Apocalypse of Jude

Cocaine’s paranoia grips Jude as he makes for his car; cocaine’s lucidity comes to fetch him as he winds his car along the road of golden yellow street lamps, the occasional one burnt to deep red. The stillness of the lone mountain looms large over him.

/how did it get there/ /all by itself/ /apart from the others/ /like its watching me/

He lights a cigarette, the smoke circulating his lungs helping to calm him. His mind, well practised, closes out the mountain’s looming. He pulls his car into the gravel driveway parking alongside the absence of Caul’s car. He enters an unlocked front door, but locks it behind him, the cocaine almost burnt through him and the craving beginning to gnaw again. He walks through into the lounge, closing its door behind him and dumping his package on the coffee table before drawing the curtains on the lone mountain outside. Then he goes over to the coffee table and pulls it closer to the chair into which he drops himself. Feeling safer, he begins the process of cutting and snorting. On his sixth line, he freezes at hearing the sudden sound of a key turning in the front door, and his paranoia returns, telling him he has been locked into death’s prison. Listening again to the sound of the key only confirms to him his incarceration to await Death’s coming. But when Caul walks in, Jude breathes relief, relaxes, and finishes off the line before sinking back into his chair. He

Caul falls into the other single chair looking at the debris on the coffee table.

“Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

“Well hello, nice to see you too.”

They sit silently with nothing to say.

“Want some snarf?”

“No.”

“You’re missing out.”

“I’ll live.”

Jude slowly and sloppily begins cleaning up the remains of his binge. Then he catches sight of Caul’s boots and the paranoia shoots through him again.

“You went up the mountain?”

“Yeah. I walked up with Mae to the gorge.”

For a moment, the rumour of Mae’s aethereal presence thunders in Jude’s broken Coriolan spirit a desire to revive a compassion for her he knows he has not loved. But the paranoia that overshadows his heart reminds him of his soul’s imprisonment, causing him to repeal his compassion and in its stead send forth a denial of sympathy for her. Silence stills itself awkwardly, as Caul knows not what to say. Jude tries to show indifference by shrugging his shoulders.

“Did I tell you I met the Spanish Inquisition today?”

He lights a cigarette.

“Not only am I heretic to the Church, but I am now of little use to the devil.”

It is a slightly disparaged look that he sees cross Caul’s face.

“You’re sick Jude. You need help.”

Jude stares hard back.

“The liturgy has never failed to beg of the Lord that a sick person might be returned to good health if conducive for his salvation. But there is no chance of salvation left in here.”

He points to his heart. “Sick or not, I cannot be healed. I have been flushed by the Church into the world so that I might be hounded and killed by its beast, after it has taken its fill of me. And it has taken its fill.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 108