Only Begotten Daughter (44 page)

“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.

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?”

“Phoebe! Phoebe!”

“Katz?
Katz
?!”

“Phoebe!”

“Julie Katz?” She can’t believe it. “Julie Katz!
Julie Katz
!!”

She bolts toward you like a dog being released from a kennel, and suddenly you’re melting into each other, bones fusing, skin knitting, your blood a single organ pouring through shared flesh.

“Oh, Katz, Katz, Julie Goddamn Katz, how the hell’d you
do
it?”

“Do it?”

“You came
back
!” Phoebe smiles like an angel on cocaine.

“I came back. Don’t let it get around.”

“How?”

“There are several competing explanations.”

Phoebe surveys your perforated arms, skewered feet, ravaged head. “Oh, God, honey, what a mess they made of you.” She flashes her gorgeous Montgomery Clift teeth. “Listen. Good news. I ran into Andrew Wyvern, and he’s in even worse shape than you. More good news—I didn’t kill Milk, but he’s dead just the same. Your mother zapped him with lightning.”

“Lightning?”

“Divine justice.”

“Secular coincidence.”

“No, buddy.” Phoebe places her hands defiantly on her hips. “God.”

“God is a sponge.”

“A what?”

“A sponge.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The data are provocative.”

“A
sponge?”

“Let’s go home, Phoebe. Let’s go play with the baby.”

On the first day of September, 1974, a child was born to Murray Jacob Katz, a celibate Jewish recluse living across the bay from Atlantic City, New Jersey, an island metropolis then famous for its hotels, its boardwalk, its Miss America Pageant, and its seminal role in the invention of Monopoly. Forty years later, the woman that the child had become walked away from New Jersey forever.

Julie studied the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, her gaze lifting past the rivets bubbling from the girders, past the braided steel cords hitched like strings on a harp only an angel could play, past the stately sweep of the main cables, past the sky and the sun. So where was God—up there polishing her arsenal of lightning bolts, or in Absecon Inlet, sucking water through her dermal pores, straining out nutrients for her tissues and spicules?

She fixed on the path before her.
WELCOME TO FLESH
, the signpost said,
UNCERTAINTY ZONE AHEAD
. Yes, for another thirty or forty years, it was all hers again, the scarred forehead, pillaged womb, stumpy right arm—just as she wanted.

And this was only the beginning, Julie thought, for under the transforming power of the moment Vine Street did not end in the City of Brotherly Love but flowed like a river, ever westward. This morning she and Phoebe would get out of Camden, next month they’d all leave Philadelphia—she, Phoebe, Bix, Irene, Little Murray—then Pennsylvania, then Ohio, mile upon mile, moving against the planet’s spin, the sun always at their backs as they passed through Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and perhaps even the South Seas island they’d discovered in the Deauville.

Her best friend loved her. Her husband loved her. She had powers. She could clothe the naked, feed the starving, water the thirsty, insulate the freezing. Then there was this child-hunger business. Would Little Murray satisfy her, or would she and Bix adopt? This too: she wanted a job. Julie the high-school physics teacher, Julie the advice columnist. Or maybe she’d get a doctoral degree. Dr. Katz, the fighting middle-aged theology professor.

Forty: not too late to start her deferred but promising life.

Julie Katz looped an arm around her best friend, who promptly gave her a wry wink and a quick kiss on the cheek, and together they crossed the warty old bridge and entered the world.

T
HROUGHOUT THE WRITING OF
this novel, my companions included several extraordinary books dealing with the scientist’s search for God, the evolution of Christianity, and other pertinent topics. Let me here acknowledge my debt to Paul Davies’s
God and the New Physics,
Edward Harrison’s
Masks of the Universe,
Stephen Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time,
Richard Dawkins’s
The Blind Watchmaker,
Thomas Sheehan’s
The Second Coming,
Hyam Maccoby’s
The Mythmaker,
Ian Wilson’s
Jesus: The Evidence,
Hans Rung’s
Does God Exist?,
and Edward Peters’s
Inquisition.

I am grateful to the wide circle of friends and colleagues who commented on the manuscript during its various systolic and diastolic phases: Joe Adamson, Linda Barnes, Michael Bishop, Jon Burrowes, Shira Daemon, Denali Delmar, Margaret Duda, Joan Dunfey, Alexander Jablokow, Ellen Kushner, Geoffrey A. Landis, Elissa Malcohn, Chris Monroe, Jean Morrow, Resa Nelson, Steven Popkes, Peter Schneeman, Brett Singer, D. Alexander Smith, Kathy Smith, Sarah Smith, James Stevens, Bonnie Sunstein, and Michael Svoboda.

Finally, I must thank my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, for her continuing moral support, and my editors, David Hartwell and Susan Allison, who provided the kind of intense line-by-line attention most novelists only dream of receiving.

After writing two science-fictional extravaganzas whose characters inhabit distant planets, followed by a political satire that unfolds largely in a post-apocalyptic Antarctica, I was pleased to finally be working on a novel whose locations I could research firsthand. While composing
Only Begotten Daughter
, I would often visit its real-world settings in contemporary New Jersey and Pennsylvania, mentally putting my heroine through her paces as if I were blocking the action for a motion picture. Sardonic in tone, irreverent in spirit, and, I would argue, feminist in sensibility,
Only Begotten Daughter
is, like most of my fiction projects, essentially a thought experiment. What if Jesus Christ’s half-sister were incarnated in Atlantic City shortly after the coming of the casinos? What if this female messiah—call her Julie Katz—had a strained (indeed, nonexistent) relationship with her mother, the creator of the universe? And what if Julie decided that the only viable way for her to be a modern-day deity was to give up her divinity?