by James Morrow
A cuttlefish drifts by, its tentacles undulating in sleepy, antique rhythms.
People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like? What sort of God stuffs her only daughter into a bell jar like so much pickled herring and dumps her on the earth with no clues to her mission? What sort of God continues to ignore that same daughter even after she cures a blind boy exactly as instructed? Seven whole years since the Timothy miracle, and while nobody has taken you away, no mothers have shown up either.
You will never forget the night you confessed. “Three summers ago I did something really bad. I gave a kid eyes.”
“You what?” your father moaned, his jaw dropping open.
“God wanted me to, I thought.”
“She made you do it? Has she been talking to you?”
“It was just an idea I got. Please don’t slap me.”
He did not slap you. He said, firmly, “We’ll get this out of your system once and for all,” and hustled you into the Saab.
“Get what out of my system?”
“You’ll see.” He drove you over the bridge into Atlantic City.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out.”
“Where?”
“To visit my friend from the fire station.”
Pop’s fire station buddies, you knew, used to draw out his blood for your ectogenesis machine. “Mr. Balthazar? Mr. Caspar?”
“Herb Melchior. So how did it feel, fixing that boy?”
I think I had an orgasm, you wanted to say. “Pretty good.”
“I thought I could trust you.”
“You can trust me.”
He pulled into the parking lot at Atlantic City Memorial Hospital. Mr. Melchior, you remembered, had lung cancer.
Pop was calmer now. “We’ll leave if you want.”
You were supposed to say yes, let’s leave, but his remark about trust had really pissed you. “No.”
The two of you rode the elevator six flights to the cancer ward. You marched past the nurses’ station, entered the hellish corridor. Trench warfare, you decided, the view behind the lines—orderlies bustling about, victims gasping on gurneys, IV bottles drooping like disembodied organs. Pain prospered everywhere, seeping through the walls, darkening the air like swarms of hornets. “Why me?” a young, spindly black man asked quite distinctly as his mother guided him toward the visitors’ lounge. “Why can’t I get warm?” He tightened his bathrobe around his tubular chest.
“Pop, this is mean.”
“I know. I love you.” He led you to Room 618. “Ready to start?”
You steadied yourself on the open jamb. Beyond, two cancer-ridden men trembled atop their beds.
“As long as we’re here, we can also try Herb’s roommate,” said Pop. “Hodgkin’s disease.” Heart stuttering, stomach quaking, you took a small step backward. “And then, of course, there’s Room Six Nineteen. And Six Twenty. And Six Twenty-one. On Saturday we’ll drive to Philadelphia—lots of hospitals. Next week we’ll do New York.”
“New York?” You were adrift on an iceberg, rudderless, freezing.
“Then Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta. You didn’t make the world, Julie. It’s not your responsibility to clean it up.”
Another reverse step. “But—”
Seizing your hand, Pop guided you into the visitors’ lounge. The black man’s mother had swathed him in a blanket; together they shivered and wept. “Honey, you’ve got a choice.” Your father and you flopped down on the death-scented Naugahyde. Hairless patients stared at the walls. “Take the high road, and you’ll be trapped and miserable.” On the television, a game show contestant won a trip to Spain. “Take the low, and you’ll have a life.”
“How can it be wrong to cure people?”
White anger shot across Pop’s face. “All right, all right,” he growled, voice rising. “If you’re going to be stubborn…!” From his wallet he removed a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle like a slice of stale cheese. “Listen, Julie, I don’t want to worry you, it might not mean anything—but look, the minute I carried you out of that clinic, somebody blew the place up.”
BABY BANK ABORTED, ran the headline. “Huh? Bombed it?” Bile climbed into your throat. “You mean, they wanted to…?”
“Probably just a coincidence.”
“Who’d want to kill me?”
“Nobody. All I’m saying is, we can’t be too cautious. If God expected you to show yourself, she’d come out and say so.”
That was years ago, eighth grade—since which time your divinity has remained wholly under control, your urge toward intervention completely in check.
Baby bank aborted. Bombed. Blown off the face of the earth like Castle Boadicea.
Reveling in your one permitted miracle, you draw a large helping of oxygen from the bay. As a gill owner, you’ll never experience the great, glorious breath a pearl diver takes on surfacing, but you’re determined to know the rest of it, everything bone and tissue offer. If your Catholic boyfriend is right, God subscribes to a spare, unequivocal ethic: body bad, soul good; flesh false, spirit true. And so in defiance you’ve become a flesh lover. You’ve become a woman of the world. Not a hedonist like Phoebe, but an epicure: it is always in homage to flesh that you devour pepperoni pizza, drink Diet Coke, admit Roger Worth’s tongue to your mouth, and savor your own briny smell while playing basketball for the Brigantine High Tigerettes. Take that, Mother. So there, Mother.
Flesh is the best revenge.
As you swim into the cave, a small cloud of blood drifts from between your thighs, quickly stoppered by water pressure. You will give credit where due. The body in which God has marooned you is the real thing, all functions intact.
Your petting zoo is defunct. Starfish, flounder, crab, lobster—all gone. Only Amanda the sponge remains, sitting in a clump of seaweed like a melancholy pumice. Thanks to Mr. Parker’s biology class, you know she is a Microciona prolifera, common to estuaries along the North American coast.
—Where’s everybody gone? you ask.
—Dead, Amanda replies. Sickness, old age, pollution. I alone have escaped. Immortality, it’s my sole claim to fame. Hack me apart, and each piece regenerates.
—I’m probably immortal too.
—You don’t look it, Julie.
—God wants me to live forever.
—Perhaps, broadcasts the sponge.
—She does.
—Maybe.
Using your feet like hoes, you furrow the sandy floor, upending stones, overturning shells, uncovering…there, beside your heel, the skeleton you first spotted at age ten. Tornadoes of sand swirl upward as, with a sudden karate chop, you behead it.
You snug the skull against your chest and float toward the filtered sunlight. How you love having a body, even a blobby one; you love your caramel skin, opulent hair, slightly asymmetrical breasts, throbbing gills. Too bad, Mother. Menstrual blood encircling you like an aura, you bid Amanda good-bye, push off from the bay bottom, and ascend through a hundred feet of salt water.
Fresh water gushed from the shower nozzle, washing away the sweat of the game but not its humiliation. Julie had played well, sinking all her free throws and chalking up fifteen points, six rebounds, and seven assists. She had stolen the ball four times. Useless. The Lucky Dogs of Atlantic City High had walked all over the Brigantine Tigerettes, 69 to 51.
She shut off the water and crept out of the shower, the most miserable point guard in the entire division.
Eerie silence reigned in the locker room. At Brigantine High, defeats were not discussed. Toweling off, she rehearsed what she intended to say to Phoebe. “Yes, of course I can score anytime, sink the damn ball from midcourt if I want. Don’t tell me what to do with my life, Sparks.”
“I’m not telling you what to do with your life,” Phoebe insisted the next day. “I’m simply saying you’re an outside shooter—you wouldn’t have to get physical, nobody’d suspect anyth
ing supernatural.” They wove through the clattering cafeteria, found a table, slammed down their trays. “If the point spread stays under twelve at the Saint Basil’s game, I’ll walk away with sixty dollars. Naturally I’ll go halves with you.”
Surveying the food, Julie winced. Why did she have to work so hard at maintaining a half-decent figure while Phoebe lived on sugar and never gained a pound or grew a zit? “I’m not throwing a game just so you can make thirty dollars.”
“You throw a game when you lose it, not when you win it.” Phoebe shoved lemon meringue pie into her mouth. “Hey, you think it’s easy being your friend, Katz? You think I’m at peace about it? I mean, here you come ripping into the world like Grant took Richmond, and you’ve got these damn powers, and some sort of God exists, and I have to keep quiet. It’s driving me absolutely nuts. Mom too.”
“Be patient. My mission’s not worked out yet.”
“I am patient.” Phoebe devoured a doughnut. “Hey, did I ever ask you for help with my shitty grades? When my cousin got knocked up, did I ask you to fix it?”
Julie’s face grew hot. “There’re lots of things you never asked me to do.” She pointed across the cafeteria to Catherine Tyboch, her stocky body suspended on crutches. “You never asked me to make Tyboch walk. You never asked me to cure Lizzie’s anorexia.”
“I was getting to them.”
“I’m sure you were.”
“Let’s face it, buddy, running up and down a basketball court isn’t exactly fulfilling your potential.”
Vengefully Julie forked a hunk of Phoebe’s pie and ate it. “There’s a room in my house you’ve never seen.”
“Where you and Roger hump? Hope you take precautions. Like Mom says, ‘His bird in your hand is worth two in your bush.’”
Phoebe’s genius for sex did not surprise Julie. Phoebe’s face was gorgeous, her shape lithe, her dark skin creamy and iridescent. Typically, God had given better flesh to Phoebe than to her own daughter. “Roger and I don’t do that. He worships me.”
Phoebe giggled. “Worships the water you walk on.” She ate a brownie the color of her skin. “Really, can’t you do better than Roger? I mean, isn’t he sort of boring, isn’t he sort of a prude? You’re smart, friendly, got nice boobers, and score twelve points a game. Not like me with my F in math and these acorns for tits. Why waste yourself on Roger?”
“He’s a good Catholic. I need that. It helps me.”
“Helps you to love your mother?”
“Helps me to stop hating her.”
“You shouldn’t hate your mother, Katz.”
“I hate her.”
“What room?”
Her temple, Julie called it. Once it was the Angel’s Eye guest room, now the place that kept her sane. The project had begun modestly, nothing but a few tragic stories clipped from Time and the Atlantic City Press and pasted in a scrapbook. But soon it spread to the walls, then to the ceiling and floor, until all six inside surfaces positively dripped with humanity’s suffering, with earthquakes, droughts, floods, fires, diseases, deformities, addictions, car crashes, train wrecks, race riots, massacres, thermonuclear bomb tests.
Was all this really essential? Pop had wanted to know.
It would keep her off the high road, Julie had explained.
He never questioned the project again.
“Impressive,” said Phoebe, surveying the collages on the afternoon following the Lucky Dogs game, “but what’s the point?”
Julie approached the altar, a former card table on which two brass candlesticks, thick and ornate as clarinets, flanked the sailor’s skull she’d recently taken from the bay. “Right before bed, I spend twenty minutes in this place. Then I can sleep.”
“You mean you simply sit here, staring at everybody’s pain? All you do is look at it?”
“Uh-huh. Just like God.”
“That’s sick.”
Julie lifted the skull, holding it as if about to make a free throw. “My mother could’ve saved this sailor. She didn’t.”
“Maybe she has her reasons.”
“Maybe I have mine.” Julie stretched out her arm, extended her index finger. Slowly she turned, three hundred and sixty degrees, then another rotation, another…“Look, Phoebe, it never stops. Round and round—forever!”
“You got pollution?” Phoebe caressed the scabby door, pausing atop a photo of a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums sitting in a landfill like unexploded bombs, oozing pink poison. “Oh, I see…”
“I mean, where do I even begin?”
“Great place to do drugs.” Phoebe’s laugh was high and uneasy, like the yip of a dog barking on command. “There’s plenty of it, I’ll give you that.”
“A girl could spend every waking minute performing miracles…”
“And not scratch the surface,” mused Phoebe. “Shit, here’s a tough one.” She punched a People magazine clipping. A four-year-old boy with spina bifida had undergone sixteen separate operations and then died. “I’ve been giving you a hard time lately.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sorry, Katz.”
“You should be.”
“Sometimes I get jealous of you. That’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“My life’s no picnic.” Julie slumped to the floor, eyes locked on an Ethiopian infant’s bloated belly and matchstick legs. “Remember when we snuck into that hotel? I don’t want there to be famines or poverty, Phoebe, just beer and Tastykake and you.”
“Oh, my poor little goddess.” Dropping, Phoebe gave Julie a magnificent kiss, wet and tasty as a slice of watermelon, right on the lips. “You’re under a curse, aren’t you? You’re all torn apart.”
Phoebe, dear Phoebe: she understood. “I can’t win,” Julie moaned. “If only I could be just one way, caterpillar or butterfly, one or the other. My mother never says a word to me. I know I’m supposed to have some amazingly beautiful and earth-shaking purpose, but God won’t talk. She won’t say if there’s a heaven, or whether I’ll die, or anything.”
“You’ll always love me, won’t you?” The second kiss was even juicier than the first. “Wherever you go, you’ll take me with you?”
“Always,” said Julie, thinking intently about her friend’s lips.
No local theater was showing the double bill Roger wanted to see, Ten Thousand Psychotics followed by The Garden of Unearthly Delights, so they went all the way to the Route 52 Cinema in Somers Point. It was an unusually passionate Roger who sat next to Julie, comforting her during the zombie attacks, feeling her up during the sex scenes. “He made me promise not to tell,” Phoebe had revealed earlier that day, “but I will anyway, that’s what friends are for. Sin no longer exists for Roger. God, Satan, hell—gone with the tooth fairy. In short, if you’re ready to become a girl with a past, he’s ready to give you one.”
Phoebe’s date for the evening, Lucius Bogenrief, had the complexion of strawberry yogurt and the smell and general contours of a submarine sandwich, but he also had Ramblin’ Girl, his family’s Winnebago, a kind of terrestrial yacht complete with kitchenette, bar, and private bedroom. As the four of them ambled into the lobby after the show, Lucius drew out his keys and ceremoniously presented them to Phoebe. “Your pilot for this evening is Captain Sparks.”
“Some people will give anything for a properly done blow-job,” Phoebe explained, winking. “The whole sixty-nine yards, eh?”
Roger cringed and pretended to study the poster for Ten Thousand Psychotics. Julie felt ice in her gills. Phoebe driving? The point of the evening was to experience sex, not to die.
They piled into the Winnebago, Lucius taking the passenger seat, Phoebe grasping the steering wheel as she might the handlebar on a roller coaster. Nuzzling like newborn puppies, Julie and Roger slipped behind the kitchenette table. “It’s like a clubhouse,” she noted excitedly.
“I used to have a treehouse,” said Roger. “It blew out of the tree.”
Julie did not really understand Roger’s interest in her, unless his Catho
lic instincts told him who she was. He ran the student council, edited the school paper, and looked remarkably like the portrait of an extremely handsome Jesus hanging in Phoebe’s old catechism class. His only defect—as Phoebe would have it, his only virtue—was his fascination with the grotesque, particularly monster movies and Stephen King novels, enthusiasms Julie attributed to the way the pre-Vatican II hell, so gaudy and voluptuous in its horrors, had captured his childhood imagination.
Phoebe lifted the microphone from the dashboard. “This is your captain speaking.” Her amplified voice rattled around the van like a marble in a vase. “The party begins at midnight.”
“Party,” echoed Roger, sounding half thrilled, half terrified. “Great.”
Predictably, Ramblin’ Girl brought out the worst in Phoebe. “Christ!” Julie screamed as the Winnebago rocketed away from the Route 52 Cinema. “Not so fast!”
They plunged down Shore Road as if Phoebe had a large bet riding on her getting a speeding ticket. New Jersey rushed by—its shabby farms, grubby refineries, garish billboards exhorting you to win big at Caesar’s and the Golden Nugget. The Winnebago rattled like a treehouse in a hurricane.
“Was anybody in the treehouse?” Julie asked.
“I was,” said Roger. “It’s a miracle I survived.”
That explained a lot, Julie figured. Nothing like a brush with death to make somebody a good Catholic.
“Ah, hah!” shouted Phoebe, swerving into the parking lot of Somers Point High School. It didn’t matter that none of them went here; they were all in the vast travel club called adolescence, and the parking lot was theirs, as friendly and inviting as a country inn. Phoebe guided Ramblin’ Girl toward an unlighted area, killed the motor. Julie laughed, kissed Roger’s cheek. Mangy basketball nets, twisted bicycle racks, gallowslike lamps—yes, they belonged.
Lucius and Phoebe joined them in the kitchenette, pulling bottles from the liquor cabinet. The labels fascinated Julie—Cutty Sark, Dewar’s, Beefeater—each logo dense with staid print and Anglo-Saxon dignity, as if alcohol were really a type of literary criticism and not a leading cause of traffic fatalities and brain rot. Phoebe mixed the drinks, starting with her own rum and Coke, then doing Lucius’s vodka and tonic. Julie’s affection for liquor hadn’t increased one jot since she and Phoebe had guzzled beer in the doomed Deauville, but she agreed to try a “Black Russian,” which definitely sounded like something her mother wouldn’t want her to have.