by James Morrow
The basement was dark and soggy. It smelled like a diaper pail. Phoebe led the way up a groaning staircase to a restaurant called Aku-Aku. Broken glass speckled the floor; grubby white cloths covered the tables; dust lay everywhere like newly fallen snow. Phoebe clunked her mother’s army backpack on the nearest table and pulled out six aluminum cans yoked together with plastic. Julie’s stomach flip-flopped. This wasn’t Coke.
“Where’d you get those?” Julie asked. Beer. Budweiser.
“Free.” Phoebe pulled up a dusty chair and sat. “When you’re a thief, stuff is free.” The mural across the room showed a frowning stone idol rising amid a cluster of palm trees on a South Seas island. Blue waters lapped against sands as clean and white as artificial sweetener. “Let’s go there sometime.” Phoebe peeled off two Buds. “We can’t spend our whole lives in this yucko city.” She ripped open her beer, jamming the circular tab onto her little finger like a ring.
“Good idea,” said Julie. The idol’s eyes were crescent-shaped, like half-moons on the doors of two adjacent outhouses. Its thick lips were puckered in a perfect circle.
Phoebe guzzled half the can. “Bud’s the best, Katz, and that’s the truth. Bud’s the best.” Burping with satisfaction, she dragged her wrist across her foamy smile.
Julie opened her A & P grocery bag and drew out the rest of their feast—a box of pretzels, a bag of chocolate-chip cookies, a big bottle of Diet coke, and four waxily wrapped packages of Tastykake Krumpets.
“Excellent selections. Truly excellent.” Phoebe polished off her beer in three greedy gulps. “Hey, know how I’m feeling right now? Know how? I’m feeling how it feels to be drunk. Try some, kid. Come in here with me.”
Julie pulled the tab from her Bud and took a mouthful. She shuddered. Ants in spiked heels danced on her tongue. Wincing, she swallowed. “Yech.”
“This is the life, eh?” Phoebe laughed like a roomful of morons and tore open her second Bud. “Hey, now that I’m drunk, I can tell you just how weird I think you are, how totally and completely weird. You’re weird, Katz.”
“Weird? I’m weird. You’re the one who pees off bridges.”
“Last night I heard our parents talking about your godhead. What’s your godhead?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t, though it probably had something to do with her mother.
“Sure you do. Tell me. No secrets.”
“I think it’s what makes a girl a virgin.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
The Tastykake Krumpets came three to a package: three wondrous bricks of sponge cake mortared together with butterscotch icing. Phoebe ate an entire set in one stupendous bite, washing them down with beer. “Bud’s so good,” she said weakly, limping toward the wall like somebody walking barefoot on a hot sidewalk. “Let’s save those other Krumpets for later.”
“Happy birthday, Phoebe.”
“Thanks, Katz. I have an announcement to make. Guess what?”
“What?”
“I’m going to be sick.” A dopey smile crossed Phoebe’s face, and she threw up on the South Seas mural.
Julie jumped to her feet. The stone idol wore a beard of puke. “Gosh, Phoebe—you okay?” The restaurant already smelled so bad that Phoebe’s vomit made no difference.
“The beer’s too damn warm, that’s the problem.” Phoebe pulled a tattered cloth from the nearest table and wiped her mouth. “Never drink beer when it’s warm. Now you know.”
“Now I know.”
Julie wanted to go home, but Phoebe insisted the party had barely begun. Together they explored the Deauville’s upper floors, wandering the rubble-strewn hallways, swallowing dust, inhaling mildew. They shouted “Asshole!” and “Pissface!” into the elevator shafts, giggling at the dirty echoes.
“Let’s split up,” said Phoebe. Standing on one thin brown leg, leaning toward the empty shaft, she looked like a pair of scissors. “You take the high road.”
“Huh? Why?”
“More of an adventure that way. Whoever finds the neatest stuff gets to eat the other Krumpets.”
“The Krumpets? I thought you were feeling sick.”
“Nothing like a good barf to make a person hungry.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“I don’t know. Something real neat. Meet me in the lobby in half an hour. Bring something neat.”
The rooms were all the same. Glass fragments. Ratty carpets. Bare mattresses, their springs breaking through the stuffing like a complex fracture or some other gross example from the Girl Scouts’ first-aid handbook. The hotel, Julie decided, was like one of Pop’s wrecked ships, William Rose or Lucy II, tossed up on shore. Maybe she’d been wrong about God’s arrival. It could happen as easily on land as underwater. God might even appear in a hotel room—a spray of divine light rushing from a shower nozzle, shaping itself into a mother.
Julie visited the bathrooms, testing them. All the showers were dead. Whenever she flushed a toilet, a great moan arose, as if the Deauville could no longer perform even the simplest functions without pain.
Room 319. She looked in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were as turquoise as Somers Bay; her dark hair was long and wild like the fur on the Wererat of Transylvania suit Aunt Georgina had made Phoebe for Halloween. (Phoebe always went trick-or-treating in the casinos, bringing home scads of quarters.) Her chin was chubby, her forehead bore a thin scar, and her nose, while nicely shaped, turned up slightly, as if she’d been punched by an elf. Her best feature was her skin, which had the smooth brownish gloss of a caramel apple.
She left 319 and went to the gym—at least, that’s what it must have been. Sunbeams slanted through the glass ceiling, igniting the dust specks that swarmed around the parallel bars and broken trapeze. Rings hung down like nooses. Across the room, beyond a shattered wall, lay an empty swimming pool, big as a dinosaur’s grave.
Near the deep end, a man sat on a plastic lounge chair, the kind people brought to the beach.
“Hello.” His friendly voice bounced all over the room. He wore a red terrycloth bathrobe and an equally red swimming suit. Black-lensed sunglasses masked his eyes. “Welcome to my casino.” One hand gripped a glass of iced tea, the other a book. “Don’t be afraid.”
“You must be lost, mister.” If he came toward her, she could easily get away: there was a whole swimming pool between them. “The casino’s next door.”
“That’s the old Dante’s. We’re expanding. Once we knock this hotel down, we’ll have the biggest damn operation on the Boardwalk.” The man’s tongue shot into his tea and curled around an ice cube, drawing it into his mouth. “It’s not easy running a casino, child, so many details—separate accounts for mobsters, bogus fill slips, falsified markers. Silly to pay more taxes than we have to, eh?” He snapped the book shut and pulled a small silver box from his bathrobe pocket. “You may call me Andrew Wyvern. My other names are legion. You’re Julie Katz, aren’t you?”
“How’d you know?”
“From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it. Come here, sweetheart. I have something special for you.”
“I don’t think I should.”
“It’s a message. From your mother.”
“My mother?”
“God’s one of my best friends. Read Job.”
A delicious warmth rushed over Julie, as if all her petting zoo creatures were rubbing against her. Her mother! He knew her mother! “What message?”
“Come here. I’ll tell you.”
Julie climbed into the shallow end. Rotten wrestling mats filled the pool; cracks and fungus wove through the tiles. She scurried up the far ladder. Mr. Wyvern had a queer sweet smell, like oranges soaked in honey. “What does she look like?” Julie asked. “Is she pretty?”
“Oh, yes, very pretty.” He drummed his large, popcornlike knuckles against the book. Strange title: Malleus Maleficarum. “She’s just the way you imagine her.”
“Yellow hair? Real tall?”
> “You got it.” Mr. Wyvern flipped open the silver box. One side was filled with cigarettes, the other was a mirror.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” said Julie.
“You’re right. Disgusting habit.” He rubbed the warts on his knuckles. “It stunts my growths.” Sunlight shot across the mirror, and then a peppery mist appeared, like static on a television screen. The mist parted, and there stood a boy in a bathing suit, looking lost and frightened. “Study this boy’s face. One day you’ll meet him.”
“I’ll meet him? When?”
“Soon enough.”
The boy in the mirror blinked rapidly. “What’s his name?”
“Timothy. Notice anything strange about him?”
“His eyes…”
“Yes, Julie. Totally blind. The doctors couldn’t cure him. But you could.”
“Pop says no miracles.”
“Yes, I know, and your father’s very smart. However, in this one case, we must make an exception. ‘Ask Julie to cure Timothy’—your mother’s exact words.”
“My mother said that?” It seemed as if the beer were back, scuttling along her tongue and into her throat. “But they’ll take me away.”
“Not after just one miracle—no.”
“You sure?”
“Your mother’s best friend wouldn’t lie to you.” Mr. Wyvern smiled. His teeth looked like shiny new pennies. “One more thing. Don’t tell your father about our little meeting. You know how frantic he can get.” The cigarette case clacked shut. “Don’t forget—the boy’s name is Timothy. Watch for him. Our special secret.”
And then he was gone.
Julie blinked. Gone. The man, his book, tea, cigarette case—replaced by a wispy white cloud drifting above the lounge chair.
“Mr. Wyvern?” Maybe she’d been dreaming. “Mr. Wyvern?” A soft wind, nothing more.
Julie dashed across the gym and down the stairs, her heart pounding like a basketball being dribbled.
Phoebe was in the lobby, tossing bricks at the chandelier.
“This amazing thing just happened! I met somebody who knows my mom!” Her friend, Julie noticed, had a bundle of fat red sticks tucked under her arm. “Hey, what’re those?”
“What do you think? Dynamite, Katz, as in kaboom. It’s all over the place. They must be planning to zap this building tomorrow.”
“Dante’s Casino is taking over,” Julie explained. “You’d better return them.”
“Return them? You crazy?” Phoebe slipped the dynamite into the army backpack. “So, how about it? Do I win the Krumpets? You find any neat stuff?”
“Not really.” A ghost. A magic cigarette case. A message from heaven. “No.”
“Who knows your mom?”
Julie shrugged. “Nobody special. He smells like oranges.”
“Look, I’ll give you one of the Krumpets anyway. Maybe we’ll even try some more beer.”
“Because of Phoebe, I got my first taste of pink lemonade,” Julie concluded her fourth-grade essay. “All in all, a person couldn’t ask for a better best friend than Phoebe Sparks.”
Andrew Wyvern baits his hook with a Lumbricus latus, the twenty-four-foot worm hell’s surgeons routinely implant in the intestines of the damned, and tosses his line off Steel Pier. Halfway across Absecon Inlet, the Atlantic caresses his schooner, lifting it up and down on its hawser like a mother rocking her baby. The line tenses, the bobber goes under. Wyvern yanks on the rod, savoring the lovely pizzicato of the hook tearing through the fish’s cheek.
But he is not happy. Everywhere he looks, Christianity is in decline. It no longer burns Giordano Bruno for saying the earth moves past the sun, or Michael Servetus for saying blood moves through the lungs. The slaughter of the Aztecs is a mute memory, the fight against smallpox inoculation a vanished dream, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum a forgotten joke, the Malleus Maleficarum out of print. From pole to pole, Christians are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Just last week, Wyvern heard a Baptist minister say it was wrong to kill.
True, the sect called Revelationism holds some promise, but the devil doesn’t trust it. “Revelationism,” he tells the snagged fish, “is a flash in the pantheon.” No, there must be a new religion, a faith as apocalyptic as Christianity, fierce as Islam, repressive as Hinduism, smug as Buddhism. There must be a church of Julie Katz.
With a sudden tug Wyvern pulls his catch from the water—a hammerhead shark, seaweed trailing from its mouth like dental floss. The walleyed monster thuds onto the pier and flops around as if being pan-broiled.
Unfortunately, God’s daughter is not by nature a proselytizer. Indeed, if her meddling father gets his way, she’ll simply live out her life, never going public. So the plan must be clever, each separate trap—Timothy Milk’s ruined eyes, Beverly Fisk’s purple gown, Bix Constantine’s supermarket tabloid—deployed with cunning and finesse, lest Wyvern’s fondly imagined church remain mired in the future like a Lumbricus inhabiting a sinner’s gut.
Glowing with hope, burning with dreams, the devil pets the shark, enjoying its sandpaper flesh against his palm. Too bad he’s a vegetarian. Shark meat, he has heard, is delicious.
Before becoming a center for gluttony, drinking, and carousing, a place for courting venereal disease and sitting at green felt tables despairing that your next card may put you over twenty-one, Atlantic City was famous as a health spa, a kind of saltwater Lourdes, and in the summer of Julie’s eleventh year it seemed the place had grown nostalgic for its virtuous past. The sun gave off a lubricious warmth that seeped into the gamblers’ bones and made them sleep soundly through the night. Salt-laced breezes wafted into its beneficiaries’ noses and throats, healing inflamed tonsils and curing sinusitis.
Every morning after breakfast, Julie and Phoebe would pedal down to Absecon Beach, their bike baskets jammed with plastic buckets and aluminum lunch boxes, and spend the day constructing elaborate sand castles, complete with battlements made of oyster shells, moats guarded by killer scallops, and secret chambers where fiddler crabs scuttled about like outer-space creatures plotting court intrigues on a distant planet. Such enterprise did not represent a return to innocence. The point, always, was for Queen Zenobia and the Green Enchantress—such were Julie’s and Phoebe’s secret identities—to blow the castles up. Not crudely, not abruptly; this was not a job for Phoebe’s dynamite. Each castle must fall in stages, piece by piece, spire by spire, as if under siege from an army of lobsters equipped with nineteenth-century artillery. Aunt Georgina supplied the necessary technology—the firecrackers, sky rockets, Roman candles, and cherry bombs, unsold items from the illegal fireworks inventory that made the Fourth of July as important to Smitty’s Smile Shop as Christmas was to a toy store.
“Hey, Katz, it’s a chimpanzee! An actual goddamn chimpanzee!”
Julie targeted a buzz bomb to sail over the west rampart of Castle Boadicea—Aunt Georgina had suggested they name their constructions after great women warriors—and hit the main tower. “Chimpanzee? Where?”
But already Phoebe was off, running toward the decaying remains of Central Pier.
An old black woman in a nurse’s uniform lay snoozing on a deck chair, her crinkled body shaded by a red beach umbrella to which a chimpanzee—Phoebe was right, an actual goddamn chimpanzee—was tied by a leather leash. Were the chimp to panic, Julie realized, it would pull the umbrella down like Samson wrecking the Temple of Dagon. (You’re Jewish, Pop told her whenever they finished reading a Bible story. You should know these things.) Arriving on the scene, Phoebe let the chimp sniff her butt and legs, then sniffed him in the same places. She turned to the chimp’s companion, a kid about their age sitting exactly where the shadow of the umbrella met the sunstruck sand: his white body seemed split, half dark, half light. Fuzzy smiles appeared on his face as he talked with Phoebe and pressed his hands into the wet sand. He was blind.
Julie’s intestines kinked up. Blind as Samson. Blind as a rock. Blind as the boy in Andrew Wyvern’s mirror.
Now Phoebe was heading back, chimp following, blind boy in tow like a water skier.
“We can’t play with the monkey,” Phoebe explained, reaching the castle. The chimp smelled like used socks. His fur was matted, his eyes wet and yellow. “He’s on duty,” said Phoebe. “He’s a seeing-eye monkey. This kid comes with him.”
The sand inside Julie’s bathing suit nipped her rear like fleas. No miracles, Pop kept saying. They’d take her away.
“An ape, not a monkey,” the boy insisted. His hair was the color of boiled carrots. Freckles spattered his round face. Sunken and forever twitching, his eyes were like newborn gerbils living in his head. “A chimpanzee.”
Cure him, Mr. Wyvern had said. Your mother wants you to. Your mother whose best friend would never lie to you…
“Sorry,” said Phoebe. “Julie, this is Arnold.”
“Arnold?” said Julie. “I thought it was Timothy.” Not the right blind boy? She was off the hook?
“I’m Timothy,” he said. “My chimp’s Arnold.”
The ape stank. The sun was sickeningly hot.
“How’d you know his name was Timothy?” asked Phoebe.
“Yeah—how?” asked Timothy.
“Lucky guess.”
“We’re about to blow up a castle,” Phoebe announced proudly. “Roman candles, cherry bombs.”
“Wish I could see fireworks,” said Timothy. “They sound so strange, all fat and mad.”
No miracles. Her mother wanted Timothy to see. They’d take her away. Her mother wanted…if Timothy got his new eyes, would her mother finally show up? Descend from heaven on a shining cloud, her arms jammed with strange and wonderful birthday presents for Julie from every planet in the universe?
Julie glanced toward Central Pier. The nurse still slept.
A miracle, Julie knew, took more than thinking. You needed objects. Stuff. To resurrect a dead crab, you poked him with your crayons. To cure the blind…
She removed a plug of sand from the main tower and, spitting on it, pushed it against the boy’s left eyelid. Arnold squealed. Timothy drew back. “Hold still!” The boy froze. A soft buzz traveled out of her fingertips and looped around the dead eye.