Only Begotten Daughter (13 page)

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

“Physics?”

“Physics, biology, stars, everything.”

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

“My mother’s a mechanical engineer,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I love it.” She couldn’t stand Greek food. “I go crazy over it.”

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

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

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

“Want a beer?”

“Coffee,” said Julie. “And I’m hungry, to tell you the truth.”

“I’ve got a microwave pizza.”

“My favorite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rubber,” Julie echoed, groaning.

“Note that the movement is both isotropic and homogeneous.”

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

“To wit, the known cosmos has no center.” Howard climbed on top.

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

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

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

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

She asked, “Do you believe science has all the answers?”

“Huh?”

“Science. Does it have all the answers?”

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

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

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

“Breathe,” Georgina told him.

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

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

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

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

“Aces,” said Georgina.

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

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

“Do girls have oats?”

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

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

“If I weren’t a lesbo, Mur, I’d marry you.”

“You would? You’d marry me?”

“Bet your ass.”

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

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

“I suppose.”

“
Anybody
can get married, Mur. Friendship is the tough one.”

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

“You’ll dance at her wedding.”

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

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

“I get tired now and then. An occasional pain.”

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

“Give him a new one,” said Georgina firmly.

Again Julie blanched. “Huh?”

“You heard me.”

“Georgina,” Julie whispered, turning the name into an admonishment.

“I won’t tell anybody—Girl Scout’s honor.”

“Georgina, you’re asking …”

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

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

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

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

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

“No way.”

“I never told anybody, but … I met Phoebe’s father once.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

Julie grimaced. “Dead?”

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

“Phoebe keeps imagining she’ll find him.”

“She won’t.”

“Should I tell her?”