“You have to go,” Joshua said.
“I’m going. In the morning, when you do. What, you think I’d back out now?”
“No, tonight. You have to go to Maggie. I can’t go.”
“What? I mean, why?” Sure I’d been heartbroken when Maggie had asked to see Joshua and not me, but I’d come to terms with it. Well, as well as one ever comes to terms with an ongoing heartbreak.
“You have to take my place, Biff. There’s almost no moon tonight, and we are about the same size. Just don’t say much and she’ll think it’s me. Maybe not as smart as normal, but she can put that down to worry over the upcoming journey.”
“I’d love to see Maggie, but she wants to see you, why can’t you go?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Not really.”
“Then just take my word for it. You’ll see. Will you do this for me, Biff? Will you take my place, pretend to be me?”
“That would be lying. You never lie.”
“Now you’re getting righteous on me? I won’t be lying. You will be.”
“Oh. In that case, I’ll go.”
But there wasn’t even time to deceive. It was so dark that night that I had to make my way slowly through the village by starlight alone, and as I rounded the corner to the back of our small synagogue I was hit with a wave of sandalwood and lemon and girl sweat, of warm skin, a wet mouth over mine, arms around my back and legs around my waist. I fell backward on the ground and there was in my head a bright light, and the rest of the world existed in the senses of touch and smell and God. There, on the ground behind the synagogue, Maggie and I indulged desires we had carried for years, mine for her, and hers for Joshua. That neither of us knew what we were doing made no difference. It was pure and it happened and it was marvelous. And when we finished we lay there holding each other, half dressed, breathless, and sweating, and Maggie said, “I love you, Joshua.”
“I love you, Maggie,” I said. And ever so slightly she loosened her embrace.
“I couldn’t marry Jakan without—I couldn’t let you go without—without letting you know.”
“He knows, Maggie.”
Then she really pulled away.
“Biff?”
“Uh-oh.” I thought she might scream, that she might leap up and run away, that she might do any one of a hundred things to take me from heaven to hell, but after only a second she nuzzled close to me again.
“Thank you for being here,” she said.
We left at dawn, and our fathers walked with us as far as the gates of Sepphoris. When we parted at the gates my father gave me a hammer and chisel to carry with me in my satchel. “With that you can make enough for a meal anywhere you go,” my father said. Joseph gave Joshua a wooden bowl. “Out of that you can eat the meal that Biff earns.” He grinned at me.
By the gates of Sepphoris I kissed my father for the last time. By the gates of Sepphoris we left our fathers behind and went out into the world to find three wise men.
“Come back, Joshua, and make us free,” Joseph shouted to our backs.
“Go with God,” my own father said.
“I am, I am,” I shouted. “He’s right here.”
Joshua said nothing until the sun was high in the sky and we stopped to share a drink of water. “Well?” Joshua said. “Did she know it was you?”
“Yes. Not at first, but before we parted. She knew.”
“Was she angry at me?”
“No.”
“Was she angry at you?”
I smiled. “No.”
“You dog!” he said.
“You really should ask that angel what he meant about you not knowing a woman, Joshua. It’s really important.”
“You know now why I couldn’t go.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
“I’ll miss her,” Joshua said.
“You have no idea,” I said.
“Every detail. I want to know every detail.”
“But you aren’t supposed to know.”
“That’s not what the angel meant. Tell me.”
“Not now. Not while I can still smell her on my arms.”
Joshua kicked at the dirt. “Am I angry with you, or happy for you, or jealous of you? I don’t know? Tell me!”
“Josh, right now, for the first time I can remember, I’m happier being your friend than I would be being you. Can I have that?”
Now, thinking about that night with Maggie behind the synagogue, where we stayed together until it was nearly dawn, where we made love again and again and fell asleep naked on top of our clothes—now, when I think of that, I want to run away from here, this room, this angel and his task, find a lake, dive down, and hide from the eye of God in the dark muck on the bottom.
Strange.
Part II
Change
Jesus was a good guy, he didn’t need this shit.
JOHN PRINE
Chapter Nine
I should have had a plan before I tried to escape from the hotel room, I see that now. At the time, dashing out the door and into the arms of sweet freedom seemed like plan enough. I got as far as the lobby. It is a fine lobby, as grand as any palace, but in the way of freedom, I need more. I noticed before Raziel dragged me back into the elevator, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process, that there were an inordinate number of old people in the lobby. In fact, compared to my time, there are inordinate numbers of old people everywhere—well, not on TV, but everywhere else. Have you people forgotten how to die? Or have you used up all of the young people on television so there’s nothing left but gray hair and wrinkled flesh? In my time, if you had seen forty summers it was time to start thinking about moving on, making room for the youngsters. If you lasted to fifty the mourners would give you dirty looks when they passed, as if you were purposely trying to put them out of business. The Torah says that Moses lived to be 120 years old. I’m guessing that the children of Israel were following him just to see when he would drop. There was probably betting.
If I do manage to escape the angel, I’m not going to be able to make my living as a professional mourner, not if you people don’t have the courtesy to die. Just as well, I suppose, I’d have to learn all new dirges. I’ve tried to get the angel to watch MTV so I can learn the vocabulary of your music, but even with the gift of tongues, I’m having trouble learning to speak hip-hop. Why is it that one can busta rhyme or busta move anywhere but you must busta cap in someone’s ass? Is “ho” always feminine, and “muthafucka” always masculine, while “bitch” can be either? How many peeps in a posse, how much booty before baby got back, do you have to be all that to get all up in that, and do I need to be dope and phat to be da bomb or can I just be “stupid”? I’ll not be singing over any dead mothers until I understand.
The journey. The quest. The search for the Magi.
We traveled first to the coast. Neither Joshua nor I had ever seen the sea before, so as we topped a hill near the city of Ptolomais, and the endless aquamarine of the Mediterranean stretched before us, Joshua fell to his knees and gave thanks to his father.
“You can almost see the edge of the world,” Joshua said.
I squinted into the dazzling sun, really looking for the edge of the world. “It looks sort of curved,” I said.
“What?” Joshua scanned the horizon, but evidently he didn’t see the curve.
“The edge of the world looks curved. I think it’s round.”
“What’s round?”
“The world. I think it’s round.”
“Of course it’s round, like a plate. If you go to the edge you fall off. Every sailor knows that,” Joshua said with great authority.
“Not round like a plate, round like a ball.”
“Don’t be silly,” Joshua said. “If the world was round like a ball then we would slide off of it.”
“Not if it’s sticky,” I said.
Joshua lifted his foot and looked at the bottom of his sandal, then at me, then at the ground. “Sticky?”<
br />
I looked at the bottom of my own shoe, hoping to perhaps see strands of stickiness there, like melted cheese tethering me to the ground. When your best friend is the son of God, you get tired of losing every argument. “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean the world is not sticky.”
Joshua rolled his eyes. “Let’s go swimming.” He took off down the hill.
“What about the God?” I asked. “You can’t see him.”
Joshua stopped halfway down the hill and held his arms out to the shining, aquamarine sea. “You can’t?”
“That’s a crappy argument, Josh.” I followed him down the hill, shouting as I went. “If you’re not going to try, I’m not going to argue with you anymore. So, what if stickiness is like God? You know, how He abandons our people and leads them into slavery whenever we stop believing in Him. Stickiness could be like that. You could float off into the sky any time now because you don’t believe in stickiness.”
“It’s good that you have something to believe in, Biff. I’m going in the water.” He ran down the beach, shedding his clothes as he went, then dove into the surf, naked.
Later, after we’d both swallowed enough salt water to make us sick, we headed up the coast to the city of Ptolemais.
“I didn’t think it would be so salty,” Joshua said.
“Yeah,” I said, “you’d never know it by looking at it.”
“Are you still angry about your round-earth-stickiness theory?”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said, sounding very mature, I thought. “You being a virgin and all.”
Joshua stopped and grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to wheel around and face him. “The night you spent with Maggie I spent praying to my father to take away the thoughts of you two. He didn’t answer me. It was like trying to sleep on a bed of thorns. Since we left I was beginning to forget, or at least leave it behind, but you keep throwing it in my face.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I forgot how sensitive you virgins can be.”
Then, once again, and not for the last time, the Prince of Peace coldcocked me. A bony, stonecutter’s fist just over my right eye. He hit harder than I remembered. I remember white seabirds in the sky above me, and just a wisp of clouds across the sky. I remember the frothy surf sloshing over my face, leaving sand in my ears. I remember thinking that I should get up and smite Josh upside the head. I remember thinking then that if I got up, Josh might hit me again, so I lay there for a moment, just thinking.
“So, what do you want?” I said, finally, from my wet and sandy supinity.
He stood over me with his fists balled. “If you’re going to keep bringing it up, you have to tell me the details.”
“I can do that.”
“And don’t leave anything out.”
“Nothing?”
“I’ve got to know if I’m going to understand sin.”
“Okay, can I get up? My ears are filling with sand.”
He helped me to my feet and as we entered the seaside city of Ptolomais, I taught Josh about sex.
Down narrow stone streets between high stone walls.
“Well, most of what we learned from the rabbis was not exactly accurate.”
Past men sitting outside their houses, mending their nets. Children selling cups of pomegranate juice, women hanging strings of fish from window to window to dry.
“For instance, you know that part right after Lot’s wife gets turned to stone and then his daughters get drunk and fornicate with him?”
“Right, after Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.”
“Well, that’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said.
We passed Phoenician women who sang as they pounded dried fish into meal. We passed evaporation pools where children scraped the encrusted salt from the rocks and put it into bags.
“But fornication is a sin, and fornication with your daughters, well, that’s a, I don’t know, that’s a double-dog sin.”
“Yeah, but if you put that aside for a second, and you just focus on the two young girls aspect of it, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds initially.”
“Oh.”
We passed merchants selling fruit and bread and oil, spices and incense, calling out claims of quality and magic in their wares. There was a lot of magic for sale in those days.
“And the Song of Solomon, that’s a lot closer, and you can sort of understand Solomon having a thousand wives. In fact, with you being the Son of God and all, I don’t think you’d have any problem getting that many girls. I mean, after you figure out what you’re doing.”
“And a lot of girls is a good thing?”
“You’re a ninny, aren’t you?”
“I thought you’d be more specific. What does Maggie have to do with Lot and Solomon?”
“I can’t tell you about me and Maggie, Josh. I just can’t.”
We were passing a lick of prostitutes gathered outside the door of an inn. Their faces were painted, their skirts slit up the side to show their legs glistening with oil, and they called to us in foreign languages and made tiny dances with their hands as we passed.
“What the hell are they saying?” I asked Joshua. He was better with languages. I think they were speaking Greek.
“They said something about how they like Hebrew boys because we can feel a woman’s tongue better without our foreskins.” He looked at me as if I might confirm or deny this.
“How much money do we have?” I asked.
The inn rented rooms, stalls, and space under the eave to sleep. We rented two adjacent stalls, which was a bit of a luxury for us, but an important one for Joshua’s education. After all, weren’t we on this journey so he could learn to take his rightful place as the Messiah?
“I’m not sure if I should watch,” Joshua said. “Remember David was running over the roofs and happened onto Bathsheba in her bath. That set a whole chain of sin in motion.”
“But listening won’t be a problem.”
“I don’t think it’s the same thing.”
“Are you sure that you don’t want to try this yourself, Josh? I mean, the angel was never clear about your being with a woman.” To be honest, I was a little frightened myself. My experience with Maggie hardly qualified me to be with a harlot.
“No, you go ahead. Just describe what’s happening and what you’re feeling. I have to understand sin.”
“Okay, if you insist.”
“Thank you for doing this for me, Biff.”
“Not just for you, Josh, for our people.”
So that’s how we ended up with the two stalls. Josh would be in one while I, along with the harlot of my choice, instructed him from the other in the fine art of fornication.
Back out at the front of the inn I shopped for my teaching assistant. It was an eight-harlot inn, if that’s how you measure an inn. (I understand that now they measure inns in stars. We are in a four-star inn right now. I don’t know what the conversion from harlots to stars is.) Anyway, there were eight harlots outside the inn that day. They ranged in age from only a few years older than us to older than our mothers. And they ran the gamut of shapes and sizes, having in common only that they were all highly painted and well oiled.
“They’re all so…so nasty-looking.”
“They’re harlots, Biff. They’re supposed to be nasty-looking. Pick one.”
“Let’s go look at some different harlots.” We had been standing a few doors down from the harlots, but they knew we were watching. I walked over and stopped close to a particularly tall harlot and said, “Excuse me, do you know where we might find a different selection of harlots? No offense, it’s just that my friend and I…”
And she pulled open her blouse, exposing full breasts that were glistening with oil and flecks of mica, and she threw her skirt aside and stepped up so a long leg slid behind me and I could feel the rough hair between her legs grinding against my hip and her rouged nipples brushed my cheek and in that instant profound wood did from my person protrude.
/> “This one will be fine, Josh.”
The other harlots let loose with an exaltation of ululation as we led my harlot away. (You know ululation as the sound an ambulance makes. That I get an erection every time one passes the hotel would seem morbid if you didn’t know this story of how Biff Hires a Harlot.) The harlot’s name was Set. She was a head and a half taller than me, with skin the color of a ripe date, wide brown eyes flecked with gold, and hair so black that it reflected blue in the dim light of the stable. She was the perfect harlot design, wide where a harlot should be wide, narrow where a harlot should be narrow, delicate of ankle and neck, sturdy of conscience, intrepid and single-minded of goal once she was paid. She was an Egyptian, but she had learned Greek and a little Latin to help lubricate the discourse of her trade. Our situation required more creativity than she seemed accustomed to, but after a heavy sigh she mumbled something about “if you fuck a Hebrew, make room in the bed for his guilt,” then pulled me into my stall and closed the gate. (Yes, the stalls were used for animals. There was a donkey in the stall opposite Josh’s.)
“So what’s she doing?” Josh asked.
“She’s taking off my clothes.”
“What now.”
“She’s taking off her clothes. Oh jeez. Ouch.”
“What? Are you fornicating?”
“No. She’s rubbing her whole body over mine, sort of lightly. When I try to move she smacks me in the face.”
“How does it feel?”
“How do you think? It feels like someone smacking you, you twit.”
“I mean how does her body feel? Do you feel sinful? Is it like Satan rubbing against you? Does it burn like fire?”
“Yeah, you got it. That pretty much has it.”
“You’re lying.”
“Oh wow.”
Then Josh said something in Greek that I didn’t catch all of and the harlot answered, sort of.
“What did she say?” Josh asked.
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