by James Morrow
“What ails you?” asks Anthrax, surveying the archipelago of puke.
“Katz,” Wyvern mutters, mouth burning with beneficence. What uncanny umbilicus now binds him to his enemy, what infernal thread? That woman with her smarmy lines, Let him among you who is without sin…Her pretentious moves: holding the vigilantes at bay with a wad of pebbles, cradling her friend’s vomit, seizing her friend’s dynamite, giving out soup. Katz with her Corning insulation.
“What about her?”
“The bitch has been busy.”
“But she got caught.” Spawned by a leprous tongue, rolling past rotten teeth, Anthrax’s tones are nonetheless soothing. “Milk will put her in the Circus.”
“Not necessarily. Not without some encouragement from us. How long till we’re in Jersey?”
“A month. Relax, sir. She hasn’t got a prayer.”
“In my experience,” Wyvern explains, drawing his hand across his seared and pulpy lips, “you can never rely on Christianity. I was positive they’d torture Galileo to death, absolutely certain. Remember my bet with Augustine?”
“You lost quite a lot as I recall.”
“A trillion lira, Anthrax. A cool trillion.”
The New Jersey National Dungeon was a kind of underground wasp’s nest, a conglomeration of passageways and cells imprisoning its population less through stone than through confusion: the illogic of its twists, the perversity of its turns. Bars of psychic chaos bound the prisoners. Shackles of entropy held them fast.
It was, on balance, a modern place. It belonged to its century. Argon lighting, solar heating, centralized air conditioning. Crystal-eyed androids tore out the papists’ fingernails. Computerized racks elongated the homosexuals’ bodies. Fusion reactors heated the tongs that seared the Uncertaintists until they renounced their ignorance and begged admittance to the True Church. Only at the bottommost stratum, the level where they placed Julie Katz, did a certain medievalism prevail.
Every day her cell—Cell 19—seemed to shrink, its wet walls pressing closer and closer as if wired to the haunted brain of Edgar Allan Poe. She knew her companions by name. Bix Rat, that mobile ball of fur. Phoebe Rat, skinny and assertive, her nose ever twitching. And the runty one, wide-eyed, his pelt like a kitten’s: according to Julie’s calculations the birth had happened last week, Little Murray Sparks, barging out of Phoebe, squalling and gurgling.
Even as Julie drew into herself, she sensed her fame spreading throughout the republic. Hour after hour, Jersey’s cable-television screens crackled with Sheila stories. For over four months, the good news had commanded the front page of the New Jerusalem Times, SHEILA CAPTURED…SHEILA IMPRISONED…TRIAL IMMINENT…SECOND COMING CERTAIN. Church bells pealed in celebration; Inquisition patrol boats fired their cannons in joy. TRIAL IMMINENT: an old story, Julie realized—Christ before Pilate, Joan before the French priests. Burn, heretic, burn. She dreamed each night of drowning in blood; she awoke drenched in sweat, her straw pallet smelling like Absecon Inlet. Her fear was like the cranberry bog in which she’d awakened after her depotheosis, a bed of stinking slime. She suffered headaches, stomachaches, spastic bowels.
Keys clattering like a slot machine paying off in the vanished Tropicana, Oliver Horrocks entered. Julie did not hate her jailor. She almost liked him. He was a former “Heaven Help You” reader whose Revelationism was much shakier than his employers suspected. He simply couldn’t decide about Julie, on some days holding her responsible for all of Jersey’s ills, from its bread lines to its failed Parousia, on other days smuggling her Tastykake Krumpets.
“Ugh,” Oliver Horrocks said, noticing the convocation of rats. “Here we are, the cleanest city on earth, and…rats. They dug too deep, that’s the problem. You put your dungeon this low, you get rats.” He was a kind of male crone, bent and birdish, his thin face laced with blood vessels. “Whoever you are, you don’t deserve rats. Let’s go.”
Julie’s phantom thumb itched. “Go where?”
“Not supposed to tell you.” He leaned toward her as if to keep the vermin from hearing and, brushing the sleeve of her zebra-striped pajamas, whispered, “I will say this. They’d rather convert you than burn you. These aren’t bad people I work for. Talk to them. They’ll listen.”
Together they ascended, following the corkscrew staircases, the raked tunnels, the wildly tilted passageways, every wall wrinkled and damp like an esophagus, at last breaking into the dazzling day.
Although Jesus had only once in his life asked why God had forsaken him, Julie now found herself voicing the question over and over, mumbling it as she and Horrocks walked gold-plated avenues jammed with merry children, whispering it as they crossed the sacred river, circumvented the Pool of Siloam, and passed a row of trim little boutiques. Immaculate streets, antiseptic sidewalks, pristine gutters: Billy Milk had done what the Mafia could not. His regime had scrubbed Atlantic City clean, lifted the old harlot’s face, killed her fleas. In the spotless front window of the New Jerusalem Toy Store, a pretty teenage girl arranged a Pro-Life Talking Embryo, a Sodom and Gomorrah Playset, and a display rack of Melanie Markson’s books. At one time, Julie realized, Smitty’s Smile Shop had occupied this same location. It was as if the store had been reincarnated on a higher plane; no squirting carnations or pornographic salt shakers here, not a single whoopie cushion.
They crossed Parousia Plaza and entered a building resembling an immense cinder block, then followed a hallway hung with tapestries depicting what Julie took to be great moments in biblical jurisprudence. Elijah beheading the prophets of Baal…Gideon shredding the elders of Succoth…the children who mocked Elisha being torn apart by bears…Jael nailing Sisera’s head to the ground with a tent peg.
The courtroom was a stark white cube reminiscent of the detox chamber where she’d brought Phoebe a year earlier. Along one wall, three urpastors in dark blue business suits sat behind a polished breccia bench. In the opposite corner, a dais supported a pair of leather chairs whose conservatively dressed occupants—gray three-piece suits, narrow black ties—were manifestly blood relations. Father and son, Julie mused, grandpastor and archshepherd, Pilate—she smiled feebly—and co-Pilate. The juxtaposition struck her as ghoulish. Ah, that pathetic little hop from youth to senility, so quick. Youth? No, beyond his boyish freckles and lustrous red curls, Billy Milk’s offspring was not young. My age, she thought. Older. Older and, if not wiser, then certainly wearier, for the more she studied him, the more narcissistically wasted he seemed, the more an epicure of his own decay.
“You may begin,” Billy Milk said, nodding toward the judges.
Love your enemies, her brother had reportedly taught. An impossible ambition, self-contradictory and insane. Julie felt but one emotion toward this man, this criminal who had slaughtered Boardwalk tourists and killed her Aunt Georgina: raw, unalloyed loathing.
“I am Urpastor Phelps,” the middle judge announced in a paternal, almost kindly tone as he tidied up the dozens of news clippings cluttering the bench. He was athletic and handsome, tanned by the Jersey sun, bright blond hair sprouting from his head like a halo. “To my left, Urpastor Dupree. To my right, Urpastor Martin. Please stand before us, Sheila of the Moon.”
“My name is Julie Katz.”
Urpastor Dupree asked, “But are you the author of these advice columns, this ‘Heaven Help You’ series?” His round, ruddy face was so pocked by acne it might have been sculpted from a sponge.
They’d rather convert you than burn you, her jailor had insisted. They aren’t bad people, Horrocks believed. “I wrote them,” she confessed.
“What was your purpose in creating ‘Heaven Help You’?” Urpastor Martin inquired. A gaunt, twitchy man, forever knitting his fingers together.
“To topple the empire of nostalgia.”
“Topple the what, ma’am?”
“Empire of nostalgia.” What could she do now but explain herself as lucidly as possible? What other course was open? If the ambiguities added up to a crime, so be it. “I
wanted people to start embracing the future. But that was sixteen years ago—now my goals aren’t nearly so lofty. Lately I’d settle for getting through the day without screaming.”
“Weren’t you also aiming to found the Church of Uncertainty?” asked Urpastor Martin.
“No.”
“But it got founded.”
“I did not intend to start a church.”
“So the error lies in those who came after you? In the Uncertaintist ministers and their congregations?”
“I can hardly blame them. You find meaning in this world, you seize upon it. People will take whatever deities they can get. Everybody has that need. I have it.”
A soft smile crinkled Urpastor Dupree’s acne. “Are you, as your followers believe, the daughter of God?”
“I suppose so. All right. Yes.” How uncanny, the gentleness of their probes. She’d expected an inquisition, not a dispassionate quiz. “In this instance, however, I believe we’re talking about a rather contemporary God. Outside the universe, know what I mean? Beyond the paradigms of both science and religion.”
A pang of envy shot through Julie as Urpastor Martin poured sugar from a bullet-shaped dispenser into a coffee mug. She hadn’t tasted coffee in weeks. “Assuming you are correct”—Urpastor Martin stirred the coffee with a gleaming silver spoon—“and God is unknowable, does that mean he didn’t make heaven and earth? He didn’t bring forth life?”
“In this century, better models for creation are available.”
“But Miss Katz, if God has given the world a person such as yourself, then surely he has given us everything else—the birds in the trees, the worms in the ground, the very sun. Isn’t that the truth of it?”
“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 nonchalan
ce 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.