Only Begotten Daughter Read Free

come on the market. Nobel sperm was cheap, reliable, and simple to use. After acquiring a turkey baster, you injected yourself with the rare fluid—the crème de la crème, as it were—and nine months later out burst a genius. The laureates received nothing for their donations beyond the satisfaction of upgrading the human gene pool. Murray Katz—retail clerk, involuntary celibate, Newark Community College dropout—received thirty dollars a shot.
    And then one afternoon a message arrived—a telegram, for like most hermits, Murray had no phone.
YOUR LAST DONATION CONTAMINATED. STOP. COME IMMEDIATELY. STOP.
    Contaminated. The word, so obviously a euphemism for diseased, made a cold puddle in his bowels. Cancer, no doubt. His semen was riddled with malignant cells, STOP : indeed, STOP : you’re dead. He got behind the wheel of his decrepit Saab and headed over Brigantine Bridge into Atlantic City.
    When Murray Jacob Katz was ten years old, he’d begun wondering whether he was permitted to believe in heaven, as were his various Christian friends. Jews believed so many impressive and dramatic things, it seemed only logical to regard death as less permanent than one might conclude from, say, coming across a stone-stiff cat in a Newark sewer. “Pop, do we have heaven?” he’d asked on the day he discovered the cat. “You want to know a Jew’s idea of heaven?” his father had replied, looking up from his Maimonides. “It’s an endless succession of long winter nights on which we get paid a fair wage to sit in a warm room and read all the books ever written.” Phil Katz was an intense, shriveled man with a defective aorta; in a month his heart would seize up like an overburdened automobile engine. “Not just the famous ones, no, every book, the stuff nobody gets around to reading, forgotten plays, novels by people you never heard of. However, I profoundly doubt such a place exists.”
    Decades later, after Pop was dead and Murray’s life had been relocated to Atlantic City, he began transforming his immediate environment, making it characteristic of heaven. The whole glorious span of Dewey’s decimal system soon filled the lighthouse, book after book spiraling up the tower walls like threads of DNA, delivering intellectual matter to Murray’s mammalian cortex and wondrous smells to the reptilian regions below—the gluey tang of a library discard, the crisp plebeian aroma of a yard-sale paperback, the pungent mustiness of a thrift-store encyclopedia. When the place became too crowded, Murray simply built an addition, a kind of circular cottage surrounding the lighthouse much as three hundred noisy, enraged, and well-dressed Christians were now surrounding the Preservation Institute.
    Three hundred, no exaggeration, brandishing placards and chanting “It’s a sin!” Even the seaward side was covered; a flotilla of yachts lay at anchor just offshore, protest banners fluttering from their masts: PROCREATION IS SACRED … SATAN WAS A TEST-TUBE BABY … A GOOD PARENT IS A MARRIED PARENT . Murray crossed the sandy lawn using the cautious, inoffensive gait any prudent Jew might adopt under the circumstances, AND THE LORD STRUCK DOWN ONAN , declared the placard of a gaunt old gentleman with the tight, reverent carriage of a praying mantis, GOD LOVES LESBIANS, GOD HATES LESBIANISM , proclaimed a large-eared adolescent who could have starred in the life of Franz Kafka. Murray studied his goal, a ring of sawhorse-shaped barricades manned by a dozen security guards anxiously stroking their semiautomatic rifles. Protestors pawed Murray’s coat. “Please keep your sperm,” urged a pale, toothsome woman whose placard read, ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION = ETERNAL DAMNATION .
    As Murray passed the barricades, a hand emerged from the mob and trapped his shoulder. He turned. A leather patch masked the protester’s right eye. To fight God’s battles, God had equipped him with massive arms, a body like a Stonehenge megalith, and a