Blameless in Abaddon (20 page)

“What species?” whispered Ockham, slogging cautiously forward.

“
Gallimimus
, I think,” said Saperstein. “Don't startle them.”

A wave of sadness washed through Martin. Poor, sick Brandon Appleyard: Brandon and his beloved dinosaurs.

The female
gallimimus
looked up from the Scrabble board and gestured smoothly with her left forelimb. “Come on over, darlings! We've been expecting you!”

The neuronauts approached the gazebo, silt sucking at their boots.

“You can
talk
,” gasped Beauchamp.

“Everything you know about dinosaurs is wrong,” said the male, bobbing his blunt reptilian head. He spoke in a nasal but endearing New York accent. “We were warm-blooded, quick on our feet, good in bed, and verbal to a fault.”

Mounting the gazebo steps, Martin glanced at the Scrabble board. The dinosaurs' word choices bespoke a morbid state of mind.
DOOM, DESPAIR, PLAGUE, DAMNNATION. NOTHING.

“
Gallimimus
, correct?” asked Saperstein.

“Correct,” said the female. She sounded more cultured than her mate, carefully shaping each syllable in the manner of a Boston aristocrat. “Call me Vivien.”

“My name's Lawrence,” said the male, cleverly obtaining a Triple Word Score by appending
NESS
to
NOTHING.

“We aren't simply
any
dinosaurs,” said Vivien. “We're the Idea of Dinosaurs—the archetypes, if you will.”

“We've just come from His lab,” said Ockham, nodding sagely. “An astonishing place.”

“This whole
hemisphere
used to be astonishing, glory pouring from every neuron,” said Lawrence. “Then the coma came. You're Father Ockham, aren't you?”

“That's right.”

“I read your book,” said Vivien. “Basically you got it right: the coma was God's idea, His way of forcing humankind to mature. You're a good writer. Try using fewer adjectives next time.”

“I appreciate your candor,” said Ockham. “Now, please answer one question for me. Are we wasting our time in here?”

“That depends—what do you want to know?” asked Vivien, seizing on the second's in
NOTHINGNESS
to make
ABYSS.

“Well, for example . . .” Ockham cleared his throat. “What is the correct value of Hubble's constant?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Vivien.

“Good question,” said Lawrence, exploiting the
A
in
ABYSS
to make
CARRION.

“Why turbulence?”

“Beats me,” said Lawrence.

“Did Fermat really have a simple proof for his last theorem?” asked Beauchamp.

“I haven't the foggiest,” said Vivien.

“How do the spirochetes adhere to
Myxotricha paradoxa
?” demanded Saperstein.

“You know what you ought to do?” said Vivien. “You ought to go see Sarkos.”

“Who?”

“Jonathan Sarkos, the tailor—he's the brightest person in this hemisphere. Walk south. After an hour you'll reach the River Hiddekel. Turn left, follow the levee for five kilometers, and you'll run into his shop. You can't miss it. He's got a satellite dish outside. Looks like a giant wok.”

“Five kilometers?” said Saperstein. “But that's longer than the whole Corpus Dei!”

“Indeed. Or, as Dostoyevsky put it, ‘If everything on Earth were rational—'”

“‘—nothing would happen,'” said Martin.

“Exactly,” said Vivien.

“May I take a photograph of you?” asked Beauchamp.

“You may,” said Vivien, batting her dual-lidded eyes.

“Go right ahead,” said Lawrence, grinning expansively.

Beauchamp framed the dinosaurs in the viewfinder of her Nikon and pressed the shutter release.

“There's one question we
can
answer,” said Vivien, running her tongue across her upper lip.

“Indeed,” said Saperstein with a skewed smile. “I hesitated to bring it up. I imagine it's a sore subject with you.”

“Quite sore.” Lawrence scowled at his mate. “We really don't like talking about it.”

“
You
don't like talking about it,” said Vivien tartly, rising from her bench. “I think we should be talking about it all the time. I mean, how
else
are we going to deal with it?” She rested her tail on the gazebo floor and pivoted toward Saperstein. “Let's begin by admitting the most popular explanation simply doesn't wash.”

“Are you referring to the cosmic-catastrophe theory?” asked Saperstein.

“I am. Indubitably an asteroid rear-ended the Earth during the late Cretaceous—the worldwide iridium layer confirms this—and, yes, it threw up a blanket of dust, blotted out the sun, and killed endless acres of vegetation, but that doesn't begin to explain our demise. If the disaster had been sufficient to exterminate all of
us
, it would've wiped out the frogs and turtles too, and
they're
still around.”

“So what's the answer?”

“Guess,” said Vivien.

“Well . . . as you probably know,” said Saperstein, “one theory holds you were too, er, unintelligent to adapt to changing planetary conditions.”

“Fuck you, buster,” said Lawrence. “The dinosaurs lasted over a hundred million years. You'll be lucky to get past
five.
Guess again.”

“Another school has it that poor skeletal design led to an epidemic of slipped discs.”

“‘Poor skeletal design'? Look who's talking, White Man—you and your four thousand backache remedies.”

“Upstart mammals devoured your eggs?” ventured Beauchamp.

“Please.”

“The world got much colder,” said Saperstein, “and even though you were warm-blooded, you couldn't maintain sufficient body heat.”

“Hardly,” said Vivien.

“A global contagion?”

“Impossible.”

“Erupting volcanoes spewed out poison gases and—”

“No way.”

“All right,” said Saperstein. “I give up.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Constipation.”

“What?”

“Constipation.”

“How's that again?”

“You want me to draw you a picture? Constipation. We died of blocked bowels after eating newly evolved, indigestible plant forms. Once we herbivores were gone, of course, the carnivores perished for lack of prey.” Vivien lifted all seven letters from her rack, but instead of placing them on the board, she enclosed them in her fist and lurched toward Martin. Her eyes enchanted him, each jet-black pupil set against a golden iris like the moon eclipsing the sun. “Judge Candle?”

“Ex-judge. I lost big in November.”

“Your project can't possibly end happily for the prosecution—I hope you know that.” Opening her fist, Vivien began arranging the Scrabble letters across her palm. “Too bad they booted you out of office—your verdicts were always environmentally sound. We especially appreciated your decision in the Pronto Prints case.” Pronto Prints was a Fox Run film processing concern that had surreptitiously dumped three thousand gallons of stale chemicals into Waupelani Creek. Martin had levied a stiff fine and made the company install a full complement of water-treatment devices. “You're absolutely determined to go through with it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then we have a request. When you draft the final indictment, keep Lawrence and me in mind. Lawrence and me . . . and the rest of us.”

“A major extinction is nothing to sneeze at,” said Lawrence.

“A bona fide evil.” Vivien placed all seven of her letters on the board. The
A
in
PLAGUE
enabled her to spell out
THANATOS.

“I quite agree,” said Martin, wondering what sort of sense, if any, it would make to mention the great Cretaceous dying in the indictment.

“You can't use that word,” said Lawrence to his mate.

“Yes I can.”

“It's a proper name—a Greek personification.”

“It's also a synonym for
death
.”

“No it isn't.”

“Yes it is!”

“I challenge you! Where's the goddamn dictionary? I challenge you!”

“We want a voice,” said Vivien abruptly, swerving toward Martin as she drew a
Random House College Dictionary
from underneath the picnic table.

“Give us a voice,” said Lawrence.

“I'll see what I can do,” said Martin.

The neuronauts departed shortly after learning that
thanatos
is not always capitalized.

W
HEN
M
ARTIN
C
ANDLE
and his associates came tromping into my backyard, boots caked with mud, brows shiny with sweat, I suddenly realized how starved I'd grown for stimulating social intercourse. With the exception of Bishop Augustine, my customers are a dull lot, and my disciples have as much use for the life of the mind as a cobra has for a corn plaster. All Belphegor wants to talk about are horror movies and baseball. Schonspigel's idea of a conversation is reminiscing about the sack of Rome. The thought of passing a leisurely afternoon with beings whose intellectual prowess rivaled my own brought me to the brink of rapture.

Upon learning the sobering fact that I am not just a tailor but also the Prince of Darkness, all four neuronauts grew apprehensive, but through copious applications of reason and charm I eventually calmed them down. The coma, I explained, had left me a metaphysical cripple. I could no more steal their souls than a decoy duck could lay eggs.

Here on the River Hiddekel, we are all devout carnivores. If it doesn't bleed, we don't eat it. My personal chef, Funkeldune, has become a purist of late, refusing to cook anything he hasn't hunted down and killed himself. Luckily, none of my guests practiced vegetarianism, and their eyes absolutely glowed upon perceiving the proteinaceous supper Funkeldune had set out for us, a stew wrought from the Jehovic archetype of Ernest Hemingway.

I said my standard grace—“Dear Lord, we know You have good reasons for allowing thousands of children to starve in various underdeveloped nations, and we thank You for concomitantly supplying our own table with these grossly superfluous portions, amen”—after which we all dug in. Naturally I kept the meat's true source hidden from my guests. They believed they were eating a wild boar, which in a manner of speaking they were.

“What I don't understand is whether you are the actual Devil or merely the Idea of the Devil,” said the Jesuit cosmologist, Thomas Ockham, devouring a chunk of Hemingway's haunch.

“The Idea of the Devil
is
the actual Devil,” I replied firmly. “The incarnate Devil, the Jobian
satan
who used to go roaming across the Earth, is but a simulacrum of myself.” I was tempted to add, “Just as the Ernest Hemingway who enjoyed fame as a terrestrial writer is but a simulacrum of the Ernest Hemingway on whom you are dining.” Somehow, I resisted.

All during the meal my visitors plied me with the sorts of questions people worry about on public television. To tell you the truth, I don't really like public television. Give me the Playboy Channel anytime—pubic television, as Belphegor calls it. What is the correct value of Hubble's constant? Why is the proton in a hydrogen atom eighteen hundred and thirty-six times as heavy as the electron? I explained that, before the coma came, I probably possessed the answers, but these days I could barely remember how to do crewelwork.

“Do you know any counterarguments to the
liberum arbitrium
or ‘free will' solution to the problem of evil?” piped up Candle.

“Doubtless I did at one time.”

“What about the ontological solution?”

“You should be talking to a doctor of theology, not a Father of Lies. The distinction is subtle but real.”

Our hero ate a piece of Hemingway's shank. “G. F. Lovett had me read Saint Augustine's
Opus imperfectum contra Julianum
, but I didn't find it very helpful.”

“One of my favorites, actually—but why settle for Augustine's last work when you can have Augustine himself? See that brown worsted three-piece suit over there?” With my taloned index finger I guided Candle's gaze toward a set of clothes awaiting pickup: coat, vest, trousers. “When he comes to claim it tomorrow, I'll tell him I'm canceling the bill . . . provided he leads you upriver, straight to the wellspring of his theodicy. I refer, of course, to that paradisiacal spot from which the Pishon, Gihon, Euphrates, and Hiddekel all flow.”

“A journey to the Garden of Eden would be most stimulating, I'm sure,” said Ockham, chewing on a morsel of loin, “and it may indeed equip Mr. Candle with the sort of information he requires, but the rest of us have come for
scientific
knowledge.”

“If
you
can't answer our questions, who can?” asked Beauchamp.

“Stop talking as if you won't be visiting the pineal gland,” I told the scientists. “I wouldn't
dream
of allowing you to leave His cerebrum until you've visited the pineal gland.” Pivoting, I pointed my sewing needle directly at Candle's left eye. “Beware of Bishop Augustine, friend. He's smarter than the rest of us. Given half a chance, he'll tie your mind in knots. Some people don't have all their marbles. Augustine has
too many
marbles.”

“The pineal gland?” said Ockham.

“The pineal gland,” I echoed.

“Do you mean to imply that Descartes—”

“Was right all along. Every person's soul, even our Creator's, is synonymous with his pineal gland. If your questions have answers, Father, you'll find them on the frontiers of His forebrain.”