Blameless in Abaddon (17 page)

“Yes.”

“Excellent.” Walking stick in hand, Lovett sauntered toward the far wall. With the insouciance of a cancan dancer lifting her skirt, he pushed aside a burgundy drape to disclose a red plastic button. “In the Augustinian view, of course, we're
already
a spoiled species. Spare the rod, and you'll spoil the species
even more
.” As the circuit sprang to life, the central bookcase rotated like a subway turnstile, revealing a gray slateboard on its opposite side. “Normally this board is covered with scraps of Old English verse and medieval poetry. Every Thursday evening my more promising pupils drop by for food and conversation—the Beer and Beowulf Society, we call ourselves, though we rarely consume beer, and we've yet to scan a single line of
Beowulf
.” Taking a stubby stick of chalk from his waistcoat, he wrote disciplinary in capitals replete with curlicues. “As I interpret my own book, it's basically a gloss on the so-called ‘disciplinary defense.' As you know, this solution to the problem of evil has a long and venerable history.”

“Indeed,” said Martin, seeking to score an early point. “I'm especially taken with Gregory Nazianzenus's image of the soul as an athlete-in-training, each day growing stronger by shouldering life's burdens.”

“You are confusing Gregory Nazianzenus with Gregory the Great,” replied Lovett with a quick little wink.

“Gregory the Great,” said Martin hurriedly. “Of course.” His cheeks grew flushed. “That's who I meant.”

“
Whom
.”

“What?”

“‘That's
whom
I meant.' It's called grammar. Don't let the ‘is' fool you—the objective case must be employed here. So what's this chink you've found in the disciplinary defense?”

“You'll learn about it in two months.” Between now and the fifth of June, Martin decided, would be plenty of time to get his Gregorys straight.

“Fair enough.” Lovett leaned toward the slateboard and wrote
HIDDEN HARMONY.
“Supplementing the disciplinary defense, of course, is the famous ‘hidden harmony' solution.”

“I call it the Father-knows-best hypothesis,” said Martin with all the sardonicism he could muster.

“‘Father knows best,'” echoed Lovett. “Yes. Very clever—just the sort of dismissive paraphrase in which
I
am accused of trafficking. Unfortunately for your case, the farther one ventures into the hidden harmony defense, the less dismissable it becomes. Meister Eckhart got to the heart of the matter when he said we have no right to impose our own limited vocabulary on God. I'm sure you know his famous remark, ‘Calling God good is like—'”

“‘—calling the sun dark.'”

“‘Black,' actually. He said ‘black.' Julian of Norwich provides an equally vivid image: we see reality through a kind of milky crystal.” Lovett pressed the chalk stick against his lips, giving himself the appearance of a man being silenced by a skeleton's index finger. “If we could but remove the cloud, plagues and tornadoes would appear necessary in their own way. Doubtless you have an answer for Julian.”

“I don't find him particularly profound.”

“
Her
particularly profound.”

“Her?”

“Her.”

Maybe I've lost this skirmish, brooded Martin as he scanned the bookcases flanking the fireplace, but I'm going to win the war. Beyond the first editions and the leatherbound reprints, the shelves' most striking occupants were ten plastic action figures derived from the Hollywood adaptations of Lovett's works. Captain Alexis Renardo stood watch atop
The Canterbury Tales.
Basil the Basilisk guarded
Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight.
Amberson the Lion protected
The Mabinogion.
Stanhope the Steam-Powered Man maintained a vigil over
Le Morte d'Arthur.

“Any
other
defenses?” asked Martin in a tone he hoped sounded more defiant than apprehensive.

Lovett touched chalk to slate,
ESCHATOLOGICAL
, he wrote,
ONTOLOGICAL. LIBERUM ARBITRIUM.

Anxiety swept through Martin, less painful than a crab spasm but almost as disorienting. His understanding of “eschatological” was hazy at best, he couldn't imagine what an “ontological” defense might comprise, and the only sense he could make of
liberum arbitrium
was “arbitrary book.”

“You look unhappy,” said Lovett.

Drawing his new laptop from his briefcase, Martin began recording the contents of the slate. “I'll master all five.”

“Splendid. What's that device you've got there?”

“Personal computer.”

“Fascinating. I suggest you start with a good English translation of Augustine's
Opus imperfectum contra Julianum
—unless, of course, you read Latin.”

“
Some
Latin,” said Martin icily, typing
Opus imperfectum contra Julianum
into his hard drive. “I'll buy a translation tomorrow. And there's something
else
I intend to do, Professor. I intend to journey through the Defendant's skull. Saperstein has agreed to let me join the expedition.”

“Why would you want to do
that
?” Lovett smiled slyly. “Are there more things in God's brain than are dreamt of in Augustine's philosophy?”

“Ten days ago that weird neuron Saperstein bagged during his first probe communicated with me via my landlady's television set. Maybe I was hallucinating, but the message came through loud and clear: I'd do well to enter the divine mind. I don't imagine
you've
been contacted by the neuron . . .”

“I don't even own a television.”

Irritated by the Port-A-Cath, Martin's right breast began to itch. Placing hand to bosom, he scratched himself through his sweater. “You're welcome to come along. I wouldn't want to have an unfair advantage.”

“Yes you would.”

Martin laughed. “Yes I would.”

Abandoning the slate, Lovett shuffled toward a lamp table on which rested two wineglasses and a many-faceted decanter filled with dark red fluid. “Eighteen years ago my brother published a book about life in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It sold in the tens of thousands. Such is Darcy's talent that he managed to make the Versailles of Saint-Simon as vivid as your grandmother's kitchen.” He yanked out the stopper. “But fancy this: my brother has never been to Versailles. When he visits The Hague as my aide-de-camp next month, it will be the first time he's ever set foot in Europe. I needn't go traipsing across God's cerebrum, Mr. Candle, to know what God is like. Care for some claret?”

“Please.”

Lovett filled both glasses, handing one to Martin. “A toast . . . to reasoned theological debate.”

“To reasoned theological debate,” Martin echoed. Their glasses clinked together.

“And may the best man win.”

“
Better
man.”

“What?”

Martin pressed the glass to his lips, took a warm swallow of claret, and grinned. “It's called grammar.”

 

 

 

 

BOOK TWO

A
FTER MY
C
REATOR'S OPTIC NEURON
made the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
simultaneously, shining forth from the magazine racks in brilliant color and three-dimensional splendor, barely a day went by before the striking hologram—coyly dubbed a “holy-gram” by Charles Braithwaite—appeared on thousands of walls, bulletin boards, and refrigerator doors throughout Europe and North America. I myself saw no need of exhibiting that particular image. It would be as absurd for a Corpus Dei inhabitant to display a divine neuron as for a Bedouin to appoint his tent with pails of sand.

The longer people contemplated their holograms, the more they were forced to acknowledge a disquieting truth. What they had in the Corpus Dei was their comatose Creator Himself, not some expendable husk. For many citizens of the Western world, this situation proved, as you might imagine, troubling—especially in the United States, where reality has never enjoyed a great deal of prestige. And so the American Baptist Confederation once again undertook to restore the average American Protestant's peace of mind. Sacred time, the Confederation explained, differs from profane time. Just as Jesus lay suspended in his tomb for three days prior to his resurrection, so would the Corpus Dei remain comatose for the same interval, seventy-two hours—measured, however, not by any terrestrial chronometer but by the Great Clock of Heaven. Be patient, the Baptists counseled their flocks. God will awaken soon.

Having abandoned the Mayfly Theory for a theology more congruent with the facts, the Baptists were in no position to protest what happened next. Flush with their victory at the Siege of Celestial City USA, the United Nations peacekeeping brigades disconnected the Corpus Dei's evaporator, compressor, and condenser, selling the whole massive refrigeration system to a Chicago meat-packing concern for 8.5 million dollars and donating the proceeds to Eternity Enterprises. As for the cooling chamber that contained the body itself, the UN decided to leave it in place. Although irrelevant to its original purpose (the Corpus Dei being alive after a fashion), this great Lucite box could still function as a kind of shipping crate. Only one person on Earth ended up regretting the chamber's retention—Hugo Ott, a wiseass freelance journalist who noted in the
Village Voice
that “God, like Adolph Eichmann before Him, will stand trial from inside a glass booth.” The day Ott's article appeared, he was visited at home by three masked vigilantes from the Sword of Jehovah Strike Force. After removing his right thumb with a scaling knife, the Jehovans informed him that his left would be next if he published any more articles comparing God to a war criminal.

The Lockheed 7000, of course, also remained undisturbed, nourishing the Main Attraction's surviving cells with the countless gallons of clean, oxygenated blood His static heart, collapsed lungs, and shriveled kidneys could not provide. Thus did the River Hiddekel continue on its route, flowing past my tailor shop at forty kilometers per hour, weaving to and fro among the dying forests and decaying cities of His western hemisphere.

God's deportation was a simple matter of reversing the steps by which He'd come to Orlando. Availing themselves of the same gantries that had lifted the cooling chamber from the Atlantic, the peacekeeping brigades next loaded it onto an array of flatcars and sent it by rail to the east coast of Florida. On April 23, 2000, the Corpus Dei arrived safely in Cocoa Beach, where the UN troops set the chamber afloat on a gargantuan raft chained to a triad of supertankers, the
Carpco New Orleans
, the
Arco Fairbanks
, and the
Exxon Galveston.
The heart-lung machine completed the flotilla, buoyed by its own raft and borne by its own ship, the
Chevron Caracas.

On the morning of May 2, just as I was completing one of my most spiritually satisfying commissions ever—the flag of the Rwandan Government in Exile, a dauntless band of Hutu tribal leaders and militiamen who, before being ousted, had presided over the slaughter of nearly a million Tutsis—all four supertankers set sail under the command of Captain Anthony Van Horne, dragging the Corpus Dei and its auxiliary cardiovascular system north toward Philadelphia. Like almost every other sentient being in Creation, I watched the convoy's stately progress on television. Joining me in front of my portable black-and-white Zenith were my clever neighbor Bishop Augustine and my crafty disciple Herr Schonspigel—the very demon who, as it happens, fashioned the prototype from which all such supertankers descend. The worthiness of Schonspigel's design has proven itself repeatedly, from the
Torrey Canyon
spill that so spectacularly spoiled the English Channel to the wreck of the
Carpco Valparaíso
and subsequent obliteration of Matagorda Bay.

 

Had the United Nations not supplied Martin with an armored car, a driver, and two personal bodyguards, he might very well have been assassinated en route to the great flotilla. As he traveled through Philadelphia that morning, the Sword of Jehovah Strike Force took up strategic positions along the sidewalks, bombarding the car with a panoply of projectiles: rocks, bricks, bottles, lead pipes. From his sanctuary inside the passenger compartment, Martin browsed his Penguin Classics edition of Augustine's
Opus imperfectum contra Julianum
and simultaneously pondered the Jehovans' agenda. What they were
really
mad about, he decided as an empty mayonnaise jar exploded against the window, was God's decision to go catatonic, not
International 227
, but their impacted reverence prevented them from directing their fury toward the Defendant Himself.

Disturbing as his trip to the flotilla was, Martin felt even worse about the previous evening's conversation with Patricia.

“You
say
you love me, but you don't
mean
it,” she asserted.

“I love you,” he said, slipping on his sports bra. “You're a dear, dear friend.”

“You love me, but you'll never love me as much as you loved
her
.”

“Please, Patricia.
Please.
I can't be thinking about this stuff right now. My bones are full of cancer, my tits are bigger than yours, and I've got less than a month to make myself smarter than sixteen different church fathers.”

“Randall Selkirk phoned yesterday—he saw my picture in the Valley of Children. He's coming to Philadelphia next week to shoot some zoo footage, and he wants to take me out to dinner.”

“Randall isn't supposed to be starting a relationship. He's supposed to be working on
International 227
”