Blameless in Abaddon (44 page)

“But didn't you just say we need Down's kids to teach us about love and gentleness and joy?”

“You're trying to make me contradict myself.”

“No, Mr. Brady, I'm trying to understand whether fixing Down's syndrome
in utero
would fulfill God's plan or thwart it. Can you enlighten us on this matter?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“No further questions.”

The prosecution team spent the lunch recess in Martin's office, where Pierre Ferrand provided them with
koffie verkeerd
and fish sandwiches. The coffee was flat. The mackerel had no savor.

“You did your best,” said Esther, laying a soothing hand on Martin's shoulder.

“We can bounce back from this,” said Randall. “I
know
we can.”

“We're
supposed to have the sympathetic victims,” Martin moaned. “Not Lovett—
we
are.”

When the tribunal reconvened, the defense called Mona Drake, a dimpled young woman with a pageboy haircut and a chronic smile, though the first thing Martin noticed about her was her wheelchair. The strategy, he had to concede, was brilliant. Harry Elder, witness for the prosecution, had seen his own son die—and so had Amos Brady, witness for the defense. Stanley Pallomar, witness for the prosecution, was imprisoned in a wheelchair—and so was Mona Drake, witness for the defense:

“Tit for tat,” said Esther.

“Lovett has no shame,” said Randall.

As Mona's testimony unfolded, the tribunal learned that, two weeks after her sixteenth birthday, she'd dived into a shallow lagoon off Chesapeake Bay and broken her neck. In a strong, mellifluous voice—a voice abrim with bravery and devoid of self-pity—she described how God had taught her to accept her quadriplegia, a process that climaxed with her decision to become a commercial artist.

“Before my accident, I was really good at drawing. My friends called me Mona
Lisa
Drake. So I had the talent—I simply needed to connect it to the parts of me that still worked.”

“Your lips . . .”

“My lips, tongue, and teeth.”

“Could you give us a demonstration?”

“Certainly.”

“Are we to be spared nothing?” groaned Randall as the defense counsel inserted a drawing pencil between the witness's jaws.

Pulling a sketch pad from his briefcase, Lovett flipped back the cover, approached the stand, and positioned the blank sheet in front of Mona. The pencil dangled like a cheroot. She lowered her gaze, pressed the pencil point against the page, and began to draw. Within one minute a comic portrait of Lovett himself emerged, a caricature capturing not only his Alfred Hitchcock features but also his blustery persona.

After Mona had finished creating her cartoon, Lovett informed the tribunal that her work was now selling regularly to publishers of calendars and greeting cards. He took out a scrapbook containing photostats of her most recent illustrations, holding it before the Court TV camera and slowly turning the pages. This artist, Martin saw, had no fear of schmaltz. Her sense of kitsch was keen. A mischievous puppy dug up a flower bed; a kitten stalked a grasshopper; a rabbit painted rainbows on an Easter egg. If Patricia was watching in her hotel room, she was probably throwing up.

“One more question, Miss Drake,” said Lovett, returning to the lectern. “Do you think you've gotten a raw deal in life?”

“I'll give you my personal philosophy, sir. I believe our lives don't truly begin till after we reach the Great Beyond. God wanted me to see that the present world can't make a person truly happy, so He sent a broken neck my way. Okay, sure, the dark despair that followed wasn't much fun, but it got me appreciating what the Gospels teach about immortality. When I finally reach Heaven, and suddenly I can walk—I mean, imagine how
thrilled
I'll be, compared to some woman who was always on her feet.”

“Thank you, Miss Drake. Your witness, Mr. Candle.”

Martin's cross-examination of Mona was perhaps the single most exasperating experience of his life. The further the interview progressed, the more he felt like Brer Rabbit slugging the Tar Baby.

“Do you ever feel angry about being a quadriplegic?”

“If it wasn't for my accident, I never would've dared to try breaking into commercial art. It's a very competitive field.”

“Are there times when the frustration of quadriplegia makes you think the Defendant might be cruel?”

“Know what I believe, sir? I believe Jesus has a great big bottle, bigger than you and I can imagine, and He collects all our tears inside it. Not a single tear we shed in this life goes unnoticed by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

 

For eight days running Lovett cleaved to the same devastating strategy, systematically canceling out each of Martin's Jobians with an equally unfortunate sufferer who knew for a fact his Creator was benevolent.

“God's character witnesses,” snarled Randall.

“Where does he
find
them?” growled Esther.

Continuing its exploration of existential evil, the defense paraded an impressive array of human wreckage—dozens of ingratiating God fearers who'd been irretrievably twisted by car crashes, train derailments, falls, fires, fumes, explosions, and grisly misadventures with power tools. In every case the witness explained how his tribulations had furnished him with a stouter heart, a stronger will, or a sturdier soul.

When it came to natural evil, Lovett flourished ten cancer patients, each insisting that his pains were as nothing compared to what Christ had endured on the cross. Staying with the theme of pathology, the defense next carted out a scrappy thirteen-year-old hemophiliac lad . . . the pious father of a preschool girl suffering from spinal meningitis . . . an eleven-year-old Mormon boy whose congenitally deficient T-cells required him to live inside a glass bubble as if he were a goldfish . . . and a winsome pair of adolescent female Siamese twins who said, in unison, “Together we are forging our separate lives.”

Turning at last to moral evil, Lovett drew heavily on the Vietnam War—four mangled vets, three bereaved siblings, and six melancholic widows, each more maddeningly seraphic than the one before—then wound up with a rape victim who averred, “Because I have God's love in my heart, I am able to forgive my attacker.”

The cross-examinations, predictably, went nowhere. Interviewing a woman whose husband had died during the Tet Offensive, Martin got her to admit to envying those Vietnam wives whose men had returned home safely, at which juncture she recounted how her grief had inspired her to found an orphanage in Dong Ha, so that “thanks to Jack's sacrifice, hundreds of Asian children are getting the love they need.” Reviewing the testimony of a teenage girl whose little brother had fallen head first from a twenty-fifth-story window in midtown Manhattan, Martin maneuvered her into calling the accident “difficult to understand,” but then she began recounting “all the evidence I've been noticing that Barry is living happily in Jesus' arms.” Speaking with a testicular cancer patient who had less than three months to live, he managed to elicit the man's apprehension over his ten-year-old daughter's future, but then the witness added that soon he'd be “standing alongside the angels, supervising Sally's life from above.”

We're losing ground, Martin reluctantly confessed to himself, staring at his latest batch of
ARID APES
anagrams,
A SEA DRIP, PEA RAIDS, DIS A PEAR.
We're losing the battle, he begrudgingly admitted. We're losing the whole damn war.

 

So disoriented was Martin by Lovett's use of countervictims, so troubled in his heart and confused in his soul, it took him several minutes to realize the defense had once again changed strategies. The present witness wasn't a sufferer but a monk: Brother Sebastian Cranach, a portly, bald Franciscan who lived in a monastery, wore leather sandals and a brown wool robe, and taught evening courses in Church history at Saint Bonaventure University.

“Holy shit, it's Friar Tuck,” whispered Esther.

“Nine articles in the
Augustinian Quarterly
and a dozen in the
Thomist Review
,” said Martin, staring at the east wall. Rain spattered the windows—an ominous sound, like a drum cadence heralding the approach of Vlad the Impaler's army. “I think we're in for a rough time.”

“You'll send him packing,” said Esther.

“I appreciate your faith,” said Martin.

Cutting through the haze of his despair, he focused on the interview. Cranach was explaining how a complex, differentiated universe must ipso facto contain defects.

“Ontological defense,” grunted Randall.

“We knew it was coming,” moaned Martin. Behemoth was upon them. The slavering beast had arrived,
REAP AIDS
, he wrote.
PAID ARSE. RIDE A SAP
.

“Like a cut diamond, this solution boasts many beautiful facets,” said Cranach, his pronunciation so florid and precise it seemed the audile equivalent of Old English typography. “It includes, first of all, an epistemological facet: a theory of human knowledge. As Lactantius put it in the fourth century, ‘Good cannot be understood without evil, nor evil without good.'”

“If everything were red,” said Lovett, “then
red
would be a meaningless concept.”

“Exactly. Epistemologically speaking, our ability to know happiness, pleasure, and contentment depends entirely upon our firsthand experiences with sorrow, pain, and misery.”

Observing Cranach's bulky frame and imperious demeanor, Martin recalled the equally overbearing defendant in the case of
Abaddon Planning Commission versus Wilcox.
In the spring of 1992, Herbert Wilcox, a Perkinsville orthodontist, had dug a swimming pool on his front lawn without obtaining proper building permits; Martin ruled that Wilcox could keep his pool, but he had to admit the whole neighborhood every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, supervised by a lifeguard hired at the defendant's expense.

“But none of this accounts for the
amount
of evil we see all around us,” said Lovett with fake dismay.

“Yes. Quite so.” Cranach slipped a hand under his robe and scratched the apex of his abdomen. “Which brings us to the aesthetic facet of the ontological defense: the theory that for all its ugliness this is still—in G. W. Leibniz's memorable phrase—‘the best of all possible worlds.'”

“One doesn't hear that argument much these days.”

“Let's assume for a moment that Leibniz—who invented the infinitesimal calculus, after all—was no fool. Does a best-of-all-possible-worlds theory get us anywhere? I think it does. Permit me to offer a simple visual aid.” With consummate nonchalance, Cranach drew a raisin bagel from his sleeve. “When we buy a bagel at the delicatessen, we know we're being charged for the dough, not the hole, so we're perfectly happy to hand over our money. When we look at the rest of reality, however, we tend to focus on the negative: the necessary fact of privation, the hole in the cosmic bagel.”

“‘Cosmic bagel'—is he serious?” whispered Randall.

“Saint Augustine makes the same point using Swiss cheese,” muttered Martin.

“The world, we must remember, is beautiful in the main and benevolent overall,” said Cranach. “‘And God saw that it was good.' Our planet abounds in glorious sunsets, golden beaches, soaring mountains, children's laughter, ecstatic lovers, faithful dogs, loyal friends . . .”

“Tasty raisins,” said Randall.

“The best of all possible bagels,” said Esther.

“Manifestly the work of a loving Creator?” asked Lovett.

“Manifestly.” Reaching into his robe, Cranach pulled out a matchbook. “If the Defendant were guilty as charged, the world would be, ontologically, a far more sinister place. It would not be Leibnizian but Lovecraftian: a great big hole with little or no bagel.” He tore off a match and ignited it. “Consider the phenomenon of fire. For thousands of years this miraculous chemical interaction warmed our homes, cooked our food, frightened away our enemies, and brightened our nights. Destructive fires occurred, but they were the exception, not the rule.”

“That fact wouldn't prove very comforting to a woman whose daughter died in, say, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire,” Lovett noted, feigning bewilderment.

Cranach blew out the match. A curlicue of smoke drifted toward the chandelier. “Quite so. Which is why the ontological defense includes a third, mechanistic facet. The instant God resolved to make a physical cosmos, He realized it must be governed by laws: combustion, gravity, motion, and so on. Far better for those laws to cause hardships on occasion than for the universe to be anarchic. Take the case of bone.” In a gesture more appropriate to Harpo Marx than a Franciscan monk, the witness slid an entire human femur from his robe. A jolt of envy shot through Martin: unlike his own thighbones, this one appeared entirely free of cancer. “Our skeletons are amazing inventions,” Cranach continued, “strong enough to support our bodies, yet light enough to let us move around.” Assuming the posture of a circus strongman intent on bending a crowbar, he snapped the femur in two. “The brittleness of bone doesn't mean the precoma God was incompetent or malign. It merely means that when fashioning our frameworks He was bound by the limitations inherent in matter. One could offer a similar analysis of our planet's crust . . .” The witness flourished a cream puff, tearing away the cellophane wrapper as smoothly as a magician performing a card trick. “If God had made the ground so hard that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions never occurred”—he poked his thumb through the cream puff's shell—“then farming, mining, and road building would be impossible. The same point could be advanced concerning wind, rain, and bacteria. Each phenomenon is fundamentally benign, even though it sometimes entails such undesirable side effects as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and plagues. In every case the so-called evil is occurring
per accidens.
The Defendant is not responsible.”