Only Begotten Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

others, and the righteous host disintegrated into a hundred separate suburbanites drifting through the December mist.
    Ever since gouging out his right eye, Billy Milk had been burdened with the ocular equivalent of a phantom limb. Just as amputees endured pain and itch in their missing legs, so did Billy endure visions in his missing eye. For six months straight the phantom organ had been showing him God’s wishes concerning the Preservation Institute. The jagged flames and billowing smoke. The cracked rafters and broken bricks. The rivers of boiling semen rushing from the shattered foundation.
    Ambling past their leader, Billy’s flock acknowledged him with discouraged nods and exhausted smiles. A lonely enterprise, this business of being against evil. To see the moral shape of things, to say this is right but that is wrong, was a habit long out of fashion in the United States of America, land of terminal relativism. But wait, brothers and sisters. Have patience. In the next morning’s Atlantic City Press, Billy’s congregation would finally be reading some good news.
    Planting the bomb had been harrowing, but since when was God’s will an undertaking for the timid? Billy didn’t mind telling the receptionist he was a donor—sin happens in the soul, not the tongue—but then came that awful room papered with naked women and obscene letters. The bomb fit neatly under the middle pillow of the couch, right below Miss April for 1970. In what kind of society was it easier to find a full-color photograph of a woman’s private parts than a Bible? A diseased society, to be sure. Only the Parousia could cure it—Christ’s Second Coming, his thousand-year sojourn in the New Jerusalem.
    Rain drumming against his eyepatch, Billy strode down the wharf and peered, Godlike, into his flock’s little worlds. Cabin cruisers were paradoxical, wholly private when at sea yet here with their sterns backed into port they baldly displayed a thousand intimacies—Oreo cookie package on the table, paperback Frank Sinatra biography on the bunk, Instamatic camera atop the refrigerator. Reaching Pentecost, her white hull shining like the ramparts of the New Jerusalem, Billy scrambled aboard, steadying himself on the three-hundred-dollar marlin rod he’d fixed to the transom. What did it mean to have great wealth? It meant you owned a yacht and a big house. It meant your church was the largest building in Ocean City. It meant … nothing.
    The Lord tested Revelationists more severely than he did other believers. If a Revelationist’s pregnant wife died delivering a premature baby, the ordeal did not end there. No, for Billy’s infant son had been subsequently placed in an incubator, where the supplementary oxygen had choked the undeveloped blood vessels in his eyes; his son had been scarred by air. When Billy first heard that one-day-old Timothy would never see, he had reeled with the incredulity and outrage of Job, puncturing the delivery room’s plasterboard wall with his bare fist, penetrating all the way to the nursery itself.
    Billy Milk had a yacht, and a church, and a sightless son, and nothing.
    No sooner had he entered the cabin when dear old Mrs. Foster sashayed over, waving a supermarket tabloid called Midnight Moon in his face. “The coming thing,” she exclaimed, pointing to an article about a British zoo that trained pets for visually impaired children. In the accompanying photograph, a harnessed chimpanzee led a blind girl across a playground. “By the time Timothy’s three, he’ll be ready for a seeing-eye ape,” she insisted. A smile spread across her flat face, its skin brown and crinkled like a used tea bag. “Orangutans are the cheapest, but the chimps are smarter and easier to care for.”
    “I appreciate your concern,” said Billy impatiently, “but this isn’t for Christian children.” Mrs. Foster was a good nurse, a devout Revelationist, but she lacked discretion.
    “I’m going to ask God about it.