Blameless in Abaddon (18 page)

“Oh, I get it,” she said in the tone she normally reserved for commentaries on her ex-husband. “It's okay if he humps me, as long as he's reading Saint Augustine at the time.”

“Don't put words in my mouth.”

“Stay home, Martin. You belong here.”

He looked into her sad, wet eyes. “‘And if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. It's not God I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.'”

“Fuck you, Martin. Fuck you from here to Holland.”

Arriving at the waterfront, he jammed
Opus imperfectum con
tra Julianum
into his pocket, snatched up his two mismatched suitcases, and, as the bodyguards lobbed tear-gas canisters into the mob, boarded a decrepit UN cutter called the
Haile Selassie.
Within minutes the cutter was steaming southward down the Delaware, a voyage made singularly unpleasant by the dead fish that, maneuvering their speedboats within range, the Jehovans managed to hurl onto the foredeck. Crab spasms exploded in Martin's right ilium and left pubic bone. No surprise, really: according to the latest bone scan, the tumor had infiltrated both halves of his pelvis. He pulled out his Roxanol, popped three tablets, and chewed.

Reeking of halibut and mackerel, the
Haile Selassie
cruised into Wilmington Bay, where the
Carpco New Orleans
and her sister vessels lay at anchor. TV news helicopters circled presumptuously overhead, poking and probing with their zoom lenses. Surveying this bizarre and epic scene, Martin realized how radically the scale of his life had changed. A year ago he'd been wondering whether it would do Margo Spencer, an adolescent shoplifter, more harm than good to spend a night in jail. Today he was confronting the panoramic fact that—thanks to him—four supertankers, a gigantic heart-lung machine, and the comatose body of God Almighty were all poised for an unprecedented trip to the Netherlands.

He bid the bodyguards farewell and, suitcases in hand, strode up the gangway and stepped onto the weather deck of the
Carpco New Orleans
, where Anthony Van Horne greeted him with a vigorous handshake. The captain was a hale, gray-haired, lantern-jawed man in his late fifties, wearing dress blues and sporting a broken nose. Guiding Martin down the catwalk, he explained that by tomorrow morning they'd be in Bayonne, where they would refuel, take on supplies, and pick up the two scientists Saperstein had chosen to accompany him into the divine cranium.

“It's good to be at sea again,” said Van Horne, inhaling a healthy helping of salt air. “It's good to have a mission. I hope you're prepared for a long, slow voyage. I speak from experience. Towing the old Smiler takes time.”

“Ever been to Holland before?”

“A Dutchman like me, you'd think I'd have gotten over there by now, but this is actually my first trip.”

“Looking forward to it?”

“My country is the ocean, Mr. Candle. Tulips and windmills do nothing for me.”

While the Jehovans regarded Martin as the most insidious piece of slime ever to creep across the face of planet Earth, the Committee for Complete Disclosure saw him as a hero, the man whose vision and stubbornness had afforded them their entrée into God. The cabin into which Van Horne now led Martin was luxurious to the point of decadence: Cornell astronomer Dwayne Kitchen, the Committee's flamboyant chairperson, had arranged the poshest accommodations available—a four-room suite featuring a Jacuzzi, a wet bar, a home-entertainment center, and a refrigerator stocked with champagne and caviar.

“I've read about your troubles,” said the captain. “Illness, and then your wife. Really rough. In your shoes, I'd probably want to strike back too.”

Setting the smaller suitcase on the bunk, Martin popped the clasps and tilted back the lid. He shuddered. A plastic syringe and fifty 2cc vials of Odradex rested atop his flannel pajamas, right next to Augustine's
Confessions
and Lovett's
The Conundrum of Suffering.
Patricia's doing, no doubt—
he
certainly hadn't packed the stuff.

“I must tell you something, though,” said Van Horne. “I'm a big fan of your opponent.”

“God?”

“G. F. Lovett. If his books are anything to go by, you've got your work cut out for you. That fellow's crafty as a marlin.”

Martin studied the beguiling vials. Hobson's choice. If he didn't go on Odradex, he might die before the trial began, whereas taking the drug meant losing the alertness on which his hypothetical victory depended. “I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person in the world who's never read
The Mermaid in the Maelstrom
.”

“You should give it a try. My little boy and I are working our way through the whole Saga of Sargassia together—it's going to take us about five hundred bedtimes. Thanks to G. F. Lovett, Stevie thinks having a skipper for a dad is a pretty good deal. He's started calling me Captain Renardo.”

 

Martin passed the voyage to Bayonne in yet another attempt to plumb
Opus imperfectum contra Julianum
, pausing only to eat caviar, swallow Roxanol and Feminone, and visit the bathroom. With the help of his
American Heritage Desk Encyclopedia
he'd already deduced that
liberum arbitrium
meant “free will,” that the so-called “eschatological” explanation of suffering had something to do with Heaven and Judgment Day, and that “ontology” was a branch of metaphysics addressing the nature of existence, enabling philosophers to distinguish, for example, between flesh and spirit. He'd been hoping Augustine would offer coherent accounts of these theodicies, so he could start devising counterclaims. Alas, the further he ventured into
Opus imperfectum
, the more perplexed he became. The proper words appeared with regularity—
evil, will, soul, body
—but their context continually veered between the obscure and the opaque. The linchpin sentence of book one, chapter twenty-two, for example: “This is the Catholic view, a view that can show a just God in so many pains and in such agonies of tiny babies.” Maybe it made more sense in Latin.

On the morning of May 11, in the supertanker's oak-paneled wardroom, a breakfast meeting occurred—a colloquy addressing matters of such consummate uncanniness that an eavesdropper might have interpreted it as a therapy session for schizophrenics. At the head of the table presided the celebrated neurophysiologist Irving Saperstein. To Saperstein's left sat Jocelyn Beauchamp, a black mathematics professor from Vassar best known for her work in artificial intelligence, which she described for Martin as “my quest to create a sentient robot whose heart is in conflict with itself.” To Saperstein's right: Father Thomas Ockham of Fordham University, the cosmologist who'd served as the Vatican's liaison during the first towing of the Corpus Dei, an adventure the priest subsequently turned into the best-selling
Parables for a Post-theistic Age.
Martin occupied the remaining chair, adjacent to a porthole framed in brass, from which vantage point he watched the stormy, windswept Atlantic, forever ejecting foam and spindrift as the convoy crept eastward toward The Hague.

Saperstein began by announcing that within forty-eight hours they'd be beyond the range of the TV helicopters. “This is all to the good,” he explained, sipping coffee from a Carpco Shipping mug. “Whatever we find in His skull, it's bound to be complex, right? God is a professional. When we reemerge into daylight, the last thing we want is some pesky CNN stringer landing in our laps, demanding an instant analysis.”

“We'll be strangers in a strange land, won't we?” said Beauchamp. She was a booming, stately, Junoesque woman with flaming red lipstick and clusters of dreadlocks hanging from her cranium like coils of insulated wire.

Saperstein grunted in agreement. “The Fodor's guide to this particular country hasn't been written yet. The Berlitz phrase-book for trips to infinity doesn't exist.”

“You're imagining we'll be able to communicate with Him, aren't you?” said Ockham.

“That cell we pried from His optic nerve tells us everything that's on its mind. Look at the Torah, Thomas. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus: this is a God who
talks.
He likes to spell out laws. You needn't be shy about asking Him to clear up certain longstanding mysteries—you know, what is the correct value of the Hubble constant, why is the proton in a hydrogen atom eighteen hundred and thirty-six times as heavy as the electron?”

“Naturally one thinks of old Werner Heisenberg, lying on his deathbed, declaring he'll have two questions for God,” said Beauchamp.

“What questions?” asked Martin.

“Why relativity, and why turbulence?” Beauchamp bit into a cinnamon roll and smiled. “Then Heisenberg added, ‘I really think He may have an answer to the first question.'”

“Fine, great, but I'd like to venture even deeper than that,” said Ockham. He was a gaunt, rawboned man, forever in motion—eyes darting, fingers entwining, spine shifting—as if trapped in an eternal state of remembering he was supposed to be somewhere else. “I'd like to go to the meat of things and ask why He bothered to create a physical cosmos in the first place. I'm assuming, of course, our Corpus Dei is in fact the Supreme Being and not some Gnostic artificer or Platonic demiurge.”

“Artificer?” said Martin, swallowing orange juice. “Demiurge?”

“It's one of the oldest problems in theology,” said Ockham. “Was the universe created by God Himself or by one of His fallible apprentices? Human vanity favors the former hypothesis, though the latter makes a good deal more sense.”

The orange juice soured in Martin's stomach. Oh, crap, he thought—with my luck, everybody will decide the Corpus Dei is really just a “demiurge.” It was God the Father he wanted to bring down, not some ancillary hit man.

“Even if our cargo
is
a demiurge, he probably knows more about the universe than we do,” said Saperstein. “We should still have our questions ready.”

“What if God doesn't exist?” asked Beauchamp. “What if our demiurge was created by another demiurge, and that demiurge by another demiurge, and
that
demiurge . . .?”

“Assuming the universe was truly
made
—assuming it didn't somehow invent itself—then eventually one must posit an uncreated Creator: a self-sufficient, self-explanatory, necessary Being,” said Ockham. “And there's the
real
puzzle. Why would a self-sufficient Being indulge in the seemingly pointless exercise of fashioning a material cosmos?”

“Maybe He was bored,” said Martin.

“Then He wouldn't be self-sufficient, would He?”

“Lonely?”

“Same problem—a lonely God is a codependent God.” Ockham slapped the shell of his soft-boiled egg with the back of his spoon. “One answer is that the Supreme Being in His day had two poles: a self-sufficient side that existed beyond space and time, and a contingent side that created the universe.
That
, I would argue, is the first thing we should ask Him. ‘God, were You bipolar?'”

Martin stared out the porthole. He didn't quite know what to make of his fellow passengers aboard the
Carpco New Orleans.
In theory their curiosity was wholly admirable, yet it seemed tainted with a certain opportunism. He pictured the scientists as three learned vultures, eyeglasses balanced on their beaks, circling around and around above the cooling chamber as they prepared to devour the spoiling meat of God's mind.

“I imagine you're planning to ask Him a math question or two,” said Saperstein to Beauchamp. “I mean, if
anybody
can prove Fermat's last theorem . . .”

“The equation
‘x
to the
n
plus
y
to the
n
equals
z
to the
n
,' where
n
is an integer greater than two, has no solution in the positive numbers,” said Martin, who'd had the good sense to take Mrs. Rosenzweig's Math for Romantics course at Abaddon Senior High. He remembered about the maddening note Fermat had scrawled in a book he was reading, brought to light posthumously; evidently the mathematician had hit upon a neat little proof of his conjecture, but there wasn't enough room in the margin for the details. “You mean they still haven't cracked that thing?”

“Several years ago my colleague Andrew Wiles announced that he'd done so,” said Beauchamp, consuming a fluffy forkful of scrambled eggs, “but his solution was such a Rube Goldberg sort of affair nobody could work up much affection for it. What we really want, of course, is
Fermat's
solution to Fermat's last theorem.”

A smile broke through Saperstein's scraggly beard. “So far we've been working from the top down—lofty, abstract questions. I'd prefer to begin near the bottom—with a single cell, okay? The human zygote. Immediately after arriving on the scene, it divides into two cells, then four, eight, sixteen, et cetera. Then, at a certain stage, one particular cell commits to becoming the baby's brain stem. Amazing. A miracle. How does
that
cell know to inaugurate the apparatus for thinking, feeling, hoping, dreaming? What keeps it from turning into a kidney or a spleen?” The neurophysiologist ate a syrup-laden hunk of pancake. “Now let's descend even further—to the protozoan
Myxotricha paradoxa
, a parasite who lives in the digestive tract of the Australian termite, engulfing fragments of finely chewed wood.”

Hearing the word
termite
, Martin cringed.
Ravenous termites have attached the guardrails on the Henry Avenue Bridge
, the police report on Corinne's death had noted,
turning them into little more than slabs of compacted sawdust.

“Look at
Myxotricha
under the microscope, and you'll see he gets around via spirochetes attached all over his body. Question: what holds the spirochetes in place?” Saperstein bit the apex off a triangle of toast. “Static electricity? Duco cement?”