Apocalypse of Jude

At the door of the Hofgarten restaurant where their last abortive meeting took place, Mae and Caul, both spattered wet, ascend steps and take a table next to a window to watch the storm unfold its drama on the earth. Mae turns to the ushering waitress and runs her hands through her hair, slicking it with fresh wetness.

“Just coffee for now thanks.”

She finds her pack of cigarettes in her bag and puts it on the table in wait for the coffee. Caul picks it up to quiz it.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking you to join me today.”

Satisfied, he tosses the pack back on to the table. She replies by way of a simple non-committal smile and an unaffected shrug of her shoulders, then shifts the attention to him.

“So tell me Caul. You still sure you’re dead?”

“Yes, very much.”

“And how about that desire to find love?”

Her question prods him to look out the window and gather his thoughts. Above the ocean lightening streaks, followed by a roll of thunder pouring itself across the dome of sky.

“Before you married Gary, the only passion in my life was uprooting people to show them what I thought was their spiritual death. I couldn’t see you for that self-righteous passion as you called it. You asked me to come clean with you on that. There you have it. I’m more sorry than you can know. And I can tell you that I had nothing to do with initiating my death.”

He stares directly into her eyes, looking for forgiveness. The merely murmured soft whisper of thank you from her lips restores to him a legitimacy with her he has long since felt.

“After you married Gary and killed my hope, all my passion seemed stupid. I realised it wasn’t just you as a consort I wanted.”

He sips from his coffee to fill the pause of his thoughts.

“I tried to look on the bright side. Took the dead hope and buried myself with it in the soil of the new, unknown future, thinking I would be able to re-root my life. But I couldn’t. I just lived three years of a half life really, feeding my proud, selfish and undernourished ego with Paul’s drugs.”

The waitress comes with the coffee. “Anything else?”

Both shake their heads and fall automatically to their coffee rituals. She lights a cigarette, inhales, exhales, props her elbow on the table with wrist turned perfume-ways to the let the smoke drift off.

“When I married Gary Caul, you were right about me not wanting to face the darkness that we would have to face.”

Caul leans back into his seat and Mae reacts to it.

“Don’t you even think about putting a smug smile on your face mister, or I’m walking out this door right now.”

She stares at him full with the seriousness of her threat. Satisfied with the gravity of his nod, she draws and exhales again, calming her nerves. She looks out the window on the rain

“I loved him as well. Even if it was for all the wrong reasons. I loved him.”

She turns and fixes on him.

“Do you understand that?”

He nods with the same gravity. She lifts her coffee to her lips, blows across it, and puts it down without a sip.

“Like I was saying, the darkness scared me. I ran away from it. And like you said, it devoured me. You have no idea how much I’ve hated you for saying that and being right about it. That’s my confession. I’m sorry for hating you.”

This time it is she who looks directly at him. And he smiles with relief back at her.

“Forgiven.”

A joyous, impish grin breaks on her face.

“Have you ever considered Caul, in that self-righteous world of yours that maybe there is an alternative path for us to take? Not a path that runs away, but one that leads out of the darkness we seem fated to?”

Caul’s heart leaps with curious surprise. “What are you thinking of?”

This time she ashes her cigarette, and with the other hand, stirs her coffee further.

“We need to teach ourselves to be perpetually conscious of what is going on around us at all times.”

Caul falls back into his seat disappointed. “Like for so-called coincidences?”

She doesn’t pick up on his scepticism.

“Exactly. And as you piece all these coincidences together over time, a guiding pattern emerges that connects the past to the present to the future. When you see that happening, you’ll be able to start focussing on the beauty of life rather than how dead you feel. That’s what I’ve been doing the past couple of months. And it’s really changed my whole attitude.”

Looking briefly out the rain-spattered window, Caul drums the fingers of his left hand three times before turning back to face her.

“Mae, again at the risk of sounding self righteous, I’ve been through this already, and what use is it to me coming from the wasteland I’m living in.”

He puts out both his hands to hold her tongue.

“And it also begs the question who is narrating so that all these coincidences can add up to a meaningful life?”

She sits back in her seat now as well, one arm across her stomach, the other resting perpendicular on it, cigarette to her slightly pursed mouth.

“Our inner selves do it. Through our connection to the cosmos.”

He shakes his head.

“I used to believe that too Mae; that if I learned to listen to my subconscious and my dreams, I could get closer to discovering my self and my connection to the cosmos, and then begin to be filled with spiritual life. But reality is the fisher king is wounded and cannot heal his own wound.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that no matter how much we connect the dots, the wound that you and I are meant to heal for a season can never be completely healed. The healing we offer is just an endless deferral. And going into our darkness is futile too. Opening the gates to the underworld to allow the spirit of life back to earth can never deliver the unwounded child, because the underworld is part of the wound.”

He watches the full import of what he has said sink in before risking his conclusion on her.

“Our only hope of healing lies in it being revealed to us somehow from beyond the stars.”

Three barrels of thunder resound the world as heavy rain pounds the roof. Then an extraordinary burst of vivid electric light almost instantaneous with a dark crack of thunder shakes the world with its reverberation. The restaurant’s electric circuits are drained under the earth’s electric surge, sinking momentarily the lights that hold at bay the violet grey darkness of the earth. To Caul it feels as if the lightening and thunder have cracked open the universe and have heralded the foreboding of an inescapable evil in the same instant.

“Welcome to summer.”

In gaunt, ghostlike suddenness, Jude stands wrapped in a thin trench coat along side them. Not realising or understanding the wildness that Caul’s pronouncement has caused to fill in Mae, Jude removes his coat and sits down next to her.

“Paul said to find you guys here, so I came. Hope you don’t mind.”

Suspicion and cold fear sweep through Caul and he looks interrogatively at Jude.

“Summer?”

“Yeah, it’s Halloween, and here comes summer crashing in on a winter festival of dead souls seeking cheer from the living.”

Jude lights a cigarette in rather glamorous fashion, inhales, falls back and exhales.

“But then we are at land’s end at the bottom of the world. That makes it May Day for us, and you the May Queen.”

Mae smiles with her wildness curling her lips. “Does that then make you my May King?”

At Mae’s question, it is Jude’s turn to turn pale, but he hides his sudden fear with a disarming smile.

“Ah, not quite my dear. Just its straw impostor.”

Caul chills further at Jude’s words. Jude continues his disarming laugh, but knows now he has made his betrayal an open confession to Caul.

“Now, where’s the waitress and what were you talking about?”

Mae looks at Jude, realising that her wildness is moving in a direction she can no longer control, nor neither wants to control.

“That coincidences have cosmic meaning.”

Caul sees Mae’s wildness taking hold of Jude too, and begins to understand the full portent of his thunder-heralded coming. He decides to counter Mae, hoping to draw Jude back.

“I was saying that I believe God exists.”

Jude’s face lights up with mirthful surprise. “What do we have here? So God exists. His self-revelation emerges from the self-righteousness of Caul’s mind.”

Caul’s face fills with consternation, but feeling the dig of Jude’s barb, he rises in defence.

“Because I can’t deny that the coincidences aren’t there. But if there is a force trying to communicate these coincidences to us, tying all the events of the cosmos together in a narrative, it has to be independent of its own story.”

For a moment, from the look of humble amazement in Jude’s eyes, Caul believes he has pulled Jude free from the trap Paul has him in.

“Boys. Enough. I’m hungry.”

Jude turns to Mae. “You know what. I was thinking exactly the same thing. Must be more than just a coincidence. What do you say?”

The cruelty Caul feels baiting Jude’s laugh sinks him, his melancholia all of sudden becoming unbearable, and he shifts his gaze into the rain-spattered window.

“Are you still going to the party tonight Caul?”

He looks vacantly over at Mae before his eyes flicker and return him to outside reality.

“Where?”

“To the party on the farm.”

“Yeah, I’ll see. You know what, I’m going to go. He looks sadly at Jude. “Give her a lift back, will you.”

“Of course old chap. Sorry you have to go.”

“But Caul, we just got here.”

Mae’s voice is a touch rueful.

“I’m sorry.”

Caul’s voice has dropped into a dislocated echo. “I’ve got to go. Here’s some money.”

He gets up with little fuss.

“I’ll see you guys later.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 11