Blameless in Abaddon (5 page)

“I'm your man,” said Vaughn. “Who's our opposition?”

“Some goat-cheese-eating liberal lawyer from Oregon.”

“What angle do we play up? Candle the family man?”

“I haven't got a family. I don't particularly like children.”

“Honesty, that's our gimmick. Honesty and experience.”

Despite the impromptu circumstances of his hiring, Vaughn Poffley proved as effective in the job as Brittany, inventing a memorable campaign slogan—
CARTWRIGHT IS ALL RIGHT, BUT HE CAN'T HOLD A CANDLE TO CANDLE
—and plastering it on hundreds of telephone poles and billboards throughout Abaddon Township. Without slinging mud or descending into sleaze, he handed Martin a winning margin of 2,418 votes.

Upon hearing that his friend had cancer, Vaughn steered the conversation in a pragmatic direction, asking Martin whether he still intended to enter the upcoming election. When Martin answered yes, Vaughn urged him to keep his illness secret.

“I'm not saying we should be deceitful, but November will be here before we know it. You'd be surprised how skittish voters get about cancer. They don't like it one little bit.”

That evening, Martin and Corinne made love. Although Blumenberg claimed that the implanted I-125 microcapsules would not contaminate his semen, Martin insisted on using condoms. Safe radioactive sex. In Corinne's view, the encounter owed its energy to its illicitness: she was abducting her lover, she felt—stealing him from the embrace of his disease. For Martin, too, the night proved unprecedented in its intensity; their bed, it seemed, had transported them to a place of unbearable urgency—to a battlefield, or a burning forest, or a South Seas beach at the height of a typhoon.

 

USAir Flight 3051 from Philadelphia to Orlando arrived nine minutes early, touching down at 6:56
P.M.
Upon entering the terminal—the first time he'd ever set foot in Florida—Martin encountered two gigantic posters, one of Mickey Mouse exhorting his fans to visit Disney World, the other of Jesus Christ bidding his followers to patronize Celestial City USA, neither image doing much to alleviate Martin's depression. Shortly after retrieving their luggage, he and Corinne found themselves in a limousine zooming down Route 528, bound for the Buena Vista Hilton. Ranks of swaying palm trees zoomed past, fronds rippling in the wind like piano keys yielding to invisible fingers.

To this day, some people argue that the Celestial City would have been a roaring success no matter where its founders had situated it. The original plan called for God and His accessories to be towed via supertanker from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Mexico, then beached along the sparsely populated eastern shore of Tampa Bay, there to lie beneath the Florida sun while the great theme park emerged at His feet. But the stockholders of Eternity Enterprises would hear none of this: the carcass, they insisted, must be located in Orlando or nowhere at all—without the spillover crowds from Disney World, Epcot Center, Universal Studios, Sea World, and the headquarters of Tupperware International, the proposed attraction might fail to turn a profit. And so began the greatest engineering project since the Suez Canal. Thirty-eight steel gantries, each as tall as the World Trade Center, were built especially for the task. They performed splendidly, lifting the Lockheed 7000 cooling chamber from the waters off Cocoa Beach and slinging it landward. Next the chamber was placed atop a matrix of ninety-four railroad flatcars, transported for fifty miles along eight steel tracks laid parallel to Route 528, and deposited north of Big Sand Lake. The haul required the collective energy of seventy-two GP diesel locomotives, five of which exploded en route and never saw service again.

Although the park would be open until midnight, the couple decided to remain in their hotel, Martin being nauseated, Corinne exhausted. The next morning they climbed aboard the shuttle bus, where a sobering spectacle awaited them. Martin wasn't the only one who'd come to Orlando out of desperation. Seated behind the driver was a withered old woman whose neck sported a goiter the size of a coconut. Beside her rested a bald young man with an oxygen mask strapped across his face. Nearly a third of the riders, in fact, exhibited various dire medical conditions, making the bus seem like nothing so much as an ambulance evacuating the survivors of some strange and far-reaching catastrophe.

Within a half hour the City loomed up, its spires and parapets cutting into the sky like guided missiles poised for takeoff. Cameras dangling from their necks, the passengers headed for the main gate, a ponderous post-and-lintel affair plated with gold, encrusted with cultured pearls, and surmounted by the park's logo: a many-towered, rainbow-roofed palace sitting atop a foundation of clouds. The breezes reeked of orange blossoms. A flock of pure white radio-controlled doves soared overhead, singing “Follow the Gleam” a cappella.

The pilgrims lined up at the ticket booth. Upon shelling out fifty-five dollars, each visitor received a packet containing a folding map, a laminated eight-inch Key to the Kingdom good for all the major rides, and a spiral-bound
Visitor's Guide to Celestial City USA.
A few yards away a band of demonstrators milled around, their T-shirts identifying them as the National Science Foundation's strident splinter group, the Committee for Complete Disclosure of the Corpus Dei.
LET US INTO THE BRAIN NOW
, a protest sign demanded in capital letters,
SCIENTIFIC CURIOSITY: A GIFT FROM GOD
, a twenty-foot banner declared. As Martin wove through the mob, he inadvertently looked a demonstrator in the eye—a stocky, bearded man whose placard read
ETERNITY ENTERPRISES: ENEMY OF TRUTH.

“Don't give them your business,” the scientist pleaded, brushing the sleeve of Martin's Hawaiian shirt.

“I'm sick,” he explained, breaking away and joining the other tourists. “I'm dying!” he cried, passing through the gate.

“They don't deserve it!”

As he entered the City, Martin was immediately struck by its aggressive cleanliness. Everywhere he turned, he saw rolling hills so expertly manicured they might have been transplanted from William Randolph Hearst's private golf course. White marble fountains dotted the landscape, huge cherub-encrusted structures spewing what looked like luminous milk.

The final paragraph of the
Visitor's Guide to Celestial City USA
was titled “Hope for the Afflicted.”
Hope.
The word enthralled Martin. He and Corinne read the passage three times, standing in the shade of an olive tree.

 

Although the City's healing energies emanate primarily from our Main Attraction, the entire park possesses therapeutic powers, and the stricken visitor is advised to sample a full spectrum of Holyspots. In one famous case, Orville Hazelton, a New Orleans taxi driver, received relief from his duodenal ulcer symptoms after winning a cuckoo clocks at the Hammer of Jael nail-driving contest (located on the Millennial Midway, right across from the Stoning of Stephen rock toss), though the process became complete only after Mr. Hazelton beheld the Godform. In a second such instance, the rehabilitation of Wilma Alcott, a Kansas chicken farmer suffering from a rare liver ailment, began after she consumed a lobster dinner at the Last Supper cafe (on Straight and Narrow Lane, adjacent to the Manna from Heaven bistro), though naturally it took Godform to finish her cure.

 

“Do you believe this crap?” asked Martin. “This business about patronizing every attraction—do you believe it's true?”

“As long as we've come all the way to Orlando,” said Corinne, cleaning her sunglasses with the edge of her muslin blouse, “we should probably play by the rules.”

Thus began a long, tedious morning of standing in lines. The wait was twenty-three minutes for the Chariots of Ezekiel ferris wheel, thirty-one for the Whore of Babylon funhouse, twenty-eight for the Stations of the Cross steam train, and seventeen for the Garden of Eden petting zoo. Of these concessions only the last gave the couple any pleasure, Corinne achieving instant rapport with the sheep and goats, Martin taking lascivious delight in the ceramic Eve, her breasts scarcely concealed by her long flaxen hair. Oddly enough, there was no line at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse carousel. Passing through the gate, Corinne selected one of the seven Famine stallions, all bones and sagging skin, while Martin picked a War mount, its flanks arrayed in spiked armor. They consciously declined to ride the animals intended for Death (not a horse but a horse's skeleton, carved from cherrywood and painted white) and Pestilence (a roan mare speckled with buboes). As the carousel reached top speed, the steam calliope screeched out “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

More waiting—a full half hour for the Heaven to Hell roller coaster, an admittedly thrilling experience that lifted you past airborne choirs of android angels, then dropped you into fiery chasms where screaming adulterers writhed in pools of molten sulfur and spitted gluttons roasted over slow fires. The hiatus required for a berth on Noah's Ark, thirty-six minutes, was also worth it. There you sat, looking through your private porthole at mobs of drowning audio-animatronic sinners while the rain poured down and the restless seas pitched you to and fro.

At 1:45
P.M.
the couple dropped into the Loaves and Fishes café. Martin decided to try the specialty of the house, haddock on sourdough. His wife ordered a Caesar salad. The food arrived promptly. To Martin it looked grotesque. These days most things looked grotesque. The intractable fact of his illness had become a kind of theatrical scrim, imparting a pall to whatever met his gaze. His eyes drifted across the table, moving from the twisted salt cellar to the sinister napkin dispenser to the menacing fillet on his plate.

“What would your father have made of the Celestial City?” asked Corinne.

Martin stared at his malformed mug of coffee. “I think he would've hated it. Sure, Dad could be pretty corny at times, having his students make gravestone rubbings and everything, but he was never vulgar. This place is vulgar. What are we doing here?”

Corinne raised her sunglasses, pushing them into her auburn hair. A wave of romantic longing washed through him, so pure and fierce he imagined it joining forces with the I-125 seeds to cleanse his prostate of cancer. How wise he'd been to delay marriage until the right woman came along; how astute of him to have passed up Robin's endearing sense of humor and Brittany's mastery of Chinese cooking and fellatio.

“We're here to make you well.”

“Fat chance.”

She bit into a carrot stick. Memories rushed past his mind's eye like snatches of scenery glimpsed by a man riding the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse carousel. The two of them walking hand-in-hand across a railroad trestle in the Poconos. Reading to each other from the
Kama Sutra.
Playing chess in the nude.

 

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, “She has a lovely face;

God in His mercy lend her grace
,

The Lady of Shalott.”

 

“You have a lovely face.”

“Thank you.”

“I'm scared.”

“I love you, Martin. Terribly and forever.”

“I'm scared to death.”

“Of course.”

“I don't
feel
lovable.”

She lifted her glass of tomato juice, took a sip, and swallowed. “Judge Candle, you're my knight in shining armor.”

 

Visiting the midway later that afternoon, Martin blew five dollars on the Stoning of Stephen rock toss. He continually failed to connect with the mannequin, while all around him corn-fed adolescents were drawing ersatz blood and receiving plush lambs and stuffed cherubs. He did much better at the Head of Holofernes, winning an Archangel Michael helium balloon by decapitating the dummy within twenty seconds, and he was positively brilliant at the David and Goliath slingshot tournament, beating out six other contestants in a race to slay the Philistine. His prize was a music box programmed to provide “a soothing aural environment for private readings of the Psalms.”

The tours of the Main Attraction departed every hour on the hour, and Martin went crimson with rage upon learning that his Key to the Kingdom would not admit him. He calmed down only after voicing his dismay to two security guards, a T-shirt vendor, and an itinerant guitarist who sang evangelical Christian folk songs. To get the full Celestial City experience, Martin and Corinne had to ride a mechanized walkway south for a mile, then queue up at a ticket booth resembling a ziggurat. In the misty distance God's cooling chamber loomed, a vague mass on the horizon, its facets shimmering in the afternoon sun like Solomon's shields of beaten gold. Examining their tickets—thirty-five dollars each—the couple saw they'd been assigned to Group C, scheduled to leave at four
P.M.
When the designated hour arrived, a guide appeared and escorted her twelve charges inside a glass-and-steel kiosk housing a ruby-studded escalator plunging perpetually into the central Florida earth.

“On behalf of the American Baptist Confederation, I want to welcome y'all to the Main Attraction at Celestial City USA,” the guide began in a honeyed and melodious voice. She was a tall, toothy blonde, no more than twenty-five, dressed in the lemon rayon shirt and white polyester slacks that constituted the City's official uniform. “My name's Kimberly, and I'll be happy to answer your questions, but first I gotta lay down one great big rule,” she continued with manufactured cheer. “We're here today to enjoy a profound spiritual experience—we're
not
here to have ourselves a debate. Understand? Some of you've probably heard that the object we're about to see is God's comatose body. The American Baptist Confederation believes otherwise. Our Main Attraction is God's discarded form—a suit of clothes, you might say, that He tossed aside on the way to becoming pure spirit.” She cranked her smile up a notch. “The heavenly Father is alive as ever, friends, the Son still reigns supreme”—she drove her clenched fist forward, as if shattering a pane of glass—“and the Holy Ghost dwells within us yet!”