Only Begotten Daughter (29 page)

“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.”

“Bricks?”

“To throw.”

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?”

“The least.”

“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.

“Atlantic City’s changed,” you observe.

“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.”

“I don’t suppose they do the Miss America Pageant there anymore.”

“The what?”

“Miss America Pageant.”

“This isn’t America, ma’am.”

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.

“Who’s there?” Julie asked.

Clicks. Thunks.

“Who is it?”

Then: cold guttural reports, like popcorn cooking in a spittoon.

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

The second slit her cheek and snipped a tress from her hair.

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.”

She did. The tube healed itself.

“Jesus is coming—please state your calling card number.”

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

“Please state your calling card number,” said the disembodied woman.

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

“Is this a collect call?”

“Right—collect. I need to reach Phoebe Sparks.”

“In the Greater New Jerusalem area?”

Julie studied the fog for armed zealots. “Give it a try.”

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.”

“They thought you were a heretic.”

“Huh? Me?”

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

“My
what?
Disciples?”

“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.”

“’Fraid I lost touch with Phoebe years ago.”

“Melanie, can I stay with you tonight? I’m a little disoriented.”

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

“Brigantine.”

“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—”

“Mayor? Milk’s the mayor? But he’s a maniac and a butcher.”

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.”

“We’re scared all the time, Sheila. We’re … you
what
?”

“I’m not divine.”

The smile vanished, the gritted teeth remained. “I don’t understand.”

“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 …”

“My old life is behind me.”

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