Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow Read Free Book Online Page A

scared.”
    â€œI love you, Martin. Terribly and forever.”
    â€œI’m scared to death.”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œI don’t
feel
lovable.”
    She lifted her glass of tomato juice, took a sip, and swallowed. “Judge Candle, you’re my knight in shining armor.”
    Â 
    Visiting the midway later that afternoon, Martin blew five dollars on the Stoning of Stephen rock toss. He continually failed to connect with the mannequin, while all around him corn-fed adolescents were drawing ersatz blood and receiving plush lambs and stuffed cherubs. He did much better at the Head of Holofernes, winning an Archangel Michael helium balloon by decapitating the dummy within twenty seconds, and he was positively brilliant at the David and Goliath slingshot tournament, beating out six other contestants in a race to slay the Philistine. His prize was a music box programmed to provide “a soothing aural environment for private readings of the Psalms.”
    The tours of the Main Attraction departed every hour on the hour, and Martin went crimson with rage upon learning that his Key to the Kingdom would not admit him. He calmed down only after voicing his dismay to two security guards, a T-shirt vendor, and an itinerant guitarist who sang evangelical Christian folk songs. To get the full Celestial City experience, Martin and Corinne had to ride a mechanized walkway south for a mile, then queue up at a ticket booth resembling a ziggurat. In the misty distance God’s cooling chamber loomed, a vague mass on the horizon, its facets shimmering in the afternoon sun like Solomon’s shields of beaten gold. Examining their tickets—thirty-five dollars each—the couple saw they’d been assigned to Group C, scheduled to leave at four P.M. When the designated hour arrived, a guide appeared and escorted her twelve charges inside a glass-and-steel kiosk housing a ruby-studded escalator plunging perpetually into the central Florida earth.
    â€œOn behalf of the American Baptist Confederation, I want to welcome y’all to the Main Attraction at Celestial City USA,” the guide began in a honeyed and melodious voice. She was a tall, toothy blonde, no more than twenty-five, dressed in the lemon rayon shirt and white polyester slacks that constituted the City’s official uniform. “My name’s Kimberly, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions, but first I gotta lay down one great big rule,” she continued with manufactured cheer. “We’re here today to enjoy a profound spiritual experience—we’re
not
here to have ourselves a debate. Understand? Some of you’ve probably heard that the object we’re about to see is God’s comatose body. The American Baptist Confederation believes otherwise. Our Main Attraction is God’s discarded form—a suit of clothes, you might say, that He tossed aside on the way to becoming pure spirit.” She cranked her smile up a notch. “The heavenly Father is alive as ever, friends, the Son still reigns supreme”—she drove her clenched fist forward, as if shattering a pane of glass—“and the Holy Ghost dwells within us yet!”
    As they started their descent, Martin realized the escalator had been designed especially for the City, each riser built wide enough to carry not only the individual pilgrim but whatever equipment he or she required. Three Group C members occupied wheelchairs: a pudgy young woman, a pimply teenage boy, a swarthy septuagenarian. Two other pilgrims, a svelte Chinese woman and a sinewy black man, made the journey downward attached to portable dialysis machines, chattering to each other all the while, the shoptalk of terminal illness.
    At the bottom of the escalator an arched tunnel stretched as far as the eye could see, its ceiling supporting a monorail from which a streamlined, bullet-shaped tram hung like a caterpillar negotiating a twig. After all the passengers