Apocalypse of Jude

Gary flicks his cigarette, close to its burnt-out end, into the garden with the satisfaction of all the land before him one day passing into his hands. He steps back off the short veranda wall just as Caul comes unseen out the lounge. Gary’s face quickly displaces shock with disgruntled irritation.

“You don’t have a knife behind that back of yours do you?”

“No. Just got back from driving around watching the morning and saw you out here.”

Caul goes to sit on the veranda wall a metre or so down from Gary. He folds his hands into the crevice of his thighs and looks out into the basin with eyes cast over his shoulder. He turns back and stares hard into Gary’s eyes as if looking for answers.

“How long has it been since you planted your corpse of a career in Mae’s father’s garden?

A sullen look passes from Gary, his right foot on the wall, his hand against the pergola pole supporting a bulky frame trying to keep its swagger. Caul hones in on the weakness he perceives.

“Has it begun to sprout? Is that why you’re leaving Mae? Because it improves your career’s chances of blooming this year? Or have you just disturbed the bed you were meant to blossom in?”

“Hey Caul, let me give you a wake-up call about Mae. She froze that ground, and now she’s beginning to live up to her name. I need to move on or be devoured. Anyway, I got what I wanted.”

Gary is unable to hide a smile of glee at the thought of his new freedom as he leaves Caul alone. Dry leaves scatter listlessly on the veranda. Caul considers them.

/but you wont be able to move on will you/ /youve got pauls bubblegum on your boots/

He raises himself wearily up off the wall and looks out over the bay.

/but at least it feels like ive escaped pauls black pit/ /who led me out/ /ive been living in a kind of hell without even knowing it/ /well something has brought me out of that dungeon/ /and i must help jude escape before it gets him/ /i dont know why/ /i just must/

He turns from the view and goes back into the soporific house to his room.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 26

“So let me get this correct. You want to see me? That’s quite a change in attitude in the past few hours Mae.”

Caul’s laugh shows an incredulity as he tucks the phone between his shoulder and cheek.

“Don’t get your hopes too high. It’s just for coffee.”

“How about lunch?”

“I would prefer coffee this afternoon.”

“It’s a bit difficult with work.”

“Oh, come on Caul, pencil me in as an interview or something.”

“You’ve got quite a cheek, you know that.”

“Well, you don’t have much leeway to play with either.”

Caul feels the defensiveness closing around her voice, and decides not to be awkward any longer.

“Okay then. Three this afternoon it is. I’ve pencilled you in for an interview at the Hofgarten. How does that sound?”

“Fine by me. Just don’t be too surprised if the tables get turned on you.”

“Well, if it means anything to you, I’m looking forward to it.”

Caul hears her snort and say goodbye, then the line from her side goes dead and he hangs up. He leans back into an office desk chair to swivel back and forth, softly biting the back end of his pen.

“That’ll make for an interesting interview.”

A heavyset girl opposite him looks up.

“Oh yeah. Who’s going to be the victim of your clinically observant psyche this time?”

He looks at her with a short laugh sparkling his green eyes and spreading to his lips.

“The daughter of the sole agent and developer of our gated golfing village.”

All the time he is speaking, his body and hands are laughing, his voice carrying the laughter’s undercurrent. She is looking on amused at him.

“Look at you. I’ve never seen you this bubbly about anything. What’s the catch? Dirty laundry on her old man?”

He laughs fluidly and sits up in his chair, leaning forward over his desk.

“Well here’s the low down. Ever since her old man came here in the mid seventies, he and Rupert Stetson have been battling for real estate supremacy in this beautiful land of ours. Rumour has it that originally these two were old friends. Together in the ships at Mylae so to speak. The old man actually went on to divorce his wife and marry Stetson’s sister. Things soured however, and instead of an alliance, it got all about sibling rivalry. Apparently the sister had empire plans of her own.

Then about three years ago, Stetson’s son and the old man’s daughter suddenly decide to get married. The old man began to see a way in which he would come out king of both kingdoms, and tried to use the marriage as leverage for an alliance. The catch is that both daughter and son respectfully hate their fathers. Their whole marriage in fact seemed one of spite rather than love, to ensure that there could be no chance of an alliance. So that backfired in old Philip Anthony’s face.

Meanwhile, Anthony has seen massive losses on investments up the coast as well. He has needed to regroup and fortify. That’s why he’s got this golfing village project up and going. It’s a castle for him to retreat into. In my personal opinion, I think Philip Anthony’s on his way down. The thing is, he’s still way too strong for Rupert Stetson to do anything about it. But Anthony lacks a successor. Therein lies the rub. And here’s where it gets really interesting. Earlier this year, who turns up at Philip Anthony’s inaugural party for the golfing estate, but Stetson’s son, sans wife. They have subsequently divorced, and by some weird coincidence, today Gary Stetson begins work for Philip Anthony, thanks partly to the influence of his aunt. The only thing is, I have no idea why any of this has happened.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 27

Opening his eyes, the beauty of the night sky is suddenly gone. Caul is back in the warehouse parking lot and the world of death is before him. Orion, the god to whom he has tied his life, the lord of heaven, who sparkled so brilliantly moments before he closed his eyes, Caul realises for the first time hangs upside down and is about to fall out of the sky. The dog star follows at his heels as if to dig up the god’s corpse to make wormwood the fresh waters of the town. Then the stars and the moon in its birth crescent darken as if the sun too, on far side of the world, has lost its light. Frightened, Caul becomes aware of clouds pushing over the dark, black peaks of the amphitheatre, pushing in such a way as to make it appear that the hulking mountainous mass is about to fall over into the sea to kill everything within it and turn it to blood. Unable to do anything else but follow the drift of the clouds, he turns his tiring neck and looks bleakly out past where the lone mountain’s slopes drop away to allow the only gap between mountain and ocean in the basin, out to where the road to the city leads. His eyes fill with the imminence of fiery hail falling from clouds the colour of dried blood that hang in the distant sky above the city. He becomes suddenly shocked at the electric colouring of the city being captured on their surface.

/our doom is being trumpeted back at us by the clouds/ /the skies/ /the mountains/ /the sea/ /why is it that they in this town do not recognise these signs/ /how to keep the dog star from digging up the god/ /or is it being a friend/ /and warning me of our doom/

Looking heavenwards and seeing Sirius scorch brightly, knowledge again of the town’s barrenness claps its shackles on him.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 28

“I see you’re the life of the party again.”

From his bed, Caul peers over the spine of his book as Jude waltzes nonchalantly in, sitting himself again in the tattered armchair. Caul crashes his head back into his pillow.

“Playing the freak takes it out of you.”

Jude lights up a smoke, takes a drag, then crosses his stretched out legs, laying arms down along those of the chair, letting wrists dangle loosely, smoke curly-cueing the still air.

“Gary left with his blonde soon after you. She looked a little, how shall we say, freaked.”

“Good. Maybe she won’t come back. And hopefully she’ll take Stetson with her. They don’t belong here. I don’t know why Paul wants them here.”

Caul speaks rather curtly, still lain flat, staring at the ceiling. Jude takes another long drag.

“Speak to me Caul. What reticence is this that’s been growing in you lately?”

Jude watches Caul fondly as he rises and packs his pillow behind his back, all the while mumbling on the impossibility of explaining what’s going on, looking for ways to circumvent this confession of feeling. And then it comes, in frustrated eloquence, that Jude loves.

“Paul and I have had this plan for years. Years.”

He churns the word out a second time painfully.

“Only he and I knew. Until tonight. I told Audrey. It just came out. I wanted to scare her. I don’t want her to come back. I don’t want to see Paul uproot her and leave her to die. And he will, even if he is not directly involved. I don’t want him to, but I should. That was the plan. Only, I’m now beginning to think that was never the plan in Paul’s mind.”

Jude’s eyes narrow in on Caul, realising the sliver of hope for escaping the grip Paul has on his soul lies in what will now be said.

“What’s the plan Caul?”

Caul moves himself into a cross-legged position of wanting to expound.

“To cause the people in this town to have no faith in the Church, so that they become unsure of what they hope for and uncertain of what they believe.”

The claim thuds at Jude’s heart, his eyes not moving from Caul’s. If there was any guilt in Caul about what he has just confessed, Jude saw none. Just the mixed green sea of emotions impossible to elicit from those strange eyes.

“How?” Jude dares the word, knowing that the thud will become a blunt, grinding cut on his heart.

“With a spirit that distinguishes nothing holy from the common; that teaches them there is no difference between what is clean and unclean. To take their rest away from them and make them captive to their fears, so that there will be no joy in their lives.”

The pain wrenching at Jude is enough to moisten his eyes and bring an accusatory tone to his voice.

“Why would you do that?”

Here Caul tightens his vocal cords with defence.

“For me at least it was meant to be a path that that would ultimately leave people here knowing their wretched, naked spiritual states, rather than living in their blind self-assured riches that they had built up at Paul’s and my expense.”

He pauses to take a deep breath for further confession.

“I thought we were doing good. Stripping people of their complacent empty beliefs of what truth is, so that when me and Paul could offer them the hope we had, they’d take it. And we could take back this town from those who stole it from us.”

Jude draws from the cigarette at his lips with bitterness.

“Your parents usurped the power from the Church first.”

Caul scrooges his face at Jude.

“Humbug. The Church was just posturing itself with its religion on top of my parent’s religion. My parents wanted to turn this town back to the source.”

Now a confused frown is on Jude’s face, his shoulders withdrawn in a mixture of perplexity and disgust.

Caul draws himself up straight, looks straight ahead of him into the drawn curtains, preparing himself for further defence.

“But Rupert Stetson betrayed my parents. Then Philip Anthony got greedy and instead of returning the power to my parents, he took it for himself and made himself king. But he’s not the king. Just an imposter. I’m the king. That priestly rite fell automatically to me when my father died. When those barbarians and infidels threw those rocks, they had no idea what line they were ending.”

Caul turns to stare defiantly back at Jude. But instead of getting the face of growing hatred he expected, he is surprised to see Jude look guiltily away. Taking heart at the unexpected grace, Caul sets his mind to revealing his guilt, the look on his face making it clear that he is now seeking carefully for the right words.

“Only thing is,…” Here Caul hesitates again, making even more sure of his words, before carrying on. Jude looks up again, grasping onto the remorse he hears in Caul’s voice as new evidence for hope.

“…Now that I’ve died and experienced that wretched state myself, I’ve realised that the wound that causes death can’t be healed. Instead it’s just working its way deeper and deeper into us with each passing generation, allowing the death within to come to the surface and bubble over endlessly into this world.”

The ash has grown long on Jude’s cigarette, but he notices it not, eager rather that Caul is leading him closer to the root of what Paul had trapped him into when he got him to sell his family’s property to him.

“What wound Caul? What death? What are you talking about?”

The questions enter Caul’s consciousness, for a moment consternate him, then reach clarity. Jude stabs the cigarette and looks at the hunched forward, cross-legged body across from him. With the palm of his hand Caul gives his forehead a rub.

“Sorry. This is going to sound ridiculous.”

Jude draws another cigarette and lights it.

“Try me. You’d be surprised what I’d be willing to accept at this stage.”

Looking at the ceiling, Caul composes himself.

“The wound is what causes the seasons, the seedtime and the harvest, the cold and heat, the summer and winter. It is the wound that causes the death of summer. Only, the spirit of summer resurrects itself each midwinter. And so the cycle goes on. There are rites to honour this process and I am a child of that rite. My mother taught me these things as I was growing up. She said one day there would be a time when my spirit would die. Not my flesh. Just my spirit. And when that happened, she said I would know that the time for my marriage in rite with Mae—she’s to be my consort—had come to ensure that the next child was born. This was to happen until the child who would come to heal the wound once and for all was born into the world.”

Jude is silent, that silence evaporating from Caul the scepticism he had of Jude listening.

“At Easter, my spirit, for reasons unknown to me, died in accordance with the Church’s calendar, which is merely an appropriation of ours. I didn’t know that I was dead until Whitsunday. But when I realised I was…It means the spirit of the next child is already conceived and will enter at our union. Our rite should then take place at Christmas, because that is the birthday of the spirit god. Mae knows it as well. I’ve told her I’m dead. As much as she is denying it right now, she knows the spirit is conceived in her. And with her now so suddenly divorced, it’s all so obvious.”

Jude looks at Caul through a veil of recently exhaled smoke.

“But what?”

“What do you mean?”

“You sound unconvinced with your own tale.”

Caul shakes his head.

“No, the tale is true. There is of course the practical issue of how I’m meant to confer the rite upon myself. But that’s the least of my concerns right now. Because, now that I’m dead, I’ve been seeing things. Things that have told me that there can be no healing to this wound. The spirit of the child comes from the universe. But I see the universe is wounded itself. There’s nothing to heal this wound; to give our roots new life. We’re all just feeding off each other’s wound. Each child just brings our death closer and closer.”

Caul shrugs his shoulders helplessly.

“The wound has caused Paul to be content to act the dog who digs up the dead roots over and over again. He doesn’t seem interested in allowing for the possibility of new life. That’s why I’m beginning to wonder if good was ever originally part of Paul’s plan. Because I can’t see any good in it anymore.”

Jude now looks very sombrely at Caul. “And what of me?”

Caul looks hard back at Jude.

“You made your choice to be uprooted and die a long time ago already Jude. Otherwise you wouldn’t be in this house letting us dig you up over and over again.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 29 

Caul sits in the gaunt dereliction of the living room, reading the Word in a thirst for God, when he looks up to see Paul darken the doorway, unshaven and eating raisins out of his hand one by one.

“Hey you hypocrite. Has your pride so blinded you as to think reading that book is going to resurrect your spirit?”

Caul gingerly closes the book on his fingers, caught off guard again at Paul’s claiming knowledge of his death. Paul laughs in a knowing way.

“You really think I didn’t know? Of course I did. You’re my doppelgänger, my brother, after all.”

Moving across the room to the lintel of the veranda door, Paul hangs a cigarette delicately from the side of his mouth and then proffers one to Caul.

“Come have a cigarette and look at the moon.”

Caul hesitates but gets up, placing the book open, upside down, and resting on the arm of the chair, ready to be entered again. He follows Paul out.

They both stand on the veranda’s surrounding wall and lean back against opposite pillars, smoking. Out to the west, the lights of the unreal city flicker in the dusk. Paul takes a moment to flick some ash into the long grass of the garden. Caul’s stare demands an answer from his half-brother.

“How did you know?”

Paul looks very carefully through the gloom at Caul, as if realising he needs to pick his words now with the greatest of care.

“Because I asked for it.”

In the shock that Caul registers, there is only disbelief.

“That’s impossible. You have no authority to ask.”

That Caul would so belittle him, not see his authority, surges an anger through Paul.

“And where would the authority lie Caul? Did you think it lay with you?”

The insinuation of his powerlessness is too much for Caul to take. His accusations against Paul begin to fall from his mouth.

“I know you want to usurp me Paul, want Jude to kill me and take my priestly right away from me. You want to be Mae’s consort. You always have. Always envied me because of what I was born to.”

Paul shakes his head, laughing, unfazed by Caul’s outburst.

“Your pride is an amazing thing Caul. Have you all this time actually believed you inherited my father’s priestly right? You actually think you’re both consort and priest-king.”

Caul stares blankly.

“Has it never entered your head that the car accident was not just some angry barbarians throwing stones, and that one of the first stone-throwers to the scene that night was there to kill, not your father let it be remembered, but my father. Kill him for the right to his priesthood.”

Paul draws on his cigarette.

“I know now that that man was Mae’s father. Mae’s father is your usurper Caul, not me. He has has no intention of using his priestly right to conduct a rite with his daughter consorting with you Caul, a coloured of all things, and at the same time let his spiritual power pass into insignificance.”

Caul is unable anymore to hide his furious disdain for his brother, shouting his words.

“Why didn’t you tell me!”

Paul whistles out a disbelieving wonder.

“Did my mother tell my father?”

The words still Caul, his very conception suddenly abhorring him.

“Caul, what do you think I’ve been doing since they died. Just being a crack-pot coke dealer? Is that all you think of me? That’s all you’ve ever thought of me, mummy’s bastard boy, child of heaven’s queen. It’s revenge on Mae’s father I’ve been wanting. Mae’s father intends to deny Dionysus his rebirth. I sought Dionysus out, and he gave me the authority to set things right. I asked him that your spirit should die. But I had to let this develop naturally Caul. I couldn’t tell you.”

Caul simply nods, a little stupified by Paul’s claims.

“Does Mae know you’re dead?”

The tangential and inconsequential nature of the question considering Paul’s sudden revelation irks Caul, as if Paul is hungrily fishing for the certainty of his efforts. The same intuitive suspicion that wrought his breast that night in the bar at Whitsuntide rises thick through Caul, but this time he neither insinuates nor answers, but wants his own answers.

“Why now all of a sudden?”

Paul takes a deep drag, burning the cigarette’s coal to its pit. He flicks it away into the dry grass.

“Very well. What I need to say, I’ll say now. It’s time for me to strengthen my authority here and I can’t do it from this house any longer. I’ve sold it to a willing buyer, if you know what I mean, and cleaned my cash. We’ve got a new place thanks again to Gary’s dealings. You’ll like it. Everything is ready for us to take over the true power in his town. All the faithful I’ve chased out or made apostates of.”

A slight bitterness in Paul’s tongue alerts Caul. “Except?”

Paul’s face sours at the thought of what he has to say.

“There is one I have been unable to dislodge. I’ve been unable to find her.”

Paul scuffs his foot in anger against the veranda wall.

“Every means of searching for her at my fingertips and I’ve been unable to find her. She’s like a woman hidden in a desert. Though I have scoured this town for her, she’s a hen who holds her brood close. And if she has not yet left her nest, it must mean her work here is not yet done. She has not yet called all the faithful in. Or is it sheep lost from her pen she’s waiting for? Whatever it is, I am unnerved by it.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 30 

Mae stares at her de-based, tear-blotched face in the hotel bathroom mirror. It is the face of mourning filled with Dionysian desire for Paul. Outside she can hear the jazz piano and upright bass jive up the pace. Excited that her nine-month mourning is about to end, she steps dishevelled back into the dining hall and sees the dance floor filled with couples taking a turn. Her father is nowhere to be seen.

“Would you like this dance?”

Mae feels Paul’s presence behind her. She turns, smiling wildly. She feels him take her offered hand and lead her to the dance floor where the rhythm sinks into them. The sensation of his hand as a secure pivot on her back moves her more aggressively into the dance. She is looking for his flesh to give her wildness form. As she finds it, the perception grows in her that Dionysus possesses her spirit now entirely. The music glides to a definitive finish.

“Come Mae, I think we should go now. Le roi est mort.”

She shivers at the chilling sound of her father’s murder. But the Dionysian spirit makes it a distant concern.

“Where are we going?”

Paul looks at her, his eyes glowering with an ecstatic desire.

“I have seen you Mae. I know what you want. You are the sibyl hanging in a jar. But I can free you.”

She smiles at him. “Right now I just want to get out of here and become the wild woman.”

“Then take me to your sacred tree, so that we can go where we need to go.”

 

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 2

Mae loosens the straps of her dress and lets it fall, revealing her angular nakedness. She starts to circle the living room in an entrancing ritual she now understands as the attempt to find the dead Dionysian spirit. Using the rhythm of her feet to absorb her agitated consciousness, a calmness slowly begins to suspend her, allowing her body’s rhythms to assimilate her into the trance-like state. But then she stops, frigid and scared at the malignant seeming darkness that each time she circles, promises to reach out and destroy her if she penetrates its veil. Instead, within moments of this darkness upsetting her induced calm, an increasingly insistent temptation seeps into her blood.

Trying to flee this temptation, she runs through to her bedroom, where she flings her body onto her bed, sprawling loosely across it, her limp hair streaming her face. But the desire within is pulsating its need in faster and faster blips, transforming her quickly back into a state of agitation.

/dont want to do it/ /oh please i dont want to/ /just let me alone/ /i dont want to/

She is up on her legs, pacing and then stopping, beginning to pace and stopping again, throwing her hands into her hair and trawling it back. The blood inside of her is growing increasingly hungry. Then she stops, looks coldly at her naked reflection, and with determination, moves from out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.

As she crouches inside the refrigerator door, the light illuminates her body against the dark that surrounds her, while her hands work at retrieving food. She begins feeding with a single-minded determination that obliterates the existence of anything else, until the epiphany of her seeking convulses her, leaving her falling suddenly away into the void of its goneness.

As full consciousness returns to her, she fills with remorse and guilty rage. She is on her feet, storming in her mind.

“Every time I let that happen. Every time I give in.”

A guttural sound utters from her throat, shaking her body with consuming frustration.

“I hate myself.”

She crumples to the cold kitchen floor, her voice moaning and wetness welling around her eyes.

“Why, why, why?”

Her body now begins its practised reaction to the intake, and is bloating itself. The turgidity soon overwhelms her and signals are being sent for the release of this waste.

“Stop, stop, stop.”

But her body is shaking violently, both in anticipation of the purge, and with the shock of emotional imbalance in her system. She is running through her house and is lurched over the toilet where the waste is coming up.

Her face is blotched with tears, and what is left of mascara around her eyes is running, staining the face.

/what do you want mae/

She meets her mirror-bottled reflection with a scoured coldness.

/i want to die/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 3

Caul follows Paul into their house and for the first time in a long time the two of them are alone together in each other’s space. Slowly the imminent morning is closed out as Caul draws shut the mustard curtains. Then he turns to allow the soft ambience of electronic sounds to bounce off the enclosing walls.

Paul meanwhile runs his lips over the gummed edge of a rizla tucked full with grass. He seals it quick and tight and then puts it between his lips to light. After doing so, they pass the toke between themselves, inhaling it in silence. Having finished, each falls slowly back into their respective sofas as Paul starts talking.

“I’ve been less than open with you of late.”

Caul stares coldly back. “You’ve gone on without me.”

“Does that surprise you Caul?” A tiredness mixed with anger quivers Paul’s voice. “You gave it all up when Mae married Gary. I didn’t.”

Caul rubs his face vigorously with his hand, shaking his head as one in disbelief.

“Maybe that was meant to happen. It’s not like my mother cared about her marriage to have me. You had no right to go interfering.”

Bending forward, he whispers with annoyance at Paul. “These things have their own timing, their own rules and you can’t change them. You are not the superior craftsman.”

Caul watches as envy washes its sheen over Paul’s face. Not moving, Paul answers.

“You are dead, are you not?”

Caul freezes within, wondering how Paul could know that. But he neither denies it nor confirms it under Paul’s scutinising eyes. Paul carries on as if the death is affirmed.

“Then, the time is now, and there were some things that needed taking care of.”

Caul remains silent, not wanting to betray his fears of Paul usurping him, not wanting to betray his knowledge of Paul’s still strong hatred for him.

“So then Caul, it’s time I brought you up to speed.”

Caul hides his relief of Paul having seen nothing.

“It’s time to get rid of Janice. She’s played the whore long enough, don’t you think?”

Paul draws a box of cigarettes from his jacket pocket.

“I know she tempts you Caul. I’ve watched her trying to drive a wedge between us, thinking she’ll be able to swing you into making her your consort.”

Cigarette between his teeth, he lights, then speaks from between them. “But I know you detest her.”

With the cigarette between the fingers of his left hand, Paul exhales.

“My three stooges hate her as well. Let her screw around a few months longer.”

Paul’s mind drifts with mild irritation to Audrey slipping from his grip, realising he’ll have to be quick in regaining her. He looks back again at Caul with confidence.

“The list of men and women whose faith Janice can whore with has run out.”

A wide, excited grin breaks on Paul’s face, but instead of dispelling the envy locked there, it only serves to bolster it.

“It’s almost time for us to put this persuasive method behind us Caul. The uprooting has mostly been done, and we can just let the violence rip. Then they will be at our mercy. We can start celebrating the mysteries freely over their dead bodies.”

Paul sits up and looks at Caul with his fixed, poised and ravaging smile running across the contours of his mouth.

“This is what you and me have been waiting for Caul. Don’t let it get away from us now. Let Jude alone. You know we need him. Don’t confuse him. Just concentrate on drawing Mae. Then everything will work out fine.”

Caul in reply turns confusedly from his listening elbow and soaks back into the foam-picked sofa.

“Are you sure?”

Paul gets up to stand over Caul, to whom it feels as if a menacing shadow has crossed him.
“Yes Caul. I’m sure.”

The shadows departs as Paul goes off to his room. Caul closes his eyes, annoyed with the uncertainty and lets his consciousness sink away into its depths, helped by the submersing ambience of music around him. But cracks of dawn light have begun to pierce the drapes. They enter his glazed eyes, refusing him the chance to dive to deeper waters and there hide from the fear that is sending his consciousness diving. Instead, it is as if the light has driven a rift between his mind and body, and allowed his soul to surface. His soul comes like the gaping mouth of a serpent ready to swallow his self back into the abyss of its own incommunicability. But before it can enclose its mouth, what surfaces in his mind is Jude’s remembrance that once upon a time by God’s Word, the waters deluged the earth, destroying the ungodly from the world except for Noah. Caul searches his own memory for the story an old lady told him once coming home from school, and remembers that in the days leading up to the deluge, Noah preached to the people while he built the ark of God’s plan to flood the earth, so that anyone who believed through Noah might be saved. On that thought he rests his growing hope despite his uncertainty, as the serpent slides unfed back into its abyss.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 4