The Lunatic Messiah

  In the gloom, Joe raised his head, as the third-person past tense kicked in again with a tangible jolt. He was slumped in a fold-up plastic chair, in a small room. For a moment he was uncertain of where he was, but it only took a few seconds for his memories to come flooding back. The shed in the backyard of the house he shared with Mary. He had come home late, and carried the pieces of wood he had bought at the hardware store up the side of the house, trying to maintain total silence. Mary was upstairs in bed, he could tell from the light, but he decided that she must have been asleep or else she would have come downstairs to confront him. Joe had then made a determined effort, over the next few hours, of building a viable frame for a guillotine. He had no plan, and even less skill, so the rickety structure that he had managed to erect before falling asleep exhausted in his chair looked quite sad in the gloom of the sixty watt bulb. It had a base with two diagonal support struts, and a flattened area to place the head of the unfortunate victim, but that was as far as he had gotten, and it didn't look like anything much. He prodded the structure with his toe, and it shook with a complaining creak. It was too late now. He still had plenty of wood remaining and, as far as he knew, four months or so of remaining life so it could wait until morning. He stood up and turned off the bulb, before stepping into the back garden and padlocking the door with a brand new padlock he had also purchased at the hardware store to ensure that only he had the key. As he was walking back across the small garden he tripped on the hose, which was still strewn across the lawn from several weeks earlier when he had been distracted from watering the garden by the arrival of Harry for his weekly dinner. He cursed out loud, and put a hand to his mouth too late. Mary appeared at the upstairs window of their bedroom and she lifted the window and peered down into the garden below.

  'Joe?'

  Joe froze, wondering if there was any possible way of hiding. When he decided there wasn't he called back cheerfully.

  'Hi, Mary.'

  'Joe! Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick! I called the police but they told me that you had to be missing for forty eight hours before they could do anything...' her voice had started at relief but it passed through the stations of confusion, then fear and finally terminated at anger.

  'Why didn't you call me? I'm your wife!'

  Joe, who was fully aware that Mary was his wife, but didn't feel the rest of the neighbourhood needed to be informed of the fact, made to go into the house through the back door.

  'Oh no you don't! You didn't even leave a note when you left. Why didn't you at least tell me where you were going?'

  Joe felt it pointless to explain that the concept of writing a note was frightening to him in view of all the assorted notes that had come into his life during the past few weeks. Mary was a rational person, although highly strung, and she would almost certainly not understand the connection. Besides which, it would also involve revealing to her the full extent of his dementia and hallucinations, and that was not something he was prepared to do until it was absolutely necessary.

  'And tell me, Joe? What is it you have been doing?'

  'I've been...' his mind flashed through his catalogue of excuses, and despite knowing it was possibly the worst thing he could have said at that precise moment, he said it anyway. 'I've been out drinking heavily and paying women to fellate me. I hope you weren't waiting up.'

  Mary screamed in frustration and pulled the window down with a thump that nearly made the glass shatter. For a second, Joe thought that he would be spending a night outside, but a few seconds later he could hear her footsteps coming down the stairs towards the back door. She flung it open.

  'Get inside immediately. I will not have you making a scene.'

  Joe, his head looking at the ground in front of him, trudged into the house.

  Once inside, Mary's fury did not abate. If anything it intensified now that they were away from public scrutiny. Joe sat on the lounge in their living room, staring at a point several hundred metres behind Mary's head.

  'We have to talk, this has gone far enough. You will tell me where you were tonight and you will tell me right now.'

  The phrase "honesty is the best policy" never seemed more like a load of crap to Joe than it did right then. In general it was not true. If somebody asks how they look after spending an hour getting ready, the correct answer is "you look great", regardless of the truth of the matter. If somebody passes in the street and says "How are you?", the correct answer is "Fine, thank you", as opposed to telling them all about your latest bout of gout or piles. Equally true, if your wife asks you what you've been doing, when you've spent a good part of the evening trying to build a guillotine because of a message scrawled by an unknown hand, the correct answer is...

  'I don't remember,' said Joe.

  Mary looked at him sceptically.

  'What do you mean?'

  Joe wrung his hands together nervously. He had never been very good at lying to his wife, and with such a frail lie, he was finding it more difficult than ever.

  'I mean, I went out for a walk and then the next thing I remember is being in the back garden. I don't know how I got there.'

  Mary's face softened slightly, just as Joe had hoped it would when he added a slight note of child-like confusion to his tone. It was a cynical and calculated ploy to win sympathy and Joe hated himself for resorting to it, but it worked. Mary placed a hand on the side of his face.

  'Joe, have you been taking the medication Dr Pontius gave you?'

  'Yes.'

  'Has it been working? Have you had any other episodes?'

  'No,' Joe lied, although he convinced himself that he was answering the first question truthfully and therefore it was not a lie at all.

  'I don't know what to do, Joe. I think that maybe I'm going to need to get some help.'

  'Help?'

  'If you're starting to lose... I mean if you don't know where you are...'

  Joe realised too late that he had overplayed his hand. The last thing he wanted was to be cooped up in the house all day with some kind of live-in nurse spoon feeding him and wiping his arse. The only thing to do now was to back-pedal.

  'It's not so bad, Mary. Not yet. Pontius said that there might be side-effects from the pills. Loss of memory and so on, but it's nothing to worry about. He said that if it got too bad he could give me something else. Different medications affect people differently, he said. I'll go and see him and try something else, that's all.'

  Mary nodded, but her form was becoming blurry.

  'Have you been having any other problems? More hallucinations?'

  Everything was becoming blurry, it wasn't just Mary. He felt himself drawing back away from the world and Mary's form retreated so far that she was soon nothing but a small pinprick of light. She was not alone, there was a galaxy of them, swirling around him with huge spiral arms that looked ready to embrace him but never came quite close enough. With a huge effort of will he dragged himself back to the living room that was in orbit around one of those stars. When he focused quite hard on Mary she seemed less blurred around the edges. She regained her form and he could see her imploring face waiting for an answer to her question. She had joined him in the centre of the universe for as long as he cared to hold her there, but he knew that in an instant he could release her and send her spinning end over end towards the periphery, a barely noticed pin prick of light consumed by the billions of others that surrounded him.

  'No. No more hallucinations,' he said faintly.

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