Only Begotten Daughter (18 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He knelt before the altar, kissing the cool sweet marble.

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

“Timothy, we don’t read this sort of material. Certainly not in here.”

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

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

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

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

“Next town over. Atlantic City.”

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

Their descent into the basement was a dance of joy.

“Dews
vult,
right, Dad?”

“Deus vult,
son.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Burning as we go?” Timothy pronounced
burning
with prayerful zeal.

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

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

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

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

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

“They look
exactly
like hosts,” said Billy’s bright-eyed son.

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

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

At least she’d tried. No one could say she hadn’t tried.

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

1. Prayers

2. Anecdotes

3. Photo offer

“Prayers?” Julie wailed. “What do you mean?”

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

“Have you lost your mind?”

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

Julie slapped margarine on a kaiser roll. She needed her column—
needed
it.

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

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

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

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

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

“Mule.”

“What did you say?”

“I said
mule.
I said
stubborn jackass.
”

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

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

“I doubt that.”

“I’m in love with you.”

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

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

“I thought you’d say something like that.”

“An enigma.”

“Right. Sure.”

“Indeterminate.”

“Let’s drop it, Julie.”

“Impermanent.”

“Here’s our soup.”

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

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

Take it. “And I love you,” she said.

“Huh?”

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

“No shit?”

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

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