by James Morrow
CHAPTER 17
♦
♦
♦
The Lord of the Underworld cannot return to New Jersey in clear weather. Hell has its protocols. As Pain cruises along Risley’s Channel, Wyvern orders up a typhoon—“Rain, Anthrax! Tell them I want rain!”—and soon the angels are voiding torrentially. The devil tilts back his head and swallows. The fine brew dances on his tongue.
Slowly he shifts, taking on a pleasing shape. His horns retract, his tail disappears between his buttocks, his cloven hoofs become feet, and his odor, normally reminiscent of a whale corpse at low tide, becomes fruity and faintly erotic. Walking down the gangplank, firmly gripping his kittenskin valise, he adorns his cranium with golden tresses and covers his veined, leathery wings with overlapping tiers of waterproof feathers. Stepping onto the storm-swept sands of Dune Island, he makes a shimmering robe rush down from his shoulders like an eruption of silken lava. By the time Wyvern reaches the salt marsh, he looks fully the role he must play. He looks like Billy Milk’s idea of an angel.
But the ruse has not been accomplished without cost, not without pain. Fighting for breath, Wyvern lowers himself onto a fallen tree trunk, slick and steamy with rain, and stares wearily at the swamp. An intolerable force squeezes his brain, as if God means to crack its casing and make an omelet of his thoughts. That lousy bitch. Her real hands: stopping the vigilantes, saving her friend, serving that soup. Her fake hand: highest of tech, warming that wog baby with its radiant fingers. Bitch.
He forces his spinning mind to focus on the immediate. History is going against him. Of all beings in the cosmos, Billy Milk is surely the last one a betting man would have cast as Julie Katz’s savior. And yet it’s happening. Only a heaven-sent creature could have given my son sight, runs the grandpastor’s reasoning as far as Wyvern can fathom it. Ergo, she’s not the Antichrist. And so, irony of ironies, Billy has determined to free her. It was true in Galileo’s time, and it was true now: Christianity couldn’t be trusted.
But the devil has a plan. He always has a plan. A sponge, a carousel, an ampule of venom. Cackling, he opens his valise and, taking care to shield his laptop computer and his stock portfolio from the gushing storm, draws out a small green bottle, its glass shatterproof, its face embossed with Julie Kate’s Moon photo. He decides to test the bottle’s contents, removing the stopper and letting a single dark dollop, no bigger than a raisin, roll off the rim and plunge into the briny water. On meeting Milk, of course, he won’t call this venom by its names. He won’t call it Conium maculatum, perdition’s poison, or hell’s hemlock. He’ll lie through his fangs—he’ll call it tetradotoxin, he’ll call it zombie juice.
Absorbing the poison, the marsh begins to swirl and boil. The eel grass and spartina grow black as used lampwicks. The medusae and the moon jellyfish becomes piles of putrefaction. In short, the stuff works.
Cheers, Julie Katz. Bottoms up, child. Place the sponge of Matthew 27:48 to your fat lips and drink deep, Sheila of the Moon.
A thousand pipefish, alewife, polyps, shrimp, and hermit crabs drift to the surface and form a mat of corpses atop the rain-pocked water as, calling upon all his powers of drama, invoking all his affinity for spectacle, the devil takes out his laptop computer and begins scripting his enemy’s death.
Doubt’s worm, the parasite that had so often colonized Billy Milk’s soul, was a mere itch compared to its opposite, certainty’s scorpion, jabbing its barbed tail into his heart as, weary and heavy-laden, he shuffled past the Pool of Siloam toward the sacred canal.
Sheila: innocent.
Sheila: not the beast.
The facts rose before Billy, palpable, irrefutable. The holy river had not burned her. His phantom eye had found no locusts on her bones. But mainly there was this: over a quarter century earlier, Sheila had healed his boy. True, Satan’s servants performed healings too, but nothing like the miracle that had brightened Billy’s life for so many years, a cure for retrolental fibroplasia, eyes where there’d been no eyes. Billy loved Timothy dearly—poor stunned Timothy, sitting in a sunny ward at New Jerusalem Memorial, his gutted head encased in gauze—but the boy was wrong, wrong. Sorceress, shaman, adept, psychic healer: whoever this Sheila was, the gift she’d bestowed on Timothy that August afternoon in 1985 had come from above, not below.
A winged man sat on the riverbank, under the Tree of Life, fishing.
“Hello, Reverend Milk.” His voice was at once lilting and firm, a voice like a harp.
“Good morning,” said Billy woozily. Silk robe, golden hair, sleek white feathers. Hence…
“I’m afraid they aren’t biting today,” said the winged man.
“An angel?” gasped Billy. “You’re an angel?”
The creature smoothed the feathers of his left wing. “Head to foot. Wingtip to foreskin.”
“She’s innocent, isn’t she?”
“Innocent as Eden’s first rose,” said the angel, nodding. He reeled in his empty hook. “Favored by God, befriended by Jesus—and you’re about to burn her.”
“No. Please. I won’t.” An angel! He was talking with an angel! “I’ll enter the arena. I’ll say, ‘Good citizens, I’ve torn up the execution order. Sheila of the Moon shall not burn—today or any other day.’”
“An admirable intention, Reverend. A laudable plan. However…” Like Aaron throwing down his staff before Egypt’s royalty, the angel passed his fishing rod over the canal. “However, if you actually do that…”
The choppy waters froze, becoming smooth and glossy as a mirror. Silhouettes twitched on the surface like shadow puppets. The figures grew flesh, faces, clothes—breadth. Billy recognized himself, standing in the middle of the amphitheater, canceling Sheila’s execution.
“Yes,” he told the angel. “That’s my plan.”
And suddenly the believers were rising from their seats and stampeding across the sand, falling upon him. “You must give them their Antichrist,” the angel explained. “Disappoint them, and they’ll tear you apart.” He cast out his fishing line. “Heaven can ill afford to lose you, Billy Milk. You’ve been a true and faithful servant, and we know you’ve got a few more cities in you. It’s time to go international. Think of how wicked Teheran is. Tripoli cries out for the torch, Moscow’s ripe for burning.”
Relief gushed out of Billy like the fluids with which he’d christened the Great Whore—joy of joys, his campaign against Babylon, so controversial on earth, had been welcomed or high! “Then what am I to do?”
From his tackle box the angel produced a stack of fanfold computer paper. “The script for Sheila’s execution,” he explained, pressing the printout into Billy’s hands. “I wrote it myself. You won’t burn the woman, you’ll drug her with tetradotoxin. Zombie juice.” Reaching into his robe, the angel pulled out the green glass bottle embossed with Sheila’s face and set it on the riverbank. “She’ll fall asleep right there in the arena. The crowd will think her dead. Don’t worry, it’s just a mild case of suspended animation. Afterward, you can give her to…whomever. Her husband. She’ll wake up entirely alive. Thus will your cardinal sin—Billy Milk, persecutor of the innocent—be purged forevermore.”
“Purged? Fully purged?” Billy’s heart pirouetted with rapture.
“Your soul will become as clear as this canal.”
“But is she really”—Billy glanced at the first page of the script: A hay wagon rolls across the field, he read, pulled by a donkey—“divine?”
“Hard to know. Ambiguous. Ah—a nibble.” The angel worked his reel, soon lifting a great luminous starfish above the surface of the river. Holy water shot from its half-dozen arms as it flailed about, trying to unhook itself. “Some would say Julie Katz is definitely a deity.”
Six arms, thought Billy, a six-pointed star: a Jewish starfish. “Then until the execution, we should be as generous as possible, right? We should treat her as God’s own. Grant all her final wishes.”
“Anything within reason,” said the angel, swinging t
he starfish onto the grassy shore. “Allow her best friend to visit, that Sparks person.”
“And her husband?”
“Yes, but don’t let anyone go poking into his past. He used to be an Uncertaintist—actually preached it. Dreadful stuff.”
Billy snatched up the bottle of tetradotoxin. A scheme conceived by God, a script authored by an angel! And yet…“We’ll drug her.”
“Right.”
“They’ll think she’s dead.”
“You got it.”
“Suspended animation.”
“Exactly.”
“Fine. Good. Only—”
“Only—where’s the drama?” said the angel. “Whither the spectacle? Trust me. My script is dramatic. Nails are involved, nails and wood. Perhaps you’ve read the Bible. Matthew 27:48. ‘And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar’”—the angel rested his soft white hand on the script—“‘and put it on a reed…’”
“‘And gave him to drink,’” said Billy.
“Likewise will your executioner give Sheila of the Moon a sponge filled with tetradotoxin.”
“You mean she’s to be…?”
“Crucified,” said the angel.
Crucified? wondered Billy. Crucified? His flock would never accept a crucifixion, that holiest of chastisements—not for the woman they considered Satan’s mistress. “Crucified. Yes, but—”
“Don’t worry, your man will have plenty of time to deliver the drug. It takes hours for a crucifixion to work.”
“But the audience—”
“Ah, the audience—they won’t much like a crucifixion, will they?” the angel anticipated. “A crucifixion won’t go over at all.”
Billy’s lips parted, his biggest smile since Timothy got his eyes. How marvelous having such rapport with heaven. “Only the Savior is worthy of crucifixion,” he said, nodding.
“That’s why she’s to be anticrucified,” said the angel. “An anticrucifixion for an antichrist.”
“Anticrucifixion? As opposed to crucifixion?”
“You got it.”
“What’s the difference?” Billy asked.
“The difference is that you call one a crucifixion,” replied the angel, “and the other an anticrucifixion.”
An anticrucifixion for an antichrist, Julie mused as Oliver Horrocks led her through a massive cylindrical door into the dungeon’s visitation room, its ceiling a jumble of floodlights and closed-circuit television cameras, their lenses poking into the air like possum snouts. An anticrucifixion for an antichrist: or so went the rumor from her jailor. Her enemies were going back to basics; tomorrow she’d be nailed up before the whole city and left to die. Nailed, not burned. A Pyrrhic victory at best, out of the frying pan and onto the cross.
The floodlights came on simultaneously, bathing the visitation room in milky luminescence, washing away the fact that outside it was late evening, still Saturday by a gentile’s reckoning, Sunday by a Jew’s. Along the left wall, seven grim-lipped and fearsomely armed corporals stood guard. As Horrocks guided her toward the center of the room, Julie clasped her real left hand in its ghostly counterpart and prayed to no one in particular that the next twenty minutes would go well, no awkwardness, no schmaltz.
Across the way, a series of interconnected cell doors opened and closed like canal locks. Her husband entered. Phoebe followed, cradling a scrawny, sleeping, terra-cotta bundle. Evidently Milk was honoring her last request. A kiss before dying. A hug before hell.
“We’re trying every damn thing we can think of,” Bix said, waddling uncertainly toward her, a flat cardboard box labeled Pentecost Pizzas balanced on his palms. “We’re always on the phone, even Irene. We’ve got quite a list—a bunch of State Department people, both our senators, a retired ambassador I found in Bryn Mawr, Elmer West from the CIA…” His zebra-striped pajamas were several sizes too small. Domes of pale flesh emerged between the buttons. What a raving paranoid Milk must be, Julie decided: get them out of their street clothes, they’ve probably sewn cyanide into the lining. “Thing is, with Jersey so anti-Marxist and all,” said Bix, “and the only record of your birth being in Trenton…” His eyes were red. Tears stained his cheeks like snail tracks. “Well, we’re just not getting support.”
“I don’t expect you to save me, Bix. I really don’t. I’ve been heading for the Circus all my life.”
“Hey, the assholes took your hand!” whined Phoebe in a loud, icy, indignant voice. Her pajama top was open, breasts slung into a nursing bra. “They took Molly.”
“No, I gave her to the Chaudrys.”
“You’re a good person, Julie Katz.” Phoebe raked her fingers through Little Murray’s hair, a mass of black spirals. His eyes popped open, dark brown disks haloed by pure white. “He sleeps through the night,” she said. “Great disposition. I’d throw him in the Delaware if you could live.”
“You don’t mean that,” said Julie.
“I don’t mean that. Oh, Katz, honey…”
“Eighteen more minutes,” said Horrocks.
“Want to hold him?” Phoebe asked.
“I’d probably drop him.” Her brother seemed intelligent and well meaning, Pop’s kid all the way. A contemplative astonishment lit his face, as if he’d arrived at the wrong planet and was debating whether or not to stay. “Is he circumcised?”
“Sure he’s circumcised. It’s what his father would’ve wanted. Take him, okay?”
“I’m afraid to. I’m…afraid.”
The baby began squalling. His face reddened like litmus paper meeting acid. “You know, my mom used to nurse you sometimes, right from her own bod,” Phoebe said, unhitching the left flap of her bra. She screwed her dark nipple into her son’s mouth. The corporals’ eyes drifted toward her. “You and I grew up on the same tit.”
A silence descended, broken only by Little Murray’s zealous sucking, a sound like Absecon Inlet lapping against a pier.
“Seventeen more minutes,” said Horrocks.
“Be quiet, you little prick,” snapped Phoebe.
“Take it easy,” said Julie.
Bix sighed, a protracted bass note. “Listen, Julie, we heard they’re not going to burn you. It’ll be…different.”
“I know.” Julie cast a cold eye toward heaven. “An anticrucifixion for an antichrist. Good old God, always looking out for me.”
“And afterward…tomorrow…they’re going to give us…I mean, our pass is good till sundown, so we’ll go home and come back, and they’ll give us…you know.” He exhaled, cheeks ballooning. “Your body.”
“My flesh.”
“Phoebe and I will do whatever you want,” said Bix. “We’ll sit shivah. We’ll cremate you, give you a wake, anything.”
Julie clenched her phantom fist. Had Bix and Phoebe actually been discussing her funeral? She was at once appalled and fascinated. She wished she’d been there. “Just drop me in the bay, darling. Bury me at sea.”
“Absecon Inlet?”
“My old playground.”
“Sure. Absecon Inlet.”
“Something else. Before you sink me, I want a kiss.”
“A kiss. Right.”
“A kiss on the lips, Bix. Right on my dead lips.”
“I promise.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of course.”
“Sixteen minutes,” said Horrocks.
“Why don’t you shut up?” Phoebe snapped at the jailor. Her fingers drummed on the Pentecost Pizzas box. “Hungry?” she asked Julie.
Strangely enough, she was. “For pizza? Always.”
“We made sure they got it right.” Bix set the box on the floor, flipped back the lid. A divine cloud rushed out, the chemistry created as a mozzarella glacier migrates across dough. “Pepperoni, extra cheese.”
Julie meditated on the topping. Was the plural pepperoni or pepperonis? God, the crazy data that pass through a condemned incarnation’s mind. “Remember our picnic in the Deauville? You have any Tasty
kake Krumpets, Phoebe? Any Diet Cokes?”
“Nope,” said Phoebe. “Sorry. Of course I remember.”
“Are those things pepperoni or pepperonis? Is there such a word as ‘pepperonis’?”
“What are you talking about?” said Phoebe.
“Those sausage things.”
“Pepperoni, I think. Why?”
Julie shrugged. They dropped to their knees. Steadying the box with her stump, she tore an isosceles triangle free, lowered it into her mouth in a parody of French kissing. Her two hundred taste buds rose to the occasion, tumefying, relaying every nuance of the cheese, every glitzy detail of the pepperoni. Being so brave was oddly pleasurable. Smiling, she chewed her way to the crust.
Were it not for Little Murray, Julie felt, none of them would have finished eating without weeping or going mad. The baby was their mandala, the focus of their fragile truce with hysteria. Each random burp, gurgle, and smile sparked joyful chatter from the three adults, as if that particular action had never before occurred to any baby, anywhere. By meal’s end, Julie was ready for him.
“Here,” she said, existing palm out, soliciting.
Intoxicated with milk, he lay on Phoebe’s shoulder like an outsized beanbag. “It’s easy.” Prying him free, Phoebe demonstrated something she called the football carry. “Take the hand I didn’t blow off and tuck it under his head.”
“Seven minutes,” said Horrocks.
Julie liked the football carry. You never lost sight of the baby’s face; you could simultaneously move him and teach him physics. “Gravity,” she whispered. “Also magnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force…” She carried the baby toward the corporals. It must feel like flying, she decided, like backfloating down a river. His chocolate eyes were at their widest. “Earth orbits the sun,” she sang to him. “Microbes cause disease.” Such a new-looking thing, so unstamped. How sad that Pop and Marcus Bass hadn’t survived to see this particular twist in their braided lives: the lighthouse keeper’s son, the marine biologist’s grandson. “The heart is a pump.”