Blameless in Abaddon (48 page)

“Fair enough,” said Martin.

“Folks, we're sittin' pretty,” said Esther.

“The more we thought about divine intervention, the more we realized what a complex transaction it is. An omnipotent deity, we saw, has three choices open to Him. One: continual intervention to eliminate all unhappiness. Two: secret and selective intervention to prevent egregious evils. Three: no reliable intervention whatsoever, even in the face of extreme and unmerited suffering.

“We did not linger over the first alternative. Imagine a universe where, thanks to God's incessant manipulations, nothing unpleasant ever occurs. Under this regime, if a thief steals a million guilders from a bank, another million instantly appears in their place. If a maniac fires an assault rifle into a crowded restaurant, the bullets melt into thin air. If a fire levels an orphanage, an identical building materializes on the spot, with all the children miraculously restored to life. Any fool can grasp the sterility of such a world. Any schoolboy can see its pointlessness, not to mention its absurdity. The God who echews option one—in short—is not a God we can rightly condemn.”

“Oh, yes He is,” said Randall.

“Take it easy,” said Martin.

“Which brings us to option two: secret and selective intervention to prevent egregious evils. At first blush this seemed like an attractive alternative. ‘If we were the pre-coma God,' we told ourselves, ‘that's how we would have behaved.' But eventually we noticed the catch: option two, we saw, sets in motion a chain reaction of impossible expectations.”

“This had better be good,” said Esther.

“Egregious evils are not egregious in themselves but only in relation to other evils. If the Defendant had caused Hitler and Stalin to perish in the womb, there still would've been Goering—wouldn't there?—as well as Mussolini and Franco. And if He'd aborted
these
tyrants, then we'd be pointing to Pol Pot—right?—along with Idi Amin and Slobodan Milosevic. The same pitfall awaits those who say America's plans to obliterate Hiroshima cried out for cancellation from on high. If God had delivered Japan from the A-bomb, instead we'd be focusing our Jobian indignation on the razing of Dresden—wouldn't we?—not to mention the Bataan death march, the My Lai massacre, the Lisbon earthquake, and the eruption of Vesuvius . . . until eventually we're indicting Him for bush wars and brushfires—then crooked politicians and poison ivy—then schoolyard bullies and bee stings. Divine intervention, the tribunal concluded, is the slipperiest of all possible slopes.”

“I can't believe I'm hearing this,” groaned Esther.

“It's rigged,” seethed Randall. “This whole damn trial is rigged.”

“And so we come to option three: no manifest or reliable intervention whatsoever, even in the face of extreme and unmerited suffering. Was the tribunal able to reconcile itself to such a regime?” Tovald took a swallow of water. “In a word, yes.”

A courtroom, Martin had always believed, should be a temple of reason and decorum. It was this conviction—and this conviction alone—that now prevented him from pounding his fist on the table and smashing his waterglass on the floor.

“Consider the alternative: a universe devoid of gratuitous catastrophe. In such a universe, plane crash victims never elicit our sympathy, for we know they deserve their fates. Famines never occasion herculean relief efforts, for we realize mass starvation is cosmologically necessary. Cancer and Down's syndrome never inspire us to probe nature's secrets, for we understand pathology is essential to the divine plan. To wit, only by building random annihilation into the scheme of things could the Defendant have secured a world containing charity, compassion, courage, patience, self-sacrifice, and ingenuity.”

“Not to mention the March of Dimes,” snorted Randall.

“Easter Seals,” grunted Esther.

“Jerry Lewis telethons.”

“The Ronald McDonald House.”

“The United Way.”

“UNICEF.”

Aphasic with rage, Martin said nothing.

“Thus ends
International 227
,” said Torvald. “The Defendant is not guilty. Justice has been served.”

“Justice has been screwed,” said Randall.

A low, coarse, surflike sound washed through the courtroom, rising and falling and then rising again. Joyful shouting, Martin realized—the cheers of the mob outside the Peace Palace.

“This afternoon the tribunal will formally cede the Corpus Dei to its previous owners, Eternity Enterprises,” said Torvald. “Our fond hope is that they will once again make God's material form the Main Attraction at Celestial City USA, offering solace and inspiration to millions of disheartened pilgrims around the world.”

Martin felt as if someone had stuck a needle in his Port-A-Cath valve and injected his soul with strychnine.

Torvald rapped his Christmas gavel on the bench with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “The Court stands adjourned until November thirteenth, when it will hear opening statements in
International 228: Kingdom of Liberia versus United States Merchant Marine
.”

 

“What do you suppose he's thinking?” asked Belphegor. His scaly finger pointed toward my television, which just then displayed a closeup of Candle's pale and trembling face.

“He's thinking it wasn't supposed to end this way,” I replied. “Once Job finished trying God, he was rewarded handsomely: new house, new herds, new kids, stock options. Candle gets a shit sandwich on stale bread.”

The camera zoomed out. Leaning on his crocodile cane, our hero rose from his chair, hobbled toward the exhibit table, and caressed the blade of Noah's ax. For a moment I thought he intended to commit a particularly garish variety of suicide, but then I saw he had something more ambitious in mind.

“I'm sick of looking at that clod,” said Schonspigel as Candle tossed his cane aside and, grasping the ax, lifted it off the table. “I wish they'd bring back the snake handler.”

The camera zoomed in. Candle stared into the lens and gave the Western world a cryptic smile.

“I've always wondered: are snake handlers in it for the religious ecstasy or merely for the ritualized masturbation?” asked Funkeldune.

“They're in it for the thrill—the pure Nietzschean thrill,” I answered, pressing my palm against the TV screen.

The image dissolved from Candle to the exterior of the Peace Palace. A CNN reporter stood on the steps, asking a beautiful young American exchange student her reaction to the verdict.

“I thought it was awesome,” she said.

“Every time the rattler strikes and doesn't kill you,” I told Funkeldune, “you grow a little stronger.”

 

Ax in hand, Martin emerged from the Peace Palace into the muted morning light. Within seconds he was surrounded by sufferers: two dozen official Jobians augmented by about four hundred equally unfortunate victims. As always, the rich, textured diversity of the damned impressed him—these stalwarts with their walkers and wheelchairs, their oxygen tanks and IV drips—but at the moment their most striking quality was their restlessness. A dark, menacing expectancy hung in the air, as if a thunderstorm were due to arrive or a North Sea dike about to break.

Riser by riser, spasm by spasm, he began his descent, the mob parting around him like a turbulent sea yielding to the prow of the
Carpco New Orleans.
Even the reporters moved back. Occasionally a victim reached out and touched his sleeve, as if some arcane therapeutic power suffused the garments of the world's most famous dissident.

He set his foot on the middle step and paused, surveying the spectacle through a fog compounded of Odradex and Roxanol. Just beyond the sufferers a second crowd had collected on the plaza, a mob of deliriously happy foot soldiers in the Sword of Jehovah Strike Force. They laughed, sang, clapped, and moved their limbs in a manner seemingly inspired by the snakes they loved to touch. “Hosanna!” they whooped, blowing into plastic replicas of Joshua's city-busting trumpets. “Hosanna! Hosanna!”

“You did your best!” shouted Stanley Pallomar over the din.

“You put up a hell of a fight!” yelled Julia Schroeder.

Bedecked in full riot gear, a deployment comprising United Nations peacekeepers and Hans De Groot's police officers stood at attention, rifles snugged against their shoulders, separating Jobians from Jehovans like the Waupelani winding its way through Abaddon Valley. The ubiquitous news media lent to the scene an atmosphere of artifice: a passerby might have fancied himself on the set of a Hollywood epic—cameras, lights, swarming extras. Martin half expected to hear Cecil B. DeMille yell, “Action!”

“It's all my fault!” He resumed his downward journey. “I'm the one to blame!”

The press corps, he could tell, wanted to rush him, reeling off a thousand questions. It was the ax that kept them away. Band by band, violet to green to yellow to red, an iridescent spectrum fanned outward from the blade, arcing across the plaza like the rainbow with which Yahweh had sealed His very first covenant with
Homo sapiens.
Whether the glow originated in the ax itself or in the fevered soul of the man who held it, Martin couldn't say. He knew only that this antique tool was about to perform its most momentous task yet.

“You're being too hard on yourself!” called Harry Elder.

“Job would've been proud of you!” shouted Rosalind Kreuger.

At last Martin reached the plaza. Defying his disease, countermanding the crab, he raised the weapon high above his head. “Was justice done this day?” he cried.

“No!” responded the Jobians in unison.

“And is this day over?”

“No!”

“And will justice be done this day?”

“Yes!”

“Sufferers, form your ranks!”

With a consensus bordering on the uncanny and an efficiency partaking of the miraculous, the mob began to move. Swiftly, surely, the Jobians became what Martin had always known they were: an army. As the divine ax pulsed and shimmered, he took command of a force Alexander of Macedon would have been honored to lead. Instead of a chariot host, he had a hundred and fifty-five paralytics in wheelchairs. Instead of an infantry, he had two hundred and twenty invalids armed with crutches and walkers.

“Forward—march!”

He shouldered the ax. A spontaneous cadence arose,
ratta-ta-tat, ratta-ta-tat, ratta-ta-ratta-ta-ratta-ta-tat:
the emphysema victims, drumming on their oxygen tanks with crocheting needles and ballpoint pens. His army rolled, limped, and staggered down Patijinlaan toward Raamweg, cutting through the normal lunchtime congestion of cars, bicycles, motor scooters, taxis, and trams, the Jehovans following close behind, monitoring the sufferers' march like wolves reconnoitering a sheep ranch. Reluctantly the UN troops joined the parade. The peacekeepers, Martin saw, were in a bind. If they attacked immediately, they would come across on television like Charles IX's royalists perpetrating the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. If they waited too long, they would miss their chance to prevent whatever strange variety of mayhem was about to erupt.

“‘Though I am right, God condemns me out of my own mouth'!” chanted the Jobians as Martin led them around the corner and down Raamweg. “‘Though I am blameless, He twists my words'!” A spiraling violet beam corkscrewed outward from the ax blade and disintegrated in an explosion of sparks. “‘The land is given over to the power of the wicked,'” they screamed, tromping past the Huize Bellevue, “‘and the eyes of the judges are blindfolded'!”

By one o'clock their destination was in view: Strandweg and the harbor beyond. A bewildered battalion of UN peacekeepers stood guard along the beach, protecting both the cooling chamber and the Lockheed 7000. Seagulls soared across the breakers, nattering and screeching. The incoming tide issued a low, coarse whisper, like some obscene secret falling from the lips of Jonathan Sarkos.

Martin slid the ax from his shoulder and, grasping the handle with all ten fingers, pointed the blade toward the peacekeepers.

“Charge!”

And so it began: the United Nations versus God's victims, a melee to satisfy the most sadistic CNN viewer. Fists collided with jaws. Shields smashed into walkers. Bayonets dueled crutches. Tear-gas canisters detonated, spraying their noisome fumes across the harbor. The cacophony grew ever louder, assailing the TV audience with groans of pain, cries of dismay, and the sickening thud of nightsticks breaking ontologically vulnerable bone. The United Nations had the law on its side, but the Jobians had their bitterness. Forming the sort of wedge with which the Spartans had opposed Persian moral evil at Thermopylae, they advanced down Pier 18 toward the Lockheed 7000, squeezing the UN troops against the guardrails. Debilitated by decades of sea spray and a succession of termite infestations, the boards disintegrated, dumping the peacekeepers into the surf. Within minutes the North Sea suggested the site of a maritime disaster straight from the gravamen of Martin's case—the wreck of the
Sisters
, perhaps, or the sinking of the
Larchmont.

Jagged bursts of blinding light shot from the ax as, hips aching, femurs throbbing, shoulders burning, Martin broke from his army, hobbled to the end of the wharf, and scrambled down onto the raft. For a full minute he stood breathless in the shadow of the Defendant's cardiovascular system. The steel-plated pump was running at full tilt, roaring and hissing as it siphoned the donated blood into the four aeration domes, through the Corpus Dei, and back to the domes again. Spewing steam, the bellows contracted and expanded like some vast primordial bladder. Seagulls perched on the maze of transparent pipes, pecking away in hopes of tapping the briny nourishment that flowed beneath their feet. The last time Martin had been this close to the Lockheed 7000, it had lain deep within the central Florida earth, but now it was completely exposed, like the organs of a gutted whale strewn across the
Pequod
's flensing deck. So naked, he thought. So vulnerable.