Blameless in Abaddon (41 page)

“Did he get his wish?” asked Martin, wondering how Duncan would have reacted to the production of
Crabs
currently running in the divine cranium.

“Two days after Thanksgiving. The city was absolutely dazzling—Christmas lights, sparkling snow. I had to carry him into the Winter Garden Theater. He stayed awake for the whole show. As we were leaving, he said, ‘You know what I'd like for Christmas? A kitty of my very own.' The minute Duncan was back in New Castle, he wrote a letter to Santa Claus. The letter ended, ‘I promise I'll take real good care of my kitty, Santa, even though I'm very sick.'”

On the first of December, Duncan's left lung collapsed again, and he returned to the hospital. A week later, just as he was about to be discharged, his right lung collapsed.

“It was more than Janet and I could stand. We both started crying right there in the hospital. And you know what Duncan did? He brushed away my tears and said, ‘Don't be sad, Daddy. Christmas is coming.'”

After Duncan finally got home, Harry and his wife began to suspect their son wouldn't make it through the holidays, so they visited their local Humane Society and picked out a black kitten with a white star-shaped patch on her head. The accompanying note from Santa explained that Starshine had been getting mighty lonely at the North Pole, so it seemed best to place her with her new family right away.

“I'd never seen Duncan looking happier. He was hurting pretty bad, but happy. He and Emily and Starshine rolled around on the floor for hours, which made Duncan cough a lot, but he didn't seem to mind. Later, he said to Emily, ‘You know what Starshine does for me? She makes me forget about my disease.'”

Three days before Christmas, Duncan was seized by terrible pains. Dr. Wendell came over and gave the screaming boy a shot of morphine, and soon he dozed off. Emily wanted to know if Duncan would be returning to the hospital that day, and Janet told her no, Duncan was going to die. Emily's jaw went slack. Was this really the end? Yes, Janet explained, it was the end. Then the three of them—Harry, Janet, Emily—sat down on the rug beside Duncan's bed and began talking quietly while he slept, reviewing his life. Shortly after they finished, he awoke.

“Have you ever seen a child die, Your Honors?” asked Harry, turning toward the judges. “Duncan kept sitting up in bed, but then he'd fall back on the sheets, right next to Starshine and Ozzie, and then he'd sit up again, and then he'd fall back.” The witness was sobbing now. His words lodged in his windpipe. “And all this while his eyes were open, darting back and forth from me to Janet to Emily, and his whole face was glowing with such unbelievable love. He sat up one last time, threw his arms around me, and stared straight at his sister. ‘Merry Christmas, Emily,' he said. Those were his final words. ‘Merry Christmas, Emily.' His eyes were still open, only now they were blank. And that is how death came for my little boy, Your Honors—on a bitter cold morning in December, in New Castle, Delaware, when he was eight. We buried him in the local cemetery, and every Sunday I visit the grave, and I cry the way I'm crying now. He was the bravest person I ever knew, and if I've made you understand that, well, then it was worth my coming all the way over here across the Atlantic Ocean.”

The witness pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and unashamedly blew his nose. The French translator wept. Tears ran down the stenographer's cheeks.

“Thank you, Mr. Elder,” said Martin. “I have no further questions.”

 

Lovett began the cross-examination by asking Harry whether Duncan had ever wanted to know the reason for his suffering.

“Once I remember him asking, ‘Daddy, does God hate me? I think God must hate me very much.'”

“How did you reply?”

“I don't remember.”

“You don't? Your son was asking an awfully important question. What did you tell him?”

“I'm sure I said God didn't hate him.”

“Might you have gone so far as to say God loved him?”

“I might have.”

“Mr. Elder, do you wish your son had never been born?”

“Objection!” shouted Martin.

“Overruled,” said Torvald.

Harry balled up the handkerchief and stuffed it back into his pocket. “Never been born? I don't think I've ever been asked that before.” He stared at the orangutan. “No,” he said at last. “No, I'll always be grateful I had Duncan, even if it was for just eight years.”

“‘Always be grateful,'” echoed Lovett. “To whom are you grateful?”

“I'm not grateful to anybody. I'm just . . . grateful.”

“How can you be grateful if—”

“You want me to say I'm grateful to God. But I'm not.”

“Mr. Elder, let me draw your attention to the March 13, 1998, issue of
Parade
, which profiles a research scientist named Arthur Jablonsky.” Lovett flourished the magazine in question before the Court TV camera. “His team has pinpointed the gene on the seventh chromosome that causes cystic fibrosis, and they've even found a way to manufacture a healthy substitute. Do you know what Dr. Jablonsky says is motivating him?”

“I have no idea.”

“He is driven by, quote, ‘my desire to do God's work.' What do you make of that?”

“I don't believe I make anything of it.”

“Mr. Elder, did you ever tell your son he'd be rewarded with eternal life in Heaven?”

Harry scowled. “I might've said something like that.”

“I don't think the tribunal heard you.”

“I said, ‘I might've.'”

“Did Duncan ever ask you any questions about Heaven?”

“Most kids have questions about Heaven.”

“Did Duncan have any?”

“As I recall, he wanted to know whether he'd be getting his wings right away.”

“What did you tell him?”

A bright crimson flush crept across Harry's face. “What did I tell him, Dr. Lovett? I'll tell you what I told him. ‘Duncan, you'll get your wings on the very first day, and after that you'll be our guardian angel, looking down at our house through Heaven's big glass floor, watching over me and Mommy and Emily until we can come and join you.'
That's
how I answered my sweet, beautiful, tortured child.”

“And did you believe yourself?”

“No.”

“Why did you lie to your son?”

“Objection!” cried Martin.

A strange distension overcame Harry, so that his suit seemed to grow yet another size too small. “What kind of question is that?” he moaned, not so much speaking the words as spitting them. He swatted at the witness-stand mike, knocking it askew. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Withdrawn,” said Lovett crisply, doing an abrupt about-face and starting back to the defense table. “Thank you, Mr. Elder. You have supplied me with all the information I need.”

“The prosecution may redirect,” said Torvald.

“I have just one more question,” said Martin, limping up to the lectern. “If these nine judges find the Defendant guilty, would you urge them to disconnect the Lockheed 7000?”

“Pull the plug?” asked Harry.

“That's right. Pull the plug.”

“I don't even have to think about it.”

“Yes?”

“I would
beg
them to pull the plug.”

“Thank you, Mr. Elder. You may step down.”

“Please call your next witness,” said Torvald.

“We have no more witnesses, Your Honor,” said Martin.

“You mean—the people rest their case?”

“Yes, Judge Torvald. On the corpse of Norma Bedloe, the suffering of Billy Jenkins, the toll of
Pasteurella pestis
, the ravages of Vesuvius, the evil of Vlad the Impaler, the depravity of Pol Pot—and the grave of Duncan Elder—the people rest their case.”

H
AVING SAT THROUGH
over a thousand Methodist church services without ever experiencing a numb posterior or the urge to yawn, I can honestly say I am not easily bored. If Candle's team had been only slightly less systematic in getting our Creator's peccadilloes on the record, I would have received these statistics with the same enthusiasm a baseball fan brings to the lore of batting averages. Earthquakes, after all, are music to my ears. Plane crashes make me come. But enough is as good as a feast, to quote Mary Poppins. Halfway through Donald Carbone's testimony, my ennui grew so acute I grabbed the tools of my trade—needle, thimble, thread—and began to indulge in the seamster's equivalent of doodling, continuing my improvisations through the interviews with Tonia Braverman and Harry Elder.

The results, I must say, were impressive: a series of samplers illustrating fourteen great moments from the Passion of Martin Candle, a kind of nouveau Stations of the Cross. Sampler number two,
Bad News
, depicted our hero in Dr. Hummel's office, receiving his diagnosis. Sampler number nine,
Good Grief
, showed him kneeling atop Corinne Rosewood's grave, leaning a bunch of lilacs against the stone. For sampler number twelve I stole a title from my favorite Dutch master, Rembrandt. I called it
The Night Watch.

Our hero could not sleep. Lying on his bed in the Huize Bellevue, he tossed and turned like a beached flounder. As the clock crept toward three
A.M.
, he rose and—not against his will, but not wholly with it either—got dressed, donned his disguise, seized his cane, and limped into the hallway. He descended to the lobby. He went outside. A silvery sliver of moon hung over The Hague, riding the midnight sky like a cutting from God's big toe. A stray mongrel dog padded past. The air reeked of geraniums and hyacinths. Candle stumbled along Raamweg, quickening his pace as the crooked street melded into Haringkade.

Despite the hour, Scheveningen Harbor was crowded: a polyglot conglomeration of vigil keepers, relic seekers, UN infantrymen, Hans De Groot's police officers, and soldiers from the Sword of Jehovah Strike Force. It took our hero forty-five minutes to elbow his way down Pier 15 and draw within view of the Defendant's waterborne cooling chamber. Three docks away, the heart-lung machine pursued its perpetual obligations, groaning and chugging as it irrigated the Corpus Dei with His creatures' loving blood.

“So, Sir, it is done,” muttered Candle, assuming the stance I so skillfully captured in
The Night Watch:
cheek pressed flat against the cold Lucite, hand arched over a chamber rivet. “I have held up Your record for all the world to see, every last massacre and volcano.”

Our hero glanced to his left. An apple-cheeked nun in a white wimple and black habit knelt on the raft, ticking off beads on her rosary, eyes locked shut in prayer.

“And now I must tell You something. The Stackpole editorial in
The Story of International 227
is wrong. There is no piety in my enterprise, Sir, not one jot of reverence. ‘To rebuke the Almighty is to honor Him.' Sorry. I don't think so. ‘A man who argues with God is a man who takes God seriously and thereby pays Him tribute.' No, Sir. Get somebody
else
to play that part.”

He looked to his right. A grieving bohemian with a ponytail, gold earring, and macramé headband cupped his palm over the waxy turret of a red taper, sheltering the fragile flame.

“Am I being clear, Sir?” Candle rubbed a patch of itching skin above the Port-A-Cath valve. “This is war. My army takes no prisoners.”

Our hero stood silently before the Defendant. 3:55
A.M.
The nun's veil fluttered. Her tears glittered in the moonlight. 4:10
A.M.
The bohemian's taper blew out. He made no attempt to relight it.

Turning, Candle lifted his hand from the rivet. He smiled at the nun, winked at the bohemian, and began the long, slow, painful walk back to his hotel.

Later that night, his brain cradled in Roxanol, Candle dreamed he was still inside the divine cranium. He was sitting on the floor of Adrian and Evangeline's hut, prodding the two hominids for an answer to the ontological defense.

“It's very simple,” said Evangeline, suckling her baby. She reached into her nursing bra and removed a fistful of Scrabble tiles—borrowed, she explained, from her dinosaur friends, Vivien and Lawrence. “As the coma reaches its climax, we shall suffer total desiccation. The milk will evaporate from my breasts. My husband's vesicles will lose their semen.” She laid the tiles in front of Candle. The letters spelled out
ARID APES.
“We shall become . . .”

“Arid apes?” said Candle. “What does that have to do with the problem of evil?”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“No.”

Whereupon the dream dissolved.

He awoke in stages, sifting illusion from truth like our Creator separating light from darkness at the beginning of time. Illusion: the answer to the ontological defense lay in the odd expression
ARID APES.
Truth:
ARID APES
was a random outpouring from his subconscious, devoid of theological significance.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe the dream had issued from the same confounding quadrant of God's psyche that had already supplied him with such sterling rebuttals to the eschatological, disciplinary, and hidden harmony solutions,
ARID APES
. . . did the term actually mean something, apart from the fact that Adrian and Evangeline were evidently destined to meet a dry and undesirable fate?

 

At 10:17
A.M.
—as the pearly Dutch sunlight filtered into the courtroom, illuminating Francis Biddle's stained-glass portrait—Martin ate a painkiller and Lovett opened the case for the defense.

The professor's first witness was Bernard Kaplan, the rabbi from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who'd been inspired to write a personal theodicy following the loss of his eleven-year-old son, Jeffrey, to a brain-stem tumor. Much to Kaplan's surprise,
When You Walk Through a Storm
became not only a
New York Times
best-seller but a source of solace to millions of readers both Gentile and Jew.