The Lunatic Messiah

  Very few people in the world are blessed (or cursed) with the ability to alter anything substantial about their environment. Of course, there are microcosms of influence, but these are completely ineffectual in terms of creating systemic changes across the whole mass of humanity and what lies below them in the food chain. There are exceptions, however. Single individuals of such momentous will who, combined with fortunate timing and circumstance, are literally able to change the course of history single-handed. History is littered with such individuals, although they number but a tiny percent of the grand total of humans that have lived and died. As Joe sat in a coffee shop one idle Thursday morning, he tried to think of himself as one of those few beings of influence, despite all evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, all he managed to do was to formulate a list of reasons why he wasn't.

  1. He was a lecturer at the Finchwood Academy for Creative Arts and Dramatics Education, one of the least respected institutions not only in the Sydney metropolitan area, but also the entire country.

  2. He wasn't even the Faculty Head, as Mary was so fond of reminding him.

  3. He had no children or living relatives of any significance to him, apart from his wife.

  4. His wife was having an affair with his best friend.

  5. He had an inoperable brain tumour that was likely to kill him in less than six months.

  Those were the five main points that Joe had narrowed down his list of reasons to. The feeling certainly wasn't relieved by the steaming mug of warm diarrhoea that he was drinking which the menu, with an optimism he was unable to share, described as coffee. When the waiter, a bored looking man with a dirty shirt that was adorned with the name 'Charles' approached and asked if he wanted anything further, Joe studied the menu hastily.

  'I'll have a grilled tomato sandwich and a glass of orange juice.'

  Charles wrote down the order and disappeared without another word. Mary certainly hadn't improved over the last few days, and she spent the vast majority of her time lying around on the lounge watching television specials about men who thought their wives were ordinary bottles of household bleach, or women whose daughters were so 'out of control' that they occasionally said the word 'fuck'. As much as Joe tried to shake her from her malaise he found that he could not. It occurred to him that their roles should be reversed, as he was the one who was dying, but he never voiced that opinion. He glanced around the small cafe to try and reassure himself that all was well. The people seemed relatively normal. There was a policeman ordering a cup of coffee to take away, a pair of elderly women discussing who's grandchild was more disappointing and nothing like the children back in their day, and a table of about three couples who, apart from being rather overdressed for a cheap cafe in Glebe, where having a perfectly civil conversation over a roast dinner and a few glasses of wine. They were in fact very overdressed, now that Joe came to think about it, with the women wearing elegant backless ball gowns and the men wearing tuxedos. One was even wearing a monocle and a top hat, and sipping on his glass of wine with an exaggerated swirling of the liquid in his mouth. The fact that it was nine in the morning suggested that these people had been out at some kind of costume party and hadn't known when to call it a night. They didn't appear drunk, and they ate their food very delicately, so unlike a group of drunken people would after an entire night of boozing. Joe turned away from them, starting to feel a growing sense of dread. People in tuxedos were not even in the same category as spider babies and public intercourse, but they were still unsettling. Just as he returned his focus to the wall, Charles returned with his meal and placed it on the bench in front of him. Joe had chosen a bench facing a side wall, because Dr Pontius had suggested that he try not to 'over-stimulate' himself and cause another stroke. Life had a funny way of coming full circle. Forty years earlier he had been commanded not to over-stimulate himself as well, but in that case the advice came from the local priest, and the consequences were something more along the lines of blindness and hairy palms. The sandwich was mediocre and soggy and he ate it with little enjoyment. He glanced back over at the well-dressed group again and to his dismay, one of the women was squatting next to the table, her dress hitched up around her waist, whilst she urinated on the floor. Another of the group was amusing his friends by jamming a fork repeatedly into his hand that he had placed flat on the table. They were all laughing uproariously as his blood slowly began to seep into the paper tablecloth. Joe quickly added another item to his list.

  6. He was clearly going completely insane.

  Fleeing from the cafe, and leaving an unpaid bill which Charles seemed particularly unconcerned about, Joe emerged onto the street feeling his head spin. The vividness of his visions was so intense that it was hard to believe that they were nothing but the imaginings of his diseased brain. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pill bottle that Pontius had given him. In the past few days he had stopped taking them completely, without telling his wife of course. Despite his protests, Mary insisted that they really were anti-psychotics and that his behaviour had improved markedly since the course began. He took two of them and then began to walk down the street carefully, placing one foot in front of the other with precision, to make sure that his feet were firmly planted on the ground, even if his head was in the clouds. His mind flitted back to the morning paper a week earlier and the message scrawled across the page in thick black ink.

  BUILD A GUILLOTINE

  The obvious question was why? A guillotine was designed with a very specific purpose; the decapitation of a human being. Joe continued his way down the street in a meandering sort of manner, but he was blind to everybody around. The search for truth, by Gabriel Armaita, had made a lie of him. It had revealed to him exactly how much of a fraud he had become. His facade of happiness had slipped away in an instant and triggered a rebellion in his brain; a grey mass that was killing him by living. So there was nothing else for it. He would build a guillotine.

  The practicalities of building a guillotine weren't immediately obvious to Joe, but it occurred to him that the very first thing he should do was get a large amount of cash. Mary was the one who usually paid the bills when they arrived, and it would have been difficult to explain why he had spent several hundred dollars at a lumber yard as he was intending on doing, so cash seemed the more obvious solution. He could then claim it had been spent on something innocuous, like cocaine and prostitutes, rather than the far more horrifying truth. There was a branch of his bank not too far down the street, and Joe made his way towards it, trying not to consider the implications of what he was doing in any particular detail as he was sure that the bubble of logic he had created would burst under the slightest bit of scrutiny. As he approached he could already see that there was some kind of disturbance outside the main doors. A group of young people had set up some tables and were distributing flyers to passers by, but one of them was engaged in a dispute with a slightly frazzled looking police officer. Most of the young people were wearing t-shirts depicting the hammer and sickle motif, or the famous print of Che Guevara that had become a badge of conformity to unite non-conformists across the globe. Joe put his head down as he walked by, determined not to get involved, but to his surprise and considerable annoyance, the young man arguing with the policeman called out his name.

  'Hey, Mr Finch!'

  He looked over at the man, and the stare was returned by the whole group of protesters. Running his eyes across their ranks he realised that he recognised at least half of them. They were students from Finchwood, largely philosophy and political science students. The one who had addressed him was not somebody he recognised however. It was a young man with a straggly beard and curly black hair which he held away from his face with a red headband.

  'Do you know this gentleman?' the policeman asked him suspiciously.

  'Sure he does. He's a lecturer at my university. Mr Finch. It's me, Mohammed Ashhad.'

  The name was familiar of course. It was the only student who had never shown up
for his tutorial, but Joe had never seen him before. The policeman stepped over to Joe's side and leaned in conspiratorially.

  'In view of your connection to these individuals could I ask you to insist that they move along? They are violating the law by being here. This is an unlawful assembly.'

  'Bullshit, pig! We have every right to be here. And you won't get any help from Mr Finch. Gabriel tells me you've become quite the rebel yourself these days.'

  'Gabriel?' repeated Joe.

  'Sure. Gabriel Armaita, my girlfriend. She's in your European Lit tutorial.'

  Joe felt a thin layer of sweat form on his brow as he looked at Mohammed. He was a scraggly youth, middle eastern in appearance, and he was wearing the Che Guevara print shirt and torn jeans. He also had flat canvas shoes decorated with liquid paper and thick black marker. What was most surprising about him was that he was the exact opposite of the type of man he would assume Gabriel Armaita would be interested in. This fact in itself made him immediately suspicious of the whole scene. The policeman, incensed by the insult, had turned his attention back to Mohammed, pushing him lightly in the chest with his finger, but retreating when the other young communist party members rallied around in defence.

  'If you do not disperse immediately, I will be forced to call for backup,' said the policeman, his voice faltering.

  'Fuck you! This is freedom of expression. It's about time that the tyrannical machinery of corporate capitalism was made to take responsibility for its actions. This bank has invested in stripping the oil reserves from the rightful owners in Venezuela and Bolivia. They're the criminals, man, and if you think some pig in a Nazi uniform can silence us then you've underestimated our commitment to the truth.'

  'Wait, wait. What's going on? Why are you here? Oil?' Joe interrupted, to the relief of the policeman who was at least twenty five years Joe's junior and clearly out of his depth.

  'Not just oil. The whole fucking system needs dismantling. They've been stripping away at our rights for years now. It's not long until they start rounding people up and shooting them. The undesirables. Anyone who thinks differently from them. They just want us all to be happy little cogs in their fucking machinery of death and I'm not a cog, man! I am not a machine!'

  'Don't you think that this is all a little melodramatic?'

  'That's the whole point, man! They know they can get away with it because no one will believe it until it's too late. What they're doing is worse than Hitler, man, but nobody cares until it's happening on their own doorstep. Here, read this...'

  Although what Mohammed said was true and nobody did care about the problems of the world until it affected them, Joe had a fundamental problem with anybody making comparisons to Hitler. In his opinion, as soon as somebody did that they lost any credibility they had, but he took the pamphlet that was offered to him anyway. It was on a yellow piece of paper, printed on university equipment (a fact Joe ascertained due mainly to the poor quality of the copy), and it listed in point form the same quasi-revolutionary rhetoric that Mohammed had just been spouting. The points were not bad ones, when facts were allowed to dominate, but the use of the word "man" in several of them detracted from the impact slightly and basically it read like schizophrenic rantings. Joe flipped it over and, cursing himself for falling for the same trick twice, dropped it to the ground. Written on the back, of course, was another message. It fluttered to the ground, taking its place next to Mohammed's foot, where the end of the message seemed to flow perfectly onto the thick black ink that was scribbled across his shoe.

  LET DEAD MEN LIE WHERE DEAD MEN FALL

  'Hey, are you okay?'

  He felt Mohammed's hand on his shoulder, and the policeman's on the other side. He was feeling faint again, and through blurry eyes he could have sworn that he saw a man across the street, running at full speed from a pack of wolves. They snapped at the man's heels, avoiding the pedestrian crowd as they hunted their prey. Just as he tried to turn a corner, the leader of the pack pounced and then the figure was gone in a frenzy of wolves, who themselves were swallowed up by a surge of commuters crossing the road as the light went green.

  'Sir, are you feeling okay?' said the policeman's voice, dragging Joe gratefully back to reality.

  'I have to go inside. I need some money,' Joe said, breaking free from both of them and stumbling towards the bank.

  He could hear voices from behind him, the young students yelling their displeasure at the world and funnelling it into his ears.

  'Money's just the blood of innocents! You mark my words, Mr Finch. They'll be lining them up and shooting them and nobody will do a thing to stop it as long as the money keeps flowing. All they're interested in is profits. Whatever you do, don't sign anything in there. It's the machine! You have to wake up some time, Finch! What's it gonna take before you wake up?'

  As Joe stood in line at the bank, he struggled not to notice that every time somebody made a deposit the money was taken from the tellers by an armed guard to a small rear door. Beyond that door he could see a huge grey furnace where sweaty men in singlets tossed the useless bills into the flames with shovels. The bank roared with delight before the door swung shut again leaving only the sound of telephones and cash drawers. When he finally reached the counter, forty five minutes later and dripping with sweat, he smiled politely at the teller.

  'Hello sir, how may I help you?' said the woman in a floral-print blouse.

  Joe glanced at the bank teller's name badge and was only mildly surprised to see that her name was Diana.

  'I need to make a withdrawal.'

  Diana nodded.

  'Okay, have you filled out a withdrawal form?'

  Of course Joe had done no such thing, but he didn't allow that minor detail to deter him.

  'Yes,' he replied.

  Diana nodded again, but when Joe made no move to give her the non-existent form she paused.

  'Okay, no,' admitted Joe.

  Diana looked at him curiously but then reached under the counter and pulled out a green form which she handed to him, along with a pen on a chain.

  'You need to fill out your details on here before I can authorise a withdrawal. If I could just serve the gentleman behind you while you do so...'

  Joe took the form and looked at it. The writing on it was absolutely incomprehensible. It looked like Arabic or something similar, and his fixed grin revealed his ignorance. The man behind him had stepped forward, but Joe pushed the form back to Diana.

  'I'm afraid I never learnt to read. Could you do it for me?'

  Diana looked moderately surprised, but her false grin soon mirrored his own, and she nodded.

  'Okay. Do you have any identification?'

  Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, which contained his driver's licence and a library card. He handed her the licence and she took it and began to transfer the information for him.

  'How much are you after today?'

  'About two thousand dollars, I think.'

  'Do you know your account number?'

  Joe shook his head, delving into the depths of his memory to try and recall it, much to the annoyance of the customer that was waiting next to him with increasing impatience.

  'How many digits is an account number?'

  'Seven.'

  Joe nodded as if this was helpful and then in a futile gesture he listed the digits one through seven. To his surprise, Diana nodded and wrote them down dutifully.

  'What was that last one?' she asked.

  'Seven.'

  'And it was two thousand dollars?'

  Joe nodded, amazed that she hadn't noticed his obvious deception. When she handed him the form to sign he noticed that she had done nothing but draw a stick figure picture of a man being set on fire by a policeman. Joe looked at the box and Mohammed's words came back to him. Whatever you do, don't sign anything.

  'I can't...' he said, wishing he knew exactly why he couldn't.

  Diana seemed a little taken aback.

  'You
have to sign, sir. It's the law,' she said, and pushed the form perceptibly closer to him.

  Joe looked at the pen in his hand and then at the roaring furnace that was illuminated as the back door flew open again.

  'Just sign it, mate. We're all waiting here,' said the impatient man behind him.

  Joe looked again at the form and the picture of the policeman burning a suspect that Diana had drawn. In that same spirit, he drew a cartoon of a penis in the box designed for his signature. Diana took back the form and read over it once, before placing it into a small automatic shredding machine that sat on the desk next to her computer console.

  'That's fine, Mr Grey. Are hundreds okay?'

  Joe was too stunned to reply as she began to count out the bills, and when she handed them to him he took them reluctantly. It seemed like some sort of bad joke, but the bills in his hand felt real enough and when he counted them back, he did indeed have two thousand dollars in cash. The door behind Diana roared open again as the men in the furnace room continued to shovel notes into the fire. Joe stared at them, but they ignored him and carried on with their labours. Finally the man next to him tapped his shoulder.

  'Are you finished yet?' he asked.

  Joe shoved the bills into his pocket and nodded.

  'Yes, that's fine, go ahead.'

  With that he walked from the bank, expecting to be stopped at any time and told that there was some sort of horrible mistake, but nothing happened. When he got outside, the student demonstrators and the policeman were all gone and as far as he could tell, everything looked exactly as it should. Unfortunately, Joe was starting to think that his idea of how things should look might be drastically incorrect.

  11