Blameless In Abaddon by James Morrow

Author:James Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

NO SOONER HAD MARTIN RETURNED to the Good Intentions than it began to rain—a thick, cold, gray downpour echoing the dismal condition of his mood. He stared at the river. Relentlessly the drops descended, speckling the Hiddekel with concentric circles and causing it to resemble a gigantic slice of Swiss cheese. A tremulous moan escaped his lips. There had to be an answer to the ontological defense, there simply had to be, but he was damned if he could think of one.

The latest e-mail did nothing to lift his spirits. Esther reported that Norma Bedloe still hadn’t decided whether to kill herself posthaste or wait until after she’d testified. Randall recounted a frustrating conversation he’d had with a PBS lawyer named James Foley. According to Foley, his clients would let the Job Society show A History of Havoc in The Hague for a one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollar donation only if the news media agreed to point their cameras elsewhere. PBS feared that people would tape the series at home, thereby cutting into the network’s profits from videocassette sales. Confronted with this stipulation, Court TV and CNN had both voiced the same reaction: you must be kidding.

In drafting his reply, Martin found himself more anxious to talk about his misadventures on the dung heap than about Randall’s difficulties with public television. “We’ve had a major setback here—a virtually impregnable theory of evil. How smart are those Harvard kids you hired? Tell them there’s a $15,000 bonus waiting for whoever can counter the ‘ontological defense.’” Only at the end of his memo did Martin address the History of Havoc crisis. “This nonsense about wanting Court TV and CNN to look the other way during the screening is clearly just a ploy. Find out how much PBS sank into the series and offer to buy it outright. We’ve still got about $8,700,000 to play with.”

At midnight the rain finally stopped, and by morning the Good Intentions had steamed far beyond the Country of Dung, reaching her destination late that afternoon, just as Augustine had predicted.

“The Garden of Eden,” the bishop said to Martin and the scientists, tapping the itinerary with the bowl of his briar pipe. “Any man who seeks to solve the riddle of iniquity must eventually end up here.”

On both sides of the river a dense wilderness thrived, a sprawling expanse of spastic trees and writhing vines. The aggressive stench of decaying vegetation clogged the air. If this was the Garden of Eden, it was a decidedly postlapsarian one, Martin mused—an Eden gone to seed. Cypresses and mangroves grew everywhere, their roots arching out of the water like immense rib cages, their branches laden with fruit resembling the heads of medieval maces. Along the southern shore huge spiders spun webs so vast that parrots and lemurs were becoming ensnared in them. A particularly rapacious specimen of Venus flytrap ruled the opposite bank, crushing entire cockatoos in its jaws as it went about the business of survival.

“I assume this was a less violent place before the coma struck,” said Martin.

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