Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  “I’m going to ask God about it. I’m going to pray.”

  “Yes. Do that.” Billy stalked off, certain the Lord would forgive him his snappishness with Mrs. Foster. He hadn’t seen Timothy since lunch.

  Creeping into the forward stateroom, he approached the little berth. Two-year-olds slept so cleanly, not like men with their snores and tossings, their foul dreams. Gently, he brushed Timothy’s blanket, his stuffed bunny, his diapered rump pushing up from the mattress like a cabbage. What a wonderfully squishy world the Lord had made. If only Barbara…but she was seeing it, she was.

  Bending over the berth, Billy kissed his son’s nape. A mere seventy years or so, and Timothy’s tribulation would be over. There was no blindness in heaven. Eternity knew nothing of retrolental fibroplasia.

  He went to the wheelhouse and took the broken binoculars from their place between his Bible and his nautical charts. During a temper tantrum, Timothy had shattered the lens in the left-hand barrel. Billy turned the binoculars upside down, aligning its functional eye with his own, and focused on the Institute, cloaked in drizzle and fog. A light burned in a second-floor window. A late worker, most likely. Billy shut his good eye and propped his forehead against the binoculars. So: there would be a boundary to cross after all, that terrible seam along which the laws of God and the ordinances of men parted like halves of the Red Sea. A Revelationist always knew which waves to ride, however turbulent and high.

  He yanked the detonator from his sheepskin coat. On both sides of the wharf, his congregation’s yachts churned across the darkening bay.

  Over a year had passed since Billy had tried making his deal with God. It had seemed so reasonable, so symmetrical. I’ll destroy one of my eyes, God, and then you’ll give Timothy back one of his. That’s all I ask, an eye for an eye.

  Billy had violated himself with Timothy’s christening spoon. Infection followed, then surgery. Afterward, Billy had decided against a glass eye. He preferred the feeling of a hole inside himself, a gap reifying the incompleteness of his faith.

  But God was not to be trifled with. God did not make deals. The heavenly father, offended, had given the earthly father a second, well-deserved cross to bear, a phantom eye spelling out the exact duties of a believer. Smite this sperm bank, Billy Milk, remove it from my creation, even if…

  Even if there’s a lighted second-floor window?

  Yes.

  Billy pushed the plunger.

  Like a seraph’s silent whisper the radio command leapt from the wheelhouse to the Institute. The explosion was thunderous and majestic, filling the night with blast-wave overpressures and, if Billy heard correctly, appreciative cheers from heaven. His phantom eye showed him the glorious fruits of it, the Playboy centerfolds and Penthouse letters bursting into flame, the tainted semen turning to steam. The building’s hot guts, its pipes, cables, ducts, and girders, rained down as nameless smoldering shapes.

  Mission accomplished! Gomorrah erased! Sodom slain!

  The thorns that grew on the path of righteousness did not cut a Revelationist’s feet only; no, sometimes they sliced his brow, and sometimes they slashed through his eyepatch and lodged in his brain. Billy determined to inspect the rubble not from guilt—a crusade was not a crime—but only because after you enacted God’s will, you were obliged to redeem whoever inhabited the aftermath.

  The burning clinic pulsed hotly against his smooth-shaven cheeks as he marched down the wharf and jumped onto the sand. He removed his sheepskin coat, resting it on his shoulder like a soft cross. Ashes swarmed everywhere, a million airborne holes.

  The black man was upright, encircled by charred fragments of wall rising from the beach like grave markers. His posture was most peculiar. Had he been pounded into the ground? Either that, or…

  The apocryphal climax of Daniel blazed across Billy’s inner vision. The two lustful elders falsely accusing Susanna of lying with a young lover…their treachery unmasked…Daniel demanding they be cut in two.

  A sharp section of wall had struck the black man’s abdomen, bisecting him and simultaneously pinching the wound shut, sealing his torso as if it were a piece of ravioli. “Are you a donor?” Billy asked. What terrible things God’s servants were called upon to behold. “‘For even now the angel hath received the sentence of God to cut thee in two,’” Billy quoted somberly. People were wrong about angels. Angels were not androgynous choirmasters with lutes and wings. Angels spread judgment and doom.

  “Gahhh…” The man’s jaw flapped up and down like a grouper’s. A strained articulation, but it definitely sounded like yes.

  “Were you contributing, brother?” The smoke sucked tears from Billy’s good eye. The fire bellowed like the Red Dragon of the Revelation.

  “Urggg…” The sinner surveyed his divided self with a combination of horror and incredulity. He was losing only a little blood: a surprisingly neat mutilation. He nodded.

  “A harsh lesson.”

  “Never…happened…before…” Tears rolled down his dark cheeks.

  “The Savior awaits your acceptance, brother.”

  The donor was opening up now. Relief blossomed on his face as the heavy bleeding started. Sinful flesh on the outside, and now his sinful colon spilled forth, now his sinful liver. Had he found Jesus? It seemed so—Billy could feel it: the donor had lost his seed and gained his soul.

  A foulness clawed the air as the saved man’s bowels gave up their contents, and suddenly he was dead.

  Marcus Bass was right, Murray decided as he piloted his Saab down Ventnor Avenue—you didn’t know you wanted certain things until they became yours. His cell cluster slept beside him, her ectogenesis machine constrained by a seat belt. He whistled a Fiddler on the Roof medley. Matchmaker, matchmaker. If I were a rich man. He slapped his palm joyfully against the steering wheel. Inverse parthenogenesis did wonderful things for you; it hit you like music, like an idea, like a kiss from God.

  Rain spritzed out of the sky. Murray turned on the wipers. The blades sketched ugly muddy streaks on the windshield. He didn’t care. The glorious day kept rushing at him, bright memories refracted through the bell jar of his newfound fatherhood. Regular infant formula, is that what Dr. Bass had said? Yes, yes, all it could eat, a hundred meals a day for a ravenous placenta.

  As he entered Margate, an explosion shattered the dusk. He pulled over, stopping by a boarded-up drugstore. Had his cell cluster heard the blast? Was she frightened? He got out. A red glow filled the seaward sky like a misplaced sunset. Undoubtedly this disaster mattered to someone, to lots of people, but not to him, not to a man with an embryo.

  Driving away, Murray patted the jar. The glass vibrated with the comforting thumps of the oxygenation process. Hush, little girl. Don’t be afraid. Pop’s here.

  He maneuvered through the bleak urban battlefield called Atlantic City, then headed over the bridge. Across the inlet lay the northern arm of the famous Boardwalk, at one time a prestigious site for vacations, but then had come jet travel and cosmopolitanism, and the wealthy had begun summering on the Riviera. There was talk now of resurrecting the place through Las Vegas-style casinos. Legalized gambling, people said, would save Atlantic City.

  Lured by the full moon, waves grabbed at the rocks along Brigantine Point, as if trying to gain purchase. Harsh winds wrapped around Murray’s lighthouse, peeling a shingle from the cottage roof, hurling it across the bay. Hunching over his embryo to shield her from the rain, he ran into the cottage and set the womb beside his propane-gas heater.

  Fatherhood changes you for the better, Murray realized. In the old days, he’d always climbed the tower at a measured pace, but now he took the steps two at a time. And this too was his embryo’s doing: filling the tank to the brim, raising the clockwork lens, and igniting the four concentric wicks—Baruch atah Adonai elohanu melech ha-olam…“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has taught us the way of holiness through the Mitzvot, and enjoined upon us the kindling of the Sabbath light.” Always t
he flame bedazzled him. How like a living creature it was, a high-strung pet sharing his habitat, barely tolerating his presence. He wound the lens motor and, as the cut-glass prisms threw twirling spiderwebs on the floor, looked south. A fire raged somewhere near the Preservation Institute.

  Heart pounding, he descended to the cottage and got his embryo, bringing her up the helix of stairs and setting her before the beacon’s nourishing warmth. As the fifty-pound lead piston glided downward, forcing kerosene into the wick chamber, the glow filled the whole room and turned the jar into a golden ark. It would be tough having a baby around. How would he know when to start feeding her? When to stop? More wick. The beam shot from the tower. He tracked the light as it passed over the bay, skewering fog, melding with stars; look here, the light said to all the ships at sea, look at me, Murray the hermit and his beautiful embryo. See: inverse parthenogenesis has come to Atlantic City, and I thought you all should know.

  Piloting his cabin cruiser away from the burning sperm bank, Billy Milk watched as God calmed the bay and sucked the storm clouds up into heaven. Pentecost retreated under a clear sky. The northern shore shimmered with the fall of the Preservation Institute. All across the peninsula, fire sirens screamed—machines in pain, technology judged and punished.

  Somebody had turned on the old Brigantine Lighthouse. An empty gesture—the Coast Guard beacon on Absecon Island had ten times the intensity and range. Yet the Brigantine lamp burned brightly, a candle blazing upon an altar of rock.

  The December stars were like the lights of a great city. Rome, Damascus, Antioch. But the greatest city of them all had been foretold in the Book of Revelation. The New Jerusalem, whose glow was like a jasper stone’s.

  What did it mean to have great wealth? It meant you could obtain things. A yacht, a mansion, a church, perhaps even…a city? Yes. Quite so. A city. Between his publishing royalties and his seminar profits, his stocks and his real estate, Billy could actually build the New Jerusalem. Not as a bargaining chip—God did not make deals…but surely Jesus would be more inclined to return if proper accommodations awaited him, a metropolis shaped to biblical specifications. The thought stunned Billy. Might he actually trigger the Second Coming?

  Slowly, ever so slowly, his phantom eye painted the New Jerusalem across the speckled sky, the seven bejeweled foundations, the twelve gates of pearl, the sparkling river in which Christ would baptize the entire world. Tonight Billy had merely saved a sinner and purged a clinic, but one day…one day he would raise up God’s city and lure down God’s son! Oh, yes, he could practically hear the Savior’s booming voice, feel his fiery breath, see his torn feet walking golden streets commissioned by Billy himself!

  Phantom eyes cannot be closed, and cities cannot rise until their sites are cleared. What ground might prove holy enough? A once wicked place, a place whose raw festering sins had been cauterized by Jehovah’s hot sword?

  Yes.

  A battle was coming, then. Babylon besieged and sacked. Billy’s brain shook with it, the smoke of her burning, the cries of her slain citizens. Your typical denominational Protestant could never face it. Every Sunday millions of them sat in their pews staring at Bibles, refusing to confront the final book, but there it was, in every tepid little Episcopalian and Methodist church: the Revelation to Saint John, that compendium of apocalypse and slaughter, of blood-robed armies marching on Babylon, of sinners cast into the lake of fire and crushed in the winepress of the wrath of God. But Billy’s Revelationists could face it. Oh, yes, oh, yes…

  Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city, for in one hour is thy judgment come!

  The Brigantine beacon flared brighter than ever as Billy brought Pentecost about and headed for the open sea.

  CHAPTER 2

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  Because the mere presence of his embryo brought Murray great joy, he decided to keep her in his bedroom, right on the dresser next to the Instamatic photo of Pop and him riding the now defunct merry-go-round on Steel Pier. Every evening, the minute he got home from Photorama, he would dash up to the glass womb with the eagerness of a twelve-year-old boy visiting his electric trains. Staring at his developing baby through her amniotic sac felt like an invasion of her privacy—but did not parenthood of any kind ultimately invade its object’s privacy? And so he watched, a voyeur of ontogeny.

  From Stephen Lambert’s Evolution in Action, Murray had learned ontogeny did not really “recapitulate phylogeny,” that is, there was no appearance in utero of adult forms from other phyla. Nevertheless, his embryo had a sense of history about her. If only Pop could have been there. Look, Phil Katz would have said, just look at my little tsatske growing up. See, she’s a herring. Now a turtle. About now we should have…I was right, Murray, an anthropoid ape! Hey, she’s a disc jockey already. What’s the next stage? A Neanderthal, I should imagine. Yep, right on schedule. Look, a high-school dropout, we’ve got. A lawyer, Mur. She gets better all the time. And now—am I right?—yes, she’s finished. All done. A Jew.

  Unfortunately, Angel’s Eye was a conspicuous and alluring installation, forever attracting bored teenagers from town and nosy adults from the Brigantine Yacht Club. Whenever he was away, serving Photorama customers or running to the Stop and Shop for a stack of Swanson frozen TV dinners, Murray was haunted by images of goonish intruders peering through his bedroom window, plotting to steal the strange machine on the dresser.

  He decided she’d be safer in his laundry room, and so one frigid February morning he drove to Children’s Universe and purchased a hundred-and-fifty-dollar crib, the Malibu Natural Babybunk, complete with hardwood endboards, a mobile of plastic geese imported from Sweden, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s highest rating. After assembling the crib and the mobile, he set the machine on the mattress, then wedged the whole affair between the washer and the drying rack. He felt better. He’d done right. His baby would mature in a secluded and tropical world, its soapy air warmed by the sultry pulse of his electric heater as it dried his clothes and bedding.

  As it happened, the day Murray relocated the machine was also the day Georgina Sparks came lumbering up the path to Angel’s Eye, laden with a U.S. Army backpack, dressed in a baggy yellow T-shirt asserting that MEN HAVE UTERUS ENVY, and pushing a rusted and spavined bicycle. At first he didn’t recognize her. Only after focusing on her pregnancy, which bulked before her like an ectogenesis machine, did he recall the friendly lesbian from the Preservation Institute.

  “See?” she said, proudly extending her occupied womb. “I brought it off. Five months down, four to go, and then—pop!—my very own marine biologist.”

  “You look great,” he said admiringly. She did: the second trimester, with its bright complexion and ripe contours.

  “You weren’t kidding, you really run this thing.” Georgina spun toward the lighthouse tower, making her long raven hair swirl. “How very phallic. Can I watch you fire it up?”

  “I use it only to commemorate wrecks.”

  “Tonight we’ll commemorate the wreck of the Preservation Institute. You ask me, it was those Revelationist idiots who bombed the place. Hey, wow—you’ve got your own private ocean here.” Murray followed as Georgina wheeled her bike past the tower and headed for the point. “Weird, isn’t it?” she said. “If I’d tried picking up my semen a day later, it would’ve been blasted halfway across South Jersey, and I wouldn’t be having this particular baby. Which to my mind raises all sorts of cosmic questions, such as how did you end up being the person you are instead of, I don’t know, some turkey who got killed in the Franco-Prussian War?”

  Murray grabbed the bike seat, jerking Georgina to a halt. “Somebody blew up the Institute?”

  She removed her backpack and pulled out a tattered newspaper clipping. “I could tell you’re a person who doesn’t keep track of the outside world. Here…”

  BABY BANK ABORTED, ran the headline. “Longport, New Jersey,” Murray read. “Police report that a home
made bomb has destroyed a sperm bank here, killing a forty-one-year-old marine biologist and leveling…”

  A cloud of hot gas drifted up Murray’s esophagus.

  Was his reaction at all reasonable? Had the bomb in fact been meant for his embryo?

  He kept reading. The First Ocean City Church of Saint John’s Vision was cited as a possible suspect, but an indictment seemed unlikely, the case against the protesters being entirely circumstantial. Dr. Gabriel Frostig, interviewed, praised the University of Pennsylvania for offering the Institute a new home, then went on to lament that a valuable piece of technology, the world’s only prototype ectogenesis machine, had been vaporized by the explosion.

  Vaporized. Good news, Murray realized. Five months ago he’d stolen a glass womb, now suddenly he was just another bookworm with a locked laundry room. Off the hook. Saved. Except he couldn’t enjoy it. BABY BANK ABORTED. Somebody was out to get his child…

  No, a silly notion. Self-centered and paranoid.

  He read on. Shock and outrage welled up in him. The murdered biologist of paragraph one was Marcus Bass. He checked and rechecked. Yes, Marcus Bass, whose four boys, sandwiched in his wallet, could all swim.

  “Dinner,” he croaked. Would any good be served by telling Georgina her fetus’s father was dead?

  “Huh?”

  No. None at all. “You want to stay for dinner? I have spaghetti but no wine.”

  “I don’t drink these days.” Georgina patted her biologist. “The pregnancy.”

  That night he made them an entirely dreadful meal, the spaghetti so overcooked it broke under its own weight, the salad soggy and self-contradictory, part Greek, part tuna. Georgina liked it, or so she said, and subsequently there were other dinners, two or three every week. In Murray, she’d clearly found the ideal audience—for her pregnancy, for her crazy interventionist theories of child-rearing (every baby a latent genius), for her grandiose questions about human existence. She was a non-practicing Catholic and a dabbler in feminist paganism. She was a dreamer and a pragmatist, a hardheaded mystic who used numerology to find her perpetually misplaced keys and pyramidology to keep her Swiss Army knife sharp. She covered her bases. For Georgina Sparks, a brilliant child was at once something you calculated into existence through preschool stimulation and something you allowed to happen through cosmic openness. Don’t attempt parenthood before placing both cognitive psychology and the Spirit of Absolute Being in your camp.