Mission

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘Oh, Jeezusss …’ groaned Miriam. ‘This is terrible.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ I said. ‘If this goes on the air, we could end up being the first unemployed Jewish doctor and lawyer in the history of New York. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous?’

  ‘Do you think ‘Brax is behind this?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course he is,’ I replied. ‘But not in the way you think. He’s not sent someone disguised as a girl reporter. He’s working on all of us. It’s the ‘Braxian element in McDonald that’s driving her on in the hope of uncovering some sensational story that’s going to catapult her into the big-time, and it’s beavering away inside us, sapping our moral courage and reinforcing our instincts for self-preservation.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ said Miriam. ‘Stand and fight him?’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ I replied. ‘This is no time to be a hero. I’m taking two weeks off, and you’ve got your patients to think of.’

  ‘True,’ she said. ‘Are you going to move The Man up to Sleepy Hollow?’

  ‘I can try,’ I said. ‘But that won’t necessarily stop him reappearing in the middle of Manhattan.’

  ‘It might, if you stay out of town,’ she replied.

  ‘Yehhh …’ I mused. Then remembered something. ‘Oh, shit!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘I left forty dollars worth of books in the coffee shop when I walked out on McDonald,’ I groaned. ‘What a pill …’

  ‘Go back and get them,’ said Miriam.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘She and that camera crew may still be hanging around.’

  ‘Okay, phone them.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know the name of the place. Fuck it. Never mind. It’ll teach me to avoid dramatic gestures. Are you coming round this evening?’

  ‘You bet,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, take care – and don’t forget to look over your shoulder.’ I hung up and, as I turned around, I found The Man standing behind me. I took a split-second to recover from the shock then I cased the street in both directions. I couldn’t see the brown VW delivery truck but by now, I had begun to develop a healthy paranoia.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got to get off the street.’ I grabbed The Man’s arm and searched the passing traffic for an empty cab.

  ‘Relax,’ said The Man. ‘You’re the only one who can see me.’ He side-stepped to let a young couple go by.

  My tongue wrestled limply with the words. ‘You mean you’re – invisible?’ A passer-by turned and gave me an odd stare.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re not hallucinating. I’m really here. All I’m doing is creating a blank spot in the minds of anybody else who looks at me. It’s a bit like the electronic counter-measures your Air Force uses to make their planes disappear from enemy radar-screens.’

  ‘Neat,’ I said, out of the side of my mouth. ‘You must be able to have some real fun with a stroke like that.’

  He replied with a shrug. ‘It comes in handy now and then. Come on, I’ll walk you back to the office.’

  As we threaded our way through the unseeing crowds, I realised that The Man had just solved three of the passages in the Gospels that had been puzzling me. Maybe they caught your notice too because the first of them clearly requires the use of paranormal powers for it to make sense. The incident I’m referring to is in Luke, chapter 4, beginning at verse 16, when Jesus returns to Nazareth, teaches in the synagogue and gets everybody so steamed up that in verse 29, they run him to the edge of town and are about to throw him over a cliff. Then comes verse 30 and the teaser – ‘… but he, passing through the midst of them, went his way’. To Capernaum.

  I’d been trying to work out how he could have just walked away from a lynch mob that had actually had him by the collar and now, the answer was walking right beside me.

  The second passage covers a similar tight corner. This time in the Temple at Jerusalem where The Man had been sounding off and, predictably, had upset a lot of folks. By this time, of course, he was doing his best to make himself unpopular in order to qualify for the ultimate sanction – crucifixion. John, chapter 8, verse 59 is where the magic happens: ‘… then they took up stones to cast at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the Temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by’. Note the words. He wasn’t stuck out of sight behind a pillar. He was right in amongst them, but they couldn’t see him.

  The third passage is less explicit but you still get the impression that, once again, he blanked himself out of the landscape. John, chapter 10, verse 39: ‘… therefore they sought him again to take him, but he escaped out of their hand’. Three near-fatal encounters from which he escaped by the use of his extraordinary powers, in order to die on the cross. No one could argue that being thrown over a cliff, or being stoned by a mob are markedly more attractive alternatives. Neither carry a built-in guarantee of instant death. In fact, I would suggest that both could be pretty messy. So it wasn’t just the suffering on the cross which Christians have made such a big thing of, that was the reason for the crucifixion. There had to be other factors involved. Things that I did not yet clearly understand. Because although death on the cross might be what the American legal system would call a cruel and unusual punishment, it was not a rare occurrence in first-century Palestine. As Publius Quintilius Varus and his two legions had shown. It could happen to anybody and frequently did.

  I could have asked him outright for the answer but I chose not to. Firstly, because I now knew that he would tell me in his own good time. And secondly because I wanted to reach out towards the answer intuitively. Put it down to my desire to be a smart ass if you like, but I genuinely believed that if I got to the answer before he gave it to me, I would be on the brink of real understanding.

  We reached 49th Street and paused on the sidewalk across from my office building. ‘Are you going to come up?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘You’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Where are you going – back to the apartment?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d take a ride on a bus – if that’s okay with you.’

  ‘Whatever you like,’ I replied. ‘But I can tell you now, it won’t be as much fun as. time-travelling.’

  I walked with him to the bus stop. As he stepped towards the curb, a florid man in an alpaca suit bumped into him. ‘Hey, watch where you’re going!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said The Man.

  I gave him a startled look. ‘He can see you.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ smiled The Man. ‘Nobody’s following us now.’

  I looked around for the brown VW truck but it was nowhere in sight. ‘You should have stayed invisible,’ I said. ‘That way you could have saved on the fare.’

  He patted my shoulder. ‘I didn’t want anyone sitting on my lap. Besides, from what I hear, New York needs all the money it can get.’

  A Greenwich Village bus arrived. The Man waited until the other travellers had climbed aboard.

  ‘Will we see you tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe. I’m not sure. There’s a lot happening.’

  ‘Okay. Well, you know where to find me.’ I stepped back and waited as he offered one of my fifty-dollar bills to the driver to pay for the sixty-cent flat fare.

  The driver eyed the bill then The Man. ‘This is a bus, friend. Not a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ said The Man. ‘Keep the change.’

  The driver looked at the note as if it were Monopoly money and brushed it aside. ‘What are you – a comedian? Gimme the right fare or get off the bus!’

  ‘Here, take this.’ I passed up a handful of loose change to The Man and addressed the driver. ‘Go easy, he just stepped off the boat.’

  The driver rolled his eyes heavenwards, little realising that a not inconsiderable chunk of i: was making its way to the back of his bus. The doors closed and, as the bus moved off, I saw The Man sitting next to a pretty girl
with long black hair. We waved briefly to each other and then he was gone.

  And once again, like that time on the verandah, I felt this curious sense of loss. I know that doesn’t make sense after telling you the increasing anxiety his presence caused but that’s the way it was. Looking back, I’m sure that if any of you had found yourselves in the same situation, you would have experienced the same mental disarray.

  Put yourself in my place. One minute you are jogging along, happily minding your own business and then, suddenly, you run slap into the Risen Christ. Not a brief, starry-eyed vision that took your breath away and made your heart leap but which remained comfortably out of reach. The Man was real. A solid, walking, talking being you could reach out and touch. Who could empty a glass of wine without emptying the bottle but who left dents in my sofa and his sandals under my coffee table. Who went in and out of the twentieth century as easily as you or I might walk into or out of the john but who, when he appeared, cast a real shadow. Whose voice was not just inside my head but could be heard on reels of tape. And whose words reduced our private obsessions and public concerns to total insignificance.

  Think about it; ask yourself what you would have done and said if you’d found The Man sitting beside you as you rode or drove to work, or sat at home with the kids in front of TV. Or if you bumped into him at the local supermarket, or if you were cutting your lawn and looked up to find that you were about to run the mower over his toes. Don’t laugh. It could happen. The Man doesn’t go in for big entrances. The nearest he ever got to the show-biz razzamatazz of globe-trotting pontiffs with their big set-piece production numbers, and white helicopters was a few palm leaves and a ride on the back of a donkey.

  When I reached our suite of offices on the twenty-second floor, I found Linda’s office empty. She’d left a typewritten note on my desk to say that she’d forgotten to mention the appointment she had made with her dentist. I had a feeling she had heard that McDonald’s interview had backfired and was avoiding me. Not that I had much of a case against her. McDonald was smart enough to find out that the ‘dead’ Mr Abraham Lucksteen was not a client of mine without making Linda break the house rules. My suspicion that there had been some collusion hinged around the fact that I’d told Linda I was going to the bookshop. One thing I was sure of: meeting McDonald there was no coincidence. She had the camera crew holding the table in the window for her. The whole thing was a set-up but it must have involved some fast footwork because my decision to go out and buy another armful of enlightenment had been made on the spur of the moment.

  I think what annoyed me more than anything was the realisation that all my dissembling had been for naught. Both of us now hovered on the brink of exposure by the media; a process that had been hastened by The Man’s encounter with Mrs Perez. As I sat at my desk pondering my next move it seemed to me rather ironic that, after all my lies, the only way I could think of silencing our pursuers was by telling them the truth.

  But how? Should Miriam and I confess to them in private? Play back the tapes and show them the Polaroids taken of The Man when he was picked up for dead? Or wait until we could confront them with The Man and just let them discover it all for themselves? Then I thought of the concept of simultaneity and said to myself: What the hell. God’s got it all worked out anyway. If The Man had not wanted Fowler and McDonald to know, he could have hit them with a mind-block the way he had Lieutenant Russell and Marcello.

  I did my best to shove it all to the back of my mind and tried to concentrate my mental energies on my faltering practice of law. At half-past five I got my second surprise of the afternoon. There was a knock on my door and Brad, the young guy who runs our mail-room walked in.

  ‘This package just came for you. Special delivery.’ He put it on my desk. ‘Linda had to go to the dentist’s.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I hefted the brown paper package. There was only one thing it could contain. Books.

  Brad stopped in the doorway. ‘Do you want a coffee or anything before we all hit the road?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, picking at the tightly knotted string.

  ‘Okay,’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t work too hard.’ A real fresh kid. But then, where he came from, it was what separated the winners from the losers.

  I gave up on the knot and sliced through the string and the wrapping with the paperknife that Joe’s son David had left on his desk when he’d taken off for Israel. Inside I found, as expected, the six books I’d left in the coffee shop. I opened the top book and took out the envelope bearing the Channel Eight logo, and addressed to me. Inside it was a note from McDonald – containing the third surprise of the afternoon.

  The note read: In your haste to leave you forgot these. I do not intend to apologise for doing my job but I think it only fair you should know that the brown VW truck that was being used to video-tape our conversation does not belong to Channel Eight or any of its affiliates or subsidiaries and the two gentlemen who gave up their seats to us are completely unknown to me. Fortunately, I took down their licence plate. I propose to check this out and will let you know if I turn up anything interesting. Meanwhile, if you feel like talking, you know my number. If not, don’t worry. I’m still on your case.

  Terrific …

  Chapter 17

  I sat back with McDonald’s note in my hand, read through it again and again while I smoked a couple of cigarettes then rang the Channel Eight news room on my private line and asked for McDonald.

  ‘You got the books …’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said flatly. ‘I also got your note.’

  ‘I hope you believe me,’ she said. ‘I am definitely not trying to put one over on you.’

  ‘Just give me the licence plate number of the truck,’ I said. ‘I’ve got friends in the police force too.’

  She gave me the details without demur. The truck had New Jersey plates. ‘By the way, that wasn’t a transmitter mike you dunked in my coffee. It was wired to a deck inside my bag.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I hung up on her to let her know how things stood, then called Larry Bekker, my law-school buddy who was now Deputy DA. ‘It’s me again,’ I announced. ‘Only this time, I’m wearing my Mike Hammer hat. Can you trace a licence plate for me?’

  ‘Are you asking me to bend the system?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll buy you lunch with two of the prettiest faces from Vogue magazine,’ I replied. ‘All you have to do is name the time and place.’

  ‘Give me the number,’ said Larry.

  I passed it over. ‘Mark it “Urgent”, Larry. If I’m not here, try my apartment.’

  I got home about seven and found that The Man had left the TV on. I picked up the remote control handset from the sofa, hit the ‘Off button and straightened out the cushions. I checked the hall closet and saw that his brown woollen robe was still hanging there with the sandals placed side by side underneath. I thought of Mrs Perez, and ran my hand over the coarsely woven cloth then took hold of both sleeves and shut my eyes. Nothing happened. I was not rewarded with a vision of Calvary, or anything else for that matter. I shut the closet door, still persuaded that the robe held some kind of power. If it worked for Mrs Perez, it could work for me. All I had to do was find the key.

  Miriam arrived at half-past-seven with a radiant smile which vanished when she found I was the only beneficiary. I explained that, when last seen, The Man had been heading downtown.

  She checked her watch. ‘But that was over three and a half hours ago. Do you think he’s gone back to Jerusalem?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I replied. ‘His robe’s still in the closet.’

  Let me just explain what prompted that remark. Despite the fact that my imagination had been honed on treasured copies of Astounding Science Fiction, I found it hard to accept that products of external reality such as the clothes we had bought him could exist outside the linear space-time continuum. And if that sounds like psycho-babble to some of you, let me put it another way. I did not believe it was physically possible for
a pair of jogging shoes purchased for eighteen dollars at Macy’s on Fifth Avenue in April 1981 to end up, albeit on the feet of The Messiah, in first-century Jerusalem.

  Because, if the shoes could make it then so, by extension, could we. Which opened up the possibility of unlimited two-way traffic, having Tamburlaine for tea, and took us into the realms of total improbability.

  I could quite happily accept that The Man could do what the shoes could not. In the same way that his robe, sandals, and other bits and pieces could time-travel because they too were four-dimensional ‘visualisations’ conjured into existence by the incredible power of the Empire. But like The Man, they were not ‘real’ in the way that the clothes Linda had bought him were real. Although he was a miraculous molecule-for-molecule reproduction, he was no longer ‘of the flesh’ in the same way that the wool of his brown robe had not grown on the back of a sheep and his sandals had never been part of a cow’s hide.

  I made the mistake of sharing these thoughts with Miriam. She listened patiently to my confident hypothesis then demolished it totally. ‘You’ve forgotten the bandages I put on his hands and feet before he disappeared from the morgue,’ she said. ‘He was wearing them when he turned up at Sleepy Hollow.’

  ‘Oh, shit, yes,’ I said grudgingly. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she smiled. ‘You can’t be right about everything.’

  I let her enjoy that small triumph. Looking back, and I say this with genuine affection, I think she was pretty niggled that The Man had singled me out as the major recipient of The Word. More than niggled, in fact. Insanely jealous. Because although I think she loved me, I’m sure she considered herself the more deserving case. Maybe she was, but in the end, The Man left without giving her the gift of healing she so badly wanted. I never asked him why but my guess is, after what happened to me, he probably decided that her life was screwed up enough already.