The Fire Gospel Read online

  I ask you, brothers and sisters, to imagine an iron spike brought near to the soft skin of your wrist, with the sure anticipation that in the next few moments, a mallet will drive that spike through your flesh and the bones. Who among us would not flinch? Who among us would lie calm and say, Do what you must?

  In the garden where I met him first, our beloved Jesus gave himself to be sacrificed; that was his supreme act of courage. I witnessed the maker of the world deliver himself to be unmade. Simon asks again and again, Why was there no miracle? To which I say, How much more miraculous a miracle does Simon require, than that the Lord of all creation takes mortal form, and gives himself to be slaughtered? How strange it is that Simon was granted the privilege of daily companionship with Jesus, eating and walking and sitting with him, and receiving into his ears, that is to say into Simon’s ears, all the wisdoms that Jesus spoke, and yet he understood nothing? Whereas I, who was in the presence of our Saviour only twice, and who possess not even two whole ears to hear with, have understood everything? But no more of Simon.

  The soldiers placed their knees on our Lord’s arms to keep them still, and tied him to the crossbeam. Then they drove the spikes through the wrists of our dear Jesus. He cried out and two spouts of blood gushed up into the air. The soldiers worked quickly to finish their task, so that the wounds could soon be lifted high above the heart, and our Saviour should not be afforded the mercy of a death by bleeding. The crowd cheered as the cross settled upright into its hole. Forgive them, my friends. They did not hate Jesus. They did not hate any of the men being tortured that day.

  Brothers and sisters, you have never witnessed a crucifixion; I pray that you never shall, for it is a terrible thing, arousing passions impossible to explain. All I will say is that there is a joy in seeing a difficult thing achieved. Two heavy beams of wood lie upon the ground, with a heavy man upon them (for Jesus, modest in stature though he was, was not small in girth); thus, when the lifting begins, also begins the doubt, whether such a weight might defeat the efforts of the lifters. Watching their exertions, one forgets the evil of the enterprise, and wishes only to add one’s strength to the labour. The soldiers groan, their faces turn red, the laden cross dips back towards the earth, and there is many a man in the crowd who leans his shoulder forward, as it were to share the burden. And many a woman also.

  Brothers and sisters, I am reminded that you asked me which of the disciples was present on that day. It is not an easy question to answer. Firstly, because a crucifixion lasts longer than a day; it is a torture rather than an execution, and there is rarely more than one victim finished by nightfall. The biggest crowd comes on the first day, but each day afterwards, a smaller crowd returns to see what progress has been made towards death. Secondly, when I came to Golgotha I was not yet acquainted with any of the disciples except Judas, and perhaps a couple of others I glimpsed in Gethsemane in poor light. I think I would remember the face of the man who cut off my ear. But I never saw that face again.

  So, I can answer with certainty only in respect of the women. For they were already known to me, as the wives and daughters of elders of the temple. Six or seven I saw there on Golgotha, huddled together for comfort. Rebekah and Abishag, whom you know from my other letters, and also the female kinfolk of other elders, including the daughter of Caiaphas himself.

  How I despised those women, only a week before! Caiaphas and I discussed their dangerous foolishness, I recall, when first they fell under the spell of the uncouth prophet from Capernaum. We likened Jesus to a mad dog with a slavering mouth, afflicting the first woman with a contagion, which then spread from woman to woman, leaping from one empty head into the next. Or, say rather, one empty hole to the next, said Caiaphas, and I laughed like a jackass. How I squirmed with delight, at the honour of sharing a joke with the High Priest of the temple! And how much louder I would have laughed, if someone had dared prophesy to me that within a week I would be suffering the same contagion as those women! Oh, sweet contagion! May it spread from mouth to mouth and heart to heart, until the whole world is sick!

  But to return to the story. The women of Jesus came to Golgotha, united in their sorrow. The daughter of Caiaphas was, as always, very beautiful, and her weeping made her no less so. Some women are ugly when weeping; others not. But I stray from the question; forgive me. As I have explained already, I cannot give an accurate account of the male disciples. There is no reason to doubt that Simon was there; we may mistrust everything about Simon, but not that. James and Andrew, as you know, became my friends in the weeks and months afterwards. They both swear that they were present, and it pains me to doubt them, for they love our Jesus with all their hearts; yet their memories of the particulars are at odds with what I witnessed with my eyes. All I will say is, If they were with us, they did not stay long.

  Among the crucified that day was a man called Barnahy, whose onlookers were a large part of the crowd. He died quickly, because, as I heard, he was given poison by his brother. After the death of Barnahy, much of the crowd drifted back into town. If you have made a study, as I have, of the behaviour of people, you will know that they are like herds of cattle. A thing attracts one or two of their number, and others follow, and soon there is a multitude. Then somebody goes away, and one or two follow, then a dozen, and soon the multitude has vanished.

  So it was on Golgotha. There was a jostling crowd to see our Saviour nailed up, but most of them had gone before the sun went down; and after Jesus was dead, the crowd dwindled to twenty or less. Our vigil on that hill, that is to say the vigil kept by the women and myself, waiting for our Lord to be taken off the cross, and watching the birds flying in circles around his head, was more lonely than I can tell. A few more disciples, if they had been there with us, might have allowed the time to pass more easily. Several other men were on that hill, waiting for their own brothers or fathers to be taken down, but, as I recall it, only Malchus and the women were waiting for Jesus. It is a difficult thing, to wait and not know when the waiting will end. Even so, I might have expected fishermen to be more patient in that respect.

  But I see I have leapt to the end of the story, without telling the middle. Let us return, then, to the time when our dear Jesus was not yet dead. Forgive my leaping to and fro, brothers and sisters. I am a gossip by profession, not a historian. Also, my wretched state of health allows me to put pen to paper only once or twice a day, whereafter I must rest. If I were stronger, I might tell a better tale, a tale that flies from beginning to end with the sureness of an arrow. But what I have written I cannot unwrite.

  So: the cross, with Jesus upon it, stood upright in its hole. It was the last cross to be erected that day. Six criminals were fixed in their places, with our Saviour sixth in the row. For the first hour, the spectacle on Golgotha was of the kind that holds the attention of a large crowd. The crucified men squirm and wriggle. They appear as unrestful sleepers, struggling in vain to find a position of comfort. Or they appear as men in the throes of carnal delight. But after a while, their movements become fewer, and each finds his own modest way of drawing the next breath. This is the juncture at which the crowds drift away, leaving only the dying man’s family and friends.

  Jesus cried out, Father, why have you forsaken me? and then hung in silence for a long time. His eyes were swollen and open, his mouth likewise. I waited. Other onlookers lost patience and turned their heads to watch elsewhere, but I kept my eyes unswervingly on Jesus. Finally his jaw began to turn, like the jaw of a cow. He uttered sounds I could not hear. I thought he might be speaking, or readying himself to speak, and I wished very much to hear the words. I walked closer, and, because the soldiers knew me, they allowed me to approach the cross, even to touch it. I gazed up at our beloved, in the shadow of his nakedness.

  Please, somebody, please finish me, he cried. These were the last words that came from his mouth during his torment, although he spoke to me in other ways, which I will shortly describe.

  His arms trembled fearsomely as he stro
ve to pull himself higher, then he slipped down once more, and his innards opened of themselves. His urine fell on my face, and a foul liquid poured down the cross onto my hand. I heard the laughter of many in the crowd, and raucous advice in the Roman tongue. But I cared nothing for that. The urine of our Saviour burned on my forehead, burned through my skull into my soul. My eyes were blinded, and yet I could see more clearly than ever before.

  I saw the world as it were from on high, higher than the highest mountain. The people far below, also the crowd assembled at Golgotha, seemed to me smaller than ants; and in their dispersing they were as raindrops on hot sand. The houses of the city were mere pebbles; the temple was a bauble in the dust.

  And in my skull, the voice of Jesus spoke, saying, This world is a dream; its joys and sorrows are dreams. Rome is a dream, as is Jerusalem. Only I, Jesus, am. I am God, the maker and unmaker of worlds. I am the commander of angels, and yet I see the lame one hurrying home when the sun sets, and the widow tossing in her sleep.

  Of what am I composed? I am composed of all who believe in me. Together, we are both perfect and mighty.

  And I say, Come, little raindrop: come into me.

  Revelations

  The first thing Theo was aware of when he regained consciousness was that he couldn’t breathe. His arms were entirely numb; he wasn’t even sure if he still had them. Maybe they’d been blown off ? There was a stink of smoke in his clothing. Not cigarette smoke: bonfire-type smoke. His mouth was fused shut, as if the flesh was horribly burned, melted. He struggled to breathe through his nose, which was half blocked with crusted blood.

  ‘He’s suffocating, maybe,’ said a voice. ‘Shall we take the tape off now?’

  ‘He’ll holler,’ said another voice.

  ‘Nobody can hear him here,’ said the first voice. Young men, both.

  Strong fingers dug into Theo’s cheek, found what they were feeling for, and ripped a rectangle of adhesive off his lips. He gasped in pain and relief.

  Two faces loomed into his field of vision. One was a handsome Arab, with a glossy black kiss-curl and cupid lips; the other was a butt-ugly white guy of some sort, with no chin, thick glasses, a bulbous forehead and a few wisps of frizzy hair. A circus clown after five courses of chemotherapy.

  ‘We’re gonna make you sorry you ever lived,’ the white guy promised, in a tone of voice that inspired belief.

  The last thing Theo could remember before waking up in this strange apartment, bound hand and foot on a fat, fake-velour armchair, was taking questions from the audience at Pages bookstore. He had a clear mental picture of the assembled multitude, and no recollection of how he had got away from them.

  His reading had been the usual set piece – Malchus’s account of the crucifixion, edited to fit into the allotted twenty-five minutes – and his voice had held out OK. Then it was over and the assembled book lovers were doing their usual pluralistic thing: looking cool and unconcerned, looking distraught, weeping, shaking their heads, staring into their laps, glancing at their watches, serenely thumbing text messages into their cellphones, swaying in a trance of anguish, and so on.

  In his journey across the United States, as sales of The Fifth Gospel had ignited beyond all forecasts, Theo had seen plenty of evidence of the book’s power to devastate people, but he preferred to concentrate on evidence to the contrary. Just as an author of critically despised fiction may cling forever to a kind review in the Sunday Times in 1987 comparing him favourably to Thackeray, Theo clung to whatever he could, in his attempt to see The Fifth Gospel as an exhilarating historical discovery and a triumph of the translator’s craft. Yeah, sure, there was widespread grief, but it was just one response among many; a minority response, maybe, even. What about that old man in Atlanta who said the book had reconciled him with his daughter? What about the guy in . . . in . . . forget the exact town, but the bookstore with the papier mâché bust of Shakespeare in its coffee shop? The guy there said that The Fifth Gospel was a breath of fresh air in the endlessly recycled atmosphere of Biblical scholarship. And then there was that young woman in Wilmington, a bit flaky admittedly, but friendly, who borrowed his signing pen to write her email address on her business card, so that they could continue their fascinating conversation about Aramaic in a ‘more relaxed context’, i.e. a context where there were no freaked-out people hanging around who looked as though they’d just had their souls ripped out.

  Anyway, every town was different and you had to take each crowd on its own merits, and the New York crowd had been mixed, nothing out of the ordinary, no histrionics. Definitely cooler than some. The Q&A session, in Theo’s opinion, was going fine, especially considering that he was out of his fucking mind with stress and ‘erbil’ medication at the time. Then a little guy in a golf shirt and checked pants said, ‘Mr Griffin, have you heard the news from Kansas?’

  ‘Kansas?’ He considered making a Wizard of Oz joke, but had an instinct he shouldn’t. ‘What happened in Kansas?’

  ‘A fifteen-year-old girl has just shot herself, like two hours ago. The cops found your book next to her on the bed.’

  An uneasy murmur passed through the audience.

  ‘That’s . . . uh . . . terrible. Tragic. Awful,’ said Theo. ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Griffin, she is dead.’

  Theo said: ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Well, the news reporter said that this girl read your book and lost all hope in life. What do you think about that, Mr Griffin?’

  ‘Grippin,’ interjected the bookstore employee who was MCing the event, in a polite but authoritative tone. ‘Our guest this evening is Mr Theo Grippin.’

  ‘I don’t care what the hell his name is,’ said the little guy, abruptly angry. ‘What I wanna know is—’

  And then . . . then what? A blinding light. A blow to the head. Darkness. And, after what seemed like several weeks of frustrated attempts to regain consciousness, a slow rematerialisation in this shabby apartment that smelled of old pizza and kebab juice. Even the armchair to which he was bound had that smell.

  The apartment was eerily ill lit, with the ambience of a garage. Its contours were fuzzy. Actually, its contours weren’t fuzzy: Theo’s vision was. He had lost his glasses in the fracas at Pages.

  ‘Where am I?’ he called out. The two guys had moved to the other side of the room from where Theo was trussed up. They were conversing in soft voices, indecipherable to Theo because of the constant chatter issuing from a big old TV.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, pal,’ retorted the white guy.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ added the Arab.

  ‘They’re expecting me in Boston,’ said Theo. It was a dumb thing to say, obviously, but until he knew more about his abductors, everything he said was equally smart or dumb. He needed to engage them in dialogue.

  ‘Your book tour is over, pal,’ said the white guy.

  ‘Live with it,’ said the Arab.

  Theo tugged at his bonds. He reasoned that if he could tug and not achieve any result, he must still possess intact arms and hands, even though he couldn’t feel them. They must have gone numb from the constriction or the unnatural angle. He was half seated, half slumped in the armchair, not upright enough to be properly supported but not low down enough to lie. His arms were draped over the padded arm rests, and he guessed that each of his wrists must be tethered to one of the back legs of the chair. His ankles were tied too, presumably to the front chair legs. He could hardly have been more uncomfortable if he’d been chained to a rock.

  The chatter on the TV had metamorphosed from inane commercials to the news. A nasal female anchorperson repeated the afternoon’s top stories. One of those was Theo’s.

  ‘Police are still searching for the two men who abducted controversial author Theo Grippin from Pages Bookstore in Penn Plaza, Manhattan at 9 p.m. last night. The kidnappers made their escape under cover of smoke from flare guns. Tragically, one of the flares set the store alight and three people lost their
lives before the fire brigade arrived on the scene. Another ten people suffered burns and smoke inhalation; two of them are in a critical condition. Gloria McKinley reports from Manhattan.’

  A different nasal female spoke. ‘When Pages opened here in Penn Plaza last year, it dreamed of being the most popular bookstore in New York, with catchphrases like “All things to all readers” and “When is a chain not a chain?” As you can see behind me, that dream has turned to ashes. Mitch Merritt is the manager of Pages. Mitch, how do you feel?’

  ‘Well, not too good, pretty bad in fact.’ It was the Pixies guy. ‘As you can see, our store is a mess. The fire and the water have destroyed a large proportion of what we had here, books and other stuff; the damage bill is gonna be in the region of . . . I can’t even think about it. But of course those people who died . . . that’s the real tragedy. We’re in shock, all of us here at Pages, we’re in shock.’

  ‘Mitch, thank you.’

  The report moved on to a précis of The Fifth Gospel, for the benefit of those viewers who weren’t yet aware of what the anchorperson called its ‘inflammatory’ nature. Theo noted that she put the emphasis on the fourth syllable, vocalising ‘oary’ as a honking diphthong, which reminded Theo of arguments he’d once had with Meredith about her annoying habit of saying ‘interplanetoary’ when she meant ‘interplanetary’, and ‘cemetairy’ when she meant ‘cemetery’.

  I’m going to die, he thought. And the last thing on my mind will be pedantic little linguistic hang-ups.

  The TV news, having devoted more than three minutes to The Fifth Gospel and its tragic consequences, moved on to another calamity: Iraq. The female anchorperson deferred to the male anchorperson, whose name was Howard. He solemnly informed viewers (or, in Theo’s case, listeners) that a particular town near Baghdad had seen ‘some of the fiercest fighting since the end of the war’. Statistics of various kinds were given, but Theo was still absorbing his own story, struggling to retrieve a phrase he’d barely taken in while busy obsessing over Meredith’s pronunciation of ‘cemetery’. It was something about police and urgent appeals for information. It was proof, in other words, that nobody had a clue where he might have been taken, or by whom, and that there was therefore zero chance of a lightning rescue.