Blameless in Abaddon (26 page)

 

As for the PBS crisis, I think we should offer them a donation of, say, $165,000. They can express their gratitude by giving us a
Wall Street Week
coffee mug, a Big Bird T-shirt, and the right to screen
A History of Havoc
in The Hague.

 

Martin was pleased to discover that Esther, too, had written back.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Fri, May 19, 11:08 AM EDT

 

You said you'd like a more exotic pathology, and I think I've got just the ticket, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Lou Gehrig's disease. From our meetings you may recall Christopher Ransom, the young man who talks using a computerized voice synthesizer. His medical bills are horrendous, and he's been hinting he'd like a serious fee. Does $85,000 sound about right to you? I'm also working on Norma Bedloe, that woman with the defective liver who has to swallow 67 pills a day. I think she'd be sensational on the stand. The problem is that Norma plans to kill herself as soon as she figures out how to do it.

 

Did Randall tell you the news? God's optic neuron is no longer with us. The poor fellow simply disintegrated, in the middle of an
Oprah
taping. There's nothing left, but they're giving it a funeral anyway.

 

Martin greeted the neuron's passing with unalloyed anxiety. When alive, the creature had never quite won humankind over; that luminous little genius had made most people feel inadequate. In death, however, it would inevitably garner sympathy.
Gee, it was cute. Golly, it was smart.
And now here comes the Job Society, bent on killing its five billion brethren. The popularity of
International 227
, he feared, was about to reach a new low.

“Your friend is gone,” he told Saperstein.

“My friend?”

“The optic neuron—-gone to its reward.”

“Lost the will to live, I suspect,” said Saperstein.

“Like a honeybee cut off from the hive,” said Ockham.

“I know the feeling.” Martin's fingers scurried across the computer keyboard. “It hit me last November, when Barbara Meredith beat me by eleven thousand votes, and I found myself without a jurisdiction.”

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Sun, May 21, 03:43 PM Local Time

 

Pay Ransom any amount he desires up to $100,000. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is just what the doctor ordered. Yes, I remember Norma Bedloe vividly. You simply
must
convince her to postpone her suicide. I want to make her our lead-off victim.

 

Shortly after the scientists went below for their customary siestas, the Hiddekel began to change. Bubbles rose from the river's depths, as if its waters had mysteriously transmuted into champagne. Coils of steam sinuated across the surface like ghosts of departed eels.

“Holy shit, it's boiling!” shouted Belphegor. “The goddamn river's boiling!”

“Steady,” said Augustine. Reaching through the wheelhouse window, he laid a calming hand on the demon's shoulder. “Steady . . . steady . . .”

“The river's evaporating! We'll get stuck on the bottom!”

“You're being irrational,” Augustine informed Belphegor. “Maybe we should speed up a bit,” suggested Martin, palms sweating, heart pounding.

“Good idea,” said Belphegor.

“Bad idea,” said Augustine. “It would annoy him.”

“Him?” said Martin.

Augustine pointed north. “Him.”

Directly off the
Good Intentions
's bow, a gigantic fire-breathing creature—an uncanny amalgam of crocodile, Chinese dragon, and blast furnace—swam in tandem with the packet. Flames shot from its nostrils like rocket exhaust, imparting a brilliant red glow to the waters. Rotating on their axes, its eyes emitted sharp pulsing shafts of purple light.

“Leviathan?” asked Martin.

“Leviathan,” Augustine corroborated. “The second great Jobian beast. ‘He makes the deep water boil like a caldron.'”

“Our hull's gonna melt!” screamed Belphegor. “
Zizz, sizzle
—and
bang
, we're in the river, gettin' cooked like a bunch of lobsters!”

“Take it easy,” said Augustine. “It's ontologically impossible for heated water to melt steel. Have we an adequate coal supply?”

“Plenty of coal, yes! That dragon's gonna cook us and eat us!”

“By nightfall he'll grow weary of the chase. Believe me, Belphegor, the law of entropy holds everywhere, even in here.”

“I hate this job! I wanted to be a first baseman!”

Hour after hour, the sea monster and the packet steamer pursued their parallel courses down the burbling Hiddekel. Martin couldn't say which river dweller exuded more smoke that afternoon: the dragon or the
Good Intentions.
He knew only that the law of entropy couldn't kick in soon enough to suit him.

“‘He leaves a great shining trail behind him,'” quoted Augustine, “‘and the great river is like white hair in his wake.'”

Eventually Belphegor decided that ridding themselves of the monster would require nothing less than a human sacrifice, a procedure for which he blithely nominated Martin as the sine qua non. “It's basic Christianity, Your Grace,” the demon explained. “We must give the Devil a ransom in exchange for our salvation.”

“Basic Christianity,” echoed Augustine mockingly. “Right. Except Leviathan is not Jonathan Sarkos, and Martin Candle—I assure you—is not Jesus Christ.”

“You never run out of things to say, do you?” grunted Belphegor.

“There will be no more talk of human sacrifice aboard the
Good Intentions
.”

As twilight crept across God's western hemisphere, the bishop's prophecy at last came true: the monster, exhausted, fell back to the packet's stern, then faded farther still, then vanished. The Hiddekel grew placid. Its waters cooled. When Belphegor offered Martin a can of Budweiser, he chugged it down eagerly. He asked for another. Only after consuming his third Bud did he begin to feel calm, though his mental picture of Leviathan remained vivid, hovering in his mind's eye like a flashbulb afterimage. Inevitably he thought of the courtroom strategy God had employed in the Book of Job. Change the subject. Pretend the topic isn't justice but mystery, then rattle your accuser with Creation's most disquieting beasts.

“I see now why it worked,” he told Augustine. “I see now why Job wet his pants and repented.”

 

In the morning the Hiddekel changed once again, becoming a kind of open sewer, its odor so vile that Belphegor's Stygian breath seemed perfume by comparison. The leukocytes, poisoned, began dying in droves. The blood flow grew clotted with obese, long-tailed rats, each as big as a beaver. A prolific species of algae soon claimed the river, riding its currents like an immense carpet and covering the adjacent levees with a creamy green scum.

“The agony of Abraham moves me to tears,” Augustine told Martin. “The fate of Lot's wife is wrenching beyond words. Noah's guilt is the stuff of Greek tragedy.” The bishop tapped his index finger on the pink itinerary. “When it comes to world-class victimhood, however, one name looms above all others. Here in the Country of Dung, you will meet the man who practically
invented
suffering.”

This time around, the scientists declined to join the expedition. As Saperstein put it, “Job probably knows as much about spirochetes as a cow knows about Sunday.”

Belphegor docked the steamer skillfully, enabling Martin and Augustine to clamber directly from ship to shore. The bishop led the way, guiding Martin through a landscape of smoldering fumaroles and smoking cinder cones. Within forty minutes their destination appeared: history's most famous dung heap, a thirty-foot mountain of ordure, guano, cow flops, buffalo chips, and coprolites, its stench so benumbing that Martin momentarily forgot the pitiless campaign the crab was waging against his pelvis.

“Hello, Judge Candle—I've been expecting you!” a raspy voice called out from above. “Come on up!”

Chewing a painkiller, Martin glanced heavenward. A cadaverous, hollow-eyed man sat on a rusty beer keg atop the heap, dressed in a shredded Crash Test Dummies T-shirt and a tattered red bathing suit. Boils and open sores speckled his skin. He was scraping himself with a Tupperware lid.

“I guess you know you're my hero!” shouted Martin toward the summit.

“I've always admired you too!” yelled Augustine. “The faith of Job can move mountains!”

“If not dung heaps!” cried the Idea of Job, gripped by a cough so catastrophic his body fluttered like a spinnaker in a gale.

Computer in hand, Martin began to ascend the holy mound. Garbage and trash lay embedded in the slope, along with dozens of castoff appliances: blenders, toasters, washing machines. With each squashy step his pulse rate quickened and his joy increased. He laughed out loud. At long last he'd attained his idol's abode—the burning heart of sacred rage! For the scientists, only the pineal gland would satisfy, but Martin needed nothing more right now than these consecrated coffee grounds, egg shells, and banana peels, these numinous Coke bottles, disposable diapers, and dolls' heads.

Panting and sweating, he reached the summit, at which instant the Idea of Job got up from his beer keg, took him by the arm, and guided him toward a blue plastic picnic cooler. Bright yellow pus leaked from the sufferer's lesions, dribbling down his chest and crisscrossing his stomach. He looked as if he'd been tattooed with a road map.

“Keeping watch here on my heap, day after day, I naturally recall your masterful handling of the Spinelli affair,” said Job. “Your sense of justice is acute.”

A flush of pride warmed Martin's innards. “Thank you,” he said, settling onto the picnic cooler and flipping open his computer.

Martin remembered the Spinelli case well. It revolved around the three-dollar fee charged by an Abaddonian named Schuyler Phelps for the use of the bathroom in his business establishment, Glendale Lawn and Garden Supplies. When Douglas Spinelli's aging mother ended up staining her favorite dress with diarrhea as a result of Phelps's policy, her son enacted a creative revenge. One Saturday afternoon, Spinelli strode into Glendale Lawn and Garden Supplies, paid his three dollars, entered the bathroom, and six minutes later emerged holding a paper bag containing a large and malodorous fecal sample. In full view of Phelps's shocked customers, Spinelli dumped the turd on the counter and said to the young cashier, “Here you are, mademoiselle—may I have my security deposit back now?” Phelps sued Spinelli for disrupting the store's normal operations, and Spinelli countersued Phelps for practicing a kind of gastrointestinal extortion. Martin threw the first case out of court and, turning to the second, ruled that Phelps must not only replace Mrs. Spinelli's dress but henceforth allow anyone to visit his bathroom free of charge.

The view from the dung heap was breathtaking. Scanning the neural landscape, Martin felt as if he were watching a movie flashback chronicling the last four days of his life. The Valley of Dry Bones was near enough for him to discern the living skeletons, still acting out
Crabs.
Beyond lay the docked ark, the ruins of Sodom, and Mount Moriah. Along the horizon stretched the glimmering black ribbon of the dinosaurs' mudflat.

“This heap is all mine, I'll have you know,” said Job proudly. “Squatter's rights.” Reaching into the dung, he pulled out a TV remote control. “For many years, I considered moving elsewhere—I even had a nice little apartment picked out, right next door to Sarkos's shop—but then we got cable, and I decided to stay.” He pointed the device toward a forlorn and filthy Magnavox television set. “For the past three years, God's Idea of CBS has been producing a daytime serial of my life,
One Mans Misery.
Stick around, and we'll watch it together. My youngest daughter's in a coma. My eldest just learned she's HIV positive. Okay, sure, after the story runs its course, I'll get three brand-new daughters and seven brand-new sons—all as good as the originals, better in fact—but that's hardly
realistic
now, is it? Life is not a fairy tale.”

“For those of us who permit God's grace to operate within our souls, life is
better
than a fairy tale!” Augustine called out as he started up the northern face of the heap.

“I believed that once too,” said Job, activating his Magnavox. “No more.”

The screen blossomed with a mid-shot of Gregory Peck playing Captain Ahab in
Moby-Dick
. “Look ye into its deeps and see the everlasting slaughter that goes on,” said Peck, standing on the deck of the
Pequod
and inviting Leo Genn as Starbuck to contemplate the cosmic mystery of the sea. “Who put it into its creatures to chase and fang one another? Where do murderers go, man? Who's to doom when the Judge Himself is dragged before the bar?”

“Your protégé didn't come here to watch television,” said Augustine, gaining the top of the mound. A sardonic smile curled the corners of his vast mouth. “He came to hear about the ontological defense.”

“The ontological defense,” echoed Job, growing suddenly lugubrious.

“Why don't you dismantle it for us? Go ahead, sir, tear it to pieces . . .”

Job shut off the TV, bit his lower lip, and frowned. “Give me a minute.”

“Take all the time you want.” Augustine turned, offering Martin a grin that revealed a majority of his teeth. “The ontological defense asserts, quite reasonably, that God is the only Perfect Being. All other realities, including the created universe, necessarily occupy a lower plane.” Pinching his nostrils shut, the bishop plucked a moldering slice of Swiss cheese from the dung. “Because the created universe is ontologically inferior to God, it must ipso facto contain defects. If the world were flawless, it would
be
God. According to this solution”—he stuck his index finger through a hole—“reality is like Swiss cheese. Inevitably it contains gaps . . . privations . . . pockets of nothingness. You may call these holes ‘evil' if you like, but God had no hand in their creation—noncreation, I should say. They occur
per accidens
, accruing unavoidably to the sheer brute fact of existence.” He extracted a discarded pair of Nikes. “God certainly never
wanted
His creatures to suffer, but if He was going to fashion a cosmos bursting with plenitude and variety, a world of shoes and ships and sealing wax”—he banged the Nikes together—“then imperfections had to be part of the package.”