The disciples placed their blankets on the dry ground and began to pull out the wine and water skins and the bread that had been patted flat by women’s hands and baked on the large inverted metal ovals used for baking. Having said the blessings for wine and bread, and only sprinkling droplets of water in lieu of fully washing their hands because water was so scarce, they tore off and chewed the thin, crusty pieces, added a few olives, and washed it all down with the wine. Once the simple meal was concluded they began to chant the Hebrew thanksgiving prayers, and this easily continued for an hour. Their song carried out across the water on the dying wind as the stars began to appear in a crystalline cool sky.
Reclining on his blanket, John looked up at the evening star and laid his head on James’ shoulder. He felt his brother’s breathing, his chest rising and falling, and he wondered if the young woman to whom he had been so drawn was rejoicing in seeing the stars again after so nearly dying.
That night, John dreamed of blood washing up on the shore of the lake as a wind whipped the blood-water into a pink froth. Fish beached by the thousands, and scores of lepers, demoniacs, cripples, people with every kind of disease, came to gather the fish, throwing them in the air and catching them with their mouths, then eating them. Yeshua and Aviel loomed large together, coming down out of black billowing clouds, Aviel clothed only from the waist down in exotic foreign yellow silk, and her long hair. Yeshua disappeared; Aviel settled near John, stars all around her, as he lay like stone, unable to move, on the beach. Then, feeling himself between his legs, he woke throbbing in the early dawn. The sense of her in the dream stayed close with him throughout the morning as the group continued moving and talking alternately of the old prophets and the political situation on the way to Yeshua’s home town.
5
Madison, Wisconsin
“Oh for chrissake!” Back in her apartment in Madison, Anna slammed shut the laptop and turned to the cat, who had just about figured out the rudiments of speech. “What good does it possibly do to be ‘saved’ if you’re so depressed you fall over your own feet?”
Anna kicked the cat’s green jingle play-ball and swept away some coffee cups and crumpled papers from her third-floor apartment desk as she continued to spout off about the e-mail from her high school girl friend Paula. Like her thoughts, Anna’s personal belongings took on a whirlwind life of their own. She was a pigpen unto herself.
“Anti-depressants, maybe? Therapy? Ya think? Might help a little. Why is it so many Christians have this disconnect between what they say they believe and how they conduct their lives? It’s as if once they’re saved, people expect Jesus to do all the work for them. Don’t they realize they’re creators within their own lives? I mean, if they can accept that Newton’s laws of physics work to keep their feet on the ground,” and here she paused in her tirade to make sure the cat was still listening, “why can’t they accept that the new laws of physics might actually work too, in terms of how their thoughts affect their lives? The observer has an affect on what is observed! The metaphor is so elemental! It’s not like if you say you have the power to create a lot in your own life that there isn’t room for Jesus anymore. Or like saying that you’re actually God. If God had meant us to fly he’d have given us wings, right? So goes the thinking. Man. People need to get help. Like psychotherapy, for example. Understanding how quantum physics works is a tool, just like therapy and medication and surgery are tools. God gave it all to us.”
If pressed here, she couldn’t have given a concise set of her beliefs about God, but she continued on her private rant. “That includes the ability to think creatively and positively. Which is something you’re definitely not capable of,” she said to the cat. The cat, if he had been able to think, would have wondered about the contents of the offending e-mail.
Anna shoved back her chair and headed for the shower. She didn’t really expect an answer from the cat, who showed large incisors in a yawn while stretching out a paw in her direction, but she had gotten so used to talking to herself out loud that she didn’t worry anymore about her sanity. The cat certainly didn’t seem to be a cocreator in his reality. After all, his brain was only the size of a tennis ball, so how much processing capacity could there be in there?
Anna hummed, “Good-bye Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all . . . ,” turned on the hot water in the shower, and watched the bathroom mirror steam over as she undressed and hung her pungent stable clothes on the back of the door. Stepping in, she wondered first why the last song she heard on the radio was always the one that stuck in her head. She had a theory that a woman could always tell what a guy had on his mind by knowing the words to the tune he was humming. Guys’ subconscious minds just worked that way. She regarded this as one of the best kept secrets women had; if men were aware women knew this, they would be more guarded about singing in the shower.
Her thoughts changed back to Paula, whose life seemed to have tanked. Anna feared Paula might actually do herself in, just from the e-mail she had sent. Husband in car sales with GM and the Big Three going south, one daughter pregnant at fifteen and the other one having joined a cult and changed her name, bankruptcy looming in the wake of the housing mortgage crisis . . . Paula’s list got grittier. But she was saved, Anna thought.
Out of the shower, she toweled off her toned and muscular body as she moved about the apartment. Cold Play cleared her head of Elton John, and she went over to the window to flush the room with spring air. Purple crocuses up next to the brick building across the street caught her eye. The cat came to sit on the window sill and began chittering at some cawing crows.
“You talkin’ kitty? Whatcha doin? Git those crows! Git those crows!”
She sometimes thought that if she didn’t have the cat to talk to, she might go off the deep end from loneliness. Just then the phone rang, and she picked up to hear a rich male voice in an accent she didn’t recognize.
“Miss Washington?”
“Yes?”
“This is Nir Tetzlah calling from the Ein Gedi school for Experiential Education.”
“The which? Um, where are you calling from?”
“Israel, Miss Washington, near Jerusalem. Ein Gedi is an oasis plateau in the Judean desert. Very beautiful.”
“Ah! Sounds lovely. You must have heard of me from my website.” The man’s Israeli accent made sense now.
“Yes, I have been looking for organizations like yours . . .”
“Well, I’m not exactly an organization, more like a consultant . . .”
“Yes, yes, that’s fine, I understand. But what I am getting at is that we have a school here, an outdoor school, much like your Outward Bound or your National Outdoor Leadership School—only much smaller, of course—and we need both a ropes element course and also a climbing site set up. We think we have found the area we want to use, and although it might be a little . . . um, argued? over . . .”
“Contested?” she interjected.
“. . . we need someone to plan it out and make it safe for our students to use within the safety standards of our organization.”
“Well, yes, that’s what I do. But you understand—my rates are higher than some out there . . .”
“Yes, yes, you shall not worry about that. We have several benefactors who want to see this come into being, and your reputation for precision in the inspection process is very good.”
Sounds all right, thought Anna.
“Well, I can’t say I speak much Hebrew, although I usually do a crash course before any foreign engagements. When do you want this plotted out? What kind of access does the public have to the area?” she added as an afterthought.
“This is all still under negotiation. The area we are discussing is the Gai ben Hinom valley just outside of the Old City . . . have you been to Israel ever?”