Mission (25 page)

‘Maybe he thinks we need him,' said Miriam.

‘We need something,' I said. ‘Even so, I still find it difficult to relate to the idea that
we
are the aliens. The strangers in a strange land who lost their memory and went to pieces. But on the other hand, it squares with the basic principles of Judaism: observance of the
Torah;
the idea of the divine presence in history; the emphasis on the solidarity of the community and moral virtues.'

And also with Israel's God-given role – to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation;
To be a light unto the nations, to open blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prisons, and them that sit in darkness…
The long forgotten words came back to me.

‘You know, when you think about it,' I said. ‘None of the major religions have a monopoly of the truth, but they all contain part of it. ‘Brax has done a good job keeping everybody at arm's length.'

‘Or at each other's throats,' observed Miriam. ‘If The Man comes back, I'd like the chance to ask some of the questions.'

‘Go ahead,' I said. ‘But don't waste time with the biggies. God is unknowable, and we won't understand the Secret of the Universe until we graduate as sunbeams. But that still leaves you with quite a few questions.'

She smiled at me. ‘What do you plan to do – write down the answers?'

I smiled back at her. ‘I would, if that was what he wanted. Taking dictation is easy. The hard part would be nailing him down long enough to get through from start to finish. You saw what happened on Sunday morning. His movements are totally unpredictable.'

‘Yes, it's a problem …' She tapped another cigarette out of the pack, switched off the plate under the coffee pot and led the way back to the bedroom.

I pocketed the cigarettes and matches and followed, cup in hand. We got back into bed but kept our robes on. She put an ashtray between us. ‘Okay. Now tell me why you
don't
want him back.'

‘Awww, come on,' I said. ‘We've been through most of this. Any reasons I have for wishing to avoid another encounter are inspired by my base animal instincts for self-preservation.'

‘That sounds like the male chauvinist piglet I've come to know and love,' she said. She softened the blow with a kiss on the ear, then
turned out the light and left me to finish my coffee in the dark.

I lay there and asked myself yet again why it was only our lives he'd chosen to turn upside down. In an effort to second-guess his next moves, I had combed the New Testament looking for clues but, after the Resurrection, there was not a lot to go on. The accounts in each of the four gospels differed but it was possible to arrive at a limited consensus. The Man had disappeared when two women called Mary visited the tomb early on Sunday morning, Jerusalem time. Okay. We know where he was – in Manhattan. Two young men in white, probably Michael and Gabriel, appear to the women and tell them not to get too upset. Later, near the empty tomb, the same two women see The Man. At first, they don't recognise him. I have a hunch that what they saw was an image of The Man as he was at a younger age; conjured up from their own memories. Whatever the explanation, he told them not to touch him – ‘…
for I am not yet ascended to my Father': John
20:17. Which must have been right after he disappeared from the morgue. John mentions that it was still dark.
Mark
and
Luke
don't record this appearance.
Luke
has the two men in white,
Mark
only one.
Matthew
also only one ‘angel' who rolls back the stone from the door to the tomb. But in Chapter 28: verse 9, he has Jesus meeting the two Marys – one of whom was Mary Magdalene – and they fall to the ground and grab his feet. In
Matthew
this encounter takes place before dawn; in
Mark,
at sunrise; in
Luke,
early in the morning. So at least they're not too far apart in their timing.

Later that same day around sunset,
Luke
24:17, recounts how The Man met up with two men heading along the road to Emmaus, a village west of Jerusalem on the road to the port of Joppa. These two were from the group of seventy-two ‘sub-disciples' known as the Followers of The Way. As The Man walks with them, they talk about the Crucifixion and he points out how the whole thing relates to the Old Testament prophecies. But despite this extended conversation, the two men don't recognise him. They invite him into their house; he breaks bread with them and disappears. And in the same instant, they realised who they had been talking to, and knew that the promised Resurrection was a reality.

According to Luke, the two men – one of whom was named Cleopas – drop everything and high-tail it back to Jerusalem. Not so. The Man told me later they went to Bethany – which was also on the Joppa road. Ten of the disciples were hiding out there in a house
belonging to friends. The Book mentions
eleven
disciples but Luke's arithmetic, as well as his timing, seems to be wrong at this point if you take John's gospel into account. Unless they were counting Mary Magdalene as ranking with the disciples (as indeed she did and of which more later), or because the number eleven was one of the code signals that are concealed in the Gospel texts. Anyway, Cleopas and his friend arrive but before they could catch their breath and break the good news, The Man appeared in their midst and almost caused a mass cardiac arrest. He calms them down, talks for a while, eats some
gefilte
fish and a little bread, shakes them all by the hand – and vanishes.

The week goes by. Nothing happens. Saturday; he turns up at Sleepy Hollow. Sunday morning we're on the verandah then POW! Back to Jerusalem. Because eight days after his first visit, he reappears in Bethany to show his stigmata to Thomas; the disciple who had missed him the first time around.

I thought about Miriam and The Man in the bedroom and wondered if Thomas had witnessed a similar demonstration. The Book didn't mention The Man's exit but I imagine that he must have walked through the wall, or a locked door because that was when he materialised in my office on the Monday morning.

It was at this point that the trail ran out. The Gospel of St John records him as turning up at Lake Tiberias where the disciples were out fishing. The Man stands on the shore and guides them on to a huge shoal of fish. Later, while reading a commentary on the New Testament I discovered that in the opinion of many Biblical scholars, this episode is out of context. I'm pretty certain that this was one of the many allegorical code messages but I'll tell you what The Man said about that later on. One thing at a time. Even though it probably didn't happen, I like to imagine that he stood in the shallows, and had some kind of sonar built into his ankles. But John's gospel did end on an intriguing note. With something like, ‘…
and there were many things which Jesus did which, if they were all recorded, the world could not contain all the books which would be written'.

I can now tell you what that means. The Man fed the disciples the same information he gave me – with one important difference. I got a brief outline, a word at a time; they got chapter and verse in one blinding mega-volt transmission. The history of the Empire; the Wars of Secession; the creation of the Netherworld; the works. No wonder it blew their minds. Let's face it. God's equivalent of Henry
Kissinger's
The White House Years
must run to quite a few pages.

There was, however, an additional clue to The Man's post-Resurrection movements. Chapter 1 of
Acts
related that The Man showed himself to his disciples – who had now been promoted to Apostles – over a period of forty days, at the end of which they were promised the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Ascension followed, and once more two men in white step out of nowhere and – in the text, at least – dismiss the Twelve in a rather peremptory manner.

Finally, at the Feast of the Pentecost, fifty days after the Crucifixion, the eleven Apostles and a new number twelve, recruited to take the place of the missing Judas, are in this building in Jerusalem. Suddenly the interior is swept by hurricane-force winds; the heads of the Twelve are surrounded by ‘cloven tongues of fire'; they fall down drunk and begin to babble in every language from Ashanti to Zoque.

And that, as they say, is where it all starts happening. Except that The Man drops out of the story. No one saw him after the Ascension although he was alleged to have made voice contact with Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus. Of which, again, more later.

As I lay there, listening to Miriam's sleep-filled breathing, I tried to figure out what might lie ahead. If what one might call the ‘yo-yo' effect continued, there was a strong possibility that The Man could pop up in Manhattan, and into our lives, anytime during the next five weeks.

And then what? After the Feast of Pentecost in first-century Jerusalem, he could head back to the Time Gate or he could come back here and set up shop on a more permanent basis. Depending on what he had in mind. He'd told me, that as far as he knew, this wasn't the end of the world but you only had to look at the global scene to realise that all the ingredients were there.

So far, we had escaped any lasting embarrassment and public exposure. If we stayed lucky, I told myself, the five-week headache we could handle. Whatever happened, we would at least get a good story out of it. Little did I realise, as I sat there in the dark shortening my life with yet another cigarette, that The Man planned to give it such an unexpected twist.

Thursday, 30th April dawned with a bright, clear innocence. I grabbed a quick shower, shared a cup of coffee with Miriam – who went back to bed to drink hers – then rode over to my apartment to change before catching my regular cab downtown. I met Joe Gutzman in the lobby and told him how the case was going as we rode up in the elevator. Linda made it to the office with another saga of missed connections just as I was leaving the building. I found myself involved in an over-the-shoulder conversation in which both of us kept walking and ended up shouting at forty paces. Ridiculous.

In court, it was one of those
blecch
-days. The case had reached the nit-picking stage with impenetrable statements by opposing sets of technical experts. I know this hasn't got anything to do with The Man but perhaps I should just explain that we were seeking to prove that Cleveland Glass were using an industrial glass-making process which was covered by patents filed by my clients – the Delaware Corporation. In other words they were ripping off the advanced technology for free instead of paying over large chunks of money for the privilege of using same. Really gripping stuff. But now you know how I fill the day.

As I sat there listening to a description of molten glass flow control systems, I began mentally adding up the salary bill and overheads for the entire operation and could not help wondering if our talents might not be better employed elsewhere. I concluded that they could but that the world would have to be differently ordered. The only problem was that we had to wait until the Twentieth-Century Flier plunged into the ravine before we could build the New Jerusalem. Until that happened, there was only one thing to do: take the money and run.

I returned to the office after court recessed for the day and heaved a sigh of relief Because – in case you hadn't thought of it – there was always the possibility that The Man could have turned up in the middle of the proceedings. Looking back, I realise that I was wrong to be worried. A public appearance would have made him everybody's problem; not just mine. The fact is, of course, I was worrying for all the wrong reasons. I was so scared that I might be exposed to scorn, ridicule and even physical danger; so concerned with the preservation of my professional standing and the benefits it conferred that not once did I ever seriously consider the implications of why he had chosen to appear to me, and not on the steps of St Patrick's Cathedral. Later, when his purpose was revealed to me, it all made sense but at this point, in the second week of this mind-blowing adventure, I was still totally blinded by self-interest.

Although he hadn't asked for anything, I had the feeling that he was waiting for a new ‘me' to emerge. I had begun waking up in the middle of the night; seized by the fear that he might suddenly fix me with those golden hawk-eyes and say ‘Follow me'. He'd tapped a lawyer called Philip to be one of the Twelve. I could only pray to God that The Man wasn't planning a new whirlwind ministry. Because if he was, I would have to take a rain-check. I didn't have what it takes – and I didn't want to have it either. I wanted to stay safely inside the fifty per cent silk/fifty per cent acrylic fibre cocoon I'd spun for myself. I had everything going for me. The Twelve might have been given the gift of the Spirit but, as I'd already had cause to reflect, it hadn't exactly enhanced their career prospects. Like them, I was now party to the secret that I was just a carrier-bag for some jigsaw puzzle pieces of the imprisoned Ain-folk, but that fact did not make me any less eager to go on living. Correctly serviced, my body had another good thirty to thirty-five years on the road and I was determined to get the maximum mileage out of it. If I got hit by a truck, the ghost I gave up would only go into parking orbit, or maybe have its parts pigeon-holed until it was called off the rank, or reassembled in the correct astrological configuration and slotted into a newly-conceived foetus for another roller-coaster ride through the Earth-World Amusement Park. My death, I told myself, in his name, or in the name of any other cause, would have absolutely no effect on the outcome of the struggle between the Empire and ‘Brax.

The Man talked about the fragmented Ain-folk being consigned, upon the death of their human hosts, to a nightmarish plane of existence from which physical rebirth was the only escape. Perhaps this
was the extra-dimensional world that western devotees of the Hereafter had labelled Limbo. Maybe, in their desire to escape, some of the disembodied Ain-folk fragments tried to jump the queue and ended up wrestling for control of the nascent embryo. It would explain those baffling cases of ‘multiple personality' where anything from two to a dozen or more distinct identities fought for elbow room within a single body. And if, in the confusion, some of the Old Testament-type demons managed to smuggle themselves aboard, the resulting conflict could manifest itself as violent insanity. Demonic possession could be a literal fact; not just a philosophical proposition; or a psychological or neural disorder. And it would also make possible the birth of totally Satanic individuals. The historical antiChrists whose presence, or impending arrival had exercised the minds of Christian scholars over the centuries.