The Fire Gospel Read online

  Bad news, so much bad news on TV. But suddenly the network became aware of having transgressed the laws of entertainment, and offered penance in the form of a very brief report on a Japanese businessman who had bought John Lennon’s bathrobe at auction for $350,000. ‘John Lennon is revered here in Japan,’ the businessman explained, in near-perfect English. ‘This robe is full of history in so many ways. It was the robe he was wearing on the morning that his first wife Cynthia found him to have spent the night with Yoko. So it was not only next to John’s skin, but . . . who knows what else?’ To which the female anchorperson, as a way of bringing the pre-recorded segment to a cosy conclusion, added: ‘Well, Howard, do you think maybe it’s been washed a couple times since 1968?’, allowing Howard to bounce back: ‘I certainly hope so.’

  And that was it as far as news went; sport would follow ‘after the break’.

  Theo had been leaning forward, straining to hear. He now tried to lean back, to rest his head against the well-stuffed fabric of the armchair. But the way he’d been tied up didn’t really permit it. Abruptly, he was energised by a vehement kind of claustrophobia, a deep conviction that he couldn’t endure this any longer, and he lunged against his constraints. For the duration of his lunge, perhaps two seconds, he was able to imagine himself snapping the legs of the armchair – cheap, spindly legs weakened by woodworm, perhaps – and jumping to his feet with a mighty gasp of relief, Prometheus unbound. It was a wonderful vision. But nothing more.

  ‘Campbell signed a two-year contract in the offseason,’ chattered the TV, ‘that could be worth up to 10.5 million dollars. He’s expected to split time with last year’s starter Duke LaMont as the Giants try to improve a running game that averaged 4.3 yards per carry . . .’

  ‘Excuse me?’ called Theo weakly. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Whaddaya want, minion of Satan?’ the white guy snapped back.

  For a few seconds, Theo had difficulty thinking of a reply. He wasn’t used to being called ‘minion of Satan’, except in Amazon reviews.

  ‘I’m very thirsty,’ he said, and it was true. His voice was hoarse and it hurt him to speak. ‘May I have a drink of water?’

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend it, pal.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What goes in must come out. Don’t want to get yourself all wet, do you?’

  Theo considered this for a moment. ‘I’ll take the risk,’ he croaked. ‘My throat feels like it’s lined with hot ashes.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  The two strange men resumed their conversation. However, a new note of tension had entered it, and after a minute or two, the Arab lost his patience and spoke a lot louder.

  ‘If he’s gonna speak for the broadcast, he will need a voice. A voice that sounds like him, like he should sound! If he sounds weird, people will say the tape is a fake.’

  A couple of minutes passed. Then a dark hand hovered near Theo’s face, holding a can of Pepsi.

  ‘Open up, man.’

  Theo pursed his lips and allowed the Arab to trickle the cola into his parched mouth. It stung like blazes. Water would have been better. Maybe this was part of the torture. Or maybe this was the kind of bachelor apartment where there were never any clean cups or glasses to put water in.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Theo. Spilled cola was fizzing on his stubbly chin, and in the fibres of his shirt. His throat felt better, though.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said the Arab instinctively, and retreated from view.

  They made him wait, these guys: oh, how they made him wait. The Arab walked past him several times, fetching food and drink for his friend, who remained installed in front of the TV. The Arab was a smallish young man, dressed in American casuals. His skin contrasted nicely with the blue of his shirt. Theo considered calling out Hey, nice shirt! or something similar, in case it made any difference. But he was inhibited by how artificial that would sound. Despite having been abducted and tied to an armchair by two desperate characters, possibly psychotics who were planning to murder him, he was too embarrassed to utter compliments that were transparent attempts to ingratiate himself. Instead, he called ‘Excuse me?’ and ‘Hello?’ every so often, suspecting that this was precisely the wussy-ass course of action pursued by doomed hostages just before they received a bullet through the brain.

  Over on the other side of the room, the TV news had given way to a rerun of a comedy show from the mid-1990s.

  ‘Are you watching this?’ said the Arab after a while.

  There was no audible reply from the white guy, but he must have indicated No, because the Arab said, ‘Then why don’t we turn it off?’

  ‘There could be a newsflash.’

  ‘A newsflash about what? About us?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Forget it, man. What you think they’re gonna say? They found out where we live and the cops are on their way? If that happens, for sure there won’t be a tip-off on the TV.’

  ‘But I don’t wanna be Switzerland!’ whined a voice on the TV, followed by a burst of what sounded like a flock of ravenous seagulls: the laughter track of a typical American sitcom.

  ‘Jews, man!’ said the Arab testily. ‘Do we have to watch these Jews? Talking about nothing, laughing about nothing; empty lives, man! And this Seinfeld guy, I read about him, he’s the richest man in show business, he’s got his own aircraft hangar where he puts all these Porsches he never drives, because he’s got a chauffeur. It’s everything that’s wrong with this country, man! You hear those people laughing their heads off? They’re laughing at us, man.’

  ‘Calm down, Nuri. You’re being paranoid.’

  ‘Me, paranoid? When you’re sitting there in front of a Jew comedy rerun waiting for a newsflash about you? There won’t be a newsflash, man, until we’ve done the tape. Then there’ll be a newsflash.’

  Theo hung his head onto his chest, inhaling the aromas of smoke-impregnated shirt and sugary cola. The tape. This was the second reference they’d made to the tape. The tape of his execution? Theo tried to imagine himself as the sort of person who survives a deadly ordeal and writes a book about it afterwards. I made a mental list of everything I’d learned so far. (1) – One of my captors was called Nuri. (2) – I was expected to speak on a tape, for the purpose of an as-yet-unspecified broadcast. All of a sudden, in a flash of inspiration, I realised the key to my escape. Theo closed his eyes, the better to see the flash of inspiration. He saw only darkness.

  A warm hand slapped him gently on the cheek. He opened his eyes. Once more, the two strange faces loomed before him. The Arab’s expression betrayed more stress than before, his lush black eyebrows almost knitted together.

  The white guy looked slightly more relaxed, or perhaps just more spaced out. ‘This had to happen, you know that, don’t you?’ he drawled, in an oddly sensuous tone. ‘We’re just playing our parts.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ said Theo, ‘but if I’ve upset you personally in any way . . .’

  ‘You will atone,’ the white guy assured him. ‘You will atone.’

  Several hours later, Theo had learned all he wanted to, and more, about the two men’s motives in kidnapping him.

  The short answer was that they felt that The Fifth Gospel was interfering with the natural function of the socio-political landscape, and they wanted him to recite a prepared speech on video camera, which they would then distribute to the media.

  The long answer was, in Theo’s estimation, two hours longer than it needed to be. A transcript of it would have filled a book, and that book, if a publisher had taken it on, would have cried out for a clearheaded editor. But the story as told by Nuri and his unnamed white associate would never be subjected to an editor’s scrutiny; it was inscribed on these guys’ mushy brains, in microscopic, incoherent, half-dissolved handwriting, an intricate labour of love that only they could decode.

  Nuri’s beef with The Fifth Gospel, as far as Theo could make sense of it, was that it was a tool of Zionism. Malchus’s story
demoralised Christians and made them doubt the Godhood of Christ. This lent credence to the Jews’ contention that Jesus was not the Messiah, and encouraged those Christians who were not quite ready to ditch the Bible altogether to regard the New Testament as a spurious addendum to the Old. Already in some states of America and, for some unknown reason, in Romania and Hungary, there was an upsurge of brand new Christian sects, who believed that the Christ was yet to come and could be identified by rigorous study of the Old Testament. There’d been TV footage of converts demonstrating in Balkan towns, holding Bibles aloft and ceremonially slicing off the New Testament with a sharp knife through the spine. Nuri couldn’t care less about these sects, and thought they were crazy. He was a Muslim. What he cared about was that these sects were a symptom of Christianity in disarray and a shift towards the Torah as the supreme religious authority in the West. Inevitably, this would strengthen the self-confidence of the Jews, help their recruitment, and lead to a gross expansion of Zionism, which in turn would add to the misery of the Palestinians. The insidious progress towards Zionist supremacy would be twofold: key members of the American administration would defect from Christianity and convert to the Jewish faith, and their policies would meet with less opposition than usual because thousands of voters would be embracing Judaism likewise. Thus, the memoirs of Malchus would, in time, prove directly responsible for a total genocide of Muslims in Palestine.

  The white guy’s theory, comparatively speaking, was a little bizarre. It lacked the political acuity of Nuri’s analysis, and its logical structure was less sound. Also, it was heavy on the polysyllables, which, given that the guy had the physical appearance and accent Theo might expect of a trolley collector at Wal-Mart, gave his whole spiel an air of incongruity. Might the guy merely be parroting the contents of a book? If so, his memorising and regurgitating skills were impressive.

  The gist of the argument, if the word ‘gist’ could be applied to a vat of refried beans, was that Jesus had never existed in corporeal form, but was a hologram, or pan-focal dwell-point, brought into being by God. The so-called disciples were magickal adepts, biospiritual channels, whose sacred task was to transform input from God into hologrammatical output. In selected locations – the seashore at Galilee, the wedding at Cana, Golgotha and so on – they would stand in special positions and, through mutual focus, create a synchronised manifestation of a living pseudoperson, i.e. Jesus. The historical impact of these manifestations was part of an ongoing project on God’s part to improve the human race; an event like the crucifixion was intended as an evolutionary trigger, propelling chosen individuals to become prototypes for a superior form of Homo sapiens. Trouble was, Satan was also a player in this game, and his agenda was to prevent these evolutionary advances, and keep mankind in a state of brutish ignorance, so that, instead of embracing pure living and sexual abstinence, they fell into the clutches of sin, and ended up in Hell.

  At this point, the white guy had paused in his explanation, and fetched some sort of shrinkwrapped muffin and a Pepsi, because he’d been talking for a long time without food or drink, and besides his throat was a little raw too, having inhaled the same smoke as Theo.

  ‘So . . . uh . . . where do I come in?’ Theo ventured to ask.

  ‘Satan is the Prince of Lies,’ said the white guy, munching on his muffin. ‘And Malchus was one of his channels. Malchus was chosen by Satan to undermine the power of the crucifixion. The adepts were onto him, but he outsmarted them, and hid the scrolls in a pregnant belly. Because God does not look into pregnant bellies. It’s part of the deal with Gaia.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Theo.

  ‘Not many people know that. But it explains why there’s birth defects, miscarriages, stuff like that. God could theoretically look in there and fix it, but, like I said, that was the deal.’

  ‘It sounds like a bad deal.’

  The white guy shrugged. ‘The universe needs to keep in harmony with the female principle,’ he said, without much enthusiasm.

  ‘So, uh . . . how do I fit into the scheme of things?’

  ‘You were fooled by Satan’s lies, and you’ve translated them, and you’ve poisoned the world with your book. But the media is open to antidotes as well as poisons. So, we’re gonna sit you in front of a video camera, and you’re gonna undo the damage you’ve done.’

  ‘By explaining to the viewers what you’ve just explained to me?’

  The white guy laughed out loud, revealing large, irregular teeth. ‘Are you kidding? Nobody would believe that. The truth is too complicated and most people’s minds can’t handle it. They can only handle a simple story. A real simple story.’ He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded square of paper. ‘So . . . we’ve written one for you.’

  Interlude: A Prophecy

  Less than a day after the end of this book, the following will come to pass:

  Meredith and her boyfriend will be cooling off after making love, allowing the sweat to evaporate from their naked bodies. Meredith will take a swig from the Perrier bottle next to the bed. The water has gone lukewarm in the broiling heat of Paris.

  The TV is still on and, now that their lovemaking is over, it seems unnecessarily loud. Meredith wishes that it hadn’t been necessary to switch it on in the first place, but Robert is in the habit of making extraordinary noises when approaching orgasm, and each morning she has to face the other guests in the breakfast room.

  It has gone on long enough, this holiday. She’s tired of the heat, the shopping for clothes she isn’t French enough to fit into, Robert’s bellowing in bed, his useless info about camera apertures and narrow escapes from predators. She is even a little tired of her own orgasms. They’re like an addiction to blintzes or something; she keeps having more, when she’s only just had the last, and no sooner does she tell herself that she’ll never need another one in her whole life, than she’s being jigged on the bed with her knees against Robert’s ears and her toes banging against the polished brass of the bedhead.

  She pours a little of the Perrier into her palm, and splashes it on her forehead. The TV has progressed to the news. A French voice is saying something about Le Cinquième Évangile. Then a video of Theo comes on. He is sitting in an armchair, in a casual pose, wearing exactly the sort of horrible shirt he always threatened to buy when he was with her. He looks OK despite it. He isn’t wearing his glasses, and looks better for that, too.

  ‘I want to apologise,’ he says, and a simultaneous translation flashes across the bottom of the screen: Je veux demander pardon.

  Lamentations

  Theo smiled sheepishly into the beam of light trained on him from a desk lamp. The white guy allowed the second-last cue card to fall to the floor and held aloft the final portion of text. As on the previous sheets, the words were printed giant sized and correctly spelled. At the very bottom, handwritten in red pen, was the message WAVE AT THE CAMERA.

  ‘And . . . and that’s all I have to say, really,’ said Theo. ‘When I made this stuff up, I never thought it would lead to anyone getting hurt. I just wanted to get rich and I figured that fooling people was a good way to do it. It was a lousy thing to do and I don’t expect you to forgive me. But please forgive me anyway. And . . . uh . . . put my book in the trash can where it belongs, OK?’

  He waved awkwardly at the camera, as per instruction. Nuri switched off the taping mechanism. Silence descended. The shotgun lay across the white guy’s knees, pointed at Theo, just as before. Theo was naturally rather curious whether, now that the videotape was in the bag, he would be allowed to live.

  ‘How did I do?’ he asked, his voice catching.

  ‘You did great,’ said the white guy, without any perceptible emotion.

  ‘Well, I did my best,’ said Theo, fresh sweat breaking out on his forehead. This time, Nuri did not lean over with a white cloth and dab it up. ‘The little hesitations . . . I don’t know if you noticed, but they were deliberate, actually. I thought they made it sound more natural. Lik
e I was thinking on my feet, you know?’

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ said the white guy.

  Theo sat back gingerly in the armchair, folding his hands in his lap, in slow motion. Maybe if he didn’t make any conspicuous movements with his arms, these guys would let him stay untied for a while longer. It was wonderful to have his arms free. Even if he couldn’t put them to any particular use, it was still a divine relief not to have ten yards of packing twine digging into his wrists.

  ‘Tie him up again,’ said the white guy.

  Nuri and the white guy sat on the couch with the TV on, and played back the videotape to check it was OK. A babel of voices ensued. On TV, a chef explained the difference between frying and searing, while Theo’s confession was fast-forwarded and rewound repeatedly, while Nuri and the white guy discussed the merits and demerits of the recording.

  ‘Cut out the pauses,’ the white guy decided. ‘They’re useless. Dead air.’

  ‘The TV people will cut them out, if they need to,’ said Nuri. ‘They’ve got equipment.’

  ‘We shouldn’t tempt them. They might cut out more than they should. If we give ’em something they can broadcast just the way it comes, they might leave it alone.’

  ‘They’ll leave it alone anyway,’ said Nuri. ‘This is dynamite news, man. This is what they call a scoop.’ He pronounced this last word with a typically Arabic inflection, making it sound like a central tenet of Islam.