The Lunatic Messiah

by Simon Cutting

  Joe ended up spending four nights in the hospital, and over that period several different doctors poked and prodded him, as well as subjecting him to a variety of expensive state-of-the-art medical scans, all of which proved conclusively and with absolutely no room for error that he had four or five months to live if nothing was done. He had also had another slight seizure the night of his horrible meeting with Mr Grey, which was not taken as an encouraging sign. During his stay he had managed to avoid seeing Dr Armaita but he had an appointment with the man the following day and it was something that Joe was dreading, despite his earlier bravado. His return home had been so uncomfortable, mainly due to Mary's inability to even look in his general direction without stifling a sob, that he had decided to return to work immediately. Harry had insisted that it wasn't necessary, but one look at Mary with her hand clamped over her mouth as she watched him on the phone was enough to convince Joe that it absolutely was necessary. So it was, on the fifth day after he had been diagnosed, Joe found himself standing in front of his bathroom mirror, straightening his tie and trying to make his facial expressions look like anything other than terrified. Once he had finally toned it down to extremely anxious, he turned and walked from the bathroom. Mary was just on her way in and they both paused like strangers passing in the street who can't decide who passes to which side. Finally Mary slipped past him and he went out into the hallway.

  'Joe, you've left the toilet seat up again,' Mary said, but the tone of her voice made it very clear that she was simply trying to maintain some sense of normality.

  Joe swivelled on his foot and strode back into the bathroom, irritated that Mary's idea of normality involved nagging. He placed a finger on the rim of the toilet seat and looked her straight in the eye.

  'Observe. If you want the toilet seat down, you can use a little something that astronauts call a gravity assist,' he said, flicking down the seat with a slight movement of his finger.

  'On the other hand, this,' he said, reaching down and raising it again with his whole hand, 'makes me feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill in hell. No matter how many times I push it up, every morning I come in here and I have to do it all over again.'

  With another theatrical turn on his heel, he walked from the room and down the stairs.

  Joe's habit for at least the past ten years had been to read the newspaper whilst he ate his breakfast and he saw no reason for that to change now. He chewed on a piece of toast as he flicked open the Sydney Morning Herald, whilst Mary sat across from him, her tea untouched in front of her, and tears in her eyes.

  'At least have something to drink,' he suggested, noting that she hadn't stopped crying in days. 'You must have lost a lot of fluid by now.'

  She looked down at her tea as if noticing it for the first time, and reluctantly took a sip. It was cold, but she swallowed it anyway. Joe's brow furrowed as he scanned over the articles in the paper. Most of it was the same old news. War in the Middle East. Interest rates were up. A celebrity who had been caught in an alley with his trousers down and his dick in a watermelon was pleading innocence, but then Joe's eye caught on a small piece on the fifth page.

  'Here, listen to this,' he said to Mary, who was still having trouble looking at him. 'With the recent legalisation of necrophilia, organ donors will now also have to specify if they object to being organ recipients in the event of death, so as not to break laws regarding consensual sex. The Cardinal of Sydney commented that this was just another sign of the decaying moral fabric of modern society, citing the recent approval for a fleet of mobile brothels to be made from retired State Transit vehicles. "These vehicles will only make it easier for men to turn to prostitution and in the process destroy traditional family values. Even more worryingly, those men who may have been embarrassed to be seen entering a known brothel will now find it easier to allow the evil of prostitution to corrupt their souls." The company thanked the Cardinal for the free publicity and named their service the Suck-u-Bus in his honour... It's not the first of April by any chance is it?'

  Joe flicked the paper over to check but froze when he saw the front page. Scrawled across it was a message written with a thick black marker. He hadn't noticed it before, as he habitually read the back page first.

  BUILD A GUILLOTINE

  Joe scanned the article that it covered, but it was unrelated. Mary touched Joe gently on the hand.

  'What is it? Are you feeling okay?'

  'Yes, yes. Fine,' Joe replied, placing the paper on the table so that the message was face down.

  With all the spare time he had had in the hospital, Joe had checked to see if the notes he had been receiving were in fact in his own handwriting. They weren't, and try as he might, he couldn't replicate them very convincingly. It was scary enough to even suspect that his own brain could have been so affected that he could have been the author of the mysterious messages, but had it actually turned out to be the case then he wasn't sure what he would have done. What did this one mean? Was it meant to be taken literally or was it some kind of metaphor?

  'I don't think you should go back to work, Joe. At least, not yet. You've just had a stroke, and you have a lot on your mind right now.'

  'I'm fine for the moment. Look, I shaved both sides of my face today,' Joe said, although he quickly brushed his cheek to make sure that this was indeed the case.

  Fortunately it was, although in truth he could barely remember having shaved at all. He had been in such a daze.

  'Harry says that he can cover for you for as long as you want and...'

  'Listen, Mary. If I sit around the house thinking about my situation all day, then I'm going to go insane. I need to get back on the horse and stay on the straight and narrow until my chickens come home to roost. I have these little pills that Pontius gave me,' he said, reaching into his pocket and shaking the small plastic canister of what were almost certainly placebos.

  Joe was certain that they were placebos, but Mary didn't seem to be, so they were still quite effective. He got up and kissed his wife on the forehead, pulling on his coat at the same time.

  'I have to go.'

  'Now? It's only eight o'clock.'

  'I'm taking the bus. Pontius said that I shouldn't drive for a while. It could be dangerous if I was to...' he let his words trail off when he saw the stricken look on Mary's face, but he took out the pills and shook them in front of her like a parent distracting a child with a rattle.

  'It's fine, Mary. The wonders of medical science.'

  Mary nodded with such little enthusiasm it may just have been a draft from underneath the door making her head sway, but Joe took it as his sign to leave.

  'I'll see you tonight.'

  He strutted down the street with a great sense of purpose, and the fact that he had no idea what that purpose was just made him strut all the harder. He was just glad to be out of that house and out of that hospital. People kept telling him to put on a brave face and keep optimistic, but it was hard to do so when those same people were looking at him as if he were already dead. He had received several cards from some of the people he had graduated with, whom Mary had apparently called to tell the good news, and they were all so incredibly depressing he would have preferred that nobody bothered. They all had printed messages inside them and a simple signature down the bottom, perhaps with the words 'best wishes' written as an afterthought. One of them even offered condolences to Mary, which seemed a bit premature. Mary had seen it and her tears had gone from pooling to flowing, and not even Joe's remark that 'something was rotten in the state of Hallmark' could cheer her up. So it was that Joe realised what his great sense of purpose required. To get the hell away from wherever he was. The joyous feeling of being on the move was short-lived, as the bus stop was only a hundred metres from the house. He hadn't caught a bus in years, but there appeared to be some sort of queue waiting patiently next to the sign, so he joined the end of it, clutching his briefcase to his chest. He was a child on his first day of school, and he didn't know w
hat to expect.

  It was crowded on the bus and Joe was forced to stand near the rear door, pushed up against the pole. There was not much room to move, but everybody seemed quite used to it. The man in front of him had obviously misheard the expression 'a man must stand on his own two feet', because he was quite happily standing on Joe's two feet instead. As Joe was wearing fifteen dollar imitation leather shoes and the man in question was wearing shin-high steel capped boots, it was fairly painful, so Joe tapped his shoulder politely.

  'Sorry, you're just... on my feet.'

  The man, who was excessively tall and quite muscular, looked down at his feet as if to gauge whether this information was accurate. Perhaps the sensory information from the nerves in his feet was still on its way to his brain and he wasn't even aware he was doing it. He shifted with a grunt and then turned back around. Joe decided to let the man's rudeness pass unremarked and instead looked out of the window. They were passing through the city centre, right near Hyde Park. It was a busy morning and there were already a lot of people on the streets. They flowed like a liquid, acknowledging each other only to avoid colliding. It was quite bizarre, and Joe started to observe certain individual flows of humanity. People tended to follow in the wake of the person in front of them, so there were distinctive streams winding through the mass. There was one such stream up ahead, near the corner of Oxford Street, where people coming from both directions were flowing around some kind of obstruction. As the bus passed, he craned his neck to see what it was. Kneeling on the ground, one shoe cast aside as if she had fallen, was a young woman dressed in a white blouse. It was stained red, and she was clutching at her mouth and screaming as a thick mass of blood poured from between her fingers and down her front. There were some objects on the ground in front of her that looked like small white cubes, and it was only when she opened her mouth and spat out a piece of pinkish flesh with three molar teeth imbedded in it that Joe realised they were her teeth. The crowd passed by her as she screamed for help, but she caught Joe's eye with such a look of terror and imploring that he turned away. He fumbled in his pocket for the pills. Placebos or not, they couldn't do any harm. He had noticed in the hospital that things had started to look a little strange. He had seen things, usually at night, but sometimes during the day, that people seemed oblivious to. Ever since the dream with Lucy, with those horrible demonic babies ripping apart their own mother, he found his mind kept being invaded by flashes of horror. Nothing too dramatic, just little things. This woman in the street was the worst so far. He placed the pills back in his pocket and closed his eyes.

  'It's not real,' he whispered.

  His mind went back to the message on the paper earlier that morning. Build a guillotine. When he opened his eyes, the people in the street were flowing past just as before, and the ones on the bus were all looking in any direction except at each other.

  Joe sat in his office with both hands on the table, holding on to the desk to keep from flying away into the thoughts he couldn't control. He breathed deeply and lifted his hands. They had left oily prints of perspiration on the cheap wooden surface. There was a knock at the door and Joe breathed in again before answering.

  'Come,' he attempted to say in the authoritative voice he reserved for students, but it came out sounding more like the whimper of a puppy.

  The door opened and Harry entered the room with a nervous little smile on his face.

  'So. Your tutorial should be starting,' he said.

  'I'm aware of that, Harry. Did you really come in here to get on my back about punctuality again? After all that's happened?'

  'No, of course not. I just thought you might be a little bit nervous, and I came to see how you were feeling.'

  'Nervous? Why should I be nervous? What would make you think I was nervous about standing up in front of a few vacuous students?'

  Harry glanced down at the still glistening handprints on the desk, and Joe followed his line of sight, but neither man said anything about it.

  'I can still take the class you know,' Harry suggested, but Joe got to his feet and brushed aside his concerns.

  'I'll be fine. Absolutely fucking fine.'

  Harry knew that when somebody said they would be absolutely fucking fine then they were probably lying. The use of that particular adjective was a clear indicator, and you didn't need to be the Faculty Head of European Literature to work that out. There was nothing to be done though as Joe had already left the room. He attempted his purposeful strut from earlier in the morning but all of his thoughts were interrupted by the image of a woman, tearing at her gums as they fell from her mouth and her teeth splashed on the footpath like hailstones.

  Gabriel Armaita tapped on the face of her watch as Joe entered the room in a gesture so conceited that Joe had to give her credit for doing it without laughing.

  'You're late again, Mr Finch.'

  'I am, aren't I? This is becoming something of a habit for me. Soon everybody will be referring to me as The Late Mr Finch.'

  There was no reply from the girl, and only a slight hint of any kind of acknowledgement. In fact, Joe was unable to convince himself that there wasn't still some kind of glow coming from just behind her eyes, like a great power trying to get out. He tried not to think about it. Dr Pontius had suggested that the pressure of the tumour as it increased in size could cause certain abnormal thought patterns as well as hallucinations. Even though he knew the root cause of all of his nightmarish visions, he could take little comfort in that because the root cause itself was so nightmarish. His tutorial was all present and accounted for except for the mysterious Mohammed Asshad. John Smith and Richard Jones were sitting with pens poised to take notes and Tess and Leah, who barely seemed to have noticed his arrival, were having a disturbing conversation about what foods a guy could eat to make it taste better.

  'Well I'm glad to see that things haven't changed in my brief absence,' commented Joe.

  'Actually, Mr Tudor was quite capable of picking up where you left off. He certainly didn't turn up late to every tutorial.'

  'No, Harry is definitely a punctual man. If I had to choose a single word to describe him, that would be it.'

  'Mr Finch, we've already missed the first ten minutes, is it possible that we could...'

  'You know, Gabriel, one day you're going to make some lucky man feel very, very trapped by the direction his life has taken.'

  He looked her over calmly, and she stared back at him, neither of them willing to look away first. Her lips had thinned down to a slit across the front of her face, like the cut from a razor. Her eyes flashed a sort of righteous anger and Joe found himself flinching and looking away. Gabriel, happy in her victory, spoke once more.

  'It's called transference, Mr Finch. You feel trapped in your life and you project those feelings onto others. I'd be surprised if your entire... episode was anything more than a psychosomatic response to your own depression. The whole thing stinks of a mid-life crisis,' she said flippantly, and when he looked back up, she was still staring at him.

  'On that point at least I know you're wrong. A mid-life crisis would suggest that I'm half way through my life. This would more accurately be described as an end-life crisis.'

  That shut her up. Her mouth opened slightly in surprise, then snapped shut again as she tried to gauge if he was serious or not. To Joe's surprise it was Tess who spoke first. He had assumed that she had absolutely no interest in anything that didn't involve promiscuous sex in the back of a panel van, but her eyes reflected concern.

  'Are you okay, Mr Finch?' she said, which was quite possibly the longest sentence she had ever directed at him.

  Joe thought back to the morning on the bus, the woman screaming in the river of people, the babies consuming their mother, and Gabriel, burning him with her eyes.

  'No.'

  'What's wrong with you?' Leah asked.

  Joe looked over to the two boys, who were both furiously scribbling away at their pads, barely looking up.

 
'Pens down, boys. This won't be on the test. I have what my oncologist describes as quite a big tumour in my right temporal lobe. I've been given a maximum of five months to live.'

  Now he had everyone's attention. The two boys had put their pens down, and the whole class was staring at him uncomfortably. He knew the feeling. What was there to say to somebody who was going to die? It was the same look he had seen on Mary's face. He had seen it on Harry's as well, and now he had five students looking at him in much the same way. He could feel his body shrinking under their gaze. In this case, it was not even pity. It was just a desire on their part to be anywhere else. Joe turned to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk, but quickly put it down again when he realised that he had absolutely nothing to write on the blackboard. He didn't even make a lesson plan. In truth, he couldn't even really recall what they had been studying a week ago.

  'Well, we really should be getting on, it's fifteen minutes into the tutorial and...'

  'He's lying.'

  Joe turned around.

  'What was that?'

  'You're lying,' Gabriel said.

  'Lying? Why would I lie about something like that?'

  'That's something only you can tell us. But I don't believe a word of it. Why would a man who has just been given five months to live come back to work a week later to give a tutorial on James Joyce?'

  Joyce! That's what they were studying, Joe thought, with the brief satisfaction of having scratched a mental itch. That faded quickly and left him with only Gabriel's question, which was actually an incredibly good one. Why would a man with five months to live come back to work? He had enough money to live out his last days in relative comfort, and still leave Mary with enough to get by on, and yet here he was standing in front of a group of students teaching them things they didn't really want to learn and he no longer placed any importance on. It didn't make sense. It was, in a word, crazy. Gabriel seemed to have done it again. As much as he hated to admit it, the girl was quite insightful.

  'It seems, Gabriel, that you have a gift for analysing people's innermost thoughts,' Joe fumbled around theatrically in his briefcase. 'I just happen to have here a fragment of text written by James Joyce on the wall of a public lavatory in San Francisco during the late fourteenth century. Would you care to hear it and share your irritatingly accurate analysis with the class?'

  'Mr Finch...'

  But Joe was already reading the hastily scrawled limerick he had written on the bus to distract him from the horror outside.

  'There once was a chicken with AIDS

  Who used to get off on clichés

  So he'd blow his fowl load

  Whilst crossing the road

  Screaming, ‘It's not just eggs that get laid!'

  Tess laughed and the two boys had again picked up their pens and were in the process of writing down the limerick, but Gabriel had crossed her arms in front of her and was looking at Joe, not now with annoyance, but with sadness. Or pity.

  'I would suggest that the author of that is a deeply unhappy man, who no longer feels relevant and now finds he has to resort to vulgarity to get any sort of attention. And he doesn't care if it's good or bad.'

  Joe began to clap his hands together enthusiastically, and held out his arm towards Gabriel as though she was a fellow actor at curtain call.

  'Ladies and gentlemen, once again, Gabriel has hit the nail on the fucking head. That is spot on. She's two for two now. But you're not always correct. I am dying, Gabriel.'

  'Then I ask you again, Mr Finch, what are you doing here?'

  Joe shrugged.

  'Because, Gabriel, sometimes even a duck needs a raincoat.'

  8