He knew the plan went tits-up when the first nail pierced his palm.
Father convinced him things would be simple enough:
First, get yourself captured.
Then, the Italians will beat you up. Your nose gets smashed. They parade you around.
Finally, Father springs you free. Right in front of their smug faces.
The Italians will look powerless when their victim slips free – all during the biggest celebrity execution of the year. After the locals smell the Italians’ weakness, they’ll finally get an appetite for an uprising.
Father’s exact words were:
IT’LL BE A CLASSIC ABRAHAM AND ISAAC STUNT
He went along with the plan. He even put his own special touch on it:
You see, the bounty on his head was getting stratospheric. And his little crew was always short of money. That reward money would be a boon for their rebellion: paying for weapons, food, transportation and bribes.
So he arranged for The Boys to “betray” him and redirect the bounty right back into their own pockets.
He set things in motion.
Brother Jude made contact with the Italians. He told them a sob story of how he wanted out. He was done with the movement. The Italians hemmed and hawed on giving him an amnesty. But then they came up with a brilliant idea: Jude will have to betray his leader to prove he was truly out.
Jude reluctantly agreed.
Everything went smoothly from there.
The Boys were having a big holiday dinner. Jude subtly pointed out their leader. The Italians burst in and slapped everyone up, including Jude for good measure.
He was grabbed. A quick mock trial followed. There were some theatrics from their leader: weeping, washing his hands of the execution. The Head Killer oh so reluctant to kill.
After the clean trial came a dirty beatdown. They took him into a nearby room. The Italians held him face down on the clay floor, one man kneeling on each limb. A short fat one whipped and whipped his back. His vision went red and all he could feel was pain. He was pain.
“When will this end?”
SOON ENOUGH, KID
After the whipping stopped they slid a saucer of cold water near his mouth. They left him to lay there and recover.
Then two other guys came in and started a fresh round of punching on his face.
He woke up the next day. Eyes so swollen he could barely see through the bloody slits.
“Father?”
KEEP WORKING THE PLAN
He was marched down a winding alley on full display for the townspeople. He could see so many faces, but they were all blurry. He searched the crowd for The Boys but… would he even recognize them at this point?
Then, he spotted Jude and Thomas.
No, not them. His heart sank.
He was used to calling the shots. But now he’d fully given himself over to the Italians. What a mistake.
“Father, when will I go free?”
ANY MINUTE NOW
KEEP MOVING FORWARD
He kept walking and walking and hoping.
He knew the plan went tits-up when the first nail entered his palm.
CRUNCH
That sound! And then came the awful pain.
And then the other palm
CRUNCH
“F… F.. F. F. FUCK!!!!”
He was hyperventilating now.
CHANGE IN PLANS, JUNIOR!
Eyes wide with terror. Darting left and right. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Then he was rising up above the crowd. The Italians were hoisting his pole. He was naked and on display and over the heads of the people.
He hung in the scorching heat of the sun for hours.
He could only register snippets of reality. His mother and brothers crying and saying something. Crows flying in the sky. Clouds rolling over the olive fields. He was thirsty. Going in and out of consciousness.
With one massive effort he lifted his face up to the sun and yelled:
“Father, why have you abandoned me?!”
And now, dear Reader, a word about death.
I used to be afraid of death by drowning. Think back to your time as a kid at the pool. You would dive and try to hold your breath as long as possible. Your chest would spasm, the convulsions getting more and more painful. Struggling against the body’s desire to inhale. A sour feeling all over.
I figured drowning would be like that but even worse. Eventually my will would fail and I’d take a deep breath. But instead of nourishing oxygen, my lungs would fill with salt water. I’d be dying in pain and surprise. Alone in a watery world that’s not meant for people.
And then I had this dream:
I was underwater looking up. The water was a murky greenish black. I was rising towards the surface. The jittering sun and the sky could be seen through the top of the water. Maybe ten metres above.
I was close but had been swimming up for a long time already.
I was running out of air. Getting closer and closer to the surface. Seeing my own hand reaching up. I was getting woozy from lack of oxygen.
Then about two metres away from the surface I died.
That pleasant woozy feeling was all that there was.
There was nothing else. Just that feeling. There was no longer a “me” there, so the last things I saw and those muted feelings went on forever. Eternal. Seeing the sun’s rays through the cloudy water. No rush. No fear. No thought.
It was a most pleasant experience.
The best dream I ever had.
As our protagonist’s head dropped for the last time, I imagine that he felt this sweet haze forever.
He woke up in darkness.
It wasn’t the normal darkness you see when you close your eyes – the kind with purple and yellow dots floating. This was the hard black that told him he was now blind.
Some enterprising crow must’ve gotten to his eyes.
Muffled sounds echoed around him. The occasional drip. It smelled damp and chalky. A cave. He was in a cave.
He could hear his own breath – weak and wheezy. His back was against flat limestone. Awareness of pain was blooming in his palms, his feet, then his contorted shoulders. It was in the raw open skin on his back. In his scalp, where a hundred thorns had poked into his skin. His face was covered with flaking old blood.
He took an inventory of his body. Through the pain, he tried to move his legs and arms. They were rigid and responded with weak jerks. He couldn’t flex his fingers. The tendons were wrecked.
He’d seen this before.
From the state of his body he guessed he’d been dead for an entire day.
They must’ve laid him out to await burial after the Sabbath.
He probed his own mind. He still knew who he was, but he couldn’t remember anything from his teenage years. They were like a word that was on the tip of his tongue but he couldn’t quite recall. There was no smell in the cave. No taste in his mouth. So those perceptions were gone, too.
And the Aramaic.
Shit, he’d been thinking in Aramaic this whole time.
He tried to think up a Hebrew word:
A…… a….. ab…. aaaaaab……..
It wouldn’t come. He knew just how he wanted to curse this cave but no Hebrew word would come.
He’d been without oxygen so long that this part of his brain had died. In the place where the Holy Language resided there was now an oozing black clot.
He will never recite the Bible.
The Bible was his one great joy in life. he’d been a Tanak’h prodigy ever since he was a child. Everyone assumed that this encyclopedic knowledge of scripture was Father’s gift to him. But they were wrong. His love of the Bible and love of a good argument was all his own. And now he’ll never recite it again.
Father’s actual gift to him was the All Knowledge of the human body. This is how he was able to cure the lame leg, right the imbalanced brain, and resurrect the not-quite-dead-yet.
His healing abilities were the reason his most loyal followers were those who sold their bodies: prostitutes and mercenaries. Their bodies suffered the kind of damage that needed constant repair and only one man could consistently fix them. He was quite a sight: running around, with his poultices of greenish mould; his nectars of poppy syrup; his frothing blocks of lye and olive oil.
He will never recite the Bible and he will never speak to Father.
Because Father only spoke Hebrew.
SKE! DKEJLRE EKEKE!
Right on cue, Father was yelling something.
But it was too late. He was beyond caring.
DDHH DWKE!
There were voices outside the cave now. And scraping sounds.
They’ve come to pry open the crypt and start burying him. Awkward youths were scrambling to move the big rock sealing the entrance. The Boys will be there. And his mother, too, weeping.
He heard a familiar voice: Daddy Joe was out there barking orders to the youths. Joe was an experienced carpenter. He knew all the tricks to make the rock move quick. They’ll be inside the cave in minutes.
DDKK ENE ENNNNE WKEE EN. ENEWKE WENENN. EWNE!
He thought about what will happen when they discover him alive. They will rend their clothes. They will scream. They will celebrate.
They will carry out this husk, this eyeless husk of a man. This man who’s crooked hands will never hold a cup. An adult who’ll need to be carried like a baby because his torn feet would never again bear his weight. He will be venerated throughout the land. But he will taste nothing, see nothing. Forever separated from The Book he loves.
The Highest Healer now a crawling cripple.
DKEKEK NENENE! ENEJEW!
Father was screaming frenetically. No need for Hebrew to guess this was something about working a new plan. That there was no other choice.
But in his arrogance Father forgot something.
You always have a choice.
A scrape of stone-against-stone vibrated the cave.
When the crowd pushed their way inside, their eyes came to rest on an empty stone slab. Just a few smears of blood and no corpse.
“It’s a miracle!” they yelled.
Bewildered faces turning to each other. Nodding and smiling.
Through the next few years people would tell tales of how He rose and lived again. Stories of Him appearing by the fire. Him appearing on the road. Him naked by the sea when they return from fishing.
There would be folktales about His wandering. Eventually his travels would end with Him laid to rest in Kashmir – a faraway land where lakes, mountains and sky meet.
But the truth is that he made a choice on that slab.
He had gone from the world.
Winked out like a star.
