3
Oh, for God’s sake, thought Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding me.
Again as a baby, another set of parents staring down at him. Already loving him, hoping he’ll be their special one. He glared at them as they fussed around the umbilical cord. Where was the knife, oh dear, shall we cut it now? Give me the bloody knife, thought Jesus impatiently, I’ll bloody do it myself. And he all but snatched it from them, and he’d have managed it too if his newly birthed body hadn’t been so feeble, and all the adults looked at him and laughed, and the rabbi said that if he wasn’t careful he’d be out of a job, and Jesus hated them, he fixed them all with a mature stare and hated them all completely.
The offer, he thought. The offer that was made to me on the cross. I made the wrong decision.
As a child he flirted with the idea of killing himself. He’d stand at the top of precipices, not sure whether today was the day he’d jump, hoping for some strong gust of wind that would take the choice out of his hands. But he knew really he was just too angry to die, he’d be damned if he’d let this ridiculous fucking world he was having to sit through for the third fucking time get the better of him. If he were going to die, he might as well do it enjoying himself. He began to drink. In all honesty, he didn’t much like the taste of it, and he didn’t like the inebriation—but there was a midway point where the taste didn’t matter anymore and he could still think straight that felt increasingly tolerable. His parents loved him, and worried for him—and he’d fly into a rage whenever that love and worry became too obvious. “I didn’t ask to be born,” he’d rail at them like an infant. They shyly hoped that he might find a job in the synagogue—that little anecdote with the rabbi which had been trotted out at every single fucking Hanukkah dinner had taken on an almost prophetic significance to them. But he wanted nothing to do with religion. He considered carpentry—looked at the wood, looked at the tools, contemplated the joy of creating purpose out of chaos, blah blah. And then he said, no, sod that, he’d rather be a thief instead. He practised thieving on his mother and father, and one day, when he decided he’d got the knack of it pretty much down pat, left the house and never saw them again.
The irony was that Jesus III had much of the charisma that Jesus II had so longed for. He’d hate people on sight; he’d judge them and detest them for the simplest of reasons—he didn’t like their faces, their hair, the way they walked, the way they talked. But he was able to bury this hatred whenever it suited him. It almost became a game—he’d meet someone new, he’d charm them with an easy smile, and all the time he’d be thinking gleefully, hate you, hate you, hate you. Some days he would tire of the game and just growl at everybody he met. But he realized that in the matter of women he slept with—and he slept with a lot, there were so many to be had—it was important to get the order right: charm first, growl afterwards. For a while Jesus told himself that he was looking for the same woman he’d slept with when he’d been a shy carpenter. And then he told himself he was just looking for the same sensations she’d inspired. And then he gave up on that and just fucked them for the sheer hell of it.
He realized that somewhere out there were his previous selves. One day he went into the shop owned by Jesus II. He thought, in a moment of drunken hilarity, that it might be fun to go and rob himself. But when he stood in front of the little carpenter, and saw just how small and meaningless he had been, he felt a wave of nausea and left without saying a word. He didn’t have the same scruples about Jesus I. Of course he knew exactly when and where to find him preaching, and he’d turn up early, always getting a good position at the front. Jesus would tell him his little sermons, and everyone who heard them would love them, and all the thief could hear was just how little this Messiah knew—whilst here he was, pissed on brandy, and he knew three times as much. “Hey, Jesus,” he’d call out. “When you’re on the cross, when they nail you to that fucking cross. And they will, you bastard. You know it and I know it.” People would try to stop him shouting, but he’d have none of it, on he’d go—“When the offer comes, when you hear the offer. Just say yes. The correct answer is definitely yes.”
He carried on stealing. He got very good at it. He discovered that it required a sleight of hand that was genuinely artistic. At times he felt as he had done when he’d been a carpenter, taking pride in creating something out of nothing, in the delight of a job well done. Then he’d laugh at himself bitterly and go and get drunk. Of course, they caught him in the end. He only wondered why it had taken them so long.
This time, he thought, I’m not going to scream. But scream he did. When the nails went in there was no way of stopping it. He looked across at Jesus I, screaming up there beside him. Couldn’t resist a final dig. “If you’re so powerful, then why don’t you save yourself? And save me whilst you’re at it.” Jesus II tried to offer words of comfort to the Messiah, and Jesus III laughed in spite of the agony and thought, if you only knew what I knew. Once more Jesus came out with that lie, the worst lie he had ever told, “Today you will sit by my side in Paradise”, and it seemed to his thief self that this little glimmer of false hope was worse than any of the crimes he had ever committed.
He raised his head, and wasn’t sure whether he was going to spit in disgust or make one last appeal—say yes!—and the effort made his heart burst. Good, said Jesus III to himself, and died.
4
I’ve got the measure of this now, said Jesus to himself. I bet next time I come back as a rapist. Or as an arsonist. Or as some bloke who hasn’t paid their taxes. I get the idea.
But Jesus IV was a woman. You could have knocked her down with a feather.
She lived a quiet life in the Judea hills. She kept chickens. She married young, and had three children who honoured her and each day made her heart swell with pride. She kept waiting for her life to intersect with Jesus Christ’s—but it never did. She never heard his name mentioned, would never even have known he was out there changing the world if she hadn’t lived through it all already. Every once in a while she thought she should ask about him, find out what was going on. But the name always died in her throat. Best not to know. Better not to draw attention to herself.
All her life she waited to be crucified. She waited for some terrible tragedy to overtake her. Some ironic twist of fate that would set her on the road to Calvary, maybe, something that would propel her into a life of crime. (Because she knew she would kill, she would for her children, if she had to save them, if it did them the least good, she would.) But she died of the palsy, and it wasn’t really painful as such. On her deathbed she babbled nonsense. “Don’t let them find me and bore nails through my flesh.” Her husband mourned her. She’d been a strange woman, all had said so—always with that hooded expression, always so fearful. But he’d loved her.
87
Jesus wondered how many times he could endure this merry-go-round before going mad. It wasn’t the unending tedium of it all—now a baker, now a cobbler, a beggar here and there—though that was bad enough. No, it was the fact that every life he led, no matter how undistinguished, no matter how much you’d want to edit it down to a few salient points here and there and move on, stayed in his memories in all their minute details.
So many bodies he’d inhabited, with all their different sins, and all their deaths too, Jesus had died in so many varied ways. And the truth of it was that, for the most part, the deaths weren’t interesting or lurid—they were just more chunks of dull inevitability. Rather than the experiences making Jesus wiser still, they seemed to dilute him rather—as if every fresh scrap of knowledge he inherited was pushing something more valuable out. There were so many conflicting thoughts bubbling away in Jesus’ brain it was hard to discern which belonged to the current Jesus, which to the original, and which ones in between. How many people could he carry around in his head before something snapped?
The answer was simple. Eighty-six.
He didn’t know what the original Jesus could do for him. But h
e was a purer Jesus, before he’d been tainted by all this adultery and robbery and murder and covetousness of his neighbour’s ass. Before all this banality.
“Help me!” he cried to him. “Jesus, you have to help me.”
“What is your name?” asked Jesus.
“I don’t know anymore!” he cried. “Which name do you want? I can’t remember them all. There’s a whole legion of them inside me!”
And the old Jesus told him he was possessed by evil spirits. And the new Jesus began to protest that it wasn’t quite as simple as that; nothing could be as simple as that, this new faith of his would never work if it divided people into the faithful and those possessed by spirits, how very convenient, how fatuous. But Jesus commanded the spirits to come forth, and he felt a tearing from within him, and his heart felt lighter and healthier and more singular than he’d known in many centuries. The other selves flew into a herd of swine, who panicked and ran off a nearby handy cliff.
Jesus the eighty-seventh—although he wasn’t that now, what was left? He was Joshua, plain and simple Josh—got down on his knees and began to weep tears of gratitude. He asked if he could join the disciples, and delighted that for once he didn’t know what answer Jesus might give him.
Jesus looked a bit puzzled, and the disciples exchanged glances. “Erm, no, that’s all right,” said Jesus. “Why don’t you just go home, eh?”
And Joshua went home, happier than he’d ever been.
Late that night the voices in his head came back.
“Evil spirits,” smirked Jesus XXIV, who had had a habit of smirking, it had irritated everybody. “We’re not evil spirits, we’re you,” said Jesus XLIII.
“No,” he moaned softly. “This was all over and done with.”
“If Jesus is there, he can banish us. But once he’s gone, we’ll just keep coming back.”
“But I am Jesus,” said Jesus. “I thought that was the whole problem.”
And he banished the other selves out of his body once more. For a few hours he succeeded in banishing them into the curtains. But as soon as he’d done it, he wasn’t Jesus any more, so he hadn’t the power to keep them out. That’s how he spent the night, banishing them back and forth. By dawn he’d banished them into the carpet, the chest of drawers, and the little cupboard under the stairs. All to no avail.
Self-exorcism really took it out of you. “I’m exhausted,” said Jesus eventually.
“So are we,” admitted all the other Jesuses.
“I don’t know how I can keep doing all this,” he said. “All this remembering. I don’t know how I can keep it all in.”
“So don’t,” was the answer. “Let go. Remember what you need to. Forget the rest.”
And that’s what he did.
412
“You say you love me. And it’s not that I don’t believe you . . . ”
“I do love you.”
“Yes. I said I believed you. Didn’t you just hear me say that?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Well then.” Jesus licked his lips. He clearly wasn’t enjoying this interview. He sighed, put a sympathetic hand on his apostle’s shoulder. “It’s not easy to do this. But I just don’t think you’re pulling your weight.”
“You’re going to sack me?” He couldn’t believe his ears.
“The question you should be asking yourself is not so much ‘do I love Jesus’, to which the answer is obviously yes . . . ”
“Yes,” he began, but Jesus held up his hand, shut him up. And continued.
“But more, really, ‘is that love I feel for Jesus doing Jesus any actual good’? All your love, James. Very nice, I’m sure. But do I have a use for it?”
It had taken the man well over four hundred goes before he’d got himself incarnated into somebody who was to live so close beside the original Jesus. But the apostle looked now into his predecessor’s eyes and saw the contempt he had for him, and knew that deep down he felt it too. No, not contempt—that’s too harsh. Pity, maybe. A world weary pity.
He’d felt so delighted to discover he’d been born as one of the twelve apostles. What a nuisance he’d come out as the rubbish one.
“If you get rid of me,” he said, “it’s because of my name, isn’t it? Because you’ve already got a James.”
“No,” said Jesus irritably, “it’s not your name.”
He was James the Less. There was already a James, so they had to call him something different. To avoid confusion, they’d said. You know, so when they called them in for supper, they’d all know which one they were referring to. James the Less had suggested they simply call him Jim or Jimmy or Jimbo or other variants thereof, they would all be fine, he’d said—but somehow James the Less had stuck. They said it was because of his height, but he had his doubts.
And besides, he’d often think, they all ate supper together. So that excuse didn’t make sense anyway.
It wasn’t fair. His own brother Matthew was seen as a more trusted apostle, he got all the responsible jobs. But Matthew was only there in the first place because James had egged him on. “We’ve got to join Jesus,” James had told him, all through their childhood. “You don’t know who he is yet, but he’s going to be this prophet, and he’s going to be big. Come on, it’ll be great!” As a teenager Matthew would push his little brother over, laugh at him, yawn. “Just don’t see myself following some sort of preacher man,” he’d tell him. “Now buzz off, pipsqueak.” When James had been to see Jesus, Matthew had only accompanied him ironically. And now look what had happened—they’d both been made apostles, and Matthew was the favoured.
“Look,” said Jesus kindly. “If you’re going to have twelve apostles, then someone’s got to come twelfth. Stands to reason. There’s no shame in it. But,” he went on, with that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger shtick he usually reserved for the Pharisees and the moneylenders, “you shouldn’t be coming twelve quite so emphatically. It’s all right. Don’t cry. Look. I’m giving you a last chance. All right? There’s a very special job I need doing.”
“An important special job?” asked James, drying his eyes.
“Very important.”
“You’re not just saying that? It’s not cleaning out the latrine again?”
“No,” said Jesus. “It’s the most important job of all. I did have it earmarked for someone else. . . .”
“No, no!” said James. “I’ll do it!”
“Okay. We can’t talk about it now, it isn’t safe. Meet me in the street tonight when all the other apostles are asleep. This is for your ears only.”
James thanked him, and Jesus said it was a great opportunity and that he hoped James wouldn’t let him down, and James said he wouldn’t, and Jesus nodded a little dubiously, and James thanked him again, and then they went in to eat. The rest of the gang were already seated, and some could hardly conceal their surprise that James was still there. “I thought he was being fired for sure,” muttered Thomas to Bartholomew, and Bartholomew said something rude, and Jesus silenced both of them with a look. They all bowed their heads whilst Jesus said grace, then they attacked the bread like vultures. Typically, James the Less was left with the crust end. But for once he didn’t mind. Jesus didn’t look his way again all evening, he was too busy swapping jokes with the others, but that was okay, he didn’t need to look, James knew they had a secret, just the two of them. He gnawed on his bread, absently tried to find some taste in it somewhere. A secret! he thought. What could it be?
He determined he wouldn’t sleep that night. He’d just pretend to be asleep, so the others wouldn’t suspect anything. He closed his eyes and thought how this could be the turning point for him. If he pulled off this job, then it went without saying that Jesus would be back for more. And they wouldn’t be secret jobs, all the apostles could see what he was up to, they’d have to respect him then. And he’d be all the closer to Jesus, and that was important, because there was something he had to prevent, something only he k
new about—and it kept sliding out of his head, he had so many peculiar thoughts in there and he sometimes forgot why, but he was sure it’d all come back to him when it was important. Yes, it’d be like that parable Jesus talked about, the one with the fatted calf being killed for the favoured son, this time the fatted calf would be killed for him.
And after a while James wasn’t sure whether he was daydreaming about calves or really dreaming about calves, and it was only when the calves in question began speaking to him and inviting him to dance that he realized he must have fallen asleep after all and woke up with a start.
He picked his way past the sleeping bodies. Matthew stirred. “Where are you off to, pipsqueak?”
“I don’t know,” said James. “I mean, I need the toilet.”
“You sure do need the toilet,” said Matthew, and he was so drowsy he probably thought it was a pretty good insult, because he chuckled himself back to sleep.
James stepped out into the cold of the night. The stars were out and lit up the street. He looked for Jesus, hoped he hadn’t kept him waiting. When he saw him in the alleyway he almost cried out a hello—and then ducked back into the shadows when he saw he had company.
Jesus talked to Judas for a long while. They seemed to argue, and then Judas fell silent, nodded briefly, and went away.
Jesus was left on his own. Then he gave a shuddering sigh that made his whole body shiver. For a moment James thought Jesus was going to be sick—he bent down, hunched over, his hands clasped tight to his stomach, and gagged. But nothing came out.
James broke his cover. “My lord,” he said. “You’re not well.”
Jesus straightened up. “James the Less. You’re late.”
“I overslept. I’m here for my mission.”
“No,” said Jesus. “You’re late.” And more kindly, “Go back to bed.”
Remember Why You Fear Me Page 44
