Apocalypse of Jude

Caul leaves the dance frustrated beyond means, not knowing why he cannot enter the dionysian state which should be his to enter. He begins to wander around the club, fighting the acid flood that is seeking to sweep him away. But as he approaches the table where Paul and the others are playing pool, he is unable to keep from entering him the dark wave of music now shuddering the club. It creeps up upon the waters of Caul’s soul, stirring them up, breaking the tent of his soul, causing the waters to pour forth their visions of desolation.

He watches Paul laughing out loud into the evening, soothing the palpable tension around the table with his words. But Caul sees that they are seductions for Paul’s own lusts sneaking unawares into those around him; sees that they are death undoing them. He watches Paul’s effect on Janice whom he has turned from Christian faith; watches her playing the whore he has taught her to play, while denying her the freedom from the lust that now agonises her. And he watches as Paul’s well-placed jibes burden Gary’s bull-like shoulders over his sense of failed performance such that with each pool ball that Gary plays, his male strength transgresses into avaricious desire.

Then his eyes settle on the blond, Audrey, one in whom Paul’s words have had little chance to grow. As he watches her, all he can observe is an angry soul cooped up in body insecurities that drag her through the evening with parched thirst for an affirmation of identity. He suddenly fears for her; for what Paul has planned for someone so ready to implode. Then realising he must look inside himself to see what has been wrought upon him by his brother’s words. As he does so, Caul finds Paul’s envy of him coiled around his being. He realises how much he has let this envy feed his own pride, and how it had hardened his love for Mae, even before she married Gary; a love that even now, despite being dead, he wants to find.

Realising what his brother’s words have done to him and wanting to see its envious cause, Caul turns horrified back to his half brother. Looking at Paul’s soul, Caul reads written there a condemnation, and beside it a wound caused by Caul’s own being. In greater mortification and grief that has ever touched him, Caul realises that the wound has rejected and perverted all possible grace and forgiveness offered, and has turned into a fiery fount through which poison and hatred spew forth into the burning sea of other’s souls. Unable to take any more, Caul back-pedals away from the table, turns away, and hurries from this booming place into the chill, late winter night.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 55