Apocalypse of Jude

A hand knocks on Caul’s door, followed without hesitation by Jude, who sees Caul sitting at his desk, staring blankly at the wall.

“Hey you introverted lump of clay, what you doing?”

It takes a few moments for Jude’s words to penetrate to Caul’s consciousness.

“Nothing much.”

“Good. Lick this.”

Jude’s hand holds out a bank card laced at the edge with the froth of a freshly cut line. Caul’s face contorts.

“Not now Jude.”

“Come on, it will tang your mouth. I kept it just for you.” These last words infect Caul and unearth a smile from him.

“Ha, a smile from such a morose piece of flesh is possible.”

Caul draws his lips across the card edge.

“Good hey!”

“Sets my teeth on edge.” He smiles again, half reluctantly. “You just get back now?”

“Oh yeah. For some reason, after last night, I feel as if I’ve escaped some dismal inferno. So I took in the sunrise up at the cliffs. Saw old man Cato up there. He wanted to know if the laws of hell had been destroyed to see damned old me up there at that hour of the morning.”

Caul stares somewhat stunned at his words as Jude laughs with delight and collapses into a grimy, cat-clawed sitting chair. Then, slightly unnerved by Caul’s continued gape, Jude throws a pointing arm towards Caul’s bed.

“Relax will you. I’m trying to approach calmness here. Slouch your rigid back on your bed and tell me what you’re reading at the moment?”

Caul tries to push Jude’s remark from his head, and goes sits cross-legged on his bed.

“Nothing. Again nothing strangely enough, but I need to. I need some healthy distraction.”

“From what?”

“This town.”

“The only thing for that squire is drugs and once the drugs are sorted this town becomes game for anything.”

“Except salvation.”

Jude throws his hands up in mock disgust.

“That’s what I can’t stand about you. You always point out what I don’t want to remember at the worst possible times. Come, come. I’m too snorted to think of salvation. Let there be no salvation. Let there only be dance, music, wine and song. Let us get drunk and dance away in this decaying castle of ours.”

“It’s eight a.m.”

“Can I at least smoke then?”

Caul nods, then heaves over on his bed and clumps his hand heavily down on a tape deck. Music begins to groove resonantly around the room. Jude tosses the box and lighter over to Caul and then loosely drapes himself all over the chair, arm hanging a cigarette in hand over the chair arm.

“You know what I love about smoking. You can watch yourself breathe. It’s the moment magnified in the most exquisite way. So different to the feeling confession gives you.”

Caul, sitting back up against the wall, legs up against his body held in fearful arms, head towards the ceiling, sucks at his cigarette and then looks over at Jude.

“Last night was your first mass and confession in how long?”

Jude ignores him, carrying on with his own thought.

“Confession’s a really constipated kind of feeling. I’d forgotten how hard it was. He’s a good priest though. Quietly suggested I come back later when my heart was truly in want of penance. So here I am, forced to wander in a kind of ritual excommunication for scorning the Church.”

He laughs the same rueful laugh Caul heard last night and hearing it triggers the question he wanted to ask last night but couldn’t find the wherewithal to.

“Three years ago, when you sold your family property to Paul…” Caul’s pause takes pensive shape. “…you quit the road to Holy Orders as well. Why?”

The inquiring lilt to Caul’s tone betrays a concern beyond simple curiosity. Jude notes its cry for truth and can no longer bear perpetuating his betrayal any further. Forcing down a well-worn stream of words about to burble from his throat, he stirs a still pool long since disturbed.

“I couldn’t bear any longer the Church’s vision of a priest rising to the alter and acting in the persona of being like the living image of God the Father.”

“Maybe it was just misplaced vocation?”

“No. I wanted to be a priest once. But then I discovered that it wasn’t God in the cathedral any more but a pagan pageant. Now if the Church’s ability to manifest and communicate the mystery of God’s salvation is a fraud…how do you come to God? And what point in being a priest! As for my vows. Obedience. Well and truly gone. Poverty. Well, still poor, but not willingly so. Chastity. Now, I still have that. It’s funny you know. One of my childish reasons for becoming a priest was so I could be faithful to Christ until he came for his bride. Ironic that. Of all things, this vow remains.”

The music takes over the silence in the room, brooding its swirling guitars repetitively in winding anxiety until finally their gyring tension breaks.

Jude gets up, scoops his cigarettes up from the bed and moves to open the door. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

Caul gives him a queer look. “Why did you go then? To mass and confession?”

Jude stops and hangs on the door, swinging slightly, looking round its corner at Caul.

“It’s Pentecost. I was hoping the Spirit might return. The Church’s curse is not the final word you know. Where there’s a hint of green, there’s hope of being purged. That’s what I felt like this morning. That I had entered a place where guilt is purged.”

A flashback of Jude’s face struggling against the death last night passes before Caul’s mind.

“I thought the Spirit was already meant to be living in you?”

Jude shrugs.

“So the Church says. Who knows any more? Maybe you’ll be able to explain it to me.”

Jude fades from the doorway, leaving Caul seated in the stillness of his room contemplating in perplexed fear at a town now divided in two before him: a place where guilt is purged with penitent hope, where initiation into joy beckons and where one emerges into light. But also a place also given to four horsemen to ride their havoc in conquest, war, famine and death, until the time given to the winds to blow destruction across the sea and earth is over. And the two begin to dissolve the one faith that since childhood his mother had taught him, frightening him.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 42