Only Begotten Daughter (36 page)

“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.

An elfin, lab-coated young man appeared in the doorway.

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

“My thumb hurts. The one back in West Philly.”

Kevin gave her off-hours visitor a sharp, disgruntled stare.

“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.
“Voila.”
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.

Nothing.

“Say her name,” Kevin urged.

“
Molly,
right?”

“Right.”

“Molly, get me a flower.”

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 time-space’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.

“Molly, get me that other one. The blue cover.”

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.

“Molly, I want
Primordial Clay
over there.”

Molly didn’t move.

“Molly—
Primordial Clay.
”

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.

“Molly, I said to get
Primordial Clay.
”

JULIE, ARE YOU THERE?
the hand scribbled.

“Stop it, Molly.”

I’M NOT MOLLY
.

“What?”

The hand underlined:
NOT MOLLY
.

“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?

“Mother?” Was it possible? At long last?
“Mother?”

NO, SISTER
, the hand wrote,
SORRY
.

“Jesus?”

JESUS
, the hand wrote.

“Really? Jesus?”

EM
EMI
, the hand wrote.

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.”

The hand underlined:
SORRY
.

“It’s not your fault.”

I WANT TO WARN YOU
, the hand wrote.

“About what?”

PLYWOOD CITY
.

“It’s not safe?”

RIGHT
.

“I should stop going?”

A DANGEROUS PLACE
, Jesus wrote.

“I’d hate to stop going. They need me.”

THEY NEED YOU
, Jesus agreed.

“My chicken soup.”

Jesus underlined:
RIGHT
. He circled:
A DANGEROUS PLACE.

“So I shouldn’t go?”

Jesus circled:
THEY NEED YOU
.

“I know. It’s almost winter.”

SOUP, BLANKETS, HEAT
, Jesus wrote.

“It’s dangerous, though? I’ll stay away if you want.”

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

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

Nothing.

“Tell me what to do.”

But the hand had stopped writing.

“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.”

“Now you have something to live for,” Julie wrote back.

“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.’”

“You’re not very religious, are you?” said Irene.

“I’m more into gravity.”

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.’”

“Does it really?” asked Irene.

“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’?”

“Bigger. Me and Irene, we’re getting … what’s the word, sweetie?”

“Married,” said Irene.

“Married,” echoed Phoebe, winking as she tapped Julie’s wedding band.

“You really love each other, don’t you?” said Julie, forcing a smile.

“Is that okay?” asked Phoebe. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

“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.”

“A baby,” said Phoebe.

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.’”

“Really?” asked Irene. “It says that?”

“Really?” asked Phoebe. “You’re happy?”

“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?”

“Uh-huh. Somebody I always admired.”

“Who?”

“A good man. One of the best.”

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.

“She’s got your nose, Julie. I like her already.”

“Nose?” said Irene.

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

A DANGEROUS PLACE.

THEY NEED YOU.

And Julie thought: I’ll go.

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.