Mission (10 page)

Miriam was sitting by the fire with her hands cupped round a glass that held enough vodka to put a Cossack and his horse under the table. Drink usually makes her happy. This time, she looked a little subdued. But in view of what we'd just witnessed it was understandable. We turned down the lights and sat around the flames and talked – mainly about ourselves. The Man was curious to know
where we were from, what we did and why, and how we had come to be together. Et cetera. With his ability to read minds he must have known what we were going to say. I can only think that he wanted to compare what came out of our mouths with what was going through our heads. So Miriam and I laid edited versions of our life stories on him. Maybe he reached into our memories and gathered up the bits we left out. If he did, he was kind enough not to ask any awkward questions.

Eventually, we moved on from True Confessions to America in general and the global situation. We told him that it was a mess and that, sooner or later, things would have to change radically. The trouble was no one was sure that things would change for the better. The major political systems of both East and West were now recognised to be morally and economically bankrupt. And it was no good looking to religion for salvation. Of the two major faiths, the Christian church had been spiritually bankrupt for centuries, and oil-rich Islam was suffering from fundamentalist schizophrenia; Judaism you couldn't give away.

‘Ask almost anybody,' said Miriam, ‘and they will tell you that the world is going mad. But nobody believes in anything strongly enough to actually start doing something about it. Resolve has been replaced with resignation.'

I knew what she was talking about but I tended to take a more optimistic view. After all, people have been saying that the world was going down the tube ever since God told Noah to build the Ark. Despite what Henry Ford said about history it did, at least, prove one thing: man was the great survivor. When I pointed this out it made The Man smile.

‘With a little help from his friends,' he said.

And that made her smile too. I gave her a ‘whose-side-are-you-on' look then we broke it up and went upstairs. It was about one-thirty. Miriam sat on the edge of the bed and listened attentively as I described his arrival, re-capped our opening dialogue and played back the recorded highlights. She listened with rapt attention for a good hour then switched off with a series of yawns like open manhole covers.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘I had a tough day at the hospital.'

‘Don't apologise,' I said. ‘I'd like to sleep on it too.' I climbed into bed. ‘At least you know now I wasn't kidding about the wine.'

‘Okay, so you were right about that,' she said. ‘It's just that sometimes
your jokes are in rather bad taste.'

That made me sit up. ‘Look,' I said, ‘there's something we ought to get straightened out. This is a very laid-back guy we've got here. Okay, he's special. Some kind of spaceman, perhaps. I can even buy the idea that he may really
be
the Son of God. But he also spent a good bit of his time whooping it up with debt-collectors, hookers and guys who'd jumped
schule
– '

She put her hand over my mouth.

I pulled it away. ‘Will you let me finish? The point is, I've never talked to a god before. The only way I can handle this situation is to treat our friend down the hall like a normal human being. And I advise you to do the same, otherwise they are going to ship us to the banana factory.'

‘Okay.' She kissed me tenderly. Somehow, only our lips touched.

I decided to push my luck. Let's face it. One way or another, it had been a pretty heavy evening. ‘I'm going to ask him about that water into wine bit. If he could do a number on a couple of hundred thousand gallons from the Hudson River we could be in business. On the other hand,' I said, ‘if he could turn it into oil …'

Miriam stood up. ‘I'll see you in the morning.'

‘Where are you going?' I said.

‘You've got three bedrooms, haven't you?'

I couldn't believe it. ‘Come on,' I said. ‘This is ridiculous.' I grabbed her hand and kissed it submissively. ‘Okay. No more jokes. May I drop dead if I ever laugh again.'

She gave me a hard-eyed look and relented. But when she finally came out of the bathroom she was wearing a nightgown. Something she'd never worn when we'd been in bed together. I sat up on the pillow with my arms folded as she got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin.

‘There … satisfied?'

‘Not quite,' I said. ‘I'm waiting for you to get undressed. I was sort of hoping that you might feel like parking your mobile home next to mine.'

She treated me to a smile that was ten per cent pity and ninety per cent malice. ‘Put it on the slate, Resnick.'

She wasn't kidding either.

When I woke on Sunday morning, Miriam was already up. I showered, shaved, put on a bathrobe, and took a peek in the guest
bedroom. The bed hadn't been slept in. I almost broke my neck in my haste to get down the stairs. Miriam was in the kitchen, dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans and sneakers, with an apron on top. Her hair was pinned back under a headscarf, and she had the freshly scrubbed look of a sixteen-year-old.

‘Where's The Man?' I said.

She gave me another absurdly chaste kiss. ‘Relax. He's out on the porch. Why don't you get dressed and take him for a walk before we have breakfast?'

I helped myself to some coffee from the pot on the stove and went out front. It was a nice warm spring day. Maybe it was my imagination but there may even have been a church bell tolling somewhere. The Man was sitting cross-legged on a mat with his back against the cedar shingles which I'd had put on the walls to save me the chore of painting the old clap-boards. I remember wondering if the one-piece robe he had on was a replica or if someone had done a deal with the guy who'd won it at the foot of the cross.

‘Hi,' I said. ‘Is it okay if I join you?'

‘Sure.'

I sat down in my uncle's wooden chair which, like most of the other furniture, had come with the house. Miriam must have brought it from the garage for him but I guess chairs were not something he was used to. I blew on my coffee. ‘You had me worried. When I saw the bed, I thought you'd left us.'

He shook his head and smiled. ‘I read through the Bible that Miriam brought, then came down and watched some TV.'

‘What, all night?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘This body doesn't function in the way yours does. It has no need for sleep.' He looked down at this flower he had in his lap and twiddled it around in his fingers. I'm not sure what kind. Red. A geranium I think. Do they come out in April?

‘How far did you get with the Book?' I asked.

‘Oh, I read all of it.' He saw my look of surprise. ‘It's not difficult. You see, whereas you can only absorb written information line by line through your eyes, I am able to absorb the totality of a book just by holding it in my hands.'

I eyed him and got up. ‘This, I've got to see.' I went into the house and returned with the first book that had caught my eye. A paperback copy of Webster's
New World Dictionary of the American Language.
I passed it over to him and sat down. He glanced at the front and back
cover then gripped it firmly in both hands.

‘Are you ready?' I said.

‘Just a minute …' He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply then let his breath out slowly, as if preparing to meditate. It took about thirty seconds and he didn't frown once. He opened his eyes. ‘Amazing language. Very ‘Braxian. Okay, shoot.'

‘Divine truth,' I said. ‘What pages do those words appear on?'

He held the book flat between the palms of his hands and rested his chin against it. ‘Pages 172 and 612.' He offered me the book. ‘Do you want the column and line number as well?'

‘No, that's good enough.' I took the book and checked his answers. He was absolutely right, of course. I leaned back and laid the book on the rail of the verandah. ‘Fantastic,' I said. ‘I suppose you realise that if you could teach people how to do that, you could make a fortune. But then, that's not what you came for.'

‘No,' he said. He picked up the red flower and gazed at it.

And something odd happened. It may have been just a chain reaction of ideas but I had feeling someone else's finger was on the button. That The Man was beaming thought-waves into my brain. The point was I found myself, almost involuntarily, reflecting on how, despite the fundamental role it had played in the development of modern society, money lay like a deadweight upon the world, distorting our true sense of values, suffocating our good intentions. If we had too little of it, we were utterly crushed by the burden of poverty. If we had too much of it, we went in fear of our lives. Living behind high wires fences and electronic alarms. Dogged by security guards. Driving with a gun in the dash. Wealth could make the weak a power in the land; poverty could make slaves of the strong and deprive them of their manhood. Even so, good fortune was a fickle mistress. A mountain of cash had buried many a man and woman alive.

The fate of nations too, hung on the mind-numbing manipulations of the money-markets. Arabian Nights fortunes in recycled petrodollars, deutschmarks, and cuckoo-clock currency were telexed across the globe to bankroll dictators or give the kiss of life to democracies with a bad case of the staggers. For a price, of course. Countries without saleable resources or strategic bases to offer as collateral could find their credit lines cut short. While the breadlines got longer. It was sobering to think of the huge food and grain reserves of North America and the commodity mountains of Europe sitting
there in silos and deep-freeze dungeons while, all over the world, people were going hungry. Yet the food that could alleviate the plight of the undernourished was not shipped, as a matter of course, from the fat nations to the thin. It stayed put, or was pulped, burned or left to rot to keep up commodity prices and because it cost too much to move it. It was unfortunate that people had to die but at least the books balanced. The politicians, financiers and economists never seemed to consider the possibility that we might owe a collective debt to the whole human race.

But who was I to pass judgement? In the past year I had put on a good inch around my waist and left enough food on restaurant plates to feed a family in Kampuchea or the Karamojo for weeks.

Looking back, I realise that it was the first session in a short course of mental hygiene; the object of which was to clear highways and byways of the mind and, in the process, prick my social conscience. Making me more sharply aware of the Gadarene-swinishness of the Me-Generation.

‘What did you make of the New Testament?' I said.

‘A very clever mixture of fact and fiction. Some of the distortions are very subtle, others are blatant bits of promotional material inserted to support the Apostolic Succession and things like the story of Judas are a travesty of the truth. It wasn't like that at all.'

‘I can't wait to get the inside track on all this,' I said. ‘But first, I want to read through it carefully so as I know what I'm talking about. However, there is one question that occurs to me. Why didn't this ‘Brax character, who you said was trying to stop The Truth from getting out, just destroy all the records? That way, no one would have known that you had ever been born in Bethlehem.'

‘What you have to understand,' he said, ‘is that in the final analysis, ‘Brax cannot destroy The Truth. He can only bury it under layers of impenetrable gobbledygook, and bar the way to it by tempting people off the True Path into the morass of the material world where they sink under the weight of their desires and possessions. Don't make the mistake of equating ‘Brax with brute force. He is devious and diabolically clever. He gets a tremendous kick out of knowing that each one of you holds the key to The Truth. The key that could free you from your ‘Braxian cell but which you are too blind to see. And that, even if you
could
see it, the majority of you would not bother to try to unlock the door because he has convinced you that there is nothing beyond the prison walls and that anyone who believes there is should
be regarded with derision. That is why The Word still lives within the corrupted text of the New Testament. It doesn't worry ‘Brax because he knows that most people don't really believe in the being you call God, and those that do have been fed a pack of lies and half-truths. So what has he got to lose?' The Man broke off and gazed into the centre of the red flower. As if to restore an inner harmony that had been disturbed by talking about ‘Brax. He looked up at me with a smile. ‘Incidentally, I see what you mean about the laughs.'

‘There's also no mention of the starship – or longship, as you call it.'

‘No, I didn't tell them about it,' he said. ‘What would have been the point? The Old Testament scribes had enough problems with Ezekiel's trip in the fiery chariot. They related my arrival to the Star of Bethlehem but I didn't go into what that really was. You can't explain space-time travel – especially our brand – in a language that can just barely cope with the wheel. These concepts have to be introduced at the right time. If at all.'

‘Does that mean you're against progress?' I asked.

He smiled. ‘Think of that city you live and work in. Has progress made that a better place? You've become prisoners of the technology you've created.'

‘Oh, wait a minute,' I protested. ‘Don't knock it. What about the developments in science, medicine, transport and communications? Don't tell me they haven't made the world a better place to live in.'

‘Leo,' he said, ‘let me tell you something.' He lifted up the flower again and inspected it, rotating the stalk between finger and thumb. ‘There was a time, before that war we spoke about, when Man knew more about the cosmos than your astronomers have discovered through their telescopes. When he was familiar with the innermost mysteries of matter which your physicists are still constructing theories to explain. When he understood the nature of this flower better than the most brilliant botanist. When the Power within protected him from those who wished him harm. When sickness had not yet entered the world and when it did, could be cured by the touch of a hand. When Man could transport himself to the four corners of the world. Or could touch the stones of power and see whatever he wished and send his inner voice soaring like a sea-bird across oceans and mountains to bring word of his coming or summon far ones to his hearth.' He smiled at me. ‘You want to hear music? Here, take hold of my hand.'