Blameless in Abaddon (10 page)

“And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible,” announces Ivan, who has concluded he no longer desires admittance to a universe where innocent children suffer, even though justice and harmony may prevail at the end of time. “And that I am doing. It's not God I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

To which Ivan's devout brother responds, “That's rebellion.”

Martin did not stay for the second act. Slurping down his coffee, he bolted from the theater, retrieved his car, and raced north through the drizzly darkness.

“I'm going to return You the ticket,” he muttered, over and over. “I'm going to return You the ticket . . .”

 

By midnight he was in Deer Haven, pounding on Patricia's door.

“Who's there?” a voice called down.

Lifting his head, he stumbled backward. Patricia leaned out the upper window, eyes flashing like a stoned calico's.

“Patricia, something amazing has happened!”

“Martin?”

“I'm returning Him the ticket!”

“Wait right there.”

A minute later the door swung open, and she greeted him with a goofy smile. A silvery satin bathrobe enveloped her, shimmering in the orange glow of the porch light.

“What's this all about?” she asked, ushering him inside.

“We're putting Him in the dock!”

“Martin, you're . . .”

“Drunk? After all that liquor, I should hope so.”

“I've had a sip or two myself.” She piloted him toward the kitchen. “There's still some left. Join me?”

“Sure.”

She poured him two fingers of Jack Daniel's on the rocks, the ice cubes crackling as the sour mash whiskey trickled toward the bottom of the tumbler.

“I'm calling Him to account, just like those rabbis did.”

“What are you talking about?” She slopped whiskey into a second tumbler. “Calling
who
to account?”

“The Main Attraction. Humor me, Patricia. Lie to me. Tell me you think it's a great idea.”

“I think it's a great idea.”

“No you don't. You think it's an evil idea, and so do I. Maybe I'll even start taking Blumenberg's damn estrogen and buy myself a few more months. So I'll lose my gender, big deal. I don't want to talk about hormones. I want to talk about harmony.”

She gulped her whiskey. “Play with me.”

“What?”

“You know—play with me.”

Drinks in hand, they staggered into her studio, their ice cubes clinking softly against the sides of their glasses.

“A week ago, I wouldn't have even
considered
a project like this,” he chattered, downing his Jack Daniel's. He slipped the
Trial of God
program from his pocket. “But the United Nations just amended the statutes of its judicial arm—maybe you read about it in the
Inquirer
.” He shoved the program in her face. “For the first time ever, an individual can be prosecuted before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.”

“‘
The Trial of God
,'” she read aloud, removing her satin slippers. “Martin, this is adolescent.”

“That's what the Defendant wants us to think.”

“Aren't you a Presbyterian?”

As the whiskey seeped into his brain, the studio began to rotate, as if mounted atop the Celestial City carousel. Steadying himself on the wheelchair, he pulled off his shoes. “I love the God of my childhood—the God of Dad's Sunday school lessons. But there's
another
God out there, and I'm going to get Him.”

“And you really believe He's responsible for all our pain?”

“Who
else
would be?”

“I don't know. The Devil.”

“A mere proxy.”

Together they knelt on the floor and began constructing a new tower from Brandon's blocks. When they reached the height of the wheelchair, Patricia leaned forward and planted a wet, sensuous kiss on his lips.

“Did you like that?” She slid her hand into one of Brandon's puppets—either a beaver or a woodchuck, Martin couldn't tell—then pressed the animal coyly against her cheek.

“I didn't come here to kiss you, Patricia. My motives were purer than that.”

“Purer?”

“Yes.”

“How boring.” She made the puppet scratch her nose.

“Maybe I'd better go home.”

“Nope, sorry—you're spending the night. Nobody in your condition should be out on the road.”

“I'm not as drunk as I seem.”

“You're too drunk to enjoy a kiss from me. That's pretty drunk.”

“If I get arrested for driving under the influence, I'd have to indict myself,” he said with a throaty laugh. “I
did
enjoy it.”

“You did?”

“A lot.”

“Good. If you're really planning to change genders, Martin Candle, we'd better seize the time.”

At Patricia's bidding, the puppet took the sash of her robe in its paws and yanked it away as if starting an outboard motor. The halves parted. Beneath the satin lay a female form as desirable as the ceramic Eve who presided over the Celestial City's petting zoo.

“I ought to be going,” he said.

“Would she really begrudge you this moment?”

“Yes. No. I don't know.
I'm
the problem, not Corinne.”

“Play with me.”

“What?”

“You know. Play with me.”

Taking a tress of raven hair in each hand, Martin pulled her toward him. He closed his eyes. “It's true what you said on Friday.”

“What?”

“Grief sharpens the appetite.”

“Right. Play with me. I'm on the Pill.”

“Estrogen?” he asked, unbuckling his belt.

“Estrogen.”

“I've got seeds in my prostate, forty-six radioactive I-125 microcapsules, but Blumenberg says they don't affect my semen.” He shed his socks, pants, and jockey shorts. “We'll use a condom if you want.”

“Irradiate me, Judge Candle.”

Afterward, she wrapped his body in her arms and, through a series of maneuvers that alternately evoked modern dance and slapstick comedy, dragged him down the hall and laid him on the bed in her guest room. As she stretched out beside him, flopping her bare arm across his chest, he realized he hated himself, a sensation he found not altogether unpleasant. It was perversely satisfying to know that, for all the confusion seething in his brain, all the chaos raging in his prostate, his sense of guilt remained intact. Only a man with an operational conscience had the right to put the Main Attraction on trial.

“‘I'll chase him round Good Hope,'” he whispered drunkenly into the darkness, quoting Ahab's great speech from
Moby-Dick
, Martin's second-favorite among the honors English novels.

“Hope?”

“Hope,” he repeated. “‘And round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round addition's flames—'”

“‘Addition's'? What?”

“‘Perdition's flames.' And round Omar's Arabian Oasis. And Shamgorod. Celestial City. And round The Hague. And . . . ‘before I' . . . and . . . ‘before . . .'”

“Before you . . .?”

“‘Before I give him up.'”

W
HEN
J
ENNY
C
ANDLE FIRST LEARNED
of her brother's audacious ambition, she decided he'd lost his mind and promptly gave him the name and phone number of her therapist. Vaughn Poffley also stood foursquare against indicting the Almighty, fearing the pre-trial publicity would cost Martin the upcoming election. Martin's mother, he knew, would have just one thing to say to him—“Your father would not be proud”—and so he didn't even tell her.

Much to his dismay, the person from whom he expected unequivocal support had no use for his project at all.

“I mean, what's the
point
, really?” asked Patricia as she and Martin sat down to espresso and sweet rolls in a Glendale coffee shop, Café Olé.

“We owe it to Brandon.”

“Brandon is dead.”

“We owe it to Corinne.”

“Even if you get a conviction—even if they shut off the Lockheed 7000—is that
justice
?”

“Patricia, I'm hurt. Why can't you believe in me?”

“I
do
believe in you. What I don't believe in is revenge.”

He jammed a Feminone capsule in his mouth. Phallic in its contours, the pill seemed designed to torment its consumers: not only do you have prostate cancer, Charlie, but your wife stands a better chance of satisfying herself with one of these things than with
your
disenfranchised dong.

“This isn't about revenge,” he said.

“Some people, when they lose a loved one,
some
people go into grief counseling.
Some
people build elaborate tombs. But you—
you
think you have to put God on trial. It's nuts.”

“No, Patricia—it's overdue.” He swallowed the estrogen along with a mouthful of cappuccino.

Among the individuals closest to Martin, only his ex-fiancée Robin McLaughlin endorsed his scheme. Upon reading Albert Camus's
The Plague
in Mrs. Felser's English class at Abaddon High, Robin had come to dislike God intensely, an animus that endured throughout her college years, her relationship with Martin, and her unhappy marriage to a Fox Run proctologist named Derrick Smedley.

“You're calling the old Bully to account?” said Robin as she and her fidgety six-year-old son sat down for breakfast with Martin at McDonald's. “I like it—”

“Thought you would.”

“—but it's not
you.
”

“I've changed.”

She slit a Half and Half capsule with her thumbnail, adding the mongrel fluid to her coffee. “I'm sure you know it's been done before.”

“Elie Wiesel's play,” he said, unwrapping his Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit.

“Earlier than that.”

“Jeremiah denouncing divine injustice?”

“Before that even. Job on his dung heap.”

“Job?”

“The Book of Job.” Robin bit into her Egg McMuffin. “It's really a kind of courtroom drama. How are you?”

“How
am
I? Terrible.”

“You don't deserve any of this—I hope you know that.” She began cutting up her child's pancakes for him with a white plastic knife and matching fork. “Is it true you're taking estrogen?”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Your
other
ex-fiancée. Brittany got it from Vaughn, who got it from your sister.”

“Jeez . . . you people publish a
newsletter
, do you?”

“The Internet does nicely. You're a great topic, Marty.”

“Yes, I'm taking estrogen. If I keep at it, I'll turn into a woman.”

“I don't recommend it.”

“I have no choice.”

“If you ever need me, just remember—I'm here.”

That night Martin read the Book of Job for the first time in thirty years, discovering to his surprise it
was
a kind of courtroom drama, with the perverse twist that the Accused also functioned as Judge and Jury. Equally disturbing was the fact that when God went to make His case, He completely ignored Job's main concern—justice—opting instead to intimidate him with the majesty of Creation: lions, whales, horses, hail, stars, and, ultimately, the unknowable monsters Behemoth and Leviathan.

A rigged proceeding, yes, and yet Martin found it gripping. He was moved by both the force of Job's bitterness and the caliber of his blasphemy. “God bears hard upon me for a trifle and rains blows on me without cause,” railed the sufferer. And then, later: “When a sudden flood brings death, He mocks the plight of the innocent.” And still later: “Far from the city, the poor groan like dying men, and like wounded men they cry out, but God pays no heed to their prayer.” Whether Job of Uz was an actual historical figure or the product of an anguished poetic imagination, this “blameless and upright” desert chieftain was a person to be admired.

After according the matter considerable thought and much research, Martin concluded he needed thirty-five thousand dollars, the price of a full-page ad in the
New York Times Book
Review.
He was about to take out a bank loan when the money from Corinne's life insurance policy came through—seventy thousand. He divided the settlement in half, earmarking one portion for the Kennel of Joy, the other for the downfall of God.

 

AN OPEN LETTER TO
THE WORLD'S INNOCENT VICTIMS

 

Dear Fellow Sufferers:

 

In the fifth century
B.C.
, a blameless and upright man named Job called his Creator to account, demanding to know the reason for his multiple misfortunes. Sixty years ago, three rabbis imprisoned in Auschwitz indicted the Almighty for crimes against His children. Now, once again, the time has come for humankind to ask an honorable question. Why, throughout history, has God permitted the innocent to suffer?

 

An organization has been formed

 

Our name: the Job Society. Our claim: in fashioning a world where deadly viruses thrive, defective genes prosper, earthquakes kill, droughts destroy, and wars lay waste, the Main Attraction at Celestial City USA acted in a manner that can only be called murderous. Our mission: to bring this matter before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

 

A meeting will occur

 

The initial gathering of the Job Society is scheduled for Saturday, September 25, 1999, 8:00
P.M.
at the Valley of Children Daycare Center, 61 Mapleshade Lane, Deer
Haven, Pennsylvania 19001. Registration is free. If you wish to attend, return the coupon printed below.