Blameless in Abaddon (22 page)

The salacious content of Augustine's confessions eventually prompted Martin to recall the case of Sidney King, a Glendale real-estate agent whose three girlfriends had come to the magistrate's office shortly after learning about each other. Their complaints were identical. Each was seven weeks pregnant by King, a situation that roundly contradicted his claim to have undergone a vasectomy. Whereas Cynthia Ringle planned to get an abortion, Karla Schwartz and Joanne Bogenrief both intended to keep their babies. None of them wanted to marry the jerk.

“Any way we can get justice here?” Schwartz had asked.

The next day Martin issued a summons, charging King with flagrant misrepresentation of a major reproductive organ. “You could go to jail for this,” he told King shortly after the defendant appeared in court. King became agitated. Seizing the opportunity, Martin extracted a pledge: until his children reached age twelve, King must make himself available as a weekend babysitter—no exceptions, no excuses, a hefty fine in the event he reneged. If the president of General Motors invited King to go trout fishing one fine Saturday morning, both of King's bastards must come along. If a Hollywood starlet proposed they spend two weeks in the south of France, she would have to make four plane reservations. Seven months later the babies arrived, a boy in each case, and from the very first the arrangement worked well, fatherhood having awakened a dormant tenderness in King. Eventually both Schwartz and Bogenrief acquired stepfathers for their sons, with King functioning in the boys' lives as a kind of year-round Santa Claus.

“Have you ever wanted to have a gerbil living in your rectum?” asked Augustine, his hands drifting toward Martin's abundant bosom.

“Can't say that I have.”

“Concupiscence, Mr. Candle—concupiscence!” The bishop copped a feel and continued. “Oh, what a deplorable species we are! Our flesh is fetid! Our souls are full of slime! The sooner the Day of Judgment comes, the better!”

It is my sacred duty to put up with this, Martin told himself, clenching his teeth and closing his eyes. My Jobians are counting on me.

 

As the late-morning sun beat down on the mudflat, raising mirages reminiscent of the iridescent icons back in the Defendant's laboratory, Martin returned to his berth and collected his e-mail.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected].

Date: Tues, May 16, 09:45 PM EDT

 

At the moment my relationship with your landlady is flourishing. Patricia and I have much in common
—
divorce, bereavement, atheism—and I believe we can help each other
,
though she remains oddly unsympathetic to our cause. She wants to know whether you're taking something called Odradex.

 

Bad news. Dr. Carbone has upped the ante. He's now asking $175,000. What's more, he insists that the only other cataclysmatician in Ohio competent to cover his summerschool course is his wife, Pearl, and
she
wants $32,000, plus $5,000 for a teaching assistant. I think these figures are outrageous, and I told Carbone so.

 

By the time Martin finished reading Randall's message, his heart was pounding, and his blood felt ready to boil.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Wed, May 17, 11:40 AM Local Time

 

For Heaven's sake, Randall, stop goofing around with our star witness's fee! Give him his $175,000 and his wife her $37,000. We may not have the angels on our side, but we do have a Hollywood budget.

 

Inform Patricia I'm not injecting myself with Odradex. This will come as no surprise to her.

 

Esther's message was considerably more soothing than Randall's, though it began on a discouraging note.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Wed, May 17, 10:17 AM EDT

 

Allison Lowry refuses to testify, not even for $10,000, and that's that. Sure, she was able to tell her story at our first
meeting, but that doesn't mean she wants to repeat it before the whole world.

 

I can't promise you any more severed spinal cords, but I think I'm on to something just as rich: cystic fibrosis. I'm interviewing three sets of parents this week. (Two of the relevant children will be dead within the year, while the third succumbed last January. Wish me luck.) On the terminal-cancer front, meanwhile, things keep getting better and better. You should hear Frank Latham describe the horrors of Hodgkins disease and Rosalind Kreuger talk about losing a daughter to acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Best of all, I think I can score us a refugee from the Rwanda genocide, Xavier Mrugama. They attacked him with a machete.

 

Tongue pressed against his upper lip, Martin reread Esther's letter. “I can't promise you any more severed spinal cords . . .” So there it was again, the cold-blooded kingdom of
International 227.
“On the terminal-cancer front . . .” No wonder humankind so rarely took its Creator to court. God hunting was not a sport for amateurs.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Wed, May 16, 11:58 AM Local Time

 

All right, fine, we'll leave Allison alone. If you can dig up an articulate cystic-fibrosis parent, that ought to plug the gap.

 

Naturally I'm pleased we're doing so well with our cancer patients. I have a concern, though. Hasn't cancer become rather jejune of late? Can you find us something with more
pizzazz? I seem to recall at least one multiple-sclerosis victim, and a couple of early-onset Alzheimer's cases.

 

When Martin returned to the daylight, the Idea of the Sun stood at its zenith. Wandering about the packet, he found Augustine on the afterdeck, sprawled across an Adirondack chair and holding a fishing rod. The line trailed off the transom for about twenty feet, connecting with an egg-shaped plastic bobber before descending into the Hiddekel's depths.

“Have you ever wanted to decorate your face by forcing fishhooks through your lips?” the bishop inquired.

“Never,” Martin replied.

“East of Eden, the temptations never stop.”

“Catch anything?”

“No . . . and when you consider the monsters who inhabit this river, it's probably just as well. Over there, for instance”—Augustine pointed north—“we have a beast so fearsome that God subdued him only after a three-day battle. Behemoth from the Book of Job.”

Martin glanced toward the levee. An animal resembling the offspring of a hippopotamus and a plesiosaur lay half buried in the muck, feasting on bulrushes and lotus plants. Its mountainous shoulders glistened with plasma. Its darting eyes were set atop stalks, a pair of organic pinwheels.

Moaning, Martin grasped the transom rail for support. It was one thing to read about Behemoth—a symbol of primordial chaos, according to most commentators on Job—and quite another to be in the cosmic hippo's presence. Inevitably Martin recalled the time his father, ever in search of provocative material for Sunday school lessons, had rented a 16mm print of
The Giant Behemoth
, a late-fifties sci-fi thriller, borrowing a projector from the church and previewing the film in the living room of the firehouse. It was a big event. Martin was allowed to invite Billy Tuckerman over. Unfortunately,
The Giant Behemoth
wasn't very scary, at least not to a twelve-year-old's sensibilities. Walter, too, had watched it with growing disappointment: except for the narrator's first line—“And God said, ‘Behold thou the Behemoth'”—and a vicar's graveside funeral speech, the movie contained no biblical material whatsoever.

“‘And God said, ‘Behold thou the Behemoth,'” quoted Martin, wishing Augustine would reel in the hook-and-bobber before the monster got wind of the bait.

“‘If the river is turbulent, he is not frightened,'” added Augustine, studying Behemoth with a mixture of terror and concupiscence. “‘He sprawls at his ease though the stream is in flood.'”

Martin stared at the receding beast, transfixed by its inscrutability. There were indeed more things in God's brain than were dreamt of in Augustine's—or anyone else's—philosophy.

“‘Can a man blind his eyes and capture him or pierce his nose with the teeth of a trap?'” quoted Augustine.

“Offhand, I'd say no,” Martin replied, laughing nervously as the monster finally passed from view.

 

The afternoon brought barbaric heat, ravenous mosquitoes, and, less predictably, the emphatic fragrance of burning wood—a sensation that evoked for Martin not only the recent loss of his Chestnut Grove farmhouse but also his unsuccessful attempt as a Boy Scout to earn a merit badge in cooking.

A crab spasm shot through his left pubic bone. He ate two Roxanols and looked north. A half mile beyond the riverbank a pyramid of faggots surmounted a hill of rock, flames and smoke curling upward from the bottommost sticks. The wood, he mused, might have come from the burning bush of Mosaic lore, for while the flames appeared sufficiently hot, they did not consume their fuel. Borrowing Augustine's binoculars, he raised them to his eyes, twisted the focus knob, and gasped.

A frail boy, no more than ten and dressed only in white cotton briefs, lay wriggling atop the pyramid, his wrists and ankles lashed together with leather thongs. Twenty feet away a stooped, bearded octogenarian wearing a lumberjack's shirt paced in fretful circles, an obsidian knife clutched against his breast. He was a man divided—pulled in one direction by a divine mandate and in the other by his impulse to unfasten the boy and bear him safely home. Both actors, father and son, seemed trapped in a kind of time loop, like clockwork figurines dancing on a music box.

“Stop the boat!” Augustine rushed toward the wheelhouse, waving the pink itinerary around like a pennant. “Stop it right now!”

Leaning out the window, Belphegor confronted Augustine with the sort of expression a husband might flash his wife upon being asked to buy her a box of tampons, but the demon nevertheless complied, throttling down and dropping anchor.

A glutinous mist drifted across the river's surface as Martin lowered himself over the side and, holding his laptop computer high above his head, started for shore through the blood flow, Augustine and the scientists right behind. The crimson currents were warm and viscous, like melted fudge, a sensation Martin would have found completely unpleasant were he not flying on Roxanol.

Plasma running down their limbs, the travelers gained the bank and climbed Moriah's muddy slopes.

“Perhaps you can assist me,” said Martin, moving as close to the boy as the flames permitted. Their eyes met. “Are you familiar with any of these solutions to the mystery of suffering?” He brought up Lovett's list on the laptop screen and held the display before Isaac. “The hidden harmony defense, for example? The
liberum arbitrium
?”

“You're Judge Candle, aren't you?” said the Idea of Isaac, sweat streaming down his face.

“Ex-judge.
Liberum arbitrium
, as you may know, means ‘free will.'”

“I'm not thinking very clearly right now. My father is on the point of killing me. Otherwise, I'd be happy to talk about evil.”

“I'm pretty confused too,” said the Idea of Abraham, staring straight ahead with weary, bloodshot eyes. “Please, Lord, give me strength . . .”

As Ockham aimed his camcorder at Abraham and ran off several feet of tape, the patriarch raised the knife, bringing it level with his gaze. The blade glittered in the fading sunlight.

“Does either of you know how the spirochetes adhere to
Myxotricha paradoxa
?” asked Saperstein.

“Who are the Spirochetes?” responded Abraham.

Augustine moved into Martin's field of vision, confronting him with his lustrous, black-eyed stare. “You're looking at the eschatological defense,” the bishop explained. “At the moment Abraham and Isaac are both suffering terribly—”

“You can say that again,” moaned the boy.

“I wish I were dead,” wailed his father.

“—and yet, in the fullness of time, the child will be rescued.” Augustine smiled expansively at the patriarch. “Have patience, sir. The material world is a vale of tears, but ultimately you ascend to Heaven.”

By way of retort, Abraham pointed the tip of his knife toward Augustine, curled his lip contemptuously, and burst into song.

 

Just around the corner
,

There's a rainbow in the sky.

So let's have another cup of coffee
,

And let's have another piece of pie.

 

“Well, yes—if you must put it that way,” sneered Augustine. “Read
Contra Celsum
by my brilliant predecessor Bishop Origen,” he said to Martin, “and you will realize all our earthly miseries are transient as grass.”

Origen invented eschatological defense
, Martin typed onto his hard drive. “What else should I know about Origen?”

“He began as a student of Plato and Gnosticism, then converted to Christianity,” said Augustine.