Apocalypse of Jude

Caul’s thoughts of Jude slowly bring him to Mae, and by the time Caul leaves the ever unlocked house, the mist has been burnt away, leaving clear blue harshness under which a swarm of grumblers and faultfinders are making ready for the advent they will shortly celebrate.

He walks gingerly in through the salon door where Mae sits, not cutting hair, and living visibly in suspended animation of the renewed madness inside her. At the sight of Caul, a ravenous thirst and a nervous fear tear at her emotions. She rises abruptly.

“Come, let’s go get some coffee. Nothing’s happening this morning. It’s just us twit twit twitting with gossip. It’s all coming this afternoon for my father’s banquet tonight.”

She calls out. “Madeline, if anyone desperately wants to me cut their hair, I’m at the bistro next door.”

They wind themselves around into a coffee aromatised bistro next door, where they sit on high stools alongside an elevated table and windows that open to the day outside. They sit in silence, waiting for their coffee, neither really quite sure where to begin with the other. Soon her cigarette smoke is swooning with the aroma of brewing coffee, a warm wafting draft of air slowly sucking it away. Caul feels the time slipping with it, his heart urgent with information.

“I need to tell you something weird.”

Mae cocks her head at him in response.

“I saw Jude this morning and had this hallucination of him as a straw man.”

Her jaw drops astounded. “That’s impossible.”

She is aware that a bowl of wrath is filling her stomach.

“You are the consort.”

“No.” He shakes his head firmly.

“My mother desired that we be consorts. But I realise now, anyone can be a consort. The power to confer the rite lies with the priest.”

“But you’re the priest right. After your father died…”

Caul’s sadly shaking head stops her short. She takes a long drag on her cigarette, swelling her lungs with smoky oxygen, trying to dull a festering sore plaguing her heart. The bowl of wrath in her stomach spills over.

“Well then, who is?”

She bores a belligerent look back at him.

“I was knocked unconscious after we came off the road. Didn’t come to until the hospital. Paul always told me that my mother and stepfather were killed instantly. But the other day he told me somebody killed them. I didn’t believe him at first, so I went to the police and asked them to dig up the records. The inquest says that my father was found with a knife in his chest, my mother with her throat cut. The police concluded that those who threw the stones had killed them, leaving me for dead. Paul believes it was your father; that he did it to steal the priesthood, and keep us from ever consorting.”

Mae looks at Caul, more annoyed than anything else, as if he is spinning her a yarn.

“What? So now my father is going to confer the rite on Jude? That’s ludicrous. Even if my father did hold the priesthood, he would never the confer the right on anybody.”

“Unless somebody was to kill him? Tonight?”

Mae shrugs her shoulders in incredulous disbelief, and leans back on her stool, casting her hardening eyes away to the outside. But remembrance of the morning’s encounter with Jude shivers her.

“Jude was parked outside my place when I left for my walk this morning. Said he wanted talk about what happened between us. He seemed to be hoping that me and him, you know, meant something other than it did. I had to tell him it didn’t.”

She sighs.

“It wasn’t even my intention to have sex with him. I was revelling in being free from Gary, and that night I wanted to revenge Gary, to spite him, flaunt my sex in front on him. But Dionysus frenzied me that night. It was as if he wanted to devour Jude’s spirit.”

She draws on her cigarette again, quivering slightly.

“Why he wanted to devour his spirit has been haunting me like a festering sore ever since.”

She looks at him, deep fear no longer hidden from her eyes.

“He was emptying Jude of God wasn’t he. Preparing him to be his avatar. Only I don’t believe he did devour Jude’s spirit, Caul.”

Caul looks straight at her.

“No, I agree with you. I don’t believe he did.”

The bowl inside her is spilling its contents once again, pumping through her blood, revolting her and thirsting her at once, turning the beautiful bright blue ocean of the world before her eyes into blood.

“You know what I need?”

She turns her head sharply, her black pony tail flicking smartly, giving her poise.

“A spring of clean water like on the mountain the other day. I’m in desperate need of fresh vitality. But every time I think I’ve got it, the freshness becomes bitter.”

“I know. I have the same experience. Every new stream I encounter without fail ends up at the bar getting mad on the wine of its own futility. It seems to me that all the world’s streams are crowding at the same bar, you know, drinking the same wine.”

She throws her hands out in exasperation as the bowl within her stomach overflows its rim for the third time.

“So how to go about escaping this plague that Jude’s carrying Caul? That not even Dionysus can kill. You called it the wound didn’t you?”

The coffee arrives, its thick bitter presence swirling up before them. Deep brown sugar crawls on the spoon as Caul lifts it to his coffee and swirls it into the blackness.

“Well that’s just the thing I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t think what you call Jude’s wound is actually part of the wound. I think what’s in Jude is God and our only hope of healing.”

The bowl in Mae’s stomach revolts suddenly for a forth time, searing her with an anger that boils her blood.

“God’s the cause of all this misery Caul. What do you want to go there for? Better to rule in hell, right, than to have to be servile before a God who could easily take away all this that plagues us, but doesn’t.”

She lights up a fresh smoke to steady her rage. He just looks down as he drinks some coffee. A dusky blues voice wails fluidly above all the other sounds around them. Finally, he looks at her.

“I guess you’re not going to follow me on this.”

In reply, Mae stubs out her half-done cigarette, leaving her coffee almost untouched.

“I should go back to work. No point in belabouring a moot point.”

She leaves some cash on the table and then tilts her head inwardly at him.

“I guess this is goodbye then?”

As Caul sighs, he feels the wrenching, burning sensation of a love passing out of existence, exploding with the air in his lungs.

“Yeah. So it is.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 65