Quarantine

23

The Gaily knew what wind this was. This was the wind on which to fly away. Its gusts and blusters came looking for him in the cave, bursting in like rowdy boys to shake him from unconsciousness. Get up, get up, it’s time to go.

He had prepared for them. His fast had made him ready. Perhaps he’d served his thirty days just to be equipped for the wind. Quarantine had been the perfect preparation for his death. His body was quiescent and reduced; dry, sapless, transparent almost, ready to detach itself from life without complaint. A wind this strong could pluck him like a leaf, and sweep him upwards to the palaces and gardens that angels tended in the stars. It was a wind of mercy, then, for al its bluster, sent by a pliant god who was prepared to bend the rules. His god, praise god, had not insisted on the forty days. He had not left Jesus in his coma, wasting and unclean, until the final moment of his quarantine. He’d taken pity on his Galilean son. Come now.

It seemed to Jesus, when he woke and put his hands out to the wind, that he was already dead and living it. Those family faces which he had summoned as his allies and his witnesses, that woody workshop in the Galilee, the fields, the boys, the shady comers in the temple yard, were only feeble memories. Another person’s life. A story toldby someone else. Those pigeons trapped amongst the vegetables would not be freed by Jesus any more. There was no future there for him. No fleshy future anyway. He had surrendered food for dreams. He’d traded in his flesh for everlasting holiness. What would his parents and his neighbours say if they could see him now? They’d say he was a very stupid boy.

But still, of course, he found the strength to drag himself — as good as saved, as good as dead — out of the cave, on to the entrance rock. He clung to it, his body naked to the wind. Already bones had pierced his skin. His chest had folded in on him. Sores on his legs and mouth no longer even tried to heal. His teeth and gums stuck out like balconies across his face. He could not shift the pain behind his eyes, though he was almost blind. He did not feel the cold. In fact, he hardly registered the wind now that he was wrapped in it. He could not separate the wind from al the rushing in his ears. He was as numb as wood. They could have driven nails into his feet. He’d not have felt a thing. His heart was too weak now to send his blood as far as that. His heart had decomposed. ‘Make sacrifices to god, and then prepare yourselffor the winds ofjudgement,’ the scriptures warned. He was prepared. He was the sacrifice.

There was a time of clarity, before his body parted from his soul. There always is. It always comes too late. That’s what makes this moment of departure large and borderless. He summoned up the words for his last prayers. Some Aramaic words, some Greek, some ookuroos, some tok-tok-tok. His prayers were answered in a way. There was a voice, borne on the wind, blown in across the cliffs, a voice not Jewish and not Greek. Jesus’s bones were shaken by the voice. It teased him for a moment with a little hope, even though there was no hope. It raised him from the precipice and placed him in the scrub. If there were any beasts around, then they grew mild. The voice took charge of him. It walked him to the row of distant caves. It led him to the remnants of the flattened tent. It took him to the swelling liver and to the troubled womb. It took him to the badu’s ears. It carried out its ministries on Shim. It worked its miracles. It said, ‘Fat Musa’s dying now. You have to come and save his life. Have pity on the man. There now. That’s it. That’s all there is and ever was. Go back to sleep.’

He was asleep. He slept in the Galilee, Jerusalem, in Caesarea, Greece and Rome. He slept in lands where orange was the orily colour, where all the lakes were full of gold, where every donkey had two tails, where there were lines of strangers waiting to be saved. He placed his fingers on their heads and said, ‘So, here, be weil again.’ A common greeting from the Galilee.

The wind nudged round him, searching for a hold. He lifted slightly, felt his body parting from the rock. The earth had lost its pull on him. He was all surface, no inside. His leafhad fallen finally. He was a dry, discarded page ofscripture now. The wind embraced him, rubbed the words off him. It made him blank. It made him ghostlier than air. Not yet, not me, he might have cried, ifhe’d had any voice. What trick was there, that he could use, to bring companions to his side? What lie, what cowardice, what treachery, would put him back inside his Galilean cot?

This was his final blasphemy. He begged the devil to fly up and save him from the wind. He’d almost welcome the devil more than god. For the devil can be traded with, and exorcized. But god is ruthless and unstable. No one can cast out god. It was too late. Jesus was already standing at the threshold to the trembling world which he had sought, where he would spend his forty everlasting days. So this was death. So this was pain made powerless. So this was fruit turned back into its seed.

Jesus was a voyager, at last, between the heavens and the earth. There was a light, deep in the middle of the night. He tried to swim to it. He tried to fly. He held his hands up to the light. His hands were bluey-white like glass. The light passed through. The mountain shivered from afar. He felt the cold of nothing there. He heard the cold of no one there. No god, no gardens, just the wind.