Honk If You Are Jesus

by Peter Goldsworthy

  And perhaps too blasphemous. Although if so, against what? Not God, certainly. Or Jesus Christ. Against good taste, perhaps. Against notions of proportion, of Knowing When To Stop. The world was one vast entertainment to Tad, its parts sharply divided into the Interesting, and the Not. Among the interesting he refused to discriminate: small-time hospital adultery, Mary-Beth’s latest clothes, cell division proteins, my relations with Scanlon, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ — all provoked the same excitement, all had approximately equal entertainment value.

  I limited my answer: ‘I decided to stay.’

  ‘You couldn’t keep away,’ he said, and his neck rolls seemed to shiver, deliciously: ‘It is interesting, isn’t it?’

  ‘May you live in interesting times: it’s an ancient Chinese curse.’

  ‘Speaking of Chinese, what say we adjourn to the coast for some comestibles shortly?’

  ‘You’re hungry?’

  ‘I will be hungry. Soon.’

  ‘I’m otherwise engaged.’

  He adopted an expression of mock hurt: ‘I hope it’s important. Scanlon?’

  I shook my head: ‘I’m eating at the White House.’

  ‘Again? You are privileged.’

  Tad had been summoned to the White House just once: the celebratory party after Mary-Beth’s positive pregnancy test. He still spoke of that night in hushed tones: of the food, especially.

  ‘I think it’s more of a housecall,’ I consoled him, ‘than a dinner.’

  He rose, smiling; his chagrin had already become mock chagrin: ‘Then I’ll let you get on with your busy social life. When are they going to tell the child-bride, I wonder?’

  I lied, I didn’t want to talk about it: ‘I’ve no idea.’

  The day was almost done — a few narrow bars of late afternoon sunlight squeezed between the slats of the blinds. My Best Friend had invited me for dinner at eight; meanwhile there were things to be done. I left Tad with his pills and followed the shore-path back towards the Medical Centre: the familiar daily walk by Lake Galilee. No one was walking on water, but for a time I was back in fairyland: giant flame trees, waterbirds, gardens spilling over with scent and colour. The towers of the Rose Cathedral appeared among the tree tops, an impossible dream building, a fairy building.

  I climbed the steps of the Medical Centre towards my holy relic. The scan would still be stuck to the wall screen in my office; Alison was under standing orders to move nothing without permission.

  I locked the door, flipped the switch and sat staring at the scan for some time: the rounded planet curve of the head, the vaguer outline of the limbs. The tiny scrotal clump. This was my icon: glowing, fluorescent. It was an image worth billions, probably: the first image of Jesus Christ seen anywhere on earth for two thousand years. I could imagine that tough, flexible film — enclosed in its own reliquary in the Cathedral, or in the Museum across the lake, an object of veneration in years to come.

  The Gold Coast Ultrasound: a far more important, and authentic, relic than any Fragment of the True Cross or Crown of Thorns. I’d inspected every grainy blotch and shadow several times already, but the image drew me obsessively: a focus for thoughts, a focal point to juggle things about. At length I slipped the films back into the drawer, locked my office and headed down the corridor to the Outpatient drug dispensary.

  The drug cupboards were locked; but as Chair of the Department I had access to a key. Tad’s pill taking had provided the cue: I chose several standard bottles of pregnancy vitamins — iron, folate, and B-group. Two I set aside, the third I emptied down a plughole.

  I selected another small bottle from the shelf and transferred its contents into the empty vitamin container. The capsules — Peptiprost, a prostaglandin derivative used (mostly) in the treatment of stomach ulcers — were of slightly different colour coding, but a near-enough match.

  I pushed all three bottles into the depths of my shoulder bag, locked the dispensary, and left for dinner.

  The maid opened the front door, but Mary-Beth immediately abducted me, leading me into a small library, or study; a room I had not seen before. Books lined the walls — or perhaps empty book spines, of the type that also filled Pfitzner’s office. Hollis Schultz was sitting at a desk, writing; he rose, greeted me and slipped an arm about his wife: ‘So how’s our girl, Professor?’

  ‘She seems fine. She’ll need some more tests, of course.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. The sooner the better.’ I turned to Mary-Beth: ‘Also, I’ve brought you something.’

  I fossicked the three phials of pills from my handbag; Schultz took them out of Mary-Beth’s hands. My heart lurched: was he suspicious?

  ‘What are these?’

  ‘Vitamins. Standard type of thing. I should have prescribed them before.’

  He inspected each bottle carefully before passing them on.

  ‘Folic acid,’ I said. ‘B6 … Iron.’

  He appeared satisfied: ‘It goes without saying that we will spare no expense. Drugs. Equipment. Anything you need. So much depends on this pregnancy. I’m sure you understand that now.’

  The doorbell chimed, we emerged from the library to find Isabella ushering Scanlon through the front door. Mary-Beth caught my eye; she smiled, coyly.

  I turned away, overcome by rage. Did she think that she was doing me a favour? Did she believe her self-appointed role of Best Friend also included that of matchmaker, or at least peacemaker? Mixed with that rage was contempt: surely she had more important things to think about.

  Scanlon took my hand, and nodded: ‘Professor Fox.’

  ‘Professor Scanlon.’

  Even Mary-Beth registered the near-zero temperature of this exchange: her eyes met mine, puzzled. Hollis Schultz was less puzzled than amused; he spoke with heavy irony: ‘Something to drink, Professors?’

  Mary-Beth attempted to stitch us together with small talk — her usual seamless web — until he returned with the drinks; then her husband took over again, delivering a kind of sermon: ‘I think we should clear the air before we eat, Professor Fox. I know it’s been difficult for you. I hope you can forgive us for being … ah, less than candid. Perhaps the decision to keep you in the dark was wrong. But I hope you can at least understand our thinking processes.’

  ‘Comprehend might be a better word,’ I said, guardedly.

  This seemed a sufficient compromise.

  ‘Then welcome back to the team,’ he said, and raised his glass. ‘To a healthy pregnancy.’

  Our glasses clinked together, each glass touched each of the others in turn, completing all possible permutations. We walked through to the dining room and sat: Scanlon opposite me, across the narrow width of the long table. He was well within kicking distance, I realised, a little crazily. Our hosts sat at each end, further apart, out of each other’s range.

  ‘For what we are about to receive, Lord …’

  Scanlon watched me throughout grace. Or was I watching him? Mary-Beth’s head was bent; he winked at me, as if trying to arrange some sort of collusion between us, an intimacy that depended on excluding others. Soup arrived, and Mary-Beth began talking, a little too quickly, too excitedly: a child, chattering inanely. It was more than the familiar scattiness of pregnancy: the inability to concentrate, to remember, to think straight. This was the scattiness of suppressed panic, surely, the terror of the Deep End, of being in way over your head. She was retreating — escaping — further into childishness.

  Schultz didn’t appear to notice; if anything he encouraged her. Not for the first time I felt there was something far too proprietorial about his manner, something which belonged to an earlier, more patriarchal era. He seemed more the proud parent, than the loving husband, of his wife. He listened, smiling, as she chattered through a compendium of Woman’s Day banalities: soup recipes, the seasons’ fashions, new places to eat, the latest Royal Estrangement. I remembered the artful way she had structured dinner conversation the first time I visited: the cue cards I suspec
ted she kept hidden up her sleeve. This was a higher-speed, fast-forward version:

  8.30–8.35 p.m. Restaurants.

  8.35–8.40 p.m. Royal Romance.

  ‘Romance?’ Scanlon moved the conversation from the particular to the general. ‘What is romance? It’s a recent invention.’

  ‘William,’ she accused, ‘you don’t believe in love?’

  ‘I believe in curiosity — a much greater force than love.’

  ‘But surely you have felt love for someone?’

  ‘I’ve felt curious about people,’ he said. ‘Certain people. I’ve wanted to know them better.’

  As he spoke, his glance rested on me, briefly, then moved away. Those words were aimed at me, I realised; he was explaining, obliquely, that he had been ‘curious’ about me, nothing more.

  He hadn’t wanted to love me deeply, he had wanted to know me, deeply.

  There was a kind of honesty in this that appealed to me; if not to my heart, at least to my head. He wanted me to understand that he hadn’t been using me; that our relationship was not just part of The Project, something done for Troop Morale. The realisation was hurtful, of course, but it was a lesser hurt. He was using the smaller hurt as balm for the greater.

  ‘I agree with Professor Scanlon,’ I said. ‘I’ve never understood what love means.’

  ‘Maya, you’re just saying that. You know you are. You’re just trying to tease me.’

  ‘I’m serious. I think there is too much emphasis on love in our culture. I think the concept is overrated.’

  ‘She’s a terrible tease, don’t you think, William?’

  Our answers didn’t seem to matter, except to the two of us. I said as little as possible for the rest of the evening; and rose to leave as early as possible. Scanlon also rose and caught me at the door; Hollis and Mary-Beth followed some distance behind, allowing us a moment alone.

  ‘I’m thinking of spending the rest of the weekend up at the cabin,’ he said.

  The invitation was unspoken.

  ‘Watch out for snakes,’ I told him.

  4

  Restlessness drove me back to the Rose Cathedral the next morning — and boredom. The drug I had fed to Mary-Beth needed a day to do its work; the interim was a void. Work no longer drew me — how could it? That part of my life which I had lived on the fifth floor of the Hollis Schultz Medical Centre was drawing to a close. The structures, the work schedules, that underpinned my new life had loosened: that Sunday morning seemed as empty as the blue sky above it.

  I wasn’t seeking guidance in Church, or confirmation of my decisions — or not consciously. I had as much belief in the value of Ouija boards as I had in the preaching and text chanting that filled the Rose Cathedral each Sunday.

  Come unto Him all ye that labour, come unto Him that are heavy laden, and He will give you rest.

  Hollis Schultz seemed inspired, but I knew this inspiration to be a practised inspiration, a rehearsed inspiration, a performance.

  But who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap: and He shall sit as a refiner and purifier …

  I was astonished, again, at the change in him. The precise weekday Schultz was a man who lowered his voice in order to be heard, who merely by speaking softly could command the attention of a room. Sunday’s Schultz was his opposite: a singer, a shouter, a ranter.

  There was no intellectual meat in his preaching: poetry, mostly. Jesus — a Natural High, was the advertised theme. The scripture quotations had changed since my last visit. There seemed a lot of talk of Messiahs, of Second Comings, of Redemption. With just a whiff of brimstone in the background.

  Hear ye the voice of Him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way for our Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

  Was he preparing the way himself? Or was I oversensitive to such themes?

  Various clean cut young men and women rose from among the blue rinses from time to time, and came forward, and were handed a radio-microphone, and cajoled to renounce their past lives of drug addiction and sin and crime — and announce that the ‘Natural High of Jesus’ now filled their lives with a much healthier addiction.

  Wearing collars and ties and short backs-and-sides and neat ponytails and skirts they seemed an unlikely bunch of drug dealers and prostitutes. Such, Schultz proclaimed, was the redeeming, transforming power of the Word. The mind-altering properties of that ‘wondrous drug, belief’.

  After the benediction I escaped through a side exit, refusing to join the throng that clogged the front portals, waiting their turn to agitate the Great Man’s hand.

  Outside, the same blue roof still covered the world. Schultz had spent the better part of an hour jabbing an index finger towards the sky, but there was no evidence of God, or heaven, in that even blueness; only the well-known effects of light diffraction, the blue shift absorption of colours of shorter wavelength.

  Tad was out, the house empty. Still restless, I summoned my car from the pool and drove away from the campus, a little aimlessly at first, finally turning towards the distant hills. If heaven still existed — my heaven — it would be found at higher altitudes, if not quite as high as the dome of blue above. I knew exactly where it had been located, one weekend afternoon, months before. Those experiences with Scanlon were past, and I was determined never to repeat them, but the site still tugged at me.

  I spotted the car from the main road: a half-hidden gleam down in the valley. I braked at the turn off, considered, momentarily, turning back, then decided against. There were things still to be said between the two of us; here at least there would be no interruptions.

  He wasn’t in the cabin; I knew where I would find him. I followed the foot track down into the dark of the forest, fully clothed, and sensibly shod. The various water noises — the chuggling stream at first, later the rush of the cataract — hid the sound of voices from me until the last moment; I stepped innocently out into sunshine at the pool and stood there, frozen.

  On the far side of the pool, on a wide slab of stone, Scanlon and Heather Sims were lying, naked, bathing in the sunlight.

  Their eyes were closed, they were murmuring to each other, the words indistinct. They weren’t touching; perhaps it was merely some kind of Platonic shared nudity, but I doubted it. I had the distinct feeling — to use his own absurd system of explanation — that Scanlon had recently been very ‘curious’ about Sims; that he had got to know her, deeply.

  And, in hindsight, had probably been getting to know her, deeply, for many months.

  I had not been seen. I stepped backwards, and planted my foot in the middle of a pair of jeans. Clothing had been discarded at the edge of the pool: his familiar scraps in a heap on the mossy path, hers draped more carefully over a low branch.

  I bent, stealthily, reached a hand into Scanlon’s pockets, and lifted out his keys, squeezing tightly to prevent any tell-tale jangling.

  My heart thumped. I stepped further back among the dark greenery, turned, climbed the path to my car, and drove slowly back down through the hills, down from heaven, descending to those sundrenched cities of the plain.

  Scanlon’s keys were an unexpected bonus; the final act might be easier than I had planned.

  5

  The holy relics were out of reach: sealed, under guard, in their bank of security boxes on the seventh floor. I doubted that any genetic material still clung to them. Scanlon had fine combed every millimetre of surface area; any organic matter that hadn’t been scraped off had been sluiced clean with solvents.

  Which meant that the eggs — so to speak — were all in one basket.

  The sixth floor was deserted, although that didn’t slow the pounding of my pulse. Or still my trembling hands: I tried to fit a succession of Scanlon’s keys into the locked door of the Cell Lab, finding the hole each time with difficulty, forced to grip the keys firmly with both hands.

  The fourth key opened the door
, but the fridge inside was also locked; this time none of the keys could be made to fit. I jemmied open the fridge using the foot of a nearby tripod. The three phials inside were clearly labelled: Nail of Monza, Armenia IV, Bone Fragment XII. I smashed the seals of the first two phials and shook out their contents — whitish, translucent pasta strands of mega-DNA — into a nearby drain. The last phial I gripped tightly for some time, wanting to break this last seal also, but unable to force myself to it. For reasons I could not fully comprehend at the time, I dropped this third phial — The Nail of Monza — into my shoulder bag. I crushed the two empty phials in the sink with the heel of a nearby pestle, and flushed away the glistening glass fragments. A bottle of steaming acid — concentrated nitric, the strongest on hand — followed these into the drain; I had to retreat from the sink, choking on the hissing fumes.

  That genetic code had survived two thousand years; it was now thoroughly scrambled.

  The pestle posed a problem. I was dealing with forensic experts — in Scanlon, with a forensic genius. A single surviving gene strand, invisible to the naked eye, was all he would need to salvage the project. I dropped the pestle into the autoclave, set the timer at maximum and left it boiling. Any DNA fragments still clinging to the tip would be denatured within minutes.

  Apart from that phial in my bag, one other remote possibility for resurrection remained: the electrophoretic films of the three specimens.

  I guessed their location; I knew that I had the key.

  Strangely, I had never entered Scanlon’s office before. It was an extension of his personality: something he wore, in a sense, and like other things that he wore, in a state of disorder. It was not quite as squalid as his house; the Department secretary had prevented the accumulation of empty coffee cups and plates of fur-covered, half-eaten food — but she clearly had no control over the paperwork. Or the basketball posters. Books and journals clustered in large, toppled piles on every available horizontal surface; in-trays filled with paperwork had apparently never been emptied, merely pushed to one side when they were full and replaced by another in-tray.