Blameless in Abaddon (12 page)

As the meeting progressed, it became obvious that the Valley of Children—this world of diaper-changing tables, wooden blocks, pastel alphabets, and stuffed animals—was a cruelly ironic choice of venue, for children figured in almost half the Jobians' stories: insane children, maimed children, sick children, dead children. But this group was accustomed to life's morbid jokes. These people had seen it all. And so they persisted—“Hello, I'm Stanley, and I'm an innocent victim,” “Hello, I'm Julia, and I'm an innocent victim”—sharing their grief and spilling their guts, telling one another of multiple-sclerosis battles and lupus defeats, of barren wombs and schizophrenic minds, of babies entering the world without brains and adolescents departing it without hope.

Particularly disturbing was the ordeal of Esther Clute, a Trenton elementary school principal whose three-year-old daughter, Heidi, had contracted the common parasitic roundworm
Ascaris lumbricoides
while playing in her sandbox. Although
Ascaris
larvae normally take up residence in the alimentary canal, depositing eggs that are harmlessly expelled with the host's stools, in Heidi's case one worm kept on migrating, bearing a load of fecal bacteria. The parasite ended up in her brain, where the microbes caused a huge abscess and widespread tissue degeneration. Within the year, Heidi was dead.

“The doctors say she was probably incurable by the time her symptoms appeared,” explained Esther, a brawny woman who looked like a goalie for a sport so brutal it was played only in Yakutsk. “I'm still trying to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.”

Martin had expected to hear about fatal and satanic diseases that evening. Paralysis, madness, addiction, bereavement: no surprise. There was one variety of pain, however, for which he wasn't prepared. But the more he considered these stories—the uncle whose niece's arm got torn off because he'd neglected to fasten her seat belt, the father who'd learned that his teenage son's suicide threats weren't just bids for attention, the young man who'd ignored his gonorrhea symptoms until he'd sterilized his girlfriend—the more he understood that guilt constituted a category of suffering no less real than cancer.

After two hours of testimony that would have left the world's most accomplished soap-opera writer feeling like an amateur, the final registrant spoke up: Allison Lowry, a Denver interior decorator whose only child, Jason, had spent the last nine years in bed, his spinal cord having been severed and his brain massively damaged in an auto accident when he was seven. The boy couldn't move. Neither could he speak, hear, or see. Swallowing was a major challenge. On his birthday Allison always baked Jason his favorite kind of cake, chocolate. She would puree a slice in her food processor and feed it to him with a spoon. As far as his mother knew, Jason's sense of taste was functional, though she'd never worked up the courage to ask the doctor.

While Allison dried her tears, a dense silence settled over play area three. The sufferers looked at one another, their eyes ablaze with righteous anger and mutual understanding.

They had a case, by damn. They truly had a case.

“What we're really talking about is a kind of class-action suit,” Martin explained, passing out the rough draft of his petition. “With your permission, I'll be naming all of you on the last page as coplaintiffs.”

Considering the many and varied philosophical complexities a Jobian complaint necessarily entails, the proposed indictment occasioned remarkably little debate. Randall argued that the bill of particulars should include biblical material—the Plagues of Egypt, Jepthah murdering his daughter at the Almighty's behest, Yahweh sending a pair of vicious bears to tear apart the children who mocked His prophet Elisha—but then Julia Schroeder, a dialysis patient from Hartford, persuaded the group that such stories were “straw men,” tangential to the heart of the matter. Peter Henshaw, a Pittsburgh AIDS victim who earned his living as a ceramics instructor, argued that they should concentrate on those catastrophes most readily laid at the Main Attraction's feet: earthquakes, birth defects, infectious diseases. It would weaken their case to include—per Martin's draft—horrors that bespoke either human incompetence (plane crashes, hotel fires) or human depravity (rape, torture, war). Peter's position held sway until Randall noted that neither the original Job nor the rabbis at Auschwitz had hesitated to address such horrors. The God who'd slept during Buchenwald and fiddled while Hiroshima burned was the God they most wanted to nail.

Charles Braithwaite, a Manhattan journalist whose son had no left kidney and a dysfunctional right one, raised the whole messy question of the Defendant's metaphysical status. If He was in fact dead—completely dead, brain-dead—would there be any satisfaction in convicting Him? (A consensus quickly emerged: yes.) Alternatively, if He was alive in some way, did they dare ask the judges not only to find Him guilty but to reify the verdict by disconnecting the Lockheed 7000?

“Speaking personally,” Esther replied, “I'd argue for . . . this isn't easy for me to say . . . I was raised a Baptist, understand? Jesus was the most important person in my life.” She closed her eyes and winced. “I'd argue for pulling the plug.”

“Would your daughter really want that?” asked Peter in a cautiously querulous tone.

“I don't know.”

“Pulling the plug won't bring her back.”

“No, but it might bring
me
back.”

“Well put,” said Ira Klein, a Long Island insurance salesman, his eyes bulging from his skull under the force of inoperable tumors. “She's right, people. We ought to go for broke.”

By midnight the meeting had lost its momentum, disintegrating into random exchanges of information about megavitamin therapies and holistic healers, and Martin declared it adjourned. The Jobians agreed to reconvene in ten weeks, at which time they would analyze the response—if any—they'd received from the World Court.

An unutterable satisfaction wove through Martin, soothing his aching flesh, cooling his inflamed pelvis. How different his Jobians were from the sufferers he'd met at Celestial City USA. Both groups required the same accoutrements—wheelchairs, oxygen bottles, IV drips—but where the Orlando victims exuded a weary resignation, these people radiated militancy. Proudly he surveyed his troops: Esther stirring Cremora into her decaf, Randall arranging Fig Newtons on a serving tray, Peter opening a pack of paper napkins, Allison sneaking out for a cigarette, a handsome Bright's disease patient from Dallas speaking with a comely San Diego watercolorist who'd gone stone blind three weeks after winning the Norcroft Prize.

Sucking the salt off a hard pretzel, the Manhattan journalist marched up to Martin and presented his card.

 

CHARLES BRAITHWAITE
Time
Magazine
Time & Life Building
Rockefeller Center
New York, New York 10020

 

“I ought to come clean,” said Charles Braithwaite, nervously running his fingers through his brush cut. He had a haunted, lone-wolf look about him, a lost soul even by Job Society standards. “My son is very sick, true enough, but that's not why I'm here. I've been covering the Corpus Dei for—what?—six years now. Might I ask you a few questions?”

Martin, wary, looked the journalist up and down. “I suppose so.

Braithwaite pulled a 35mm SLR with flash attachment from his rucksack. “I'd also like, with your permission”—he brought the viewfinder to his eye—“to make that strong chin and noble brow famous.”

 

On the last day of September, Martin slipped the polished petition into a manila envelope, addressed it to the registrar of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and drove the package to the Chestnut Grove post office. It cost the Job Society $11.95 to lay its case before the world.

Were it not for the feature article and accompanying photograph that Braithwaite published in
Time
, Martin might have enjoyed a relatively tranquil autumn. The Roxanol was keeping his pain in check, the Bactrim had finally defeated his prostatitis, and the side effects of the Feminone (swelling bosom, plummeting libido), though disturbing, were nothing he hadn't anticipated. But the piece indeed appeared—“The Man Who Would Kill God”—and by week's end he knew his life would never be the same.

The morning after the October 5
Time
hit the newsstands, a brick came crashing through his kitchen window and pulverized the ceramic teapot Vaughn had given Corinne and him as a wedding present. It arrived wrapped in a paper towel onto which someone had Scotch-taped Martin's
Time
photo; a rope noose, crudely drawn in blue ballpoint ink, swayed menacingly above his head. Two days later, as he limped across the parking lot of the Abaddon Municipal Building, intending to retrieve his car and drive home, he was shocked to see that all four tires had been slashed. Someone had written
LEAVE GOD ALONE, FUCK-FACE
on the driver's door with red paint. He abandoned his crippled car and took a SEPTA bus to Chestnut Grove, where a cardboard carton trussed with twine lay on the doorstep. The carton exuded a horrendous stench. Opening the package, Martin found himself looking into the empty eye sockets of a dead muskrat.

Traumatic as these assaults were, the prying of the mass media proved even more unnerving. The reporters' energy was matched only by their obnoxiousness; they telephoned him at odd hours, clogged his fax machine with petulant pleas, and hung around his house like male dogs besieging a bitch in heat. Every periodical from the
Abaddon Sentinel
to
Playboy
wanted his story, and when he turned them down they went ahead and wrote about him anyway. While
Psychology Today
speculated that he was “a man with an unresolved Oedipus complex, out to murder his heavenly Father,” the
National Review
called him “a modern Frankenstein's monster, bent on destroying his Creator.” The
Geraldo
organization offered Martin forty-seven thousand dollars for an exclusive interview. Oprah Winfrey's people upped the ante to fifty thousand. Martin declined both invitations—partly because he believed such exposure would compromise the purity of his case, partly because he was loath to advertise himself to whichever self-righteous lunatics had not yet heard of the Man Who Would Kill God.

As October progressed, shortening the days and blessing Abaddon with leaves so bright and psychedelic they rivaled the carp of Waupelani Creek, Martin grew preoccupied with his mailbox. He started driving home for lunch, just to see if the International Court of Justice had written back, but the only personal correspondence he received that month consisted of four sob stories from fellow Jobians, three death threats from an organization called the Sword of Jehovah Strike Force, and a Halloween card from Patricia. Compounding the pathos of these trips was the fact that the mailbox itself, a miniature wooden castle, had been a Christmas gift from Martin to Corinne. She'd been delighted when, the following March, a pair of bluejays had built a nest inside. Throughout the spring Martin had spent many hours patiently wiping bird droppings off their mail.

When he wasn't brooding about the World Court's silence, he turned his attention to the Kennel of Joy. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon he called up Corinne's dull but dutiful cousin Franny. The news was always good. The endowment from Corinne's life-insurance policy remained intact, and private contributions were pouring in at a steady rate. Recent beneficiaries included Nanook, a Siberian husky with a brain tumor whom the Kennel had sent all the way to Nome so she could run part of the Iditarod, as well as Boris, a Saint Bernard with failing kidneys who got to rescue an avalanche victim in Aspen. The whole event was staged, but Boris couldn't possibly have known, and he died a happy dog.

Election Day found the citizens of Abaddon rushing en masse to the polls and, in a contest that Martin's opponent had managed to define as a referendum on his character, telling him what they thought of his project. The final tally was 11,784 (for Barbara Meredith) to 322 (for Martin). In the township's entire history, no incumbent JP had ever lost by a wider margin. When he telephoned Meredith to concede defeat, she apologized for capitalizing on his status as America's most conspicuous blasphemer. “We simply couldn't resist,” she told him. “Your opponent goes around drawing mustaches on God—it was too good to pass up.”

Patricia urged him to take the drubbing philosophically: if the World Court came through, he'd appreciate having so much time for preparing his case. Her argument left him unmoved. Magistracy had been Martin's whole life, his raison d'etre, and now he'd lost it. The prosaic but ineluctable matter of solvency also haunted him. His savings would last another six or seven months, but
then
what?

Two days after the election Benjamin Blumenberg gave Martin a bone scan, telephoning him the following afternoon with the preliminary results. “It's not what we wanted to see,” said the urologist. “The malignancy's evidently in your right hip and the head of your right thighbone.”

“I'm not surprised.”

“Me neither.”

“So what do we do?”

“We increase your Feminone and hope for the best.”

Setting down the receiver, Martin realized he'd begun to personify his disease.
Cancer
, Latin for “crab.” A malicious and depraved crustacean had appropriated his prostate, extending its spindly legs outward, digging them into his lymph nodes and pelvis. The crab's claws were sharp and serrated. Its teeth were white-hot needles.

On the last night in November, Martin lay writhing atop his mattress, tortured by the crab, high on Roxanol, and wondering what else could possibly go wrong. Across the room his VCR played the climax of
Judgment at Nuremberg:
Burt Lancaster, the Nazi with a conscience, making his improbable admission of guilt.