Blameless in Abaddon (46 page)

Martin leaned forward and said, “As a matter of fact, His first line is, ‘Who is this whose ignorant words cloud my design in darkness?'”

Cracking open the Bible, Lovett licked his index finger and flipped ahead one page. “Indeed . . . but what I want to know is, how would you answer the question?”

“Which question, the first or the second?”

“Where were you when God—”

“Laid the foundations of the Earth?”

“Yes.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“I didn't exist when God—”

“How unfortunate for the rest of us. If you
had
been there, you could've told Him how to do it properly—or am I overestimating your opinion of yourself?”

“Objection!” shouted Randall, leaping up.

“Overruled,” said Torvald.

“I might have kibitzed a bit, yes,” said Martin, rubbing his eyes. Lovett's face looked narrow and warped, as if reflected in a hubcap.

“Please explain to the tribunal why the universe contains three spatial dimensions and not two or four,” said Lovett.

“What?”

“Tell the tribunal why the universe contains exactly three spatial dimensions.”

“I've never really thought about it.”

“If
I'd
made the universe, I think perhaps I would've given it
four
spatial dimensions. More is better, right?”

“If you say so.”

“Why settle for three when we could have four?”

“I don't see what you're getting at.”

“Scientists now tell us that the ultimate particles of reality, quarks and so on, are knots in space-time. You can't make a knot in two dimensions because there's no ‘over' or ‘under,' and—here's the rub—you can't make a knot in
four
dimensions either—a ‘raveling,' yes, but it won't hold. So it turns out this four-dimensional cosmos of ours would be a disaster, and God in His day knew best.”

“I've never questioned His math, Professor. My quarrel is with His morality.”

“Do you know what would happen if the ‘strong nuclear force,' the interaction that binds atomic nuclei together, were slightly more intense?”

“I have no idea.”

“God did. He knew that if He were to make the strong force only two percent greater, protons would become
di
protons, resulting in a variety of hydrogen so unstable our universe would consist entirely of helium. If He'd made the strong force five percent
weaker
, the deuteron couldn't form, and so there'd be no deuterium, a situation—”

“I'd rather discuss Deuteronomy than the deuteron. Let's talk about God urging the Israelites to go out and mercilessly slaughter the Hittites, Amorites, and Canaanites.”

“—a situation that would preclude the main nuclear reaction chain used by the sun, thus canceling all life on Earth. But we
do
have life on Earth, don't we? Tell me: if I were to hand you a jar full of prokaryotic cells, the sort found in pre-Cambrian blue-green algae, could you change them into eukaryotic cells—animal tissue, that is, complete with nuclei, nucleoli, mitochondria, and Golgi apparatus?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not, and neither could the brightest biologist at the University of Amsterdam. But
God
in His day could do it, and over the eons He put that power to use, so that our pre-Cambrian algae ended up sharing the planet with arthropods, brachiopods, sponges, worms, fish, reptiles, cats, dogs, and giraffes. Do you know anything about giraffes, Mr. Candle?”

“Not much.”

“As you might imagine, a giraffe's blood pressure must be very high—otherwise, the blood could never make it up that eight-foot neck. But there's a problem. When he bends down to drink, he's going to black out from all that squeezed fluid in his brain. So how do we prevent this?”

“Don't ask me.”

“
God
knew how to prevent it. Through evolution, intervention—whatever—He equipped the giraffe's circulatory system with a pressure-reducing mechanism, the
rete mirabile
.” Reaching into his suit coat, Lovett took out a squat cardboard cylinder capped with a hot-pink lid. He marched up to Martin. “Do you know what's in here?” he asked, setting the cylinder on the stand.

“It says, ‘Play-Doh,'” Martin replied, wistfully remembering the night he and Patricia had fooled around with Brandon's Play-Doh in her studio.

“Exactly. Children's Play-Doh. Now—I'd like you to take this Play-Doh and use it to fashion a living creature. Nothing fancy. Not a frog or a snake or any other vertebrate—but perhaps you could give us a slug. Is that asking too much? Could you please favor the Court with a real, live, wriggling slug?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake.”

“You can see where I'm heading, yes? If the Defendant knew how many dimensions the universe must contain—if He knew how strong to make the subatomic forces and how to turn prokaryotic cells into eukaryotic cells and how to keep giraffes from blacking out—if He knew all these things, then maybe He knew some
other
things as well. Is that possible?”

“I'm not questioning His
power
, Dr. Lovett. I'm positively in
awe
of His power.”

“Answer the question. If God knew all these things, is it possible He knew some other things too?”

“
Some
other things, yes.”

“Perhaps He even knew why the fact of evil does not imply malice on His part. True?”

“Objection!” cried Randall.

“Overruled,” said Torvald.

Martin steeled himself. “I'm willing to concede He's innocent until proven guilty. I'm
not
willing to concede He's innocent until I can make a slug out of Play-Doh.”

“Thinking back on Brother Sebastian's testimony, do you recall him saying bacteria are ‘fundamentally benign'?”

“I remember that, yes.”

“Are you as well disposed toward bacteria as Brother Sebastian?”

“I suppose so.”

“In
The Conundrum of Suffering
I suggest that we are to the divine as bacteria are to us. We matter in our own way, but we're insignificant alongside God. Tell me, have the
Lactobacillus acidophilus
in your intestines ever accused you of mismanaging their universe?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“What would you think of an intestinal bacterium that put you on trial? Might you not regard it as misguided?”

“If I knew my microbes were in trouble, and if I were capable of helping them, I would certainly intervene.”

“Most admirable. Might you not even incarnate yourself as one of those germs—assuming you had the ability—the better to understand their predicament?”

“Assuming I had the ability . . .”

“Good for you.” Lovett held out his palm like a bellboy soliciting a tip. “Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“Your hand. Please.”

Cautiously, reluctantly, Martin extended his palm and inverted it, pressing Lovett's skin with the gentle but steady force his father had taught him to employ when making gravestone rubbings.

“You're in pain,” said Lovett.

“Yes.”

“Metastatic prostate cancer—one of the worst catastrophes imaginable.”

Martin nodded. “It's pretty bad.”

“Do you feel anything besides your pain?”

“I can feel your hand.”

“Listen, Mr. Candle. Forget that confounding object moored in Scheveningen Harbor and concentrate instead on the Eternal Entity who rules the universe even as we speak. Can you perceive God's grace rushing from the heart of Creation, passing through my gnarled fingers, and pouring into your afflicted flesh?”

“No.” Martin had to admit that a quivering sensation was now suffusing his palm, as if he were gripping a power sander or a motorized drill. “Not really.” For whatever reasons, the throbbing in his pelvis diminished slightly, and his fever seemed to drop at least one degree. “I wish I could, but I can't.”

“You feel nothing?”

“Nothing.” This was merely some insidious variety of hypnosis, Martin decided, akin to what he'd experienced thirteen months earlier standing atop the Defendant's cooling chamber. “Leave me alone.”

“God loves you, Martin Candle, and I love you as well.” Lovett withdrew his palm and backed away from the stand. “That will be all. Thank you for your testimony.”

Seizing his crocodile cane, Martin stood up. The entire courtroom was spinning, around and around like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse carousel. He was vaguely aware of Torvald asking Lovett to call his next witness, and of Lovett saying he had no more witnesses.

“Does the defense rest its case, then?”

Martin took a tentative step forward, a second step, a third. It seemed as if he were crossing an especially ephemeral stretch of Abaddon Marsh, a tract so soft that if he advanced any farther he would sink all the way to the other, the infernal, Abaddon. “The defense rests its case, Your Honor.”

A loud, serrated scream spewed from Martin's throat, wrought by some irreducible mixture of cancer and bewilderment. He dropped his cane. He pressed his sternum. His legs failed, his vision dimmed, and as he toppled to the floor a Voice filled his skull, its bassy vibrations spiraling toward the center of his soul as God Himself said, distinctly, “Let there be night.”

A
T THE RISK OF SPOILING
my reputation, I shall admit I felt sorry for Martin Candle as his bodyguards carried his unconscious form out of the courtroom and bore it down the street to Saint James Hospital. Consider our hero's plight. Lovett had just treated him with imperial condescension before the entire world, he had bobbled his great opportunity to slay Behemoth and Leviathan, and the cancer had reached its crudest crescendo yet. I actually shed a tear, something I hadn't done since 1965, when Pope Paul VI ruled that even the crime of deicide should enjoy a statute of limitations, and so the world's Jews must no longer be persecuted for having—in the Church's opinion—murdered Jesus Christ two thousand years earlier.

Thanks to Holland's robust system of socialized medicine, our hero entered Saint James with minimal bureaucratic fuss. As Funkeldune likes to say, “It's easier to get admitted to the average Dutch hospital than to the men's room of the average American gas station.” Later that afternoon, acting on orders from an oncologist named Van der Meulen, the bodyguards brought Candle up to Suite 1190, where the nurses gave our hero a shot of morphine, rubbed him with alcohol, and put him on an IV drip that suffused his system with saline solution and broad-spectrum antibiotics. Within the hour he rallied, becoming alert enough to tell Van der Meulen the bald-faced lie that he was injecting himself each day with two cc's of Odradex-11 via his implanted Port-A-Cath.

By sundown he was permitted to receive visitors. In a manic burst of energy, Candle spent his first evening at Saint James dictating his closing argument to Selkirk, who dutifully entered each word in our hero's computer and converted the speech to hard copy via the hospital's laser printer.

“
Now
will you take your medicine?” asked Patricia Zabor, drawing a syringe and a vial of Odradex from her shoulder bag.

“It's all over, isn't it?” said Candle resignedly. “All over but the shouting.”

Zabor filled the syringe with two cc's, leaned toward the adjustable bed, and, parting the halves of Candle's robe, slid the needle into the valve protruding from his chest. “I won't pretend I'm not furious with you.” She pushed the plunger. “We should've done this
weeks
ago.”

Before the drug kicked in, fuzzing his mind and abridging his diction, Candle managed to read over his speech four times. He liked it. “The final
j'accuse
of a dying Job,” he told Zabor.

There was no question of Candle giving the speech himself, and with Lovett's blessing the task fell to Selkirk. At 10:15 the next morning this angry middle-aged man stood before the bench and read Candle's words with predictable aplomb: Selkirk was, after all, a person who at age seventeen had convinced a Pennsylvania district court to outlaw classroom prayer. The speech's basic theme was that, while Lovett and his witnesses had indeed supplied the Defendant with “alibis of a certain sort,” the circumstantial evidence against Him remained overwhelming.

“‘Our position is simple: no being is above the law,'” Selkirk read. “‘In rendering a “guilty” verdict, you will be helping to heal millions of broken, bleeding, blameless hearts around the world. In disconnecting the Lockheed 7000, you will be striking a blow for temporal justice, human dignity, and the other noble ideals to which this Court is consecrated.'”

“Good Lord, he's actually doing it,” I said. “He's asking them to pull the plug.”

Funkeldune devoured a slice of pepperoni pizza and said, “Where are the Ring Dings?”

“You ate them,” said Schonspigel.

“‘Thank you, learned judges. The world awaits your decision.'”

Lovett's closing argument contained nothing I hadn't heard before, either during the trial or in the course of my checkered career. He began by reviewing the disciplinary, eschatological, and hidden harmony solutions, according them barely ten minutes apiece. The soul of his case, clearly, lay in the one-two punch of ontology and free will, and he spent the rest of the afternoon recapitulating “these venerable and invulnerable defenses.”

“Are we out of pork rinds?” asked Funkeldune.

“We've been out of them for a week,” said Belphegor.

“It's really very simple,” said Lovett. “Moral and existential evil together constitute the cost of human freedom, while natural evil is the price we pay for having a material world in which to exercise that freedom.”