Apocalypse of Jude

Outside the bar, Caul is met with the sharp, fresh air of the burgeoning morning. Free from the deathly atmosphere of the bar, his breathing gulps help restore him to himself again. The sleeping road running in front of the bar is an incandescent mix of streetlight glow and morning indigo light. Gazing up, sheer mountains wall in his view with their purple bulk. He unlocks and slides into the seat of his car.

The sudden, intense safety of his hoisted bark and the town dawn through which he is gliding, comforts him again to a sense of place and renews the delight of his eyes. His whole being is enjoying the silence of no music and the gentle turn of the engine. There is no direction to his driving, just deep relief at being able to drift and regain identity. He haunts himself with laughter or sometimes cringes visibly as he passes by sights steeped in memory. But he is unable to connect them together with a sense that they constitute life.

Slowly, indigo changes to a sapphire blue, making less surreal the line between sky and cloud crowding the top of a mountain range that folds from the coastline like an arm around the town. Independent and perpendicular to this backdrop, a single mountain of three peaks lies cloudless, so that the basin is fully enclosed in mountainous relief. Coming up from the south, an onshore wind blows from off two oceans that sweep uneasily together in the bay that borders the basin. The wind carries sails of tepid moisture up against the towering amphitheatre of mountains where the moisture knits itself with the night’s cold, interior desert air. Above the peaks, voluptuous blanketing clouds gather. But they will bring no rain.

As the surrealness fades into a deep clear ocean horizon, Caul’s car rolls to a rest outside a security complex, its marble-white wall like a rampart. From its wrought black gate, Mae emerges. She does not see the car, having walked off in the opposite direction, wrapped in meditation. The sight of her and knowing she now walks alone, summons from within him a long-sealed oath of restless hurt seeking healing—an oath to love her and her only. What he does not know is that this very night there have been stirred dull roots in the frozen ground between them. They will take hold and grow out of this land once the shroud of winter now about to cover the land gives way to spring. Yet this work is not the work of Paul alone. It is also an answer to those who in their common salvation have contended earnestly for their faith. Their prayers from Easter till this Whitsuntide too have been heard in a land where desire for God is no longer stirred.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 8