Only Begotten Daughter (30 page)

The traffic in Margate and Ventnor was lethargic and expensive, wave after wave of Revelationist clergy heading for work in their imported Cadillacs, Mercedes, and Lincolns. Slowly Melanie drove Julie past New Jerusalem’s gem-studded walls; past pearly gates where ten years earlier had stood the Golden Nugget and the Tropicana; past a gleaming monorail train gliding soundlessly over the ramparts, hugging the groove like a caterpillar moving along a twig. They headed west. A thirty-story building labeled
ROOMS AT THE INN
loomed above the salt marsh. At the entrance to the New Jerusalem Expressway, churchgoers swarmed around a mammoth cathedral that looked like a spaceship designed to ferry Renaissance princes to Alpha Centauri. A mile down the highway, nestled between two vast oil refineries, a public garden called
GETHSEMANE PARK
glowed under the rising sun, waiting to receive Sunday strollers.

At the Pomona exit, the bones began.

Everywhere: bones. “God,” Julie gasped. Bones. “Sweet Jesus.”

The columns stretched for miles, an army of grim reapers dangling from power lines, telephone poles, lampposts, cattle fences, and billboards, lining both sides of the expressway like defoliated trees—skeleton after skeleton, grinning skull after grinning skull, but each bone blackened, soot-painted, as if the world had become its own photographic negative.

“This is news to you?” Melanie asked.

“It’s … yes. News. God.”

Crows perched on craniums and shoulder blades, pecking out marrow. Around each fleshless neck, a wooden plaque swayed like a price tag.

“Public executions,” sighed Melanie. “Very popular.”

“You mean they were burned
alive
?”

“Alive. In the Circus.” Melanie’s tone hovered between bitterness and resignation. “Always douse the fire before it reaches the bones,” she lectured. “Otherwise you end up with a lot of ashes, and the message gets lost.”

“The message?”

“Don’t be a heretic. Don’t sin.”

Julie’s heart felt uprooted, a wild muscle caroming around inside her chest. “Do Americans know about this? Does their government know? The United Nations? Somebody’s got to
intervene.
”

“They know,” said Melanie, nodding. “But there won’t be any interventions, Sheila, not while Trenton’s such a bulwark against socialism.”

The skeletons glided by like the resurrected dead rushing toward their Judgment Day appointments with God. “Are they all my”—the word stuck in Julie’s throat like a sliver of bone—“disciples?”

“About a third. The rest are murderers, homosexuals, zotz dealers, Jews, Catholics, and so on. Only Uncertaintists go to the stake willingly, though.”

“Willingly?”

“Some of us do. Not many. You talk to us, and we go.”

“I don’t talk to you.”

“We hear you, Sheila. Not me, I’m afraid, but some of us.”

As Melanie eased into the slow lane, the skeletons’ marathon became a more stately procession, and Julie could read the plaques. Below each victim’s name—Donald Torr, Mary Benedict, James Ryan, Linda Rabinovich, a thousand names, two thousand—a single word explained his presence.
Heresy, Heresy, Adultery, Blasphemy
—the convictions fused into a terse poem—
Heresy, Perversion, Theft, Murder, Socialism, Coveting, Heresy, Heresy, Sodomy, False Witness, Heresy, Adultery, Zotz Dealing, Blasphemy, Heresy …

At the Hammonton exit, Melanie pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. “Something you should see …”

“Hey, things are really over the edge these days,” Julie protested. “I get it. Entirely demented. If I were still a deity, I’d put Milk out of business. I don’t need—”

“You
do
need. Excuse me, Sheila, but you
do.
”

Squeezing her burned palm, pouring her outrage into the gummy tissue, Julie followed Melanie to a quartet of skeletons chained to an old Trump Castle billboard. Armored in green, a chubby police corporal approached, moving past the ranks of sinners like a wolf on the prowl, crows scattering before him.

“He wants to make sure we aren’t stealing relics,” Melanie muttered. “Your followers do that sometimes.”

“Will he arrest us?”

“
Us?
We’re just two old-fashioned gals on their way to a Revelationist service.”

Thanks to Melanie, they looked the part. Melanie sported a dress suggesting an immense doily, Julie a maroon silk blouse and a white dirndl skirt splashed with yellow; silver lambs hung from their necks, and they both wore what Melanie called optimal makeup: enough to suggest they valued their femininity, not so much to suggest they enjoyed it.

Pointing his assault rifle downward in a conscious gesture of hospitality, the corporal greeted them in a slow, sandpaper voice. “Morning, ladies.” He swept his arm across the black forest. “When Jesus comes, it’ll be just like this, only a million times greater. Armageddon. Amazing.”

Julie glanced at the nearest skeleton: a broad feminine pelvis, the gnawed bones sewn together with piano wire.

“Let’s go, honey.” Melanie poked Julie’s shoulder as if operating a telegraph key. “We’ll miss the sermon.”

A hole formed in the pit of Julie’s stomach, a tunnel plunging straight to hell

Bored, the corporal drifted out of hearing range, leaving Julie free to weep and bleed and die.

Aunt Georgina’s plaque proclaimed two convictions.
Perversion:
no surprise.
Heresy:
why? Oh, God, oh, no, Georgina, no, no. Julie ran her finger along a blackened rib, revealing the whiteness beneath. Did you go out cursing them, old aunt? Did you spit in their faces? I know you did.

“I always liked her,” said Melanie. “She was a real good mother to Phoebe.”

“You should’ve warned me,” Julie croaked.

“I’m sorry.” Melanie glanced toward the retreating corporal. “We need you. You can see that now, right?”

“This isn’t fair, Melanie!”

“I know. We need you.”

“This isn’t fucking
fair
!”

She tried reconstructing her honorary aunt atop the bones—the sprightly hands, narrow laughing face, quick spidery walk. But a skeleton was a house, not a home; whatever relationship this matrix bore to the vanished events called Georgina, it was too obscure to matter.

“Phoebe know?”

Melanie shrugged. “Didn’t see her in the Circus that day. She’d probably left Jersey years before.”

Julie brushed her aunt’s plaque. “Heresy, it says.”

“They kept asking her to convert, and she kept saying she already had a religion—she said she worshiped the Spirit of Absolute Being. Once they even brought her to the sacred canal to try baptizing her. You know what she did?”

“What?”

“She peed in it. Georgina died well, Sheila. She didn’t beg for mercy till the flames came.”

The faith and funding by which Atlantic City had been upgraded to New Jerusalem had not yet reached Camden, which still retained the blasted, bombed-out look Julie remembered from routinely crossing its southern tip on her way to college. As they approached the Walt Whitman Bridge, she looked toward America. Brick walls, watchtowers, and high spirals of barbed wire flourished along the Jersey side of the Delaware, a metallic jungle, thick and bristling like the seedy Eden that Wyvern was cultivating below.

Declining the bridge, they took the Mickle Boulevard exit and looped east into the city’s bleak, rubbled heart. Broken glass paved the streets. Dandelions sprouted everywhere, nature’s shock troops, invading the empty lots, fracturing the sidewalks. Melanie pulled over, aligning her BMW between two parking meters with cracked visors and scoliotic shafts.

“Don’t tell them who I am.” Julie grabbed Melanie’s lacy sleeve as they walked to the Front Street intersection. “I’ll reveal myself when I’m ready.” They stopped before an ancient saloon, the Irish Tavern, as tightly sealed as a crypt, with boarded-up windows and a cluster of padlocks on the door.
Cold Beer to Go,
said a shattered neon sign. Melanie opened the adjacent wooden gate and started into the trash-infested alley. “Promise you won’t tell,” Julie insisted.

“Promise,” Melanie mumbled. She pounded on the side door, a riveted metal slab, and called “
Moon
rising” in a high, urgent whisper.

Nervous eyes flickered in the diamond-shaped window, and seconds later the door opened to reveal a young woman in a billowy white dress hung with ribbons and frills. She was remarkably thin, a kind of inverse fertility doll, a totem fashioned to foster population control. “
Moon
rising.”

Melanie tossed Julie an anxious glance. “
Moon
rising,” Julie responded, stepping cautiously forward.

The thin woman led them through the murky saloon, its air stale, its furniture sheeted like corpses waiting to be autopsied. They descended the basement stairs, then the subbasement stairs, eventually landing in a cavernous room, a major intersection of Camden’s sewer system, its curving brick walls crisscrossed by ducts and cables, a network that Julie imagined shunting away the city’s undercurrents—its septic blood and unclean thoughts. A swift, malodorous creek gurgled across the floor, spanned by wooden planks on which the Uncertaintists had erected a half-dozen pews, several random chairs, and a lectern plus accompanying altar. Melanie slipped into an unoccupied pew near the back, Julie right behind. Brass candlesticks shaped like lighthouses paraded along the altar, capped by squat white candles. Behind the lectern, a banner proclaimed Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation, ΔχΔρ≥h/4π. Two outsized paperback books rose from the rack before Julie, their white covers emblazoned with computer-generated Old English script. Passing over the
Hymnal,
Julie opened a
Word of Sheila.
Each page reproduced a “Heaven Help You” column. Her eye caught one of the few replies Aunt Georgina had liked—Sheila giving tax advice to a coven of witches in Palo Alto.

Oh, Georgina, Georgina, how could Georgina be dead?

The skinny Uncertaintist who’d greeted them glided toward the altar and, turning, addressed the heretics. “Number thirty-one.” The congregation, a hundred spiffily dressed men and women, lurched forward like bus passengers reacting to a sudden stop, snatching up their hymnals.

“We’ll share.” Melanie shoved an open hymnal under Julie’s nose. The performance proceeded a cappella, an austerity Julie alternately ascribed to purism and to the difficulties of getting an organ into Camden’s sewers.

She came to place uncertainty

And science on our shelf.

She taught us to doubt everything

And seek her sacred self.

While every truth is putative

And every faith a lie,

We know she’ll let us praise her name

And love her till we die.

By the time the refrain arrived—“Despite the fact belief’s absurd, we’ll follow you, just give the word”—Julie’s entire body had become a wince, a posture she maintained during hymn seventeen, “Her Daughter’s Growing Under Glass.”

“Ahhhhhmennnnn,” the heretics sang, holding the note as they replaced their hymnals.

From the sewer pipe nearest the altar, a preacher emerged. “Father Paradox,” Melanie explained.

The man was fat. His belly arrived like an advance guard, heralding the bulk to come, huge shoulders, a surplus chin. His white cassock had settled over his body like a tarpaulin dropped on a blimp. Dear mother in heaven, sweet brother in hell: him. Bearded now, older, bespectacled, but still unquestionably him.

“Fellow skeptics, logicians, doubters, questioners, relativists, rationalists, pragmatists, positivists, and enigmatists,” Bix announced, “today we’ll be talking about God.”

As her former lover wrapped his stubby fingers around the lectern, Julie realized that its cylindrical contours and glassy surfaces were meant to represent an ectogenesis machine. Bix Constantine—in a pulpit? Her heart stuttered. Her brain seemed to spin in its skull.

“Column five, verse twenty,” Bix boomed, flipping back the cover of an enormous
Word of Sheila.
Julie pulled the nearest
Sheila
from the rack. Column five, verse twenty was her answer to a young man in Toronto who’d wanted to find faith.

Bix cleared his throat, a noise suggesting a despondent garbage disposal. “Sheila writes, ‘Over the centuries, four basic proofs of God’s existence have emerged. To be perfectly frank, none of them works.’” Snapping his
Sheila
shut, he yanked off his bifocals and swept them across his flock like a maestro wielding a baton. “Does she speak the truth here? Is it impossible to verify God through sheer deduction? Proof one—the ontological. In Saint Anselm’s words, ‘God is that being than which nothing greater can be conceived.’ Unfortunately, no evidence exists that, simply because the human mind can devise ideas of perfection, infinitude, and omnipotence, such qualities occupy an objective plane.”

“Agreed!” the congregation called in unison.

Next Bix demolished the moral argument: if God were the source of humankind’s ability to distinguish right from wrong, then believers would behave better than atheists, a postulate unsupported by history.

“Agreed!”

He ravaged the cosmological argument: one has no warrant to move from the innumerable causal connections within the universe to a comparable connection between the universe and some hypothetical transcendent entity.

“Agreed!”

He made hash of the teleological argument: from the mythic universe of the Greeks to Aristotle’s crystalline spheres to the contemporary big-bang model, all pictures of reality are wholly human in design, and it is therefore presumptuous to ascribe any of them to God.

“Agreed!”

“As we all know,” Bix concluded, “there is but one proof of God’s existence, and that proof is she to whom we give our confused hearts and confounded minds.” His voice rose powerfully and majestically, like a supersonic jet leaving a runway. “Sheila who revealed the God of physics and forged the Covenant of Uncertainty! Sheila who, against all logic and natural law, commanded the ocean, quenched the fire, and ascended!” He listed away from the lectern. “Thank you, bewildered brethren. Next week we’ll discuss what Sheila meant by the empire of nostalgia.”