Blameless in Abaddon (15 page)

Martin felt a tightening in his chest—the Feminone, he realized, attempting to enlarge his breasts. “Me? The entire case? Really?”

“You. The entire case. Really.” Torvald laid his gavel on the piano bench. “Budget permitting, you may employ whatever outside experts you wish, but the opening statement, the closing argument, the examination of witnesses—all this must come from you. Evidently you've offended Lovett to the core. The man wants your head on a platter.”

Martin picked up the gavel and rapped it against his soggy palm. Win or lose, he was morally obligated to accept this daunting mission. His Jobians deserved no less. “All right,” he said at last. “Very well. Fine.” He returned the gavel to the piano lid. “The Baptists—they'll actually let you impound His brain?”

“After my press conference at the UN, they won't have any choice—not unless they want to face prosecution themselves for obstructing justice.”

“Perhaps I should drop by tomorrow, so I can see the optic neuron in action. I ought to know what I'm up against, right?”

“You aren't up against
God
, Mr. Candle—you're up against G. F. Lovett.”

“If I were you, I'd rather be taking on God,” said Saperstein, returning the velvet snowman to its branch. He retrieved the scruffy attaché case from under the tree and set it atop the piano. “As for our prize neuron, you may attend the press conference if you wish”—flicking his thumbs, he unfastened the two brass latches—“but we can satisfy your curiosity on
that
score right now.”

An unearthly light filled the penthouse, rising from the attaché case in a shimmering blue vortex that struck the great Christmas tree and transmuted its ornaments into flaming asteroids, the tinsel into filaments of fire.

“What's going on?” asked Martin.

“Each time he sets it free,” said Torvald, “it does something new.”

Even before the judge had finished speaking, the errant neuron slithered, amoebalike, out of the attaché case and across the piano lid. A cry of amazement broke from Martin's throat. Blinding in its luminosity, fearful in its symmetry, the neuron suggested a kind of immanent Frisbee, perhaps, or a radioactive pizza.

“It's just one of billions, of course,” said Saperstein as, rippling like a pebble-struck pond, the neuron extended a dendrite toward the keyboard and pressed middle C. “Imagine the wonders we'll encounter once we actually breach His cerebrum.”

The creature began playing “Heart and Soul.”

Impressed as he was by the neuron's performance, Martin found himself unable to occupy the moment. His mind had drifted elsewhere—toward the astonishing quantity of work that lay ahead, his upcoming odyssey into theodicy. Could he really hold his own against Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bishop Origen, and all those other dead Christians mentioned in Dr. Phillip H. Strand's obnoxious letter?

“June the fifth—that's only five months away,” said Martin.

“I wanted to wait till autumn, but Lovett would hear none of it,” said Torvald. “I hope you're not getting cold feet.”

“Lukewarm feet.”

“Science is counting on you,” said Saperstein.

The crab clamped its jaws around Martin's thighbone. He gasped, bit his inner cheeks, and said, “Do you know where I'm headed next, gentlemen? Uptown—to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, that's where.” He pulled out his Roxanol and ate two tablets. “I'll chase Him round Good Hope, Your Honor, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give Him up.”

“Then we'll see you in The Hague?” asked Torvald.

“With bells on,” said Martin.

 

The climax of Martin's visit to Memorial Sloan-Kettering came when Blumenberg examined the results of the latest bone scan, ushered him into his office, and said, “The Feminone is working wonders.”

“It's given me a lovely pair of knockers. That's a wonder of sorts. Maybe I could become a Rockette.”

“The spread of the tumor has definitely been halted. Now we're going to send it into a full retreat.” Blumenberg clasped his hands together behind his head and tilted backward in his swivel chair. “We'll keep you on the hormones, but I want to supplement them with something called Odradex-11—experimental, hush-hush, terrifically encouraging results with prostate cancer. The good news is you can administer it yourself. The bad news is you must stick it directly in a vein—two cubic centimeters per day for the next three months.”

“You mean I'll have to puncture myself?”

“Nothing that medieval. We'll install a Port-A-Cath in your chest—minor surgery, but surgery all the same—then send you home with a syringe. The injections themselves are a snap, easy as watering a house plant. Can we put you in the hospital Friday?”

“I guess so.”

“How's the hip?”

“Until the Roxanol kicks in—terrible. Does this Odradex have any side effects?”

“A few.”

“Feminone turned me into a woman. What will Odradex turn me into?”

Blumenberg leaned forward, propped both elbows on the desk, and rested his jaw in his cupped hands. “It won't turn you into anything. You'll probably experience some drowsiness, that's all, and you might have trouble focusing your thoughts.”

“Forget it, Doc.” Martin's gaze alighted on Blumenberg's 1964 World's Fair paperweight, a brass Unisphere the size of a softball. “During the next seven months my mind has to be sharper than ever. It's the only way I can win my case.”

“A sharp mind won't win your case. An Odradex regimen might.”

“My
legal
case.”

“I thought they rejected you.”

“They found an investor. The catch is, I've got to run the whole show. I can't lose my edge, not for a minute.”

“Nobody rebels against God and wins, Martin. Prometheus couldn't do it. Job couldn't do it. Ahab couldn't do it. Take the damn drug, okay?”

 

The installation of the Port-A-Cath came off without a hitch, though the procedure left Martin with an unpleasant sense of having been invaded, as if Patricia's Vestans had implanted some insidious monitoring device in his body. It was easy to forget about the microcapsules filling his prostate, but the Port-A-Cath—a plastic shunt buried above his right breast, the socket angling into the air like an inner-tube valve—irritated the surrounding skin and made his nipple tingle. He hated it, though not half as much as he hated the aggressive anticancer drug whose intrusion the device permitted.

Within an hour after receiving his first hit of Odradex from Patricia, he felt as if an elephant were stepping on his head. His vision went blurry. Sleigh bells jangled in his ears. He clambered into the guest-room bed and stayed there.

As he continued taking the drug, his subconscious began to torment him. With the approach of each dawn he routinely experienced the notorious inverse nightmare all cancer patients must endure. He dreamed he was in his little courtroom, sitting before the people he loved—Vaughn, Jenny, Patricia, Corinne—and telling them Dr. Blumenberg had just pronounced him cured.

During those rare and precious moments when Martin was lucid, he set about designing the prosecution's case. By availing himself of his century, that miraculous age of voice mail, fax machines, and computer webs, he was able to coordinate his Jobians without leaving bed. He directed Task Force 1, headed by Randall, to comb through academia, seeking out sociologists and historians willing to argue that a truly inculpable Supreme Being would have supervised His creatures' fates far more diligently. Task Force 2, headed by Esther, was responsible for lining up a full roster of angry victims. “I want at least twenty-five heartbreaking stories,” he told her. “Thirty, if you can manage it.”

Throughout January he remained an Odradex invalid, dividing his time between grappling with Lovett's
The Conundrum of Suffering
and zoning out on Patricia's television, a twenty-seven-inch Mitsubishi poised at the foot of the guest-room bed like a tombstone overshadowing a grave. He watched Court TV, the Sci-Fi Channel, and the Comedy Network—but most of all he watched the Siege of Celestial City USA.

The showdown traced to the ICJ's decision that the trial must not devolve into an empty symbolic exercise: this was a real criminal proceeding, and the Defendant must be extradited and imprisoned accordingly. Unfortunately, Eternity Enterprises was not about to surrender its cash cow without a fight. On the day the Court announced its intention to tow the Main Attraction to the Netherlands, each stockholder was enjoying a fivefold return on his investment. Following Saperstein's televised demonstration of the optic neuron's talents—proof that an indictable entity resided within the divine skull—a significant percentage of the world's legal scholars, academic philosophers, and liberal theologians had come out in favor of
International 227
, but this cut no ice with the stockholders. The average Eternity investor couldn't have cared less whether His cranium contained five living neurons or five billion: God was the property of the corporation. Upon learning that United Nations peacekeeping forces were headed for Orlando bearing deportation orders, the stockholders shed their business suits, picked up their handguns and hunting rifles, and secured the Celestial City against invasion.

CNN provided the best coverage. While the network claimed to be impartial, its sympathies clearly lay with the stockholders: six hundred and twenty photogenic white people, all prepared to die in the name of God's dignity and profit's honor. The peacekeepers' strategy proved a masterpiece of nonviolent aggression. Knockout gas was the key. Every time a new sector of the theme park fell under Eternity Enterprises' control, the UN would unleash canisters of Soporphoria-B. The CNN cameras revealed heaps of unconscious capitalists piled up around the Chariots of Ezekiel ferris wheel, the Heaven to Hell roller coaster, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse carousel: scenes that for Martin evoked the comatose kingdom in the Disney
Sleeping Beauty
, which he and Jenny had seen together when it first came out in 1959.

As Martin interpreted
The Conundrum of Suffering
, its theodicy sprang from the concept of ancestral disobedience. For G. F. Lovett, the story of Adam's insubordination in Eden was true in some fundamental anthropological sense. Although the prelapsarian hominids who'd once inhabited the world were unsophisticated technologically, they were highly advanced spiritually, enjoying an immediate relationship with their Creator. But then, as a function of the very consciousness that had enabled them to apprehend God's love, these original sinners grew fatally absorbed in themselves, eventually turning away from the divine to pursue their own agendas. To wit, they became us: a damaged species, sick with sin, twisted by pride. “Is it any wonder God allows vermin such as we to suffer?” Lovett asked, rhetorically, in chapter three.

 

It is not. The mystery is that He does so with the sole aim of making us once again worthy of His love. Real love, divine love—as opposed to mere grandfatherly kindness
—
is hot as slag and hard as steel. It insists that its object be deserving and not depraved, clean and not corrupt. The tribulations of this world are like the incisions the surgeon makes as he cuts the malignant tumors from a patient's vitals. Awakening from the anesthesia, the patient finds himself in pain. At first the pain seems gratuitous and cruel, but then he remembers the alternative is much worse.

 

God as cosmic surgeon. Martin had to admit it all made a kind of sense. (Indeed, in the days when he'd viewed his Creator more sympathetically, his image of God was not unlike his image of Dr. Lloyd Zimmerman, the swashbuckling cardiologist who'd performed a triple bypass on his father.) Doubtless this theodicy had its weaknesses, but in his present drugged state he was far too befuddled to notice them. The more Odradex he received, the woozier he grew. His gait became unsteady, his eyelids heavy, his memory porous. It seemed as if he were actually fighting two wars that January: one against cancer, the other against its cure.

On Groundhog Day, Martin reached a fateful decision.

“I'm going off the drug,” he told Patricia. “The darn stuff's blowing out my neurons.”

“Don't talk nonsense. It's keeping you alive.”

“Alive for what? Alive so I can lose another election? So I can die a horrible death? It's in my lymph nodes, Patricia. It's in my bones. Don't tell me any fairy tales about Odradex.”

“Please, Martin. I love you.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“That's not a very good idea.”

“Keep taking the Odradex—
please
.”

“No. I can't. Sorry. No.”

Forty-eight hours after the last Odradex dose had entered Martin's bloodstream, his mind miraculously cleared. His brain, he decided, had been like one of Abaddon Marsh's frog ponds: suddenly the scum was gone, leaving the waters pellucid and pristine. Bring on the dead Christians, he thought. I'm ready for the lot of them.

February featured record snows, unprecedented lows, and a valiant effort by Martin to fathom the theologians cited in Lovett's footnotes, a project that included entering his reactions onto the hard drive of his Apple PowerBook 630, one of the first items he'd purchased with the $26,580,000 the professor had obligingly deposited in the Job Society's bank account. As a blizzard raged through Abaddon Township, Martin struggled with the indicated portions of Saint Augustine's
Confessions
, doing his best to grasp the bishop's notion of pain as a teaching tool sent by God so that we might learn self-restraint. “But does the pupil learn self-restraint,” Martin typed into his laptop, “or merely what pain feels like?” He tackled the relevant sections of Gregory the Great's
Moralia
, striving to comprehend the pope's idea that souls were like athletes: to realize their potential, they must submit to painful training. “But there's a difference, surely,” Martin wrote, “between training and torture.” He sampled Gregory Nazianzenus's
Discours
, pondering this church father's argument that natural disasters bespoke divine displeasure. “The evidence is slim,” Martin wrote. He dipped into Julian of Norwich's
Book of Showings
, plowed through twenty-four of Meister Eckhart's five dozen
Sermons
, and forced himself to read two hundred pages of Martin Luther's sixty-one-volume
Werke.
“All three thinkers,” he wrote, “are making essentially the same argument: if life contained no challenges, virtue would wither for lack of exercise.