Gospel (79 page)

(Patrick, you do not know what is in store for you ahead. And nor does Lucy. O My children, so much you have not counted upon.)

When I come back to Greece, thought Lucy, walking the deck, running her hand along the rail, I will call up Stavros to get another look at him, to see if he's grown up, maybe start a less rambunctious, less immature affair. I don't exactly love him, she told herself, but I love what happened and he was part of that.

“Halloo,” said the sweet-faced baggage boy in his pressed white uniform, waving to her as he hauled someone's suitcases to an upper deck.

“
Iasoo,
” said Lucy, making him laugh for her effort.

They're not so impossible and unobtainable, men. She decided: They're much more simple than I thought, less complicated and implacable. That baggage boy, all of fifteen, could be
had,
for God's sake.

(A little young for you.)

No, of course she wouldn't seduce him, but such things
could
be done, couldn't they? A gentle kiss, an invitation to her room when his duty ended. I would be the older, rich American adventuress and he would flatter himself in retelling the event to his friends for years to come. I could change the course of his life on a whim if I wanted to; I could scar him … or I could seduce him and ask for his address and write him love letters for years and meet up with him again and, indeed, change his future with minimal effort, deprive the Greek girl that would have married him of her destiny, change Mediterranean history, perhaps. All on a whim of an evening. I never knew humans had such powers.

(All the free will in the world.)

And I see now, thought Lucy, how easy it would be to mess with people, abuse your power with them, trifle with them and hurt them. Like Stavros trifled with me. Although, I really think, his millions of women aside, he did like me. Perhaps I will write him, after all.

(He won't write you back.)

And actually I trifled with him too.

(Not something to be so proud of, My child.)

Lucy then stopped at the rail and let the wind blow her dress between her legs and rearrange her hair, tickling the back of her neck. To be moving, to be at sea again, with Jerusalem ahead! But the Holy Lands gave way to thoughts of the silly onboard disco, where there was no shortage of good-looking men on the ship to dance with … and who knows, Lucy smiled, I do have a cabin to myself.

(Yes, tonight you will dance and go to bed in a haze of exchanged flirtations, liberties taken by handsome Cypriot soldiers, a kiss, a squeeze, a fog of one too many metaxas. And it will be the first night at sea that you don't think to pray to Us and ask the boat not to sink, and it is good that you fear your world less and less. But will you forget Us entirely, My dear? We have lost so much good company through the ages.)

Oh, sighed Lucy, feeling the sweetness of this escaping day to her very soul, I must make it a point never to die. And to keep traveling and keep meeting new people, and I must make it a point to fall in love with frequency so I am never without this full, swooning heart. I do like this world, she thought, hugging herself in the growing Aegean chill, looking upon the Evening Star, feeling less in need of gods as she sailed to the mysterious and sanctified East.

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O Ephesus, Mother of architecture, of mathematics and the sciences, greatest city of all that is Greek, why must you be so given to what is carnal and undisciplined in the human condition? In Asia [Western Turkey] any idea formerly noble and good finds some ardent attachment to wickedness—indeed, so much wickedness that it would take the strength of ten prophets to begin to discuss all the sins.

Praised be the Lord that He has made me up to the task!

2.
In my youthful travels in the Aegean, I had seen everywhere the rites of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, not too different from our own former Temple sacrifices, really, if we are to be worldly about such things; a blood offering to the Divinity to show we appreciate the bounty of the land each spring. Ah, but here in Ephesus, the goddess and her Artemision [her temple] cater only to fornication and whoredom. Once-proud Artemis herself is transformed into a monstrosity weighed down by hundreds of breasts. (One sees little clay figurines for sale in the streets of Ephesus, this perversion visible to the saintly and children alike!)

3.
Attis, Astarte, Cybele, all pagan gods that prey upon the desire for blood spectacle and
porneia,
every one of them beginning in some froth of blood and castration, ending in general lewdness, copulation, orgies of the nonpriestly celebrants. For this, throughout Asia and Phrygia, virgin girls are set aside to serve in the temples as whores, recepticals for every lust and disease known to the polities of the Great Sea. And yet, these festivals are holy and clean when one compares them to the secular Ephesus, which excels all other cities—except Tyre, the lowest pit within the many pits of Hell!—in entertainments for the most degraded of natures.

Carved into the stones of the streets themselves, advertisements give directions to the nearest brothel, shamelessly directing one to the “Pugixeinon,” a disreputable orgy-chamber known as
Cras vives?
and a lovely bower known as
Quo Irrumbis?
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For less money than it would take to feed a mule in Judea, one can have three identical sisters of barbaric Moesia service one's every portal, or perhaps a parade of girl-children upon which one may obliterate the hymens until sated for a small price. One can take a mother and her infant into an alley where, for the price of a jar of olives, she has trained her infant to suck upon the members of men. This is not to mention the stench of the perpetual Dionysian festival upon the seafront in which entertainments of unthinkable lewdness transpire, no deformity of genital, no inconceivable size of organ or breast, no act so terrible, no pairing of races, children, numerous partners with animals cannot be observed for a simple remittance of spare coins.

And I merely relate what one can see from the street!

4.
For myself, it was a strained parting from Xenon. I was sorry to be leaving him, while he remained stoic and controlled, though I reckoned him much moved within. The apprenticeship at his uncle's looked to be more slave labor than privilege and he saw a road of ordeals stretch before him. After several nights in Ephesus, I asked if he might rather join me in further evangelization of the nations, but he confessed his skills were elsewhere, I think, to save my feelings. It was unspoken between us that I had been a failure as a minister of the Righteous Teaching.

5.
Presently, I was to make myself known to John [Zebedee]. A word about his former master, John the Baptist,
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decrier of Jerusalem's evils, a Nazirene too pure for any congregation—an impossible but I believe God-inspired man. My recollection of my first encounter with the Baptist was terrifying.

The debauchees of Herod's court would ride down from Machaerus or Herodion [Herod's palaces] and attend the Baptist's fanatical displays at the Jordan. I recall one woman, given to fat, painted in the Greek fashion. The Baptist called her out of the crowd and made her confess publicly her sins, her adulteries, her covetings, her willingness to cause trouble.
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He spat upon her, slapped her, ripped her robe from her, and berated her fallen figure. “Behold your nakedness, harlot!” he cried as she wept. “Lavishing your harlotries on passersby!
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Here, woman! Here are strangers: splay yourself before them.” When he had brought her to a final point of humiliation, he then held her head under water, dragging her up by the hair and using his rough, unwashed burlap loincloth to wipe away her facepaint; then back again into the water she would be submerged. John the Baptist had a strange gift for knowing how long one could endure before drowning; then his victim was brought up and allowed to live. He was so gentle and loving the next moment, that those who underwent this hysterical process often went away chastened and converted. Others returned that very sabbath to saturnalia, and were back again the next week for more repentance. Chariots and carriages from the city lined the hillsides for these spectacles.

6.
I saw the Baptist, renowned son of Zechariah,
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take a young man, fallen to whoremongering, by the member, produce a knife, and threaten to cut it from him. I saw him beat upon a fat merchant, who wept as a baby, and take his purse and force him to hold the filthy Roman coins in his mouth, since his love for money was so great. An elder, given to indiscretions with young virgins, engendered a frenzy in the Baptist. He went to the shore and got a rock and taunted the elder with the stoning he would receive in this world, the perpetual never-ending avalanche of rocks he would endure in
Gehenna
[Hell], and said “Since you so love the sin for which you are to be stoned, I give you this taste of your eternity!” and hit him until he bled. Then the man was made to kiss and reverence the rock, then lick it clean, then take it and beat his own head with it, before the Baptist relented and was willing to baptize him. I was lucky because when I went to him he had just humiliated a lawyer, and so his wrath was spent for a young student as myself.

Yet for all his extremity, I always felt the Baptist to be sincere and quite possibly of God.

7.
Among his followers was the Disciple John.
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When I first met John he was a girlish youth of seventeen, formerly a prized student of the Temple. Brazenly, he castigated me for being a landowner and called upon me to eschew my worldly estate—I was a usurer, a swine. (By this we see he imitated the Baptist's rhetoric superbly. That is all, I tell you, my brother, I ever thought John bar-Zebedee good at: mouthing what his rabbi wanted to hear.) When he began service with Our Master he became a little lambkin and whispered back all the assurances of love and the Paradise to Come in the Teacher's own language, and for his trouble became the Beloved of Our Master, privy to His every utterance.
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8.
John's monastery was, not surprisingly, in the wealthier suburbs of the polis. Young men, often self-made eunuchs, mostly Greek, lived here an ascetic life contributing their inheritances and worldly goods. These goods were invested by John in property along the seafront, from which John was assured a continuous profit for his order. Within the spacious country house, John's converts spent the better part of their day in prayer, in isolation, in fasting, which is the type of Essenic indulgence Our Master frowned upon, these great shows of holiness while there is so much charitable work to be done.

9.
John was remarkably unchanged. He was beardless as a youth and remained so, though I wonder that he had some depilatory treatment by which he remains beardless, being that he wishes to preserve his looks from when he was the Beloved of Our Savior, or so he told me. John, who from a distance seemed to be ever twenty-one, showed his half-century upon closer inspection—I believe he used a dyed oil to blacken his hair, but I did not say anything because one who has made oneself a eunuch, for the Lord or otherwise, is less likely to age, having robbed his body of the corrupting manly fluids that make the rest of us elder and gray.

Not surprisingly, John had surrounded himself with young men of his kind, for which no amount of discursive talk of doctrine and rabbinical cant was too much. I met his scribe Zossima, Pentheus to his Apollonius.
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Like the Essenes known in our childhood, these young men looked as if they were in some trance of near-starvation in which a commonplace can appear to be a miracle, and John's doggerel worthy of remembering as Holy Scripture.

10.
In the atrium I saw a young monk, not fourteen, weeping as he pulled up the weeds up from between the stones and began to eat these grasses.

“That is Andreas,” John said to me, “and he weeps for the beauty of the weeds and honors them as if they were the yield of a rich man's garden, the fruits and vegetables of autumn. To the Glory of God!”

I recall Our Master discouraging fasting on many occasions, suggesting we should eat in moderation and drink wine and be content to live in the pleasurable moment.
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“Our Lord's eating and drinking,” said John to me softly, “was but illusion, my brother, for his Divine Body had no use for this carrion and leafage we call food of this world.
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He was fed by angels each night.” John's eyes dazzled with potential tears. “The Cherubim fed him the sweetmeats of Heaven on beams of light, the Seraphim poured him celestial wine while borne by the lyre music of David. Foods of every imaginable spice and color, arrayed before him on garnet and agate, bathed in the bejeweled Light from that one unconsumed, ever-burning Source of Light…”

(You see what jargon one must contend with in this era to have any discussion of theology.)

11.
Nonsense, I protested. I remember in one encounter (I was accompanied by my tutor Polycrates) Our Dearest Master in Capernum being made ill by a piece of smoked fish. And I remember upon my second meeting with the Teacher, as John must himself, a feast in Cana in which he ate too many of the fowls cooked for us and made jest at His discomfort. And as a man, He joined us in endurance of all bodily functions. Or was all ordure wiped away by an angelic host?

John said to me, “This is all the more to the supremacy of the illusion by which we took Him to be as we are, simple mortal Men.”

12.
I asked of John, “So you think Him God and not Man completely?”

“I think him both,” John said to me, “but partaking of different Essences at different moments. His Sonship is derived from the Father, conveyed by The Holy Spirit and Her Infinite Wisdom, which was preeternal. His Divine Essence was before the world and it will be after the world, uncreated and ever-proceeding and yet ever-originating. But such is the result of years of study here where I have made propounding such doctrines my life's work.”
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