Blameless in Abaddon (31 page)

Get out of here, he told himself. Leave immediately.

He pivoted the canoe two hundred degrees, aimed the prow toward his wife's truck, and began to paddle, churning against the onrushing flood. Ten minutes later he reached the Ranger. The driver's door bore a cracked and peeling painting of a deliriously happy springer spaniel encircled by the words
KENNEL OF JOY.
Martin propped his elbows on the frame of the shattered window, eased forward, and peered inside.

Corinne's corpse, thank God, was gone.

A glass bowl occupied the driver's seat. Several inches away, a crayfish lay belly-up on the damp upholstery, its legs rowing back and forth in the air. Beside the crayfish a golden carp enacted a death dance, flopping and gasping.

Inside the glass bowl a tiny creature—reminiscent of a tadpole in size and shape but possessing a distinctly humanoid head—swam around and around. Its eyes bulged with fear. Its cheeks quivered with pain.

“Are you Martin Candle?” the tadpole inquired, a string of bubbles exiting its mouth.

“W-what?” he said, flabbergasted.

“You're Judge Candle, correct?”

“That's r-right. Ex-judge.”

“Hello, Father.”

“Father?
Father?
”

“Father,” the tadpole repeated, wheezing. “It's really very simple. Your wife was pregnant when she died.”

His jaw went slack. “Pregnant? Corinne? You're . . . my child?”

“Alas, that's overstating the case . . . by about four thousand billion cells.”

“Oh, dear,” he sighed. “We would've lost you?”

“A banner headline in the
Abaddon Sentinel. Local magistrate loses embryo. Miscarriage of justice's daughter.
”

“Daughter? You would've been a girl?”

“It's the Y chromosome that does it.”

Was this happening? Was he dreaming? Even if she could claim no objective reality for herself—a hallucination inside a hallucination—he still felt an instinctual urge to nurse the tadpole through whatever illness had befallen her.

“I always thought ‘Jolene' was a lovely name for a girl,” he mused dreamily. “Corinne liked it too.”

“I don't want a name. I want a voice.”

“A voice? What do you mean, Jolene?”

“I stand before you today not as your hypothetical descendant but as the ambassador of my kind. The statistics, as you may know, are appalling: two of us sloughed off for every six who make it into the world. In all of history, there was never a more prolific abortionist than God Almighty. Make sure the tribunal learns that fact.”

“Okay, but the thing is, Jolene—”

“Stop calling me that.”

“—the thing is, the minute I start going after God for miscarriages, Lovett will simply counter with the Swiss cheese defense. ‘If you want a differentiated, variegated, plenary universe,' he'll say, ‘then defective embryos become a metaphysical necessity.'”

“You got justice for that lady whose dress was ruined. You got it for those women whose boyfriend lied about his vasectomy.”

“Yes, Jolene, but they were
people.
Maybe you haven't heard, but in the outside world the ontological status of embryos is a matter of considerable controversy.”

“Of
course
I've heard. I wasn't born yesterday. Cut the ‘Jolene' crap.” The tadpole coughed, convulsed, and spoke again. “Give us a voice, Judge. Our day in court. Justice.”

“I
can't
drag miscarriages into
International 227
. It's a gigantic can of worms. I
can't
.”

“Let me try another tack.” A seizure coursed through her ethereal body. “Imagine a planet where—”

“Yes?”

The tadpole made no reply.

“Jolene?”

She quivered once more, nose to tail. Her eyes retracted into her head.

“Jolene!” he screamed as her limp body drifted to the top of the fishbowl. No answer. “Jolene!” Silence. “Say something!”

Cupping his hand, he dipped it into the bowl and lifted the corpse free.

“Jolene? Can you hear me?”

As Martin watched in horror, her skin fell away like a thimble slipping from Jonathan Sarkos's finger, revealing an array of tiny gelatinous organs. The disintegration continued, claiming her bones and tissues, leaving him with nothing in his hand but a puddle of water.

Dazed and exhausted, he slumped back onto the canoe seat. He picked up the paddle, oblivious to the dozen splinters that broke off the shaft and lodged in his palms. Pushing the canoe free of the Ranger, he poled forward twenty yards into a shallow lagoon where anemic bullfrogs hopped amid clusters of rotting logs. He set down the paddle, lowered his head, and, as tears squirted from his eyes, began pondering the curious fact that in the entire Book of Job the sufferer never once lamented the loss of his children.

 

While our hero sat stupefied in his stolen canoe, I was working at my sewing machine, stitching together a pair of overalls for one of my regular customers, a Boeing aviation technician who wishes to remain anonymous.

His name is Desmond Featherstone.

The crowning event of Desmond's career occurred on August 12, 1985. At 6:12
P.M.
Japan Air Lines Flight 123, a Boeing 747, took off from Tokyo's Haneda Airport. Thirteen minutes later the plane's rear bulkhead ruptured—a consequence of faulty repairs by Desmond and his teammates—causing a section of rudder to break loose and fall into Tokyo Bay. As cushions and oxygen masks flew crazily about the cabin, flight attendants instructed the passengers to put on life preservers and lean forward, heads down.

In the rear of the 747 off-duty stewardess Yumi Ochiai felt her ears pop as the cabin lost pressure. Glancing out the windows, she caught a glimpse of Mount Fuji. The stricken plane went
hira hira
, and seconds later it skidded through the foothills of Mount Osutaka, uprooting trees and crashing into the slope.
Hira hira:
who else but the Japanese would have a word for the slow, twisting fall of a leaf?

With morning's first light scores of rescue workers arrived, picking through a hellish landscape of charred metal, melted plastic, dead bodies, severed limbs, and pools of blood. Nobody imagined finding any survivors. But then a worker noticed something moving amid the wreckage. It was Yumi, badly hurt but still alive. Minutes later, another worker spotted a twelve-year-old girl caught in a tree, her injuries miraculously limited to cuts and bruises. A third worker found a mother and her eight-year-old daughter, both suffering from nothing worse than broken bones.

One of the most poignant moments I have ever witnessed occurred a year after the 747 hit Mount Osutaka and sent five hundred and twenty irredeemably depraved travelers to their graves, along with eight wicked fetuses and four sinful embryos. On July 31, 1986, the Idea of Desmond Featherstone came into my shop and asked me to make him a pair of dungarees. While placing his order, he repeatedly slid from his pocket a newspaper photo of the four Flight 123 survivors, waving it in my face. “They're all alive,” he muttered tonelessly, his mouth locked in a pained smile. “They're all alive . . .”

And yet, confoundingly, from time to time I still meet people who deny that God protects the innocent.

 

For two solid hours Martin remained in the canoe, the soggy night pressing upon him as he squeezed the splinters from his palms. High above, a crescent moon glittered in the sky like a silver sickle. The air trembled with insect serenades and bullfrog love songs. Leaving the
Good Intentions
had been a mistake, he now realized. There was no reason to believe the firehouse still stood, whereas the sooner he reached the pineal gland, the sooner he could ask the Defendant about His own personal theodicy.

A new sound arose, unexpected yet familiar, an exquisite female voice singing “The Lady of Shalott.” Pangs of loss intermingled with prostate cancer shot through Martin. He seized the paddle, gasping and groaning as he jabbed it into the lagoon.

 

Out upon the wharfs they came
,

Knight and burgher, lord and dame
,

And round the prow they read her name
,

The Lady of Shalott.

 

He looked up. Luminous with moonlight, the Idea of Corinne Rosewood danced on the far shore of the Algonquin, moving synchronously with the song. A pantherskin rug covered the ground beneath her feet, secured by her portable sound system. She wore no clothes. Cerebrospinal fluid gleamed on her naked flesh. Despite the divine coma, this vision of Corinne was no less enchanting than his memory of her terrestrial equivalent. For an entire minute he sat motionless in the stern, transfixed by her supple limbs.

 

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, “She has a lovely face;

God in His mercy lend her grace
,

The Lady of Shalott.”

 

“Martin!” she called in a choked, husky voice. Abaddon Marsh lay spread out behind her, cattails and spartina grass swaying in the nocturnal breeze. “Martin, is that you?”

“It's me!” For a fleeting instant he recalled what concupiscence was like, the sweet pain of it all. “It's really me!”

“Oh, Martin, Martin!”

As she shut off the sound system, the moon caught the halo of serum encircling her auburn hair. Firming his grip on the paddle, he stroked vigorously and sent the canoe on a direct course for his dead wife.

“I've missed you!” he wailed, weeping uncontrollably. “I've missed you so much!”

“Darling!”

“We would've named her Jolene, wouldn't we?” he shouted, tear ducts throbbing.

“Named
who
Jolene?”

“Your pregnancy. I just spoke with her.”

“This brain is haunted, Martin. It's full of ghosts. Ignore them.”

He dragged the canoe onto the beach, panting with a mixture of exhaustion and longing. Fiery pains traveled up and down his femurs. He didn't care. Using the paddle as a crutch, he hobbled toward Corinne, whereupon a wholly unexpected command broke from her lips.

“Stay away.”

She might as well have been a divine emissary forbidding Mrs. Lot to look back.

“Stay away,” she said again. “Don't touch me.”

He stopped.

“I'm not being irrational—really.”

He studied her exquisite feet. Sprigs of catnip sprouted from the sandy beach, curling around the edges of the black pelt. “What's this all about?”

Goose bumps grew on Corinne's thighs and breasts. She crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing each triceps with the opposite hand. “Here in the divine skull, if somebody you love arrives from the outside world, and if the two of you connect . . .”

“Yes?”

“If you touch me, I'll—”

“What?”

“—dissolve.”

“
Dissolve?
”

“I'll dissolve, Martin. Like cotton candy, Myself, I wouldn't mind, but
you'd
be traumatized forever.”

“That's crazy, Corinne. I don't . . .” He was about to say
believe you
when a memory froze his tongue. Militant little Jolene, disintegrating in his palm. “But why would He
make
such a law?”

“Insecurity, why else? He wants to be loved for what He is, not for what He gives us.” She smiled wryly, pulling a sticky strand of congealed fluid from her hair. “So, who's taking care of my animals?”

“Jenny found an eccentric old dowager on the Main Line—Merribell Folcroft. She added them to her private zoo.”

“Wonderful. What about the Kennel of Joy?”

“When I left for Europe, it was flourishing.”

“Any good stories?”

“The one I remember is about a seeing-eye dog up in Boston: Montesquieu the Labrador retriever.”

“Montesquieu . . . perfect.”

“The owner, Stephanie Brandt—she lost her vision a decade ago. Retinitis pigmentosa. Last year Montesquieu himself started going blind—inoperable cataracts—so Stephanie decided to get a second dog. Not for her, for
Monty.
”

“Beautiful. Did the Kennel come through?”

“You bet—a female German shepherd named Bonnie. The three of them make quite a sight. Here comes Stephanie, walking down the street in the company of her faithful guide dog, Monty, who's being led by
his
faithful guide dog, Bonnie.”

“Love it.”

“Thought you would.” He leaned all his weight on the canoe paddle. “I'm afraid our catnip patch has gone to seed. I've been busy.”

Corinne offered a cryptic nod. “Yes.
International 227
. It's all anybody can talk about in here.”

“I'm doing it for you.”

“No, you're not.”

“You're
one
of the reasons.”

“You're doing it because, back in Abaddon, once you knew somebody was guilty, you convicted the person and made him pay. You even made
me
pay.”

“I wish we could touch.”

“Me too.”

“I need to touch you.”

“Yes.”

“You have a lovely face.”

“So do you.”

“Next year I'll plant a new crop—I promise. Okay?”

Saying nothing, Corinne bent over her sound system, ejected the cassette, and aimlessly pulled several feet of tape from the spindles. “It's horrible being a thought,” she said at last. “I hate it.” Tossing the cassette aside, she stepped off the pelt and backed toward the marsh. “Good-bye, darling. Thanks for telling me about Montesquieu.” She faced north, breaking into a run. “I'm dead!” she called over her shoulder. “I'm nothing! I love you!”