Blameless in Abaddon (16 page)

He glanced at Patricia's television. The one hundred Eternity stockholders not yet taken prisoner were making a stand atop the cooling chamber. Strung out shoulder to shoulder along the Lucite slab, an image recalling various Hollywood depictions of the fall of the Alamo, God's defenders hunkered down as thousands of UN peacekeepers prepared to storm the Corpus Dei from all four sides.

The further Martin ventured into Augustine and his ilk, the more apparent it became that a second theory of evil was afoot in their tomes. He dubbed it the Father-knows-best hypothesis. According to this argument, an obscure benevolence underlay most human suffering—but our perceptions were too limited to grasp it. “To an extraterrestrial, a mother's labor pains might seem pointless, whereas she herself knows a greater good will result,” Martin wrote, paraphrasing the apologists as best he could. “To a kitten, a flea bath seems sadistic, even though it may be all that stands between the animal and anemia.”

The Siege of Celestial City USA lasted fifteen days, two more than the Siege of the Alamo, after which—realizing the hopelessness of their situation—the Eternity stockholders laid down their arms, surrendered the Corpus Dei, and began appearing on the talk-show circuit. They were the new national heroes, more popular than the Apollo astronauts of the sixties, more sympathetic than the Iran hostages of the seventies.

“If Jesus had wanted us to, we would've fought down to the last man,” they informed Oprah.

“We regretted having to take up arms,” they explained to Geraldo, “but there comes a time when your duty to God outweighs everything else.”

“Thank goodness they didn't kill anybody,” Martin told Patricia.

“
Lots
of people are going to crack up before your damned trial is over, Martin—not just freaked-out stockholders,
lots
of people. It's not too late to call it off.”

 

On the last evening in February, as midnight approached, Martin lay in bed wondering whether, having taken himself off Odradex, he should jettison the Feminone as well. His bosom was now so substantial that he had to wear a sports bra, his libido so beleaguered that not even the raunchiest erotica from Perkinsville Video could bestir it. Convulsed with shame, racked with pain, he climbed off the mattress, stumbled into the hall, and stood before the full-length mirror dressed in nothing but boxer shorts. In the feeble light of the forty-watt bulb his Port-A-Cath valve looked as innocuous as a mole. “Nice tits,” he muttered, fighting tears.

Patricia appeared beside him, sketch pad tucked under her arm. The exposed page showed a Vestan flying saucer slicing through the Washington Monument like a knife bisecting a salami. “Nice tits,” she echoed, laying a sympathetic palm against his cheek.

“It isn't
fair
.” As a teenager, Martin had frequently indulged in the common male fantasy of wishing his body would transmute into a woman's, so that he might ogle himself in the mirror. Sometimes he would even mold his bosom into a facsimile of Gloria McIntyre's. Now his wish had come true. “First my health, then Corinne, my job, my house—”

“Read a detective novel, Martin, something in which justice prevails. Watch television. American Movie Classics.”

“—and now my gender.”

“You need a Fred Astaire flick. Fred and Ginger.”

He returned to the guest room, retrieved the Feminone bottle, and reluctantly jammed a capsule in his mouth, washing it down with sour orange juice. Staying with the estrogen regimen made sense in the long run, he told himself. The drug was quite likely keeping him alive, and while it had deformed his body and disempowered his penis, it hadn't reduced his outrage one iota. Like many Republicans, Martin was ambivalent toward the so-called women's movement—he couldn't tell where the legitimate critique ended and the whining began—but he had to admit that the mere presence of female hormones in your blood didn't make you fainthearted, weak-willed, or unaggressive. Indeed, he felt more determined than ever to chase the Main Attraction from Good Hope to perdition's flames. Estrogen was not destiny.

Fishing the remote control out from under the blankets, he trolled through the channels in search of Fred and Ginger and hit upon
Larry King Live
instead. Irving Saperstein was gleefully demonstrating
God's
optic neuron for the spellbound host. Martin's finger froze. He stopped changing channels. Prompted by Saperstein, the neuron computed the value of pi to thirty-six decimal places. Martin yawned. His mind drifted. By the time he was asleep, the neuron had painted a first-class forgery of Van Gogh's
Sunflowers
, proved the four-color map theory, and written a love sonnet so beautiful and true the studio floor manager burst into tears.

Three hours later a crab spasm jolted Martin awake. Slipping on his bifocals, he glanced at his digital Westclox . . . 3:55
A.M.
—a sinister hour, he mused. He wouldn't be surprised to learn that a disproportionately large number of people died at 3:55
A.M.
, violently and unmourned.

He swallowed a Roxanol and fixed on Patricia's Mitsubishi. Strangely enough, the neuron still commanded the screen: a closeup highlighting its silvery outer sheath. Grabbing the remote control, he aimed it at the TV and pushed
OFF.
The image remained intact. He changed channels. Nothing happened.

“You don't want another network,” said a high, squeaky, but emphatically noncomical voice, each syllable entering the room with a crispness and fidelity far surpassing what the Mitsubishi normally delivered. “I'm the best thing on television right now.”

So deep was Martin's astonishment, he kept his eyes locked on the screen even after a second crab spasm ripped through his pelvis. He ate another Roxanol and nervously addressed the televised cell. “Are you talking to
me
?”

“To you and you alone. For the next five minutes Cable News Network is my plaything—the simplest method I could devise for communicating with you directly.”

“I didn't realize you were so powerful.”

“I'm a piece of
God
, for chrissakes—I'm not something the cat dragged in. Listen, Candle, if you're still determined to stage this trial, we insist you do it right.”

“We?”

“Me and my Progenitor.”

“Your Progenitor?”

“A.k.a. the Corpus Dei.”

Martin gulped audibly. “I guess I'd been assuming that your, er . . . your
Progenitor
was dead against
International 227.”

“He has a much broader mind than you might suppose. In His own peculiar way, He wants to see justice served.”

“I'm confused. God hopes I'll
win?
”

“Let's just say He hopes the trial will be aesthetically satisfying. The point is this: you've got a tough row to hoe. To triumph in The Hague, you'll need to do much more than foreswear Odradex, stay on Feminone, read Saint Augustine, memorize
The Conundrum of Suffering
, and put your Jobians on the stand—though all of those moves are essential.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Mastering the world's great theodicies means going inside my Progenitor's head.”

“Is this a dream?”

“Neither dream nor chimera nor hallucination. I'm offering you the best advice you'll ever receive. Take it or leave it.”

“Join Saperstein's expedition? I'm not much of a traveler.”

“Indeed. Some people are armchair psychologists. Some are armchair politicians.
You're
an armchair human being. Jesus, Candle, you've lived in Abaddon your whole life. Okay, sure, you've had your reasons: inertia, lack of funds, neurotic girlfriends—plus, of course, your nebulous desire to protect your father from your mother—but it's time you widened your horizons.”

“Good heavens, is there anything you
don't
know about me?”

“Yes. I don't know whether you deserve to win.”

The neuron began to glow a brilliant crimson, and suddenly it was gone—
poof
—replaced by the normal CNN transmission, a report on a promising new AIDS therapy.

Martin aimed the remote control, killed the image, and collapsed on the mattress. His hands shook. His heart thumped wildly, causing his implanted Port-A-Cath to vibrate. Seeking to quiet his nerves, he made a mental list of the items he would take on the expedition. His painkillers, of course. His Feminone. Several sports bras. What sort of place was the “ultimate terra incognita,” anyway? A land of milk and honey, bounteous beyond comprehension? Or had the coma turned it into a wasteland? He decided he would bring his hiking boots. Tea bags. Dental floss. Kleenex. And a flashlight.

“I think I'm going mad,” he told Patricia's television.

 

When Dr. Gregory Francis Lovett sent Martin a registered letter requesting that he fly to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a pretrial meeting, all expenses paid, the ex-JP's initial instinct was to decline. It seemed foolhardy to permit the first brush with Lovett to occur on ground of the professor's own choosing. But eventually Martin realized he had more to gain than lose by accepting the invitation. Better to size up his adversary now than in the confusion of courtroom battle.

After touching down at Logan Airport on the bitter cold morning of March 11, he hailed a cab, gave the driver Lovett's address, and settled into a Roxanolian catnap. The noon hour found him slipping through the wrought-iron gates of 87 Mount Auburn Street. As he approached the front door, briefcase swinging at his side, an uncommon sight greeted him: a plump, red-faced man lying supine in the snow. The man's arms were outstretched, and he was moving them up and down as if back-stroking across a swimming pool.

“You made good time, Mr. Candle,” said the man, slowly rising like a lead soldier climbing out of its cast-iron mold. Brushing the flakes from his parka, he gestured toward his impression in the snow. “Until the Day of Judgment, that's the closest I'll ever get to being an angel.”

“Dr. Lovett, I presume?” inquired Martin, extending his arm. Their mittened hands connected, wool clinging to wool. “Do you make snow angels every winter?”

“I haven't done this since boyhood—a very satisfying experience. Snow angels, I mean. Boyhood too, come to think of it. Would you like to produce one yourself?”

“Thank you, but what I most want is a hot cup of tea.”

From
The Conundrum of Suffering
, Martin had expected to find G. F. Lovett rather smug, somewhat pompous, and a tad misanthropic. As the afternoon progressed, he revised his hypothesis. Lovett was intensely smug, profoundly pompous, highly misanthropic . . . and also quite likable. In appearance he rather resembled Alfred Hitchcock, though where the film director's manner had been solemn and lugubrious, Lovett indulged in rat-a-tat speech and a peculiar arm-flapping gesture suggestive of a penguin attempting to take flight.

“Two months from now, you and I shall engage in the greatest chess match of all time,” said Lovett, after providing Martin with a cup of Irish breakfast tea and a tuna-fish sandwich. Gripping a Malacca walking stick, the professor guided his guest into the library, where, as if to underscore his pronouncement, a green-and-white jade chess set adorned the reading table. He picked up the white king and held it before Martin's gaze like a sideshow mesmerist displaying a hypnotic charm. “God Almighty: Ruler of the Universe—omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent . . . in a word, worshipworthy. And yet there is evil. And yet there is pain. You're asking the right question, Mr. Candle, no doubt about it.” Lovett returned the king to its square. “I'm strictly a duffer at this game. I still don't know how en passant works.”

“When your opponent advances a pawn two squares, you can capture it if you've got a pawn on one of the squares he passed.”

“Want to give it a shot? I promise to lose graciously.”

“Chess has unfortunate connotations for me,” Martin replied as Lovett's rococo marble fireplace lured him toward its crackling warmth. “Before she died, my wife and I played every Sunday.”

“You have my deepest sympathy.”

“In the nude. The sensual and the cerebral, all at once. Ever done that?”

“No. Sounds rather . . . French.” Lovett rested his walking stick against the reading table, sat down before the chess set, and moved the green king's pawn to square four. “You're wondering why I summoned you.” Continuing his solitaire game, he developed the white queen's knight. “In my protracted sojourn on this planet, Mr. Candle, I have come to value three commodities above all others: good books, decent claret, and worthy opponents. Are you a worthy opponent?”

“By the fifth of June . . . yes, I'll be worthy.”

“I want a sound return on my investment—a good fight, you understand? No knockouts in round one. A good fight.”

“You don't believe I've got a chance—am I right? You're thinking, ‘If they let O. J. Simpson walk, they'll certainly let God walk.'”

“Who is O. J. Simpson?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, but I follow your meaning anyway. Will you give me a good fight?”

“I've read your
Conundrum of Suffering
twice now, and I've started investigating the theologians you cited in your footnotes—Augustine, Luther, Meister Eckhart.”

“Splendid. And have you grasped the essence of my argument?”

“I think so.”

“And what might it be?”

“Spare the rod, and you'll spoil the species.”

A prodigious grin spread across Lovett's ruddy face. “‘Spare the rod,'” he echoed in a half whisper. “‘Spoil the species.' Wonderful, sir. Perfect. And do you believe my argument works?”

“Not completely.”

“You've found a chink?”