Apocalypse of Jude

Caul lapses back into his swivel chair again, putting his pencil to his lips, as his thoughts fall into a cobweb of memories draped by a beneficent spider. They wander to the house where he stays. He thinks of the year in which it was built. 1967. The year Paul was born. The year that his mother eased her shadow Christianity into the twilight to give rise to her dream of becoming the image of the goddess, the queen of heaven. It was the year that she conceived him with a man whom he knows not, and whom he thinks of only as the Moor. As for Paul’s father, she, despising all authority, had long since brought him under her sway and turned him to her way. Paul’s father had left the Church, relinquishing all his power, the two of them rather raising him and his half-brother in the mysteries of her religion.

He remembers how both he and Paul had hated growing up like that, their parents’ choice having made them outcasts their whole childhood. He remembers now that Paul blamed Christianity as the cause for his parents’ denial. He remembers also how Paul had often blamed him, hating that it was Caul who his mother had designated as son to impregnate the next goddess.

When his parents died, but he survived, Paul changed, and came almost to love him, as if the old wound had healed. He remembers how he and Paul had decided they would wait upon the property merchants to enrich this town. For wealth, Paul had said, causes people to bathe in tepid notions of right and wrong, and then slowly strips them clean of their religious convictions so that they go the way of disbelieving Israel taken out of Egypt, become like the angels who left heaven to come into the daughters of men, and then give themselves like Sodom and Gomorrah over to the lusts of this world, all the while denying their God. This, Paul had said, would open the way for Paul and him to take back the town to institute the mysteries. All that had now certainly happened.

Caul’s mind turns to Jude, as he is now, in the mid morning, sleeping in the ash grey light of a square room saturated with the smell of nicotine and stale body odour. Where no curtain hangs over the window, whose one pane is broken, ensuring that some fresh air does circulate. Where the only personal effects that exist are a minimal change of clothes, and the tools required for daily personal up keep. Where there is no evidence of the Word that used to be his daily bread, or of the faith that it upheld. And he remembers how long Paul, himself a studied man of God, had cajoled Jude all those years back, uprooting his faith, so that now Jude, who having once believed, now believed no longer.

/and now is in danger of dying/

Caul feels suddenly ashamed that he has been part of the cause for Jude to throw away the dignity of his image, such that he can no longer see that the clothes he thinks he wears have been torn from him, and that he has been shamed like the parading emperor.

/if this is this the sum of what paul had wanted/ /destroying christian faith/ /then we have come close in succeeding/ /having turned so many away to the unconscious worship of my mother’s religion/ /and banishing those who have refused to change from this town/ /if he had truly repented of his hate for me/ /then we would be working now to bring worship of the mysteries into the public sphere/ /but paul is up to something/ /janice has hinted as much/ /and i have seen now that his hatred of me has never ceased/

/what then has become of his second hatred/ /surely it has evolved into a plot to take away from me/ /my divine right to impregnate mae/ /but how can he/

Paul’s angry words to him at the bar the night he saw the horsemen come into his mind.

/why did paul think that mae and gary splitting up is what i wanted/ /i didn’t want it/ /i was leaving the whole farce behind/ /but if he’s going to usurp me/ /he needs mae to be ready/ /for her garden to be in flower/ /and he knows that i can ready her/ /cause her to come looking for me/ /and what is he hoping/ /that she will find him before she finds me/ /is this the beginning of his destruction of me at last/

/what if i choose not to make mae ready/ /it’s too late/ /her turning has already begun/ /i could choose not to go to her/ /but that would play right into paul’s hand/ /then what of jude/ /getting together with mae won’t save jude/ /and if it doesn’t save jude/ /then the rest of us are doomed/

Caul sits up a little, shocked at this thought. /whichever way i go/ /i lose/

He gets up from his chair and goes over the window of the office he sits in.

/which do i fear losing more/ /my divine right/ /or my soul/

Looking upwards he sees the sun blazing midway above an earth balanced perfectly between day and night, but nevertheless, a day like any other, with people eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building.

/just a day like any other/ /yet all this time/ /paul/ /whose wound i thought had been healed of its fatal gash/ /has been bringing to fullness the time of authority for my mother’s doctrine to rule over this town/ /yet he hates my mother’s mystery/ /he desires only to be worshipped himself/ /and will do away with all worship but for himself/ /and he will spew his violence on the moors people/ /on the city/ /on this town/

Caul turns his eyes towards the horizon and sees hovering above the vast, restless ocean, the smoky cauldron of clouds being gathered up off the surface of the sea. To him, the sea seems to have become like souls that have become like smoky fires under the cauldron of darkness that is bubbling sulphurous waste into the air as a shadow of death and darkness, letting the climate of the surrounding mountains absorb it into its beastly frame. Three times the vision passes before his eyes, the first with the tone of grace, the second, with warning, and the third with doom.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 105