Blameless in Abaddon (11 page)

Sincerely
,

Martin Candle

Justice of the Peace

Abaddon Township, Pennsylvania

 

He would never forget buying the
New York Times
for Sunday, August 29, 1999, pulling out the
Book Review
, and seeing his cri de coeur shouted to the world in aggressive Geneva type. Despite his perusal of the dummy version he'd created on his computer, he wasn't prepared for this outsized incarnation. Everywhere he went that morning—bathroom, kitchen, catnip patch—he carried the
Book Review
with him, reading his ad over and over. He chastised himself for not catching the typo on “Auschwitz” (it read “Auchwitz”) when he'd examined the proof that the advertising director had faxed him from Manhattan; he wished he'd said Job had “put his Creator in the dock” instead of “called his Creator to account”; he decided Helvetica type would have looked more serious than Geneva. But for all this, Martin felt unabashedly pleased with his complaint.

The telephone started ringing right after lunch.

“I can't believe you did this,” fumed Vaughn.

“Neither can I.”

“I won't stand by while you throw the election to some starry-eyed tree-
shtupper
from Harvard.” Vaughn was alluding to Barbara Meredith, the Democratic candidate for JP, a woman with environmentalist views most charitably described as extreme. “It's political suicide. There's a typo on ‘Auschwitz.'”

“I know.”

No sooner had he replaced the receiver when his mother called, every bit as vexed as Vaughn.

“Is this really the sort of thing you should be spending your money on?”

“I can afford it, Mom.”

“Your father would not be proud. There's a typo on ‘Auschwitz.' I'm worried they'll come after you.”

“For a typo?”

“An ad like this—it's going to make people mad.”

Patricia called next.

“Well, it's certainly
dramatic.
Are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied, thrilled, scared.”

“My ex saw it. He wanted to know, quote, ‘How the fuck did the Valley of Children get mixed up in this?'”

“Maybe he'd like to make a donation.”

“I doubt it. He's pretty religious.”

“So am I. Will you come to the meeting?”

“This is your fight, Martin. Not mine—yours. There's a typo on—”

“‘Auschwitz.'”

He spent the evening drafting a formal petition of the sort an aggrieved party must submit before its case can be considered by the International Court of Justice. Running to three singlespaced pages, the petition was essentially a prolix rewrite of the
Book Review
ad, with a postscript detailing instances of ostensibly unjustifiable aggression by the Main Attraction—the cholera bacterium, the eruption of Vesuvius—and a post-postscript pointing out that the Court's newly acquired jurisdiction over individuals logically included deities as well as people.

Two days later the responses started arriving from the outside world. They divided neatly into three categories—completed registration forms, heartfelt expressions of support, and intellectual hate mail. The majority of the friendly communiqués included donations, the smallest being a five-dollar bill from a precocious adolescent in Des Moines who claimed her hero was Friedrich Nietzsche, the largest being a cashier's check for two thousand dollars from the leader of a Satanic cult in Bangor, Maine. (“Our Father, who farts in Heaven, thinks you've got a terrific idea.”) Typical of the intellectual hate mail was a letter from a religious studies professor at the University of Memphis.

 

Dear Judge Candle:

 

The “honorable question” you raise has been pondered for centuries by minds far subtler than yours.

 

Have you never read Saint Augustine's
De civitate Dei?
Thomas Aquinas's
Summa theologiae?
Bishop Origen's
Contra Celsum?
Saint Anselm's
De casu diaboli?
Gregory the Great's
Moralia?
Gregory Nazianzenus's
Discours?
Martin Luther's
Werke?
Until you acquire some credentials in theodicy, I suggest you stick jaywalkers and leave evil to the grown-ups.

 

Sincerely
,

Phillip H. Strand, PhD

 

The dispatches from academia gave Martin considerable pause. He hadn't been prepared for them, and it didn't help when Patricia said, “I'll bet you haven't read
any
of those heavy thinkers, right?”

“I'm named for Martin Luther,” he replied feebly.

“‘Theodicy'?”

“A theodicy is a systematic attempt to reconcile the fact of evil with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator.”

“Where'd you learn that?”

“Webster's Tenth New Collegiate
.”

“Yeah? Well, it'll take more than a
dictionary
to bring down God. You're in over your head, Martin. Get out while you can.”

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana—one of my favorite philosophers—used to say. I would add that those who
can
remember the past are also condemned to repeat it, but that's another story. The point I wish to make is that Martin Candle's project did not represent the first time the good people of Abaddon Township had awakened to find a rebel in their midst.

Cast your mind backward—to February 11, 1962. On that date a tenth-grade classmate of Candle's named Randall Selkirk is sitting in his homeroom in Abaddon Senior High School, pondering the student-produced “morning show” he has just heard, involuntarily, over the public-address system. Selkirk is discontent. As usual, the program has included the Pledge of Allegiance, a meaningless Fact for the Day (“Mount Everest is twenty-nine thousand feet high”), a series of stupid announcements (“the Chess Club will meet after school in Room 217”), and the obnoxious closing motto (“Abaddon: first in the Alphabet, first in Achievement, and first in Attitude”), but what really bothers Selkirk is that this broadcast, like all the others before it, began with a student reading ten Bible verses and then leading the school in the Lord's Prayer. Selkirk and his parents attend Fox Run Unitarian Church. They are staunch atheists who believe God is a unity, not a trinity, and while they appreciate the Bible for its literary merits, moral insights, and general raciness, they certainly don't think it divinely inspired.

That afternoon, Selkirk sees the assistant principal, Mr. Trevose, and reports his unhappiness with the religious portions of the morning show. Unmoved, Trevose flippantly suggests that Selkirk take his complaint to the Supreme Court.

Which is exactly what he does.

The route is indirect. Selkirk wins in a three-judge statutory court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, but the commonwealth appeals the decision, and eventually Earl Warren and his fellow Supreme Court justices agree to hear the assorted arguments for and against school prayer. Selkirk's political science teacher, William Rorty, gives him extra credit for writing out the detailed deposition that his counsel, Henry Sawyer, will use in arguing the appellee's case before the Warren Court. Rorty jokes that changing the course of American history is worth as much as a term paper.

Again Selkirk wins. His victory is a mixed blessing, however, for as soon as the rest of the Abaddon student body realizes that a heretic dwells among them, an ethos of persecution descends. The Current Affairs Club paints
COMMIE FAGGOT
on Selkirk's locker. The Math Society steals his slide rule. The soccer team urinates on his sister. Eventually he and his family move to Delaware, and who can blame them?

Randall Selkirk has never been a hero of mine either. Thanks to his meddling, millions of youngsters will never hear the rousing speech Moses delivers to his generals in chapter thirty-one of Numbers following the surrender of the Midianites: “Kill all the male children! Kill also all the women who have slept with a man!” They'll never hear the uplifting attitude toward families Jesus expresses in chapter fourteen of Luke: “If any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple.” They'll never hear the line from chapter twenty-seven of Matthew that helped make anti-Semitism such an intractable feature of Western civilization: “His blood be on us and on our children!” If any of you knows of an organization devoted to restoring Bible reading to America's public schools, have its officers contact me right away. I'm good for a generous donation.

 

While Martin had assumed the first sufferer to appear that evening would be a stranger, the man now standing in the open doorway to the Valley of Children was presenting himself as an old school chum.

“Randall Selkirk,” said the visitor.

“You
do
look familiar.”

Martin took a deep breath, and it all flooded back:
School District of Abaddon Township, Pennsylvania, et al., versus Randall Catlin Selkirk, et al.
, the 1963 Supreme Court case that—against the wishes of nearly everyone living in the United States at the time—had led to the banning of sectarian prayer and devotional Bible reading in the public schools. Shortly after the Court's opinion was reported in the
Philadelphia Bulletin
, Martin's father had broken down and wept.

“Abaddon versus Selkirk
, right?” said Martin, extending his hand to Randall. “You've lost weight.”

A lot of weight, if he was remembering correctly. Randall looked so skinny that his black silk shirt appeared to be on a wire hanger. His most striking feature, however, was not his emaciation but his manner. Martin had seen the type before: the aggressive atheist, the true unbeliever—fingers twitching with nervous nihilistic energy, eyes blinking frantically, their irises pained by light, a consequence of staring into the Nietzschean abyss for hours at a time.

“I run the Boston Marathon each year,” Randall explained. “It keeps me trim.”

He went on to reveal that he worked as a videographer for WGBH, in which capacity he'd recently shot “Immortal Coils,” a
Nova
episode about the great technologies—the Lockheed 7000 heart-lung machine and the General Dynamics refrigeration system—that shielded the Main Attraction from the ravages of decay. Two summers ago, he added dispassionately, his six-year-old son had drowned in the South Beach undertow on Martha's Vineyard while the baby-sitter flirted with the lifeguard.

“I assume that's enough to get me in your club.”

“Oh, Randall, I'm so sorry.”

“Tomorrow's Larry's birthday. He would've been eight. The minute I saw your ad, I said to my ex-wife, ‘This is the organization for me. God's enemies ought to stick together.'”

Martin stepped onto the welcome mat, inhaling the crisp September air. “I'm not God's enemy.” The harvest moon hung low, its silvery beams flowing across the Valley of Children like liquid mercury, glazing the parking lot and burnishing the wooden clown. “In my own way, I still love Him.”

Other Jobians had started arriving—most of them locals, with license plates bearing the slogans of Pennsylvania and her neighboring states, though some had driven from as far away as Virginia, Kentucky, Connecticut, and Quebec. A dozen sufferers came in rental cars and airport limousines, having flown into Philadelphia International that afternoon from Indiana, Illinois, and points west.

“Jesus, Martin, I hope we know what we're getting into,” said Randall, resting a palm on his classmate's shoulder. “This project isn't going to be popular.”

“I never imagined otherwise.”

“They treated me like a monster back in sixty-three—
I Was a Teenage Atheist.
The Future Homemakers Club threw dog shit at me. The football team photographed me in the shower and gave the prints to the cheerleaders. Right before we moved away, somebody nailed a Randall Selkirk voodoo doll to our garage door. This township lived up to its name that year. Abaddon—Hell. You
love
Him?”

“In my own way.”

“And yet you're . . .”

“Correct.”

“I don't get it,” said Randall, slipping into the daycare center. “‘If everything on Earth were rational,'” said Martin, quoting Dostoyevsky, “‘nothing would happen.'”

He greeted each new arrival personally. After directing the sufferer to deposit his coat in nap area two, Martin next escorted him into play area three and—depending on the registrant's preference—offered either a folding chair, a beach recliner, or a place on the Winnie the Pooh hooked rug. “Help yourself to some coffee,” he said, indicating a pair of urns labeled
DECAF
and
REGULAR.
By 8:20
P.M.
the entire Job Society had assembled: sixty-seven
Times Book Review
readers for whom prosperity and intelligence had proven inadequate defenses against disaster.

“Hello, I'm Martin, and I'm an innocent victim,” he began. The allusion to Alcoholics Anonymous drew uneasy laughter. “Before we get down to business, I thought we should introduce ourselves. Give your name, tell us where you're from, and if you want to say what brings you here, fine. In my case it was prostate cancer combined with”—his throat constricted—“my wife's untimely death.” He swallowed French roast from a Styrofoam cup. “Let me add that I undertook this campaign with great reluctance. I'm a Presbyterian. My dad taught Sunday school. Sometimes it seemed like God lived in our attic. Many of you, I suspect, come from equally religious backgrounds.” He perused the room: a score of heads nodded in unison. “And yet we're all here, aren't we? For whatever strange reasons, each of us showed up.”