Blameless in Abaddon (13 page)

Martin's nostrils twitched, aroused by the odor of burning wood and smoldering upholstery. He put the VCR on
STILL:
a closeup of the defense counsel, Maximillian Schell, telling the tribunal that Lancaster didn't really mean it. Heart fluttering, Martin stumbled downstairs, limped across the living room, and tore open the door. His enclosed front porch was ablaze—a seething red inferno, smoke rising in thick black coils, flames leapfrogging from the curtains to the throw rugs to the cushions. Waves of heat rushed toward him, striking his cheeks like vengeful slaps. His eyes grew watery. His lungs burned. Convulsive coughing wrenched his ribs.

“Die, Judas!” a man shouted, his voice amplified by a bullhorn. “Die, Judas!”

Martin pivoted. A dozen shadowy figures swarmed across the front lawn, brandishing their fists.

“Die, Judas!”

He hobbled to the kitchen. Snatching up the precious bottle of Roxanol, he opened it, ate two tablets, and staggered out the back door. Hacking, weeping, he made his way to the catnip patch and collapsed.

“Die, Judas!”

Lying on the cool earth, he seriously considered calling the fire department. That would certainly be the rational thing to do. But instead he stayed where he was, rolling around amid the rotting
Nepeta cataria
like a stoned tabby.

Sirens shattered the night, drilling through his tympanic membranes, rattling his Eustachian tubes. A peculiar truth fell upon him. He didn't care whether the flames devoured his house or not. No, he actually
wanted
the flames to devour his house. A thousand remorseless ghosts haunted 22 Flour Mill Road. Hardly a day went by in which he didn't encounter one of Corinne's hair ribbons, a bag of her bath herbs, or a photo of some slavering Kennel of Joy beneficiary. Let it burn. Let the whole damn thing burn down.

He levered himself upright and, groggy with Roxanol, wandered toward the fire. The flames had transformed November's chill, bringing an ersatz summer to his property. Dozens of Chestnut Grove residents had collected on the lawn, holding handkerchiefs to their mouths as they sweated in the heat. Black hoses sinuated amid the crabgrass and the fallen leaves. Men in thick yellow raincoats and white fiberglass helmets wandered about, their faces obscured by oxygen masks, looking less like firefighters than like methane-breathing aliens out of Patricia's trading-card series.

Camouflaged by shadows, Martin called toward a uniformed police officer—one of Constable Steadman's underlings, he realized. “Who lives here?”

“That JP who just got voted out, Martin Candle.”

“Is he dead?”

“Don't know. Dead or alive, looks like the sucker's gonna lose everything.”

“‘Candle.' Isn't he the guy who wants to prosecute the Main Attraction?”

“Same bastard, yeah. Tell you one thing—we find his charred body in the rubble, I won't be sheddin' a whole lotta tears.”

 

He spent the night at his sister's house, and the next morning he drove his soot-smeared Dodge over to 65 Mapleshade Lane. As Patricia sat before her drawing board, adding veins to a Vestan's gigantic eyeballs, he told her of his newest misfortune.

“Burned down your house? Jesus. Are you okay?”

“Good question.”

Extending an inky hand, she fondly squeezed his wrist. “You're welcome to stay in my guest room.”

“Thanks, but . . .”

“You're afraid they'll do
my
house next?”

“A reasonable concern, don't you think?”

“A reasonable concern,” she echoed. “Guess what? I'm so depressed lately that reasonable concerns roll right off my back. The guest room is yours, pal.
Mi casa es su casa
.”

He grimaced and inhaled. His clothing stank of the myriad odors liberated by the flames: paint, varnish, shellac, linoleum, plastic, fiberfill. “Whatever you charge, it's bound to be cheaper than a bodyguard.”

“No payment necessary.”

“You're a kind person, Patricia. I promise you I'll lay low.”

“It's going to be fun having you around.”

“I'm not a terribly fun person these days.”

“We're going to have a ball.”

Relocating to Patricia's guest room proved the simplest such move Martin had ever made. His only possessions to survive the fire—some carpentry tools, a few kitchen utensils, a dozen smoky books, an alarm clock, and the music box he'd won at Celestial City USA—fit easily into four cardboard cartons. He had plenty of time that afternoon to visit the Chestnut Grove post office and inform them of his new address.

With the advent of the Christmas season, Martin became as fixated on Patricia's mailbox as he'd ever been on Corinne's. He checked it incessantly—obsessively—like a new mother tiptoeing into the nursery to make sure her baby was still breathing. When he finally did learn the World Court's response, though, the news reached him not through the postal system but through Charles Braithwaite's second
Time
article about the Job Society. The piece was titled “The Trial of the Millennium: Postponed,” and the key information lay in the final two paragraphs.

 

While the ICJ has made no formal announcement, economic realities will probably keep the Job Society's case off the docket for years to come. “The budget for such a trial would be many times our annual appropriation, something on the order of eighty million dollars,” the Court's vice president, Giuseppe Sanfilippo, told
Time.

The costs in question
, Time
has learned, include hiring a supertanker fleet to extradite the Corpus Dei, paying advocates to construct arguments on both sides of the issue, housing witnesses, and retaining UN peacekeeping forces to control whatever factions might attempt to disrupt the proceeding.

 

Eventually a letter from the World Court did arrive at Patricia's house, but it contained nothing Martin didn't already know. “Although the judges are open to hearing a class-action indictment of the sort your organization proposes,” wrote the registrar, Pierre Ferrand, “they see no way to finance such an elaborate undertaking.”

“A blessing in disguise,” said Patricia.

“Hardly,” said Martin as a crab spasm tore along his femur.

“Put this trial out of your mind. It's time to get on with your life.”

“I've got no life to get on with.”

“Yes you do.”

“‘The wolf is now my brother, and owls of the desert have become my companions,'” said Martin, quoting Job. “‘My blackened skin peels off, and my body is scorched by the heat. My harp has been tuned for a dirge, my flute to the voice of those who weep.'”

“Know what I think? Somewhere deep down inside, you believe if you reenact that crazy Bible story—if you call God to account and listen patiently to His defense—He'll replace everything you lost, just like He did with Job. New house, new career, new Corinne, new prostate gland. Well, it just doesn't work that way.”

“This isn't about my prostate gland, Patricia.”

“Then what
is
it about?”

He glanced furtively at her cleavage. Feminone now ruled his endocrine system so completely he might as well have been looking at a stop sign. “‘Think again, let me have no more injustice. Think again, for my integrity is in question.'”

On December 17 the Job Society gathered once more in the Valley of Children. As the sufferers entered play area three, Randall sidled up to Martin and gestured toward a photograph thumbtacked to the bulletin board: Patricia and Angela wearing matching lime green sunsuits and standing outside the daycare center. Together the women held the nozzle of a garden hose and gleefully sprayed a gaggle of preschool boys in bathing trunks.

“You know them?” asked Randall.

“The one on the left is Angela Zabor—she runs this place. The other one is her twin sister, Patricia.”

“Handsome women.”

“I'm living in Patricia's guest room.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“My friend. Her kid died from complications of spina bifida.”

“Spina bifida? Then why the hell isn't she
here?
”

“She doesn't believe in what we're doing.”

Randall scowled indignantly. “People shouldn't let other people fight their battles for them, especially when the enemy is God.”

The meeting was not long under way when a curious fact dawned on Martin: the Jobians were more anxious to learn about his private disasters than about the ICJ's rejection of their case. Since their last gathering he'd gone out and become a celebrity, and his fellow sufferers wanted to know what fame was like.

“I'll bet your life's been horrible,” said Esther.

“All our lives are horrible,” Martin replied, casting his gaze about the room. Braithwaite was conspicuously absent—afraid, no doubt, to show his face. “But, yeah, you're right. I've had a pretty rough time.”

“I heard they burned down your house,” said Allison.

It was as if, having cheated the world out of a talk show appearance, he was obligated to give such a performance here and now. Only after questioning him for a full half hour were the Jobians satisfied to tackle the business at hand.

“Eighty million dollars,” said Esther, drumming her fingers on the December 14
Time.

“So what're we going to do?” asked Randall. “Hold a fucking bake sale?”

“Let's all become Amway representatives,” said Julia with a dark smile.

“Job never quit,” said Martin. “He stayed on the dung heap, railing against injustice, and eventually the whirlwind appeared.”

“I've got an idea,” said Allison. “We're a grassroots organization, right? So why not stage a grassroots trial? My sister-in-law is a district judge in Macon, Georgia. Maybe she'd be willing to hear our case.”

“I'd hate to settle for something that small,” said Martin.

“Depending on how much media coverage we get, a scaled-down proceeding might be quite satisfying,” said Peter.

“My heart's not in it,” said Martin.

With the approach of midnight the pace of the discussion accelerated. Eventually it was agreed that, upon returning home, Allison would find out whether her sister-in-law could work the Trial of the Millennium into her schedule, a thought Martin found endlessly depressing. Holding the trial in Macon instead of The Hague would be like getting a plush terrier for Christmas when you'd asked for a live Dalmatian.

At five minutes to twelve, he declared the meeting adjourned.

A crab spasm radiated through his pelvis. He ate three Roxanols and looked around. Sixty-five Jobians were heading for the door, a morbid procession of wheelchairs, walkers, IV drips, and oxygen tanks. Ruefully he recalled the bittersweet denouement of their previous gathering. How alive he'd felt back then—how like Job himself, full of bracing belligerence. But tonight he felt like what he was: a widowed, impotent, homeless, lame-duck justice of the peace, marooned in a benumbing Republican suburb and dying of metastatic prostate cancer.

C
ANCER IS MY MASTERPIECE
, the source of all my awards, but weather has always been my bread and butter. You cannot be a credible Prince of Darkness without a talent for hurricanes, a feel for drought, and a working knowledge of snow.

On December 14, 1999, a ferocious blizzard engulfed the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a community boasting more IQ points per capita than any comparable settlement east of the Mississippi. For eighteen hours straight it snowed. Weighted down by the conglomerated crystals, scores of telephone cables and power lines snapped in two like Jason Lowry's spinal cord, rendering the city deaf, dumb, and blind. The streets became frothy white canals negotiable only via snowshoe, snowmobile, or cross-country ski. Enterprising teenagers made fortunes clearing sidewalks and delivering groceries. By Christmas the casualty count stood at twenty-five, including four citizens who'd experienced lethal heart attacks while out shoveling, an elderly piano teacher who'd bled to death after his snowblower lacerated his foot, and an eighty-year-old antiques dealer who, unable to obtain her insulin, had lapsed into a diabetic coma and died.

Throughout the city only one person remained oblivious to the disaster. This was Gregory Francis Lovett, a semi-retired medieval literature professor who rarely left his house, read his mail only when he felt like it, subscribed to no periodicals save the
Augustinian Quarterly
, owned neither a radio nor a television, and had not permitted a telephone in his life since 1962. For news of the outside world, G. F. Lovett relied exclusively on the man with whom he shared his Mount Auburn Street abode, his alcoholic younger brother, Darcy. If the stock market crashed, a war broke out, or Jesus Christ materialized in Harvard Yard accompanied by a band of angels, Lovett would not know of it unless Darcy got around to telling him.

When the emergency officially ended—on the morning of December 19—Lovett was sitting in his private library and savoring a cup of Irish breakfast tea, his ample rump squeezed into a cowhide wing chair. Cedar logs blazed on the hearth. Three thousand leatherbound volumes rested on mahogany shelves, their gold titles sparkling in the fire's glow. In the far corner a grandfather clock stood guard, ticking like the mechanical heart of Stanhope the Steam-Powered Man, the robot featured in one of the many beloved children's books Lovett had penned over the years.

Of all the various pieces of mail occupying Lovett's lap, the only item that intrigued him was the package from Vernice, his ne'er-do-well, thrice-married sister up in Maine, whom he was paying seven thousand dollars a year to send him clippings of a theologically provocative nature. This week's collection featured a dozen articles about an organization called the Job Society, and he had not known such a rush of excitement since 1971, when he and the analytic philosopher Emily Arboghast had crossed swords under the auspices of Harvard's Socratic Club, the topic of their debate being “The Plausibility of the Impossible.” The fight had been grueling, but in the end God and G. F. Lovett had prevailed, with Lovett proving that Arboghast's rejection of the supernatural amounted to a rejection of the thought process itself.