Blameless in Abaddon (23 page)

“After which he sold his books, became an ascetic, and castrated himself,” said Ockham.

Also cut off balls
, Martin typed, shuddering as he recalled Dr. Blumenberg's proposal to battle his cancer via the same operation. He had difficulty imagining anyone mutilating himself in this manner merely for the spiritual thrill.

Extending his index finger, Augustine indicated a nearby thicket, where a plump ram stood frozen in a posture of fatalistic resignation, its horns ensnared in the branches. “See that ram, Isaac? Your deliverance is at hand. Any second now, Abraham will notice the creature and make the swap.”

“I know, I know,” muttered the boy sarcastically. “It's an old story.”

“You don't sound satisfied,” said Beauchamp.

“Satisfied? How can I be satisfied? My father hears a Voice from on high commanding him to immolate me and hand the charred meat over for His delectation and delight. ‘Make Me an offering I can't refuse,' says Yahweh. Then, at the last second, He withdraws the demand. Do you imagine I'll go home now and simply
forget
the whole thing? The smell of the smoke, the gleam of the knife, the thongs chafing my wrists—do you imagine these facts aren't etched permanently into my brain? Do you imagine I'll ever be able to look my father in the eye without thinking, ‘He would have done it'?”

“Or for that matter,” said Abraham, “do you imagine I'll ever be able to look
Isaac
in the eye without thinking, ‘I would have done it'?”

Dysfunctional family
, Martin typed.

“You're both missing the point,” Augustine insisted, frowning extravagantly. “The Binding of Isaac is a
symbolic
story.”

“Your symbol, my son,” said Abraham.

“Don't get testy with me, sir. I am Augustine of Hippo Regius, discoverer of concupiscence. Between my legs hangs the axis on which will turn the brave new world of Christian antieroticism.”

“Excuse me,” said the ram in a plaintive voice. “I don't mean to butt in. But if you want to destroy the eschatological defense, Judge Candle, don't start with the psychodynamics of the situation. Start with the crude truth that, wonderful as this boy's incipient deliverance may be, such happy endings are the exception, not the rule.”

“The beast has a good point,” said Abraham.

“Call me Gordon.” Breaking free of the thicket, the animal stepped tentatively toward the altar. In both voice and demeanor he reminded Martin of Eeyore the donkey. “Consider my own predicament. As Abraham starts to sever my jugular, will Yahweh drop by and say, ‘Stop, hold it, only kidding, April fool?' Will an alternative sacrifice appear in the next thicket over—a rabbit, maybe? And if it does, then what about justice for the rabbit? Will Yahweh be satisfied with a toad instead?” Gordon pawed the soggy ground. “Admittedly, I can't be objective here. But the fact remains that when child abuse is about to occur in the real world, it is not commonly canceled by divine intervention.”

Augustine whipped off his horn-rimmed glasses and pointed them toward Gordon. “The correct interpretation of this incident does not lead us to expect justice here and now. The Binding of Isaac helps us remember that, through the atoning death of Jesus Christ—represented in the story by you yourself, Gordon—humankind has been redeemed.” He gave the ram a firm pat on the rump. “When our Savior comes again, the dead will be raised, the wicked punished, and the virtuous blessed with eternal life.”

“I cannot respect any theory of evil that so neatly immunizes itself against empirical disconfirmation,” said Gordon. “All theodicies requiring belief in an afterlife are manifestly begging the question.” The ram cast his limpid brown eyes on Martin. “Are you getting this? If the pre-coma God were as loving and powerful as His supporters claim, then He possessed no warrant, absolutely none, to wait until some hypothetical Judgment Day before eradicating evil. A father doesn't have the right to sexually molest his children throughout the winter simply because he intends to take them to Disneyland in the spring.”

The Disneyland defense
, Martin typed.

“In your opinion,” said Augustine huffishly.

“In my opinion,” said the ram evenly.

“Another problem with afterlife theodicies, it seems to me,” said Martin, “is their blithe assumption that Heaven will be wonderful. Maybe the flip side of the grave is
also
a vale of tears, full of pain and loss and, of course, clerics promising us that once we check out, we'll find ourselves in Paradise. And so it goes—jam tomorrow, always tomorrow.”

“That's good, Judge,” said the ram.

“Thank you.”

For the second time that day, Abraham began to sing.

 

Just below your pelvis
,

There's a tumor in your thigh.

So let's have another shot of morphine
,

'Cause cancer is a rotten way to die.

 

He sheathed his knife, hobbled over to Isaac, and loosened the thongs from the boy's wrists and ankles. “Here,” he said, presenting the bindings to Martin. “They're yours. Outside the divine cranium, they'll last only a few months, but that's plenty of time to offer them in evidence. Tell the tribunal, ‘Behold Exhibit A. Perhaps Yahweh saw fit to call off Isaac's private holocaust, but since then His record has been atrocious.'”

Martin grasped the thongs, damp with the boy's agonized sweat, stained with his tortured blood.

Climbing off the altar, Isaac addressed his proxy. “You are a truly marvelous beast.” He jumped free of the flames, hit the ground, and rubbed Gordon's woolly head. “I shall always be in your debt.”

“Go to Hell,” rasped Gordon. “You're spoiling my whole fucking afternoon.”

“Is there no other way?” Isaac asked his father.

“If it were my decision, I'd let the animal live.” With a single, fluid movement, Abraham unsheathed his knife and thrust it into Gordon's neck, “Do you believe that, Son?”

“I do, Father.”

“
Aaaiiihhh
,” bleated Gordon as a stream of blood, red and rich as the Hiddekel, spurted from his innocent throat.

M
ARTIN SPENT THE NEXT MORNING
lounging in a wicker chair on the steamer's afterdeck, grasping Isaac's bindings with one hand and typing into his laptop with the other. His straw Panama hat, borrowed from Father Ockham, settled down around his eyebrows, blocking the blinding sun. At length he saved the file, wiped his forehead, and smiled. Unless he was mistaken, he had finally amalgamated the ram's attack on the Binding of Isaac with the equally astute critique offered by Abraham and his son. Let Lovett try shielding his Client with the eschatological defense—oh, just let him try!

Looking up from the computer screen, he glanced across the river. Along the southern bank, a razed and ravaged city rose against a crimson sky. Fallen towers, scorched spires, seared timbers, melted domes. Its ramparts were broken and cratered, like the limestone grave markers whose inscriptions Martin's father had so obsessively sought to preserve through charcoal rubbings.

“The disciplinary defense,” said Bishop Augustine, joining Martin on the afterdeck.

“What about it?”

“There, there—in the suburbs of Sodom.” Augustine drew the pink itinerary from his coat and pointed toward the carbonized metropolis. “The eschatological solution may have a weakness or two, but the disciplinary defense stands tall.”

Rising from the wicker chair, Martin directed his gaze along the vector of the bishop's extended finger. Beyond the city's walls lay a tract of split and blackened earth, the fissures zigzagging everywhere like cracks in a shattered mirror. A silver-bearded man in a scorched jumpsuit was making his way slowly westward, his back bent by a rucksack, his arms wrapped around a white humanoid artifact only slightly smaller than he. Dressed in a T-shirt, a prominently pregnant adolescent with straw-colored hair and a sullen countenance followed in the man's footsteps, while a second young woman—a redhead, likewise T-shirted and pregnant—brought up the rear.

The artifact was evidently heavy: every twenty paces or so, the man would pause and set it upright on the ground, leaning on it until he caught his breath. The longer Martin contemplated the thing, the more distinctly female it seemed, albeit grotesquely so, like a caryatid supporting the roof of a cubist pagan temple.

Martin knew the story well, for it had engendered his father's most notorious Sunday school lesson. “Neither look behind you nor stop anywhere on the plain,” God's emissary had told the band of refugees as they prepared to flee doomed Sodom in Genesis 19:17, but Lot's wife had looked back anyway and beheld the burning city, and by verse twenty-seven she'd become—of all things—a pillar of salt.

“Keep your eyes fixed on me,” Walter Candle had told his class as his brother-in-law, Martin's Uncle Wilmer, sneaked into the back of the room clutching a rolled-up poster for a late-eighties horror movie called
Hollywood Chainsaw Hoofers.
Unfurling the disconcerting image—a buxom prostitute wielding a chain saw—Wilmer Scotch-taped it to the closet door. “Behind you is something God doesn't like,” Walter continued. “Something God
hates
, in fact. I'm giving you the same order those angels gave Lot and his family. Don't look back at this hateful thing, children. Don't you dare peek.” And within a minute, of course, a dozen children were looking back; and of these twelve, half became terribly upset (partly over the image, partly over the failure of their wills). Tommy Williams, Lucy Winthrop, and Sammy McPhee burst into tears. Douglas Hill suffered an asthma attack. By the end of the week, Walter Candle's Sodom lesson had occasioned nine reproving phone calls from the bewildered youngsters' parents.

As the midday sun beat down on the ruined city, Martin, Augustine, and the scientists forded the river and drew within hailing distance of the archetypal Lot and his crystalline wife.

“Permit me to offer you my condolences,” said Augustine, gesturing toward the salt pillar with his unlit pipe.

“I lost a wife too,” said Martin sympathetically, flipping open his laptop.

“My Fiona died two years ago,” said Saperstein.

The Idea of Lot removed his rucksack, raised a tattered sleeve to his face, and mopped the sweat from his brow. An oblique smile played about his lips. “I'm managing,” he said, a peculiar lilt in his voice.

“Don't restrain your grief on our account,” said Augustine.

“I won't.”

“Let your lament be so loud it rattles Heaven's gates.”

“You bet.” Reaching inside the sack, Lot lifted out a cocktail shaker, a long-stemmed glass, a thermos jug full of ice, and three bottles containing, respectively, lime juice, triple sec, and tequila. He filled the shaker with several ounces of each liquid, added the ice, and stirred. “On the other hand—”

“Cry tears as bitter as your beloved's transformed tissues.” Augustine lit his pipe. “‘On the other hand'?”

“On the other hand, there are ways in which her present condition is not entirely a drawback.” Lot pressed the longstemmed glass against the pillar's left thigh. “Don't get me wrong.” He poured the contents of the cocktail shaker into the salted glass, then raised the margarita to his lips and sipped. “I'm not saying she's become the perfect wife. Nevertheless, she now boasts both a measure of reticence and a caliber of compliance that did not obtain previously.”

“Maybe
he
thinks this is a change for the better . . .,” said the redheaded adolescent.

“. . . but
we
don't,” chimed in her straw-haired sister, touching Martin's plasma-soaked sleeve. “Judge Candle, right?
International 227?
”

“That's me,” said Martin, chewing a Roxanol.

Saperstein turned toward the young women's father. “But surely you miss the pleasures of the flesh,” said the neurophysiologist.

Lot shrugged and gestured toward the pillar's crotch. “All problems have solutions.”

Martin lowered his gaze. Someone had modified the pillar just below its abdomen, hollowing out a conspicuous concavity.

“You've heard of sodomy?” said the straw-haired adolescent. “Our father practices the corresponding vice, gomorry.”

“Sexual intercourse with condiments,” explained the redhead. Her T-shirt displayed the words
BABY ON BOARD
atop an arrow indicating her uterus. “I'm Shuah, by the way.”

“Call me Maleb,” said Shuah's sister. The motto on her T-shirt read
UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

“Does anyone here know why a self-sufficient Supreme Being would fashion a material cosmos?” asked Ockham.

“Or whether Fermat really proved his last theorem?” asked Beauchamp, photographing the pillar with her Nikon.

“Fermat's what?” Shuah scowled. “Theorem? Maleb and I barely passed geometry.”

As Martin surveyed the pillar, he was struck by the chilling possibility that, beneath her crust, Mrs. Lot was still conscious, buried alive like a character in an Edgar Allan Poe story. It would take a powerful argument to convince him she deserved such a fate.

Augustine cupped his palm around Lot's shoulder. “Maybe you're still able to slake your disgusting lust, but from your
wife's
perspective this is a calamity. Divine retribution is always stern and permanent.” Unhanding the old man, he allowed his fingers to brush the pillar's right buttock. “Stern, permanent—and also just. This woman was told not to look back, but she did, and now she's paying the penalty.”

“Your friend is peddling the disciplinary defense,” said Shuah to Martin.