Blameless in Abaddon (4 page)

The tragedy returned briefly to the fore when the Vatican, seeking to expand its missionary program and recover from various ill-considered real estate ventures in eastern Europe, agreed to sell the Corpus Dei to the American Baptist Confederation—on condition that the new owners keep Him inside the cooling chamber and connected to the Lockheed 7000. The negotiations stretched over months. Five law firms on two continents got into the act. Eventually the Baptists paid 1.3 billion dollars for God. To many observers (myself included) the price seemed exorbitant—until it became clear that the Corpus Dei's new owners fully intended to recoup their investment, their plan being to found a theme park called Celestial City USA and make Him its centerpiece.

But it wasn't the body of God per se that brought people in droves to the Celestial City. It wasn't the rides, the gardens, the shops, or the concerts, and it certainly wasn't the muggy Orlando air. It was the fact that, of the innumerable emphysema victims, arteriosclerosis sufferers, manic-depressives, alcoholics, diabetics, hemophiliacs, and cancer patients who visited the City and beheld the Corpse of Corpses, one out of five returned home cured—or so the brochures claimed.

 

“Our best course of action would be an immediate and total prostatectomy,” said Dr. Hummel. “You'd be rendered impotent, I'm afraid, but it's our only hope for a remission.”

A feeling of suffocation overcame Martin, a sense of being swallowed by something cold and miasmal, as if he were sinking to the bottom of Abaddon Marsh. His hands smacked together in prayer. Although he hadn't attended church in years, preferring to engage his Creator the way a person might retain a private tutor (as opposed to the collegiate model of organized religion), his faith had remained steadfast. One thing he'd never understood was how any sane person could neglect to cultivate a relationship with God. When the doctor said “prostatectomy,” what was there to keep an atheist from going mad?

Of course, Martin had to admit that faith was something he'd come by easily. Before succumbing to heart disease at age seventy-eight, his father had been the most popular Sunday school teacher in the history of Perkinsville First Presbyterian. A flair for the dramatic and a talent for the mawkish were chief among Walter Candle's gifts as an apostle to the young. Several times a year Walter would herd his students into an ancient, preindustrial section of Hillcrest Cemetery and instruct them to make rubbings of the deteriorating limestone markers. (“Before the turn of the century, all these names and dates will be gone, erased by wind and rain. It's up to us to save them. The dead deserve no less.”) In an equally effective lesson, Walter would bring in an artificial Christmas tree decorated with miniature chocolate doughnuts and, seeking to help his students empathize with Eve's ordeal of temptation, forbid them to eat.

“I'd like a second opinion,” Martin told Hummel.

“In your shoes, so would I.”

By canceling the speeding ticket that Ralph Avelthorpe, son of a prominent Deer Haven neurosurgeon, had acquired in Abaddon Township, Martin was able to wrangle an early appointment with Benjamin Blumenberg, chief of urology at New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He hated to abuse his office so blatantly, but he was desperate.

Whether Dr. Blumenberg turned out to be old or young, Martin was determined to find him impressive. If old, he would be thankful so much experience was being marshalled against his illness. If young, he would decide he was in the hands of a prodigy, the Bobby Fischer of urology. But Dr. Blumenberg, when Martin finally got to see him, did not appear to be any particular age—somewhere in his late forties, perhaps his early fifties—nor was there anything striking about his appearance: doughy face, thinning hair, tortoiseshell glasses. His only remarkable feature was his voice, which had the raspy, beleaguered quality of Montgomery Clift in
Judgment at Nuremberg.

This great doctor, this urologist's urologist, studied the pathology report, palpated Martin's gland, and said, “I'm glad you didn't opt for the prostatectomy.”

Relief flooded through him. “You mean—it's not so bad?”

“Far as I can tell, the hard area on your left lobe is close to the prostatic capsule. Truth is, I suspect it's gone outside the capsule to involve the seminal vesicle.”

Martin gulped audibly. His bowels turned to water. “It's . . . spreading?”

The specialist nodded. “A radical prostatectomy is justified only when there's a solitary nodule the surgeon has a chance of removing in toto. Don't despair, sir. Alternatives exist. We could try synthetic estrogen—you know, female hormones. Menaval, maybe, or Feminone.”

“Estrogen?” groaned Martin.

Blumenberg offered a grimace of commiseration. “The side effects are crummy. Erosion of the sex drive. Gynecomastia.”

“Gyneco—?”

“You'll grow breasts. And the hormones alone won't be enough. I'd have to do an orchidectomy.”

“My orchids?” said Martin with a nervous little laugh. “Your orchids.”

“Please.” He squirmed. “I'm only fifty-two.”

“Happily, there's another route, equally promising: radiation. We can shield your testicles, shlong, the whole package. With any luck, your sexual functioning will remain intact. Step one is a lymphangiogram to determine whether the tumor has migrated beyond the vesicle. Can you go into the hospital on Thursday?”

 

Lymphangiogram: lovely word—wouldn't you say?—so layered and mellifluous, its syllables rising and falling like the soft, gentle slopes of a woodland meadow.
Lym-phan-gi-o-gram
. Someday I shall embroider
LYMPHANGIOGRAM
on the back of my red velvet smoking jacket.

Did I ever tell you how I sold our Creator on cancer? I walked into the pitch meeting and said, “Got a new pathology for You.”

“Shoot.”

“Solipsistic cannibalism. Your body starts eating itself alive.”

“Like it.”

“Thought You would. I call it
glutch
.”

“Glutch? Glutch? Come on, Sarkos, what the hell kind of name for a dread disease is glutch? You can think of something more euphonious than that.”

Thus did my masterpiece acquire its association with a half dozen of the world's most soothing and musical sounds.
Cancer. Metastasis. Carcinoma. Tumor. Oncology. Lymphangiogram.

 

Martin's lymphangiogram disclosed three abnormal lymph nodes in the vicinity of his prostate.

“Abnormal?” he wailed. “You mean malignant?”

“We won't know till we biopsy them,” said Blumenberg. “If I had to make a guess, though . . . yes, Martin, malignant.”

“Can we beat it, Doc? Is this cancer gonna kill me?”

“These days, with God out of commission, it's hard to know anything for sure.”

“I don't believe He's out of commission.”

“You favor the Mayfly Theory?”

“Don't you?”

Blumenberg shrugged. “When it comes to God, I have very few opinions. It's all I can do to keep up with urology. But to answer your first question: yes, I think we can beat it.”

On May 25 Martin returned to the hospital, and twenty-two hours later Blumenberg cut into his abdomen. The specialist biopsied the three suspicious nodes, and each proved rife with cancer cells. Blumenberg excised these nasty little time bombs, then biopsied their neighbors, subsequently taking his knife to the ones infiltrated by carcinoma: the majority, predictably. With Martin already out cold on the table, Blumenberg decided to start therapy immediately, sowing the diseased gland with several dozen radioactive I-125 microcapsules, each no bigger than a grain of sand.

Surfacing into consciousness, Martin grew instantly aware of the violence wrought by Blumenberg's scalpel. From pole to pole, his belly throbbed and spasmed. He felt as if some demonic child had opened up his abdomen with a beach shovel, reached inside, and attempted to fashion a toy castle from his viscera.

A nurse stood by his bedside, wielding a syringe filled with Demerol. She jabbed the needle into his thigh, flashed a professional smile, and pushed the plunger.

Corinne squeezed his hand.

“The nodes,” he rasped.

“It's what we thought,” said Corinne.

“Positive?”

“Blumenberg cut 'em out, every last one.” She lifted his fingers to her lips and kissed them. “Listen, honey, he also stuck forty-six radiation microcapsules in your prostate. It's a cure, Martin. In two days the side effects will hit, nausea, weakness, that sort of thing, but meanwhile the seeds will be hard at work, shrinking the tumor, and then the prostatitis will vanish too.” Martin was no fool. He knew that a man whose lymph nodes have been invaded by cancer cannot count on living for much more than a year.

“It's time we took a . . . vacation,” he told his wife, the Demerol fuzzing his enunciation. “It's time we went to . . . went to . . . went. . .”

“Went to. . .?”

“Orlando.”

N
OTHING DELIGHTS ME SO MUCH
as spoiling a surprise. Stapleton masterminded the Hound of the Baskervilles. Rosebud was Charlie Kane's sled. Jim Young pawned his watch to buy Della a set of combs even as Della was selling her hair to buy Jim a watch chain. God willed Himself into a death trance because He thought He'd do His creatures more good that way.

As the Jesuit cosmologist Father Thomas Ockham put it in his best-selling
Parables for a Post-theistic Age
, “It was essentially a strategy for forcing our species to grow up. By preventing us from taking Him for granted, He is making us fall back on our own resources.”

So now you know. Mystery solved. Case closed. Unfortunately for His grand scheme, however, our Creator failed to reckon on Celestial City USA. As usual, He underestimated the human potential for self-deception.

 

Among the drawbacks of developing a terminal illness while still relatively young is the large number of people you must notify. Most of your loved ones are still alive. On the day before Martin and Corinne's scheduled departure for Orlando, he telephoned everyone who mattered to him.

He began with his liberal Democrat sister, Jenny Candle, knowing that her talent for transmuting life's conventional horrors into black comedy would give him a needed lift.

“Oh, God—I'm so sorry.”

“Say something funny, Jenny.”

“Funny? How can prostate cancer be funny?”

“It's not as funny as lung cancer, but it's still pretty funny.”

“You tell Mom yet?”

“Haven't worked up the courage.”

“This'll be good for her. All those years of wasting her anxiety skills on trivia. ‘What if I run out of candy on Halloween?' ‘What'll happen when the boy who cuts my grass goes to college?' Now she's got something she can sink her teeth into.”

“Cancer is worthy of her.”

“We're gonna whup this thing, Brother Man,” Jenny insisted, shifting into her impersonation of Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat. “We're gonna whup this thing till Hell won't have it again.”

The next people to learn of his diagnosis were his two exfiancées. Robin McLaughlin, a dental technician with whom he'd lived while they both attended Perkinsville Community College, began weeping hysterically. Filtered through the telephone receiver, her sobs sounded like the death rattle of a Kennel of Joy client. At first he declined to call Brittany Rabson, who claimed to despise him these days but who was nevertheless continually arranging for their lives to intersect in pointless ways. (“Marty, do you have those snapshots of us feeding the ducks in Fairmount Park?”) After thinking it over, he decided he'd better contact her: if the news arrived indirectly, he would never hear the end of it. Upon learning of Martin's tumor, Brittany reacted with characteristic narcissism, insisting that when he was in his final throes, withering away on a morphine drip,
she'd
be the one he could count on,
she'd
be the one who'd appear at his bedside, assuming he had the foresight to summon her.

Then came Mom, a Montclair, New Jersey, rose fancier and neurasthenic who habitually came on like Olga Prozorova yearning for Moscow, though in Siobhan's case the locus of her fantasies was her ancestral Belfast. After absorbing the blow, she predictably went to pieces, calming down only after Martin explained that he intended to visit the Celestial City.

“Your father would like that.”

He saved his campaign manager for last: Vaughn Poffley, a scrappy extrovert who, when he wasn't making sure the office of JP remained in Republican hands, earned his living teaching driver's ed (“dread,” the students called it) at Abaddon Senior High.

Martin and Vaughn had first met at a school board meeting. It was June 15, 1991, and Martin had come to protest the proposed elimination of driver's ed from the senior high curriculum, a budget reduction scheme he'd read about that morning in the
Abaddon Sentinel.
Recognized by the chairman, he stood up and explained that his conscience had compelled him to attend. As their local magistrate, he'd seen firsthand the damage that lack of driver's education caused. Martin told about broken bodies and bashed brains, dashed hopes and ruined lives. Were these loving parents truly willing to send their children onto the open road untutored in the art of defensive driving?

All in all, a brilliant performance, and by evening's end not only did Vaughn still have a job but Driving 101 had become a graduation requirement.

As the meeting broke up, Vaughn marched over and introduced himself—a short, balding, effusive man with a mild lisp. “Any time you need a favor,” he said, clasping Martin's hand, “all you gotta do is ask.”

Normally Martin would have dismissed Vaughn's offer as the rhetorical pleasantry it was, but he'd been feeling overwhelmed of late, ever since Brittany had moved out on him. While the woman's intractable vanity and affection for Sturm und Drang had made the relationship qua relationship impossible, she'd been a splendid campaign manager. “Now that you mention it, I could use some help with my reelection effort. Leafletting, door-to-door canvassing. . .”