Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  Bang, a blast of searing pain—“No! Stop! No!”—and now, bang, a second fiery bolt, this one in her wrist—“Stop! No! Don’t!”—and then, by way of dealing with her mutilation, the gap, bang, bang, between her ulna and radius, bang, a row of three steel nails pinning her right arm like tacks holding upholstery to a chair. The wagon pulled away, leaving all of her hundred and thirty pounds hanging on the nails like a pelt, the shafts cutting deeper and deeper, and still the executioner attacked, left foot, bang, right foot, bang, unbearable pain, made worse by uncertainty—how long would it take to die from this, an hour, two hours, the rest of the day?

  The carousel started up.

  She tried to distract herself with science, naming her pathologies, her hypercarbia, her tetanic contractions, the nail through her first intermetatarsal space, the nail through her flexor retinaculum and intercarpal ligaments, but it was no use, her muscles kept spasming, the hot knives continued to chew and burn. Breathing was impossible; the mass of her body on her outstretched arms filled her lungs to bursting. To blow out, she had to push up on her feet, placing all her weight on the tarsals and driving white-hot corkscrews through the damaged nerves.

  The steam organ fell silent.

  A voice said, “I…deserve…this.”

  “Nobody…deserves this,” Julie replied, flopping her head to the left.

  “I do,” said the bearded prisoner. “Read Bible and…you’ll see…Jesus favors…death penalty…for my kind…me.”

  “You’re…guilty?”

  “Raped…girlfriend…killed her…doctor said I’m…psychopath…but really…pornography…made me do it.”

  The pain was coming in waves now, as if her execution were some obscene version of childbirth. After each crest Julie’s collateral torments broke through, the fiery sun, the vertigo caused by the carousel’s spin, a thirst straight from a hadean iron mine.

  “We are…connected,” gasped the other prisoner.

  Julie pivoted her head. “I’ve…met you?”

  “Gabe Frostig…told your father about…he had…embryo…you.”

  “You should’ve flushed me…down the…”

  “Almost did.”

  Pain, sun, vertigo, thirst. Pain, vertigo, pain. All she wanted was to die. There were truly fates worse than death, oh, yes…

  “I’m…please…w-water,” said Julie.

  “Thirsty?” said the executioner.

  “Y-yes. Please.”

  “I’ve got just the thing.” He held up a fat, dripping object hanging from the muzzle of his nailgun. “Drink.”

  A sponge. Matthew 27:48, Mark 15:36, John 19:29. Had they no shame? She opened her mouth, sucking the saturated tissues. The animal reeked of the sea. Its juices tasted like salted piss. Trickling downward, the liquid scored her teeth, burned her tonsils, and sent sharp bursts of nausea through her guts.

  “How long…been here?” she asked Frostig. Her impaled ligaments pulled her hand into a claw.

  “Don’t know…two days…in the end, it’s the air…no air…gets you…exhaustion asphyxia, they’ll call it on…certificate…maybe hypovolemic shock, stress-induced arrhythmia, peri…pericardial effusions…if you’re lucky.”

  Pericardial effusions. Like father, like daughter. Her heart was fated to collapse.

  The steam organ started up.

  “Drink,” demanded the executioner, once more proffering the sponge.

  She drank. A tingling arose at the point where her spinal cord entered her skull. Silver stars pinwheeled in her head. Sand castles exploded.

  On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City…

  Someone sang.

  Frostig? The murderer? The executioner?

  No, myself, she realized.

  We will walk in a dream.

  She ascended. Julie Katz lay dying in the Circus of Joy, gasping bad lyrics, but she also soared high above, spiraling around Saint John, the video screen, the floodlights.

  Glancing downward, she saw herself stapled to the carousel, bleeding, singing. Saw herself: vision, something eyes and eyes alone did, eyes, those soggy spheres of gelatin suspended in bone, wired in backward to visual cortex. “Dream,” she repeated. Hence, a tongue, flapping in her mouth like a beached fish. So she’d left the ground—so what? This, too, was an incarnation, and even as her Doppelganger glided past the towers and spires of New Jerusalem, across the roaring Atlantic, kicking clouds and terrifying gulls, she still felt its limitations, its vast potential for discontent. Time to return, then, back to her sad planet, back to the nails, the carousel, the exhaustion asphyxia, and so she fell, forsaking her wings and fusing with her singing self, not dead yet, oh, no, Mother, not dead yet, not yet…

  On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City

  we will walk

  in a

  dream

  on the

  Boardwalk in

  Atlantic

  City

  life

  will

  be

  peaches

  and—

  CHAPTER 18

  ♦

  ♦

  ♦

  Perched on steel stilts high above the city’s eastern wall, the video screen glowed with close-ups so obscene that Bix could barely bring himself to watch. Julie’s left wrist: an oily gray nail burrowing into her flesh. Her feet: toes curled in rigor mortis. Her face: glossy and rigid like crystallized sulfur. While the average psychic, visionary, or Midnight Moon reader would doubtless have registered the exact moment of her death, experiencing it as an explosion in the skull or a sudden skewering of the heart, Bix did not. He knew only that at some nebulous moment between noon and now the Circus had done its work, taking from the earth his new wife, one-time god, and forever friend. So here they were, the two people who loved her most, huddled in the shadow of the Tropicana Gate, studying the pale, pearly faces of the bas-relief angels and awaiting the promised corpse.

  Monitor and sky darkened simultaneously, the gray clouds seething like charcoal drawings made by a schizophrenic. The storm broke; a trillion raindrops clanked against the gold-plated causeway. Phoebe raised her umbrella, an old Smile Shop item with IT’S ONLY GOD PISSING on the canopy, and held it out, offering sanctuary. Bix flattened himself against the portal. Conventional sentimentality argued that loss bound people together, erasing old enmities, but such clumsy intimacy was the last thing he wanted, especially with her.

  The gate parted with a deep, raspy grunt, like humping yaks trying to disengage, and a police sergeant marched through the gap, his mirrored sunglasses beaded with rain. Two young urpastors in waterproof cassocks followed, a large tubular sack slung between them like a hammock.

  “Mr. Constantine?”

  Bix nodded. White and pulpy, the sack suggested the larva of some monstrous insect. Rainwater settled into its dents and sluiced down its folds.

  He led the urpastors to the Green Tureen, and as they laid the flexible coffin in the kitchenette aisle his gaze wandered toward the city. Burnished ramparts, towers like titanic icicles, a shimmering, sinuous monorail track. A jokey umbrella sat by the open Tropicana Gate.

  “Thanks,” he told the urpastors. Umbrella, Bix mused. Open gate. “Go for it, Phoebe,” he muttered as he got behind the steering wheel. “Shoot Milk and his whole crew. You have my blessing.”

  He headed into the broiling storm, across the crest of the city and over the bridge into Brigantine, his grief marching to the cardiac thock of the windshield wipers. Lightning zagged across the sky, gilding the refineries, flooding the apartments and condos with brief electric pallor. He swerved onto Harbor Beach Boulevard, glossy with rain, splotchy with puddles, and, turning sharply, drove down Rum Point as far as he could and braked. He shut off the engine, the wipers. Rain clattered against the windshield like fistfuls of marbles, IT’S ONLY GOD PISSING, Phoebe’s umbrella had said, but this time Julie’s mother was shedding all of herself, her urine, blood, lymph, sweat, amniotic fluid.

  Opening the rear door of the Ture
en, he found himself drifting from sorrow into a less expected emotion, a dull but undeniable anger. The fool—why had she given up her powers like that? Didn’t she know that on this side of mortality the nails are made of steel, they don’t bend, they don’t budge?

  Saturated, his William Penn High sweatshirt clung to him like papier-mâché as he lifted the sack over his shoulder and, carrying it to the end of the jetty, set it on the rocks. The rubber exuded the thick grim odor of a gas mask. Dropping to his knees, he tugged on the zipper.

  Of course he wanted to deny the whole business, of course he wanted somebody to vouchsafe her a blissful eternity. He thought of the book his honors students were reading, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel—unbelieving Eugene Gant groping toward the divine. “Whoever You Are, be good to Ben tonight, show him the way,” Eugene prays, singsong, over his dying brother. “Whoever You Are, be good to Ben tonight…”

  Her face burst out and he groaned. What had he expected, Snow White on her bier? Certainly not this open-eyed shell, this bald husk, certainly not this thing. The corpse’s inertia was unnerving. What, exactly, was it? When your car expired, it remained your car, but with death a new object evidently came into being, supplanting spirit, supplanting body as well, a vacant and degraded lump of nothing.

  He kept pulling on the zipper. Raindrops pelted her, some collecting under her eyes, others rolling into the gorge between her slightly asymmetrical breasts. Leaning forward, he shielded her from the storm and dried her face with his shirtsleeve. Wrinkles and pouches, true, but still those heavy lips, that cute upturned nose. He’d never really looked at her before, not this way. He wondered whether each crease corresponded to some dark event in her life—there the imprint of her father’s death, there the brand of Phoebe’s dipsomania, there the mark of her infertility.

  A promise was a promise. He kissed the corpse on the lips. Nothing. Not disgust, not fascination, not the merest sexual twinge. It was a corpse. It was nothing.

  He zipped it up, nudged it gently, and sent it sliding downward along the slick, algae-coated rocks.

  “Whoever You Are,” he whispered as the sack hit the water, “be good to Julie tonight, show her the way. Whoever You Are,” he said again as his wife disappeared into Absecon Inlet, “be good to Julie tonight…”

  As Phoebe ran past the Tomás de Torquemada Memorial Arena, her yellow parka ticking with deflected raindrops, the last of the crowd streamed forth, their umbrellas blooming like black flowers, their Circus pennants limp and soggy. They seemed little different from Philadelphia basketball fans leaving the Spectrum. Judging by their smiles, you couldn’t say for certain whether they’d just seen the 76’ers win by a three-pointer or a hundred sinners burn.

  Across the street, the Holy Palace rose into the squalling sky, its golden pilasters cutting upward through a dozen balconies. Phoebe reached inside her parka, grabbing metal. Her plan might be ill-considered and vague, but her Smith & Wesson was loaded.

  She let the night settle and, camouflaged by rain and darkness, hauled herself over the wrought-iron fence. In the rear courtyard a sycamore beckoned, and she climbed, quiet as stone, ever mindful of the guards and their Uzis, black and fearsome as her mother’s bones. History pulsed through her. Father cut in half. Mother burned alive. Best friend crucified. Thick and wet as moray eels, the branches took her to the third floor. How naturally it all came: loosening the pane with Mom’s old Swiss Army knife, unlatching the window—how easy to be the creature of history’s vengeance.

  Her charge to Irene had been simple. One: give him twenty to thirty ounces of formula a day. Two: put him in for his nap at noon. Three: if his mother is murdered, get married again. Every kid deserves two parents, more if possible.

  Silently she wandered the gilded hallways—carpets as soft and warm as marsh muck, chandeliers like giant luminous crabs—eventually finding the floor where the clergy retired after a hard day’s auto-da-fé. She peeked into the rooms one by one, just as she and Katz had done years before in the Deauville. Piety and luxury flourished side by side; for each altar there was a hot tub, for each portrait of Jesus a massage-bed. Not a bad life, grace.

  At last, the grandpastor’s chamber, it had to be—four-poster bed, solid oak writing desk, Oriental rug. Empty. She slithered toward the window, her boots marking the rug with mud and dead leaves. Raindrops clung to the glass like pustules. Draping the window curtain around her narrow body, she eased into the red velvet and waited.

  When they were ten, a few weeks after Katz had cured that Timothy kid, the two of them had stolen a crucifix from Ventnor Seminary and pried off the Jesus. His arms were slightly raised—a perfect slingshot. After stringing rubber bands and a leather pouch between his wrists, they’d spent an unsuccessful afternoon hunting sea gulls on the Boardwalk, aiming to bring them down with marbles.

  “I don’t like this,” Katz had said.

  “Too disrespectful?” Phoebe had asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Of your brother?”

  “No,” Katz had said. “Of the gulls.”

  Milk entered, fur slippers flopping, silk pajamas hissing. Approaching his four-poster, he dropped to his knees, interlaced his fingers, and began talking to God.

  “Oh, Lord, Lord, because of my sins he is stricken again, for it was I who brought Sheila into your city, Lord, I and I alone…”

  Phoebe had read somewhere that after a person commits a revenge murder, he typically experiences excruciating regret. Not at his deed, but only at his failure to tell the victim two facts: who was killing him, and why.

  “Hold it right there, Billy baby!” she screamed, thrusting the curtain aside.

  Bastard. He allowed no explanation. He simply ran to the glass door, tore it open, and started onto the balcony.

  He was halfway across when she caught him, springing onto his back like a lioness attacking an antelope. Together they arced over the balustrade, dangling toward the watery street. He spat in her face. She bit his hand, drinking his salty blood.

  They fell. Fell with the raindrops.

  Oh, shit, oh, God, oh, Katz, Katz, if you ever had a mother…!

  The night air whizzed by and splat, exactly that, splat, a cartoon sound effect, and with it a redeeming ooze, blessedly soft. A sharp green stench cut into Phoebe’s brain. She rolled over. Rigid fingers scraped her cheek. Lifeless eyes watched her; a crossbow bolt ran through the corpse’s brow like a toothpick through an olive. She blinked. Another body, another. Corpses everywhere. Milk, dazed, lay wedged between two headless women. So much death, and yet these rumblings, these vibrant winds against her face.

  Her mind cleared. Truck. Pickup truck, Circus truck: corpse removal. She laughed. Saved by the sinful dead. Already the vehicle was surging through the Tropicana Gate and onto the wet ribbony blackness of the expressway. Unmoving, Milk snorted and wheezed. Condos rolled past. Apartments, churches, farms. A solitary flame writhed and roared atop an oil refinery tower like a burning flag.

  She made a fist, squeezed metal. Metal, glorious Smith & Wesson metal. Throwing herself atop Milk, she rammed the steel muzzle against his skull…ah, but there was a better entrance, wasn’t there? She flipped back his eyepatch and slid the pistol into the socket until it bumped scar tissue, a sound like a doctor’s rubber hammer striking a knee. “Know who I am?” she asked.

  Milk seemed oddly pleased, as if the excitement of being under a woman compensated for her evident intent to murder him. “Babylon, is that you? You’ve grown darker, sister!”

  Phoebe’s mother had once told her every woman tries to imagine having a penis, every man a vagina. Well, Reverend Milk, she thought, twisting the revolver as if operating a screw driver, here we have it.

  “Ravage me, Babylon!”

  The truck lurched to a stop. Steadying the revolver inside Milk’s head, Phoebe leaned back in time to see the driver jump from the cab and, preceded by the beam of his flashlight, hurry through the rain to the nearest roadside exhibit, a mass o
f wired bones chained to a cattle fence. He inspected the skeleton carefully, as if to determine whether it needed replacing.

  “Take me, Babylon!”

  “I’m not Babylon, you crazy man.”

  “Ah…you’re from the junta!” Milk cried. A pale light hit his face. Phoebe turned. Briefly the driver contemplated the two living corpses tussling in the back of his truck. “Colonel Ackerman sent you!” Milk persisted, pawing at Phoebe’s parka.

  Dropping his flashlight, the driver dashed into the stormy darkness like a frightened deer.

  “You killed my best friend!” Phoebe sawed the Smith & Wesson back and forth. Why couldn’t she pull the trigger? Why these spasms of hesitation? “Burned my mother! Cut my father in half!” Gunmetal ground against bone.

  “In half?” Milk grimaced. “I remember. Your father died a saved man.”

  “You—” She smiled. Stopped sawing. Withdrew the revolver. The gospel according to Phoebe—she was really going to write it, really and truly. “Take a hike,” she muttered, tucking the Smith & Wesson into her parka. The gospel according to Phoebe—and she didn’t want a tawdry murder on page 301, no, she had more class than that, more style. “Out!”

  Of the gulls, Katz had said.

  Like a disappointed lover evicting her partner from bed, she levered Milk over the side of the truck and dumped him into a wet gunky ditch. The flying mud spattered her face.

  Lightning exploded with flashbulb suddenness. The cranberry bog stretched in all directions, interrupted only by the expressway and its crop of ebony bones. A second flash: Milk, struggling to his feet. A third: Milk, hopping through the bog like an immense black cricket. Quite so, bastard, you are smart to run. Run your dick off. My mercy’s not terribly reliable.