by James Morrow
Lurching onto Sea Spray Road, she stopped dead and, like Orpheus taking his fateful glance, looked behind her. No one—no carapaced soldiers or Revelationist crazies, no Nick Shiner vigilantes. The streets were silent. The surf purred. Moving forward, she soothed herself with Phoebe’s favorite song.
“On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, we will walk in a dream. On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and cream…”
At the Sandy Drive intersection an upright sarcophagus loomed, a sparkling glass cylinder labeled NEW JERUSALEM TELEPHONE SYSTEM. As Julie approached, the tube split open like a breakfast egg and a cloying female voice spilled into her ear. “Enter, please.”
She did. The tube healed itself.
“Jesus is coming—please state your calling card number.”
“I want my friends! I don’t want to be shot at! I want Phoebe and Bix and Aunt Georgina!”
“Please state your calling card number,” said the disembodied woman.
The future, 2012. Forget wires, mouthpieces, headphones; simply talk. “I don’t have a calling card number.”
“Is this a collect call?”
“Right—collect. I need to reach Phoebe Sparks.”
“In the Greater New Jerusalem area?”
Julie studied the fog for armed zealots. “Give it a try.”
The voice had no Phoebe Sparks in its data bank. No Georgina Sparks, no Bix Constantine. Julie inquired after herself. Nothing. Numb with frustration, she asked about Melanie Markson, and, miraculously, a Melanie Markson lived in Longport. A pause, then: Melanie’s dignified voice, asserting that of course she’d accept a collect call from Julie Katz.
“Hey, is that really you? You?” Melanie’s normally staid enunciation was joyful, gasping. “I can’t believe it. Sheila, you’ve come back!”
“I’m Julie—forget that Sheila stuff. What the hell’s going on around here? I was just at Angel’s Eye, and they tried to shoot me.”
“They thought you were a heretic.”
“Huh? Me?”
“To your disciples that place is holy ground, so the hunters use it as bait.”
“My what? Disciples?”
“I’m definitely one of them, Sheila. You can count on me. I’m only a Revelationist on paper.”
“The bastards stole my house!” Julie stomped her bare foot on the phone-booth floor. Her wounded cheek throbbed. Disciples? Holy ground? “I have to find Phoebe,” she insisted, staring into the blackness. Pieces of fog hung in the night air like cataracts on an aging eye. “Phoebe needs me.”
“’Fraid I lost touch with Phoebe years ago.”
“Melanie, can I stay with you tonight? I’m a little disoriented.”
“Stay with me? I’d be honored. Have you eaten? I’ll broil you a steak. Where are you?”
“Brigantine.”
“I’ll pick you up. Curfew’s not for another hour. Oh, Sheila, there’s so much you can do for us, there’s so amazingly much you can do.”
Portly as ever, Melanie had through astute applications of makeup wholly defeated the last fifteen years. Her rotund features were youthful and vivid. “So here I am,” she gushed, nervously ensnaring her fingers in her brightly dyed, pumpkin-colored hair, “talking to Sheila in my own living room.” Julie could remember when Melanie used to call the cosmetics industry a boot stamping on women’s faces everywhere. “Incredible,” said Melanie. “Just incredible.”
Smiling wearily, her stomach burbling with porterhouse steak, Julie stretched across the corpulent velvet couch. Melanie’s BMW had been classy enough, but her Longport condominium was truly spectacular, a twelve-room extravaganza reminiscent of Julie’s mansion below. “Looks like the Disney people are paying you pretty well.”
“Not the Disney people,” Melanie answered, face reddening under her makeup. “The Revelationists.” She rose from her imported Sears and Roebuck ottoman and, gliding toward a wall of books, took down a stack of oblong volumes. “Sure, this isn’t the stuff I want to be writing, but who can resist a thousand mammons for a week’s work?”
Julie wrapped herself tighter in Melanie’s white terrycloth bathrobe. The topmost book, Ralph and Amy Get Baptized, showed two adolescents immersed to their shoulders in a clear shimmering river. Underneath lay Ralph and Amy Visit Heaven. Julie flipped back the cover—the title characters scampering toward a mountainous, multiturreted city—and turned to page one.
Imagine a meadow with grasses of silk,
Imagine a river with waters of milk,
Imagine a rainbow as big as the skies,
Imagine a city where nobody dies…
“Most every kid in the country owns a set,” Melanie explained. “Rather hefty royalties, I’ll admit. Hey, listen, I’ll chuck the whole career if you want. Just say the word. Yours is the church for me, Sheila—the only one.” Contemptuously she squeezed the crucified lamb on her necklace. Her jowly face twitched with anxiety. “Okay, okay, maybe I’m not as devout as some, maybe I haven’t been hearing your voice, maybe I let those Revelationist idiots baptize me and convince me not to sleep with women and everything, but believe me, I’m with you all the way.”
“Church?” Julie tugged the gauze bandage on her cheek. “I’ve got a whole church?”
“Honestly, I’m an Uncertaintist down to my toes. Sometimes I drive clear to Camden just to hear Father Paradox. Oh, yes.”
Julie fixed on the dust jacket of My First Book About Eternal Damnation: a Satanic hare leering at a frightened bunny. “Melanie, I’m confused. Right before leaving, I drove the Revelationists into the sea. And now they’re—”
“You certainly did, Sheila, and they stayed away for months. Months. When they came back, they were a much subtler bunch—didn’t burn anything, not one building. Eventually, of course, Milk got himself elected mayor, then—”
“Mayor? Milk’s the mayor? But he’s a maniac and a butcher.”
Melanie grinned sheepishly, as if embarrassed by history’s unlikely turns. “Within a year, just about every apocalyptist east of the Mississippi was living here. It became a wholly Revelationist state—the secession was something of a formality. For a while there was talk of an invasion from across the Delaware, but after Vietnam and Nicaragua I guess the Pentagon was pretty sick of ambiguous little wars. Fact is, the U.S. State Department likes the idea of a right-wing terrorist theocracy along America’s eastern border. Keeps New York in line—they wish they’d thought of it themselves.” Melanie acquired an uncanny expression, a kind of diffident Machiavellianism, the mien of a shy country parson accepting an invitation to rule the world. “Hey, I want to suggest something. Know what tomorrow is? It’s the Sabbath—not the Jewish Sabbath, Milk’s—it’s the Sabbath, and I suggest we go to church. Your church.”
Julie wrapped her palms around her coffee mug. A wonderful little stove, but the warmth failed to reach her heart. She had a church. It was like hearing: you have cancer. And yet, and yet…she must go. It was all a mistake, she’d tell these Uncertaintists. I was tricked. Cut this heresy crap and get yourselves baptized.
“Your church needs you.” Melanie gritted her teeth and smiled. “Nobody knows who’ll be caught next.”
“I’ll go with you tomorrow, Melanie, happy to, but I can’t stop these heretic hunters. I gave up my divinity.”
“We’re scared all the time, Sheila. We’re…you what?”
“I’m not divine.”
The smile vanished, the gritted teeth remained. “I don’t understand.”
“True, Melanie. No more powers.” Good or bad? “It was the only way I could get home.”
“I see,” said Melanie icily. “Fine. But once you realize what’s been going on around here, how trapped we are…”
“My old life is behind me.”
“Your powers will come back. I know they will. Try, Sheila. You have to try.”
The traffic in Margate and Ventnor was lethargic and expensive, wave after wave of Revelationist clergy heading for work in
their imported Cadillacs, Mercedes, and Lincolns. Slowly Melanie drove Julie past New Jerusalem’s gem-studded walls; past pearly gates where ten years earlier had stood the Golden Nugget and the Tropicana; past a gleaming monorail train gliding soundlessly over the ramparts, hugging the groove like a caterpillar moving along a twig. They headed west. A thirty-story building labeled ROOMS AT THE INN loomed above the salt marsh. At the entrance to the New Jerusalem Expressway, churchgoers swarmed around a mammoth cathedral that looked like a spaceship designed to ferry Renaissance princes to Alpha Centauri. A mile down the highway, nestled between two vast oil refineries, a public garden called GETHSEMANE PARK glowed under the rising sun, waiting to receive Sunday strollers.
At the Pomona exit, the bones began.
Everywhere: bones. “God,” Julie gasped. Bones. “Sweet Jesus.”
The columns stretched for miles, an army of grim reapers dangling from power lines, telephone poles, lampposts, cattle fences, and billboards, lining both sides of the expressway like defoliated trees—skeleton after skeleton, grinning skull after grinning skull, but each bone blackened, soot-painted, as if the world had become its own photographic negative.
“This is news to you?” Melanie asked.
“It’s…yes. News. God.”
Crows perched on craniums and shoulder blades, pecking out marrow. Around each fleshless neck, a wooden plaque swayed like a price tag.
“Public executions,” sighed Melanie. “Very popular.”
“You mean they were burned alive?”
“Alive. In the Circus.” Melanie’s tone hovered between bitterness and resignation. “Always douse the fire before it reaches the bones,” she lectured. “Otherwise you end up with a lot of ashes, and the message gets lost.”
“The message?”
“Don’t be a heretic. Don’t sin.”
Julie’s heart felt uprooted, a wild muscle caroming around inside her chest. “Do Americans know about this? Does their government know? The United Nations? Somebody’s got to intervene.”
“They know,” said Melanie, nodding. “But there won’t be any interventions, Sheila, not while Trenton’s such a bulwark against socialism.”
The skeletons glided by like the resurrected dead rushing toward their Judgment Day appointments with God. “Are they all my”—the word stuck in Julie’s throat like a sliver of bone—“disciples?”
“About a third. The rest are murderers, homosexuals, zotz dealers, Jews, Catholics, and so on. Only Uncertaintists go to the stake willingly, though.”
“Willingly?”
“Some of us do. Not many. You talk to us, and we go.”
“I don’t talk to you.”
“We hear you, Sheila. Not me, I’m afraid, but some of us.”
As Melanie eased into the slow lane, the skeletons’ marathon became a more stately procession, and Julie could read the plaques. Below each victim’s name—Donald Torr, Mary Benedict, James Ryan, Linda Rabinovich, a thousand names, two thousand—a single word explained his presence. Heresy, Heresy, Adultery, Blasphemy—the convictions fused into a terse poem—Heresy, Perversion, Theft, Murder, Socialism, Coveting, Heresy, Heresy, Sodomy, False Witness, Heresy, Adultery, Zotz Dealing, Blasphemy, Heresy…
At the Hammonton exit, Melanie pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. “Something you should see…”
“Hey, things are really over the edge these days,” Julie protested. “I get it. Entirely demented. If I were still a deity, I’d put Milk out of business. I don’t need—”
“You do need. Excuse me, Sheila, but you do.”
Squeezing her burned palm, pouring her outrage into the gummy tissue, Julie followed Melanie to a quartet of skeletons chained to an old Trump Castle billboard. Armored in green, a chubby police corporal approached, moving past the ranks of sinners like a wolf on the prowl, crows scattering before him.
“He wants to make sure we aren’t stealing relics,” Melanie muttered. “Your followers do that sometimes.”
“Will he arrest us?”
“Us? We’re just two old-fashioned gals on their way to a Revelationist service.”
Thanks to Melanie, they looked the part. Melanie sported a dress suggesting an immense doily, Julie a maroon silk blouse and a white dirndl skirt splashed with yellow; silver lambs hung from their necks, and they both wore what Melanie called optimal makeup: enough to suggest they valued their femininity, not so much to suggest they enjoyed it.
Pointing his assault rifle downward in a conscious gesture of hospitality, the corporal greeted them in a slow, sandpaper voice. “Morning, ladies.” He swept his arm across the black forest. “When Jesus comes, it’ll be just like this, only a million times greater. Armageddon. Amazing.”
Julie glanced at the nearest skeleton: a broad feminine pelvis, the gnawed bones sewn together with piano wire.
“Let’s go, honey.” Melanie poked Julie’s shoulder as if operating a telegraph key. “We’ll miss the sermon.”
A hole formed in the pit of Julie’s stomach, a tunnel plunging straight to hell.
Bored, the corporal drifted out of hearing range, leaving Julie free to weep and bleed and die.
Aunt Georgina’s plaque proclaimed two convictions. Perversion: no surprise. Heresy: why? Oh, God, oh, no, Georgina, no, no. Julie ran her finger along a blackened rib, revealing the whiteness beneath. Did you go out cursing them, old aunt? Did you spit in their faces? I know you did.
“I always liked her,” said Melanie. “She was a real good mother to Phoebe.”
“You should’ve warned me,” Julie croaked.
“I’m sorry.” Melanie glanced toward the retreating corporal. “We need you. You can see that now, right?”
“This isn’t fair, Melanie!”
“I know. We need you.”
“This isn’t fucking fair!”
She tried reconstructing her honorary aunt atop the bones—the sprightly hands, narrow laughing face, quick spidery walk. But a skeleton was a house, not a home; whatever relationship this matrix bore to the vanished events called Georgina, it was too obscure to matter.
“Phoebe know?”
Melanie shrugged. “Didn’t see her in the Circus that day. She’d probably left Jersey years before.”
Julie brushed her aunt’s plaque. “Heresy, it says.”
“They kept asking her to convert, and she kept saying she already had a religion—she said she worshiped the Spirit of Absolute Being. Once they even brought her to the sacred canal to try baptizing her. You know what she did?”
“What?”
“She peed in it. Georgina died well, Sheila. She didn’t beg for mercy till the flames came.”
The faith and funding by which Atlantic City had been upgraded to New Jerusalem had not yet reached Camden, which still retained the blasted, bombed-out look Julie remembered from routinely crossing its southern tip on her way to college. As they approached the Walt Whitman Bridge, she looked toward America. Brick walls, watchtowers, and high spirals of barbed wire flourished along the Jersey side of the Delaware, a metallic jungle, thick and bristling like the seedy Eden that Wyvern was cultivating below.
Declining the bridge, they took the Mickle Boulevard exit and looped east into the city’s bleak, rubbled heart. Broken glass paved the streets. Dandelions sprouted everywhere, nature’s shock troops, invading the empty lots, fracturing the sidewalks. Melanie pulled over, aligning her BMW between two parking meters with cracked visors and scoliotic shafts.
“Don’t tell them who I am.” Julie grabbed Melanie’s lacy sleeve as they walked to the Front Street intersection. “I’ll reveal myself when I’m ready.” They stopped before an ancient saloon, the Irish Tavern, as tightly sealed as a crypt, with boarded-up windows and a cluster of padlocks on the door. Cold Beer to Go, said a shattered neon sign. Melanie opened the adjacent wooden gate and started into the trash-infested alley. “Promise you won’t tell,” Julie insisted.
“Promise,” Melanie mumbled. She pounded on the side d
oor, a riveted metal slab, and called “Moon rising” in a high, urgent whisper.
Nervous eyes flickered in the diamond-shaped window, and seconds later the door opened to reveal a young woman in a billowy white dress hung with ribbons and frills. She was remarkably thin, a kind of inverse fertility doll, a totem fashioned to foster population control. “Moon rising.”
Melanie tossed Julie an anxious glance. “Moon rising,” Julie responded, stepping cautiously forward.
The thin woman led them through the murky saloon, its air stale, its furniture sheeted like corpses waiting to be autopsied. They descended the basement stairs, then the subbasement stairs, eventually landing in a cavernous room, a major intersection of Camden’s sewer system, its curving brick walls crisscrossed by ducts and cables, a network that Julie imagined shunting away the city’s undercurrents—its septic blood and unclean thoughts. A swift, malodorous creek gurgled across the floor, spanned by wooden planks on which the Uncertaintists had erected a half-dozen pews, several random chairs, and a lectern plus accompanying altar. Melanie slipped into an unoccupied pew near the back, Julie right behind. Brass candlesticks shaped like lighthouses paraded along the altar, capped by squat white candles. Behind the lectern, a banner proclaimed Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation, ΔχΔρ≥h/4πς. Two outsized paperback books rose from the rack before Julie, their white covers emblazoned with computer-generated Old English script. Passing over the Hymnal, Julie opened a Word of Sheila. Each page reproduced a “Heaven Help You” column. Her eye caught one of the few replies Aunt Georgina had liked—Sheila giving tax advice to a coven of witches in Palo Alto.
Oh, Georgina, Georgina, how could Georgina be dead?
The skinny Uncertaintist who’d greeted them glided toward the altar and, turning, addressed the heretics. “Number thirty-one.” The congregation, a hundred spiffily dressed men and women, lurched forward like bus passengers reacting to a sudden stop, snatching up their hymnals.