Apocalypse of Jude

Caul and Jude sit on the veranda couch in the awkward silence of an unconfessed tension, cigarettes melting in their hands while watching the early morning thick mist roll in from the ocean. The mist obscures the lone mountain with its shroud and gives the earth the eerie calm of the morning before the deluge, when all men, bar eight, were destroyed from the earth for filling it with their violent ways.

Jude suddenly leans forward and sinks back again into the couch with guilt-edged laughter.

“When do they say the ice packs are projected to melt by?”

Caul looks across at him both humorously and warily.

“Where did that come from?”

“I have no idea, but it suddenly came to me that the Church teaches that after the flood, God put a rainbow in the sky and promised Noah that never again he would destroy the world with water. Well, if this were to be a true account of that ancient event, that means the world is going to end before global warming melts the ice packs.”

Caul laughs on his exhaled air. “I guess so.”

“What do you mean I guess so?”

Jude affects a mock abhorrence at Caul’s irreverence, hoping the to lift the mood.

“If the world’s going to end before the ice packs melt, we’ve got to find out how much time we’ve got left before we get destroyed. And we’ve got to know if we can get you into the ark.”

His voice and face suddenly go mournful like a clown.

“It’s going to be kind of difficult though.”

Caul this time looks at him in curiosity. “What are you talking about?”

Jude cannot hold the mourning façade and his voice cracks back into humour and mock seriousness, seeking to hide his desperate sense of guilt.

“You got to get baptised dude. What if you’re wrong about who you say you are. Baptism’s the only way you can save yourself from the fire if it comes to burn up the world.”

The tragi-comic gripping Jude turns his face ashen again.

“But baptism has got to be accompanied by faith that God can save you, because it’s only through faith that God can communicate His love into this world.”

From Jude comes the clown’s sigh.

“But how am I going to communicate to you what the Church cannot even communicate to its faithful anymore?”

Caul, knowing the clown in Jude, gazes intent upon him, guessing at the guilt seeking to exonerate itself. But he searches deeper for the profundity of the reasoning being expressed in what Jude is trying to say until he comes to understand at last in his own head how this enclosed universe might be broken in upon.

“But you still have the Spirit in you right? You admitted that yourself a while ago. And you’ve been baptised. So why can’t you communicate that faith?”

Wagging his finger with arm outstretched, Jude shakes his head.

“Ah, there Caul, you flatter me. I may have passed through the Red Sea, but sloth has gotten the better of me, and in the wilderness God destroys those who lose their desire to believe.”

He shrugs his shoulders, laughing ironically.

“After all, I’ve got to pay somehow for betraying my priestly duty, right? But we got to know when those ice packs will melt by. We got to know.”

“Got to know what?”

The voice emanates from behind them and Jude half jumps off the couch.

“Paul you beast. You scared the death out of me.”

Paul moves past them and sits on the veranda wall, locking his arms to it to hold him as he leans back.

“Got to know what Jude? What are you thinking of? What are you thinking? I never know what you are thinking anymore these days Jude.”

There’s a paranoid insistence in Paul’s voice.

“Got to know by when the ice packs will melt.”

It’s Caul’s flat-toned voice that speaks, but Jude breaks in quickly, laughing nervously.

“And then there was this ominous voice behind us and I thought it was the end.”

“You’re like a dog returning to its vomit Jude. Leave us, I want to talk to Caul alone.”

Jude merely touches his right fore and middle finger to his forehead in salute to Paul, and drifts away into the house. Paul waits until he has disappeared down the passageway before turning to Caul.

“Let’s go inside to smoke some weed. It’s getting way too light out here.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 39