Blameless in Abaddon Read Online Free PDF Page A

by a force even greater than Himself? Taken a good, hard look at His favorite species and forthwith succumbed to despair?
    But then, inevitably, other matters caught the public’s attention—the famine in Mozambique, the unexpected success of the Boston Red Sox—and the Corpus Dei was relegated to the op-ed pages and the occasional political cartoon. Even the
Weekly World News
saw the handwriting on the wall, and by the end of the year headlines such as COMA DEITY COMMUNICATES BY BLINKING and ALIENS USE GOD’S BODY AS LANDING FIELD had been supplanted by ELVIS SIGHTED AT LOURDES and DEAD SEA SCROLLS YIELD ARTHRITIS CURE. If people talked about the Naples cadaver at all, it was merely to repeat one of the tasteless jokes—offensive even to me—then in circulation. (“So one day God’s doctors are poking Him with these huge electrodes, and He starts coughing. Suddenly He spits out the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. The first doctor turns to the second and says, ‘No wonder He couldn’t breathe. He had a Frog in His throat.’”) Finally, even the jokes stopped.
    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.
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    â€œOur 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