange houses where Timothy is playing with some boy whose name you can’t remember. You single-handedly organize his fourth birthday party. Half the children are blind like Timothy; they are wizards at pinning the tail on the donkey. You organize his fifth birthday party: Come As Your Favorite Bible Character. His sixth, seventh, eighth, nearly a dozen birthday parties. You do all this, and your son’s closet ends up filled with whips, dangling into the darkness like a normal man’s belts and ties. Could such be the proper destiny for a child to whom the angels had given eyes?

Billy’s gaze drifted to the Tomás de Torquemada Memorial Arena, a great bowl-shaped amphitheater jammed with tier upon tier of enthralled spectators. Bestriding the western gate was a fifty-foot marble statue of Saint John the Divine receiving the Revelation, his left hand gripping a quill pen, his right holding aloft a scroll in which Billy’s brilliant engineer—the grandson of the man who did Giants Stadium—had embedded a billboard-sized television monitor. A matinee was in progress. On the monitor, a man stood bound to a wooden post: a papist, hence a papist’s chastisement, the one inflicted on Saint Sebastian. A dozen men in diamond-patterned harlequin tights loaded their crossbows.

People were wrong about inquisitions, Billy felt. Look at the word: an inquisition was merely a questioning process. The court’s purpose was leading lambs to the fold, not the slaughter; torture and the Circus were persuasions of last resort. Even the Spanish autos-da-fé, most debatable of Billy’s inspirations, had probably burned fewer than three thousand, a tittle compared with the output of the same era’s secular courts.

Turning from the Circus, Billy went to his desk and opened the top file. His good eye raced past the plea (not guilty) and the verdict (guilty), settling on the evidence. “The defendant, one ‘Brother Zeta,’ was apprehended while conducting Uncertaintist services in an abandoned Hoboken subway,” Harry Phelps, former Cape May orthodontist and current inquisitor general, had written.

Billy took up his fountain pen. The hand that now countersigned the execution order was white and withered, its veins like strands of blue twine. So many years stored in that hand, and what, really, had it accomplished? A believers’ republic, a New Jerusalem—good enough. But God had made Billy a father, and he’d failed. God had appointed him gatekeeper for Jesus, and he’d failed.

Billy’s commandant entered on the run, gasping, his smile testifying to good news. A fine specimen of believer, Peter Scortia, the kind of soldier who could have kept the Holy Land from infidel hands for a millennium. Hard to imagine he’d once managed Scortia’s Jiffy Dry Cleaning in Teaneck.

Good news. Or possibly even…the best news, the very Second Coming? More likely the news concerned the stranger at Peter’s side, a cherubic man dressed in brown corduroys and a blue blazer.

“He works for us,” Peter explained. “Carries sinners out of the city. His name’s Nick.”

“Nick Shiner,” said the cherub. “It’s an honor, Reverend. Being here, I mean. Not the hauling.”

Billy kept his monocular gaze locked on Peter. If you looked directly at people of Nick Shiner’s station, they often ended up pressing their advantage, telling you their opinions about taxes and bread lines. “Is Mr. Shiner unhappy with his situation?”

“I wouldn’t mind a couple of free passes on occasion,” said the truck driver.

“I’m sure it’s her,” said Nick Shiner. “I remember how she looked from that picture they always ran with her advice. She’s gotten older, but it’s her.”

“What is Mr. Shiner talking about?” Billy focused on the Distinguished Service Cross that Peter had received for flushing out a family of sodomites in East Orange.

Spontaneously Billy unleashed a dual stare—real eye, phantom eye—upon his visitor. “Her?”

“She was kissing this fat man, and he pointed to her and shouted, ‘Sheila of the Moon!’ Then the two of them escaped to Philadelphia in a garbage scow.”

Fire. Billy saw fire. He rubbed his eyepatch. Not the Circus’s flames, not the inferno below, but a holy conflagration raging within his own skull, a psychic burning bush, its hot roots probing the soft meat of his brain. In the center: a face, her face, Sheila of the Moon, abomination-666; her gross and voluptuous limbs emerged, her breasts with eyeballs for nipples. All was clear now. The Antichrist ruled. Maybe she’d quit the earth as her followers believed, but today she was back, preventing the Parousia, blocking Jesus’ return.

“Go to our Midnight Moon files,” said Billy as he guided Peter Scortia to the balcony. Below: Act Three. The stake. “Clip her photo, brother. Before your brigade slips across the Delaware, make sure each man knows her face as well as he knows the Lord’s Prayer.”

As the sinners smoldered on their stakes, applause swept through the arena, thousands of hands waving like summer wheat. An intense gladness swelled the grandpastor’s heart. Sheila was in Philadelphia now, but soon she’d be back in Jersey—soon she’d be right here. Billy’s inner vision showed all, the flames peeling away her flesh, revealing the worms beneath, and now the worms disintegrated, yielding to the thousand locusts clustered on her bones, beyond which, as the fire continued to undress her, he saw wasps, scorpions, and the foul, stinking ordure at her core.

“Give that man Shiner a lifetime pass to the Circus,” Billy instructed his commandant.

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 14
♦	♦	♦

Phoebe Sparks slammed her plastic Pluto the Dog cup onto the Formica tabletop and told the bartender to fill it up again. Reverse God and you got Dog, she thought; you got Pluto, Lord of the Underworld. What a surreal place hell must be if indeed ruled by a cartoon dog who was once the pet of a mouse.

For a six-foot-tall gorilla with garter snakes slithering from his eyes, the bartender operated most efficiently, filling half of Phoebe’s cup with Bacardi rum, half with Diet Coke, using his hairy thumb as a swizzle stick. She tilted Pluto toward her lips and swallowed. Ah, blessed ichor, blood of the worst gods. As always, the stuff did wonders. Her kitchen walls stopped moving like windblown sheets on a clothesline. The gorilla, cunning shapeshifter, changed back into her refrigerator. The tombstones commemorating her abortions became what they were, red and green boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

Self-destruction had its etiquette. Emily Postmortem. No, forget it, she decided. What, exactly, could her suicide note say? “To Whom It May Concern: My life has never concerned anyone, therefore you aren’t even reading this. My mother’s disappeared. My father will never find me. Everybody in New York City hated me, so I came here, where everybody hates me too.”

The pistol had turned up during a routine frisking. First rule of the hooker biz: never admit a customer until you’ve disarmed him. Take away his snubnose, blackjack, stiletto, hand grenade. Leonard, he’d called himself, barely seventeen. He had a skin disease. While Leonard sat on the bed drinking her rum, Phoebe slipped the Smith & Wesson into her panty-hose drawer. Maybe it was the rum, maybe the lack of proximity to his revolver, but the poor leper couldn’t get it hard. He hurried off in a fog of shame laced with Bacardi, leaving behind the Smith & Wesson and a thousand discs of dried flesh, pennies from hell.

Lepers. Christ. Still, freelancing was better than franchising. Over the phone, Phoebe could usually screen legitimate customers from pimps, though occasionally one snuck past her guard, in which case she got out her Deauville Hotel dynamite. One glance at Phoebe holding a match in her hand and a nitroglycerin stick between her teeth—for the sake of effect, she’d replaced the electric detonators with gunpowder fuses—and the pimp knew here was a woman to avoid, a woman who, when you least expected it, might nuke your cock.

She fixed herself another diet rum and, taking a swallow, patted her stuffed friend, H. Rap Brown Bear. She ate a Do-si-do. Finished the rum. Scratched her left temple with the Smith & Wesson. Such an exquisite gun, she thought. Its muzzle smelled like Robbie the Robot’s asshole.

Act, girl. Do it. Die. She coiled her tingling finger around the trigger. Each chamber was full, Atlantic City Roulette. Her hand vibrated as if she were operating a chain saw. Slowly she flexed her finger, tighter, still tighter: she might leave a note behind after all, written on the wall in blood and rubbery loops of brain.

Missed? Missed? How could anyone miss? The blood felt thick and warm, like a glob of egg fresh from a hen’s toasty womb. No time to waste. This time the muzzle would go elsewhere, past the lips and across the teeth. For blowjobs, Phoebe always insisted on a condom, but this case was exceptional.

Finger on trigger. Gun in mouth, the oily metal teasing her taste buds. Flexing…

Ah, the wondrous, beyond-the-grave powers of Alexander Graham Bell. The phone could interrupt intimate conversations, screws, shits, suicides, anything. Phoebe lifted the receiver. “We’re out of business. Try humping your hand.”

“I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m shooting myself. If that fails, there’s always the dynamite.”

“Katz?” Phoebe wrapped the phone cord around her arm like a tourniquet. “Julie Katz?”

“Listen, I’m sending Bix over. We’re married. Stay on the line. You can live with us. Let’s sing a song, Phoebe. ‘On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, we will walk in a dream.’ Stay on the line, honey. Don’t do anything.”

Phoebe pumped two slugs into the phone, sending a spray of plastic and metal against the refrigerator, and lovingly licked the hot smoking muzzle.

522 South 43rd Street. A converted row house, one apartment per floor. On the mailboxes, faded illegible pencil scrawls adorned semidetached labels, as if the tenants had no ultimate interest in receiving their mail. No. 3—P. Sparks. Julie grabbed the knob, a bulb of engraved brass worn smooth by a century of flesh. Why had the idiot hung up? Just once in her life, couldn’t Phoebe do what she was told? The door opened. Julie charged up the steps, swerving past the second-floor banister, Bix puffing behind her.

But for Julie’s flesh, but for her bladder, she would never have discovered the fateful phone number. The search for Phoebe, a frantic three-day marathon conducted out of a Kensington hotel, had taken them through every human catalogue in the Delaware Valley, through police files, coroner’s reports, taxpayer lists, welfare rolls. They placed an ad in the Philadelphia Daily News: Phoebe, Get in Touch—Queen Zenobia, Box 356. Then, ten minutes after the Upper Darby Township Justice of the Peace pronounced her Bix’s wife, Julie went to the ladies’ room and saw, scratched in the gray paint, “For Professional Sex, Contact the Green Enchantress, 886-1064. All Genders Welcome.”

Apartment 3 was locked. Julie pounded, no answer. But now came Bix, Father Paradox to the rescue, hurling his two hundred and twenty pounds against the door.

A tornado’s wake: clothes in ragged heaps, newspapers and Bacardi bottles strewn about, a decrepit, unraveling teddy bear surrounded by Tastykake wrappers and boxes of Girl Scout cookies. Beyond, in the sallow kitchen, a figure in a mint bathrobe slouched at the table, crusted blood clinging to her forehead like a snail.

Julie charged. Oh, let me be divine again, Mother, I won’t lose heart, I’ll fix every neuron…

“Hi,” slurred Phoebe, waving a revolver over her head. “You’re gonna pay for that door, fatty.” She gulped down the contents of a plastic Pluto cup.

Alive. A mess, a sunken-eyed drunk, a whore, her hair a nest built by psychotic sparrows. But alive.

Julie reached out. The hug cure. Phoebe hiccupped. Food cascaded from her mouth, the steamy stinking remains of a thousand cakes and cookies, splashing into Julie’s shocked palms, rolling through her startled fingers.

“Wasn’t a nice greeting for my old buddy, was it? Shitty greeting. Remember when we dropped those dead fish on that Fourth of July parade?”

“We’re bringing you home with us.” Gritting her teeth, Julie marched to the kitchen sink, jammed with oily frying pans and scabby dishes. The slime in her hands was heavy and warm. “We’ve got a house on Baring,” she explained, washing.

“You think I want to live with deities and pigs?” sneered Phoebe, stuffing cookies into her mouth. Trefoils, Do-si-dos, Thin Mints, Samoas. “Whatever else they say about me, I supported the Girl Scouts.”

They pulled off her bathrobe and stuck her in the shower, holding her upright like two people trying to erect a Christmas tree. “Get him out of here,” she moaned, flailing at Bix. “He wants to see me naked, he pays.” The water grew pink as it hit her bleeding head. Her thinness frightened Julie; she had a ballet dancer’s chest. “Better not mess with my metabolism, Katz. You mess with my metabolism, I’ll punch you out.”

After stuffing Phoebe in the only clean clothes they could find—black bicycle pants, a man’s Hawaiian shirt—they flagged down a taxi and took her to the detox center at Madison Memorial, where a bony young paramedic named Gary, tall as a basketball center, sonogrammed her liver, pumped her full of vitamins, and locked her up in a ten-by-ten lucite chamber equipped with a closed-circuit television camera.

“She tried to shoot herself,” Julie explained as Gary ushered them into the observation room. On the monitor, Phoebe punched and kicked the air like Saint Anthony beating back temptation.

“That’s often the point when we see them,” said the paramedic with a knowing nod. For all his height, he did not inspire Julie’s confidence. The world was not set up to save its Phoebes.

At last an M.D. appeared, a Dr. Rushforth, a tall, pompous Englishman with enormous hands, strutting into the observation room on a cloud of noblesse oblige.

“Get your friend to stop drinking, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance her liver’ll bounce back,” he prophesied, unfurling the sonogram printout.

Rushforth knotted his sausagelike fingers. “She seeing a psychiatrist? We use Dr. Brophy. And encourage her to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In this town you can find one every day.”

“We’re not a treatment facility, Mrs. Constantine,” said Rushforth. “Call Brophy tomorrow. And get her to A.A.”

Julie winced, recalling Marcus Bass’s opinion that sending an alcoholic to a shrink made about as much sense as sending a heart patient to a poet.

And so Phoebe was on their backs again, the addict as addiction. They carried her out of Madison Memorial and maneuvered her onto the Market Street subway.

“Dear Sheila, I’m a lousy whore!” she screamed over and over above the screeching and clacking of the train. Like Judeans avoiding a leper, the passengers moved as far away as possible. “I’m hungry! I just puked my guts out! Get me some fucking food!”

They took her to the Golden Wok in Chinatown, where, by threatening to rip off all her clothes, by threatening to “make a scene,” she cowed them into buying her a bottle of plum wine. She drank it in ten minutes and, seizing a moo-shu-pork pancake, filled it with the contents of the nearest ash tray.

But already she was stuffing the befouled pancake into her mouth. “Yum,” she said, choking it down. Charred tobacco flecked her lips; her tongue curled around an orphan Marlboro filter. Phoebe the agnostic ash eater, the false penitent, going through the motions of contrition. “Yum, yum,” she said, and promptly passed out.

“I want to bring her home,” said Julie. “I mean, I don’t want to, but—”

Considering the modest rent, their neo-Victorian house in Powelton Village—a bohemian enclave on the west bank of the Schuylkill, a world of brick sidewalks, dozy cats, and walk-in garages jammed with bearded young men welding hunks of squashed metal into art—was astonishingly large. Crumbling, true. Roach-ridden. But certainly a surfeit of space, including a relatively uninfested back parlor. They dumped Phoebe unconscious on the living-room couch and set about preparing for the worst, nailing bed slats over the parlor window, installing a dead bolt, and removing every object with which she might stab or strangle herself—sash cord, table lamp, radiator valve. A war was coming, Julie sensed. They must dig their trenches and gird up their loins.

Julie threaded the key through a length of twine. “I think this is bigger than psychiatry, Bix.” She suspended the key around her neck like a Saint Christopher medallion—like a millstone, an albatross, like Phoebe’s weighty and confounding dementia. “I think this is war.”

Had Julie not actually lived in Andrew Wyvern’s domain, she might have called the subsequent six days hell. Grotesque, impossible, nerve-shattering, but not exactly, not quite hell. “Life imitates soap opera,” she moaned. To enter the back parlor—here, Phoebe, eat some chicken; hey, kid, we have to empty the commode—was to invite a skirmish, Phoebe swooping down on you like a fascist angel, kicking your shins, uprooting your hair. A war. A war, complete with artillery fire, Phoebe’s screams answered with her keepers’ pathetic replies: Phoebe, settle down, Phoebe, get a grip on yourself. Like Eskimos naming the myriad varieties of snow, Julie and Bix catalogued her screams, each unique in pitch and rhythm. There was the scream that signified general despair, the scream that accompanied her pleas for beer and rum, the scream that underscored her demands for her Smith & Wesson. It was like living with a diurnal werewolf, a lycanthrope from the new spinning city in the sky called Space Platform Omega, world of eternal moonlight. They wanted a silver bullet, anything to put Phoebe the werewolf out of her misery, anything to get her out of their lives. They wanted to bash Phoebe’s brains out with a silver-headed cane as Claude Rains had done to Lon Chaney in Roger Worth’s favorite movie, The Wolf Man.

On the seventh day, Julie marched up to Phoebe’s door, tugging on the key. “Phoebe?” The twine pressed against Julie’s throat like a garrote. “Phoebe, you there?”

Hope, Julie concluded. A nibble from God. “I’ll tell you…when you start going to Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“Assholes Anonymous,” Phoebe wailed. “I tried it. Bunch of macho dorks bragging about their binges—forget it. Is Mom all right? Tell me that.”

“Get your act together,” said Julie, “and we’ll talk about your parents.”

Perhaps it was the week of mandatory sobriety she’d already suffered, perhaps the proposed bargain, but ten hours later Phoebe declared that she’d seen the light.

“Will you stay sober for twelve weeks?” Twelve weeks, Julie figured, and Phoebe would be home free. “Can you ride the wagon that long?”

Twelve weeks, and—what? The truth? Both your parents were murdered, Phoebe, too bad, kid? “In twelve weeks I’ll tell you everything.”

A new woman? Ambiguous. Uncertain. On the surface, things looked good. Phoebe returned to 522 South 43rd Street and prospered, supporting herself through a conglomeration of part-time jobs—McDonald’s server, laundromat attendant, grocery bagger. She called Julie every day.

“Sobriety bites the big one, Katz.” Phoebe’s voice was wobbly but clear. “Sobriety sucks raw eggs.”

“My hands shake. There’s a Brillo pad in my mouth. Yeah, I can hold out. Pussycat. Watch me.”

According to Bix, Phoebe’s transformation was a sham, the deal she’d cut with Julie a farce. According to Bix, they were “walking on eggs.” Julie disagreed; Bix didn’t know Phoebe as she did. Bix had never peed off a railroad bridge with Phoebe or collaborated with her on bombarding a Fourth of July parade with dead fish. Julie and Phoebe’s love would conquer all. It would conquer the Courvoisier Napoleon, shoot the Bacardi bat, run the Gordon’s boar to earth; it would defeat Old Grand-Dad, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Johnny Walker…

On Phoebe’s birthday, Julie visited 522 South 43rd bearing a bottle of Welch’s Nonalcoholic Sparkling White Grape Juice and a stout chocolate layer cake. Happy Third Week of Recovery, the compliant clerk at the Village Bakery had squirted onto the icing.

“Know what I really want for my birthday?” asked Phoebe, sipping the virginal champagne. Her face seemed deflated; her eyes looked like rusty ball bearings. “I want to pack up H. Rap Brown Bear and move in with my best friend.”

“We’ve got roaches.” Julie slashed open the cake with one of the stilettos Phoebe had confiscated during her career as a hooker.

“Yeah.” Phoebe devoured Recovery. She was dressing in style these days—a green blouse made of the flashiest new silkoids, a gold earring dangling from her left lobe. “I miss ’em.”

“Bix likes you fine,” said Julie. Bix could not stand Phoebe. Yet he would agree, Julie knew. The man was loosening up. “I’ll take the boards off the window.”

As spring wafted into Powelton Village, Julie came to realize that ministering was both harder and more satisfying than having a ministry. Saving a friend from rum easily eclipsed saving humankind from nostalgia, especially since the former ambition lay within the possible.

Not that this life could hold her forever. True, there were no overt signs of Revelationism in Philadelphia, no hints that anyone hunted heretics on the American side of the Delaware. Ostensibly the founder of Uncertaintism was as safe at 3411 Baring Avenue as anywhere. But a stark fact remained: Milk’s ravenous theocracy was barely seventy miles away, so close that, lying beside her husband at night, Julie imagined she heard the squeal of Ned Shiner’s pickup truck hauling dead sinners down the bone-lined expressway.

Bix was no less her patient than Phoebe. Just as her friend might return to the bottle, so might her husband slip into either his traditional nihilism or more recent religiosity. And yet, he seemed to be healing. “You have to understand,” he explained one evening during a roach hunt in the kitchen. “Your performance on that Space Tower knocked me out. I was completely unprepared—the South Seas native getting the white man’s head cold. Disaster.”

“It’s all behind us now.” Julie removed her shoe, raising it like a hammer.

“Will we ever get this behind us? Haven’t we been touched by some deep cosmic mystery?”

Slap, Julie sent a roach to hell. “Cosmic mysteries don’t interest me much these days.”

“It really helps talking with you, Julie. I think I’m becoming a normal person.”

“We could use the money, sweetheart. We could use the damn medical insurance.”

Ever since the turn of the century, the Philadelphia Public Schools had been short of English teachers, and Bix the former Midnight Moon editor was a shoo-in. The only mandatory credential was American citizenship, a status that everyone caught up in the Jersey secession still technically retained. A week after applying, Bix was deputized to bring “language arts skills” to one hundred and twenty-three eleventh graders at William Perm Senior High School.

He was terrified. The eleventh graders bewildered him. “I never know what they’re thinking,” he told Julie. “There’s too much going on at once. I can’t keep track of it.”

“You are fat. I’m proud of you. You’ve come a long way, Bix. Father Paradox to Mr. Chips.”

Public education in America was not following a rigid curriculum that year, progressivism being on the upswing. As far as Bix could tell, only three standards held for everyone on the William Penn faculty: no blood on the floor, no sexual relations with the students, and leave all window shades half-drawn at the end of the day. It was an era of creativity and change, of innovation and relevance—Bix talked incessantly of something called “the curriculum of concerns”—and when Julie suggested he toss away the syllabus and have the students publish a newspaper instead, a rehabilitated and rationalistic Midnight Moon, his spherical face glowed. A newspaper! Sure-fire. Fabulous. Jack Ianelli would do the sports column. Rosie Gonzales would write the horoscopes.

Julie could barely keep up with the transformation. The man who used to have difficulty loving his own mother had fallen for a bunch of adolescent zotzheads and thugs.

And Phoebe. Talk about idealism, talk about rebirth! Phoebe now believed in everything—in resuscitated rain forests, lesbian pride, saved whales, full bellies, empty missile silos. “I have powers,” she liked to say. “I have powers coming out my ears.” She bought a truck, converting it into a kind of traveling soup kitchen. It consumed her life savings, the full fruit of her years on the streets, but there it was, parked in the driveway of 3411 Baring Avenue—a used United Parcel van, repainted a bright shamrock green. The Green Tureen, Phoebe dubbed her soup kitchen. Love on wheels.

“You should see how these people live,” she told Julie and Bix. “Home is a packing crate, if that. Come with me on Sunday, Katz. You too, Bix. Plywood City.”

“These people sell their blood,” said Phoebe. “They sell their bodies. Will you come?”

“We’ll come,” said Bix gloomily. Always this skepticism, this devout disbelief in Phoebe’s recovery. Walking on eggs, he kept saying.

Plywood City: not a lumberyard, Julie learned that Sunday, but a West Philly shantytown, its splintery suburbs sprawling for half a mile between two sidings near 30th Street Station; it was as if the Penn Central Railroad had erected a theme park, Poverty Land, and this was the first exhibit. Phoebe drove the Green Tureen as far into the yard as she could, parking beside a Chesapeake and Ohio refrigerator car, a traveling abattoir whose hundred slaughtered haunches—Julie imagined them hanging in the car like subway commuters—could have nourished the shantytown for a year. Julie and Bix unloaded both serving carts, outfitting them with charity. Fresh coffee, sugar, milk, oranges, Hostess powdered doughnuts. Most importantly, Phoebe’s homemade soup, its broth packed with diced carrots and robust lumps of chicken.

“What they really want,” said Phoebe, “is for us to hold the broth and lay on the beer.”

“How about you?” asked Julie, uncertain whether Phoebe’s mentioning liquor was good or bad.

Phoebe tugged her gold earring so fiercely Julie expected the lobe to rip. “Where are they?”

Phoebe shrugged and took off, cart rattling along the rocky ballast, soup slopping over the rim of her pot. The old Phoebe would be a handy person to have around now, Julie thought—the crazy, alky Phoebe, the one who would’ve jimmied open the Chesapeake and Ohio refrigerator car and passed out the meat, Santa’s little redistributionist.

Side by side, Julie and Bix started into the town, pushing their cart through the planet’s discards, through the olfactory cacophony of tobacco, cabbage, urine, feces, and beer. Zotz-heads with three-day beards sat on fifty-five-gallon drums, staring into space, brains running on empty. Naked preadolescent boys with muddy feet urinated against the sides of their homes, painting the plywood with curlicues. A portable radio blared Gospel music. By Phoebe’s account, the majority of Plywood City’s inhabitants were refugees of one sort or another, people for whom cold, cruel homelessness was preferable to their colder and crueler domesticities: their abusive husbands, molesting parents, fleabag orphanages, hellish reformatories. The second largest category comprised the winos and zotzheads, forever in need of transportation to Madison Memorial for detox or to the West Philadelphia Free Clinic for general repairs. Then, of course, there were the itinerant mental cases, a manageable group provided they remembered to take the free chlorpromazine that Dr. Daniel Singer, an iconoclastic shrink from Penn, dispensed from the back of his station wagon, Dr. Singer’s soup kitchen for psychotics.

Each in his own way, Julie sensed, the inhabitants of Plywood City hated their benefactors. Charity was not justice. Let Julie, Bix, and Phoebe give out food all day, fine, but come nightfall who had to stay in this cesspool and who got to return to Powelton Village? Nor was their resentment wholly unrequited, for Julie could not exactly say she loved these people, could not even say she liked them. Yet here she was, paying her brother homage: hell below, Plywood City above, morphine below, chicken soup above. Here she was, dipping her ladle into the soup, pouring the soup into plastic cups, passing the cups to a narrow Malaysian woman, a puffy, rheumic-eyed Pakistani man, a raffish Puerto Rican boy…

“Not her style.” Ladle into pot, soup into cup. “She’s been dry seven weeks.” Cup into the mistrustful hands of a crinkled old man with a gray tumbling beard, a rummy Ezekiel. “Our deal’s working.”

“Seven weeks,” Bix echoed, sneering. “I’ve been looking into this business. You don’t make deals with alcoholics, Julie. You maneuver them into rehab programs. Sometimes an alky’ll go through three or four before she gets well.”

“Seven weeks is zilch. It’s borrowed time. The disease will foreclose, always does. I’ve been reading about it.”

“Willpower has nothing to do with it. She’s got to feel things she’s never felt before. She’s got to find something bigger than herself.”

Julie’s bowels tightened, a gastrointestinal Gordian knot, hard, insoluble. “Did I ever tell you what happens after death?”

“Everybody’s damned,” she explained. Cup into a hag’s leathery hands, a stringy-haired creature right out of the Brothers Grimm. “Earth is as good as it gets.”

Julie could practically feel the eggs underfoot. She could almost hear the crunch.

On the morning of July 24, 2012, Julie awoke possessed by a conclusion so sharp and certain it felt like the climax of a dream. Encircling her husband’s bearish body with both arms, she told him the time had come for a new generation.

Down in hell it had been a mere notion, back on the garbage scow a simple whim. But now…“I want a baby.”

“I want a baby happening inside me.” She did. Oh, God of physics, yes. Let her mother procreate planets and black holes; her own ambitions would be sated by a fetus. “You know—one of those protoplasmic blobs that grows up to be an orthodontist or something.”

She untied the drawstring of Bix’s pajamas. “Some of them become English teachers.”

“Language arts.” Julie thought: A blob, a baby, a squalling organic ball chained to her leg, dragging her down. Scary. But Georgina had faced it. Her father, for Christ’s sake, had faced it, all alone in his lighthouse, raising his problem child. “The clock’s ticking, husband. Burn your condoms. Let’s have a kid.”

He had a fine erection, angled like a flagpole. She rolled toward him, all her lushness, her big arms and thick black hair and irresistible thighs. Her throat thickened. A regular guy, the father of her child. She felt like a beautiful planet, and now here was Bix, becoming her axis, south to north, and when she climaxed she indeed experienced the proper Newtonian rotation, a wild swing into her own miraculous flesh.

Almost forty: a perfectly safe age for a pregnancy, but she still resolved to get herself checked out. Her baby must have every advantage, the best preconceptual care. Studying the gynecological listings, she had trouble deciding between a classy-sounding Swede within walking distance and a Jew in Center City. If a girl: Rita. If a boy: Murray, little Murray Constantine-Katz.

Dr. Hyman Lefkowitz’s clinic was the most fecund place Julie had ever seen, its hallways lined with photographs of drooling, toothless infants, its waiting room jammed with back issues of Parenting. Swollen and wobbly, expectant mothers came and went. They all seemed astonishingly beautiful: fecund Madonnas, knocked-up Aphrodites.

The nurse took a dozen sonograms of Julie’s baby-making organs. Phoebe should have come, Julie decided. She imagined her friend extrapolating from this technology. You know what we’ve got here, Katz, we’ve got a whole new kind of smut, we’ve got a pornography of the internal.

“I’ll be frank with you,” said Dr. Lefkowitz as he ushered Julie into his office.

He held up a sonogram. Fear rushed into Julie’s stomach like cold chicken soup.

“Not good?” Uterine cancer—it had to be. A true pornography of the internal.

“They aren’t there.” The doctor’s thick glasses gave him Peter Lorre’s popping eyes. “You don’t have any.”

“You don’t. It’s as if they’d been”—Lefkowitz’s eyes came at her like headlights—“stolen.”

And Julie thought: A bird. A luminous bird, ripped from its perch atop her heart, its beak clamped around an olive branch. An olive branch—or so it had seemed to her blurry vision when Wyvern had ablated her divinity.

Not an olive branch. Never was. Something else. Two moist, pulpy stalks, the fallopian tubes of God’s only daughter. Wyvern…Satan…evil incarnate…deception made flesh.

Julie pleaded, “Can you fix me?” A photograph sat on Lefkowitz’s desk, framed in K mart gold. The doctor. His buxom wife. Three perfect, shining children; boy, girl, baby. She hated them all, the children especially, the baby most especially, so smugly present, so cockily there. “Can you do a transplant?”

“Isn’t this supposed to be the future? Isn’t this 2012? I want a transplant.”

All the way home, the city tormented her. Pregnant women shadowed her like KGB moles. The number 31 bus reviled her with its ads for day-care centers and well-baby clinics. She alighted near the Sundance Nursery School. Toddlers roamed the sandboxes like cruel mocking dwarves; birds chirped everywhere, a million little birdshit factories. Reaching 3411 Baring, she dragged her sterile middle-aged body up the steps and stumbled into the living room. You’ll be getting a full life, that malevolent angel had told her, that creature who held the patent on lies.

Julie ran. No, God, wait, Mother, this is the day I find out I’m infertile, not the day Phoebe falls off the wagon.

Wrong. The window stood open, yet a dense malty cloud hung in the air, as if Phoebe had washed the walls with beer. On the vanity, five empty Budweiser bottles encircled H. Rap Brown Bear. Phoebe lay slumped in her chair, gripping the sixth. She was, as usual, well dressed: a clean white blouse, a madras skirt of the sort popular among the Powelton Village gypsies. A box of kitchen matches, half open, lay on the segment of skirt bridging her thighs.

Julie felt as betrayed as on the day Bix ordered her out of his sewer. “Phoebe, how could you, how could you?”

Phoebe quieted herself with a swallow of Bud. “Dead,” she announced, voice thick and lumpy, eyes small and dull as pearl onions.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Phoebe struck a kitchen match, alternately moaning and giggling. “You think Plywood City doesn’t have any Jersey immigrants? You think they don’t all know what happened to the poor old lesbo who ran the Smile Shop?”

Julie studied the evil bottles. Bud, Bud, Bud, Bud, Bud. “That’s not all. Your father’s dead too.”

“Dead? Dead? You shithead—for this you string me along? This? ‘Wow, Phoebe, guess what, you’re a goddamn orphan’?”

Julie grimaced, making her S-scar bulge. What was driving her, some sadistic urge, some mean-spirited wish to maximize her friend’s pain? No, in the end Phoebe would profit from this news, provided it came embellished with a benign untruth. “Listen, your father wants revenge. Really. ‘Tell Phoebe to get that bastard’—his last words to me.”

Phoebe struck another match. “Milk? Milk? I can’t kill Milk. He’s the fucking poobah grandpastor.” The flame skittered down the stick and snuffed itself against her thumb. She pulled back her skirt, burying the matchbox in the folds.

“I can’t even kill myself. Maybe this time, though.” Phoebe struck a third match, inserting the flame between her dark thighs.

A coarse hiss, a cobra’s gasp—but not from Phoebe’s throat. Lower, where the match was.

And suddenly she saw it. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ in hell. She curled her fingers around the terrible stalk. Of all things, she thought of “Heaven Help You”—how she’d always counseled the despondent that, if they truly saw no other option, they should at least contact the National Hemlock Society and do it right. Hadn’t Phoebe read that one? Certain prescription drugs were quick and efficient. A plastic bag cinched around your neck served well. But never this. Oh, God, never this.

Bix arrived just in time to see Julie yank the stick of dynamite out of her friend’s vagina. Ah, leave it to Phoebe to expand her husband’s horizons—even the Plywood City derelicts couldn’t offer him anything quite so baroque. “No!” he screamed.

She ran to the open window. A quick sky-hook from her old days on the courts and—

Midair, a thunderclap and a blinding blast, lashing against Julie’s outstretched arm, turning the window into a tidal wave of pulverized wood and shattered glass.

She looked at Phoebe. Bix. The teddy bear. The corral of brown bottles. And then, before the nausea, the jetting blood, the unspeakable pain, Julie saw in an instant of brilliant stroboscopic clarity that she no longer had a right hand.

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15
♦	♦	♦

Designed by a pious and literal-minded architect, the new Seraph of Mercy Hospital on City Avenue looked, when viewed from the clouds, like an angel. An oval driveway sat poised above the administration building like a halo. A maternity ward occupied the hospital’s midriff. The two main wards sloped gently away from the central block and, arcing sharply, simultaneously enclosed restful green parks and gave the seraph its wings.

Julie Katz and Phoebe Sparks ended up in opposite wings—in the amputee unit and the alcoholism clinic respectively. They communicated through get-well cards from the hospital’s gift shop.

“Dear Sheila, I’m sorry,” Phoebe scrawled beneath the printed doggerel accompanying Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“You should be,” Julie wrote back beneath Piero della Francesca’s The Discovery and Proving of the True Cross. Her left-handed printing was childlike, chaotic.

“Dear Sheila, tell them to cut off my hand and sew it on you,” Phoebe wrote beside Dürer’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“Too late for that,” Julie replied next to Signorelli’s The Damned Cast into Hell.

“Dear Sheila, they have A.A. meetings here four times a day. I go every afternoon.”

Bix. Dear Bix. But for Bix she’d be dead. The ride to Madison Memorial was lodged in Julie’s brain like a fossil in granite: Phoebe pushing H. Rap Brown Bear against the faucet that was her best friend’s wrist; the question mark of bone protruding from the stump; both women screaming uncontrollably. And throughout the nightmare—her husband at the wheel of the Tureen, moaning and weeping and shouting over and over that he loved her, he loved her.

“Feeling better?” Bix asked, setting a vase of pale, dispirited roses on the nightstand. For the third time that week, he’d snuck in before visiting hours.

“No,” said Julie. Roses: quite touching, actually. Her husband was truly becoming normal.

“You don’t like Seraph?” Bix had opposed the transfer to Seraph of Mercy—she’s not Catholic, he kept telling the doctors at Madison, leave her here—but they insisted that only at Seraph would Julie receive what they called a holistic approach to limb loss. “They aren’t treating you well?”

“I like it fine.” The Madison doctors were indeed right about Seraph. It was nourishing and spiritual. Sun-drenched rooms, glowing portraits of saints, spry wimpled nuns waddling around like little organic churches, soothing the city’s legless, footless, armless, handless. “It’s not this place. It’s not the hand.”

“It’s the ovaries, isn’t it? I wish I could comfort you. I wish I knew how.”

“Not one of your language arts skills, huh?” she said with more bitterness than she’d intended. She rubbed her nose with her bandaged stump. By some theories she was closer to transcendence now, less flesh dragging down her spirit, but instead she felt wholly corporeal, a broken piece of matter mourning its lost symmetry. “Nobody can comfort me. God couldn’t comfort me. Have you ever wanted to be dead?”

“Don’t talk like that. Please.” Bix lifted her stump to his lips and kissed it. Julie hated her wound: its itch, its ooze, the stinking gauze. For the sake of a safe closure, the surgeon had sacrificed most of her wrist, debriding the ragged tissue, recessing ulna and radius, and tucking the skin inward, so that her suture looked like a smile on a drunken catfish. “I saw Phoebe this morning,” her husband said. “She’s becoming a real A.A. demon.”

“After blowing off your best friend’s hand, you start rethinking your priorities.” Odd how she kept imagining the hand as an intact object, lying in the alley beside 3411 Baring like a prop from one of Roger Worth’s horror movies, a Beast with Five Fingers, a Hand of Orlac, when in fact it had been mashed beyond recognition, the finger bones scattered like bits of clam shell strewn across Absecon Beach.

“Kevin from Prosthetics,” he announced with fake glee. “How are we today, Mrs. Constantine?”

“It’s okay—I’m a patient here too.” Bix pointed to his crotch. “Just had a new set installed.”

“My husband.” Julie gestured with her fishmouth suture. The hand she’d lost was no beauty, its palm a mass of scar tissue, but it’d been a hundred times more eloquent than this.

Kevin dragged forward a cart on which sat a gauntleted glove of rubber and steel. “Voilà.” He swirled his open palms above the device, as if attempting to levitate it. “Programmable. Voice-activated. User-controllable temperatures. Fluent in English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese. Molly, wave.”

The hand reared up on its gauntlet and, animated by the kind of blind striving Julie had previously observed only in penises, flexed its palm.

“How am I supposed to afford this shit?” Mentally, Julie gagged. Molly? Molly? Jesus.

“We’re reviewing your husband’s medical insurance,” said Kevin. “Far as we can tell, Molly’s all yours. Soon you’ll know her like”—he issued a quick, snorty laugh—“the back of your hand.” He parked the cart beside Julie’s bed and gently slipped the gauntlet over her stump. The device felt soft and warm, an incubator in which tiny, wet-lipped creatures grew. “Go ahead—try her out.”

What an unsatisfactory century, the twenty-first. A million high-tech hands, but not one robot ovary. She guided the ridiculous machine to within grabbing distance of the roses. “Get me a flower,” she demanded.

A glass eye rose from the hand’s dorsal side like a periscope from a submarine, swiveling slightly. The thumb and index finger parted, then closed around a rose stem.

A shudder crept through Julie’s spine. A dance had just occurred, but who had done the dancing? “Molly, drop it.” Her new fingers parted, sending the rose floating into her lap.

“Just be careful nothing happens to her,” Kevin admonished. “One to a customer, right? Get her insured, is my advice.”

In the days that followed, Julie grew increasingly fond of Molly, as if the machine were a sponge or a starfish from her old underwater petting zoo. Indeed, at times Molly seemed the sole island of competence and warmth in an otherwise pointless universe—literal warmth, for the variable-temperature feature meant Molly could function as a kind of vibrating hot-water bottle, a ninety-degree caress ready to be applied anytime, anyplace.

Disembodied, the hand proved equally useful. Molly was a tireless servant, forever crawling around the hospital room in compliance with Julie’s whims. “Molly, fetch me that TV Guide.” “Molly, dial Phoebe’s room.” “Molly, rub my back.” “Molly, turn the page.”

Turn the page, for Julie was at it again, her old obsession, the mother quest, the God odyssey. But things were worse than ever. According to the pile of books and scientific journals Bix had smuggled in from the Philadelphia Free Library, the God of physics was not simply outside timespace, she was outside timespace’s outsideness. In the April 2011 issue of Nature, for example, the renowned particle physicist Christopher Holmes, extrapolating from the new Theory of Imaginary Time, had postulated a universe having no boundary or edge, no beginning or end—a universe in which a Supreme Being would have nothing to do.

Carl Basmajian’s God and the Biologists—for maybe she’d been conducting her search on too lofty a level. Maybe God lay manifest in the lily, the butterfly, or the subtly engineered optics of a baby’s eyeball. By invoking the classic argument-from-design—no watch without a watchmaker, no eye without an eyemaker—Julie might lure her mother into reality after all.

She read Basmajian. The wonders of nature, she learned, from wing of bee to sonar of bat to eyeball of baby, were not so much perfect machines as adequate contraptions. If nature bespoke a mind, it was a confused and inchoate one, a mind incapable of locating the optic nerve on the correct side of the retina, a mind unable to accomplish much of anything without resort to jerry-building and extinction.

Something was wrong. A short-circuit, a busted silicon chip, something—for instead of obeying, Molly marched across the stiff white bedsheets, seized the pencil with which Julie did the Philadelphia Inquirer crossword puzzle each morning, and, returning, began writing on the endpapers of God and the Biologists.

“Huh?” Not Molly? “Don’t joke with me, Molly.” But this was no joke, Julie sensed, no fraud from some neo-Boardwalk channeler quack. Not Molly. A spirit, then? The spirit of Murray Katz? The spirit of primordial clay? Perhaps even…her, the big-shot, the Spirit of Spirits?

Odd. For all the wonders Julie had experienced in her life, calling into the air and being answered by a disembodied hand still made her extremely queasy. “I miss you, brother,” Julie called. “I’m so depressed.”

Molly splayed her fingers. The pencil rolled down the endpapers of Cod and the Biologists and disappeared into the bedsheets.

“Jesus?” Julie placed the pencil in Molly’s grasp. “Answer me. Should I stay away?”

“Dear Sheila, I’m smitten,” Phoebe wrote inside a Seraph of Mercy get-well card—Tintoretto’s Christ Before Pilate—two days before she and Julie were scheduled to be released. “Irene Abbot, a homeless alky. It’s love, Sheila.”

“I want her to move in. We have great news, Sheila. The kind of thing you announce to your oldest and dearest friend over a Chinese meal.”

In her eccentric sentimentality, Phoebe selected the Golden Wok, the same restaurant to which they’d dragged her the night she almost shot herself. All during dinner, the litany of Alcoholics Anonymous—one day at a time, count your blessings, live and let live—rolled from Irene Abbot’s thin lips with the regularity and fervor of one whose entire brain has become a warehouse for clichés. How could Phoebe have fallen for such a dull person, this pale, skinny, talkative lesbian who looked like a victim of leeches?

“The main thing to realize is that I’ve given myself over to a Higher Power,” Irene told Julie as the fortune cookies arrived. “God got me off the bottle”—she tossed Phoebe a coy little smile—“with a little help from Phoebe Sparks and A.A.”

“How nice,” Julie grunted. God got Irene off the bottle. Maybe so, Mother. Good for you, Mother.

Phoebe said, “You should come to an A.A. meeting sometime, Julie. You’d learn a lot about life.”

“I’m afraid I know more about life than I care to.” Julie instructed Molly to seize her black dragon tea, then lifted the cup to her mouth. Her brother was a fine man, but his recent coyness—a dangerous place, they need you—was as irritating as it was uncharacteristic.

Not only could Seraph supply hands, they did exemplary work with lushes. Phoebe hadn’t looked so healthy since she was ten. Her spiraled hair glowed; her dusky complexion had the tight expectancy of a trampoline. “People are completely honest at A.A.,” she said. “‘Hello, I’m Phoebe, and I’m an alcoholic’ No lies.”

“I could’ve used an organization like that. ‘Hello, I’m Julie, and I’m an incarnation.’”

Phoebe snapped open a fortune cookie and drew out the paper slip. “It says, ‘You’re about to tell an old friend some great news.’”

“Headline stuff,” said Phoebe. “Bigger than I Was Bigfoot’s Surrogate Mother.’”

Julie chuckled without meaning to. “Bigger than ‘Scientists Prove Aliens Wrote U.S. Constitution’?”

“I’m not jealous.” Of course Julie was jealous. Who wouldn’t be? For the first time in years, the real Phoebe was back, and Julie had to share her with a boor.

“I need this, Katz. You’ll always be my best buddy, but in the end only a drunk can help a drunk.”

“Marriage is just the half of it,” said Irene. “We’re hoping to have a baby.”

Julie clenched her teeth, her fist. Her dredged and damaged uterus spasmed with envy. “Which one of you’s growing the shlong?”

“I had myself checked out,” said Phoebe. “I’m fertile as a cheerleader. All we need is some pixie dust and—pow!” She brushed Julie’s existing palm. “Listen, buddy, I know about your ovaries, really shitty, but this is going to be everybody’s kid—mine, Irene’s, Bix’s, yours. We’ll never tell her who the mother is.”

Julie opened her cookie, retrieved her fortune. You are careful and systematic in your business arrangements. She must be happy for Phoebe. Must be. “It says, ‘Your best friend is about to get pregnant, and you are very, very happy for her.’”

“Of course I am.” Julie felt a disembodied ache in her right thumb. She rubbed Molly’s. “And the pixie dust? You have anyone in mind?”

They could have waited a few nights, but patience had never been Phoebe’s strong suit, so they went over to Penn right after dinner. Breaking into the Preservation Institute proved a mere matter of explaining the problem to Molly and watching the various locks crumble under her steel grip.

The three women scurried down a corridor suffused with sixty-watt gloom, its walls lined with three tiers of squat steel doors, until at last Julie found Pop’s alias, Four Thirty-two, etched on a brass plate above the handle. She opened the door—a blast of cold air, like a corpse sneezing—and slid the frosted drawer forward. Test tubes jammed the rack, their identification tags stiff with ice. Evidently the Institute had gotten someone to pick through the rubble after the Longport explosion, excavating the sperm canisters, for the stockpile covered her father’s entire career. He’d been a faithful subject, one shot per month for over twenty years.

History could be read here, as in the concentric rings of a tree stump. Pop had first contributed on March 14, 1965. The telling gap began in December of 1973 and ran through June of 1976, when the Institute had reopened at Penn. December: her month of conception, then. Julie did the arithmetic, December to her birthday: nine months. She’d been a full-term baby. When God went with flesh, there were no shortcuts.

“This would be our best bet.” Julie lifted the most recent donation away, presenting it to Phoebe like a trophy.

Phoebe passed the sperm to her lover. “Here, sweetie. Let’s go have ourselves a bookworm.”

Although Phoebe hedged her bets by dividing the sample into two equal halves, she succeeded on the first application, a mere matter of using a Sanyo Improved Urine-Testing Kit to determine her precise day of ovulation, then applying Murray to herself with a turkey baster. Just like Georgina, Phoebe kept pointing out. Just like Mom.

“I wish you’d told me about this,” said Bix upon learning Phoebe was pregnant. “I live here too, you know.”

“This place needs a roach fumigation and a shower that works. Babies are like kittens, Julie, they grow into something much more sinister. Can you imagine the amount of chaos a baby will bring to our lives, can you even imagine?”

“Once she arrives, you’ll fall for her, I just know it. You’ll take her to school, show your students what babies look like.”

“Don’t rain on this particular parade, Bix Constantine. Not on this one. Don’t.”

Humanity did not have all the science, but by 2012 it did have a simple way for a pregnant woman to learn her baby’s sex within seven weeks of conception. Go to Dr. Lefkowitz’s clinic, get your womb sonogrammed, and a minute later a technician named Bob announces the either/or result.

“It’s a boy!” Phoebe screamed, running deliriously through the house. “I’ve got a boy growing inside me!” she shouted to Julie, Irene, and Bix.

A boy. The news won Julie over completely. A boy, a nascent Murray Jacob Katz—oh, the wondrous stories she’d tell her little brother about his pop. “Can we call him Murray?”

“Little Murray, eh? Little Murray Sparks?” Phoebe rolled the syllables across her tongue, testing them. “Sure, honey. Absolutely. Little Murray.”

A perfect warmth moved through Julie, clear to her steel fingertips. “And he’ll really be as much mine as yours?”

While nothing in her past history indicated that this middle-aged alcoholic, dynamite thief, and retired prostitute would take expectant motherhood seriously, that is exactly what Phoebe did. She followed Lefkowitz’s advice religiously, giving up coffee, wolfing down vitamins, and daily inserting a kind of vaginal suppository known to prevent miscarriages. Although she planned to have the baby at home—“the natural way,” as she put it, “like a goddamn cave woman,” as Bix put it—she readily agreed that Bix and Irene should rush her off to Madison Memorial the minute things got too natural for her own good.

Phoebe’s pregnancy filled the house like flower fragrance, penetrating every crack and wormhole, oiling the wainscoting with its sweet fecund ooze. Her face glowed like brown porcelain, her voice grew mellow, her small breasts swelled. Prodded by Georgina’s pagan blood, she took to strolling naked through their azalea-choked conservatory, thrusting her abdomen toward the windows, letting Little Murray feel November’s diamond sun.

And yet, beneath the earth mother’s crust rumbled an earlier Phoebe, Julie felt—the louder, angrier, wilder one. “Something’s eating you,” Julie asserted during one of Phoebe’s sun-worship sessions.

“It’s a bitch and a half staying sober.” Phoebe patted Little Murray. “That’s not it.” Stretched and squeezed by the pregnancy, her navel had become as flat as the valve on a basketball. “My dad expects me to shoot Billy Milk.”

“Oh.” Phoebe sounded mildly disappointed. “Did you really meet Dad? Is he good-looking? Smart like me?”

“I don’t care who thought of it—it’s a great idea either way. Milk even has Mom’s bones, doesn’t he? Know what I’d like to do, Katz? I’d like to slip over to Jersey right now, shoot the bastard, and bring those bones back home. Right now.”

“The Sermon on the Mount—it never ends for you, does it? If somebody kicks your right buttock, turn the other cheek.”

“Once you’ve got somebody’s bones, you can give her a funeral. A major production, with eulogies and flowers and all that shit. It wasn’t easy raising me.”

“Ever notice what a great word ‘revenge’ is, Katz, how it throws your lips apart like you’re about to blow a lion?” Phoebe threw her lips apart. “Revenge, honey. Let’s go shoot Milk.”

“Hey, you want a funeral? We’ll do a funeral. Fine. But stop talking crazy.”

And so, the following Sunday, the four inhabitants of 3411 Baring gathered in the backyard beneath a sycamore tree, its leaves aglow with their incipient deaths: strawberry red, pumpkin orange. The funeral began with Phoebe addressing the ground, assuring Georgina her daughter was off the sauce for good, telling her a grandson was on the way. Irene said a few banalities to the effect that anyone who could raise so fine a person as Phoebe had surely found a favored room in God’s many mansions. Bix, self-defrocked priest of Uncertaintism, speculated aloud that Georgina had fused with the Universal Wave Function, ashes to ashes, quarks to quarks.

At last came the burial itself, Bix and Julie grabbing their spades, chopping a hole in the taut November earth, and depositing a yard-sale hope chest filled with a joy buzzer, a whoopie cushion, a swatch of latex dog vomit, and a fully functional pair of windup chattering teeth.

A dangerous place, the hand had said. But the planet kept circling, tilting, carrying Plywood City away from the sun, and now came December, the worst in memory, crashing into Philadelphia like a frigid meteor, dunning it with ice, snow, and record lows. The Green Tureen stayed on call around the clock, fighting the incipient winter with soup. To Milk’s church, no doubt, Julie and her followers had always been avatars of Satan, and now they were indeed Lucifers, bringers of light, bearers of incandescence: Sterno heat, Coleman heat, off-brand heat, any source would do.

Just as Pop used to comb flea markets and thrift stores for books, so Julie now frequented such places in quest of used fur coats, second-hand blankets, castoff woolen mittens, hand-me-down ski caps, and recycled insulation, for the heat once brought needed to be preserved and nurtured. And if the coats, blankets, and mittens failed to appear in the bargain spots, then Julie would visit the retail stores, paying when she could, shoplifting when she couldn’t—Julie Katz, the thermodynamic Robin Hood, robbing the warm to give to the cold.

“A dangerous place,” Julie muttered to herself as she and Mohammed Chaudry nailed a swatch of Corning insulation to the north wall of his family’s shanty. The stuff was pink, fluffy, and laden with glass, like some corrupt form of cotton candy.

In the far corner, Mohammed’s eleven-month-old daughter issued a sound somewhere between a moan and a gasp. The baby’s teeth chattered like the windup novelty they’d buried at Georgina’s funeral; Julie could hear the tiny clicks.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered, the words buried by the whacks of her claw hammer. She enjoyed the feel of the hammer, its unambiguous utility and steely balance. Her brother, too, knew his way around tools.

But this particular night, she realized, none of it would be enough. “Zero degrees exactly,” said the sprightly young voice on Julie’s portable radio. “The WPIX Weatherwatch Team predicts twenty below by dawn.” A can of Sterno wouldn’t protect the Chaudry baby tonight, nor would a garage-sale comforter or a flea-market snowsuit. Forget warm milk. Forget these feeble chunks of fiberglass.

Julie liked Mohammed Chaudry, refugee from the CIA’s recent and wildly successful attempt to reinstate a shahdom in Iran. He made his way in the world collecting scrap metal and redeeming it for fifty cents a pound, the tin cans of wrath, except Mohammed wasn’t Pa Joad, he wasn’t the deserving poor. He stole. He thought the world was owned by Jews. He talked, half seriously, of assassinating the secretary of state. Mohammed’s plausibility, that is what Julie liked about him, his lack of any uncommon virtues, and when she resolved that night to give him something more than Corning insulation, she saw it not as charity but as justice, not as his deserts but as his due.

Justice served, she headed into the snow-swept dawn toward the Green Tureen, the sepulchral boxcars to her right, the frozen shantytown to her left. Snowflakes mashed against her parka like soft-bodied insects. She yawned, long and hugely, her mouth filling with the miniature crystals. Next stop, the all-night Superfresh at 35th and Spring Garden. The Tureen was out of coffee, sugar, oranges, everything. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to drive straight home and make furious love to her husband.

A sudden sound, reverberant, like a bowling ball colliding with steel pins. Julie turned. The massive metal door of a New York Central boxcar slid back, and even before the dark figures poured out she knew something ungodly had been set loose. And then, as the policemen charged through the storm, her heart, prophetic pump, drummed the full truth: Circus. “Get out of here!” she screamed into the cold blaze of their flashlights. “Leave me alone!”

There were over a dozen, decked out in globular riot helmets and green armor, a swarm of malevolent grasshoppers. Their captain, a tall, coarse-skinned man whose handlebar mustache flared from beneath his nose like antlers, marched forward wielding a Mauser military pistol. “The sacred river will burn you like acid,” he declared, raising his visor, “and by that sign we shall know you.”

“Brother Michael, show the woman our passports.” The captain’s syllables emerged as palpable clouds, words made flesh.

A stumpy, pimple-faced sergeant approached—Brother Michael, evidently—brandishing not passports but handcuffs.

“Hey, she’s only got one hand!” Brother Michael sounded bewildered and hurt. “Somebody stole her hand! Where’s your hand?”

Quite true, no hand, no Molly. Molly of the hot circuits, Molly the oven with five fingers, now permanently installed in the Chaudrys’ shanty. Not a loan, not even a gift. A sacrifice, rather, the penny from the pauper. She could hear Bix say: But Julie, it’s not insured, we can’t get another, why’d you give it away?

Done. Tethered. Trapped. A dangerous place. The frigid metal gnawed Julie’s left wrist.

The captain’s Mauser prodded her to the end of the siding, past the Green Tureen, past a dark brooding chemical car sitting on the tracks like a shipment of liquid hate. “I have my rights!” Julie insisted. Beyond the bumper lay an unassuming Tastykake delivery truck, fleecy with snow. “Where’re you taking me?” she demanded. The sergeant climbed into the passenger seat, pulling Julie in beside him. Suffocating clouds of sugar drifted into her nostrils. “I’m an American citizen!” The captain got behind the wheel. “Let me go!”

As the Tastykake truck pulled onto Market Street and headed toward the Delaware, Julie wept. From fear, naturally. From regret and anger. From self-pity, loneliness, uncertainty. But most of all from her sudden realization that her true fortune-cookie destiny read, You will miss seeing your second brother come into the world.

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 16
♦	♦	♦

Zipping up his stark-white neoprene wetsuit, Billy Milk strode past the eternally fecund Tree of Life, scrambled down the bank, and waded into the River of Christ’s Return, its bubbling currents rushing from the northern creeks straight through the city and onward to the sea. Exactly as the Book of Revelation required, the tree grew “on either side of the river,” its mammoth trunk arcing across the canal like a footbridge, a miracle predicated on the existence of root systems at both ends. Among God’s gifts to the year 2012 was the biotechnology required to fulfill Scripture.

Although the baptisms were less popular than the burnings, Billy’s flock still attended faithfully. Over three hundred believers lined the riverbank while another hundred sat atop the tree trunk, their bright faces peering between boughs laden with golden apples. But was it sheer love of God that brought them here, wondered Billy, or did they come because, at least once during each such gathering, their grandpastor’s phantom eye looked beneath the skin of a supposed convert to reveal the wormy guts of a closet Uncertaintist? “Heretic!” Billy would shout. “Let God and the Circus have their way with you!” Whereupon the crowd would go wild.

Most of them. There were always those who misinterpreted the New Jersey Inquisition, those who found it unloving or even unscriptural. Billy had learned to live with such judgments. Equally false readings had attended his attack on Atlantic City.

Reaching the sandbar, Billy mounted the submerged slope and turned. A full house, but no Timothy. Doubtless the archshepherd was still on his penance retreat, still sitting naked in the frozen muck under Brigantine Bridge. Billy’s inner vision displayed his boy’s ordeal, the ice sealing Timothy’s eyes and lips, December’s malign winds lashing his flesh. You raise a blind son. You tell him about Jesus, feed him oats and bran, tuck him in each evening, and, on the very day heaven heals his eyes, buy him a fifteen-speed bicycle with a horn and a saddlebag. And yet he ends up torturing himself like some sort of papist flagellant. It doesn’t make sense.

So cold, the holy river—but then the Jordan was no sauna either, Billy realized. Shivering violently, the day’s first convert approached, a black man, doubtless another Newark citizen who’d wearied of trying to reach the humanist fleshpots of Staten Island and had elected to receive his redeemer instead. Staten Island: God etched his messages everywhere, didn’t he, not just in Scripture, not just on the Mosaic tablets. Take away the first T in Staten, take away the cross, and you got Saten, that is, Satan.

Billy placed one hand on the convert’s shoulder, the other against the small of his back. Scripture was crystal clear about baptism. The whole body must go under, one, two, three—death, burial, resurrection—none of this fey papist business of sprinkling a person’s head. “We descend with Christ in the likeness of his death.” Billy bent the man, immersed him, held him under. “We’re raised to walk in a new way of life.” Billy brought the convert up, the bright waters rolling down his ebony face like tears of joy.

“Hallelujah!” shouted the convert, simultaneously coughing and laughing. No Satan Island for him.

Minute followed minute, conversion begat conversion, and suddenly Billy’s commandant was before him, waist deep in the canal, a plump woman at his side. Jewish, Billy sensed. Fortyish, half homely, half voluptuous, brown skin, fungus-green eyes, a turban of dense black hair spilling from her scalp and across her forehead.

She lacked a hand. From the right sleeve of her parka a grinning suture emerged. A fitting irregularity, Billy thought, for everything about this woman was sinistral: left, demented, malevolent, wrong.

Teeth clacking like castanets, mouth slung at a contemptuous angle, the one-handed woman came forward. “Julie Katz. And you’re Reverend Milk.”

Odd: the waters were causing her no pain. The holy river should be scalding the Antichrist; it should be boiling the meat off her bones.

Odd: as thoroughly as Billy probed her frame, his phantom eye could find no locusts scuttling along her ribs, no scorpions in her heart.

He channeled the full force of God’s will into his left eye, swelling its vessels, countering the woman’s terrible gaze. “Do you know why you’ve been arrested?”

“Hard to say. There’s something inevitable about it, don’t you think? Jesus tried to warn me.”

Billy took a loud swallow of air. “You believe you’re the Lord Jesus’ sister?”

“I suppose it makes you something much worse, Sheila of the Moon.” The interview was giving Billy no pleasure. For the first time in years, his phantom eye was tingling, an itch that couldn’t be scratched. “It makes you—”

A sign! A stark unequivocal sign! Just as the Holy Spirit had visited the Savior’s baptism in the form of a dove, so did a New Jersey sea gull now soar into view, its course sure, purpose certain. Billy’s phantom eye grew hot, a molten marble seething in his head. How clearly God speaks, he thought as the gull released a large black-and-white pudding. How lucid the language of heaven.

The sign splatted against the woman’s brow and crept down her cheek. “Damn,” she said, wiping her face with her glove.

“Children of the Lamb—behold!” Billy addressed the Tree of Life. “The Antichrist’s reign has ended! Spring will come to New Jerusalem, and with it our redeemer!”

The tree erupted in cheers so thunderous a dozen golden apples fell into the canal.

Thank God for the courts, thought Billy, thank God for the Inquisition. The learned judges would answer the riddle once and for all. Sheila of the Moon: venially guilty or mortally guilty, simple atheist or very Antichrist, mere foul-mouthed Jew or eternal scourge of God?

Satan is seasick. Leaning over Pain’s starboard rail, he coughs into the watery border where the Straits of Dirac meet the Pacific Ocean.

The vomitus arrives in a great tide, as if from a horn of liquid plenty. Andrew Wyvern disgorges the eight tons of soybeans he pirated and swallowed before they could relieve the 1997 Sudanese famine. The devil regurgitates the river’s worth of fresh-frozen plasma he’s been keeping from Canada’s hemophiliacs. He spews out a thousand vials of hijacked interferon originally intended for a Peking cancer clinic. He upchucks the mountain of nickels and dimes collected last Halloween by California schoolchildren on behalf of UNICEF.

“Katz,” Wyvern mutters, mouth burning with beneficence. What uncanny umbilicus now binds him to his enemy, what infernal thread? That woman with her smarmy lines, Let him among you who is without sin…Her pretentious moves: holding the vigilantes at bay with a wad of pebbles, cradling her friend’s vomit, seizing her friend’s dynamite, giving out soup. Katz with her Corning insulation.

“But she got caught.” Spawned by a leprous tongue, rolling past rotten teeth, Anthrax’s tones are nonetheless soothing. “Milk will put her in the Circus.”

“Not necessarily. Not without some encouragement from us. How long till we’re in Jersey?”

“In my experience,” Wyvern explains, drawing his hand across his seared and pulpy lips, “you can never rely on Christianity. I was positive they’d torture Galileo to death, absolutely certain. Remember my bet with Augustine?”

The New Jersey National Dungeon was a kind of underground wasp’s nest, a conglomeration of passageways and cells imprisoning its population less through stone than through confusion: the illogic of its twists, the perversity of its turns. Bars of psychic chaos bound the prisoners. Shackles of entropy held them fast.

It was, on balance, a modern place. It belonged to its century. Argon lighting, solar heating, centralized air conditioning. Crystal-eyed androids tore out the papists’ fingernails. Computerized racks elongated the homosexuals’ bodies. Fusion reactors heated the tongs that seared the Uncertaintists until they renounced their ignorance and begged admittance to the True Church. Only at the bottommost stratum, the level where they placed Julie Katz, did a certain medievalism prevail.

Every day her cell—Cell 19—seemed to shrink, its wet walls pressing closer and closer as if wired to the haunted brain of Edgar Allan Poe. She knew her companions by name. Bix Rat, that mobile ball of fur. Phoebe Rat, skinny and assertive, her nose ever twitching. And the runty one, wide-eyed, his pelt like a kitten’s: according to Julie’s calculations the birth had happened last week, Little Murray Sparks, barging out of Phoebe, squalling and gurgling.

Even as Julie drew into herself, she sensed her fame spreading throughout the republic. Hour after hour, Jersey’s cable-television screens crackled with Sheila stories. For over four months, the good news had commanded the front page of the New Jerusalem Times, SHEILA CAPTURED…SHEILA IMPRISONED…TRIAL IMMINENT…SECOND COMING CERTAIN. Church bells pealed in celebration; Inquisition patrol boats fired their cannons in joy. TRIAL IMMINENT: an old story, Julie realized—Christ before Pilate, Joan before the French priests. Burn, heretic, burn. She dreamed each night of drowning in blood; she awoke drenched in sweat, her straw pallet smelling like Absecon Inlet. Her fear was like the cranberry bog in which she’d awakened after her depotheosis, a bed of stinking slime. She suffered headaches, stomachaches, spastic bowels.

Keys clattering like a slot machine paying off in the vanished Tropicana, Oliver Horrocks entered. Julie did not hate her jailor. She almost liked him. He was a former “Heaven Help You” reader whose Revelationism was much shakier than his employers suspected. He simply couldn’t decide about Julie, on some days holding her responsible for all of Jersey’s ills, from its bread lines to its failed Parousia, on other days smuggling her Tastykake Krumpets.

“Ugh,” Oliver Horrocks said, noticing the convocation of rats. “Here we are, the cleanest city on earth, and…rats. They dug too deep, that’s the problem. You put your dungeon this low, you get rats.” He was a kind of male crone, bent and birdish, his thin face laced with blood vessels. “Whoever you are, you don’t deserve rats. Let’s go.”

“Not supposed to tell you.” He leaned toward her as if to keep the vermin from hearing and, brushing the sleeve of her zebra-striped pajamas, whispered, “I will say this. They’d rather convert you than burn you. These aren’t bad people I work for. Talk to them. They’ll listen.”

Together they ascended, following the corkscrew staircases, the raked tunnels, the wildly tilted passageways, every wall wrinkled and damp like an esophagus, at last breaking into the dazzling day.

Although Jesus had only once in his life asked why God had forsaken him, Julie now found herself voicing the question over and over, mumbling it as she and Horrocks walked gold-plated avenues jammed with merry children, whispering it as they crossed the sacred river, circumvented the Pool of Siloam, and passed a row of trim little boutiques. Immaculate streets, antiseptic sidewalks, pristine gutters: Billy Milk had done what the Mafia could not. His regime had scrubbed Atlantic City clean, lifted the old harlot’s face, killed her fleas. In the spotless front window of the New Jerusalem Toy Store, a pretty teenage girl arranged a Pro-Life Talking Embryo, a Sodom and Gomorrah Playset, and a display rack of Melanie Markson’s books. At one time, Julie realized, Smitty’s Smile Shop had occupied this same location. It was as if the store had been reincarnated on a higher plane; no squirting carnations or pornographic salt shakers here, not a single whoopie cushion.

They crossed Parousia Plaza and entered a building resembling an immense cinder block, then followed a hallway hung with tapestries depicting what Julie took to be great moments in biblical jurisprudence. Elijah beheading the prophets of Baal…Gideon shredding the elders of Succoth…the children who mocked Elisha being torn apart by bears…Jael nailing Sisera’s head to the ground with a tent peg.

The courtroom was a stark white cube reminiscent of the detox chamber where she’d brought Phoebe a year earlier. Along one wall, three urpastors in dark blue business suits sat behind a polished breccia bench. In the opposite corner, a dais supported a pair of leather chairs whose conservatively dressed occupants—gray three-piece suits, narrow black ties—were manifestly blood relations. Father and son, Julie mused, grandpastor and archshepherd, Pilate—she smiled feebly—and co-Pilate. The juxtaposition struck her as ghoulish. Ah, that pathetic little hop from youth to senility, so quick. Youth? No, beyond his boyish freckles and lustrous red curls, Billy Milk’s offspring was not young. My age, she thought. Older. Older and, if not wiser, then certainly wearier, for the more she studied him, the more narcissistically wasted he seemed, the more an epicure of his own decay.

Love your enemies, her brother had reportedly taught. An impossible ambition, self-contradictory and insane. Julie felt but one emotion toward this man, this criminal who had slaughtered Boardwalk tourists and killed her Aunt Georgina: raw, unalloyed loathing.

“I am Urpastor Phelps,” the middle judge announced in a paternal, almost kindly tone as he tidied up the dozens of news clippings cluttering the bench. He was athletic and handsome, tanned by the Jersey sun, bright blond hair sprouting from his head like a halo. “To my left, Urpastor Dupree. To my right, Urpastor Martin. Please stand before us, Sheila of the Moon.”

Urpastor Dupree asked, “But are you the author of these advice columns, this ‘Heaven Help You’ series?” His round, ruddy face was so pocked by acne it might have been sculpted from a sponge.

They’d rather convert you than burn you, her jailor had insisted. They aren’t bad people, Horrocks believed. “I wrote them,” she confessed.

“What was your purpose in creating ‘Heaven Help You’?” Urpastor Martin inquired. A gaunt, twitchy man, forever knitting his fingers together.

“Empire of nostalgia.” What could she do now but explain herself as lucidly as possible? What other course was open? If the ambiguities added up to a crime, so be it. “I wanted people to start embracing the future. But that was sixteen years ago—now my goals aren’t nearly so lofty. Lately I’d settle for getting through the day without screaming.”

“Weren’t you also aiming to found the Church of Uncertainty?” asked Urpastor Martin.

“So the error lies in those who came after you? In the Uncertaintist ministers and their congregations?”

“I can hardly blame them. You find meaning in this world, you seize upon it. People will take whatever deities they can get. Everybody has that need. I have it.”

A soft smile crinkled Urpastor Dupree’s acne. “Are you, as your followers believe, the daughter of God?”

“I suppose so. All right. Yes.” How uncanny, the gentleness of their probes. She’d expected an inquisition, not a dispassionate quiz. “In this instance, however, I believe we’re talking about a rather contemporary God. Outside the universe, know what I mean? Beyond the paradigms of both science and religion.”

A pang of envy shot through Julie as Urpastor Martin poured sugar from a bullet-shaped dispenser into a coffee mug. She hadn’t tasted coffee in weeks. “Assuming you are correct”—Urpastor Martin stirred the coffee with a gleaming silver spoon—“and God is unknowable, does that mean he didn’t make heaven and earth? He didn’t bring forth life?”

“But Miss Katz, if God has given the world a person such as yourself, then surely he has given us everything else—the birds in the trees, the worms in the ground, the very sun. Isn’t that the truth of it?”

“What is truth?” said Julie. She pondered the three judges. Their faces beamed a glorious fascination, a blessed expectancy. “Study the problem in depth, as I have, and you’ll find that the overwhelming bulk of the evidence favors cosmological and biological evolution. I’m sorry. That’s simply the case.”

“The human eye—any vertebrate eye. Instead of being linked directly to the brain, the optic nerve faces the light; the retina is wired in backward. No competent engineer, and certainly no deity, would ever design such a thing.” Julie offered the bench a wry little wink. The urpastors leaned forward, radiant with appreciation of a point well made. “It’s even starting to look like the very idea of reality had no actual beginning,” she pressed on, merrily, “no moment before which physical laws didn’t apply, no prime movement, no—”

“Incompetent, perfect, who knows? God is whatever we agree to pretend God is. God is our image of God.”

Remarkably, the large red volume Urpastor Dupree now removed from behind the bench bore a title Julie recognized. Malleus Maleficarum—she’d once spotted the same book in Howard Lieberman’s apartment; years earlier she’d seen it in Andrew Wyvern’s lap in the doomed Deauville. The Hammer of Witches, which Destroyeth Witches and their Heresy as with a Two-edged Sword: everything the Renaissance priest ever wanted to know about the devil but was afraid to ask, Howard had gleefully explained. Have you any idea, Julie, what a terrible and insane era the so-called Renaissance was?

“I must say, we admire the audacity of your intellect, Miss Katz,” said Urpastor Dupree, opening his Malleus Maleficarum.

“We’ll be burning you to death not because your mind is weak or your will feeble,” said Urpastor Dupree, “but rather because the Second Coming cannot happen until you, the Antichrist, are in hell.” He folded his hands into a neat little bundle and rested them atop the bench.

“Burning? Antichrist?” Julie felt brutalized and betrayed, as if Phoebe had started drinking again, as if Bix had taken on a mistress, as if she’d been shot by a baby. “No, wait—”

“All right, all right—maybe there was a prime movement, maybe there was something before the big bang. But quite likely the bang was generated by mere brute geometry, points in pre-spacetime, not by a divine—”

“Wait! Wait!” Julie splayed her phantom fingers. “Once you have space expanding—I’m talking right after the bang—you get organized energy appearing spontaneously, then comes your hydrogen, your helium, gravity, stars, organic molecules, eyeballs—”

“‘Wherefore that you may be an example to others,’” Urpastor Dupree read from his Malleus Maleficarum, “‘that they may be kept from all such crimes, we the said inquisitors assembled in tribunal’”—hunched with the burden of his office, he fixed her with his watery eyes—“‘declare that you, Sheila of the Moon, standing in our presence at this appointed hour, are dominated by demonic spirits, and by said judgment we pass upon you our sentence…of death’”—he sighed heartily—“‘by burning.’”

Julie gasped and wept. Carnivorous paramecia swam through her heart; the hammer of witches smashed her skull. Beyond, someone—herself, she sensed—released a loud squawl of anguish. She pressed her fish mouth suture against the bench, steadying herself. Implausibility, that was the New Jersey Inquisition’s great strength, its total freedom from any impulse to be credible. The world was not prepared to move against Milk’s mad enterprise because at some level the world did not believe it existed.

It came as a sudden shout, a resounding “Stop!” It came in the person of Billy Milk’s son hobbling across the courtroom. “Stop!” he called again. Breathing raggedly, exuding an aroma of adoration mixed with silt and algae, he reached her side. “I know this woman!”

Slowly, reverently, the archshepherd traced Julie’s scar with his index finger. “I know her!”

She studied his moonish face. His freckled cheeks were like pointilist paintings executed by chimpanzees. How appropriate—for it was indeed he, Timothy the ape-boy, his clever pet made obsolete by an August miracle.

“Is this true, Miss Katz?” asked Urpastor Phelps. “You gave our archshepherd sight?”

“I gave him eyes,” Julie declared proudly. Complete with optic nerves on the wrong sides of the retinas, she thought.

Timothy! Dear, freckled Timothy! It was exactly like that wonderful legend, she decided, Androcles and the Lion. Androcles was spared by the beast he’d delivered from a thorn, and now Julie would be spared by the boy she’d delivered from darkness! Who said God didn’t care? Who said God never got in touch? Forty years of silence, but now her mother was at her side, working through the grandpastor’s son—poor Billy Milk, foiled by his own fertility, hoist by his own pecker, just look at the old dog, quavering there on his throne, sweating with awe, convulsed with epiphany.

“She gave me eyes!” Timothy shouted—and now, for the first time, Julie heard pain in his voice, sensed despair in his demeanor. “The Antichrist gave me eyes! I’ll not wear Satan’s eyes! If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out! Out! Out! Out!”

Julie screamed. It happened in a single unbroken movement: mad Timothy grabbing Urpastor Martin’s silver coffee spoon and with the practiced nonchalance of a gourmet removing a wedge of grapefruit from a rind, the methodical efficiency of a mechanic stripping a tire from a wheel, de-eyeing himself. The noise suggested a thumb rubbing an overinflated balloon. Blood spouted from the ragged hole. The gouged organ rolled off the spoon and adhered to the floor like a wayward Brussels sprout dropped from a dinner plate.

Because this monstrous act seemed so complete in itself, Julie could not fault Timothy’s astonished cohorts for assuming he would go no further. Had they realized he wasn’t finished, they would doubtless have fallen upon him and wrested the coffee spoon away. Instead, when Timothy went after his remaining eye, the clerics simply stared, dumbstruck and incredulous, moving to intervene only after it stood poised on the spoon like an Easter egg leaving a cup of red dye.

“And if thy left eye offend thee”—shrieking in agony, weeping blood, Timothy collapsed—“pluck it out too!”

“Timothy! Timothy! Noooo!” Billy Milk rushed toward the shivering heap on the floor. “Somebody help him! Noooo!”

Stunned, flabbergasted, Julie followed Oliver Horrocks out of courtroom and back into Parousia Plaza, though to her fractured psyche it was not the plaza but Andrew Wyvern’s stomach, digesting her, melding her with his excrement, flushing her away, and while she arrived at the cosmic sewer not as a royal visitor this time, not as Satan’s guest, still the imps and demons welcomed her, their old friend Julie Katz, former deity, condemned human, newest citizen of hell.

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 17
♦	♦	♦

The Lord of the Underworld cannot return to New Jersey in clear weather. Hell has its protocols. As Pain cruises along Risley’s Channel, Wyvern orders up a typhoon—“Rain, Anthrax! Tell them I want rain!”—and soon the angels are voiding torrentially. The devil tilts back his head and swallows. The fine brew dances on his tongue.

Slowly he shifts, taking on a pleasing shape. His horns retract, his tail disappears between his buttocks, his cloven hoofs become feet, and his odor, normally reminiscent of a whale corpse at low tide, becomes fruity and faintly erotic. Walking down the gangplank, firmly gripping his kittenskin valise, he adorns his cranium with golden tresses and covers his veined, leathery wings with overlapping tiers of waterproof feathers. Stepping onto the storm-swept sands of Dune Island, he makes a shimmering robe rush down from his shoulders like an eruption of silken lava. By the time Wyvern reaches the salt marsh, he looks fully the role he must play. He looks like Billy Milk’s idea of an angel.

But the ruse has not been accomplished without cost, not without pain. Fighting for breath, Wyvern lowers himself onto a fallen tree trunk, slick and steamy with rain, and stares wearily at the swamp. An intolerable force squeezes his brain, as if God means to crack its casing and make an omelet of his thoughts. That lousy bitch. Her real hands: stopping the vigilantes, saving her friend, serving that soup. Her fake hand: highest of tech, warming that wog baby with its radiant fingers. Bitch.

He forces his spinning mind to focus on the immediate. History is going against him. Of all beings in the cosmos, Billy Milk is surely the last one a betting man would have cast as Julie Katz’s savior. And yet it’s happening. Only a heaven-sent creature could have given my son sight, runs the grandpastor’s reasoning as far as Wyvern can fathom it. Ergo, she’s not the Antichrist. And so, irony of ironies, Billy has determined to free her. It was true in Galileo’s time, and it was true now: Christianity couldn’t be trusted.

But the devil has a plan. He always has a plan. A sponge, a carousel, an ampule of venom. Cackling, he opens his valise and, taking care to shield his laptop computer and his stock portfolio from the gushing storm, draws out a small green bottle, its glass shatterproof, its face embossed with Julie Kate’s Moon photo. He decides to test the bottle’s contents, removing the stopper and letting a single dark dollop, no bigger than a raisin, roll off the rim and plunge into the briny water. On meeting Milk, of course, he won’t call this venom by its names. He won’t call it Conium maculatum, perdition’s poison, or hell’s hemlock. He’ll lie through his fangs—he’ll call it tetradotoxin, he’ll call it zombie juice.

Absorbing the poison, the marsh begins to swirl and boil. The eel grass and spartina grow black as used lampwicks. The medusae and the moon jellyfish becomes piles of putrefaction. In short, the stuff works.

Cheers, Julie Katz. Bottoms up, child. Place the sponge of Matthew 27:48 to your fat lips and drink deep, Sheila of the Moon.

A thousand pipefish, alewife, polyps, shrimp, and hermit crabs drift to the surface and form a mat of corpses atop the rain-pocked water as, calling upon all his powers of drama, invoking all his affinity for spectacle, the devil takes out his laptop computer and begins scripting his enemy’s death.

Doubt’s worm, the parasite that had so often colonized Billy Milk’s soul, was a mere itch compared to its opposite, certainty’s scorpion, jabbing its barbed tail into his heart as, weary and heavy-laden, he shuffled past the Pool of Siloam toward the sacred canal.

The facts rose before Billy, palpable, irrefutable. The holy river had not burned her. His phantom eye had found no locusts on her bones. But mainly there was this: over a quarter century earlier, Sheila had healed his boy. True, Satan’s servants performed healings too, but nothing like the miracle that had brightened Billy’s life for so many years, a cure for retrolental fibroplasia, eyes where there’d been no eyes. Billy loved Timothy dearly—poor stunned Timothy, sitting in a sunny ward at New Jerusalem Memorial, his gutted head encased in gauze—but the boy was wrong, wrong. Sorceress, shaman, adept, psychic healer: whoever this Sheila was, the gift she’d bestowed on Timothy that August afternoon in 1985 had come from above, not below.

“Hello, Reverend Milk.” His voice was at once lilting and firm, a voice like a harp.

“Good morning,” said Billy woozily. Silk robe, golden hair, sleek white feathers. Hence…

The creature smoothed the feathers of his left wing. “Head to foot. Wingtip to foreskin.”

“Innocent as Eden’s first rose,” said the angel, nodding. He reeled in his empty hook. “Favored by God, befriended by Jesus—and you’re about to burn her.”

“No. Please. I won’t.” An angel! He was talking with an angel! “I’ll enter the arena. I’ll say, ‘Good citizens, I’ve torn up the execution order. Sheila of the Moon shall not burn—today or any other day.’”

“An admirable intention, Reverend. A laudable plan. However…” Like Aaron throwing down his staff before Egypt’s royalty, the angel passed his fishing rod over the canal. “However, if you actually do that…”

The choppy waters froze, becoming smooth and glossy as a mirror. Silhouettes twitched on the surface like shadow puppets. The figures grew flesh, faces, clothes—breadth. Billy recognized himself, standing in the middle of the amphitheater, canceling Sheila’s execution.

And suddenly the believers were rising from their seats and stampeding across the sand, falling upon him. “You must give them their Antichrist,” the angel explained. “Disappoint them, and they’ll tear you apart.” He cast out his fishing line. “Heaven can ill afford to lose you, Billy Milk. You’ve been a true and faithful servant, and we know you’ve got a few more cities in you. It’s time to go international. Think of how wicked Teheran is. Tripoli cries out for the torch, Moscow’s ripe for burning.”

Relief gushed out of Billy like the fluids with which he’d christened the Great Whore—joy of joys, his campaign against Babylon, so controversial on earth, had been welcomed or high! “Then what am I to do?”

From his tackle box the angel produced a stack of fanfold computer paper. “The script for Sheila’s execution,” he explained, pressing the printout into Billy’s hands. “I wrote it myself. You won’t burn the woman, you’ll drug her with tetradotoxin. Zombie juice.” Reaching into his robe, the angel pulled out the green glass bottle embossed with Sheila’s face and set it on the riverbank. “She’ll fall asleep right there in the arena. The crowd will think her dead. Don’t worry, it’s just a mild case of suspended animation. Afterward, you can give her to…whomever. Her husband. She’ll wake up entirely alive. Thus will your cardinal sin—Billy Milk, persecutor of the innocent—be purged forevermore.”

“But is she really”—Billy glanced at the first page of the script: A hay wagon rolls across the field, he read, pulled by a donkey—“divine?”

“Hard to know. Ambiguous. Ah—a nibble.” The angel worked his reel, soon lifting a great luminous starfish above the surface of the river. Holy water shot from its half-dozen arms as it flailed about, trying to unhook itself. “Some would say Julie Katz is definitely a deity.”

Six arms, thought Billy, a six-pointed star: a Jewish starfish. “Then until the execution, we should be as generous as possible, right? We should treat her as God’s own. Grant all her final wishes.”

“Anything within reason,” said the angel, swinging the starfish onto the grassy shore. “Allow her best friend to visit, that Sparks person.”

“Yes, but don’t let anyone go poking into his past. He used to be an Uncertaintist—actually preached it. Dreadful stuff.”

Billy snatched up the bottle of tetradotoxin. A scheme conceived by God, a script authored by an angel! And yet…“We’ll drug her.”

“Only—where’s the drama?” said the angel. “Whither the spectacle? Trust me. My script is dramatic. Nails are involved, nails and wood. Perhaps you’ve read the Bible. Matthew 27:48. ‘And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar’”—the angel rested his soft white hand on the script—“‘and put it on a reed…’”

“Likewise will your executioner give Sheila of the Moon a sponge filled with tetradotoxin.”

Crucified? wondered Billy. Crucified? His flock would never accept a crucifixion, that holiest of chastisements—not for the woman they considered Satan’s mistress. “Crucified. Yes, but—”

“Don’t worry, your man will have plenty of time to deliver the drug. It takes hours for a crucifixion to work.”

“Ah, the audience—they won’t much like a crucifixion, will they?” the angel anticipated. “A crucifixion won’t go over at all.”

Billy’s lips parted, his biggest smile since Timothy got his eyes. How marvelous having such rapport with heaven. “Only the Savior is worthy of crucifixion,” he said, nodding.

“That’s why she’s to be anticrucified,” said the angel. “An anticrucifixion for an antichrist.”

“The difference is that you call one a crucifixion,” replied the angel, “and the other an anticrucifixion.”

An anticrucifixion for an antichrist, Julie mused as Oliver Horrocks led her through a massive cylindrical door into the dungeon’s visitation room, its ceiling a jumble of floodlights and closed-circuit television cameras, their lenses poking into the air like possum snouts. An anticrucifixion for an antichrist: or so went the rumor from her jailor. Her enemies were going back to basics; tomorrow she’d be nailed up before the whole city and left to die. Nailed, not burned. A Pyrrhic victory at best, out of the frying pan and onto the cross.

The floodlights came on simultaneously, bathing the visitation room in milky luminescence, washing away the fact that outside it was late evening, still Saturday by a gentile’s reckoning, Sunday by a Jew’s. Along the left wall, seven grim-lipped and fearsomely armed corporals stood guard. As Horrocks guided her toward the center of the room, Julie clasped her real left hand in its ghostly counterpart and prayed to no one in particular that the next twenty minutes would go well, no awkwardness, no schmaltz.

Across the way, a series of interconnected cell doors opened and closed like canal locks. Her husband entered. Phoebe followed, cradling a scrawny, sleeping, terra-cotta bundle. Evidently Milk was honoring her last request. A kiss before dying. A hug before hell.

“We’re trying every damn thing we can think of,” Bix said, waddling uncertainly toward her, a flat cardboard box labeled Pentecost Pizzas balanced on his palms. “We’re always on the phone, even Irene. We’ve got quite a list—a bunch of State Department people, both our senators, a retired ambassador I found in Bryn Mawr, Elmer West from the CIA…” His zebra-striped pajamas were several sizes too small. Domes of pale flesh emerged between the buttons. What a raving paranoid Milk must be, Julie decided: get them out of their street clothes, they’ve probably sewn cyanide into the lining. “Thing is, with Jersey so anti-Marxist and all,” said Bix, “and the only record of your birth being in Trenton…” His eyes were red. Tears stained his cheeks like snail tracks. “Well, we’re just not getting support.”

“I don’t expect you to save me, Bix. I really don’t. I’ve been heading for the Circus all my life.”

“Hey, the assholes took your hand!” whined Phoebe in a loud, icy, indignant voice. Her pajama top was open, breasts slung into a nursing bra. “They took Molly.”

“You’re a good person, Julie Katz.” Phoebe raked her fingers through Little Murray’s hair, a mass of black spirals. His eyes popped open, dark brown disks haloed by pure white. “He sleeps through the night,” she said. “Great disposition. I’d throw him in the Delaware if you could live.”

“I’d probably drop him.” Her brother seemed intelligent and well meaning, Pop’s kid all the way. A contemplative astonishment lit his face, as if he’d arrived at the wrong planet and was debating whether or not to stay. “Is he circumcised?”

“Sure he’s circumcised. It’s what his father would’ve wanted. Take him, okay?”

The baby began squalling. His face reddened like litmus paper meeting acid. “You know, my mom used to nurse you sometimes, right from her own bod,” Phoebe said, unhitching the left flap of her bra. She screwed her dark nipple into her son’s mouth. The corporals’ eyes drifted toward her. “You and I grew up on the same tit.”

A silence descended, broken only by Little Murray’s zealous sucking, a sound like Absecon Inlet lapping against a pier.

Bix sighed, a protracted bass note. “Listen, Julie, we heard they’re not going to burn you. It’ll be…different.”

“I know.” Julie cast a cold eye toward heaven. “An anticrucifixion for an antichrist. Good old God, always looking out for me.”

“And afterward…tomorrow…they’re going to give us…I mean, our pass is good till sundown, so we’ll go home and come back, and they’ll give us…you know.” He exhaled, cheeks ballooning. “Your body.”

“Phoebe and I will do whatever you want,” said Bix. “We’ll sit shivah. We’ll cremate you, give you a wake, anything.”

Julie clenched her phantom fist. Had Bix and Phoebe actually been discussing her funeral? She was at once appalled and fascinated. She wished she’d been there. “Just drop me in the bay, darling. Bury me at sea.”

“Why don’t you shut up?” Phoebe snapped at the jailor. Her fingers drummed on the Pentecost Pizzas box. “Hungry?” she asked Julie.

“We made sure they got it right.” Bix set the box on the floor, flipped back the lid. A divine cloud rushed out, the chemistry created as a mozzarella glacier migrates across dough. “Pepperoni, extra cheese.”

Julie meditated on the topping. Was the plural pepperoni or pepperonis? God, the crazy data that pass through a condemned incarnation’s mind. “Remember our picnic in the Deauville? You have any Tastykake Krumpets, Phoebe? Any Diet Cokes?”

“Are those things pepperoni or pepperonis? Is there such a word as ‘pepperonis’?”

Julie shrugged. They dropped to their knees. Steadying the box with her stump, she tore an isosceles triangle free, lowered it into her mouth in a parody of French kissing. Her two hundred taste buds rose to the occasion, tumefying, relaying every nuance of the cheese, every glitzy detail of the pepperoni. Being so brave was oddly pleasurable. Smiling, she chewed her way to the crust.

Were it not for Little Murray, Julie felt, none of them would have finished eating without weeping or going mad. The baby was their mandala, the focus of their fragile truce with hysteria. Each random burp, gurgle, and smile sparked joyful chatter from the three adults, as if that particular action had never before occurred to any baby, anywhere. By meal’s end, Julie was ready for him.

Intoxicated with milk, he lay on Phoebe’s shoulder like an outsized beanbag. “It’s easy.” Prying him free, Phoebe demonstrated something she called the football carry. “Take the hand I didn’t blow off and tuck it under his head.”

Julie liked the football carry. You never lost sight of the baby’s face; you could simultaneously move him and teach him physics. “Gravity,” she whispered. “Also magnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force…” She carried the baby toward the corporals. It must feel like flying, she decided, like backfloating down a river. His chocolate eyes were at their widest. “Earth orbits the sun,” she sang to him. “Microbes cause disease.” Such a new-looking thing, so unstamped. How sad that Pop and Marcus Bass hadn’t survived to see this particular twist in their braided lives: the lighthouse keeper’s son, the marine biologist’s grandson. “The heart is a pump.”

His mood swung, a sudden jagged screech. “Shut up,” she whispered, pressing him to her arid right breast, the larger one. “Your problems are just beginning.” It was not death that terrified her but, more prosaically, the nails. She feared for her flesh, its coming pain.

Pop’s son shut up. His gums were spirited and wet, munching on her pajamas like a flounder taking bait, stiffening her nipple. The corporals pretended not to notice. Julie hated them. They were astonishingly handsome, impossibly clean-shaven: men with cauterized whiskers.

Julie veered toward the cylindrical door, set the baby prone on the floor, and dropped to his level like a child flattening herself alongside her dollhouse, making it the measure of all things. What should one say to babies, what did they want to know about? “Well, first of all, there’s your mother,” said Julie. “A little flaky, but I think she’s starting to be happy. Then there was your father—also a bit nuts, but I know you would’ve liked him. Your grandfather Marcus was a great biologist. Your grandmother Georgina was somebody I sinned against…”

“Thought you would. Hey, Katz, guess what—I’ve figured out your purpose.” A tear sat in Phoebe’s left eye like a pearl in oyster flesh. She flipped open the nursing bra and gently lifted her son from the floor. “Here’s your purpose, right? This guy. Little Murray. If you hadn’t dragged his mother off a couple of battlefields, he’d still be living in a test tube.”

Rising, Julie kissed her brother’s nappy head. Good old Phoebe, never at a loss for bizarre ideas. “My purpose, huh? Why? Is he a deity too?”

“Ordinary? Exactly, Katz. You were sent to be ordinary.” Extending her tongue, Phoebe snagged the tear as it fell from her cheek. “Someday I’ll write your biography. The gospel according to me. How God’s daughter gained her soul by giving up her divinity.”

Julie’s stump tingled. Her phantom fingers seized Bix’s pajama lapel, and he leaned into her like a wino grabbing a street lamp. They hugged more tightly than they ever had before; they crushed each other like colliding cars. Her libido blazed to life. She smiled, impressed by the party-crashing shamelessness of sex, its willingness to show up anywhere—a funeral, a sermon, a final farewell. This was the way to go out, all right, thumbing your labia at the cosmos.

Throat swelling like a broken ankle, Julie sidled toward her best friend. “Good-bye, Green Enchantress.”

“I can’t stand this.” Tears bubbled out of Phoebe as if from a medicine dropper.

“I’m going crazy. Good-bye, Queen Zenobia. God, I hate this. Hate it, hate it…”

Slowly Phoebe melded with her, exuding an unfathomable mix of tenderness and eroticism, until the three of them—nursing baby, fecund bisexual, former deity—became a tight knot of bone and tissue, Little Murray trapped like a ship’s bumper between the hull of his mother and the dock of his sister, and for a fleeting instant Julie was not afraid.

Brother and sister, Little Murray and Julie Katz, side by side, swimming through her petting zoo—so went the dream the policemen shattered when they barged into Cell 19, six of the usual smooth-jawed corporals, stroking the grips of their Mausers. Horrocks entered next, snipping at the air with a pair of steel scissors.

“Barber?” she groaned, rising from her straw pallet. She yawned. Slowly the world seeped into her. She slammed her palm protectively against her braids, always her best feature, still long and wild like Phoebe’s old Wererat of Transylvania costume, still black and glossy like bundles of licorice.

He made no pretense of finesse, attacking her hair like a selfish and stupid child cutting the twine from a Christmas package. The disembodied tresses floated to the floor like raven feathers, mingling with the damp straw. Her cranium grew progressively cooler. She pictured her gawky naked ears, her exposed S-scar; she imagined jagged tufts of hair sticking out randomly from her scalp. Thank God no mirrors were permitted in the New Jersey National Dungeon. She never wanted to see herself again.

The policemen guided her upward through the maze of stairs and corridors, Horrocks in the lead, unlocking doors, raising gates, opening the vertical Via Dolorosa.

“You’re supposed to take a shower,” he said. “You’re supposed to start out clean.”

He prodded her into the ladies’ room, its walls gridded like drafting paper, the pattern marred where here and there tiles had fallen away like snapshots unglued from a photo album. A brand-new pair of zebra-striped pajamas drooped over the illustrated, three-panel Chinese screen standing between sink and shower. Julie stepped behind the mural—reviving Lazarus, stilling the waters, transforming the wine—and stripped. For the first time in her life, she was her ideal weight, a hundred thirty. There was no diet like terror.

She spent a full half hour scrubbing the dungeon’s gunk from her body. The water ricocheted off her firm thighs, her milkless breasts, her scorched-earth head.

Dressing, she delivered herself to Horrocks and the police, who escorted her out of the dungeon and into the golden city. Citizens jammed the sidewalks of Eternity Place, men in white silk suits, women in pale yellow dresses, children in lederhosen and Bermuda shorts. Everyone seemed tense and confused, uncertain what to make of her; they’d never seen an antichrist before. Should they revel in Jesus’ imminent return, or curse his enemy’s flesh? For every low Wyvernian sssss, Julie heard a hosanna or a shout of joy. Perhaps they should even…love her? Ambiguous.

A tomato sailed out of the crowd and exploded against her shoulder. The police reacted instantly, spinning around, drawing their Mausers, but already more rot was in the air—stinking egg, mushy cantaloupe, soggy head of lettuce—a barrage of garbage, slamming into her fresh pajamas. When had she asked to be God’s daughter? What sort of mother would allow this?

The crowd dispersed, breaking apart like a melting iceberg, and the death march continued, across the Advent Avenue intersection and past the Pool of Siloam, its sunbright waters reflecting the Tomas de Torquemada Memorial Arena with the clarity and fidelity of a mirror, doubling it, inviting Julie to project her inner life into the Rorschachian symmetry. What do you see, daughter of God? I see two arenas. I see two marble quoits, two lifebuoys from Pain, two doughnuts made of bleached dogshit.

Horrocks guided her through the narrow prisoners’ gate and into the holding area, a gloomy granite dugout filled with about twenty criminals and heretics hunched on picnic benches. Beyond, an iron-toothed portcullis opened onto the execution field, a kind of landlocked beach, its rolling sands dotted with chunks of charred kindling. A dozen chopping blocks sat amid the dunes like tree stumps.

“Moon rising,” echoed another prisoner, a leathery old woman in ill-fitting pajamas.

“There are none so blind as those who see angels,” Julie sneered in reply, dropping her thirty-nine-year-old ass onto the nearest bench. “None so deaf as those who hear gods,” she added. The garbage had soaked through her pajamas, moistening her dark skin. “Screw the Moon.”

“If you’re not an Uncertaintist, what brings you here?” asked the old woman.

The tiers were packed, thousands of spectators waving pennants, focusing binoculars, buying hot dogs, perusing program books. At the far end of the field, a colossal statue of Saint John the Divine—legs splayed, hand gripping a quill pen—held aloft a thirty-foot television monitor while, higher still, banks of floodlights stood poised to illuminate the next nighttime performance. SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT THE CIRCUS OF JOY, proclaimed the video screen, the title gradually dissolving into the famous angel-with-sword logo.

Between Saint John’s legs a massive wooden gate opened and out marched a brass band, their white uniforms glowing in the South Jersey sun as they played “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” in 4/4 time, tubas bellowing, trombones blaring, drums thundering. A procession of motorized floats followed, bearing inflated rubber statues depicting what Julie, peering through the fog of her dread, took to be glimpses of the Millennium: lambs nuzzling lions, angels strumming mandolins and lyres, frisky multiracial children gamboling across grassy hills, a smiling middle-class couple harvesting beets and turnips from a pest-free vegetable garden.

Julie turned. Eyes wrapped in red veins, jowls slick with tears, Melanie Markson smiled.

“Oh, Sheila, they’ve been hitting you. And your hair, they took your hair.”

“I remember that terrific thing he wrote about snapshots. I thought your father was dead.”

The parade circled the arena twice and vanished beneath Saint John, whereupon the portcullis climbed groaningly upward. A thickset, overdressed man—red dinner jacket, red pleated cummerbund, white top hat—swaggered into the holding area and tapped a dozen prisoners, Melanie included, on their forearms with his riding crop. He raised a silver whistle to his lips and out came a sharp metallic shriek. “Get moving, folks,” he said. “Right now, please.”

In the field below, an executioner with bounteous blond hair, wearing a white jumpsuit and red canvas gloves, strutted amid the chopping blocks. A chain saw sat on his shoulder like a beloved but mentally defective little brother. Julie shut her eyes. The portcullis dropped closed. She could feel her fear—feel it coiled around her spine like a snake entwining a caduceus. I don’t want to die, Mother. I absolutely don’t.

On the monitor, Melanie Markson knelt as if in prayer, her pumpkin-colored hair flowing over the chopping block like a tablecloth. “No!” Julie screamed as the executioner pulled the starter cord on his chain saw. “For God’s sake, no!” The motor kicked in. “Stop it!” The chain saw descended, grinding into Melanie’s naked neck and swiftly severing nerve and bone—a deft move earning the executioner a standing ovation. “No! No!” The skillful camera operator caught it all, panning precisely as Melanie’s head dropped free, turned over twice, and settled into a low dune like a cherry atop a mound of whipped cream. “No! No!”

For the next forty minutes, heads rolled and Julie wept, her sobs made inaudible by the chainsaw’s roar. Her tears were large, hot, and no longer for herself alone. She wept for Melanie. For Georgina. For Marcus Bass, for the slaughtered Boardwalk tourists, for every person who’d ever died for what somebody else believed in. When at last the act was over, a rawboned young man in a harlequin costume—black mask, diamond-patterned tights—trundled across the field collecting the heads and dropping them into his wheelbarrow. Julie pounded the bench with her stump. She rammed her bare heel into the dirt.

Intermission. As the harlequin wheeled the heads off the field—he looked like a farmer transporting a load of cabbages—a team of roustabouts in Torquemada Memorial Arena sweatshirts lined the hippodrome with upright ladders.

The man in the white top hat strode into the holding area and blew his whistle, whereupon the remaining prisoners rose from their benches like schoolchildren participating in a fire drill and started onto the field. “Not you,” he told Julie, his lips and nostrils quivering with contempt. But of course, she thought—Sheila of the Moon is a headliner, Sheila gets her own separate act.

In a series of elegantly composed longshots, a half-dozen harlequins chained the heretics to the ladders and buried them to their knees in kindling.

Zoom in: straw, twigs, logs, gin bottles, cocaine spoons, zotz needles, feminist manifestos, Kurt Vonnegut novels, back issues of Groin, Wet, and Ms., videocassettes of Swedish Nuns and Bonnie Boffs the Vienna Boys Choir, nude snapshots of the sort Pop’s nuttier customers used to bring to Photorama—piles of sin, stacks of iniquity, heaps of vice, dams engineered by leftist, druggie, prurient beavers.

Cut to: the grandpastor himself, Milk the holy arsonist, eye glassy, hands writhing around each other.

Cut to: the blond executioner, weaving among the ladders, lighting the pyres with a gleaming red flamethrower, spirals of fire gushing from the barrel.

The director covered the subsequent holocaust through tight close-ups. Mouths flew open and out rolled smoke and sparks, syllables of incineration. Faces writhed like beached eels. Thighs blackened, eyes exploded, hair ignited, muscles melted. The heat pounded Julie’s shorn head. The air vibrated with screams. Bulbous and obscene vapors drifted over the arena.

Second intermission. The roustabouts carried aluminum pails filled with water—drafts from the sacred river, a subtitle explained—across the field and hurled the blessed liquid onto the flaming pyres, dousing them as emphatically as Julie had doused Atlantic City. Unchaining the hot bones, the roustabouts bore them away in rubber body bags.

Alone on her bench, Julie shivered and moaned, suddenly aware that her bladder had split off from her brain. The warm pee dribbled down her thigh.

A hay wagon appeared beneath the portcullis, driven by the man in the white top hat and harnessed to a mangy, spavined donkey. “Get in, please,” he commanded. “Antichrist Jew,” he muttered under his breath.

“When I feel like it,” Julie said, wrapping the words in spit. The donkey brayed. Her soggy pajamas grew cool.

Julie watched the monitor. A huge mechanism appeared, gliding between Saint John’s legs, a thing at once frivolous and sinister, familiar and grotesque. Not just any merry-go-round, she realized, but an Atlantic City native, the famous Steel Pier carousel, a creation from which she and Phoebe had once stolen a wooden stallion. Whether any such animals remained, Julie couldn’t tell, for the carousel had been boarded up like a condemned building, the entire span from cornice to platform sealed with a checkerboard of black and white plywood panels, giving the huge antique the look of a bass drum lying on its side. Round and round went the carousel, round and round to the rhythm of the Wurlitzer steam organ bleating out “On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.”

Two men in prison pajamas lay nailed to separate white panels. Two men, spinning, bleeding, crucified.

Laughing, Julie climbed into the wagon and sat on the sweet straw. The driver flicked his riding crop, producing a snap like a gunshot, and the wagon rolled forward, bouncing her up and down as if she were riding the stolen stallion of her youth. Laughing: for it was all quite hilarious, wasn’t it, she finally saw the humor. She thought of the communications course she’d taken in her sophomore year, Crosscurrents in Popular Culture, the idiot professor finding Christ symbols in everything from Superman comics to Elvis. Tell me, Dr. Sheffield, when a woman gets nailed to the Steel Pier carousel, does that by any chance make her a Christ symbol?

The driver reined up within three yards of the mechanism, and immediately a quartet of black-masked harlequins scrambled into the wagon like tarantulas invading a banana boat. Their stares seemed to reach beyond that slice of the spectrum available to human vision: burning, hate-filled stares, looks meant to kill. Laughing, she turned away. The crucified men swept past, their blood patterning the plywood—river systems, root systems, nervous systems—half dead, half alive, once, twice, a third time, a bearded stocky man and a gnomish balding man, nose like a walnut, so close she could have touched their steel nails, licked their sweat. Now the blond executioner came aboard, cradling what looked like an amalgam of bicycle pump and power drill. Not a bicycle pump, of course, not a power drill: an electronic nailgun, a modern-day malleus maleficarum, state-of-the-art, for it was 2013, wasn’t it, the future had arrived, supplanting hammer, supplanting iron spikes.

The carousel stopped, framing her against a white panel, the bearded prisoner to her left, the gnomish one to her right.

Laughing, Julie lifted her arms. The harlequins held her fast against the wood. Plywood splinters pushed through her pajamas, pricking her skin. Hefting his nailgun, the executioner pressed the muzzle into her left palm. No laughter this time, no laughs left, no chuckles or giggles. “No!” Within and without, she shuddered; her bones vibrated, spleen rattled, liver trembled, pancreas shook. “Don’t! No!” This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t—

Bang, a blast of searing pain—“No! Stop! No!”—and now, bang, a second fiery bolt, this one in her wrist—“Stop! No! Don’t!”—and then, by way of dealing with her mutilation, the gap, bang, bang, between her ulna and radius, bang, a row of three steel nails pinning her right arm like tacks holding upholstery to a chair. The wagon pulled away, leaving all of her hundred and thirty pounds hanging on the nails like a pelt, the shafts cutting deeper and deeper, and still the executioner attacked, left foot, bang, right foot, bang, unbearable pain, made worse by uncertainty—how long would it take to die from this, an hour, two hours, the rest of the day?

She tried to distract herself with science, naming her pathologies, her hypercarbia, her tetanic contractions, the nail through her first intermetatarsal space, the nail through her flexor retinaculum and intercarpal ligaments, but it was no use, her muscles kept spasming, the hot knives continued to chew and burn. Breathing was impossible; the mass of her body on her outstretched arms filled her lungs to bursting. To blow out, she had to push up on her feet, placing all her weight on the tarsals and driving white-hot corkscrews through the damaged nerves.

“I do,” said the bearded prisoner. “Read Bible and…you’ll see…Jesus favors…death penalty…for my kind…me.”

“Raped…girlfriend…killed her…doctor said I’m…psychopath…but really…pornography…made me do it.”

The pain was coming in waves now, as if her execution were some obscene version of childbirth. After each crest Julie’s collateral torments broke through, the fiery sun, the vertigo caused by the carousel’s spin, a thirst straight from a hadean iron mine.

Pain, sun, vertigo, thirst. Pain, vertigo, pain. All she wanted was to die. There were truly fates worse than death, oh, yes…

“I’ve got just the thing.” He held up a fat, dripping object hanging from the muzzle of his nailgun. “Drink.”

A sponge. Matthew 27:48, Mark 15:36, John 19:29. Had they no shame? She opened her mouth, sucking the saturated tissues. The animal reeked of the sea. Its juices tasted like salted piss. Trickling downward, the liquid scored her teeth, burned her tonsils, and sent sharp bursts of nausea through her guts.

“How long…been here?” she asked Frostig. Her impaled ligaments pulled her hand into a claw.

“Don’t know…two days…in the end, it’s the air…no air…gets you…exhaustion asphyxia, they’ll call it on…certificate…maybe hypovolemic shock, stress-induced arrhythmia, peri…pericardial effusions…if you’re lucky.”

Pericardial effusions. Like father, like daughter. Her heart was fated to collapse.

She drank. A tingling arose at the point where her spinal cord entered her skull. Silver stars pinwheeled in her head. Sand castles exploded.

She ascended. Julie Katz lay dying in the Circus of Joy, gasping bad lyrics, but she also soared high above, spiraling around Saint John, the video screen, the floodlights.

Glancing downward, she saw herself stapled to the carousel, bleeding, singing. Saw herself: vision, something eyes and eyes alone did, eyes, those soggy spheres of gelatin suspended in bone, wired in backward to visual cortex. “Dream,” she repeated. Hence, a tongue, flapping in her mouth like a beached fish. So she’d left the ground—so what? This, too, was an incarnation, and even as her Doppelganger glided past the towers and spires of New Jerusalem, across the roaring Atlantic, kicking clouds and terrifying gulls, she still felt its limitations, its vast potential for discontent. Time to return, then, back to her sad planet, back to the nails, the carousel, the exhaustion asphyxia, and so she fell, forsaking her wings and fusing with her singing self, not dead yet, oh, no, Mother, not dead yet, not yet…

On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City
we will walk
in a
dream
	on the
Boardwalk in
Atlantic
	City
life
	will
	be
peaches
	and—

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 18
♦	♦	♦

Perched on steel stilts high above the city’s eastern wall, the video screen glowed with close-ups so obscene that Bix could barely bring himself to watch. Julie’s left wrist: an oily gray nail burrowing into her flesh. Her feet: toes curled in rigor mortis. Her face: glossy and rigid like crystallized sulfur. While the average psychic, visionary, or Midnight Moon reader would doubtless have registered the exact moment of her death, experiencing it as an explosion in the skull or a sudden skewering of the heart, Bix did not. He knew only that at some nebulous moment between noon and now the Circus had done its work, taking from the earth his new wife, one-time god, and forever friend. So here they were, the two people who loved her most, huddled in the shadow of the Tropicana Gate, studying the pale, pearly faces of the bas-relief angels and awaiting the promised corpse.

Monitor and sky darkened simultaneously, the gray clouds seething like charcoal drawings made by a schizophrenic. The storm broke; a trillion raindrops clanked against the gold-plated causeway. Phoebe raised her umbrella, an old Smile Shop item with IT’S ONLY GOD PISSING on the canopy, and held it out, offering sanctuary. Bix flattened himself against the portal. Conventional sentimentality argued that loss bound people together, erasing old enmities, but such clumsy intimacy was the last thing he wanted, especially with her.

The gate parted with a deep, raspy grunt, like humping yaks trying to disengage, and a police sergeant marched through the gap, his mirrored sunglasses beaded with rain. Two young urpastors in waterproof cassocks followed, a large tubular sack slung between them like a hammock.

Bix nodded. White and pulpy, the sack suggested the larva of some monstrous insect. Rainwater settled into its dents and sluiced down its folds.

He led the urpastors to the Green Tureen, and as they laid the flexible coffin in the kitchenette aisle his gaze wandered toward the city. Burnished ramparts, towers like titanic icicles, a shimmering, sinuous monorail track. A jokey umbrella sat by the open Tropicana Gate.

“Thanks,” he told the urpastors. Umbrella, Bix mused. Open gate. “Go for it, Phoebe,” he muttered as he got behind the steering wheel. “Shoot Milk and his whole crew. You have my blessing.”

He headed into the broiling storm, across the crest of the city and over the bridge into Brigantine, his grief marching to the cardiac thock of the windshield wipers. Lightning zagged across the sky, gilding the refineries, flooding the apartments and condos with brief electric pallor. He swerved onto Harbor Beach Boulevard, glossy with rain, splotchy with puddles, and, turning sharply, drove down Rum Point as far as he could and braked. He shut off the engine, the wipers. Rain clattered against the windshield like fistfuls of marbles, IT’S ONLY GOD PISSING, Phoebe’s umbrella had said, but this time Julie’s mother was shedding all of herself, her urine, blood, lymph, sweat, amniotic fluid.

Opening the rear door of the Tureen, he found himself drifting from sorrow into a less expected emotion, a dull but undeniable anger. The fool—why had she given up her powers like that? Didn’t she know that on this side of mortality the nails are made of steel, they don’t bend, they don’t budge?

Saturated, his William Penn High sweatshirt clung to him like papier-mâché as he lifted the sack over his shoulder and, carrying it to the end of the jetty, set it on the rocks. The rubber exuded the thick grim odor of a gas mask. Dropping to his knees, he tugged on the zipper.

Of course he wanted to deny the whole business, of course he wanted somebody to vouchsafe her a blissful eternity. He thought of the book his honors students were reading, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel—unbelieving Eugene Gant groping toward the divine. “Whoever You Are, be good to Ben tonight, show him the way,” Eugene prays, singsong, over his dying brother. “Whoever You Are, be good to Ben tonight…”

Her face burst out and he groaned. What had he expected, Snow White on her bier? Certainly not this open-eyed shell, this bald husk, certainly not this thing. The corpse’s inertia was unnerving. What, exactly, was it? When your car expired, it remained your car, but with death a new object evidently came into being, supplanting spirit, supplanting body as well, a vacant and degraded lump of nothing.

He kept pulling on the zipper. Raindrops pelted her, some collecting under her eyes, others rolling into the gorge between her slightly asymmetrical breasts. Leaning forward, he shielded her from the storm and dried her face with his shirtsleeve. Wrinkles and pouches, true, but still those heavy lips, that cute upturned nose. He’d never really looked at her before, not this way. He wondered whether each crease corresponded to some dark event in her life—there the imprint of her father’s death, there the brand of Phoebe’s dipsomania, there the mark of her infertility.

A promise was a promise. He kissed the corpse on the lips. Nothing. Not disgust, not fascination, not the merest sexual twinge. It was a corpse. It was nothing.

He zipped it up, nudged it gently, and sent it sliding downward along the slick, algae-coated rocks.

“Whoever You Are,” he whispered as the sack hit the water, “be good to Julie tonight, show her the way. Whoever You Are,” he said again as his wife disappeared into Absecon Inlet, “be good to Julie tonight…”

As Phoebe ran past the Tomás de Torquemada Memorial Arena, her yellow parka ticking with deflected raindrops, the last of the crowd streamed forth, their umbrellas blooming like black flowers, their Circus pennants limp and soggy. They seemed little different from Philadelphia basketball fans leaving the Spectrum. Judging by their smiles, you couldn’t say for certain whether they’d just seen the 76’ers win by a three-pointer or a hundred sinners burn.

Across the street, the Holy Palace rose into the squalling sky, its golden pilasters cutting upward through a dozen balconies. Phoebe reached inside her parka, grabbing metal. Her plan might be ill-considered and vague, but her Smith & Wesson was loaded.

She let the night settle and, camouflaged by rain and darkness, hauled herself over the wrought-iron fence. In the rear courtyard a sycamore beckoned, and she climbed, quiet as stone, ever mindful of the guards and their Uzis, black and fearsome as her mother’s bones. History pulsed through her. Father cut in half. Mother burned alive. Best friend crucified. Thick and wet as moray eels, the branches took her to the third floor. How naturally it all came: loosening the pane with Mom’s old Swiss Army knife, unlatching the window—how easy to be the creature of history’s vengeance.

Her charge to Irene had been simple. One: give him twenty to thirty ounces of formula a day. Two: put him in for his nap at noon. Three: if his mother is murdered, get married again. Every kid deserves two parents, more if possible.

Silently she wandered the gilded hallways—carpets as soft and warm as marsh muck, chandeliers like giant luminous crabs—eventually finding the floor where the clergy retired after a hard day’s auto-da-fé. She peeked into the rooms one by one, just as she and Katz had done years before in the Deauville. Piety and luxury flourished side by side; for each altar there was a hot tub, for each portrait of Jesus a massage-bed. Not a bad life, grace.

At last, the grandpastor’s chamber, it had to be—four-poster bed, solid oak writing desk, Oriental rug. Empty. She slithered toward the window, her boots marking the rug with mud and dead leaves. Raindrops clung to the glass like pustules. Draping the window curtain around her narrow body, she eased into the red velvet and waited.

When they were ten, a few weeks after Katz had cured that Timothy kid, the two of them had stolen a crucifix from Ventnor Seminary and pried off the Jesus. His arms were slightly raised—a perfect slingshot. After stringing rubber bands and a leather pouch between his wrists, they’d spent an unsuccessful afternoon hunting sea gulls on the Boardwalk, aiming to bring them down with marbles.

Milk entered, fur slippers flopping, silk pajamas hissing. Approaching his four-poster, he dropped to his knees, interlaced his fingers, and began talking to God.

“Oh, Lord, Lord, because of my sins he is stricken again, for it was I who brought Sheila into your city, Lord, I and I alone…”

Phoebe had read somewhere that after a person commits a revenge murder, he typically experiences excruciating regret. Not at his deed, but only at his failure to tell the victim two facts: who was killing him, and why.

“Hold it right there, Billy baby!” she screamed, thrusting the curtain aside.

Bastard. He allowed no explanation. He simply ran to the glass door, tore it open, and started onto the balcony.

He was halfway across when she caught him, springing onto his back like a lioness attacking an antelope. Together they arced over the balustrade, dangling toward the watery street. He spat in her face. She bit his hand, drinking his salty blood.

The night air whizzed by and splat, exactly that, splat, a cartoon sound effect, and with it a redeeming ooze, blessedly soft. A sharp green stench cut into Phoebe’s brain. She rolled over. Rigid fingers scraped her cheek. Lifeless eyes watched her; a crossbow bolt ran through the corpse’s brow like a toothpick through an olive. She blinked. Another body, another. Corpses everywhere. Milk, dazed, lay wedged between two headless women. So much death, and yet these rumblings, these vibrant winds against her face.

Her mind cleared. Truck. Pickup truck, Circus truck: corpse removal. She laughed. Saved by the sinful dead. Already the vehicle was surging through the Tropicana Gate and onto the wet ribbony blackness of the expressway. Unmoving, Milk snorted and wheezed. Condos rolled past. Apartments, churches, farms. A solitary flame writhed and roared atop an oil refinery tower like a burning flag.

She made a fist, squeezed metal. Metal, glorious Smith & Wesson metal. Throwing herself atop Milk, she rammed the steel muzzle against his skull…ah, but there was a better entrance, wasn’t there? She flipped back his eyepatch and slid the pistol into the socket until it bumped scar tissue, a sound like a doctor’s rubber hammer striking a knee. “Know who I am?” she asked.

Milk seemed oddly pleased, as if the excitement of being under a woman compensated for her evident intent to murder him. “Babylon, is that you? You’ve grown darker, sister!”

Phoebe’s mother had once told her every woman tries to imagine having a penis, every man a vagina. Well, Reverend Milk, she thought, twisting the revolver as if operating a screw driver, here we have it.

The truck lurched to a stop. Steadying the revolver inside Milk’s head, Phoebe leaned back in time to see the driver jump from the cab and, preceded by the beam of his flashlight, hurry through the rain to the nearest roadside exhibit, a mass of wired bones chained to a cattle fence. He inspected the skeleton carefully, as if to determine whether it needed replacing.

“Ah…you’re from the junta!” Milk cried. A pale light hit his face. Phoebe turned. Briefly the driver contemplated the two living corpses tussling in the back of his truck. “Colonel Ackerman sent you!” Milk persisted, pawing at Phoebe’s parka.

Dropping his flashlight, the driver dashed into the stormy darkness like a frightened deer.

“You killed my best friend!” Phoebe sawed the Smith & Wesson back and forth. Why couldn’t she pull the trigger? Why these spasms of hesitation? “Burned my mother! Cut my father in half!” Gunmetal ground against bone.

“You—” She smiled. Stopped sawing. Withdrew the revolver. The gospel according to Phoebe—she was really going to write it, really and truly. “Take a hike,” she muttered, tucking the Smith & Wesson into her parka. The gospel according to Phoebe—and she didn’t want a tawdry murder on page 301, no, she had more class than that, more style. “Out!”

Like a disappointed lover evicting her partner from bed, she levered Milk over the side of the truck and dumped him into a wet gunky ditch. The flying mud spattered her face.

Lightning exploded with flashbulb suddenness. The cranberry bog stretched in all directions, interrupted only by the expressway and its crop of ebony bones. A second flash: Milk, struggling to his feet. A third: Milk, hopping through the bog like an immense black cricket. Quite so, bastard, you are smart to run. Run your dick off. My mercy’s not terribly reliable.

The smell, the pervasive unholy stink. And so she jumped, words pouring from her mouth, a speech heard only by the rain and the decaying sinners. “Katz, Katz”—she lifted her revolver heavenward—“you really got your hooks into me, didn’t you?” She glanced at Milk’s retreating figure. “Me, I would’ve shot the bastard. Oh, yes—”

Lightning. Jesus. Wasn’t that a bit much? Yet it had certainly done the job, a crisp, clean hit.

She sensed the regret spreading through heaven, and she laughed. One: he hadn’t known who’d killed him. Two: he hadn’t known why.

But Phoebe did. This was no fluke of nature, this was an assassination, plain and simple. Katz, no doubt, would’ve called it coincidence. “A universe without coincidence would be an exceedingly strange place,” she’d said in one of her stupid columns. Stubborn Julie Katz, whose worldview did not admit of guest editorials by God.

Phoebe ran, rain washing over her face. Even before reaching Milk’s corpse, she knew how the bolt had transformed him. God’s punishments always fit: eye for eye, bisection for bisection. She gazed upon the miracle. A bisection indeed, only not at midriff as with her father but lengthwise, like a rail split by Abraham Lincoln.

She staggered to the nearest tree and collapsed, curling her body around the trunk as if it were the core of her mother’s womb, and soon the drumming rain carried her into a thick and dreamless sleep.

April’s first sun rose fiercely, drawing steam from the cranberry bog. Gradually Phoebe gained her feet, jeans soggy with dew, chest heavy with milk. She slipped her damp fingers into her parka and, drawing out her ecclesiastical pass, noted that it had expired twelve hours earlier. What clever tricks would it take to reach America now, she wondered, what escapades, what lies? No point in worrying. She’d cross that bridge—that literal bridge, she thought with a quick smile, that Benjamin Franklin Bridge—when she came to it. The important thing was to get going. If Irene kept Little Murray on formula too long, he’d never go back to the tit.

The previous night was a hundred years in the past. Had it even happened at all? But then she started walking, and there he was, stretched out in the precise light of morning, his entire body a wound, the two halves cauterized. She felt sick, a sensation owing less to Milk’s condition than to her incriminating proximity. If caught, she’d be blamed, no doubt about it. Phoebe Sparks, God’s fall guy.

And so she began her furtive trek, sneaking from farm to farm and store to store like a marauding animal, living on pilfered fruit, stolen candy bars, and milk from her own fecund breasts. She shoplifted a backpack, the better to carry her plunder. She slept in cornfields, ate in Revelationist churches, peed in gas stations. On Thursday night a fresh thunderstorm arose, slashing a thousand creeks and ponds into the republic’s face. She claimed someone else’s umbrella from a bus depot lost-and-found and began looking for shelter, starting with the obvious—restaurant, laundromat—but in each case something made her lose heart: an armored van, a milling soldier, an Inquisition helicopter, a stranger’s suspicious glance. The Smith & Wesson sustained her. A mere touch and she felt nourished, renewed. Every girl should have a gun.

A mile outside Cherry Hill she came upon a shabby and demoralized farm. A rusting John Deere tractor and two moribund threshing machines sat amid a grove of spidery apple trees. A battered windmill turned jerkily in the storm like a telephone rotor being spun. Phoebe slipped into the barn and, peeling off her parka, flopped down in the hay. To judge from the two dozen stalls, the owner had once raised horses or dairy cows, but now the place belonged wholly to hens and roosters, a fragrant, fidgeting kingdom, their clucks breaking through the howl of the storm like some animal Morse code.

Phoebe’s stolen backpack held a feast. Swiftly she emptied it, setting out her imported Oscar Mayer hot dogs, an apple the size of a croquet ball, and a peanut-butter jar into which she’d expressed over a pint of breast milk. She devoured three wieners, washing them down with milk; her gastric juices sizzled. Satisfied, she stretched out in the cool, shit-sweet dark. Tomorrow afternoon she’d finally be back in America, kissing Irene, arranging a service for Katz, nursing Murray. God, how she missed that kid.

A peeing urge woke her. She’d had to urinate three times a night during her final month of pregnancy, and the conditioning lingered. She looked at her watch. Two A.M. Full bladder, full boobs, what a bloatoid she’d become.

Twenty feet away, a match flared. The tiny flame staggered through the air like a drunken firefly, alighting atop a cigarette.

“Nobody here but us chickens,” the man replied, simultaneously coughing and laughing. A foul odor ripped through the air, rotten oranges soaked in rancid honey. “You remember me, don’t you? Years ago we met on Steel Pier. We rode the carousel together. Same one they nailed Katz to.”

A sudden glow suffused the barn as Andrew Wyvern ignited a kerosene lamp, a kind of miniature Angel’s Eye suspended on a nail. Sallow and collapsed, his face suggested a jack-o’-lantern kept till Christmas. He sat propped against a cow stall, surrounded by nesting hens, a burning, filtertip Pall Mall wedged between his lips.

“So’ve you. Want to hear a joke?” A small snorting pig—round, pink, and bristled, a belly with legs—waddled across the barn and climbed into Wyvern’s lap. “Billy Milk was planning to let your friend go free. Can you imagine?” With casual cruelty Wyvern dug his talons into the piglet and began skinning it alive. “I had to intervene.”

Phoebe tightened her hold on the Smith & Wesson. “Know something, Mr. Wyvern?” The pig squealed horribly, bloodily. “You’re sick.”

“It was my poison that killed Katz, not the merry-go-round, not the spikes. Conium maculatum, a whole spongeful.” Like a depraved potter, Wyvern molded the pig’s red gooey flesh into a football. “Once again, the devil himself comes off the bench and throws the touchdown pass!” He lobbed the football into the adjacent stall, creating loud fluttery panic among the hens. “That’s me, a winner all the way.”

Wyvern mashed out his Pall Mall, lit another. “Her hand around your dynamite,” he sighed. “Her lousy insulation. But I’m feeling much better, thank you. Give me some milk.”

“I want some milk.” The devil aimed his clawed index finger at the peanut-butter jar. A large, empty swallow traveled down his throat. “Please.”

“I don’t walk terribly well these days.” Wyvern exhaled a jagged smoke ring. “Temporary infirmity. Now that she’s dead, I’ll be back on my feet”—he snapped his fingers, and a luminous sphere of brimstone jumped out—“like that.”

“Thanks.” Wyvern wrapped a mud-encrusted hand around the jar and, unscrewing the lid, took a huge gulp. “Great stuff, child. Nothing like home cooking.”

Scrabbling through the hay, Wyvern drew out a glass bottle. Phoebe shivered, gripped by nostalgia laced with terror. Ah, the paradisiacal places rum had taken her, sun-kissed beaches, blue lagoons, Jacuzzis filled with ass’s milk.

“Fresh from Palo Seco, child.” He pressed the fifth of Bacardi into her palm.

Bacardi, the best. She studied the tense and slender bat on the label. Her old friend.

“Hi,” said Phoebe again, breathing deeply as her mother had taught her. “Hi, I’m Phoebe, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“I knew you’d say that, I just knew it.” Wyvern puffed on his Pall Mall, coughing so violently Phoebe expected his ribs to separate from his sternum. “No matter. This has been a marvelous week for me. The Circus nailed her up real good. Why didn’t you shoot him?”

“The whole thing would’ve looked bad in Katz’s biography. I’m writing it. But then God came along and did the job.”

“No, that was lightning, child.” The devil coughed, a sound like a tubercular calliope. “If you’re really writing her biography, be sure to get the facts right. She and I are two of a kind now. Obsolete. Even hell doesn’t need me. Last I heard, they’d put in a fucking parliament.” Again he coughed. “Time was, I could split open an entire Exxon supertanker with a wave of my hand. A simple nod from Satan and suddenly Mount Popocatepetl’s dumping molten shit on Quauhnahuac. I’d just have to think about counterinsurgency, and—bang—a million Tanzanians are disemboweling each other. From now on, if people want evil and violence on their planet, they’ll have to get it from sources other than me. From nature. From themselves.”

The devil looked simultaneously insulted and amused. “The usual sources,” he agreed, swilling down the remaining milk.

Beaming like Angel’s Eye in its glory days, Phoebe packed up her incongruous belongings—her apple, umbrella, Smith & Wesson, peanut-butter jar—and strutted happily across the barn. She chuckled. Katz had beaten the devil after all! She’d actually done it!

In a sudden spasm Wyvern grabbed a chicken by the neck. “This isn’t the end for me, you know. I’ve had plenty of job offers. I’m joining the circus.” The bird twisted and squawked, kicking like a prisoner on a gallows. “Not Milk’s circus, the regular kind. They’re hiring me as the geek. I’m good at geeking.” He jammed the chicken’s head into his mouth and chomped, severing the neck.

The devil chewed slowly, grinding the skull against his rusting, roach-brown teeth. “Not bad for a vegetarian, eh?” He spat out a mixture of breast milk and chicken blood.

Phoebe opened the barn door. New Jersey dripped. Silvery moonlight poured down on the threshing machines, streamlining them.

“Hey—what do you get when you eat a live hen?” Wyvern called from behind her.

It is harder to be alive than dead. The water seeps relentlessly into your coffin, stinging your eyes and burning your sinuses. Your esophagus twists like a hangman’s rope. Your heart pumps panic and bile.

Why this supplemental torment, you wonder as your fingers claw at the rubber. Does the Circus never quit? Wyvern never sleep?

Your nails catch metal. The zipper moves—it moves, oh, God, oh, yes, it moves.

Like a moth exiting a cocoon, you slither out and, lungs screaming, fight your way upward, wresting free of death—of death, of hell, of Morphean oblivion—with a single rapturous gasp. The water is frigid and choppy. Absecon Inlet? There’s the spit, there’s Angel’s Eye, rising and falling in the distance like a piston. Alive. Unbelievable. A fiery web spreads across the sky, but nobody’s razing any casinos today, it’s merely the sunset Panting, coughing, you swim toward shore and pull yourself into the shallows, draping your body over the splendid rocks, their glorious slime greasing your bare abdomen and naked thighs. The tidepool is a carnival of life. Shrimp, scallops, pipefish, nereids. Two fiddler crabs mate within inches of your nose.

Rain slides across your back—and something else, something warm, soft, and rubbery, massaging your neck and shoulders. It creeps down your stubby right arm and bathes your three aligned wounds in salubrious salt.

—This is amazing, you say. I never thought I’d see you again, old sponge. They crucified me.

—I can’t blame you for not recognizing me. You were in great pain. But there I was, dripping with hemlock.

—Tetradotoxin. High grade, ninety-eight percent pure. Remarkable drug. Produces death’s symptoms but not its permanence. It saved your life, Julie.

Delivered by a sponge! Heart saturated with love, soul abrim with appreciation, you kiss Amanda on what you take to be her eyes.

—Some would say the miracle was entirely my own doing, Amanda notes. You were always kind to me, so I paid you back: Androcles and the Lion, right? But that strikes me as a hopelessly romantic and anthropomorphic view of a sponge’s priorities. Others would call the whole thing a gigantic biochemical coincidence: under optimal conditions, sponges will metabolize hemlock into tetradotoxin. I am not persuaded. Still others would claim that God herself entered into me and performed the appropriate alchemy. A plausible argument, but rather boring. Then there is the final possibility, my favorite.

—Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable…and a hermaphrodite to boot. Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be fatally dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I am both immortal and infinite.

—Neither can God, as far as I can tell. I’d be happy to see some contrary data.

—Look at it this way. God is not so much a sponge as she is the behavior of a sponge when confronted with…oh, I don’t know…say, a middle-aged woman with a bad haircut who’s recently been crucified. Turn over.

You turn over. The sponge traverses your chest and, waddling down your left leg, begins disinfecting your mangled feet.

You sit up. You are at peace. It’s only temporary happiness, of course, but you opt for a cheerier syntax: it’s happiness, only temporary.

Twilight enshrouds Amanda. Not a particularly impressive mother, but evidently the only one you have. You sense she has forgiven your failings as a daughter, and so you resolve to forgive her failings as a parent.

Mind reeling, wounds throbbing, you climb to the top of the jetty and head west. You feel immeasurably conspicuous. A woman with seven holes in her body limping stark naked down Harbor Beach Boulevard will not go unnoticed for long. “Send me some clothes,” you pray to Amanda. “Something undramatic, something that doesn’t brand me Sheila of the Moon.”

No clothes appear. You aren’t surprised. Your mother is a sponge. And where, exactly, does that leave you? Where you’ve always been, you decide.

The rain is slackening. Run home, Amanda has instructed you. You can’t, of course, not with your feet torn to pieces—but by stealing a hideous red pantsuit from a Pleasantville clothesline and a bicycle from Pomona Junior High School, you do manage to reach Camden within four days.

Slowly, like a photographic image materializing in a tray of developer, the Benjamin Franklin Bridge emerges from the dawn, its cables burnished by the rising sun, its macadam lanes blanketed with fog. Your only adversary is a lone, overweight policeman snoozing in the guardhouse. You leave the bicycle on the puddled steps of the Port Authority Building and limp onto the northern walkway.

The lanterns are still on, set on poles high above the road, their globes glowing through the mist. Gradually the land drops away, a scruffy, trash-littered neighborhood huddled against brick ramparts, and now comes the besmirched and clotted river. A Jersey Inquisition patrol boat and an American Coast Guard cutter pass each other in icy silence.

Ten yards away, a thin woman in a yellow parka walks briskly toward America, and you know right away it’s her, her, and so you cry out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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