The Maggot People (23 page)

“Oh, that little innocent had nothing to do with it.”

Paolo nodded. “I have to say I agree. But I'd give my eye-teeth to know how he managed to get out of that cell. And find Jesus…”

“And rouse him,” said Günter. “Who would have thought it?”

Giacomo looked at his watch again. “So we have to be out of Rome in just under three hours. Does that give us enough time to pack?”

“Pack what, in the name of God?” said Paolo. “I shall just bring my Bible and my walking boots.”

“The only thing I own is my collar,” said Günter.

“We have to find a suitable container for the maggots,” Giacomo said. “From now on we'll take one or two every morning.”

Günter yawned. “I'm ready for a little peregrination. The gardens of Bonus Pastor are starting to look a little dull.”

Paolo looked at Giacomo: “And where should we go?”

“I own a nice little monastery in La Spezia,” said Giacomo. “We'll wait there until Jesus surfaces. His presence won't go unnoticed. At some point we'll have to go and see… Him… and persuade… Him… to turn Himself in.”

“Sounds funny, when you put it like that,” said Günter.

“It may sound funny,” Giacomo growled. “But it isn't.”

He swallowed two maggots as if they were vitamin pills and bid the others do the same. They poured the maggots into large plastic containers, after perforating the lids and placing rotten bananas inside.

At exactly twelve o'clock they boarded a train. Giacomo and Paolo were carrying hefty rucksacks, loaded with food, maggots, and a change of clothes.

A group of unsmiling men at the barrier, obviously Vatican agents, spoke into their walkie-talkies as the train pulled away. Giacomo saluted them, as if making light of their presence. But he quickly brought his arm down. When he looked at his wrist it seemed as if there was a leash clipped to it, a leash effortlessly fed out from an infinite, many-geared spool in Rome.

I'll never get away from them, he thought.

41
.

A few weeks after their departure in the camper bus, Michael and Ariel took stock of their experiences so far. While it could not be denied that Jesus had some sort of power, the Master remained deeply enigmatic to them.

At his bidding, they had driven all over Europe: along valleys, up hills, and through tunnels, across bridges and over plains. No matter how far they drove it was never quite enough for Jesus, who mostly sat at the back of the camper bus drinking goat's milk (which he was terrifically fond of) and methodically working his way through Michael's newly acquired CD collection. “Keep going, keep going,” he'd call out, waving his arm. “Farther, farther…”

At first they had been patient. After all, they didn't know what Jesus was looking for or where he was intending to go.

“But where? Where now?” they'd call out and Jesus, closing his eyes as if in deep concentration, would say, quietly, “Vienna,” or “Zurich.” And so the haphazard journey continued.

It was almost as if Jesus was intent on seeing every motorway in Western Europe. Even ring roads did not escape his rapt interest: Frankfurt, Berlin, London, and Paris were all circumnavigated, and service stations sampled for their cafés and shops.

“Jesus, do you actually
like
pizza?” Michael asked once, as they sat at a red Formica table one evening on the outskirts of Hamburg.

“Liking or not is unimportant. I need to eat a pizza so I know what a pizza is, and once I know what it is I can then decide if it is good or not,” said Jesus. “But for my part it seems little more than bread and meat. In my day there would have been little call for it, although outside the temple or the market there were usually one or two vendors' stalls.” He shrugged. “They sold
fava
beans and chopped herbs or perhaps liver or falafel. People were less prepared to waste money in those days. Every piece had value. But they were fond of tittle-tattle even back in my day; they did not have televisions and not newspapers, either. So they liked to gossip instead.” With an amused smile he held up a celebrity magazine and shook it in the air. “Rihanna,” he said. “She seems a nice little girl; what a pity to give her so much attention.”

At night, when they retired to their bunks, Jesus would lie in his bunk singing along to whatever music was playing on his portable hi-fi. His favorites were Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, and Janis Joplin, but he also had a sneaking regard for early U2 and knew most of their songs by heart.

He seemed impervious to boredom. He could spend all day throwing dice or rearranging some peanuts in a bowl.

There were days when Michael looked at him and thought to himself, “Is this the same Jesus who changed the history of the world?”

Even Ariel, with her customary good humor, found little to entertain her in the garish sweet shops where they spent hours so that Jesus could stock up on magazines and chocolate.

His interest in minutiae was enormous. For instance, he was capable of reading food labels almost infinitely, wanting to know what folic acid was, or emulsifier, E331, Omega 3, and B6.

Tension was building up.

Ariel started snapping at Michael. “Don't be so bloody presumptuous,” she told him. “The Master has a plan, and we don't know what it is. Not yet. We have to be patient.”

“But what's the bloody plan? Eating sweets is not going to do much good, is it?” he protested. “I just wish I could understand.”

Only once did Jesus allay Michael's doubts. He put his hand on Michael's shoulder and said, “You think you must do something. But you are a mechanism, my friend. You think work is done by turning the handle. I tell you, this handle you turn with so much energy is not attached to anything; it merely spins in the air, and the machine remains idle in spite of everything you do.”

One morning as they lay in their bunks like sailors becalmed in the middle of some ocean, Jesus opened his eyes and sat bolt upright in his bunk.

“Enough of this,” he said. “Time to go south.”

His words brought immense relief. Immediately the trade winds seemed to stir among their idle sails. They were parked in a truckers' lay-by just west of Strasbourg, close enough to the nearside motorway lane to feel a slight tremor every time a roaring juggernaut passed on the other side of a narrow skirt of what looked like plastic trees. The landscape on both sides of the motorway was more or less flat to the edge of the horizon and seemed productive only in so far as it was covered in short, green blades of chemically enhanced growth.

Over their heads hung an indistinct gray sky too inert even to produce rain. Its sole purpose was to bathe the planet in a murky, wearisome light.

Michael turned the ignition and hoped there would not be too many detours on the way.

As they headed south, Jesus did not often move from his upholstered sofa by the window. By now he'd amassed a great pile of books and magazines which he flicked through, occasionally looking up and analyzing the scenery outside. Or asking impossible questions. He tended not to be moralistic, but occasionally his sensibilities were hurt by something he saw or read.

Once, while flicking through a copy of
Vogue
, his face contorted with pain and he said, “So a supermodel is considered more beautiful than other women, is she?” Then frowning, added, “Young women always have beauty because they are loaded with physical destiny. But this beauty cannot be captured on a photographic plate; everybody knows this. The makers—so many makers you have in this world of yours—persevere with the impossible task because they can't think of anything else to do with their weary hands.”

Another time he commented on some lyrics by Bob Dylan:

“This Bob is correct in his thinking,” said Jesus, smiling with recognition as if he had come across a kindred spirit. “Sometimes the thing that
is
can only be described by saying exactly what it is
not.”

“Actually, that's just the Chicago School of Disembodied Poetics. There's nothing very profound about it,” said Ariel. Jesus told her she was mistaken. Most so-called profundity was about as illuminating as a cowpat in the grass. And yet, he added, when one actually considered a cowpat in the grass it was not as simple as it seemed. Who would have thought that, in some obscure corner of the universe, a large hairy four-legged beast would lift its tail and deposit a lump of digested organic material on the ground?

Frequently his words were obscure or there seemed to be very little method in his ramblings. “Well, what did you expect?” Ariel whispered to Michael one night after the Master had gone to sleep. “I mean nobody actually knows what he was like. The people who told his story were basically poets or mystics—may-be they just liked a decent yarn and they jazzed it up a bit? Whatever happened in Palestine two thousand years ago has been mythologized.”

The days passed and still Jesus did not reveal his intentions, thus prompting the question: was this just an extended sightseeing trip?

One day in the south of France, Jesus spent the afternoon walking, singing, and watching clouds while Ariel and Michael sat in the camper bus playing cards. When Michael articulated his disquiet, Jesus looked at him sternly and for the first time Michael felt directly challenged by his words:

“How can I give you purpose, a thing you will not give yourself nor even ask for?”

“I'm sorry,” said Michael. “I don't mean to be presumptuous. I just want to know if there's a plan.”

“Plans are for fools.”

Later that night, when Michael and Ariel lay in their double-bunk, Michael wondered about his purpose in life. He tried to explain his hopes and dreams to Ariel, but he found to his own surprise that he had none—although he didn't admit so much to her. Ariel listened with interest although it was abundantly clear to her that Michael was a typical twenty-first century man with an ethos of materialism as the oxygen of his blood.

Besides, the very notion of “a dream” had something plasti-cized about it. Dreams were mostly actions involving a purchase: an airline ticket, a house, a horse, some land. Michael's generation did not say, “I am a player of the drums; hear me.” Michael's generation said, “I want to buy a drum kit.” Having acquired the physical, defining object, there was the whole problem of turning oneself into someone else, a rock star, film director, deep-sea diver, astrophysicist, martial arts expert, poker player, tycoon.

In practice, ideas were far more interesting and accessible as nuggets of speculation than the grind of their attainment.

After listening to Ariel's arguments, Michael told her he wanted to live on a farm, grow vegetables, keep animals, and learn some carpentry. She found herself slightly disheartened.

“What you're describing is nothing. It's not a dream.”

He sat up on his elbow and stared at her. “What is it, then?”

“A description.”

“Well, in that case I don't have any dreams.”

“Good. Be honest. Spit it out. Life is bloody meaningless. The only things people actually like, and I agree with them, is dancing and making love. That only works while you're young. Everything else is a bore from beginning to end.” She sighed deeply, glancing towards Jesus's cabin, where the lights were still on.

Since that luminous day outside the Master's tomb in the catacombs, their sexual intimacy had once again died a slow death. A feeling of ennui had begun to permeate their hurried lovemaking whenever Jesus left the camper bus for one of his meandering walks.

That night, Michael had nightmares about Ariel dying all over again.

In the morning when they woke up, Jesus was standing over them, squinting down at them with a slightly bemused expression on his face. “You're only here for the struggle to live,” he said. “Not to mystify or complicate.”

He put his hands on Ariel's temples and looked into her eyes. “Busy yourself,” he said. “Accept my gift.”

And to Michael he said “Rise into the light, my umbrageous son. Go forth.”

That same evening they crossed the frontier and made their way down tiny roads into the Pyrenean massif, until they found a remote valley with a crumbling, semi-abandoned village at one end. The road climbed to the top of a steep hill covered in scree.

“Park it here,” said Jesus. “Park it straight and well, for it shall never move again.”

Michael was puzzled, but he did as he was told.

Over the next few days he followed with growing interest the news bulletins on their radio and television, brought to them courtesy of the satellite dish on the roof of their vehicle. The world had started picking itself apart while they had been loafing about in Europe. Stock exchanges everywhere were in meltdown because of malfunctioning computers. Scientists were being hired to solve the problem, but the problem was not in the programming or the hardware. The problem, in the words of one fascinated Nobel laureate, was that “the logos has changed; the laws of the universe have scrambled themselves so that we have to reinvent mathematics, physics, and chemistry using a new set of rules.” It seemed beyond their capacities and they admitted as much.

Banks were having problems establishing what monies were held in their deposits. Customers didn't know from one day to another whether they were millionaires or paupers.

Cars wouldn't start.

Aircraft had turned into dinosaur-proportioned lumps of metal no more likely to fly than stones.

Even power stations refused to generate electricity. In effect they had become very large, wasteful log fires pumping heat into the night, and there seemed little point in turning them on at all.

Everywhere there was a run on candles and paraffin. Junk shops were raided for brass lamps and candlesticks.

Gardens were ploughed up and turned into vegetable patches.