Apocalypse of Jude

People mill around the bar’s inviting warmth, busy with chatter, being chilled by dub vibes and oblivious to the one they call the village idiot, shuffle-dancing, clutching an empty to his chest, and grinning stupidly from the middle of the bar floor at one whose shadow enters the bar door.

“Hey Caul, I see heaven coming down for you. But you’ve got to ask the right questions first.”

Caul looks at Ben in a mixture of surprise and amused perplexity as their right hands move through a rapid ritual of positions.

“That sword’s looking kind of blunt Ben. You want another?”

“Only if it’s like okay with you.”

Ben flourishes a bow. “You can score some pipe with us you make out.”

Caul, still amused, looks over at two familiar figures shrouded around a corner table where a window lets the night shine in.

“Sure, let me get the beers first.”

He gives Ben a backhand clap round his shoulder as he moves forward to the bar.

“Caul, my good fellow. Where have you been? Come hither.”

From behind his bar, Jude, feeling his guilt of betrayal flow back through him, beckons the new arrival to follow, then disappears into the kitchen, leaving the bar again to a girl working alongside him.

Caul meanders around the peopled bar, into a passageway, and through a closed door that opens up to Jude before the gaping womb of a long-disused oven. He locks the door behind him.

“What took you so long?”

Caul doesn’t answer, but just lays his left forearm against the wall’s dust-coated side, lowering his head to peer at Jude’s hands at work on the blackened inside.

“I’m not going to be throwing this up later tonight am I?”

“Guaranteed soap-sud free. Courtesy of Paul’s cartel that he’s trying to get together. How was your realty who’s who dinner?”

“All so civilised, drinking wine and discussing golfing estates. Enough to make you puke.

But our house clerk was there.”

“Oh yeah? He was always a greedy turncoat. You think that means he’s broken from Mae?”

“That’s what I’d like to know too.”

“Well, you can ask him. He came in a few minutes ago.”

Jude’s words twist deep into a hurt freshly ruptured in Caul’s depths, forcing a silence between them for a few moments. He breathes deeply and affects a light-hearted voice.

“So how was mass?”

This time it is Jude’s turn to suffer a brief, bitter silence and collect his wits. He looks into the oven’s void.

“Too much confusion Caul. Just my vain hope of relief in a lost cause. They seem to have completely lost the authority to transmit faith. But enough of that.”

Below Jude’s hands is a pentacle-shaped plate with four white powdered strips on it and a tossed aside ATM card. He straightens up, withdrawing a rolled note from his shirt pocket. He hands it to Caul, who takes it and descends into the oven mouth, rising to let the chemical taste pass down the back of this throat. He goes down a second time and then sniffs hard to clear his nose. Jude descends to clear his lines in two swift snorts before his fingers pick up a small tin-foiled square from the plate, unfurl it and tear its contents into a triangular two. Looking downwards, he laughs ruefully to himself at how long this betrayal has been going on.

“I guess this is what it must feel like to administer the Eucharist. I could offer you red wine at the bar after this, if you want.”

Jude laughs awkwardly at his own joke and stares into Caul’s off-putting green eyes. “By the way, I hear this bread is hexed.”

Caul stares searchingly back at Jude, his eyes suddenly flickering with frightened shock as he meets in them the desolation of his own soul. Ben’s words suddenly return their echo, making Caul aware that he wants to ask Jude a question he can’t quite catch. Instead he puts the tab on the tip of his tongue.

“Come, you’ve got a bar to tend.”

He shoos Jude away with his hand and turns to leave by the door he came, the tab beginning to secrete its juices into his system. He merges back into the bar’s dull glow, the music’s dub grooves helping to take the edge off the cocaine buzz pulsing through him. He stands in silence at the bar, awaiting his ordered beers. In his gut, beyond the chemical sheet of bravado growing in his ego, the events of the evening churn. Cutting off these thoughts, he listens to the disembodied voices of those around the bar become to his ears like those lamenting death at a funeral.

/hell this place is desolate/ /how did i end up here/ /how long can i have been here/

He picks up two beers and walks towards the window table, planting them down before two figures sitting there, pulling up a remaining stool.

“I hope you know which white rabbit you’re following tonight.”

The measured voice comes from Drew, a lanky figure sitting suspended between the window light and the dim lights of the wall. He shares the table with a peroxide-haired man on whose hair, a tacky neon sign outside projects its changing colours. Ben pulls up alongside Caul, clawing up the bought beer in a half-fingered left hand.

“Don’t follow the white rabbit, bru. You need to go into the fire.”

Ben, still standing, play surfs to the groove of the music and then tumbles forward exuberantly, throwing his right arm around Drew, who throws him off in feigned disgust. Ben spins away laughing onto the floor between the table and bar and then back again.

“And when you come out of the water, it’s spiritual vibes. You will know what God is singing from his heavens of gold.”

Ben’s words draw a laugh from Drew.

“Shut up and have a fag Ben. Maybe that will keep your tongue busy. You want one Caul?”

“Thanks.”

They punch fists together before Caul pulls the cigarette from the loosely filled box, and lights it from a lighter held up by the other. On exhaling, a half grimace, half smile ripples Caul’s lips.

“I remember we did this the first time I came to this bar. Just after Paul bought it. What was that? Three years ago? You were sitting in this corner as well.”

“Can you remember what you were feeling that night?”

“I remember feeling how desolate this whole place seemed.”

Drew’s laugh is caustic. The smoke he exhales hangs dead in the air.

“But you kept coming back didn’t you, and that feeling has buried itself in all that snow, hasn’t it?”

Sudden awareness of the length of his having been in this desolation without his knowing digs its way through to Caul’s surface.

“Until tonight I think.”

From the speakers new music comes and a trumpet carves a river of lamentation through the air, flooding the world into Caul’s mind, drowning the freshly opened wound again inside him. He laughs with desperate relief and looks over to the peroxide-haired man.

“Don’t you just dig that trumpet?”

His fingers gesture vaguely to where the brassy stream emanates from.

“That band haunts me, you know that. It’s like they’re saying nothing, but telling us everything about ourselves.”

“Difficult to do sound for as well. Screw up and they sound like chaos.”

Caul lifts his beer to his mouth, cigarette between his fingers, elbow of the other arm laid on the table, letting his head rest in his right hand as he looks at the solid figure next to him.

“You’ve got quite a job don’t you. Keeping the reins on chaos. Making it sound like something.”

“Well, I love my job.”

Caul laughs in a way that suggests that there is nothing left to say, and scratches his head amazed.

“A love that makes chaos sound like something. I need love like that.”

He sighs haggardly and gets up into an undulating world of melting dimensions. His hand shakingly lifts his cigarette to his mouth, and he feels in his heightened sensitivity, the smoke curling its way down the back of his throat and into the lungs that sigh as anxious blood is stabilised.

“I need new faces.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 6