Blameless in Abaddon (50 page)

“I was hoping it felt like justice.”

“Sorry. No. Revenge.” A blast of fecal odor hit Martin, an obscene inverse of the lavishly perfumed bulb fields he'd experienced during his sojourn in Holland. Crouching beside Job, he stretched out his hand and shooed the flies from his wife's brow. “Is she . . .?”

“Yes. Try not to grieve too much. She's only an idea.”

“I know,” said Martin, eyes welling up with salt water. A tear broke free, tickling his cheek as it fell. “But she's so convincing.”

Job nodded. “God was always good with the details.” He shifted the corpse's weight from his left knee to his right. “She had a final request.”

“Let me guess. I'm to make sure the Kennel stays in business.”

“Bingo.”

“Heaven knows what I'll do if the donations stop rolling in. I'm unemployed, and Lovett no longer finances my projects.”

“You'll think of something.” A gentle breeze wafted across the dung heap, tousling the corpse's auburn hair. “Do you know what her last words were? ‘Tell Martin I'm proud of him.'”

“I hope you're not just saying that.”

“I've never told a lie in my life. No, wait, there's one exception: my most famous line, as it happens—usually translated as ‘I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.' I never repented, sir. Not in dust, ashes, cow flops, dog doody, or anything else.”

“Corinne really said she was proud of me?”

“Her last words. And do you know what
my
last words will be?”

“What?”

“‘To close the gap between jurisprudence and justice would require a canon of a hundred million laws,'” said Job.

“Yes, exactly—a hundred million laws, like a map so accurate it was as big as the territory that it . . .”

Martin didn't bother finishing the sentence. The man was dead, stone dead, his prophesy fulfilled.

“Job? Job?”

Silence.

As Martin gained his feet, a relentless entropy overtook the landscape. Flop by flop, chip by chip, maggot by maggot, the great stinking mound dissolved, until nothing remained but a modest pile of peach stones, orange rinds, egg shells, and coffee grounds. Robbed of all ontological status, the bodies of Job and Corinne succumbed as a unit, devolving irrecoverably from divine ideals to sacred notions to mere supernatural fancies. Their abandoned clothing littered the ground like mayfly husks.

The sun expired. The wind died. A spasm of homesickness shook Martin's soul. He wanted to be back in Abaddon again, savoring a Monday-night NFL game with Vaughn, arguing about capital punishment with his sister, or simply sitting beneath a weeping willow on the banks of the Waupelani, watching a school of golden carp flash beneath the pellucid waters like a sunken cache of pirates' doubloons.

He swallowed a painkiller and lay down atop his dead wife's wedding gown, soon falling asleep despite his burning bones and the lingering odor of the vanished dung.

 

The next morning, shortly after Martin awoke, a solitary ram wandered onto the scene, alternately pawing the ground and sniffing the refuse. He was as large as a pony, with moist nostrils, a black face, and two horns spiraling eternally inward like cross sections of a conch. Sauntering over to the peach stones, he began to gobble them down.

“Gordon?”

“Morning, Mr. Candle,” said the ram lugubriously, without looking up from his breakfast. “These peach stones are lousy. The pits.”

“I thought you were . . .”

“Dead? Every day at three o'clock I return to Mount Moriah and Abraham slits my throat. Rain or shine. Winter, spring, summer, or fall, holidays included. It's not a life—you should've pulled the plug years ago.” He fixed Martin with his rheumy eyes. “You've been summoned, friend. Climb on my back.”

“Summoned? Where?”

“Climb on up. You've probably never ridden a ram before. The worst part, I'm told, is the fleas. They're only ideas, but they're very
definite
ideas.”

Although Martin was braced for an ordeal, riding Gordon proved far less stressful than his last such experience: his journey on Jonathan Sarkos's horse from Abaddon Marsh to the pineal gland. Gordon's gait was rapid but steady, and the abundant wool made a wonderfully cushy saddle. The promised fleas never materialized. Extinct, Martin guessed. Killed by the hemorrhage.

Within two hours they reached the outskirts of Jerusalem, its sparkling spires and phosphorescent ramparts spreading toward the horizon like an elaborate Christmas diorama. The ram slowed to a canter, then to a trot. Before them lay a range of rocky hills that a team of talented and tireless sculptors had converted into a necropolis.

Dismounting, Martin approached the nearest tomb—a cottagelike edifice that, with its blank marble walls and opaque windows framed by functionless bas-relief shutters, partook equally of the quaint and the macabre. It was like a playhouse for dead children. Although he'd never encountered this particular tomb in person before, it still felt familiar, figuring as it did in the various Jesus epics his father had collected on videocassette. The door was a granite disk, riddled with air vents and big as a millstone, but like everything else in the posthemorrhage brain, it was extremely tractable. Gordon merely had to nudge the stone with his snout and it rolled away, making a soothing rumble as it turned.

“This crypt belongs to Joseph of Arimathea,” said Martin.

“Correct.”

“Is Rabbi Yeshua here?”

Gordon lethargically shook his head. “It's deserted.”

“Deserted? You mean he's been resurrected?”

“Don't let it get around. The last thing we need in this skull is another religion. It's hard enough coping with Judaism. Right now he's on the hills outside Bethany, trying to ascend. Expect him back by midnight. Meanwhile, make yourself at home. There's a cot, a commode, a well-stocked larder—everything you could possibly want. I'd join you inside, but I'm scheduled to be sacrificed in an hour.
Au revoir
.”

For Martin, the interior of the Arimathean's tomb owed less to the New Testament than to the culture of recreational vehicles. A red velvet divan occupied the far corner, adjacent to a four-poster bed roofed by a gold silk canopy. A refrigerator stood against the opposite wall. He peeked inside. Cold chicken wings, a German chocolate cake, a pitcher of iced tea, six-packs of Rolling Rock and Guinness stout. Assembled from oak planks and trimmed in brass, the commode was as luxurious as a throne.

He had just poured himself a glass of iced tea when a balding, portly man turned back the stone and entered. Dressed in spotless tweeds and wielding a Malacca walking stick, the visitor looked astonishingly like G. F. Lovett, though his complexion was pastier and his paunch less pronounced.

“Professor Lovett?”

“Surely you jest. It's a major accomplishment for G. F. Lovett to cross Harvard Square at ten o'clock each morning so he can lecture his undergraduates on
The Romance of the Rose.
He's not about to show up
here!
”

“The
Idea
of Professor Lovett?”

“Ahhh . . .” Sauntering over to the refrigerator, the visitor obtained a Guinness stout and a chicken wing. “Normally I'd be snugly ensconced on the Idea of Mount Auburn Street this time of day, taking a nap.”

“What brings you here?”

“An engraved invitation,” replied the Idea of Lovett, flourishing a piece of heavy stock embossed with black letters.

Like two Civil War buffs refighting the Battle of Gettysburg, Yeshua's guests proceeded to hash over the recent trial, a project they pursued throughout the afternoon and well into the evening. Martin offered Lovett a begrudging congratulations on his victory. Lovett complimented Martin on his tenacity but chastised him for “cheap jokes at the expense of Eleanor Swann's dignity.” As the antagonists polished off the chicken wings, they found themselves agreeing that Torvald's final speech was no Gettysburg Address. His argument amounted to nothing but a clumsy recapitulation of the hidden harmony defense seasoned with a dollop of ontology, so superficial it seemed plausible to suppose he'd tuned out nearly everything that had followed Bernard Kaplan's testimony. The judge's gimcrack theodicy was a proper monument to neither side of the controversy.

 

At midnight their host appeared, his entrance heralded by the groan of the granite disk. A luminous white shroud flowed downward from his shoulders. He boasted the same handsome features as always, but the hemorrhage had left him looking drawn and anemic.

Lovett, flustered, loosened his tie and hid his Guinness behind the four-poster. Limping confidently up to Yeshua, Martin gave him the most vigorous handshake he could manage. The perforation in their host's right wrist was large and ragged, like the fleshy wake of a dumdum bullet.

The three of them sat on the divan.

“Fate has appointed me the bearer of sad tidings,” said Yeshua, tugging absently on his ponytail.

“My disease?” said Martin.

Yeshua nodded. “It's beyond the reach of everything. Feminone, Odradex, radiation, prostatectomy, divine intervention.”

“Everything,” Martin echoed. He blanched, seized by the now-familiar sensation of sinking through Abaddon Marsh. He'd never really doubted his illness would be the death of him, but hearing the verdict from Yeshua's own lips brought the truth irredeemably home. “I was hoping I'd been summoned to . . . you know.”

“Receive a cure? Sorry. Not possible.” Yeshua closed his piercing blue-green Jeffrey Hunter eyes. “You're here to learn the solution, Mr. Candle. You deserve to know it.” He opened his eyes and spun toward Lovett. “
You
deserve to know it too, though now I'm using ‘deserve' in rather another sense.”

“That would be the ontological solution, right?” said Lovett breezily, retrieving his hidden Guinness. “Maybe Torvald didn't buy it, but it stands to reason
you
do.”

“The ontological?” said Yeshua, incredulous. “The
ontological
? Do you really think your terrestrial counterpart is living in the best of all possible worlds? Where I come from, an eighth grader would be ashamed to enter planet Earth in a junior high school science fair.”

“There's more to the ontological defense than its Leibnizian facet. If the universe is to be predictable, it must be governed by laws.”

“Okay, but then why did our Creator keep those laws
hidden
? Why didn't He
tell
humanity that rats bring plague, mosquitoes carry malaria, and obstetricians should wash their hands? The ontological defense is a loser before it's out of the gate.”

“No, you're wrong. Imperfections are inherent in matter. The Creator had no choice but to—”

“Shut up, Lovett,” said Yeshua. “You give me a pain in the ass.”

“Are you perhaps alluding to the free will argument?” asked Martin.

Yeshua screwed his face into a sneer. “If free will is such a good thing—if it's the blessing that can reconcile us to Hiroshima and Auschwitz—I'd like to know why there's so
little
of it.”

“Have you noticed that whenever a debater gets desperate, he drags out Hiroshima and Auschwitz?” grumbled Lovett.

“Hiroshima and Auschwitz,” echoed Yeshua tauntingly, extending his tongue and aiming it at the professor. “Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the big H and the big A, H and A, HA, HA, HA!”

“What do you mean ‘why there's so little of it'?” asked Martin.

“Most animals don't have free will,” said Yeshua. “Neither do the destitute, the addicted, the senile, the stupid, or the psychotic. If
I
were God—which, by the way, I am, as Brother Sebastian pointed out during his testimony—I wouldn't go around touting the merits of freedom until I'd made the stuff generally available.” Rising, he procured a Rolling Rock from the refrigerator, the bright green bottle slick with condensation. “Beyond the question of distribution, of course, there's a purely mathematical flaw in the free will defense. Can we honestly say human free will leads to an ever-expanding community of autonomous beings? When Pol Pot exercised his
liberum arbitrium
by putting half his nation in jail, the aggregate quantity of freedom in the universe actually
decreased.
”

Martin said, “Surely you're not about to resurrect the hidden harmony, the disciplinary, or the—”

“Don't worry.”

“So what
is
the solution?”

Yeshua sneezed.

“God bless you,” said Martin.

“I intend to,” said Yeshua, opening his Rolling Rock. He curled his hand around the dislodged cap and fixed Lovett with an iridescent stare.
“You
know, Professor.”

“I haven't the foggiest—”

“Oh, yes you do.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes.”

Lovett was trembling now. His face assumed the color of Swiss cheese. He set his Guinness on the floor.

“The Church fathers were fully conversant with the best of all possible theodicies,” said Yeshua. “Saint Ignatius apprehended the answer, and so did Bishop Polycarp, Philo of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, and Saint Anselm, though none of them had much stomach for it. Neither do I, as a matter of fact.”

“The last time we met, you insisted you weren't a theologian,” said Martin.

“International 227
has sparked my interest.” Yeshua flipped the bottle cap into the air like a coin. He caught it, palmed it, and took a swig of beer. “I've been reading up.”

“Surely not . . .,” rasped Lovett.

“Yes.”

“Dualism?”

“Dualism,” Yeshua confirmed, grinning ear to ear. “The Manichaean heresy, the Gnostic dichotomy, the Albighensian blasphemy, the Mephistopheles hypothesis—call it what you will.”