Blameless in Abaddon (6 page)

As they started their descent, Martin realized the escalator had been designed especially for the City, each riser built wide enough to carry not only the individual pilgrim but whatever equipment he or she required. Three Group C members occupied wheelchairs: a pudgy young woman, a pimply teenage boy, a swarthy septuagenarian. Two other pilgrims, a svelte Chinese woman and a sinewy black man, made the journey downward attached to portable dialysis machines, chattering to each other all the while, the shoptalk of terminal illness.

At the bottom of the escalator an arched tunnel stretched as far as the eye could see, its ceiling supporting a monorail from which a streamlined, bullet-shaped tram hung like a caterpillar negotiating a twig. After all the passengers were aboard, Kimberly plucked a megaphone from its cradle behind the engineer's booth. The tram lurched forward, gliding into a tunnel speckled with twinkling lights, a kind of cylindrical planetarium.

“Each of these constellations is mentioned in the Bible,” Kimberly announced into her megaphone. “Job 38:31, for example. ‘Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades or loose Orion's belt?'”

A mile down the monorail, the tunnel opened into a room suggesting an immense Antarctic cavern. Patches of frost covered the tiled walls. Icicles hung from the ceiling like stalactites.

“Station one: Preservation Central,” Kimberly lectured as the tram slowed to a crawl. “I could tell the engineer to stop and let y'all explore, but, believe me, you don't want to. This room connects directly to our cooling chamber, and the temperature out there averages”—she mimed a shudder—“
brrr
, fourteen degrees! See that humongous silver tank? It contains nearly eighty thousand gallons of high-pressure Freon-114. After leaving the tank, the Freon spills into that huge green basketball thing, which allows it to reach a much lower pressure, then it slithers into that big snaky tube over yonder, where,
pffff
, it boils away, absorbing lots of heat in the bargain and thereby keeping our Main Attraction as cold as a penguin's kiss. Meanwhile, that big motor in the corner sucks up the Freon vapor and squeezes it so tight it starts wanting to change back into a liquid. The Freon gets its wish the minute it reaches that
other
big snaky tube. See how we've got lots of water pouring down like Jehovah sending the Flood? That's our trick for speeding up the condensation. Once the Freon's become a liquid again, it returns to the silver tank, and the whole process starts over. Anybody got a question?”

Not one person on the tram, Martin guessed, had been able to follow Kimberly's lecture. They all remained mute.

The cavern narrowed. The tram sped a thousand yards into the next station: another subterranean room, dominated by the most astonishing contraption Martin had ever seen. A steel-plated pump as big as a jetliner intersected a labyrinthine network of six-foot-wide transparent Plexiglas pipes, which were in turn connected to four igloo-sized aeration domes surmounted by an accordion-shaped bellows so gigantic it could have fanned a forest fire. Each pipe held a churning river, blue when it entered the domes, red on departure. A rhythmic thundering filled the air, a steady
thok-thok-thok
that rocked the tram back and forth on its rail.

“Station two: Cardiovascular Control,” Kimberly explained into the megaphone, her voice building toward a shout. “As y'all know, not everybody agrees with us that His brain has no need of blood. Here at Celestial City USA we respect all viewpoints, so we keep Him hooked up to that device on your left: a Lockheed 7000 heart-lung machine. Every day of the year over a million gallons of O-positive blood are shunted into those aeration domes, each with a volume of two thousand cubic feet. Once inside, the blood is warmed, oxygenated, and filtered of impurities before getting pumped into His veins. The plasma itself—this part always kind of chokes me up—the plasma itself comes from just about every nation on Earth. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims have all made donations, even an atheist named Jules Wembly. If any of you would like to augment the flow before leaving the City, just drop by one of the clinics conveniently located at each exit. Any questions?”

An emaciated young man with four Kaposi's sarcoma lesions on his forehead raised his hand. “May I leave the tram for a minute?” he yelled over the roar of the heart-lung machine. “I want to touch one of the pipes.”

“We don't allow that.”

“Please.”

“It's simply not permitted.”

“I must.”

“No way, sir. Out there, the noise of the pump is enough to cause permanent hearing loss.”

“Let me feel His blood, and I shall be made whole!”

Kimberly winced, and for the first time Martin saw that her job had a downside. “No. Sorry. No.”

The tram moved on—through Cardiovascular Control and back into the tunnel.

“We're entering the Corridor of the Cured,” Kimberly narrated as Group C traveled past dozens of illuminated niches, each filled with a device more commonly found on the premises of the halt, the blind, or the lame. “Each and every item displayed here was once needed by a Celestial City visitor. No more. We have the largest such collection outside the famous shrine at Lourdes.” Ambulatory aids flashed by, row upon row of crutches, canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. Braces appeared next, fearsome contrivances of steel and leather designed to straighten crooked spines and warped limbs. Farther down the line lay respirators, oxygen tanks, and dialysis machines. “Not a day goes by without one of these things arriving in our mail room. That motorized ergonomic wheelchair came all the way from Kyoto, Japan. Any questions?”

 

I am a creature of many faces, manifold personae, multiple disguises. While our hero was touring the Corridor of the Cured, I was making myself a new suit: red pants, red jacket, red cap, all trimmed with white weasel fur. Yes, friends, my alter ego is none other than Father Christmas himself. Excavate our respective mythoi, and you will learn that Satan and Santa are one and the same, beginning with the anagrammatic connection between our names. According to legend, the frozen north is the Devil's pied-à-terre, where he flies through the air aided by a team of reindeer. He enters people's homes via their chimneys. Food and wine are left out for him as a bribe. His sobriquet “Old Nick” derives from “Saint Nicholas.”

Needless to say, my admiration for the Corridor of the Cured was boundless. As frauds go, the Corridor easily eclipsed Piltdown man, the Hitler diaries, and Clarence Thomas's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Which is not to say the Celestial City's visitors never benefited from the Main Attraction.
Au contraire.
Thanks to the placebo effect, these wretched pilgrims routinely enjoyed spontaneous remissions. And while it's true that the Corridor's proprietors obtained most of their display items from medical supply houses, their aim was not deception for deception's sake—no, they merely wanted to harness deception to a profitable variety of healing. Never underestimate the value of a falsehood, friends. Never doubt the power of a lie. Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

In case you're wondering, I don't spend the entire workday inside my tailor shop. Even the Devil deserves a break. Come noon, I set down my sewing needle, grab my lunch pail, and stroll into the blinding glare of His neurons. Usually I'm content to explore the immediate neighborhood, wandering through His olfactory center, a few miles due east of the hippocampus; but sometimes the arteries beckon. During the hour that Martin and Corinne were dining at the Loaves and Fishes café, for example, my friend Bishop Augustine and I were piloting my rusty old packet steamer down the crimson channel that feeds our Creator's left cerebral hemisphere, eating corned-beef sandwiches and trailing a fish line from our stern. I'm eternally grateful to Lockheed for building the heart-lung machine. Because of this technology, the River Hiddekel's sanguine currents remain deep, clean, and fecund. On most of our expeditions Augustine and I catch at least one leukocyte and a mess of red blood corpuscles.

My days, I know, are numbered. All around me the landscape is disintegrating, despite the efforts of His keepers and their Lockheed 7000. Jerusalem's walls are crumbling, Eden's trees are dying, the Euphrates has become a sewer, the maggots shall inherit His meat. Luckily, our Creator constructed reality with an eye to His ultimate departure. He filled the universe with self-sustaining miracles. Long after He and I are gone, the great geophysical processes will continue yielding earthquakes and volcanoes, the vicissitudes of biology will bring forth multiple sclerosis and cancer, and the perversities of human nature will keep rape and murder in the headlines.

The one person to whom I have difficulty lying is myself, and in all candor I must admit I became obsolete long before I became mortal. Oh, how I long for that era when my Creator wasn't comatose and people consulted me as frequently as they now see psychiatrists, Mafia godfathers, and other members of the helping professions; that golden age when Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV's mistress, implored me to render the queen sterile so the king's attentions might be wholly fixed on her; that bygone time when the nuns of Loudon hired me to help them release their pent-up sexual frustrations. I don't want your sympathy, friends. I don't want your understanding. I merely want to be taken as seriously by you as Santa Claus is taken by your children.

 

“Station three: the Cooling Chamber,” said Kimberly as the tram reached the end of the Corridor of the Cured. “Please watch your step.”

The tour guide led Group C through a terminal decorated with a facsimile of Donatello's bronze
David
and a reproduction of Leonardo's
Last Supper
, then into a passenger elevator so roomy it accommodated the entire party, wheelchairs and all.

“Two thousand and eighty-four feet from here to the top,” said Kimberly, pushing a button. The door whooshed closed. Vibrating gently, the car shot heavenward. Three minutes later, it stopped. “All out, please.”

Disembarking, Martin found himself atop a transparent Lucite plain. A larger-than-life facsimile of Michelangelo's marble
Pietà
loomed over the pilgrims. Beyond the
Pietà
stretched a meandering footpath bordered by flower boxes abloom with daffodils and hyacinths. Every six feet, a neon arrow lay embedded in the polymer, blinking bright red as it pointed the visitor toward the next checkpoint on his trek across the Main Attraction.

“As befits a journey so intimate, your meeting with the Godform will be entirely self-directed,” said Kimberly. “Allow forty minutes for the complete circuit. Seven private chapels, three rest rooms, and a dozen snapshot opportunities are located along the way.” She glanced at her Twelve Disciples wristwatch. “I'll expect you back at this statue no later than five-thirty.”

Sneaking up behind him, Corinne seized Martin's hand, entwining their fingers in a fleshy knot. “You'd better follow this path alone, darling,” she said. “A pagan's presence might annoy Him.”

“You think so?” he asked, reverently brushing the marble Madonna's left knee.

“Let's not take any chances. You never know.”

“You never know.”

He started away, walking west across the Main Attraction's left nipple, then north along His sternum. There wasn't much to see. Pausing atop the frosted polymer, he directed his gaze through a hundred feet of sub-zero air and focused on the divine chest, a hairy landscape rolling a thousand yards in all directions: compelling vistas, but their therapeutic value seemed nil. He kept moving north. Reaching the mouth, he discovered to his astonishment that God, like everyone else on the staff of Celestial City USA, was smiling. The fifty-yard rictus stretched ear to ear, pulpy lips pulled back to reveal teeth as white as Ivory soap, each the size of a refrigerator door.

The path curved east, bringing him directly over the left eye. God's tear duct was as big as a barrage balloon. Staring into the luminous pupil, Martin suddenly experienced a tingling in his toes. A divine emanation, he wondered, or the mere result of standing on ice-cold Lucite? An actual intervention, or the efflux of his wishfully thinking mind?

“Help me, God,” he muttered.

The tingling sinuated upward, making his knees tremble.

“Please, God! Yes, God!”

Still migrating, the tingling reached his loins—stomach—lungs—brain.

“I'm yours, God!”

His whole body quivered with epiphany.

“I'm cured!” he shouted, jogging back down the path.

Corinne was sitting in a lotus position, spine against the
Pietà.
Hearing Martin's cries, she disentangled her legs and rose. They threw themselves into each other's arms, embracing in the Madonna's sharp black shadow.

“I'm cured!”

“Oh, Martin!”

“Cured!”

“Oh, yes, Martin! Oh, yes, Martin—yes, yes!”

“I love you!”

They kissed: their most passionate such connection since her lips had melted the snowflakes from his face.

Other tourists arrived, gathering around the Madonna, hugging her robes, pressing their faces against her feet.

“Jesus has healed me!” cried the Chinese dialysis patient.

“Praise the Lord!” shouted the black dialysis patient.

“I'm signing up for dance lessons!” sang the pudgy woman.

“I'm going to Barcelona!” whooped the man with Kaposi's sarcoma, though his brow remained dotted with lesions.

 

On the Friday after his return from Orlando, Martin took the train to New York for his biweekly checkup at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. As soon as Benjamin Blumenberg entered the examination room, Martin began prattling about his pilgrimage.

“You saw the corpse?” asked Blumenberg. “What's it like?”