Blameless in Abaddon (9 page)

As Angela marched out of the kitchen, Patricia tore away another pizza slice. “I'd like to know . . . I mean . . . if you don't mind my asking . . .”

“Auto accident.” Martin slipped the Roxanol bottle from his pocket, rubbing the pliant amber plastic with his thumb. “She went off the Henry Avenue Bridge. Excuse me while I take a pill.”

“Antidepressant?”

“Painkiller,” he replied with a sardonic grin. “I have a touch of—what's it called?—prostate cancer.”

“Oh, dear . . .”

“It's probably in my pelvis now—my right hip hurts all the time.” Tossing a tablet into his mouth, he ground it between his molars and washed down the grains with Diet Pepsi. “This drug is my best friend. Roxanol.”

“Brandon was on that for a while. Kids aren't supposed to take it, but it was the only thing that worked.”

“I've had lymph-node surgery, radiation—now they want me to try estrogen. Last month Corinne and I went to Celestial City USA.”

Patricia offered a knowing nod. “We tried that too. Disney World did him more good, I think. He became great friends with two guys dressed up like Chip and Dale.”

“Next time I get cancer, I'll go to Disney World instead.”

“I can't believe we're just sitting here, talking about these things. We should be . . .”

“What?”

“You know. Screaming.”

“Screaming,” he echoed. Like a firehouse siren, he thought.

“Are you religious, Martin?”

The Roxanol—God bless it—kicked in. “My dad taught Sunday school when he was alive. Somewhere in the basement I've got all these little medals I collected for perfect attendance. They hung from my lapel. I looked like a brigadier general.”

“Let me guess. Lutheran?”

“I'm named for Martin Luther, but I was raised Presbyterian.”

“My ex is a Methodist.”

“And what are you?”

“Me? I knew God was dead even before the corpse showed up.” Patricia pried a mushroom from her pizza slice and set it on her tongue. “It must be terrific, having faith.”

“It's wonderful,” he said tonelessly.

After they consumed pizza number two, she guided him down the hall and into a spacious room she called her “studio,” though it had evidently been one of Brandon's favorite places as well. The drawing board held various Berenstain Bears books and children's crayons intermingled with pen nibs, charcoal sticks, artist's brushes, straight edges, and elaborate, skillful sketches depicting assorted frog-eyed space aliens bent on conquering the Earth. Additional sketches—same lurid subject—papered the walls. The freestanding shelves displayed collections of stuffed dinosaurs, hand puppets, wooden building blocks, and Saga of Sargassia action figures.

“Some of your bubble-gum cards?” he asked, gesturing toward a raygun-wielding alien vaporizing a distraught child's poodle.

“Trading cards, remember? I just got a big commission,
Invaders from Vesta
, ‘the thrilling sci-fi saga of Earth's war against the bloodthirsty inhabitants of our system's brightest asteroid,' in fifty-four action-packed scenes.”

“You actually make a living from this?”

“Apex Novelty Company pays me three hundred dollars per finished painting. Sure, today's kids have their video games, their virtual reality, their Internet chat rooms, but they always come back to trading cards. There's nothing quite so satisfying as walking around with a complete set of
Mars Attacks
or
Invaders from Vesta
in your pocket.”

Approaching the shelves, Martin picked up a Sargassia action figure, Stanhope the Steam-Powered Man. As he fingered the miniature robot, he realized how little he understood about children; he found them as cryptic as cats. In the far corner lay a community manufactured by a company called Fisher-Price, complete with a school, a barn, a Colonial-style house, and dozens of two-inch-high plastic citizens. Beside the drawing board reposed a wheelchair, its seat occupied by a fearsome Godzilla punching doll. Martin imagined Brandon using the doll therapeutically, hitting back at the evil lesion on his spine,
bam, bam, bam.

“The dinosaurs were his favorites,” said Patricia, taking a stuffed triceratops off its shelf. She set the Godzilla doll aside and, triceratops in hand, climbed into the wheelchair. “He'd sit right here, head bobbing every which way, and I'd act out little dramas for him, life in the late Cretaceous. The triceratops was always getting into trouble. The stegosaurus loved ice cream. So did Brandon. At least he's not in pain anymore. There were days when that's all I could think about. ‘Please, God, stop his pain.'”

“God is out of the loop,” said Martin, examining a sketch that seemed to make his point: a Vestan spaceship melting the Brooklyn Bridge at the height of rush hour. “He's left the scene”—he grimaced, realizing what he was about to say—“of His crimes.”

Hugging the triceratops, Patricia rose from the wheelchair. “Play with me.”

“What?”

“Play with me. Get on the floor. Play with me. These toys have never been properly played with. Brandon . . . couldn't.”

“Neither can I.”

“Please. Try. Please.”

They pulled off their shoes, sprawled across the rug, and played. Seizing upon Brandon's building blocks, they made a multicolored tower, so high it overshadowed the drawing board. They worked with the dead child's Play-Doh, Patricia fashioning a blue elephant, Martin a yellow giraffe. They lovingly rearranged the Fisher-Price settlement, filling the Colonial house with healthy relatives, the barn with hardy animals, and the school with robust children—a utopia, they decided, a world that had no words for prostate cancer or spina bifida.

“I loved him so much,” said Patricia. “Not because he was sick, and not in spite of it either. I just . . . loved him.”

She yanked a cylinder from the foundation of their tower. The construction collapsed spectacularly, block tumbling over block—and then, finally, the scream did come, a bright red howl rushing from her mouth and blowing through the Fisher-Price community like a tornado.

Martin's palms grew damp. His heart raced. Instinctively he leaned toward her, and for a full five minutes they silently pressed against each other, embracing and shivering. Like shipwreck survivors, he thought. Like two freezing castaways, adrift on an ice floe, heading nowhere.

 

Believe me, I dislike these interruptions as much as you do, but I thought you'd be intrigued to know that the appearance of a shipwreck metaphor in our hero's consciousness foreshadows an eventual obsession with nonmetaphorical shipwrecks and similar cataclysms. Among the exhibits to which Candle will be drawn while perusing the Kroft Museum of Natural Disasters and Technological Catastrophes is the rudder from the steamer
Larchmont
.

Maybe you know the story. At eleven
P.M.
on February 11, 1907, the
Larchmont
was rammed near Block Island by the schooner
Harry Knowlton.
Most of the
Larchmont
's passengers were drowned in their cabins. Dressed only in their pajamas, those few who managed to escape on life rafts were beset by sub-zero winds and heavy seas. Ice soon covered them, freezing their hands and feet solid. To end his agony, one survivor slit his own throat. All told, three hundred and thirty-two people died that night.

For my money, the funniest part of the
Larchmont
story is the name of the company that owned and sailed her. The Joy Line. Get it? The Joy Line. Whatever you may think of our Creator, you can't fault His sense of humor.

 

Martin spent the weekend in bed. Trembling with grief, tortured by illness, he rolled back and forth on his mattress, tearing the sheets free and wrapping them around his aching pelvis. His front lawn, uncut since July, had vanished beneath a carpet of weeds and crabgrass. Frost clogged his freezer. His reelection campaign was a shambles. The Glendale rent-control case would be upon him in a matter of hours, and he had yet to review the facts. But instead of acting he simply lay there, imprisoned within his own buzzing skull.

By the grace of Roxanol he slept most of Sunday night, waking the next morning with dry skin, clogged sinuses, and an astonishingly lucid sense of his immediate future. He would kill himself with liquor. Yes, this afternoon he would drink his way through the city of Philadelphia, saloon by saloon by saloon, then hurl his benumbed body into the Delaware River. The process would prove fascinating and pleasurable, and he had nothing to lose but his life.

He called his secretary, told her to defer his cases another day, then set about filling his stomach lest the coming binge knock him senseless before he'd accomplished his goal. The refrigerator contained some leftover macaroni; the pantry yielded four cans of tuna fish and a jar of baked beans. The condemned man's last meal, he mused, throwing everything together in a saucepan.

By noon his belly had reached capacity. He grabbed his Roxanol, climbed into his Dodge Aries, and took off.

Within the hour he had situated himself in Omar's Arabian Oasis at Seventh and Lombard, alternately munching painkillers and sucking a black Russian through a straw as if it were a Coke. Over the years the booth had acquired so many coats of thick, badly stirred olive-green paint that its surface now resembled a relief map. Two tubby men sat at the bar, bathed in the light of a Phillies game. The air was dark and heavy, clogged with the sweet odor of cheap whiskey.

Although his troubles did not disappear, they miraculously migrated outside his body. He still had prostate cancer, Corinne was still dead, but both disasters had been banished to the farthest corner of Omar's Arabian Oasis. They hovered in the smoky air, unable to get at him. Above the bar hung a buxom plastic Saint Pauli Girl with a clock embedded in her stomach. The hour hand crept toward two
P.M.
, millimeter by millimeter. He ordered a gin and tonic. Two-thirty. A rusty nail. Three
P.M.

Brain spinning with whatever neurotoxic reaction occurs when hard liquor meets Roxanol, he wandered out of the saloon. At the base of the nearest parking meter a large puddle of dog urine lay drying in the afternoon heat. He ate a painkiller and started down Rodman Street, all the while imagining himself back in Celestial City USA, standing atop the Main Attraction. This time, instead of simply beholding God's right eye, he spat in it.

He staggered into the Royal Pub at 605 Rodman, sat down at the bar, and ordered the specialty of the house, “authentic English fish and chips.” They arrived cold. He did not so much wash his chips down with beer as set them adrift in it, glass after glass of freshly tapped Samuel Adams. He visited the men's room once every ten minutes: an agreeable experience thanks to the blessed Roxanol-alcohol synergy, which spared him the usual fiery ordeal caused by his unending prostatitis.

Shortly after Martin returned from his fifth trip to the urinal, the man on the adjacent stool swiveled toward him and asked, “Come here often?”

“Only when I lose a wife.”

His drinking companion was a grizzled giant with a leather patch over his right eye, an accessory that lent their surroundings the ambience of a pirate's den. “Divorce?”

“Gravity.”

“What?”

“Gravity in the first degree. God's favorite modus operandi.”

“If you're making fun of God,” said the one-eyed man, “I may have to punch you in the face.”

“I'm not making fun.”

“Bad enough He's comatose, without people making fun of Him.”

Once again Martin decided to change the venue of his suicide. Leaving the Royal Pub, he headed down South Street toward the Front Street intersection, where the words
MIKE'S TAVERN
flashed on and off: a neon beacon shining across the urban sea, guiding tempest-tossed rummies to port.

He never got past Third Street. Before him blazed a luminous marquee heralding the Theater of the Living Arts, where he and Corinne had seen
Witness for the Prosecution
on their first date. Several dozen playgoers were queuing up—a smaller, more somber group than the crowds who patronized the Agatha Christie revivals.

 

Tonight at 8:00
Hand-to-Mouth Players
present
Elie Wiesel's
THE TRIAL OF GOD

 

A soft rain fell. His hip throbbed. He checked his watch. 7:39
P.M.
Limping into the foyer, he bought a ticket from the young woman in the booth, a hatchet-faced brunette with acne. He hobbled down the aisle, accepted a program booklet from the sullen male usher, and collapsed in his designated seat, where he tried repeatedly to read the dramaturge's essay. Only on his sixth attempt did he cut through his beery fog and comprehend the article in toto.

The Trial of God
promised to be wholly unlike the courtroom thrillers Martin normally attended. According to the dramaturge, the plot traced to a bizarre event the author had witnessed while incarcerated at Auschwitz. In Elie Wiesel's words, “Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one winter evening to indict God.”

The setting was the Russian village of Shamgorod in 1649, during Purim. Fixing his clouded eyes on the stage, Martin beheld a troupe of itinerant minstrels arriving at the local inn to perform a holiday play for the community. Much to their dismay, the minstrels discovered that Shamgorod had recently suffered a pogrom. Only two Jews remained alive—the innkeeper, Berish, and his traumatized, gang-raped daughter, Hanna. Goaded by Berish, the actors agreed that instead of a
Purimschpiel
they would stage a mock trial of God, prosecuting Him for allowing His children to be massacred.

As the first intermission got under way, Martin sat motionless in his seat, rolling his program booklet into a tube, unrolling it, rerolling it. He stood up. In the muzzy reaches of his brain a grand and terrible plan was taking shape. He wandered into the lobby, approached the refreshment stand, and, handing the concessionaire a one-dollar bill, indicated that he required a cup of coffee. Receiving his change, he slid the dime into his pants pocket, where his fingers encountered his ticket stub. He pulled the stub free and stared at it, a shabby piece of red cardboard, torn along one edge and stamped
LEFT: F-106
. Slowly, inexorably, the stub entered another dimension, becoming the very ticket around which Ivan Fyodorovich had constructed his famous diatribe in
The Brothers Karamazov
, Martin's favorite novel from his twelfth-grade honors English class.