by Michel Faber
‘Yes, but my book is in a whole different class from these,’ said Theo. ‘I don’t mean in terms of quality, I mean in terms of the sheer numbers of people who’ll be interested. There’s just no comparison. This book is going to explode.’
Baum wandered away from the desk, stood in front of a poster for Sing Times Seven on which two cartoon children in a sudsy bathtub were blowing numbers at their delighted parents. The mild, vaguely despondent expression had settled back onto Baum’s face and he once again resembled an unworldly second-hand bookseller.
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘I fear it will.’
Every Word That Proceedeth Out Of The Mouth
The make-up girl dabbed at his forehead with a sable brush. She frisked his nose, stroked his eyebrows with the tip of her manicured finger. It was almost erotic, especially since she had a low-cut blouse and a lacy pink bra and she was leaning over him in his dressing-room chair.
‘So, what’s your book?’ she enquired.
‘It’s called The Fifth Gospel,’ he said. He had a childish desire to fetch it out of his bag and show her. Elysium had really gone to town on the cover design: a diecut, two-fold jacket, the outer flap of which was a photographer’s re-creation of Golgotha, with a crucifix shape cut out, affording a glimpse of the second cover beneath, a high-res reproduction of Malchus’s handiwork. Despite Baum’s protestations about being an academic publisher at heart, and despite the low-budget, unpretentious cover of Sing Times Seven, Elysium had clearly evolved with great speed into the major league. Even the title was embossed in silver foil.
‘Is it gonna be a movie?’ said the make-up girl.
‘No,’ he said. (Although . . . who could predict the ways of Hollywood?) ‘It’s not fiction, it’s real. I discovered some scrolls, ancient scrolls written in the first century by a man called Malchus. He met Jesus. Actually met him.’
‘Wow,’ said the girl. She didn’t sound too overwhelmed.
‘You know the other four Gospels, the ones in the Bible? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?’
‘Sure,’ she said, her eyes half shut as she powdered his chin.
‘Two of those guys definitely never met Jesus, and the other two did, but we can’t be sure if they were really kosher, if you’ll excuse the expression.’
‘Do I look Jewish?’ she asked, a wrinkle spoiling the pellucid patina of her brow.
‘No. I meant that we don’t know if the Gospels of Matthew and John were originally by Matthew and John. The earliest surviving manuscripts were written a long time after the events, by people who must’ve been copying copies of copies. Copies of what? We don’t know. Maybe Matthew and John did write their memoirs. Maybe someone else did, fifty years later.’
As he babbled, he had the uneasy feeling he might be blowing his load prematurely, here in a backstage make-up chair, instead of in front of the cameras, egged on by the glamorous Barbara Kuhn, confessor to the stars. But the vacant Valley Girl visage of this nymphet symbolised, for him, the mass public he was trying to win over. Baum had convinced him that these first few days of the book’s release were absolutely crucial. The Fifth Gospel was not the sort of publication that could be a sleeper, a slow burn. It must ignite the world’s imagination in a coordinated campaign.
‘My scrolls are the original deal,’ said Theo, as captivatingly as he could, given that the girl was at that moment dabbing at the fleshy hollow between his nose and his upper lip. ‘Malchus wrote his story directly on the papyrus with his own hand. And Malchus was there. When the Bible was happening, so to speak. He was in the garden of Gethsemane on the night Jesus was betrayed. He was the one who got his ear cut off.’
‘Yeah?’ A flicker of interest. ‘I didn’t know that. In this job, you learn something new every day. Yesterday, we had this other guy on the show. He’s like the world’s biggest expert on child abuse. And he’s found a part of the brain where bad sex-related memories get stored. It’s like a special part of the frontal load of the brain, he had diagrams of the exact location, and if you have an injection of some new kind of drug into that part, you can get rid of all the damage from the abuse. I was like: now this the world needs.’
‘Speaking of which,’ he quipped wearily, ‘are you sure I really need so much make-up?’
‘Relax,’ she replied, with the aplomb of the very young. ‘It’s just to stop those big bad lights reflecting off of you. Otherwise you look like a total greaseball.’
On the scale of humiliations, Theo’s appearance on the Barbara Kuhn Show was worse than some he’d endured in recent days, and better than others. Ms Kuhn had at least read the book, which was more than many chat-show hosts managed, despite the slimness of the text (126 pages, including Malchus’s bits). She gave him a great intro – so good and so comprehensive, in fact, that there was little for him to add. There were only two logical directions to go after an intro like that: either he should be allowed to wave at the cameras, take a quick bow and leave, or he should be allowed to discuss Malchus’s Gospel in-depth. Neither was on the agenda. This was TV, and he had to find a way of conveying the illusion of leisurely complexity in four minutes. The one mercy was that it was a pre-recorded affair, so there wasn’t the ignominy of a horde of gum-chewing, applauding onlookers to contend with.
‘Malchus was not a disciple as such, am I right?’ said Ms Kuhn, whose ample chest was slightly wrinkled at close range but whose face was stretched flawless and inscrutable.
‘Well, yes and no,’ said Theo. ‘Everyone who followed Jesus was a disciple, and Malchus certainly calls himself such. He’s not one of the original twelve disciples Jesus chose. But then neither were Mark or Luke. Malchus actually met Jesus. He saw him crucified. He was there.’
The studio director, a stocky white-haired man in a black shirt and cream trousers, butted in from the sidelines. ‘That’s good, that’s fine. But let’s try not to have too many “yes and no” answers.’
‘Do we have to do a retake?’ said Theo.
‘No, one “yes and no” is OK. One we can get away with. Just try not to do it again.’
‘So,’ rejoined Barbara Kuhn, ‘Mr Grippin.’
Theo blinked. He hadn’t yet fully adjusted to his nom de plume; each time journalists or talk-show hosts uttered it, his first instinct was to look over his shoulder to see whom they were addressing. But Baum had convinced him that ‘Theo Griepenkerl’ was a problem for customers and booksellers; the chances of somebody misspelling it in a search engine, or failing to remember it in the first place, were too high. ‘Grippin’ was nice and simple, yet distinctive enough to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
‘A marketplace crowded with newly discovered Gospels?’ Theo had remarked sarcastically.
Baum had shrugged. ‘We can go with Griepenkerl if you insist. It’s your call.’
Theo jerked back into focus, forced himself to re-inhabit the body that was perched on a cream sofa in the studio set of the Barbara Kuhn Show. His body was dressed in smart casuals, including a jacket he’d bought specially for this tour. His hair was washed and combed, the little scars on his face were hidden under a dusting of cosmetics. To the best of his ability, he switched on a light of amiable yet authoritative intelligence behind his eyes, for the viewers at home to notice and admire.
‘Please, call me Theo,’ he said.
‘Tell me, Theo,’ said Ms Kuhn. ‘In what historical period exactly was Malchus writing?’
‘Probably 38 AD, 40 AD, something like that.’ Theo paused for a split second, in case the director demanded an exact date, then ploughed on. ‘That’s a full thirty to fifty years before the earliest of the New Testament Gospels is supposed to have been written, and just a few years after Christ’s death. Basically, as soon as he’s had his encounter with Jesus, Malchus quits his job as Caiaphas’s spy and starts evangelising, and he does that full-on for several years, and then he gets a wasting disease that’s presumably cirrhosis or cancer of the liver or something like that, and he writes his memoir.’
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br /> ‘Excuse me,’ interjected the director again. ‘But the narrative sequence is not too good here. This guy gets his disease after the career he has after meeting Jesus, but the viewers haven’t even seen Jesus yet. If we could have more Jesus, and sooner, that would be excellent.’
‘I think we should let Malchus speak,’ said Theo, flipping the pages of The Fifth Gospel to the place he’d bookmarked. ‘It’s his words that are important, not mine. If you’ll . . . ah . . . if you’ll let me, I’d like to read the part where Jesus is in the garden of Gethsemane, and Judas has just betrayed him.’ He lowered his eyes to the text, and tried not to appear fazed by the nearest camera rolling swiftly and silently towards him like a huge armour-plated predator. ‘Malchus has been hanging around, gathering info for Caiaphas, the High Priest. Then this:
Upon the signal that was thus given by Judas, the soldiers moved forward. Only then was it evident to me that I, that is to say my body, was in the space between the Roman guards and the followers of Jesus. I counselled myself that I was in no danger, for the soldiers knew me to be the servant of Caiaphas, whereupon a servant of Jesus said, Lord, let me despatch these jackals. I was straight away upon my knees, believing a strong man had brought down his fist on my shoulder, with force enough to buckle my legs. In truth, as I was told afterwards, I was struck by a sword, which cut off the right ear from my head, so that it dangled to my shoulder like a woman’s adornment.
Then Jesus stepped forth, and called to his servant to do no more, and furthermore Jesus said, I am a leader of a far mightier army than this. Don’t you think I could call down a battalion of angels to fight for me? But the time is not yet.
Then bloody and giddy I fell forward, and my face was upon his groin, and with gentle hands he took my head—’
‘Excuse me,’ said the director. ‘We have a problem. Groin. Specifically: groin and Jesus. The Barbara Kuhn Show is a mainstream show. We gotta be careful with gay stuff. Johnny Mathis is fine. AIDS is OK, within reason. Armani, Yves Saint Laurent . . . bring ‘em on. But gay sex with Jesus . . .’
‘I’m sure there’s nothing sexual meant,’ said Theo, blinking into the spotlights. ‘The groin is just the . . . ah . . . relevant juncture of the body, that’s all. The bit where the . . . ah . . . lower torso meets the legs. I could’ve translated it as “loin”, but I felt that would be unnecessarily archaic. See, in my translation, I wanted to strike a balance between the no-nonsense directness of the original Aramaic and the sort of weird Elizabethan-Hebrew hybrid that people are used to from the King James—’
‘Plus it’s too long,’ said the director. ‘Way too long. This thing of reading aloud from a book on TV: it only works if you’re an actor. I mean, like, an act-tooor.’ And the director gestured in an extravagant fashion that struck Theo as, frankly, gay.
Barbara Kuhn, consummate professional that she was, perceived that the studio dynamic was growing slack and took it in hand.
‘Let’s talk about you,’ she purred. ‘How did you feel when you first set eyes on the scrolls?’
‘Scared,’ he said, wiping his powdered forehead nervously. ‘Scared that another bomb would go off and I would be buried in the rubble of the Mosul museum’s toilets.’
‘Not to be found for another two thousand years,’ suggested Ms Kuhn, deadpan.
He nodded, grinning like an idiot, relieved that she was steering the encounter back towards some kind of convivial conversation. Although, at the same moment, it dawned on him that she probably despised him, for some reason he would never guess unless he lived with her for half a decade.
‘How long did it take you to translate the scrolls?’
‘A few days. Maybe a week.’
‘Only a week?’
He could tell from her tone that this was the wrong answer. And if he pointed out that the total amount of text was not large, he would only dig himself deeper, as it would imply that the book was flimsy. ‘I’m fast,’ he said. ‘My Aramaic is probably as good as most people’s French.’
‘We’ll need to cut that,’ said the director. ‘It would only make sense in Canada.’
‘Sorry,’ said Theo.
‘We’re not in Canada,’ said the director, with a hint of peevishness.
‘I appreciate that.’
‘How did you feel, Theo,’ Ms Kuhn pressed on, ‘when you’d finished translating the scrolls?’
‘Uh . . . I felt relieved. I felt I’d done a good job.’
‘You didn’t feel elated? A rush of excitement?’ She was obviously trying to help him conform to a stereotype the viewers would find attractive.
‘Pleased.’ It was like the final offer in a haggling transaction.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Barbara Kuhn, and turned to face the camera, to touch base with her legions of supporters. ‘Of course, what will astonish readers of this Gospel is the many differences between Malchus’s version of events and the versions we know from the Bible. For example, there’s a part where Malchus is in the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus has been betrayed by Judas, and one of the disciples slices off his ear with a sword . . .’
Theo nodded dumbly. He understood that this little précis of Ms Kuhn’s meant that his carefully rehearsed, dramatic reading, freshly captured inside the cameras, was already condemned to oblivion.
‘In the Bible,’ continued Ms Kuhn, ‘specifically in the Gospel of Saint Luke, who was a doctor, it says that Jesus reached out and healed Malchus’s ear. But in Malchus’s account, the ear isn’t healed. Malchus goes home, gets his injury bandaged up, and it gets infected for a while – which he describes in great detail – and then finally it dries up. And for the rest of his life it’s like a scrap of gristle hanging off the side of his head.’
‘Or like a woman’s adornment, as Malchus himself so vividly puts it,’ said Theo.
‘In other words,’ Ms Kuhn pressed on, ‘there’s no miracle. Saint Luke made it up. He lied. How do you think Christians will feel about that?’
‘Uh . . . well, interested, I hope.’
Ms Kuhn tilted her head to one side, a trademark gesture of mildly appalled bemusement that was selected for a close-up by the camera.
‘What’s your faith, Theo, if I may ask?’
‘I don’t have one.’
She leaned back, faux-reflective. ‘If I could get you to imagine, if you will . . . If you had faith, how do you think you’d feel to read that Jesus’s last words, on the cross, were not “It is finished” or “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”, but “Please, somebody, please finish me”?’
‘Uh . . . well, I hope it would give me a new awareness of Jesus’s humanity, and the awfulness of what he went through.’
‘Has it done that for you, Theo?’
Theo leaned back in his chair, fighting off a sensation of claustrophobia as beads of sweat broke through the make-up on his face and he saw his bloodshot eyes staring back at him from multifarious monitors and lenses.
‘Yeah,’ he breathed.
Judges
The Fifth Gospel had been out for six days, officially. Theo was, at this moment, chain-smoking and eating peanuts in a soulless corporate hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel room was the latest berth in his whistle-stop tour of the USA; the peanuts were provided in the mini-bar refrigerator, alongside various candies, savoury snacks and booze.
‘Unbeatable deals on hair and nails,’ chattered the TV, a hulking robot that loomed over the foot of the bed. Theo slid his fingers inside the foil sachet and fetched out another peanut. Each one tasted wonderful – lightly greased, salt-encrusted yet silky smooth – but there were too few of them in the packet. In fact, there were more peanuts depicted in the photo than actually inside the foil. There was also a helpful message for allergy sufferers: WARNING: CONTAINS NUTS.
‘. . . five convenient locations,’ the TV said. ‘We’re here waiting to welcome you!’
This seemed unlikely, given that it was now the middle of the night.
Theo opened the refrigerator
and closed it again. The Elysium sales representative who’d chaperoned him earlier in the day had treated him to a Chinese buffet at 9 p.m., and there was no reason to feel ravenous now, especially since he would normally be asleep. He ought to have the willpower to limit his excess consumption to the sachet of peanuts. Face it, he did not need pretzels, Twinkie bars or Snickers-flavoured milk. In any case, the cost of all that crap would be added to the hotel bill, and somewhere down the line, weeks or months from now, a smart young accountant in Elysium’s head office would peruse a list of all his expenses, peanuts and all. Printed on one balance sheet would be the number of copies sold of The Fifth Gospel; printed on another would be the author’s attacks of the midnight munchies.
Of course, it was madness to worry about small change when hundreds of thousands of dollars had just taken up residence in his bank account. He should either pay for all the extras himself, or have the chutzpah to freeload with gusto. To his annoyance, he couldn’t bring himself to do either.
He badly, badly, badly needed to know how well The Fifth Gospel was selling. All the sales reps in each city he visited assured him that the demand was phenomenal. The staff in all the bookstores told him the same. Shop window displays almost always found room to feature a copy, in amongst the latest bestsellers about sexy criminologists, celebrity footballers, loveable drug addicts, conspiracy theories, and the national trauma of 9/11 refracted with unbearable poignancy through a literary fable about an anorexic New York teenager and her imaginary friend Kuki. And, of course, Elysium’s guide to teaching your kids arithmetic the Sing Times Seven way. The omens seemed excellent.
Yet he was aware that new books, movies and CDs are often launched in a haze of hoopla and that, when the haze clears, many items prove to have fizzled. Bargain bins and remainder tables are full of ‘surefire sellers’ and Next Big Things. Baum had done his utmost to make Theo feel that the $250,000 advance was a foolish, fatherly act of largesse, whose loss the publisher would bear with stoic good grace. Theo wanted to prove him wrong, to confirm that the sly old bastard was raking in the money.
