Only Begotten Daughter (39 page)

“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.”

“How can you be God’s daughter and not believe in God?”

Julie pressed her index finger against her left eye. “Take the eye.”

“The eye?”

“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—”

“You see God as an engineer?” asked Urpastor Phelps.

“I don’t see God as anything at all.”

“An engineer, you said. An incompetent engineer.”

“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?

Witches.
Witches?
Oh, God, if you ever were a mother …

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

“You have a subtle imagination,” said Urpastor Martin.

“A unique perspective,” said Urpastor Phelps.

“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—”

“Guilty,” said Urpastor Dupree.

“Guilty,” echoed Urpastor Martin.

“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—”

“Guilty,” concurred Urpastor Phelps.

“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.

Then: an intervention.

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!”

“You do?” said Urpastor Dupree.

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.

“It’s she! The one who cured my blindness!”

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

“His name’s Timothy, right?”

“Yes!” shouted the archshepherd.

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

“Eyes!” echoed Timothy.

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!”

Which he did.

Quite so. Plucked it. 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!”

“Jailor!”

“Help him!”

“Grab her!”

“Move him!”

“Don’t move him!”

“Jailor!”

“Find his eyes, find them! Noooo!”

“Get her out!”

“Find his eyes, they do transplants!
Noooo!
”

“Out!”

“Find them!”

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.

T
HE 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.

Sheila: innocent.

Sheila: not the beast.

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.

A winged man sat on the riverbank, under the Tree of Life, fishing.

“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 …

“I’m afraid they aren’t biting today,” said the winged man.

“An angel?” gasped Billy. “You’re an angel?”

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

“She’s innocent, isn’t she?”

“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.

“Yes,” he told the angel. “That’s my plan.”

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.”