Tartarus: Kingdom Wars II (12 page)

I nearly laughed out loud.

Jesus did. “Have you tasted any better?”

“What is it?” Jana asked.

“Dr Pepper.”

Jesus howled. “Correction. Diet Dr Pepper. It has no calories!”

The crowd was inching toward the containers. Looking. Sniffing. They didn’t understand.

“I thought we might have some Baptists in the crowd,” Jesus explained. “I didn’t want to be a stumbling block.”

He stepped close to me and took me by the arm. His grip was so tight it nearly brought tears to my eyes.

“I’ve heard of you, Grant Austin,” he whispered close to my ear. “Why are you here, you foolish man? To flaunt the mark of the Father?”

I pulled away so I could look at him directly. “I know who you are.”

It was an overstatement, but I enjoyed the flash of uncertainty in his eyes when I said it.

He grinned mischievously. “I wonder how the Israelis would react if they knew an American Nephilim had infiltrated their borders?”

A chill swept through me. I had never given a thought to crossing into Israel, or any other country for that matter, as a Nephilim. I didn’t want to find out what the Israelis would think of it.

He knew he had me at a disadvantage.

“Tomorrow. Capernaum. Three
P.M
.,” he whispered. “And bring your gorgeous reporter friend with you.” Raising his arms, he yelled to the crowd, “Tomorrow on the Sea of Galilee!”

Having walked into Khirbet Kana like a man, he departed in heavenly fashion. He rose upward into the sky and was soon gone.

“What did he say to you?” Jana asked, shoving the microphone into my face.

I placed my hand over it and lowered it.

She signaled her cameraman to stop recording.

Sue Ling was right there with her.

“He knows who I am,” I said. “He threatened me.”

“But the mark,” Sue Ling said.

“The longer I have it, the more the mark seems like a target.” Turning to Jana, I said, “He gave me the location and time for tomorrow. We’re heading north.”

The Sea of Galilee is a big place, but despite the lack of public directions the shoreline close to Capernaum was packed. I guess it just made sense. The historical Jesus was linked to Capernaum.

Ostermann, whom I’ve been calling Bow-tie because I’d forgotten his name, was no longer with us. Jana had sent him back to Jerusalem with the video of Khirbet Kana.

I’d watched her record the wrap-up. It was the first time she’d called him Joker Jesus on the air. Now that’s what everyone was calling him.

Once again we had front row seats when he appeared, this time walking along the shore. He positioned himself in front of us and frequently spoke directly into the camera.

“The disciples and I spent many hours on this sea. You probably recall reading about our fishing excursions, rough weather experiences, and—who could forget—the walking-on-water incident. Since I haven’t taken a stroll on water for a couple of thousand years, I thought I’d re-create that particular incident for you today.”

The gasps from the crowd were audible. Applause rippled through it. People held up personal video recorders, cameras of every description, and cell phones to record the event.

He requested a fisherman sitting in a small boat take him a good distance offshore. It was unclear whether he’d arranged for the boat or if the fisherman just happened to be there. Once again the figure of Jesus wearing white garments, his long brown hair blowing in the wind, his bearded chin pointing out to sea could be seen on the Sea of Galilee.

When they were roughly a hundred yards from shore, the rowing stopped. Bending down and gripping the side, he swung one leg over the water.

The crowd stilled. The only sound was the lapping of the sea against the shore and the clicking of a thousand cameras.

His toe touched the water. He jerked it back. Embraced himself and shivered. “It’s cold!” the Joker Jesus shrieked.

The crowd laughed. It was a different crowd from the one at Khirbet Kana. The humor didn’t seem to offend them; in fact, they seemed to expect it.

A second time the Joker Jesus swung his leg over the side of the boat. This time he didn’t recoil. He gained a footing. Transferring his weight to the foot on the water, he swung his other leg over, released the side of the boat, and stood as though on solid ground.

To one side of me Sue Ling was as entranced as any of us, but without the wonder. Jana’s eyes were riveted on the spectacle as she spoke into her microphone, narrating the event with a golf sports announcer’s whisper.

Then the comedy act began.

His arms swinging like windmills, the Joker Jesus looked like a tightrope walker who was losing his balance. Forward, his arms flailing, catching his balance, then, backward, arms flailing again.

After he’d milked this routine for all it was worth, he assumed a casual stance, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms folded, as if to say there was nothing to it.

He broke into a soft-shoe dance, water splashing with each tap, with a big foot stomp finish and jazz hands.

The crowd laughed. Applauded.

Bowing, the Joker Jesus strolled toward us, then broke into a run. The next thing we knew, he’d tripped and was sailing through the air. He hit the top of the water and skid like a kid in his backyard on a Slip ’n Slide.

Coming to a stop, he picked himself up, dusted the water off his garments, shrugged, and said sheepishly, “Tripped on a fish.”

The crowd went wild.

To enthusiastic applause, he completed the stroll to shore, halting a few feet from solid ground. For all the water tricks, he was completely dry…his face and beard, his garments.

A woman charged into the water toward him, shouting and screaming in Hebrew. Choni slipped close to Jana to translate. Sue and I listened in.

“She’s angry,” Choni said.

“I can see that!” Jana replied.

Overcome by emotion, the woman was shaking her fist at the Joker Jesus. In her fury she spat at him and splashed water. In her other hand she clutched a boy who looked to be about eight or nine years old, so skinny you could count his ribs from a distance. He had what appeared to be a pair of gray clouds in both eyes.

“She’s calling Jesus a fraud and an impostor,” Choni translated. “She says if he was truly the Savior, he would perform real miracles, not silly tricks.”

The smile disappeared from the Joker Jesus’s face. “Your son?”

The woman pulled the boy in front of her. Her story tumbled out. “He has been blind and deaf since birth. We walked all night to get here. My son has burns on his legs from walking into fires. He has been hit twice by cars running into the street. The doctors tell us there is no hope.”

For all of his troubles, the boy appeared to be happy. Even while his mother was pouring out her heart, he was grinning and slapping the water with the flat of his hand.

The Joker Jesus waded to her and stretched out his hand. The mother pulled the boy forward. During the exchange, the boy became frightened. All he knew was that his mother was handing him off to another, and he didn’t like it. He thrashed and fought to stay close to her.

Until his hand touched the hand of the Joker Jesus. The instant it did, the boy stopped thrashing. A calmness came over him. He willingly went to the Joker Jesus.

The crowd had stilled. Everyone watched to see what would happen next. We didn’t know what to expect. Would the Joker Jesus heal him, or pull silk scarves out of the boy’s ear?

Jana shot a glance at the cameraman. She knew him well enough to know he’d be getting this, but something inside her had to check to make sure.

The Joker Jesus dipped his hands in the water and then placed an index finger in each ear. I confess, my first thought was that he was giving the boy a Wet Willy.

But when the fingers came out, the boy gasped. He raised his hands to his ears and cupped them, then pulled his hands away, then cupped them again. He squealed and scared himself with his own voice.

His mother called to him.

He cocked his head. He’d never heard her voice before. He splashed to get to her and she to him.

“No!” the Joker Jesus said.

He held them apart. That in itself was miraculous. How could anyone keep mother and son apart at a moment like this?

Jesus stood the boy in front of him. He placed the fingers of both hands on the boy’s eyes. Jesus didn’t say anything. He didn’t wet his hands first as he did with the ears. He just touched them. And when he removed his hands, the boy’s eyes were clear.

He blinked. Then blinked again. Wider eyes I have never seen. He took in the Joker Jesus, the water, the sky, but when he saw his mother, I don’t think the Joker Jesus could have kept them apart this time.

The crowd watched in silence at first, then there was the sound of weeping, followed by cheers and laughter and praises.

After several moments of having the stuffing hugged out of him, the boy turned to the Joker Jesus for a hug and was swept up out of the water by his healer’s strong arms.

The Joker Jesus set the boy on his shoulder, both he and the boy grinning ear to ear. It was one of those moments that was captured by cameras and appeared on the cover of every major newspaper and news magazine in the world.

Even though I knew the Joker Jesus wasn’t who he pretended to be, a shiver of excitement swept up my spine at what can only be described as a miracle.

A
s he did at Khirbet Kana, the Joker Jesus told me where he would appear next.

“The Mount of Olives. Meet me at the top. We’ll take a nostalgic stroll down the Via Dolorosa.” Then he added, “Two girlfriends, Grant? You dog! Bring them both with you tomorrow.”

He was wrong about the girlfriends, of course. But clearly he was being fed information, and I feared it was Semyaza.

When I told Jana his agenda, she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. It was gratitude, nothing more. No other reporter in the world was getting inside information.

Sue saw the kiss. She turned away and acted as if it didn’t bother her, but it did. This feud had gone on long enough. I determined to use the ride back to Jerusalem to talk to Sue and try to smooth things over between her and Jana.

That didn’t happen. The entire journey Sue Ling was a stone statue. She spoke to Choni only when necessary and to me not at all.

Choni on the other hand was a verbal fountain. He was like a kid on vacation. If he wasn’t reliving Cana and the Sea of Galilee, he was speculating about what the Joker Jesus had in store for tomorrow. Mostly, though, he plied me with questions.

Why had the Joker Jesus singled me out? Why did he whisper in my ear? When he did, did he speak of anything other than his agenda? Why was I able to see angels before everyone else? Was it really the professor who knew about Khirbet Kana, or had I seen angels headed that direction?

Sue Ling broke her stony silence quickly enough to answer the question about the professor. She assured Choni that it was indeed the professor and not me who knew about Khirbet Kana.

Choni was taken aback by the heat with which she answered. “Are you and Grant having a lovers’ quarrel?”

After sputtering a protest that she and I were not, had never been, and would never be lovers, she clammed up and said nothing to either of us the remainder of the journey.

On what would be referred to as “The Third Day of Miracles,” the Joker Jesus descended upon Mt. Olivet in the cool of the morning. There was something different about him. He appeared somber and didn’t look at anyone directly.

Levitating a foot off the ground, his eyes closed, his head lifted heavenward, his arms at his side, he hung in space for nearly an hour.

The gathering crowd arrived boisterous, but upon seeing him hanging there, matched his mood. Hushed and reverent.

He gasped as though he was coming up for air, raised his arms horizontal to the ground, and completed his descent, his sandals touching the ground. Turning west, he set his eyes upon Jerusalem.

Jana’s cameraman backpedaled, recording every step as the Joker Jesus led us down the hillside, through the Garden of Gethsemane, across the Kidron Valley, up a steep embankment, and through a cemetery to the double-tiered Golden Gate.

He paused at the black iron fence that blocked us from the walled-up gate. No one had passed beneath the arches since the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I sealed the gate, allegedly to prevent the Messiah’s entrance.

The Joker Jesus stood there. He appeared to be looking for a doorbell.

A sizable crowd began running northward to the Lion’s Gate, the modern entrance to the Via Dolorosa. They missed what happened next.

Four angels appeared, the kind you read about in the Bible with the flowing gold hair, white robes, and wings. Two at the iron fence, and two above, framed by the gate’s arches.

The two angels at the fence lifted it effortlessly out of the way. The Joker Jesus approached the wall. As he did, the bricks crumbled and fell at his feet. The gate that had been shut for centuries was open once again.

We walked beneath the arches onto the Temple Mount.

Sue looked up in awe at the arches and the hovering angels. “No one has passed through this gate since 1541!”

“Since when?” Jana asked, hearing only part of the comment.

The icy anger that lay between them melted.

“Since 1541,” Sue said. “The Muslims closed the gate and built the cemetery in the mistaken belief that Elijah, the forerunner to the Messiah, would not be able to approach it because he was a priest.”

“Mistaken belief?”

“While a Jewish priest cannot enter a Jewish cemetery, there is nothing forbidding him from entering the cemetery of Gentiles.”

Jana’s eyes were sparkling. I could tell she was thankful for the information, but mostly because Sue was talking to her again. Beneath the double tiers of the Golden Gate, the two friends hugged.

I was smiling, too. My life had just gotten a little less complicated.

As the procession made its way toward the Via Dolorosa, the Israeli police made their presence known in force with a hastily erected barricade.

The Joker Jesus’ pace never faltered. A vanguard of angels appeared with swords that burst into flame. The police fell back, their weapons rendered inoperative.

A growing parade of followers found palm branches and began waving them back and forth, shouting hosannas.

Upon reaching the Monastery of Flagellation, the Joker Jesus stopped and knelt in the roadway. Two Roman guards appeared from nowhere, dressed in first-century military uniform. They stripped his clothing from his back and whipped him and placed a crown of thorns upon his head.

It was a scene pulled from the pages of the Bible, if not for the crowd. Orthodox Jews dressed in black stood next to mid-western couples with cameras slung around their necks, who stood next to modern Israelis and Palestinians wearing burqas and backpacks and baseball caps and riding motorized scooters.

A wooden cross was laid on the Joker Jesus’ back and the drama continued to the top of Golgotha, where the Roman soldiers nailed him to the cross. Once it was erect, two other crosses appeared. The scene appeared just as it had been described in the first century.

It was noon. A black cloud blotted out the sun. The crucified Joker Jesus cried out and died. A soldier pierced his side.

This is where the script deviated from the record. Time was telescoped.

One of the Roman soldiers addressed the crowd. “Is there a doctor among you to certify this death?”

Several doctors came forward. Four were chosen without explanation. An Israeli, an Arab, an American, and a German.

The crucified man was taken down from the cross and each of the doctors was permitted to examine him. Each man reported to the crowd. Their diagnosis was unanimous.

He was dead.

I scanned the faces of the crowd. Some were crying. Some had smirks on their faces, expecting the Joker Jesus to pop up and say something funny.

No one appeared to claim the body. The Roman guards themselves carried Jesus to the garden tomb. They placed the body inside, rolled a large stone in front of it, sealed it, and posted a guard.

“Are we going to have to wait here three days?” Jana asked me.

I shrugged.

Anticipating the question, the Roman spokesman said in a loud voice, “In the end times, days will seem like hours.”

I noted the time. We had three hours to kill.

For the first hour Jana and several members of the crowd questioned the two Roman soldiers who stood guard over the tomb. The soldiers must have been trained at the Buckingham Palace school for guards. They didn’t speak. They didn’t blink.

The second hour passed with most everyone having found a comfortable place to sit and wait. Conversations of every kind and in every language could be heard around us, but nobody’s attention wandered far from the tomb.

With fifteen minutes remaining, people began getting to their feet. At ten minutes, several groups took it upon themselves to provide verbal announcements every minute. The announcements were not synchronized.

A minute to go. Thirty seconds. At ten seconds the count-downs began. The only thing missing was the Times Square descending ball.

“…three, two, one!”

Nothing happened.

A few seconds later a different group began their count-down. “…three, two, one!”

After that, it became something of a competition to see which group would be closest to the actual time of the resurrection.

Then the Roman guards disappeared into nothingness. Two angels appeared. They broke the seal and moved the rock aside as though it were made of papier-mâché.

As the angels entered the tomb, the glory of their presence illuminated the inside walls. A moment later, one of them returned.

In a voice that carried effortlessly over the crowd, the angel said, “He is not here. He is risen!”

A cheer went up.

The angel selected a large, bearded man, a woman wearing a burqa, and Jana. “Come see. He is not here.”

Jana pointed to her cameraman. “May I?”

The angel nodded.

Jana and the cameraman ducked their heads and followed the others into the tomb.

The bearded man came out grinning. “He is not there!”

The woman in the burqa came out weeping. “He is not there!”

The cameraman backed out, recording Jana as she appeared. In one hand she held a microphone, in the other the folded grave clothes. “The tomb is empty. This is Jana Torres, KTSD, reporting live from Jerusalem.”

“Why seek you the living among the dead?”

The voice came from above us. Looking up we saw a circle of angels. In the center was a radiating Jesus.

He said, “And that’s how, on the third day, I rose from the grave. No joke.”

After four days with no more appearances, the professor suggested we return home.

I used those four days to pound out a few chapters of my book. On the day we returned to Jerusalem and cell phone service, I retrieved my messages. After the third one from my publisher, each one more ominous than the last, I called him.

He did give me credit for having the most original excuse for missing my deadline he’d ever heard. And while I expected him to demand I return the advance money because he was canceling the contract, instead he asked me to narrate the things I’d seen. As it turned out, he offered me a reprieve on my deadline if I agreed to be interviewed by Bart Dover, a professor of religion at Yale University who was writing a book on the Joker Jesus. His working title:
Is the World Ready for a Laughing Christ?
It was one of those rush-to-publish projects.

We left Jana behind. Her producer wanted her to stay a few more days just in case the Joker Jesus made another appearance. She made me promise to call her if I got wind of anything.

Choni insisted on driving us to the airport. He had become something of a celebrity on the Hebrew University campus. He hugged us repeatedly and insisted he was going to visit us in California during summer break.

The twenty-two-hour flight home was unmercifully long. The only diversion was hearing firsthand the world’s reaction to the Joker Jesus. Every station including the in-flight news led with footage of the miracles and speculation about what would come next. I must have seen Jana emerge from the tomb at least fifty times in a half-dozen different languages. Overnight she had become an international news celebrity.

Airport magazine racks and newsstands were plastered with stories of the Joker Jesus.

In Rome I made the mistake of telling someone I had just come from Israel and had seen the Joker Jesus. I was mobbed and, if security hadn’t intervened, I would have missed my connection. From then on, I only listened and nodded.

We were in Atlanta when the published version of the Alexandrian manuscript hit the stands. I purchased a copy and read it on the flight to San Diego. It had teeth.

Home. My own shower. My own bed. No matter how anticipated the trip or how hospitable the host, a man is never as relaxed as he is in his own house.

I was eager to get on with my life. All that remained of my obligation to the professor was a debriefing, after which I planned to hole up in my condo and focus all of my energies on writing the book.

Already the ideas were flowing. I loved this part of the creative process. If I could pull it off—and my confidence was growing every day—this book would be better than the autobiography that won the Pulitzer.

I arrived at the professor’s house. Built in the forties with a spacious front porch, it had an old-fashioned feeling of Mom and apple pie. I felt like I was visiting family.

“Grant! Come in!” the professor said through the screen door.

He looked tired. Not the lost-sleep tired, but the world-weariness that ages a man.

“Sue is getting us coffee,” he said.

The living room was back to its usual neat and orderly condition—not like it was when we spoke to him on the webcam. Sue Ling had been busy since her return.

She emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a white carafe, three coffee mugs, sugar, and cream. The sugar was cubed. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen sugar cubes.