Apocalypse of Jude

Glad to be in the frosty silence, free from the party lights intruding on sweaty faces and the bass reverberating like thunder, glad to free from the agony of the shouting and crying of his spirit in that stony prison and palace, Caul turns his still wide-eyed pupils to the sky stretching its magnificent space over the dark surface of an earth growing warm in its turn towards the sun. Breathing the chill, almost fertile air, dissolves some of the fear that holds his soul ransom. The night air is vivid and he watches its energy breathe while walking over to his parked car behind the warehouse. On the scatterling of bare trees that stick up out of the asphalt of the warehouse parking lot, twigs are getting tender and new leaves are starting to come out. The period of hibernation is nearly over. Whatever has lain buried and dormant is beginning to stir. And what was sown before the winter set in, will now feed its roots to find the fullness of fruition.

Leaning now against his car, he turns his head once more upwards and then begins to wheel himself around, becoming fixated with the firmament, the stars that inhabit it and the cotton-grey clouds move against it. As he moves, his eyes are absorbed by the pulsating bursts of light burning from a belt of three stars. In worship he gives himself up to the constellation, hoping to feel the earth’s roundness turning inside the sphere of the calming, self-enclosed heavens. He closes his eyes and begins telling himself a story that he has been telling since the day he realised he was dead.

/orion/ /once a young man of great stature and beauty and a mighty hunter/ /he fell in love with the daughter of the king/ /and for her love/ /he worked to clear the land of christian faith/

/but she spurned his love to marry another/ /he was angry and insulted the maiden/ /causing enmity between them/ /so he sought out dionysus to release him from his pain/ /but instead the god threw him into a deep sleep for three years/

/one day an oracle told him to go into the fire/ /and wait to come out of the water/ /so he went into the fire/ /and found out that he whom he thought was living was in fact dead/ /that he who is living is now dying/ /and that the vengeance on her that he wanted to be his/ /was not worth having/ /only reaching the source of his love for her was/ /so that healing could be given to the one who is dying/ /and life to the one who is dead/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 85

Caul drives his car along the winding coastal road among the rocky eastern peaks, their cliffs dropping away to the false bay below, him coming down from the evening before, restless, unable to stop and think, thirsty, but with no place to stop and drink, looking out at the expanse of undrinkable water below, and hearing the voice of thunder coming from out of the heavens, cracking the sky above the waters.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 86

Caul leaves Mae’s house, angered at her silent accusation, with the day drawing its shadow longer and the buzz of daylight fading fresh in the late fall air. From the slopes where he stands, far out, he can see the rippling sea giving up its heat and the horizon hazing with the sky. Turning his head to the sky above, he gazes at the clouds that stretch across the heavens in textures of shapes and layers of heights. He decides to drive down to the beach, the sky meanwhile, busy shading its colours from indigo atop the mountains across the spectrum to glowing shades of orange, and then pink, and then red to the setting sun in the last of its dying trajectory.

On the beach, Caul stops to pluck from a clump of rushes, a single reed. It unsheathes itself cleanly from the earth, remaining to swing humbly in his hand. He walks down to meet the ocean’s edge with his hair in a tussle with the wind. His eyes survey the greenness of the bay as it deepens to darker blue. The beaches are shortening and the tide starting to build. Where the sun casts its final rays, the surface of the sea shimmers as waves rush on shore. As the lip of the wave pulls back, he stands mesmerised by the wet sand glistening with its thin sheen of water skin.

He walks along this edge, being pushed ever further as high tide drowns the beach. Twilight turns to darker dusk. The air becomes chill with the viscous edges of winter. Looking back at the mountains he realises that both the fold range and lone mountain have lost their modesty, having given way to becoming vague, black, naked shapes with mouths of carious teeth that cannot eat.

Coming to a standstill, sea water rushing his ankles, the wind brushing his dry skin, Caul is aware that the presence of the enclosing, decaying mountain range is starving the inhabitants of this town, and the encircling sea restless for their lives.

/one can neither stand nor lie nor sit here/ /yet they rely on these mountains for their daily food/ /and they look to the sea to give them rest/

Turning to the triple peaks of the singular mountain, its sight washes through him a sense of the foulest stench. He gags.

/and this one for some reason theyre fouling/

Feet sinking now deep into the sand, he looks from range to mountain, mortified as he realises in the range the inferno that holds the four horsemen, and in the mountain a purgatory where mercy, peace and love might be found.

/in so foul a place/

Though the questioning thought surprises him, a further part of the castle built around him by his mother dissolves. Shaken, he pulls his feet from the sand. Their clear form emerging whole from the soupy mix calms him.

/what if there is still water amongst its rock/

Breathing deep, he trudges away from the ocean, over the dry sand of the still unclaimed beach, desirous to follow his thoughts of a path into the foul place.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 87

/is that thunder/ /it is thunder/ /well i never/ /strange/ /dry thunder no rain/ /if there was rain/ /then i could drink from the sky/

The voice of the thunder rolls again powerfully.

/can’t even get any silence from nature out here/ /what is the thunder trying to shout at me/ /is it a portent of fertility or wrath/ /is it trying to tell me how much time we have left before the ice packs melt/ /or an oracle of a coming son/

This time the voice is majestic.

/if we could read its oracles in the rustling leaves/ /could we find our way into the ark/ /or are we forever hopelessly lost here/ /no noah to be a prophet and warn us/ /waiting for the stars to go out and for it to begin to rain/

A crack comes so loud as if threatening to strip the forested slopes bare.

/are you hiding around here somewhere noah/ /building a boat i cannot see/ /if you are/ /do you think you could save a place on your boat for me/

Again, the thunder shatters the air with the intent to break the boughs of trees. Caul sighs.

/i wish i knew what to think/ /so that i could know the words to say/ /that would open my eyes/ /to see a boat/ /if its there/ /because im tired of all this confusion/ /being stuck between a joker and a thief/

Across the sky strikes flashes of lightening.

/but what am i really looking for/ /if i am looking for noahs boat/ /for all men who entered noahs ark knew God/ /it must then be to him i want to speak/ /God/ /i hate that word/ /what else can i call you/ /i know you by no other name/

A final peal shakes the desert that Caul beholds before his eyes.

/are you there/ /outside of me and your own being/ /creator and omnipotent/ /could i tell you all that im thinking/ /would you reveal yourself to me then/ /and tell me if what i am thinking is right/ /so that i could have some peace/ /and the knowledge that i was on a path back to life/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 88

Caul sits before an old woman, in a circle among others. This is not the first time he has seen her in his dreams. He has often seen her praying alone. But this time she is speaking.

“If only this town knew whose union it is so blaspheming. But people here are fools despising both wisdom and discipline. If they knew, they would see the birds slowly gathering for great supper of God, so that they might eat the flesh of kings and mighty men and of men, free and slave, small and great. But they do not know, because they have chosen to obscure the Spirit’s counsel that to fear the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Otherwise they would have known that Enoch, seventh from Adam, prophesied that the Lord is coming with ten thousand of his saints to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done, and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.

“If they knew this then, they would see that heaven even now stands open before their fornication, with the white rider called Faithful and True about to spit out the faithless bride, and host this feast of the birds with the faithful bride dressed in white, riding out behind Him, His robe dripping with the blood of ten thousand saints. And for their blood, he will give his faithful the blood of those that slew them. He will tread the winepress of God’s fury upon them, for He is called King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

“If this town had knowledge, then this is what they would see. But they don’t know because they do not seek to know. With red sullen faces they sneer and snarl and shout out in vanity from the doors of their mudcracked houses, where is God that we should give Him witness? But beware. The four angels that for eternity have been bound at the Euphrates will soon be released and be given authority to kill a third of man with plagues of sulphur, fire and smoke.

“Now to the remnant who have remained faithful, who have not worshipped the beast or his image, who have through their faith enabled their offspring to fill the earth with God’s glory; your time to rule and judge the nations is coming to a close, after which you will go to your first death over which the evil one has no power. This then is now the time of your final hour, during which it will be given you to bring forth through your faith, the true visions of the One who created you, so that He can complete the great work begun in you, and so that the world may know the I AM.

“Soon you will see the sun become like sackcloth and the moon dim the tides with blood. A great earthquake will split the great city into three. Stars will tumble like ripe fruit from a tree and the sky will close as a book snapped shut. No more will man seek to read in the narrative of God the vanity of his own fortune. No. All men of every status will be made alike to cower in caves of mountains begging to be hid from the wrath of the Lamb.

“But we do not need to be afraid. For we are the faithful and most beautiful of brides. We are indestructible, for our salvation was sealed even before the four horsemen rode out and covered the world with conquest, strife, scarcity and death. Even now we stand before the throne of God in robes washed white by the blood of the Lamb. Neither can we hunger, nor can we thirst, the sun cannot burn us, nor death overcome us, for we have been led by the Lamb at the centre of the throne of God to ever living springs of water.

“In these then, our final days, let ill be to you no ill, but only grace in the form of Christ’s mystery. And by this grace let loss enrich you, let sickness heal you and ridicule be your honour. For to your death you will go and it will be to your gain.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 89

The music of the gorge nestled halfway up the slopes of the lone mountain sinks into Mae and Caul as they penetrate its gloomy boughs in the last light of the evening. Breathless, they both crouch on haunches alongside the clear stream that emerges here from deep underneath the mountain. Drafting from its icy freshness with scooped hands, both feel the water’s coldness burn down their insides.

Mae stands up, shaking her hands, looking around at the dark boughs and vegetation that surrounds her.

“There’s an oak tree that they’ve let stand in the centre where I work. Every morning and evening as I come and go, I brush my hand against its trunk like just to say hello, and sometimes when I touch it there is so much energy that I feel. That’s the energy I feel now.”

Caul stands up and wipes his hands on his trousers, pensive to the evening’s purpose, wondering why he decided to it at all.

“You ready to go up?”

She nods, and they pick their way up the narrow path winding along the stream until they reach a peculiarly large flat-topped rock from beneath which the stream gushes into the world from its source deep within the mountain. They clamber upon its rough-hewn two-by-two metre surface and make themselves comfortable by sitting beside each other with legs gathered up. She lights a cigarette, and Caul watches its orange tipped glow be the only light in the gloom.

“It’s going to be pitch dark soon.”

She smiles. “You want to light the candles?”

“It will get a bit warm won’t it?” Caul looks sceptically at the rock.

“Probably. We can always blow some of them out if it does. It’ll look beautiful, like a sacred rite’s meant to be.”

Caul hurrumphs. “I’m not so sure sacred rites were so beautiful as bloody and sacrificial.”

Together they place the metal-cupped candles around the square rock, letting their light diffuse the darkness and allowing an eerie glow to cast dancing shadows on the dark foliage around them.

“You want to open the wine?” She says this impishly.

“You’re going to have to drink from a plastic cup though, I’m afraid.”

His hand takes the bottle and corkscrew she offers, half his face bathed in yellow light, betraying a deeper struggle go one beneath.

Once he is done, Mae takes the bottle from his hand and holds it over the burbling stream coming from beneath, her long dark hair falling over half her face.

“On this Midsummer’s Night, we offer the spirit of the vine the blood of its harvest in thanks for your goodness.”

Caul’s mind continues its struggle with the image of offering up sacrifice to the god who has blinded his mythic Orion conception of self. Mae lets fall from the bottle’s funnel a full measure of the blood wine into the waters below. As it is done so, the water becomes as blood to Caul, and he hears the cries of slain souls calling out as if from beneath the alter on which they sit, wanting the avenging of their blood. Then there flashes before his eyes the vision of the rock upon which they sit as a winepress, pressing out in wrath the wine of the vine of the earth.

Mae finds her place again among the lit candles, their thick flames heavy in the unmoved air around them.

“This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever done.”

She pours the wine into two plastic cups, handing one to him. Both their tongues are bitten by the bitter vintage and they let it soak in. In the silence that follows, Caul’s vision continues, as he watches the air begin filling with the relentless beating of creatures wings that look like locusts coming up from an abyss. At this sight, Caul is pierced with thoughts of sorrow and revenge, illness and sad old age, fear, hunger, squalid poverty, destruction, pain, lust and deadly war. And in his vision he realises that these creatures have been tormenting him his entire life and will never let him find the death of being he so eagerly desires.

/if only there were water and not this rock/ /or this rock but also water/ /not this blood/ /but water/ /a spring to find rest in/

Coming to from his vision, Caul looks squarely at Mae. “Aren’t you exhausted from trying to find a place to rest from the dark abyss beneath us?”

Mae looks hurt and shows she has taken offence, turning her body slightly away from Caul.

“But I am finding rest Caul. I am.”

They go silent again, he reflecting on her answer, she probing his question. In Caul’s mind, the continuing sense of restive torment brings to him the thought of God.

/i know you’re the only one who can answer me adequately/ /just wish i knew from which way to approach you/

Caul’s question irks Mae though. Since her time with Jude, her spiritual waters seem to have been cursed and she has sensed their drying, along with an impending sense of plague. As if to dispel the incorporeal spirits haunting her mind, she moves suddenly to the middle of the flattened rock where she begins to reach her arms to the boughs above her, as if seeking to part them. Then, with precise fingertips stretching out from thrust-out hands, she slowly pulls in tendrils of moonlight through the boughs, her fingers then weaving them with the candle light, so that a sphere forms around her as a kind of woven protection against the spirits that assail her.

She now begins to sway rhythmically within this aura, rapt to the dance as her arms, in submission to her body’s sway, circulate the aura of her spirit while her hands move to direct its flow. Caul, unable to help himself, gazes rapturously on as she slowly brings herself to stillness.

“Now that is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.”

She laughs with her face flushed, breath rushing out, but a countenance touched by serenity.

“Come join me then.”

She is extending one of her hands. He just shakes his head resolutely, but her hand stays.

“I know you can still dance.”

“Mae, its been too many years.”

“This used to be your rest Caul. A long time ago.”

Her hand remains waiting for his. Inside of him, the wound of his failure with her a long time ago is breaking out of the cyst in his soul. The voice within him makes subtle suggestion to him that going with Mae would show him healing. Though he knows the deception, and shakes his head to dispel the temptation, yet the hurt is so great that he takes her hand, which he feels give way in submission to his leading. He awkwardly composes the coursing water of her body to flow around his unsteady body upon the rock. But gradually his arms begin to bring her body into the rhythm of his sway, his hands in hers bringing her in close, wrapping her body round him like a cloak and then unfurling her, their bodies moving in breath, the air swishing around their frames, their minds riveted to the nuance of every move; composure as he lifts her from her gravity and brings her above him to stretch out in flight, then settling her to her feet and their inertia. Both are glowing inside to out, breath tingling with the pumping blood in their breasts that lightens the dense darkness of their matter.

“I didn’t think I could still do that.”

They stand next to each other looking at the number of candles that now stand dark, the rest dancing erratically in the unstable air.

“I told you it was still in you.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 90

/can’t even hear the sound of water anymore/ /lapping under the boat/ /nor the cicadas/ /if i could only hear the sound of water/

Janice looks at Gary with a soul burning, disgusted with herself that she is unable to control her sexual lust.

/you have left me nothing paul/ /not even a pool among the rocky beds of this dried up river/ /well im going to take gary down with me/ /if its the last thing i do/

“Want to go to your place and do some lines?”

The light entering Gary’s eyes at the suggestion reflects a greedy hunger that nauseates her, as she realises he knows nothing of the ritual to take place in its rooms tonight.

“Let’s go down to the car then.”

Nothing further passes between them as they leave the hotel for their car. Once in the car, the silence continues as Janice allows her head to turn over the events of the previous day, of the lateness of her returning from work, the kitchen empty of Audrey’s painful smile of greeting, the house empty of her belongings.

Images of lines being snorted between her and Audrey the evening before last start flashing through her head. She remembers leaving a vacant, sad Audrey at home.

/im sorry i had to do that to you audrey/ /where ever you are right now/ /but doing gary was my last chance to try get free from paul/ /what an illusion/

Gary’s car pulls up outside the still darkened house on the hill. Janice continues to look straight ahead, not moving. Gary looks annoyed.

“Hey, I don’t want to sit here all night. I want to snort.”

Her voice snaps “Hey, this is my stash and I’ll take as much time as I want.”

/ok paul/ /whatever you are you up to/ /im ready/ /you just better make sure this beached whale goes down with me/ /hes been living off my lust for years/ /make him weep at my demise/ /then destroy him/

“Let’s go.”

They exit the car and go up into the house.
In the living room Gary slouches into one of the arm chairs while she cuts the coke on the coffee table.

“Here.”

She presents him with two severed lines. In his own hands he rolls a note, while she bends to snort the crystals, Gary unable to keep his eyes off her cleavage open to him. She falls back hard against the couch, her head up against its back, her eyes closed. He gets up and sits himself down next to her, snorts his lines then pulls her astride him.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 91

From far above, the world reveals the shape of its figure in all its rises and falls, and how it captures the early morning shadows of the clouds moving in a regularity along their way towards the ocean. On the street Mae is walking, defacing herself in a torrent of self torment.

/i became exactly what my name means last night/ /i practically devoured him/ /i couldnt stop/ /couldnt even see anyone else/ /you frenzied me for him alone/ /what have you made me do my lord/

She runs her hands through her black, tired and knotted hair. Her fingers are getting stuck, aggravating her such that she jerks them through.

/why jude/ /what has he got to do with all of this/ /where is this in the plan of drawing me closer to caul/ /he must hate me now/ /i dont understand/ /i dont understand/ /why would you make me do that/

The pain from wrenching her hair wells her eyes, and the frustration is enough to trip her tears. She runs into the small pine grove shouldering the park she is walking by, and falls to her knees, the softness of the brown needles beneath breaking her fall. Around her the trees guide the wind and birdsong softly through their interwoven branches while her hands cover her face, muffling the convulsive heaves of emotional energy leaving her bloodstream, and being pulled out of the nerves, to be exorcised in these saltwater offerings that burn the ground where they drip, drop, drip, drop, drop drop unappeased.

The circles that his forefinger runs in the mustard coloured cloth of seat next to him help still Caul’s mind.

“I’ve been doing some map reading lately, and your big book says it is impossible for those who have received the seal of the Spirit to lose it.”

His finger stops and he looks straight at Jude.

“Months ago, you told me I was right when I said you had the Spirit in you. But then you came to me after screwing Mae, telling me you don’t have the Spirit in you. Well which one is it? Because it can’t be both?” Caul pauses for the question to sink in.

“And who is the third who always walks beside you? Don’t look surprised Jude. I just haven’t told you about it. But every time I’ve tripped since Pentecost, and I’ve been around you, there has always been this person gliding alongside you in a brown hooded mantle; I’m not sure whether man or woman. Who is it? Is the Spirit or is it Death? Because it can only be one of the two.”

Jude suddenly laughs one of his cutting laughs.

“You still think you can heal me don’t you? I can see you working inside your head Caul, trying to grasp hold of the healing mystery of God’s power so that you can use it for your own glory. It’s the self same mystery that the Church has been trying to jealously hold onto, and that the devil wants. But all is lost, because in the process of trying to hold onto it, the Church has lost God, and since healing is a gift that only the Holy Spirit can impart, even if I could be healed, any chance of healing is gone. As for you, you would do good to let your delusions go.”

No change comes over Caul’s complacent listening complexion. But he stands and leaves quietly, going to his room and closing the door behind him, having realised again that a prayer has been answered and that if he is to find God, he needs to find the Holy Spirit.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 93

The street outside the bar is quiet. Jude leans up against the glass door of a phone booth, coins jiggling in his hand. His fingers have finished dialling and the receiver is pushed close to the side of his face. A timid voice transmutes itself into his ear.

“Hi Mom.”

“Well I never. Are you coming home for Christmas?”

“No Mom, I’m not.”

“Then you phoned just to make sure we would know that.”

“No, not that either.”

“You are going to Mass tomorrow night?”

Jude smiles at the attempted threat. “Yes Mom, I am.”

“Your Dad’s going to be very disappointed you’re not going to be here for Christmas.”

“Mom, I haven’t been home for Christmas in three years now.”

“You terribly disappointed him by not becoming a priest.”

“Well it’s been five years mom. I think both he and you should have dealt with that by now. Look mom, I just phoned to talk and find out how things are at home and wish you a merry Christmas.”

“But it won’t be the same without you.”

“Mom that’s not why I’m calling.”

“Then why did you call, if you’re not coming? Is that how you treat your mother? Call her to get her hopes up just to deceive her?”

“That was never my intention mom.”

He is too weary to get angry at her maternal lamentation.

“All I want to know is how are things with you and Dad.”

“They would be a lot better if we had the comfort that you were a priest.”

“Can you not answer my question?”

“You do not need to know because you obviously don’t care.”

“Would I be calling you now if I didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter if you care or not. You’re not going to be here for Christmas and that’s all that counts. I don’t know why you bother to call.”

“I bother because I’m sorry I can’t be with you for Christmas, but I can’t because you make it unbearable to be with. You’re always treating me like a failure. I was really hoping to talk tonight. Tell you about what’s going on in my life.”

His voice is still interminably weary. “But I guess not.”

“There you go again. Only concerned with your life. We didn’t raise you to be so selfish.”

“No mom, maybe you did. For all your religion, you are just desperate followers of ritual that the Church tells you will make you okay with God. That’s pretty selfish to me. No wonder people hate it. Its full of lies and deception, destroying people like me who want to believe in God but can’t because she is drunk on her own power to care about God. Anyway. Here’s wishing you and Dad a good Christmas. Bye.”

The phone is dead on its hinge. High in air he can make out the sound of a woman wailing. He sinks morosely in his weariness to the bottom of the phone booth and into a darker depth of thickening despair, his eyes taking in the dankness of night outside, the lurid glow of neon streetlights, his nose is dulled to the smoke of his own cigarette.

/sooner or later someones going to come along offering the answer to the churchs so called mystery/ /have it in his hand and people will fall before him/ /theyll rejoice they will/ /but theyll have no clue what theyre ushering in/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 94

On his bed, Caul lies holding his media invitation to the banquet tonight in one hand, Evelin’s hastily scrawled card in the other. But his mind is clear of any abstraction. Cut off from Mae, forced to abandon Jude to his own road, betrayed by Paul, he looks at where he stands—in a town retreating into walls of its own making, trying to blindly keep the church-sanctioned good life going. While beyond the mountains is the capitulated city with its fallen church towers. And between them, on the endless plain, the hooded hordes of his father, oppressed, poor, restless, readying themselves to swarm.

/its only a matter of time before they do/ /but the darker pagan instincts now holding the city are being raised against them/ /even here there is no longer anything to halt that pagan tide/

He hears the sound of his door and looks up to see Paul entering his room.

“You didn’t join me for lunch Caul. I’m disappointed. You dreaming again?”

Caul gingerly seats himself upright on his bed, feet square on the floor and hands steepled together across his knees.

“Doubting rather.”

Paul leans himself back against the inset cupboard.

“Ah. Doubting. That doesn’t become you Caul. What’s there to doubt?”

“Whether there is any hope of life left in this town.”

Paul scoffs.

“Just ask them what they want for Christmas. That’ll give you your answer. Peace and goodwill to all mankind, when all they do is spend money on the luxuries their whore of a city gives them. But the city is almost no longer theirs. We were pagan before the that city came aping Rome with its lies of Christendom. We’ll be pagan again and the people will marvel as we rise, with this town in our wake.”

Paul laughs with a glee.

“Things are finally happening Caul. It’s now me and my three that rule this town. Those real estate empires will collapse under me eventually.”

He lurches forward and pulls Caul up by the arm, clawing him into a huge embrace. He laughs heartily.

“But tonight, Caul, let you and me go and glut on the wine of their downfall, and then go herald our rise. How about that!”

He gives Caul a good hard shake with right arm draped across Caul’s shoulders. He is too exultant to notice Caul’s taciturn grimace as he wanders from the room.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 95

Caul and Jude leave the house unlocked on its hill to haunt the air as they make their way down to the gleaming white mall below, with its towers boasting of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London on its five corners, all far away places of mystery for those who people the stream of vehicles going in and out of it, like ants weaving steadily in and out of a nest. Caul pulls into this stream of vehicles, moves into parking lot avenues, searches then dives and stills the car. Both he and Jude wonder dazed into the emporium, a vision taking Caul as he passes through its doors. Both walk straight and people, each one with eyes cast upon the ground, part. Through this walled city’s tiled thoroughfares of contrived harmony, the constant resonance of people’s minds, voices and bodies mingle to create a haunting oceanic music of lament and toil in Caul’s mind.

“Look at them. All buying into what they’re told. You were right Caul. I had not thought that death held so many. The only thing they know is the craving lust that possessed them when they drank the maddening wine of the whore’s adultery.”

As they work their way through the masses to the circular heart of the mall, Caul becomes aware of more and more money changing hands, the merchants growing rich with this place’s growing lust for luxuries.

On their left opens the semicircular front of a department store and its cosmetics counters. Both Jude and Caul see Janice in the middle of the floor, clothed in a scarlet suit, glittering with jewellery and in her hand the effigy of a golden chalice, the marketing tool of a fragrance called Mystery to which she is unsuccessfully inviting arriving patrons to savour, or buy. Upon her, Caul sees piled us as if to heaven, deeds of her darkened soul, and above an angel about to pay her back by mixing her a double portion of her own wine.

“As much glory and luxury that she gives herself, double will be her torture and grief. She says I am a bride and a queen and will never mourn. But in one hour her plagues will overcome her and she will burn. My people need to come out of her, so that they will not share in her doom.”

The world is suddenly normal again. Jude looks with bizarre curiosity at Caul.

“You okay?”

Habitual hands rub Caul’s face, knows it wasn’t, but decides to say so anyway.

“Weird flashback. That’s all.”

They enter an open faced restaurant opposite the department store, ordering simply two beers. The waitress’s face grimaces before she walks away.

“She must think we’re bastards?”

“Aren’t we?”

“I try not to be.”

“Good for you.”

They cast casual glances around, getting a lay of the place.

“I guess I owe you an apology for my episode last night.”

Caul nods. “Just promise me you’re going to get help for the coke.”

Jude just laughs and lights a cigarette.

“That’s rich coming from someone who suffers flashbacks.”

He offers Caul a cigarette, who hesitates for a moment then takes one. They sit back in silence smoking, listening to the melancholy words of an overplayed pop song, the words of which a few faces around them are mouthing. Jude smirks, then turns to Caul.

“You say you want to find God. Everything we are is cultural. Everything we do. Everything we say. No matter how subtle, at some point everything can be ascribed to the nurture of our culture in general and all the permutations within it.”

Caul wanders through the haunting images he has just seen trying to find their nurture.

“So you’re saying, it’s impossible to find God because whatever God is, is mediated?”

“Exactly. We are in a Babylonian captivity. Held captive by the culture. The system. Babylon.”

“Never quite thought of it like that.”

The furrow of Caul’s brow reveals his brain trying to tie all he has come to realise together with as much honesty as he can understand.

“But if God exists, he is not dependent on culture for revealing himself. Even if that revelation was mediated by the culture, it doesn’t deny the fact of the revelation itself. If you believed it, God could just reveal himself to you in and through the culture couldn’t he?”

“That would make it a personal revelation.”

Caul allows his pause to grow pregnant. “Yes.”

Jude snatches.

“Who are you to believe you can bring yourself to some righteous standing and come into God’s presence without the mediation of the Church, and then have a personal revelatory affair with Him?”

Caul lets his slowness drag on a cigarette.

“But isn’t that exactly what you’ve retreated to, ever since you left the Church? Made the existence of God a personal affair, to be dealt with as you so wish.”

“That’s only because the Church can no longer mediate God.”

“Well then, we’re in the same spiritual boat.”

Jude leans forward, slight indignation in his breast.

“Now listen my dear fellow. I’ve been baptised and confirmed by the Church. This they tell me is enough to ensure my place in heaven. Beyond that God remains an incomprehensible mystery that the Church pretends to hold onto but can’t communicate. So instead they propagate the mystery in their own lust for power. That’s my spiritual anguish. You on the other hand, whether you like to admit it or not, proceeded from a stock, who, after emptying God of awe and magnificence, slowly eroded Him from existence. Your culture orphaned you spiritually and now you collectively don’t know where to turn anymore. That’s your spiritual anguish. No wonder your parents became pagans.”

Caul swallows the insult.

“But you’ve missed the point. Both cultures are still attempting to have a personal relationship with God by themselves, only both cultures have turned God into a-whatever-you-call-it-beyond-thing experienced only in our minds, but not with each other. They both believe, but they don’t belong to the same belief. They don’t belong to the same belief because they don’t know what to believe, and they don’t know what to believe because they reject the one institution that can keep the line between good and evil clear. And this is what both our cultures, cultures that have both proceeded from the Church, have culminated in and led us to believe. But it just seems like one big fallacy to me. God’s revelation exists despite what our culture might choose to make us think regarding that revelation.”

Both sink back into their seats, drawing the last of their cigarettes, to let the tension go. Jude leans forward, stubs his butt out and offers Caul another cigarette in a hand outstretched across the dark table. There is lighting and inhaling and exhaling, then words.

“We’re living in a dark ages, Caul, and they’re getting darker. And we’re clinging to the remnants of our reason getting more and more mystical and cutting ourselves away from reality. Why do you think there are so many religious nuts running around. And you’re going to become one of them if you’re not careful.”

Caul ashes his cigarette and Jude looks at him, smoke escaping his nose, before Caul commences.

“I’m already one of them. I’m having visions.”

Jude just throws his head back and chuckles.

“Oh great, too much acid for you.”

The seriousness does not leave Caul’s face.

“They’re not flashbacks Jude. They’re too constructed. Like they have a narrative. And the images are Biblical. I just had one as we were walking through the mall.”

Jude tries to tame the bemused ridicule that surfaces within him.

“The Biblical images are culturally copyrighted into us Caul. We just talked about that.”

But Caul is determined to finish.

“It’s like I can be totally occupied with this reality, but then suddenly I’m looking on at everything from this other reality that I can’t break out of even though I want to. Do you know how scary that is? That’s why I’m trying to find out if God reveals Himself so that He can be communicated with Jude. Because I want to know if God’s trying to talk to me, or if I’m going crazy.”

Jude’s silence gives his verdict. Caul peers deeply into Jude.

“You’re right to berate me for my sudden religious leanings Jude. And right now they are something I irrationally cling onto. But that’s all of us. None of us have anything to take the place of our own internal irrational logic. I look at our culture and its like we’re just biding time waiting for a new system to come along and worship that which will give us peace of mind again. But whatever that is will just be deception as well. I don’t want to be deceived again. I’m petrified of that Jude. I want to know that whatever I end up building my life on, I want it to be something that even when I am deceived by this culture as to its nature, at least I know my basis is solid and I just have to return to that. None of this shifting sands of human thought. Can you see why now, my growing fascination with God?”

Jude is staring around him and suddenly hating everything. He can see the amphitheatre of the mall and around it shops arrested in plastic green trees, shiny tinsel and golden thread and in the centre a man dressed in red surrounded by children, and he hates it all, rising vehemence beginning to throttle him.

“You want Biblical images Caul, I’ll give them to you. This town has gone the way of Cain, Caul. It has gone after the profit Balaam sought, and because of this, many in this town have followed into Korah’s rebellion of seeking to declare holy what God has declared unclean. And as a result we have become like clouds without rain blown by the wind; trees for harvest, but without fruit and uprooted, twice dead, never having produced goodness. We are like the foaming waves of a sea in storm. We are wandering stars and blackest darkness has been reserved for us forever. God has abandoned us.”

Caul lowers his eyes from Jude’s glare.

“I think I’m willing to take the chance He hasn’t.”

The shrug of Jude’s shoulders is mixed anger and indifference.

“Well, its your life. As for me, this whore of a system is just going to have to do away with its velvet glove and pull out the iron fist to put an end to all this crap. Yes sir. I know I’m going to die in agony, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of having refused to let it use my life potential so it could use it at my expense.”

Jude looks again over the amphitheatre, there suddenly being a torrent of words coming up from deep within.

“But all these people here that walk her wide, glittering thoroughfares and share in her luxury, when they see her burning, they will weep and mourn over her demise. And all those that sell her luxurious wares will weep and mourn as well. Their gold, silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen, silk and scarlet cloth and things made from ivory, rare wood, bronze and marble will be worthless. Their cinnamon and spices, their incense, frankincense and myrrh, the wines and the olive oil, all the fine flour and wheat will all have rotted. And all their cattle and sheep, and horses and carriages, and souls of men that they enslave for the production of their luxuries will be wasted. Because no one will buy or sell these things anymore. As for all the kings who shared her body, they will see in one hour her power be stripped from her, leaving her naked and to be burnt. And they will cry out their woe.”

Jude stops abruptly as Caul stares amazed before the verbal vision.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 96

Many are gathered at this old farm house that lies tucked in a vale to the east of the basin, far from the town lights and on the lower slopes of the crouched mountains. They are gathered here by an ancient notion of worship calling from somewhere deep in themselves that they do not understand, but choose to follow.

Hiding the farmhouse from the road leading into the town is a dark, silent green shrove of trees. And in front of it, across an open meadow is a small lake with a mist gathering. From within the farm house, comes the call of drums beating in deep, hypnotic rhythms. But for the most, the many that now gather a coven of souls here prefer to let the trance-inducing drugs drift lazily through their blood near the warmth of a large bonfire in the meadow, unaware that the drums that beat are beginning to beat the earth with the beat of war. All unaware that is, but for Janice. She wheels around the circle’s dark, outer circumference, watching the mesmerising flames dance on Audrey’s and Gary’s pill-bitten faces. Audrey pulls Gary’s arms in closer around her waist and then laughs with a delight that signals a growing security that she has grabbed him back. Unsure whether to smirk at Audrey’s idiocy or feel sad for it, she lets her eyes leave them, knowing that she is relinquishing all her remaining power over Audrey to Paul. Her eyes search out her last hope at escaping the man she has played the whore for, for too long. She finds him across from Gary and Audrey, and for a moment stills herself to enjoy the mesmerising effect that the fire’s hypnotic dance is playing on his frame. But as she watches, she becomes aware of a sac-like thing sitting on top of his head, and it irritates her that she can hold herself back no longer. She goes forward and shakes him on the arm.

“Hey sexy.”

Caul rises abruptly from his deepening visual exploration into hallucination, turns his head and is annoyed to see a tripping and drunk Janice.

“I’m sorry, but you have this brown egg white sitting heavy on your head.”

Janice’s voice mocks close to his ear as her body sways against his.

“And I just wanted to take it off.” She dusts her hand through his hair.

“Oh, but look. It doesn’t want to come off.”

Caul pushes her hand away in disgust.

“Just leave me alone Janice.”

He turns to go to another point on the circle. But she is awakened with a sudden insight and follows him round.

“So this must be what makes you so damn indifferent to me. You think because of your caul, you’re spiritually special and nobody can steal your birthright away from you. Don’t you? That’s why you don’t take me seriously. Oh you are such a fool.”

Her last word, however, is drained of any passion, and her blood suddenly grows cold as her eyes catches Paul, in the dark shadowy recesses behind an unaware Caul, his left hand bringing a freshly lit cigarette to his lips. His stare bores through her, the coal of his cigarette burning bright. He holds her gaze to him, before he exhales, letting her go, laughing softly to himself as he fades away back into the darkness.

With his fading though comes a new darkness from down by the lake where Mae is leading Jude out of the shadows in her tow. She is hungry and her smile is one of mad joy for blood and raw flesh. Janice watches dismay become Caul’s face and slumps to her own despond, realising Paul has played a trump she has no hope of beating. She watches Mae take Jude’s hand and move toward the house where the dance floor awaits. Janice knows that now all will irresistibly flock after, not realising that this is the sign for which their souls have been waiting. Beaten, she follows Caul towards the dance, cursing Paul and desperately racking her brains.

One by one, those by the fire turn, until Audrey is left with Gary, shivering now in the comfortless cold of her inadequacy, the sculptured image of Audrey Hepburn passing by in her head again and again freezing her body.

“Take me home.” Her face is pale.

“No. What you talking about?”

Her cheeks are flushing and her soul is shaking with a possession of jealousy.

“If you want to go in there, you go dance. But not before taking me home for good first.”

The threatening timbre of her voice mildly disturbs Paul in his watching, listening darkness. Hesteps up from his place of hiding. “Take her home Gary.”

Gary, looks up incredulous at Paul, riveted in a boiling anger, but knows better than to say anything. He turns in a ramrod stiff posture and stalks towards his car. She follows, isolated, some steps behind. Paul watches for a few steps, then pleased, turns towards the farm house.

In the dark sky above his absence, bats beat the air with their wings. There is no cloud, allowing heat from the earth’s surface heat to rapidly evaporate. The mist from the lake is beginning to cover the earth as the night deepens. As it deepens and grows colder, the rhythms of those dancing flow deeper together, the drugs having rooted themselves in the blood, and the beat having hypnotised them. In a dark corner of the dance floor Caul desperately, despondently seeks out Dionysus, the one who blinded him, the one who now seems to have betrayed him; seeks him beyond the barrier of heavy bass where his consciousness can enter and know the god’s calling upon him. As he concentrates his candy-flipped mind on dancing his body into oneness with the electronic beat, his mind dives slowly deeper into the outer edges of consciousness where the gates to the unconscious lie. In that moment, Caul looks up and the swirling lights flare out brightly, lighting directly above Mae, golden mistletoe woven into her hair. Then the voice he has been seeking comes.

“You know that she is the way.”

Then a sudden hand grabbing his brings Caul back to the surface, his blood growing cold, then freezing at the touch.

“What do you want Janice?”

“Come, let’s go steal the dance floor from those two.”

He literally snorts at her, but his eyes wonder back to Mae’s fertile body in red shoes seeking to free the waters of fertility by taking Jude in close to begin a gyration with him.

“If you don’t come with me now Caul, and break that energy, our fallen priest is going to end up sticking it into her after this party has fallen apart tonight. And there is no telling from that kind of reproductive energy being freed up, what power Paul is going to be able to incarnate.”

The desperate, threatening tone of Janice’s voice unnerves Caul, but it is the consonance of her desire with the dionysian voice that unsettles him more.

/is mae now his handmaiden/ /or is dionysus being capricious with me/

“You’ve had too much coke up your nose tonight Janice.”

She laughs in a high-pitched, bordering on hysterical way.

“You really are clueless you know that. You style yourself as some sort of spiritual quester that’s got some destiny to fulfil. But that caul on your head has got you blind. If you’d just let go of it, you’d start to see what’s really happening around you.”

“That’s really deep Janice…”

“Oh will you just hush and listen to me for once in your life.”

She turns and grabs Caul round the waist, looking straight at him.

“Jude’s the reason Paul’s got no use for you anymore Caul. But you wouldn’t have seen that. Or that my time is done. And unless you come with me and break that ritual going down on the dance floor, both of us are done for. Because then Paul will be open to resurrect a power that won’t rest until it destroys everything.”

She follows his eyes to where Paul’s malign eyes glassily take them in, but is determined to play her last card despite her fear. She runs her index finger down the middle of his chest.

“You don’t want to believe me do you? Well then don’t. But once that power is released, the Mae that you think is yours and to whom you will steadily grow closer in readiness for your coming…”

Janice’s lips mock a succulent taste. “…into her…”

She cannot withstand laughing derisively at Caul.

“…she will destroy you, because she is no longer yours.”

Her hand grabs his crotch, squeezing it gently.

“What a shame it has to go this way. I would have made you a good queen.”

She shrugs her shoulders in sadness and turns away leaving him to his dark corner.

From his isolated spot Caul watches with an opening depression, Jude openly betraying him, going with the woman he loves, and seeking to put his light out for good, mocking Caul’s attempt to heal him. The pain in his gut jackknifes into a sullen pride, a pride that turns him angrily away from both of them. He tries to go back into the dance, trying to ignore all that has been said, confused at what the dionysian voice said about Mae.

/can mae really show me the source of the love im looking for/ /but the rainbow pointed me towards God/

He turns again to look at Mae, only to see her drawing out her long black hair with her fingers that intimate a kind of whispered music, and then leaving with Jude, a piece of mistletoe from her hair falling to the ground. In their leaving he realises that his failure to act has not only bereft him of his consort, but in failing to take Mae from Jude, he has failed to save Jude from his spiritual death.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 97

The desolation Caul feels at Mae and Jude’s leaving is met by the first grey colours of morning penetrating the blackened windows into the ultraviolet fluorescence of the dance floor. With the power of the drugs beginning to fade, Caul stands listlessly staring at a Halloween fresco behind the dj, where bats are crawling downwards with cathedral spires and city towers falling. Within the music, a bell tolls and to Caul it seems as if to toll out the end of the world. Staring at the bats too long, their faces start taking on dull human features to his hallucinating eyes. A little freaked, disgusted and disheartened, Caul picks up Mae’s fallen mistletoe and walks out of the dying party into the mundane reality of morning light. His footsteps take him away from the farmhouse down a forested track. Behind him, voices in the chill-out music coming from the farmhouse sound to him more and more like they are echoes out of an empty cistern, the farmhouse itself, feeling to him like an exhausted well of human possibility.

The sky is light, but the sun not yet up by the time he hits the farm road leading away from the town and up into the mountains. He breaks into a run to try calm his wired body. Quickly tiring, he slows to a walk again, his hands on his hips, and head looking down. The only thing to be heard is the sound of his shoes padding the tarmac. Above him, a pale moon but twelve days old hangs in the sky. He comes to a halt at a cul-de-sac barrier. Beyond it the odd car rushes by, up the mountain pass to over and beyond. The barrier surprises him somewhat.

/this is the town limit/

He stands there, staring beyond it to the ruin of what was once long ago a chapel haunting the otherwise empty mountain slope.

/that where i’m going/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 98

Caul hops the barrier, saunters across the highway to hop the barrier on the other side. He picks his way through the singing grass towards the centuries old, decayed and burnt chapel ruins. He is aware of the broken graves that surround it, and though he knows the dead bones are harmless, he nonetheless feels death’s presence beginning to enclose around him, seeking to draw him into the empty chapel, and there promise him to reveal the way back to life.

He approaches the gaping doorway, the golden mistletoe hanging unconsciously in his fingers. The malevolent atmosphere swirling round the ruin scares him, but he enters, and picks out the seat of a broken alter that looks out through the broken wall into the graveyard with its gnarled, burnt branches of dead trees. As he stares at them, the frayed ends of dying hallucinogens draw lewd shapes from them in his mind. He hopes his eyes will penetrate the hallucinations to open the world beyond to descend into from which to bring back the life which he seeks. But there continues to be nothing more than perpetual shape-shifting distortions. Then his eyes pick out the shape of a half exposed skull and corresponding skeleton. On a farm somewhere not far away, the co co rico crow of a cock pierces the still dawn air. Caul pulls back, suddenly terrified, the shock of death’s reality terminating his attempted descent into its world. The mistletoe falls to the ground as he grabs his head with his hands. Shaking it, he looks again to confirm the fact of the unearthed skeleton. Rising quickly, his feet stumble through the ruined wall and over the dead man’s bones, as he scurries his way back through the long grass, slowing down when he is clear of them.

/those bones cant harm me/

From his pocket he draws his keys, jangling them in his left hand for comfort.

/time to run across the road again and play chicken/ /why did the acid head chicken cross the road/ /saw the other side of the road and said wow man got to check that out/ /but there was no life there/ /just death/ /how do you escape that death/ /who can make those dead bones breath again/ /what spirit/

He runs back across the mountain pass road and vaults the barrier, but drops his keys. Looking down at them as if surprised at their falling, his curiosity is caught, his eyes cocked like a raven after seeing something shiny.

/are these really the keys to life/

His knuckle grazes the bitumen as he bends to pick them up. He looks at them as they lie in his open hand.

/i mean without them id die sooner or later/ /but im going to die anyway/ /so what kind of security is that/ /if i lost them/ /who would i be/ /id be me without the things these keys represent/ /without all this false sense of security i have/ /without all this self-righteousness that i carry around with me/ /and without all my fantasies of destiny/ /i would just be me/ /but what would me be/

He rolls their weight in his hand and feels them between his fingers, sees the talisman of a broken, translucent and bulbous plastic heart, grooved subtly to hint a pelvis, acting as key ring.

/a broken heart/ /with no one to heal it/ /just death to claim it/ /no hope of resurrection/ /the fisher king can not heal his own wound/ /but the knight himself is wounded/ /and cannot be the healer/ /even if he wants to be/ /why havent i been able to see this/ /its my pride/ /my pride/

He stands in stillness, in sadness, in shock, as a dense bank of firm white clouds falls over the amphitheatre of folded rock, rushing their free flowing forms thickly into the basin, their white immensities turning pink as they begin to feel the burning intensity of the sun rising behind them.

/i couldnt of saved jude anyway/ /and didnt i just lose him/ /we are all doomed/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 99

All around the air is filling with humidity, as a frenzy of friction gathers among the clouds, building them from deep within to a sweating fury, darkening them to smoke heavy grey. Driving along the Strand, Caul and Mae look on with uneasy awe at the dark protruding palls, pregnant with the promise of a thunderstorm. The sea is rising tempestuously in reaction to the pressure bearing down on it from above. A flash of lightening rivets the sky above the mountains, followed momentarily by the first peal of thunder. Then with a damp gust, on the windscreen, slow sluggish drops of heavy moisture burst, then more vivid lightening, and louder thunder, and finally the urgency of huge rain drops.

Mae opens her window briefly and fills her nostrils with the static electric air and the smell of urban heat steaming up from sun-baked streets. The smell winds its way down through her lungs to her blood, rapturing her slight body with a wildness. Static in her black hair, she looks back voraciously at Caul, her eyes filled with the desire to devour flesh.

“That smell of electricity and rain. I love it.”

He senses the change, a change he has not been in the presence of for years. But instinctively, the familiar reaction of being vaguely disturbed at its foreboding, triggers a melancholy that haunts the unknown fate of his existence. He brings the car to a halt, but not close enough to the restaurant they are going. They run through the wind-sweeping gusts of heavy rain pelting the earth to the shelter of the sidewalk eaves.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 100

The tide is sucking its force back over the rocks in the false bay. The mountains are already gathering a distant haze of dark cloud, but the lone mountain, like a Himavant, remains in shadow, its river sunken, waiting for rain, its dense overgrowth crouched in silence and limp leaves. Mae ascends the stairs that climb the outside wall of an apartment washed Mediterranean white and bought from one in this town who sold it to her father.

Her morning walk, an act she is still refusing to admit to herself is an act of mourning for Caul, has failed to rid her of the want of excessive food gripping her. Yet the growing glint of a freshly uncovered spirit is beginning to yearn for her to fight back the desire of the flesh to gorge itself, and seek, despite the fearful stench of darkness, what lies beyond the veil she needs to go. On the platform of her upper-floor door, she breathes deep for courage. But passing through the door which opens into the kitchen, the stronger spirit overpowers. Her restraint gives way and she moves to open the freezer.

She is eating ice cream quite frantically, feeling the satisfaction of her flesh being welded together with the desire of her fear. Then a tearing guilt feeling forces its way into her consciousness, making her action repugnant to her. She forces the tub down onto the table, and locks her arms over the sink, the heaves of her sobs interspersed with the heaves of her stomach.

With her skin clammy and cold, and water swilling her mouth to wash out the alkaline taste, she begins the caustic process of closing the emotional gate and not allowing a thought to run through her.

Undressing herself, she moves determined now, into circling around her studio apartment. At the moment of entering an entranced peace, however, the loathsome darkness that smothers her in fear presses in like a blanket round her. But today, in the curtained morning of her small space, the will of her spirit within her is too powerful even for her fear to control, and making use of her entire soul, a long repressed vision thrusts itself through her molten surface.

{A man of incredible beauty is standing before her bed in the light of a shining shawl. He beckons her to rise from her bed and come to him. She does so, held in rapture by his beautiful features, telling herself that this is what she has been searching for and waiting for all her life. But as he touches her, a darkness so hideous unveils itself before her. It hides his face as he removes her clothes to rape her on her marriage bed. As he deposits his seed in her, she feels her flesh become entwined and one with his seed’s spirit. The uniting opens up an abyss in her soul that begins swallowing her into its night, so that ultimately she will become totally possessed by this spirit unless she escapes it.}.

She collapses from the force of the remembered dream, onto her bed. The strength of the darkness that has enveloped her, concealing her from this remembrance for more than four months by entwining itself to her bulimic weakness every time she tried to remember what happened, is broken. Lying there, she remembers waking up that Easter Sunday, lying naked and bruised, only to stand before her bell jar mirror haunted with a confused shame, before starting to circle in the small open area of a bedroom that once was hers. She remembers the mirror capturing her image and refusing each time she looked at it to offer up any image but the raped figure she first saw. Closing her eyes, but gingerly raising her head, she looks in the direction of the mirror she could not leave behind when she moved. Feeling it must be the thousandth and first time she has looked towards it in hope of a refreshed image, she opens her eyes. She sees squinting back at her, a naked girl lying with gingerly raised head. Exhausted, with relief now cradling her where darkness once groped her, she crawls her way under her duvet and gives way to a curled up sleep.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 101

The voice of the thunder spoke, shaking the earth again, as now into from out of the storm, Caul goes. The wipers of his car fall uselessly in the heavy downpour, while the mirth of Jude’s laugh and words continue to rattle his head.

/so God exists/ /his self-evidence emerges from the self-righteousness of cauls mind/ /thats the second time God has emerged from me today/ /could this be one of maes coincidences/ /if its not my inner self/ /whos narrating his existence to me/ /am i growing familiar with the spirits workings/

Caul drives his way back past a white mall sheltering a horde that daily swarms to its site on the open plain between the shore and the residential slopes of the lone mountain, the plain’s flat westward horizon opening up the road to the city beyond.

/how strange this storm comes on halloween/ /but what does weather know of human ritual/ /nothing/ /yet the gods use weather to carry their omens of warning/ /and now im back to where i was this morning/ /trying to figure if this thunder is God speaking/ /or Zeus ordaining/ /and in my death/ /too much confusion/ /with all hope of revelation lost/ /but if i don’t get that revelation/ /i can only go round in circles/ /there will be no way out of here/ /please God give me that revelation/ /did i just pray that/

There is a burst and crack from out of the black clouds as he is going up the back ridge of the lone mountain towards his house, and then all is abruptly still. Lightening flashes all around the sky, but the air is still and the rain stopped.

/its like im inside the very core of nature itself/ /to think from all this stillness comes all that energy/ /to have a stillness like that inside/

“Oh you of little understanding. Don’t you see? Stop your car and get out before it is too late.”

Why Caul stops and gets out, he does not quite know. But he does. As he does so, a moment of sun creeps through to shine upon the earth, causing a rainbow to emerge through the black clouds gathered above the lone mountain. Caul stands wide-eyed at a gap in the trees of the wet avenue leading him home, and recognises that being communicated to him is the sign that flood waters will never again destroy the earth.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 102

“For all this weird weather, we’re getting we’re getting extraordinary sunsets.”

Jude takes a seat alongside Caul on the veranda’s couch, staring at the sun diffusing in constancy its burning death through the cloud over the ocean. The sea is white. Their silence is still awkward. Caul flickers a cold glance at Jude.

“Can I have a cigarette?”

Jude just smiles.

“I was just about to offer you one. That must mean I’m beginning to read when you want a cigarette.”

Jude’s loops his box over to Caul, then holds out his arm, the clink of the lighter igniting the burning fluid, the subsequent flame dancing lazily as Caul lights up.

Caul grimaces placidly, not really enjoying the smoke going in and out of his lungs. He watches the smoke drift a non-committal path through the still air.

“One names a wind from whence it comes right?”

Jude just gives a short chuckle.

“Now that takes me back to school geography. Yes. I believe you are right. Why?”

Caul rolls the cigarette in his fingers and stares at the burnt end melt the filter paper.

“It’s just interesting that we name a wind from where it comes, not to where it goes.”

His head laid back on the couch, Jude lights his own fag, staring at the mottled, fibreglass awning.

“Thus is laid premise number one. Go on. Take my mind from this heat.”

Caul drags.

“So, I guess it follows that by setting course to the wind, you will never know where you will land up except somewhere opposite to the direction from where you started from.”

A smoke ring escapes Jude’s mouth.

“Well deduced monsieur professor. And it was just his argument that led to the invention of the rudder.”

He turns his head lazily sideways and queries.

“Caul, what are you getting at?”

Caul looks blankly at Jude for a few moments. “No. Nothing. Just a thought I suddenly had.”

Not moving his head, sucking on his cigarette, Jude returns the gaze.

“Caul, what is it you are going to do with all those half-baked ideas and flashes of unfinished inspiration that you’ve entertained me with these past three years? Where are you going?”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, for instance,…”

Jude’s hands go up in gesticulation along with his body, cigarette clasped between fore and middle of the right hand, smoke curling towards Caul.

“…if we’re chatting, we inevitably land up in a stream of consciousness about whatever issue, but rarely will you actually commit yourself to a point of view. To extend your own metaphor, it’s like you’ve set sail but you haven’t rationalised the conclusion of a rudder yet.”

Caul steers Jude’s hand away from him.

“No, its not that. I have a rudder. I just don’t want to use it anymore.”

Jude drags and then ashes over the couches edge with his left hand.

“Not even to get yourself somewhere?”

The melting filter paper transfixes Caul for a moment.

“All it did was steer my life into a storm that tore me apart, leaving me to drift at the mercy of what ever wind prevailed. And since nobody else seemed to have a replacement rudder, and all my past maps had become defunct, I decided I’d rather just float out there and simply allow what ever cosmic power that is out there to find me.”

“But the likelihood of being sunk or grounded is just the same.”

“Exactly. And look where I’ve run aground. Like you insinuated yesterday, I think I’ve stumbled on God’s wind. Now I guess, I want the rudder to steer me in that wind so I can get off this island of purgatory I’m stuck on.”

Caul stubs his firmly into the tray that lies between them.

Jude has neither smiled or shown astonishment at Caul’s remarks, but rather looks hard out over the shining milky mass of cloud stretching over the sea swallowing the land.

“Even if you have found God’s wind Caul, there is no rudder, because when it comes to God, everyone’s rudder is just as screwed up as yours. Anyhow, who cares what I insinuate? For what random reason do you think you’ve found God’s wind? Like you say Caul, you have no map. You’re lost. Along with all of us here.”

Staring out into the white haze, Caul pauses a long time.

“What if it’s the same wind that has blown itself through a multitude of lives over the entire course of human history, running them aground on this wasteland I now am, in order to find God? That’s what your church would claim right? Spirit, Bible and Church. Wind, map and rudder?”

A silence settles on Jude. In it he becomes aware of the battered rudder of Church Tradition underneath him still trying to hold its course over his life. Its stubborn resilience in spite of all that he has done to rid himself of it, plummets his soul’s barometer further down the spiral.

“Well the pope would put Church first in that sequence.”

The cynicism of Jude’s retort churns to the centre of Caul’s heart, filling him with a desperate but nauseating yearning for knowledge of events last night.

“Why do you hold onto your virginity then?”

The words almost spit themselves from Caul’s mouth. He pushes forth accusingly.

“For all your cynicism you’re still holding onto the hope that God exists and is coming for you. Like some unrequited love.”

The sudden triumphalism arising from Caul’s charge, sets the storm in Jude’s heart to thunder loudly against that last hold Tradition has on his mind. His voice barks out a triumphant DA!

“There is nothing left to be requited anymore Caul. Christ’s not coming anymore to marry me.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 103

Jude sits quietly for a moment, considering the act.

“It was just a moment of surrender to something that my life of chastity can never take back.”

Jude sits back satisfactorily, denying the desolation that he feels from the event.

“I am free of my ridiculous infatuation with marrying Christ at last. Me being a priest was meant to be a beautiful vocation of God in man, man in woman and the mystery of sanctification. The true romance of which all our romances are mere shadows.”

He laughs another cynical laugh.

“Now then Caul, it’s just us left burdening the earth with our toil and screams of childbirth. What of marriage? From now on it’s just sexual relationships tied by whatever social convention it finds itself in. But hasn’t this been how we’ve always existed? They don’t tell you that in the obituaries, do they?”

Jude looks now again at Caul, the sound of his soul’s thunder still reverberating through him.

“So my friend, I ask you, what then did I give Mae? Love? If it had been possible for me to have given her that, then there would not have been this whole farce. But I didn’t, because there was no Love in me to give. Therefore no God in me. No Spirit. No life. But flesh I have, and flesh I gave and she took it, because that’s what she wanted, because that is all she can want. I am finally free to be cynical and hopeless in my sloth.”

He shouts these last words out in a glee to the burning world. Sparrows gathered in late evening chatter in an overgrown bougainvillaea tumbling over the veranda’s far left corner, scatter.

“So I am free to say, Caul, that you failed in your mission to heal me. Dionysus got to me first through his maenad. I am dying, and my land will die.”

“As for you Caul, go ahead. Drift in whatever wind this is you’ve found. But you don’t even know what you are seeking. How do you ever hope to find it, if you can’t even call out for it?”

Caul doesn’t answer, but the mention of the god’s name and his tie to Mae pierce Caul with a bright light, and it is as if scales of blindness have fallen from his eyes. In the new light, Caul recalls the dionysian voice in the dance, and realises the way of Mae is not love, but just yet another flattering falseness of Orion’s deceiver. In Caul’s mind too comes the remembrance of Janice’s words that the consorting of Mae and Jude would open a door to a spirit to destroy the life in Jude that he, himself, had been trying to save, but has realised he can no longer save, being wounded himself. Finally, he remembers the voice when the storm passed over the mountains bringing summer so suddenly upon this beautiful place in a rainbow that echoed to him the ancient covenant that never again would freed waters cut off all life. Deciding that he knows that this is the voice he seeks, the path of love he seeks, he calls it God.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 104

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

After Mae is gone, Caul calms himself to finish his cup of coffee before leaving. As he exits and begins to cross the courtyard, he sees Audrey emerge with Evelin from their office, leaving behind the empty rooms and broken seals of their lean solicitor. He stops them short, his mind resonating with Evelin’s presence in his morning dream.

“Hello.” He addresses Audrey. “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Likewise. Oh, this is Evelin. Evelin, Caul.”

Evelin smiles. “Yes, I know. Caul and I were at school together. Always very intense and moody.”

She kind of impersonates Caul’s heavy manner in a light-hearted manner that forces him to smile despite himself. He looks back at Audrey.

“Where you off to?”

Evelin answers. “We’ve decided to pack in a half day today, to go get ready for a Christmas Eve celebration. You want to come? Audrey hasn’t come up with anyone to invite yet. So you can be her guest.”

He looks at Audrey, wanting a sign of confirmation from her, but only gets a look of bewilderment. Nevertheless, the sudden option floods him with relief and he decides to take it.

“I like that idea. Sounds like fun. Would solve my problem of not having to go where I don’t want to tonight.”

Evelin gives him a card on which she has hastily scrawled a telephone number.

“Give me call later, to let me know for sure. But it’s seven for seven thirty, and dress with a comfortable sense of sophistication that wants to chat.”

He laughs. “With pleasure.”

“We must go. Hope to see you tonight.”

“Sure.”

The two of them move on beyond Caul, where Audrey turns almost harshly on Evelin.

“I can’t believe you invited him just like that.”

“I didn’t do it just like that.” Evelin snaps her fingers. “I think I was meant to invite him.”

Audrey, still irritated, gives a half glare. “What are you talking about?”

Evelin turns to her and looks straight at her.

“Remember when you asked me yesterday why I invited you for Christmas Eve dinner, and I said because God sometimes puts a desire of His in my heart. Well the same thing just happened now, only this was like a ringing bell going off in my head.”

They carry on walking.

“Geoff and I have been praying for Caul for about seven months now. It’s been kind of weird. Both Geoff and I have known Caul since school, but we’ve never been very close, and haven’t had contact with him for years. Then all of a sudden, seven months ago, Geoff just started getting this heavy burden to pray for Caul. And so we have, and it all just came together now. Geoff will be excited to hear about this.”

Evelin faces Audrey from across the roof of her parked car and laughs her gay laugh.

“You think I’m nuts don’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, that’s because you’re still blind to God’s work in the world. But if you accept Christ, I promise you, life with Him has this secret garden that opens up to you, and you’re eight years old again dreaming you’re a grown princess been taken away by a dashing prince, only this time its true. Now, let’s go to my grandmother’s house.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 106

Evelin emerges from her kitchen with a tray in her hands.

“Come guys, sit down. Dinner’s ready.”

Two women follow her, each bearing a dish in their hands that they place on the table, stream rising off them.

“Okay, let’s see, Stuart, you’re over there and Susan there. Caul, you’re next to Susan. Audrey, you’re on my right.”

They take their places as Geoff moves around the table with a bottle of red wine, filling each glass before taking his seat at the head of the table. Evelin rises from her seat, adjacent to him, glass in her hand.

“Okay, the food’s quite hot, so it can do with a few moments cooling.”

She looks to Stuart and Susan.

“I’d like to give thanks to the Lord for His graciousness this Christmas Eve in bringing old friends back together. May you enjoy the food and wine that He has provided, and may you enjoy communion with His Spirit as He moves through us in His wisdom and knowledge.”

Stuart, Susan and Geoff exert their agreements in a banter of thanks.

“And,” She quietens them down.

“I’d like to thank the Lord for bringing Audrey and Caul into our fellowship tonight. Audrey, may your heart be blessed by the Spirit’s movement tonight, and Caul, may you know that Christ is really among us.”

She raises her glass to Audrey and Caul, who raise theirs in soft graciousness and circumspection, respectively, quickly followed by the others’ amens. Clinking glasses then seal the table before they settle to the first mouthfuls of lamb.

Susan looks up from her plate. “This roast lamb tastes heavenly Evelin.”

“My grandmother’s recipe.”

Caul looks at Evelin perplexed. “Why a lamb and not turkey or chicken?”

She pauses for a moment, then shakes her head.

“I don’t know. Just a family tradition.”

Evelin smiles as they continue their eating, chewing, savouring, the four friends soon falling into a graceful rhythm of conversation. Audrey casts a glance around the table, watching their faces, coming to the realisation that a song is being sung in the hearts of the four friends that she cannot hear nor understand yet, but desires to hear.

Caul too, watches the four friends, their conversation striking him as being like the sound of harps. DA! Outside, a large peal of thunder rolls like rushing water across the sky. Caul looks to the still smiling face of Evelin, who becomes suddenly filled with an incredible beauty of intense compassionate purity.

She sits back as if she is being overwhelmed.

“I know why grandmother always cooked lamb at Christmas.”

Everyone else looks up at her.

“When God told the Israelites in Egypt to prepare a roast lamb, and paint its blood on the door frames before the Angel of Death came, He did so because He wanted His people to know that being under the blood of the lamb is the sign that He will use to distinguish them from those that belong to Egypt.

“As it turned out, the lambs’ blood foreshadowed Jesus’ own blood sacrifice, whose blood it is under which we are to wait, so that when Christ comes again, the Angel of Death might pass us over. And it just struck me that Christmas Eve, which is the night before Christ’s coming into the world, is not only a celebration of Christ’s birth, but also a rejoicing of His imminent return. Roasting Lamb on Christmas Eve was my grandmother’s way of saying, I’m under your blood and I’m ready to go.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 107

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

In the living room, Audrey and Caul occupy the two arm chairs, the sofa by Susan and Stuart, while soft cushions spill on the floor for Geoff with Evelin. The smell of coffee pervades the room.

“The light’s too bright Eve. Can we light the candles?”

“With pleasure.”

Susan and Evelin rise and move amid silent figures to light the candles prepared around the room. Then the electricity goes, only the coloured lights hanging from the tree flickering, as if trying to co-ordinate with the dancing flames.

“The tree is really lovely Audrey.”

Audrey turns towards Evelin, with a smile and cheeks full of blood with warmth. The gloaming festivity of the light slowly breathes into them a comforting intimacy. Evelin take a deep breath, and begins again to speak.

“When I was small, my grandmother used to tell me not to ever fear Red Riding Hood’s big bad wolf because he is locked away for a thousand years. It was just one of those quirky things she did. But today, Audrey and I went to visit my grandmother, and she effectively told me to change my focus, and to see the big bad wolf as inevitably coming, though we don’t know when. I had never realised that she had been using the fairytale as a foil for the Christian life, and that the big bad wolf is Satan coming to get Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. But when it dawned on me, I got very scared. I told you all earlier Geoff’s and my wonderful news that I’m pregnant. But what I didn’t tell you was that my grandmother also told me today…”

She takes a deep breath. “She told me I was pregnant, before I knew it.”

Murmurs go up from around the room, as Evelin extends her hand and places it on Geoff’s shoulder next to her.

“When Audrey and I left, we were both kind of in a shocked state. We went to the doctor and discovered that I am with child.”

She says nothing for a bit and the room remains silent, waiting for her to continue.

“I realise I may have troubled your hearts with what I’ve just said.”

Evelin looks at them from her now earnest, cross-legged position on the floor.

“But I spent some time in prayer about it this afternoon while Audrey decorated the tree. About whether I should tell you all or not. I must admit, I had a great fear in me all afternoon. All I could think of was Jesus’ words about how dreadful it will be for pregnant woman and nursing mothers in the time at the end. I felt this incredible weakness and desire to runaway and pretend none of today ever happened. And then I was angry with God for letting any of this happen. Why did I have to have new life stirring in me only to find out the world I’m going to bring my baby into could be the one which will see distress unlike the world has ever seen before. But more than anything, it made me want to give up my faith, because suddenly all my life seemed futile, and my child nothing but a sacrifice to evil. But then I read that passage in Matthew.”

Here she stops momentarily to open a Bible which is already laid beside her.

“And these verses struck me. ‘Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.’ And I was encouraged so much by that. It made me realise that if I told you what I heard today, you’d probably go through the same barrage of doubt and anger. But that’s not our message is it? Our message is one of perseverance until Christ comes again. As I was praying, the Spirit directed me to this passage from Jude which I want to read to you.”

Again she stops to let her fingers thumb to the prepared passage.

“‘But, dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus foretold. They said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their ungodly desires.” These are the men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit. But you, dear friends, build yourselves in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them; to others show mercy, mixed with fear—hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.’”

She closes the book and then looks up at all of them again.

“At first I was confused as to why the Spirit had led me here. But after spending some time meditating on the passage it dawned on me why. To start with, the passage is headed ‘A call to persevere,’ which was exactly what was on my heart. And then Jude is also the last book before Revelation. For me that was just the Spirit confirming that the perseverance I’m pointing all of us towards tonight is one of end-time perseverance; not just general perseverance in the world, but perseverance against those who might cause our love for Christ to grow cold and cause divisions among us. And then finally but most importantly, I realised that tonight with us we have two unbelievers. Caul, Audrey, I hope that you won’t be offended by me drawing you in like this, but my firm belief is that the Spirit has drawn both of you into our presence this evening, which means God desires to have you both as His own. And its our duty tonight, to show mercy and godly fear at your doubt, but to also seek to snatch you both from the fire that you’re currently burning in. So I would just like to say that this evening, we all here, and I know I speak on behalf of the rest of us, would like to invite both of you to explore with us our faith and the hope we have in Jesus to give us eternal life.”

DA! The thunder echoes once again around the sky. Caul looks at Evelin, and finds in her visage the face of an alms giver, not of silver or gold, but of life.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 1o9

A distant rumble of thunder grumbles its disquieting portent in Mae’s ears as she steps from her apartment. Her legs take her quickly down the staircase and onto the street where her eye catches the dew-laden shape of Jude’s car ghosting in the eerily thick mist, the sun discernible only as a dim solar disc. As for the mountains, they are covered in the dense shroud. Seeing his car riles her already irritated and nervous state, as if the day itself is wanting to impregnate her. She knocks on his window, her other hand against the glass diminishing the reflection so she can see in.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

She watches Jude’s crumpled figure rise from its huddled position on the back seat. He rubs his eyes. She raps her knuckles again, with insistence.

“Hey answer me.”

Her voice sounds dim to him like it may be coming from the other side of a sepulchre he is in. But he isn’t dead, neither has the day of the great earthquake come to raise him. He opens the back door, tumbles out, stretches as he stands and groans. He rubs his face and tries to smooth his hair.

“I want to talk but you don’t seem to have time and I know you go walking, so I want to talk now.”

“Well, you’ll have to do it walking. You look like you could do with a good load of fresh air. You hung over?”

She asks with disgust.

“No, a little wired still I think.” He says it with reflection.

“I’m sure I’m supposed to be dead, but I’m not.”

His tone is not emotional in any way. Merely matter of fact.

“Come, drink some water.”

Her voice has softened as she proffers him her bottle. He takes and drinks gulping a few, then twists the lid and returns it to her.

“Let’s go.”

She turns without waiting for him and walks on, hearing him stumbling along and catching her. She closes her eyes in fearful tension, clenching back the memory of her devouring him, Dionysus desiring his spirit through her. Then as he pulls alongside her, her eyes are open. Clear. Looking straight ahead. For a while they walk in silence, each gathering the rhythm of the other’s footsteps and breathing. As they move through the earth’s shroud, a funereal mood descends on both of them, their rising body heat meeting the vapid moisture which settles in glistening marbles on their skin and hair.

“It’s going to be hot today.” Hers.

“And crowded and frenetic.” His.

“Did you have a good time with your mother last night?”

She laughs. Not lightly. Not humorously. Very personally.

“A good time isn’t how I’d describe an evening with my mother.”

Her voice hesitates.

“Please understand Jude, what happened that night between us…I don’t know how to say this any easier…It was your spirit I wanted, not the person.”

She looks at him briefly before continuing to look straight ahead of her.

“That whole afternoon, I was like a boat responding gaily on a calm sea to your oar and sail.”

This time she sighs deep.

“My fault was not realising my heart is a boat on a desolate and empty sea. Had the sea been calm, then maybe my heart would have been obedient to your invitation to come into controlling hands. But it wasn’t. That’s why I did you the way I did. Dionysus frenzied me to devour your spirit, and I thought he had devoured it. But like you said, it seems you should be dead, yet somehow you’re still alive. To be quite honest, that kind of unnerves me. I still don’t understand why it had to be you either.”

He is silent, swallowing the thunder her words have released, and feeling the last hope of being able to reconcile himself to her drift from his control. The full bowl of his desolation empties now on him. He stops short. Stops ghosting her. Mae looks at him, comprehending the full horror of her words.

“Say something to me. What part do you play in all this?”

He looks at her anguished face but sees only the meaninglessness of the emotion.

“I came because I wanted to see you reconcile our sex into being more than you devouring me in a frenzy. So I could say once in my life I had loved, sympathised and yielded to another person. That our sex had at least implied the image of God, despite its ungodly manner.”

He is quiet for a moment, looking down, but then looks directly at her.

“You’ll know soon enough why me.”

He raises a half smile, looking into the mist around him.

“It’s so silent when its misty, like it has swallowed up all life.”

He breaks the gaze.

“I’m going to go back to the car. Enough fresh air for one day.”

He turns. He doesn’t look back. Mae enfolds herself in a hug, but doesn’t linger, turning herself to forward movement into a wind that blows fresh as the higher moving sun begins its burning through the mist.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 110

Jude stands upon the old footbridge, arms rested on its walls, a stick in his hand that leaves the appearance of one fishing. Behind him is the road from the town that feels to him like an arid desert, while ahead of him lies the road leading to where Saint Mary’s keeps the hours with her bells. As he looks down into the stone cobbled canal, he spies a rat creeping its slimy belly through the weeds along the bank.

“London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.”

He carries on singing to himself until the rat is lost in the vegetation.

/well/ /let me at least go and set my lands in order/

But he still feels no assurance that the dark night ahead is going to be met with a clean soul.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 111

On the wide span of beach, sand wet and compact, six stand in a circle as the high tide rushes in over their feet. Before them is the sea, shimmering like glass mixed with fire. Behind them, the rising sun is blazing from beyond the mountain peaks. Their hands are joined, their heads are bowed and their hearts sing a victorious song as Geoff prays.

“Great and wonderful are your works, Lord God Almighty. You are the King of ages and when You come, all will fear You, O Lord, and bring glory to Your name. All nations will come and worship before You, even as we do so today on this beach, for Your righteous love have been revealed in Caul and Audrey. By Your grace, You have this night given to them victory over the beast, his image and his number. You have given to them as You have given to us, the song of Moses and of Christ to sing in their hearts, not only now, but for eternity. The final trumpet of heaven now sounds victorious in their hearts as it does in ours, and we sing with heaven, the kingdom of the world in Caul and Audrey has become the kingdom of our Lord and Christ, and He will reign forever in them both. We shout Hallelujah to rejoice and be glad that the wedding of the Lamb is coming and His bride is making herself ready.”

Together they begin to plough barefoot into the rushing waters that sound like a great multitude. They reach to where the ocean envelops their waists. The cold waves lap against their torsos, but the fire within them feels it not. All of them are dressed in white linen, the sun fully bathing them with the very fresh warmth of the new day. Geoff lifts up his arms and places his hands upon the heads of Caul and Audrey.

“Lord, we ask that You bless this baptism of Caul and Audrey that they themselves have sought, like the Ethiopian eunuch sought it from Philip after he had understood the Word.”

While the others hold hands in a circle around them, Geoff takes Audrey in his arms.

“Audrey, I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

He dips her backwards and immerses her. She rises, with her face shining and smiling as she first hugs the one who immersed her and the others gathered round. Then Geoff takes Caul.

“Caul, I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Caul feels his being immersed into the sea and then being raised up again by the arms that hold him. As he rises, he feels his caul’s opaque weight fall from his head. And in the moment of being raised he watches the lake of burning sulphur that once before had been burning with torment all those, including himself, in the bar—he watches it give way to the purifying flames in which he is now hid until there is no longer any sea around him but a new heaven and earth. From the heavens he sees a most exquisite bride descending to the new earth, dressed in dazzling white. Into this timeless void, he hears Geoff’s voice addresses him and Audrey, and he listens.

“In this kingdom which both of you have now entered, God will one day live with men, and we will be His people forever. All tears will be wiped away. Neither will there be death, mourning, crying or pain, for when the bridegroom comes all manner of old things will be gone and everything will be made new. What I say to you is trustworthy and true, written and recorded in the Word. Christ’s command to both of you is to bring whoever is thirsty, so that they may drink without cost from river of Life that you now drink from. For to anyone who overcomes this world, what He has just given you, will become theirs, and they will become the sons and daughters of God for eternity. But whoever hears these words and does not seek to drink from the source who inspired them, from them will be taken the right to enter into the gates of the new Jerusalem. Do not seal up these words inside your soul. For the time is near.”

In the water, Geoff gathers the rest round, and raises his hands over them all.

“Now unto Him who is able to keep us from falling and who can present us faultless and with great joy before His glorious presence. To the only God our Saviour, be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Come, Lord Jesus. Come. Amen.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 112

In her garden, the old lady kneels alone under the yoke of prayer, bowed before the One to whom she speaks.

“If Your thunder is heard, I pray that it has been heard as the Love of the One who sent the Spirit to be a Counsellor in Your name until the end of the age.”

She is silent, for many minutes, neither moving nor murmuring, but waiting, as if for something to be poured out within her. Her face calm, now fills with the pain of travail, until what desires to be cried forth can be held no more.

“But Lord, when shall I be as the swallow, that I may cease to be silent. A swallow, a swallow.”

Her voice breaks the silence with blame.

“Your people, whom you have promised to keep safe, as in the cleft of the rock where the eagle makes her nest… We, who should be counselling in Your Spirit the whisper of God’s voice that You have revealed today amid the thunder…”

She spits out the agony of sadness doubled in her spirit.

“We have let those who speak abusively against the heavenly beings creep in and foul this town’s roots with mutations of the Truth.”

Again she remains silent as the travails passes into wrath at the knowledge of those who speak abuse.

“Lord, not even Michael dared slander Lucifer in fighting for the body of Moses. But these insolent, arrogant and boastful gossips, they spew their ignorance loudly to the world.”

Her skin mottles with the anger passing through her, but her head remains bowed, her voice taking now a tone of scorn.

“The only things that these men understand are instincts that every unreasoning animal knows from birth.”

And now shocked horror.

“And it is these things they lift up as the fount of all wisdom!”

Here she breathes calmed relief.

“But their wisdom shall destroy them, and they shall perish as the beasts perish.”

Calm on her face again, clouds cross the sky, and the sun past its zenith.

“Lord, I pray that you will open the eyes of those you have called, so that they can see that Your Love for them is burning intensely, so much so that You can no longer contain its ravishing heat, stronger than death and unyielding to the grave.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 113

Caul turns away again to the window overlooking the ocean, flushed and irritated, his shield of self-righteousness strengthening its already tight-fisted hold on his heart. He revolts at having to sit and finish his paid for coffee, so he gets up, leaving the untouched money as payment on the table. Going downstairs, he realises only a beach walk will calm his mind. He crosses the strand road, takes off his shoes at the beach’s edge, and walks down to the sheen of wet sand where waters meet the earth in perpetual rolling motion.
His body is still mixing its blood and hormone cocktail of self-righteousness, but the freshness of the sea breeze encourages him to breathe deeper.

Thus calmed, he walks and looks out over the ocean bay towards the horizon beginning to pile up with cloud visions. The view, in turn brings to memory his thoughts of this world being one big black hole with no way out, and no way for light to get in; just people and nature feeding off each other, breathing each other in, the darkness getting heavier and heavier.

Then he breathes out heavily in a force of realisation.

/what right did i then have to go around passing judgement on mae/ /when i myself am stuck in this dark cycle/ /and should have been scared/ /how more self-righteous can you get caul/

The realisation sends a grief washing over him, forcing him to a halt. His hands grab the sides of his head, pulling back its skin and hair. A thin sheet of water carried by the ocean’s momentum ripples fluidly over his feet. Then in the wake of the ocean’s retreating edge, his feet begin sinking and whelks surface to escape his weight.

/but what does it matter/ /there is no answer to the darkness/ /my failure with mae was because of my pride/ /gary failed with mae as well/ /maybe because his love was overcome by his greed/ /but which ever way she went/ /there had to be failure/

He looks down at his ankles and brings first his right foot and then his left foot out of the soupy sand. With his left big toe, he scratches, without thinking consciously, a heart in the soaked sand.

/but that doesn’t mean we weren’t able to love her/ /we did love mae/ /it’s just that we were overcome by our vices/ /and love died/ /or in my case wasn’t allowed to grow/

Another wave washes up, burying the heart, and then slips away. Caul lifts his sinking feet out of the sand again.

/if two people inside their self-enclosed worlds can communicate with each other so that love can grow between them/ /even if it must fail in the end/ /surely that means this universe can be broken into from the outside/ /assuming of course there is something outside this universe that wants to break in and communicate/ /which is tantamount to admitting to the existence of God/ /and a God who wants to talk to us/ /who wants to love us/

He looks back down along the sunlit contour of wet sand, watching the waves wash away his footsteps that brought him to where he stands, even as another wave swallows his ankles.

/but can that God save us from this darkness that destroys/

Caul raises his eyes to hover above the ocean where the afternoon sun is beginning to fill with burning colours, the tumultuous city of clouds rising to engulf the land, with incredible fluctuations of light being filtered by clouds as it passes to the earth. For a moment, Caul allows the beauteous feeling of light ripple through him, but within the instant knows it to be corrupted by the darkness that flows through all men and into all of creation, poisoning it. In his mind, Caul follows the trajectory of this thought to its own end, realising that as the corruption of darkness grows heavier and nears its culmination, so earth will move to destroy all men. He stands for a moment, an unconsoled Orion, a prince, whose tower he realises is now truly in ruins as his constellation must die within this black hole.

/this darkness will not masquerade as light for much longer/ /even now its beginning to raise its blood-dimmed tide of violence/ /and paul’s got his fingers in it/ /mae has no choice but now to go into it/ /but my hope must now lie with jude/ /with his once upon a time God/ /and save him from paul/ /who must want to use him to usurp me/ /but who has killed me/ /so that my eyes have been opened to all this/ /paul couldn’t of/ /not without my consent/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 114