Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  The smell, the pervasive unholy stink. And so she jumped, words pouring from her mouth, a speech heard only by the rain and the decaying sinners. “Katz, Katz”—she lifted her revolver heavenward—“you really got your hooks into me, didn’t you?” She glanced at Milk’s retreating figure. “Me, I would’ve shot the bastard. Oh, yes—”

  Crack: a long, forking thread of lightning, slicing open the sky.

  Whitening the bog. Striking Milk.

  Phoebe blinked. Indeed: a running man, a bright zag, and—gone.

  Lightning. Jesus. Wasn’t that a bit much? Yet it had certainly done the job, a crisp, clean hit.

  She sensed the regret spreading through heaven, and she laughed. One: he hadn’t known who’d killed him. Two: he hadn’t known why.

  But Phoebe did. This was no fluke of nature, this was an assassination, plain and simple. Katz, no doubt, would’ve called it coincidence. “A universe without coincidence would be an exceedingly strange place,” she’d said in one of her stupid columns. Stubborn Julie Katz, whose worldview did not admit of guest editorials by God.

  Phoebe ran, rain washing over her face. Even before reaching Milk’s corpse, she knew how the bolt had transformed him. God’s punishments always fit: eye for eye, bisection for bisection. She gazed upon the miracle. A bisection indeed, only not at midriff as with her father but lengthwise, like a rail split by Abraham Lincoln.

  Lightning. Perfect.

  She staggered to the nearest tree and collapsed, curling her body around the trunk as if it were the core of her mother’s womb, and soon the drumming rain carried her into a thick and dreamless sleep.

  April’s first sun rose fiercely, drawing steam from the cranberry bog. Gradually Phoebe gained her feet, jeans soggy with dew, chest heavy with milk. She slipped her damp fingers into her parka and, drawing out her ecclesiastical pass, noted that it had expired twelve hours earlier. What clever tricks would it take to reach America now, she wondered, what escapades, what lies? No point in worrying. She’d cross that bridge—that literal bridge, she thought with a quick smile, that Benjamin Franklin Bridge—when she came to it. The important thing was to get going. If Irene kept Little Murray on formula too long, he’d never go back to the tit.

  The previous night was a hundred years in the past. Had it even happened at all? But then she started walking, and there he was, stretched out in the precise light of morning, his entire body a wound, the two halves cauterized. She felt sick, a sensation owing less to Milk’s condition than to her incriminating proximity. If caught, she’d be blamed, no doubt about it. Phoebe Sparks, God’s fall guy.

  And so she began her furtive trek, sneaking from farm to farm and store to store like a marauding animal, living on pilfered fruit, stolen candy bars, and milk from her own fecund breasts. She shoplifted a backpack, the better to carry her plunder. She slept in cornfields, ate in Revelationist churches, peed in gas stations. On Thursday night a fresh thunderstorm arose, slashing a thousand creeks and ponds into the republic’s face. She claimed someone else’s umbrella from a bus depot lost-and-found and began looking for shelter, starting with the obvious—restaurant, laundromat—but in each case something made her lose heart: an armored van, a milling soldier, an Inquisition helicopter, a stranger’s suspicious glance. The Smith & Wesson sustained her. A mere touch and she felt nourished, renewed. Every girl should have a gun.

  A mile outside Cherry Hill she came upon a shabby and demoralized farm. A rusting John Deere tractor and two moribund threshing machines sat amid a grove of spidery apple trees. A battered windmill turned jerkily in the storm like a telephone rotor being spun. Phoebe slipped into the barn and, peeling off her parka, flopped down in the hay. To judge from the two dozen stalls, the owner had once raised horses or dairy cows, but now the place belonged wholly to hens and roosters, a fragrant, fidgeting kingdom, their clucks breaking through the howl of the storm like some animal Morse code.

  Phoebe’s stolen backpack held a feast. Swiftly she emptied it, setting out her imported Oscar Mayer hot dogs, an apple the size of a croquet ball, and a peanut-butter jar into which she’d expressed over a pint of breast milk. She devoured three wieners, washing them down with milk; her gastric juices sizzled. Satisfied, she stretched out in the cool, shit-sweet dark. Tomorrow afternoon she’d finally be back in America, kissing Irene, arranging a service for Katz, nursing Murray. God, how she missed that kid.

  Sleep rolled across her like warm surf.

  A peeing urge woke her. She’d had to urinate three times a night during her final month of pregnancy, and the conditioning lingered. She looked at her watch. Two A.M. Full bladder, full boobs, what a bloatoid she’d become.

  “Hello, child.”

  Phoebe clutched her revolver.

  “I see you finally got some tits.” A male voice, fuzzy and thin.

  Twenty feet away, a match flared. The tiny flame staggered through the air like a drunken firefly, alighting atop a cigarette.

  “I’m armed,” Phoebe announced.

  “Nobody here but us chickens,” the man replied, simultaneously coughing and laughing. A foul odor ripped through the air, rotten oranges soaked in rancid honey. “You remember me, don’t you? Years ago we met on Steel Pier. We rode the carousel together. Same one they nailed Katz to.”

  A sudden glow suffused the barn as Andrew Wyvern ignited a kerosene lamp, a kind of miniature Angel’s Eye suspended on a nail. Sallow and collapsed, his face suggested a jack-o’-lantern kept till Christmas. He sat propped against a cow stall, surrounded by nesting hens, a burning, filtertip Pall Mall wedged between his lips.

  “You’ve aged,” said Phoebe.

  “So’ve you. Want to hear a joke?” A small snorting pig—round, pink, and bristled, a belly with legs—waddled across the barn and climbed into Wyvern’s lap. “Billy Milk was planning to let your friend go free. Can you imagine?” With casual cruelty Wyvern dug his talons into the piglet and began skinning it alive. “I had to intervene.”

  Phoebe tightened her hold on the Smith & Wesson. “Know something, Mr. Wyvern?” The pig squealed horribly, bloodily. “You’re sick.”

  “It was my poison that killed Katz, not the merry-go-round, not the spikes. Conium maculatum, a whole spongeful.” Like a depraved potter, Wyvern molded the pig’s red gooey flesh into a football. “Once again, the devil himself comes off the bench and throws the touchdown pass!” He lobbed the football into the adjacent stall, creating loud fluttery panic among the hens. “That’s me, a winner all the way.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  Wyvern mashed out his Pall Mall, lit another. “Her hand around your dynamite,” he sighed. “Her lousy insulation. But I’m feeling much better, thank you. Give me some milk.”

  “Huh?”

  “I want some milk.” The devil aimed his clawed index finger at the peanut-butter jar. A large, empty swallow traveled down his throat. “Please.”

  “Thought you were a vegetarian.”

  “Lacto-ovo.” He took a drag on the Pall Mall. “Bring it here.”

  “Come and get it.”

  “I don’t walk terribly well these days.” Wyvern exhaled a jagged smoke ring. “Temporary infirmity. Now that she’s dead, I’ll be back on my feet”—he snapped his fingers, and a luminous sphere of brimstone jumped out—“like that.”

  Rising, brushing hay from her jeans, Phoebe carried her milk across the barn.

  “Thanks.” Wyvern wrapped a mud-encrusted hand around the jar and, unscrewing the lid, took a huge gulp. “Great stuff, child. Nothing like home cooking.”

  “I made it for my baby, not you.”

  “Nevertheless, let me reciprocate.”

  “With what? Horse piss?”

  “With this.”

  Scrabbling through the hay, Wyvern drew out a glass bottle. Phoebe shivered, gripped by nostalgia laced with terror. Ah, the paradisiacal places rum had taken her, sun-kissed beaches, blue lagoons, Jacuzzis filled with ass’s milk.

  “Fresh from
Palo Seco, child.” He pressed the fifth of Bacardi into her palm.

  Bacardi, the best. She studied the tense and slender bat on the label. Her old friend.

  “Live it up,” said Wyvern.

  “Hi,” Phoebe addressed the bat.

  “Cheers,” said the devil.

  “Hi,” said Phoebe again, breathing deeply as her mother had taught her. “Hi, I’m Phoebe, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  She scooped out a miniature grave in the hay and promptly reinterred the rum.

  “I knew you’d say that, I just knew it.” Wyvern puffed on his Pall Mall, coughing so violently Phoebe expected his ribs to separate from his sternum. “No matter. This has been a marvelous week for me. The Circus nailed her up real good. Why didn’t you shoot him?”

  “Who?”

  “The grandpastor. Billy boy. You were supposed to shoot him.”

  “Yeah? Well, it started looking like a poor idea.”

  “You disappointed me, Phoebe. You hurt me.”

  “The whole thing would’ve looked bad in Katz’s biography. I’m writing it. But then God came along and did the job.”

  “The biography?”

  “The assassination.”

  “No, that was lightning, child.” The devil coughed, a sound like a tubercular calliope. “If you’re really writing her biography, be sure to get the facts right. She and I are two of a kind now. Obsolete. Even hell doesn’t need me. Last I heard, they’d put in a fucking parliament.” Again he coughed. “Time was, I could split open an entire Exxon supertanker with a wave of my hand. A simple nod from Satan and suddenly Mount Popocatepetl’s dumping molten shit on Quauhnahuac. I’d just have to think about counterinsurgency, and—bang—a million Tanzanians are disemboweling each other. From now on, if people want evil and violence on their planet, they’ll have to get it from sources other than me. From nature. From themselves.”

  “The usual sources,” noted Phoebe.

  The devil looked simultaneously insulted and amused. “The usual sources,” he agreed, swilling down the remaining milk.

  Beaming like Angel’s Eye in its glory days, Phoebe packed up her incongruous belongings—her apple, umbrella, Smith & Wesson, peanut-butter jar—and strutted happily across the barn. She chuckled. Katz had beaten the devil after all! She’d actually done it!

  In a sudden spasm Wyvern grabbed a chicken by the neck. “This isn’t the end for me, you know. I’ve had plenty of job offers. I’m joining the circus.” The bird twisted and squawked, kicking like a prisoner on a gallows. “Not Milk’s circus, the regular kind. They’re hiring me as the geek. I’m good at geeking.” He jammed the chicken’s head into his mouth and chomped, severing the neck.

  “I think you’ve found your purpose,” Phoebe told him.

  The devil chewed slowly, grinding the skull against his rusting, roach-brown teeth. “Not bad for a vegetarian, eh?” He spat out a mixture of breast milk and chicken blood.

  Phoebe opened the barn door. New Jersey dripped. Silvery moonlight poured down on the threshing machines, streamlining them.

  “Hey—what do you get when you eat a live hen?” Wyvern called from behind her.

  “What?” Shouldering her backpack, she stepped into the sopping yard.

  “You get a feather in your crap,” said the beaten devil.

  It is harder to be alive than dead. The water seeps relentlessly into your coffin, stinging your eyes and burning your sinuses. Your esophagus twists like a hangman’s rope. Your heart pumps panic and bile.

  Why this supplemental torment, you wonder as your fingers claw at the rubber. Does the Circus never quit? Wyvern never sleep?

  Your nails catch metal. The zipper moves—it moves, oh, God, oh, yes, it moves.

  A foot, two feet.

  Like a moth exiting a cocoon, you slither out and, lungs screaming, fight your way upward, wresting free of death—of death, of hell, of Morphean oblivion—with a single rapturous gasp. The water is frigid and choppy. Absecon Inlet? There’s the spit, there’s Angel’s Eye, rising and falling in the distance like a piston. Alive. Unbelievable. A fiery web spreads across the sky, but nobody’s razing any casinos today, it’s merely the sunset Panting, coughing, you swim toward shore and pull yourself into the shallows, draping your body over the splendid rocks, their glorious slime greasing your bare abdomen and naked thighs. The tidepool is a carnival of life. Shrimp, scallops, pipefish, nereids. Two fiddler crabs mate within inches of your nose.

  You’re alive. Incredible.

  Rain slides across your back—and something else, something warm, soft, and rubbery, massaging your neck and shoulders. It creeps down your stubby right arm and bathes your three aligned wounds in salubrious salt.

  A sponge. A familiar sponge. Her? Could it really be…?

  —Amanda? you inquire.

  —Right, broadcasts the sponge.

  Amanda! Amanda from your petting zoo!

  She waddles onto your left arm and starts cleaning out the hole in your wrist.

  —This is amazing, you say. I never thought I’d see you again, old sponge. They crucified me.

  —I know, Julie. I saw.

  —You saw the Circus?

  —I can’t blame you for not recognizing me. You were in great pain. But there I was, dripping with hemlock.

  —You? I drank from you?

  —Me.

  —Poison?

  —By the time it touched your lips, I’d transformed it: tetradotoxin.

  —What?

  —Tetradotoxin. High grade, ninety-eight percent pure. Remarkable drug. Produces death’s symptoms but not its permanence. It saved your life, Julie.

  —You saved my life.

  —True.

  Delivered by a sponge! Heart saturated with love, soul abrim with appreciation, you kiss Amanda on what you take to be her eyes.

  —I can’t tell you how grateful I am, you inform her.

  —You’re entirely welcome.

  —I’m confused, you let the sponge know.

  A thousand smiles ripple across her porous facade.

  —Some would say the miracle was entirely my own doing, Amanda notes. You were always kind to me, so I paid you back: Androcles and the Lion, right? But that strikes me as a hopelessly romantic and anthropomorphic view of a sponge’s priorities. Others would call the whole thing a gigantic biochemical coincidence: under optimal conditions, sponges will metabolize hemlock into tetradotoxin. I am not persuaded. Still others would claim that God herself entered into me and performed the appropriate alchemy. A plausible argument, but rather boring. Then there is the final possibility, my favorite.

  —Yes?

  —The final possibility is that I’m God.

  —You’re God?

  —Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable…and a hermaphrodite to boot. Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be fatally dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I am both immortal and infinite.

  —You’re God? You’re God herself? You?

  —The data are provocative.

  —God is a sponge? A sponge? There’s not much comfort in that.

  —Agreed.

  —Sponges can’t help us.

  —Neither can God, as far as I can tell. I’d be happy to see some contrary data.

  —I’m getting depressed.

  —Look at it this way. God is not so much a sponge as she is the behavior of a sponge when confronted with…oh, I don’t know…say, a middle-aged woman with a bad haircut who’s recently been crucified. Turn over.

  You turn over. The sponge traverses your chest and, waddling down your left leg, begins disinfecting your mangled feet.

  —Are you saying God is more like a verb than a noun? you ask Amanda.

  —I’m saying God is a sponge, doing what a sponge can do. Understand?

  —I think so.

  —Now run to America, child, before you get into trouble.
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br />   You sit up. You are at peace. It’s only temporary happiness, of course, but you opt for a cheerier syntax: it’s happiness, only temporary.

  Twilight enshrouds Amanda. Not a particularly impressive mother, but evidently the only one you have. You sense she has forgiven your failings as a daughter, and so you resolve to forgive her failings as a parent.

  —Sholem aleichem, you tell her.

  —Aleichem sholem, the sponge replies.

  She wriggles off your feet, hops into the surf, and is gone.

  Mind reeling, wounds throbbing, you climb to the top of the jetty and head west. You feel immeasurably conspicuous. A woman with seven holes in her body limping stark naked down Harbor Beach Boulevard will not go unnoticed for long. “Send me some clothes,” you pray to Amanda. “Something undramatic, something that doesn’t brand me Sheila of the Moon.”

  No clothes appear. You aren’t surprised. Your mother is a sponge. And where, exactly, does that leave you? Where you’ve always been, you decide.

  The rain is slackening. Run home, Amanda has instructed you. You can’t, of course, not with your feet torn to pieces—but by stealing a hideous red pantsuit from a Pleasantville clothesline and a bicycle from Pomona Junior High School, you do manage to reach Camden within four days.

  Alive. Astonishing.

  Slowly, like a photographic image materializing in a tray of developer, the Benjamin Franklin Bridge emerges from the dawn, its cables burnished by the rising sun, its macadam lanes blanketed with fog. Your only adversary is a lone, overweight policeman snoozing in the guardhouse. You leave the bicycle on the puddled steps of the Port Authority Building and limp onto the northern walkway.

  The lanterns are still on, set on poles high above the road, their globes glowing through the mist. Gradually the land drops away, a scruffy, trash-littered neighborhood huddled against brick ramparts, and now comes the besmirched and clotted river. A Jersey Inquisition patrol boat and an American Coast Guard cutter pass each other in icy silence.

  Ten yards away, a thin woman in a yellow parka walks briskly toward America, and you know right away it’s her, her, and so you cry out.

  “Phoebe! Phoebe Sparks!”

  She turns. “Yeah?”