Blameless in Abaddon (29 page)

To: [email protected]

Date: Thur, May 25, 03:10 PM Local Time

 

We've had another setback. Not only is the ontological solution a bear, its counterpart in the moral domain—the free will defense—appears equally unassailable. Get your young philosophers on the job right away. We're paying a $15,000 bounty to whoever can slay the Leviathan of
liberum arbitrium!

 

Beyond our theological difficulties, I thinly we're in good shape. Esther has scheduled some absolutely beautiful victims.

 

Sooner or later Randall's Harvard kids would come up with something, Martin told himself. The thought of the ontological and free will defenses being dismantled at Lovett's place of employment, practically under his nose, filled him with unabashed glee.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Thur, May 25, 08:36 PM EDT

 

The news at this end is all good. Our amyotrophic-lateral-sclerosis witness, Christopher Ransom, just signed up for our initial offer of $85,000, and our cystic-fibrosis dad is also in the bag. His name is Harry Elder, and he refuses to take any money (“I'd feel like a leech”). Best of all, Norma Bedloe has agreed to defer her suicide until after we put her on the stand. Her fee—her “legacy,” as she puts it
—
is $110,000. If she knew how to go about the deed, I don't think she'd be so cooperative. No doctor will give her the information she requires.

 

Writing back to Esther, Martin found himself singing the “Prufrock” song from
Crabs
, matching the notes to the rhythm of his fingers tapping on the keyboard.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Thur, May 25, 03:32 PM Local Time

 

As Randall may have told you, he has secured the services of a human-depravity specialist named Tonia Braverman and an authority on natural and existential evil named Donald Carbone. Between these two expert witnesses and your fine roster of sufferers, we've got a damn good chance of winning.

 

At dusk the
Good Intentions
reached the river's source, a freestanding column of donated blood shooting three miles into the air and bulking a thousand feet in diameter. The cataract fed not only the Hiddekel, Augustine explained, but three other cranial arteries as well: the eastward-flowing Euphrates, the Gihon as it rushed to circle the land of Cush, and the Pishon pursuing its southern course to Havilah. Martin had never seen such a phenomenon before, this frothing, thundering mass rising heavenward like a liquid tornado. Sipping a margarita, he bent over the transom and stared into the roiling plasma.

Something strange appeared.

A fifth river rolled out of Eden—just a brook, really, its bed filled not with blood but water. Martin recognized it. The brook's hue bespoke its identity: God's Idea of Waupelani Creek, aglow with Abaddon Township's legendary golden carp.

“Which river drains the pineal gland?” he asked Augustine.

“The Euphrates. The Gihon as well, also the Pishon—even the Hiddekel, if you want to take the long way around. Here in God's brain, all roads lead to His soul.”

“What about that little one over there? Waupelani Creek—will that bring us to the gland too?”

Augustine scowled and said, “About twenty miles from here it empties into the Schuylkill and from there into the Gihon.”

“I want us to follow it.”

“Bad idea. Our draft's too deep. We'd run aground.”

“Then I'll make the trip alone.”

“Alone? On foot?”

Martin nodded.

“It'll take you three days at least,” said Augustine.

“I'll camp out,” said Martin.

“I don't think we should split up,” said Ockham.

“Aren't you too sick to go off on your own?” asked Beauchamp.

“Of
course
he's too sick to go off on his own,” said Saperstein.

“Please understand—I've got a unique opportunity here.” Martin shifted his gaze back and forth among the scientists: a worried Ockham, a confounded Beauchamp, a disgruntled Saperstein. “When I was fourteen, I watched two bulldozers destroy my childhood home. It used to be a firehouse, but Dad had turned it into a really magical place, full of funny little rooms and slanted floors you could use like sliding boards. I'll bet you anything that, in God's Idea of Abaddon, my firehouse still stands.”

Drawing the pink itinerary from his coat, Augustine faced Martin and ripped the paper to shreds. “Whether you visit your native township or not, we won't be needing this anymore.” He tossed the confetti over the bulwark. The blood tornado caught the fragments, sucking them toward its core. “I hope you've learned your lesson, sir. Theodicy is a serious business. Ontology, free will . . . it takes more than righteous indignation to defeat two thousand years of subtle and courageous Christian thought. Perhaps you'd better pull out now, before Lovett trounces you.”

“Thanks for the advice, Your Grace, but
International 227
is going to happen. Maybe if you're nice to Job, he'll let you watch it on his Magna vox. It's a much bigger set than the Devil's.”

 

At eight o'clock the next morning, after entrusting his laptop, modem, cellular phone, and theological artifacts to Father Ockham, Martin shouldered his backpack and began to trace the circuitous and shimmering Waupelani.

A ten-mile hike beneath a shining neuronal canopy brought him to the outskirts of the township's affluent northern section. As the creek wound through the parks and playgrounds—through the golf courses, tennis courts, and backyards sporting swimming pools and Japanese rock gardens—the coma's devastating legacy presented itself in stark detail. Severed power lines hung uselessly from their poles. The grass suggested the beer-stained surface of a pool table in some shabby urban saloon. Whatever glorious views and pristine vistas had once graced the divine edition of Abaddon, they had long since succumbed to His sleep.

A crab spasm detonated in Martin's right hip. He pulled the Roxanol bottle from his pocket, swallowed two tablets, and waited impatiently as the opium found its way to his brain.

He pressed on.

At noon he reached the weedy environs of his old high school. A chanting sound, cadenced and aboriginal, wafted across the field. He stopped. Listened. The noise resolved into scores of adolescent voices reciting the Twenty-third Psalm.

 

. . .
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

All the days of my life:

And I will dwell

In the house of the Lord forever.

 

Martin resumed his journey, following the creek for another fifty yards, then pausing at the threshold of a familiar wooden footbridge. As a student, he had crossed this stout span nearly three thousand times, but only now did he see how evil it was—a lethal trap, waiting to snare some innocent Abaddonian's wife. He closed his eyes and stumbled forward. Passing over the Waupelani, he approached the glass-and-aluminum front door of his school, raised his palm, and pushed. The door broke loose and crashed to the floor, launching a spiraling plume of dust.

Like its terrestrial counterpart, the foyer of God's Idea of Abaddon Senior High featured a six-foot-wide plastic globe etched with contour lines and coordinates. Martin drew nearer. The globe, he saw, depicted not the Earth but some infant planet whose Pangaeaic mass had yet to fracture into continents.

 

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord
,

All ye lands.

Serve the Lord with gladness:

Come before His presence with singing . . .

 

Psalm One Hundred grew louder, echoing up and down the empty corridors as Martin limped into the auditorium. Dust carpeted the aisles; springs poked through the seat cushions like decapitated jack-in-the-boxes; the curtains hung in tatters, as if they'd fallen prey to some voracious species of moth. Up on the stage the Idea of Mr. Gianassio strutted back and forth as he taught twelfth-grade honors English, an open copy of
The Brothers Karamazov
balanced on his palm.

“Dostoyevsky himself believed that the heart of the novel is Ivan and Alyosha's debate about the nature of God,” said Gianassio, lecturing at the top of his voice lest the thundering recitation drown him out. “Ivan's examples of evil—all taken by the author from contemporary newspapers—are among the most devastating ever compiled. The peasant boy torn to pieces by hounds in front of his mother for hurting a nobleman's dog. The baby whom the Turks amuse with a shiny pistol right before blowing her head off. The five-year-old whose educated parents, angered by her bed-wetting, smear her face with her own feces, make her eat the remainder, then lock her all night in a freezing outhouse, the child beating herself on the chest the whole time, crying out for God to protect her.

“To his brother, Ivan says, ‘Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?'

“And Alyosha replies, ‘No, I wouldn't consent.'”

Mr. Gianassio snapped the novel shut, pivoted on his right heel, and exited stage left.

The instant the chanters finished Psalm One Hundred, they launched into the Lord's Prayer. Following his ears, Martin left the auditorium, limped down the hall to Room 107, and stepped furtively inside. Two dozen students sat at their desks, eyes closed, heads bowed, hands clasped. Dissection kits and tripleobjective microscopes rested atop the counters. Storage cabinets lined the walls, their shelves jammed with taxidermy specimens: great horned owl, bobcat, beaver, snapping turtle, rattlesnake. At the front of the room stood a spindly, sunken-eyed man, his fingers so tightly intertwined their tips were red with blood.

 

. . .
but deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the kingdom
,

And the power, and the glory, forever.

Amen.

 

The spindly man raised his head and blinked, whereupon Martin recognized Oscar Simmons, his eleventh-grade biology teacher. Without saying a word, the Idea of Mr. Simmons removed a red leatherbound New Testament from his desk drawer, opened it near the middle, and flipped ahead one page. Martin smiled. Throughout his life—every time his father had picked up a Bible—he had witnessed this startling phenomenon of a man cracking the spine of Scripture and finding himself within a page of the desired verse.

“Today's reading comes from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians . . .”

Mr. Simmons's students lifted their eyes in unison. The coma had exacted a severe toll. With their small skulls, beady eyes, and gap-toothed smiles, they seemed descended not from healthy Abaddonian stock but from some isolated backwoods family drowning in its own gene pool, a classroom of village idiots.

“Excuse me,” said Martin, stepping forward.

Mr. Simmons lowered his New Testament, cradling it protectively against his chest as he fixed Martin with a stare so feral it rivaled the stuffed horned owl's. “If you don't like what you're about to hear, sir, you may leave the room—provided you can show me a note from your mother.”

“When I had you for advanced biology, you were the ultimate logical positivist. What happened?”

The teacher pointed skyward. “Out there, yes, I'm a skeptic, but in here I'm a fundamentalist Christian. My most popular course is called Introduction to Scientific Creationism.”

“Prayer and Bible reading have been banned in the public schools,” Martin protested. “My classmate Randall Selkirk got the Supreme Court to declare this sort of exercise unconstitutional. What you're doing is against the law.”

“In God's version of reality,” Mr. Simmons explained, “the Court ruled that the First Amendment permits classroom Bible reading for the purpose of ethical—as opposed to religious—instruction. ‘The Holy Scriptures are a proven source of moral education, manifestly meriting a place in every student's schedule,' noted Justice Thomas Clark, writing for the majority.” With a florid gesture, he directed the class's gaze toward the interloper. “Ladies and gentlemen, do we know who this is?”

“Yes, Mr. Simmons,” said the students in unison, as if still reciting the Lord's Prayer. “This is Martin Candle.”

“And what is Mr. Candle's project?”

“International 227: Job Society versus Corpus Dei.”

“And how do we feel about
International 227?”

“It makes us mad!” said the students, rising in a body.

“How mad?”

“Mad as hornets! Mad as
Vespula maculata
!”

It took Martin only a second to realize what Mr. Simmons's class intended. Charging away from their desks, six students formed a human barricade across the doorway, while the others raced toward the storage cabinets, tore open the doors, and systematically armed themselves.