Blameless in Abaddon (3 page)

Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott.

 

And then he saw her: Corinne, improvising a sinuous ballet atop her panther pelt, her white Lycra bodysuit giving her buxom form the appearance of a snow sculpture by Praxiteles. The sight transfixed him. He forgot to breathe.

 

Out upon the wharfs they came,

Knight and burgher, lord and dame
,

And round the prow they read her name
,

The Lady of Shalott.

 

The song ascended, pouring from her battery-powered tape recorder. As the snow collected on his face, Corinne danced toward him and pressed her lips against his cheeks and brow, kissing each crystal into oblivion.

The animal lover who danced on an animal's hide—the contradiction charmed him. Inevitably he thought of a remark made by a character in
The Brothers Karamazov
, a novel he'd read in Mr. Gianassio's twelfth-grade honors English class: “If everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen.” Thus did one of Martin's most intense experiences with cosmic benevolence reach its climax, with Corinne's lips and Dostoyevsky's epigram.

Two days later he had the first in a series of intense experiences with cosmic evil.

It happened while he was on the job, marrying Demetrius Mitsakos and Gina Fontecchio, high-school dropouts who could barely afford the low end of his sliding scale. Standing in his living room, surrounded by wedding guests, Martin was seized by an overwhelming urge to urinate. He barely got through the ceremony. Rushing into the bathroom, he began emptying his bladder without bothering to lift the toilet seat. A razoring pain hit him, as if a strand of barbed wire were traveling through his urethra. He screamed. His knees buckled. He fell to the floor, eyes fixed on a stain compounded of fungus, rust, and desiccated toothpaste.

Slowly, the agony slackened. He exhaled, thanking God for the relief. His bladder was still complaining, but he dared not pee. Stumbling out of the bathroom, he limped up to Demetrius and Gina, smiled bravely, and wished them all the happiness in the world.

Later that afternoon everyone reconvened at the local Wendy's—the first time this particular restaurant or, Martin suspected, any restaurant in the entire Wendy's chain had hosted a wedding reception. For Demetrius and Gina, the place was redolent of sentiment. They'd met three months earlier at the salad bar.

Had his bladder not been torturing him, Martin might have enjoyed the party. Splendid in his yard-sale tuxedo, Demetrius swaggered to and fro amid the Formica tables, assuring his guests the food would cost them nothing. “Eat up, everybody!” he said expansively. “Gina and I are payin' for everything. Have another Frosty for chrissakes, Sid. More fries, Trixie?” Never before in his life, Martin guessed, had Demetrius been anyone's benefactor, nor was he ever likely to play that part again.

The urge became intolerable. Martin retreated to the men's room and, steeling himself, peed a pint of what felt like sulfuric acid. A foul-smelling yellowish discharge followed.

Pale and shaken, he hobbled back into the dining room, bade the newlyweds farewell, and fled the festivities in a panic.

Twenty-four hours later his primary-care physician, an ethereal young man named Harrison Daltrey, subjected Martin's rectum to a digital examination and offered a diagnosis: acute prostatitis. Dr. Daltrey wrote him a prescription for an antibiotic called NegGram, then explained that Martin would require periodic prostatic massages to expel the urethral secretions. The magistrate felt better even before swallowing the first pill.

And then he felt worse. The NegGram diminished the burning only slightly, and the yellowish discharges continued unabated, staining his underclothes so thoroughly that he took to washing these garments separately, when Corinne wasn't around. Daltrey switched him from NegGram to Furadantin. No improvement.

Then came the fateful prostatic massage of May 4, 1999.

“Something new today,” said Daltrey, withdrawing his gloved index finger. “I'm picking up a small hardening along the lateral border of the left lobe. I want to make sure a specialist can feel it too. Matt Hummel's the best urologist around. You'll be in good hands.”

Dr. Hummel's good hands also detected a hardening in Martin's prostate.

“Until we have a look, I can't tell you whether it's fibrous or neoplastic,” said the urologist, a dour, moon-faced man who'd never shed his boyhood freckles. “If I had to make a wager, I'd bet my last nickel it's benign.”

“You're sure? Your last nickel?”

“You're only fifty-one,” Hummel explained, reaching for the phone. “Let's put you in the hospital this afternoon, okay? We'll do a lab workup, and tomorrow I'll biopsy the area.”

When the anesthesia wore off, the first thing Martin realized was that a Foley catheter projected from his urethra, angling downward like a retrofitted science-fiction penis. Antiseptic fragrances suffused the recovery room. The aggressive chill of central air-conditioning blew across his skin. The nurse on duty, a rotund woman who might have just stepped out of an opera about Visigoths, seemed edgy and distant, as if she feared he might engage her in conversation. Where the hell was Hummel?

“We're keeping you another night,” said the nurse, sidling toward the door.

“Why?”

“Doctor's orders.”

“I hate this catheter.”

“I can imagine.”

And suddenly she was gone, leaving him alone with his fear. As the clock on the recovery room wall crept toward three
P.M.
, Hummel finally appeared.

“How're we doin'?” he asked.

“You didn't tell me there'd be a catheter.”

“We'll take it out before you go to sleep.”

“It's driving me crazy. Did you win your bet?”

“What bet?”

“Your last nickel.”

“Lab report was vague. I told 'em to look at the tissue again.”

“Good-vague or bad-vague?”

“Vague-vague. Let me worry about it, okay?” Hummel started out of the room. “If you're a cooperative patient, we'll let you watch the Phillies tonight.”

Martin sat up, intent on chasing Hummel down the hall and asking what “vague-vague” meant, but the catheter made him reconsider. He lay back, closed his eyes, and brooded.

Twenty minutes later the Visigoth nurse and her ham-fisted male assistant removed the catheter, a procedure that would have caused him only slightly more pain if the device had been a lag screw. They transferred him to a regular room, one boasting not only a color TV and a civilized temperature but also a private phone. Grabbing the receiver, he punched up the number of All Creatures Great and Small.

“They're not letting me out till tomorrow,” he told Corinne. “What about the biopsy?”

“They won't tell me anything.”

“Within a week, this'll all seem like a bad dream.” Her tone was warm, kindly, reassuring. No wonder armadillos fell in love with her. “You'll be standing on home plate, marrying a couple of baseball fans, and you won't even be thinking about your prostate.”

At nine o'clock the next morning Corinne appeared at his bedside bearing the happy news that Hummel had signed him out. His back throbbed. His bladder spasmed. His urethra burned fiercely, as if it had been colonized by fire ants. He wondered whether his augered penis would ever be able to perform its various duties again.

Slowly he eased himself out of bed, collected his watch and wallet from the nightstand, and put on his street clothes. As he and Corinne shuffled past the nurses' station, the pasty-faced woman behind the desk spoke up.

“Dr. Hummel said to get in touch before you leave. Here's the number. There's a pay phone by the Coke machine.”

Hummel's receptionist was expecting Martin's call. “The doctor wants to see you down here at six o'clock. Would that be convenient?”

“Okay,” he said, palms growing damp.

“Can your wife come along?”

“I think so.”

“Please bring her.”

The receptionist hung up.

“He wants to see us at six,” said Martin, staring at his shoes. “Both of us. That's ominous, don't you think?”

“Not necessarily.” Corinne clasped his forearm. “When I was seventeen, a surgeon cut a benign cyst out of my breast. He wanted my mother there afterward to hear exactly what he'd done and why. Here's the plan: once we're finished with Hummel, we're going to Chi-Chi's for dinner.”

And so it happened that, on May 12, 1999, at 6:23
P.M.
, Martin and Corinne stood together in his urologist's badly lit office, hearing a verdict more punishing than anything the JP had ever handed down in his courtroom. Hummel summarized the results of the biopsy, then showed them the report from the pathology lab. The final line read, “Diagnosis: adenocarcinoma of prostate.” In other words, at the age of fifty-one, this devout Presbyterian and devoted public servant, this innocent lover of justice, had developed cancer.

 

Lucky you: I'm back. At this juncture in our hero's plunging fortunes, it would be appropriate to chronicle the origin of the great shrine toward which his cancer will eventually propel him. Initially, of course, no one believed that the eighty-million-ton carcass embodied God Himself. Candle, for example, favored the theory that it was a hoax: a foam-rubber statue carved by a wealthy sculptor with a demented sense of humor, perhaps, or an inflatable dummy constructed by prankster existentialists. Other people were convinced it had fallen from a passing UFO. Still others dismissed the body as a movie prop that had drifted away from the set of an aquatic religious epic, much as the mechanical whale from the Hollywood adaptation of
Moby-Dick
had escaped during shooting.

But then Pope Innocent XIV—staggering beneath the burden of his conscience, a weight that lay upon him like his Savior's cross—came clean. On December 30, 1998, the pontiff stood before a dozen radio microphones, a score of TV cameras, and a phalanx of journalists from every corner of the globe and told an astonishing story. How six years earlier the Vatican had been visited by an archangel claiming that God's inert body lay adrift in the Gulf of Guinea. How Gabriel and his fellow angels had hollowed out an iceberg pinned against the island of Kvitoya. How Captain Anthony Van Horne of the United States Merchant Marine, acting on orders from Rome, had piloted the supertanker
Carpco Valparaíso
to the body's splashdown point off the coast of Gabon, strung two parallel chains from her afterdeck, secured them inside the divine ears, and—after a series of harrowing adventures—towed this strange cargo to the Arctic and deposited it inside the great crypt.

While the fact that its Creator was quite possibly dead proved, on the whole, depressing for the human race, the situation nevertheless boasted a bright side. To the tabloid press the Corpus Dei was a godsend. General Dynamics was delivered from bankruptcy when the Vatican commissioned it to build the cooling chamber that, if He was indeed defunct, would presumably spare His body an unsightly dissolution. Lockheed Corporation was likewise saved when it submitted the low bid on the Series 7000 heart-lung machine that, if He in fact harbored a spark of life, might possibly stabilize Him. And, of course, there were those thousands of O-positive donors who, upon contributing their blood to this unprecedented project, experienced a variety of spiritual satisfaction no human beings had known before.

Grief became a growth industry. Sympathy cards flowed back and forth among the world's bereaved believers (even I sent one, to myself)—a phenomenon that not only quadrupled the worth of Hallmark, Incorporated, but forced the U.S. Postal Service to double its normal number of carriers. The major airlines fell over themselves offering discount rates to pilgrims wishing to pay their last respects. Arriving at the port of Naples, where the Corpus Dei was now moored (another tow by the tireless Van Horne), the mourners purchased bouquets from dockside vendors and tossed them into the waters, watching through tear-stained eyes as the currents bore the flowers across the bay and deposited them alongside His cooling chamber. For the first time in history, orchids had become a bonanza crop, eclipsing both tobacco and cotton, bowing only to opium.

From New Year's Day until well past Easter, Rome's startling revelation commanded the front page of every major newspaper in the Western hemisphere. Dead or alive? Corpse or coma victim? Above all loomed the question of causality. Assuming that the object was in fact a corpse, by what means and for what purpose did God die, and why now? Had He been murdered by a force even greater than Himself? Taken a good, hard look at His favorite species and forthwith succumbed to despair?

But then, inevitably, other matters caught the public's attention—the famine in Mozambique, the unexpected success of the Boston Red Sox—and the Corpus Dei was relegated to the op-ed pages and the occasional political cartoon. Even the
Weekly World News
saw the handwriting on the wall, and by the end of the year headlines such as
COMA DEITY COMMUNICATES BY BLINKING
and
ALIENS USE GOD'S BODY AS LANDING FIELD
had been supplanted by
ELVIS SIGHTED AT LOURDES
and
DEAD SEA SCROLLS YIELD ARTHRITIS CURE.
If people talked about the Naples cadaver at all, it was merely to repeat one of the tasteless jokes—offensive even to me—then in circulation. (“So one day God's doctors are poking Him with these huge electrodes, and He starts coughing. Suddenly He spits out the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. The first doctor turns to the second and says, ‘No wonder He couldn't breathe. He had a Frog in His throat.'”) Finally, even the jokes stopped.