Apocalypse of Jude

Caul draws deeply from his cigarette in attempt to stave off the encroaching rabbit hole and the pain hiding deep within it. He moves through an arch on the bar’s right into a room concealing a pool table. At the far end of the room, below a curtained window, he sees Gary. Pretending casualness, Caul goes over and drops himself into the couch alongside the swagger fellow.

“You know, it’s not like you to turn up at Mae’s father’s promotional galas.”

Gary’s shoulders shrug drunkenly.

“I’ve buried my career for Mae and my old man for long enough. Whether they like it or not, that golfing estate’s the future of property in this town.”

They sit in awkward silence for a few moments, nothing else to say to each other.

“I need to piss man.” Gary rises and stumbles away.

Wild conclusions fly though Caul’s head, but again, with practised hardness, he stubs them out with along with his cigarette butt and closes his eyes to let his body soak into the comfort of the couch. He is pulled to the surface by a hand resting on his knee. His eyes open to Janice falling back into the seat with him.

“Gary been ranting to you?”

He feels her fingertips work their sliding way up the inside of his thigh, tingling his nerves with a slight hardening desire. He pulls his leg away, unsurprised at her familiarity.

“Does Gary ever not rant?”

Janice laughs lightly, withdrawing her hand without any suggestion of rejection, and turns her nose to the nape of his neck.

“You’re wearing the cologne I gave you.”

“I was at Philip Anthony’s gala.”

Her forefinger and thumb start stroking the lapel of his shirt.

“Indeed. And you’re wondering why Gary was there. But I’ll tell you that Paul’s been at work while you’ve been buried in snow.”

Her choice of words serve to unearth him further than he has already been this evening, even as she smiles sweetly at him.

“Whose game you playing Janice?”

He looks back into her sweet, unanswering smile, its spirit of flattery unable to hide for a brief moment a trawling lust beneath before it is quickly masked again by flattery. She lights a cigarette, draws in close to his ear again, exhaling her smoke into it.

“Do you know why I gave that fragrance to you? It drives this woman crazy.”

She allows her lips to kiss his ear, but he pulls away, pushing his body up from the sunken seat and strides away to under the archway. Through his increasing hallucinogenic vision, his eyes drop to the pool table in mid game, waiting for someone to reorder it. The acid burns the scene photo-like into his mind, then as it loops in his head, the image metaphors to him the deathly inertia his life has been since Easter.

/can this be it/ /has it happened at last/ /my spirits death/ /without my knowing/ /impossible/

Lifting his eyes, Caul catches Paul from across the pool table, watching him as one who watches an animal recently tranquillised, keel. The manipulative design that Caul hallucinogenically witnesses underpinning his half brother’s curiosity conjures up an ugliness that seems to be what living death looks like, and it fills him with disgusted fear. From his limbo between bar and poolroom, he looks around as a hushed silence steals over his ears. All the faces now have that look of death in them, and on the maroon walls their shadows become moving, staring forms enclosing the room, leaning out as if they are contorted, prostrate worshippers trying to resurrect their spirits, but receiving no appeasement for their anguish, while, it seems to Caul, four men on shadowy horses torment them. Realising now his incomprehensible death, he watches with a sickening stomach as the walls suddenly melt into a sulphurous burning fire.

Caul looks desperately for Jude among the lights of the bar, around which worshippers gather to keep out the darkness. He sees him wounded by a fearful doubt that has turned him astray from his path. But on Jude’s face, the death he sees in others is not complete in him, though it has almost overtaken him. Around Jude is also a flame, but it is different, as though it were trying to burn away the death, yet itself is dying. This fraction of hope in desolation suddenly bursts from Caul a surge of strange compassion for Jude, and an unaccountable desire to help him escape from that death. To get him out of this bar. And it suddenly occurs to him that if Jude were healed, all in the bar could have the chance to receive their lives again.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 36