The Lunatic Messiah

  Joe wandered casually across the ice shelf, swinging his cane and doffing his top hat to the penguins that waved to him as he passed. He had dressed in a tuxedo, to better fit in with his avian friends, although the sea lions seemed to take it as something of a snub because they began to bang their flippers on the ground when he approached, sending loud shockwaves reverberating through the ice. Rhythmically they pounded, hundreds upon hundreds of them until the ice began to crack...

  Joe jerked into consciousness, and instantly regretted it, as he felt a horrible tearing sensation at his back and then a burst of pain so severe that he cried out in agony. Next door, somebody was enjoying himself. A woman was screaming with pleasure, either real or simply for the man's reassurance, as the bed pounded rhythmically against the thin walls of the Valhalla. Joe tried to halt his screaming, but the agony was unbearable and he reached around to feel the source of it. His wounded hand touched his wounded back and he could feel nothing but pain, running from his missing kidney and through his arm and on again like an electrical circuit. Then he noticed something else. He was cold. He was incredibly cold. As his senses came back to him, forcing through the discomfort, he realised where he was. In a bathtub. Filled with ice. In a hotel. He got to his feet, which was hard work, and he slipped several times and fell back into the icy water, screaming each time. Nobody came to see what the problem was, as there were people screaming all over the hotel. It was that kind of place. He finally managed to haul himself out of the icy water and support himself on the sink, where he stood shivering, his arms around him in an embrace. He was about to reach for the towel, but it was sopping with blood and dripping onto the floor, and looking back into the icy water, it was red also. His nipples would have been capable of cutting diamond at that point, but he suddenly noticed a folded sheet of paper on the edge of the sink and he fumbled for it, desperate for some kind of explanation for his current predicament. He unfolded it with trembling hands and began to read.

  To whom it may concern,

  You have just undergone an operation to remove one of your kidneys, which will be used to improve the life of somebody greatly in need. You are able to function with only one kidney, although you should speak to a health professional in regards to certain limitations on your lifestyle that this may bring about. It is also suggested that you report to a hospital immediately, as you may find you have lost a large amount of blood and require further medical assistance. If you have any further questions then you can call this toll free number whereupon a recorded message will advise you to go fuck yourself. Men who perpetuate the cycle of prostitution deserve no better.

  Joe's bloodstained hand trailed to his side and he allowed the letter to drop to the floor. It fluttered down and stuck to the blood and water that was pooled there. He suddenly felt an almost overwhelming surge of embarrassment. To be involved in such a clichéd urban legend! Here it was again, yet another cliché to go with his gold watch and his failing marriage. The shame of it was too much, and Joe knew that there was no way he could possibly walk into an emergency room and tell them such a story. He turned around to examine his injury in the mirror, which was speckled with dots of blood that he could only presume were his own. He wiped them aside, smearing them across the alternate world behind the glass, and looked at his back. It was a clumsy job. For the length of the scar there were only ten stitches, but the wound required at least thirty. The edges were white and purple and if he moved then a slight discharge of blood came forth from between the cotton. He winced with the pain and then regarded his own pallid face. He was as white as the sheets on the bed, which were actually a slight yellowish colour, but already he was feeling better. The wound was the same as the one on his hand. It hurt more when he was looking at it than when he wasn't, so he determined not to look at it. He went back into the hotel room, feeling something squelch under his feet outside the bathroom door. Red liquid oozed up between his toes like sand on the beach but he ignored it and sat down on the bed, looking for his clothes. They had been at the end of the bed where he had thrown them, not so much in a fit of passion, but in a fit of drunken indifference. Wherever they had been, they were there no longer. He sat for a few moments contemplating what to do. He could have called Mary or Harry and had them come and get him, but that would have been too much to bear, and besides, they would have forced him to go to a hospital. Instead he simply clapped his hands together and stood up. There was nothing else for it. He walked to the door and opened it, walking casually down the hallway in the hope that if he didn't draw attention to it then nobody would notice the fact that he was completely naked. As he got to the bottom of the stairs, Tony looked up at him. He ran his eyes up and down his body and looked slightly disgusted.

  'Don't look at me in such a disapproving manner. Places that rent their rooms by the hour have no right to take the moral high ground,' Joe said and walked to the front door, placing his hand on its chipped red finish.

  'Wait a second. You only paid for an hour. You've been in there for three. You owe me sixty bucks,' said Tony.

  Joe turned back to him, still shivering from the cold, and with a fresh trickle of blood running down his back. He patted his thighs theatrically.

  'You know what, Tony? I seem to have left my wallet in my other birthday suit, so I'm going to have to catch you next time.'

  Tony shook his head, his amusement gone.

  'Well what do you want me to do?' Joe said, trying to appear menacing, or at least as menacing as a naked man on a cold night could be.

  Tony shrugged in such a way to indicate that it was not his problem. Joe looked to his wrist, where his new watch was. That explained that he thought, sighing as he slipped it off and placed it on the counter. Tony picked it up and looked at it, turning it over in his huge hairy hands. Finally he nodded and Joe turned to go, but something stopped him and he turned back.

  'Listen, Tony, I don't wish to sound insecure or anything but I noticed a few sly downward glances from you before. I'd just like to point out that I recently woke up in a bathtub filled with ice. This,' he gestured at himself, 'is not representative.'

  'Sure thing, boss.'

  Joe reached through the small rectangular hole and pulled out a towel from the stack that was sitting on the counter. He wrapped it around himself, loincloth style as Tony watched.

  'Fine, take it. This is a Rolex,' said Tony and he dismissed Joe with a wave of his hand.

  It was cold outside, but Joe barely noticed it. He walked the streets barefoot, wearing nothing but his improvised loincloth, and with no clear idea of where he was going. Most people didn't even look at him, although some seemed to be purposefully averting their eyes. The streets were filled with the sound of distant screaming as the garbagemen prowled the streets looking for new prey. Joe saw a few trucks go past, but he didn't feel the urge to run, and they ignored him. With the sounds of gunshots ringing in his ears he eventually found himself walking through the Botanical Gardens, along the harbour-side path. There was nobody else in the gardens at all, late as it was, although many of the grassy areas were strewn with empty bottles and rubbish. On top of a small incline, overlooking the Opera House, he saw a huge tree. Its trunk was several metres thick with soaring branches that created a sort of natural ceiling, they were so dense. He felt somehow compelled to go to it, and he made his way up the wet grass. It was rough, and obviously quite old, but its root system was so welcoming. They formed many natural alcoves that almost looked designed to be sat in. There was a small plaque nearby, and he glanced at it. It said 'Sri Maha Bodhi - Latin name: ficus religioso' and the brief description underneath said that it had been grown from a cutting from a tree in Sri Lanka. Whatever it was, it was the best he had, and he nestled down amongst the roots and lay back, wincing as his stitches scraped on the bark. Things had certainly changed. He had thought that nothing worse could happen to him than the death sentence handed down by Dr Pontius, but it seemed that they could. He had lost his wife, his best friend, his job,
his kidney, his mind, and in a few months he would lose his life as well. It didn't seem fair for a single man to lose so much so quickly, when just over a month ago he had been happily contemplating what he would be doing with his retirement. He had been hoping to retire early, maybe even at sixty if he was lucky. He still had the urge to travel, but that was not going to happen now. Pontius had informed him that no airline would take him because he was at risk of dropping dead during the flight due to his condition. His whole life he had been nowhere. India had seemed like the start of such an exciting new world, and it had ended up being his last hurrah before the monotony of life set in. How was it possible that the days could seem so interminably long and yet the years passed by like nothing at all? Then he remembered the one thing he did have. Sitting in his shed at home, was his guillotine. It didn't seem to matter at that moment who had written the message. The only thing that was important was that they had been right. It was the answer to all of his problems...

  'Hey! What the fuck are you doing underneath my tree?' barked a voice, and Joe's eyes snapped open.

  Standing in front of him was a wild-eyed man with unkempt hair and a huge beard that was probably an ecosystem unto itself. He was wearing clothes that were little more than rags, hanging from him like the skin of a mummified Egyptian.

  'What?'

  'This tree. It's mine. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that this is Sid's tree. I've been here twenty years. Nobody gets to sit under Sid's tree without Sid's permission.'

  'Well, Sid,' said Joe wearily. 'Can I please sit underneath your tree?'

  'No. Fuck off!'

  Joe shook his head, feeling the pain between his hand and his back fighting it out for supremacy across the battlefield of his synapses.

  'Listen, Sid. I've recently discovered I have a tumour in my right temporal lobe and have four months to live. On top of that, tonight somebody stole my kidney, so if I could just sit here for a while...'

  'Your kidney?' barked Sid. 'Why didn't you say? Any victim of the Medicare conspiracy is welcome to sit under Sid's tree.'

  'The Medicare conspiracy?'

  'Sure! You know. They've been at it for years. They've been extracting venom from red-belly black snakes and putting it into laundry powder, you know. For years they've been doing this and nobody said nothing. But I knew. Old Sid here was too smart for them. I don't use their laundry powder. That's when I found this tree. That's why I'm here.'

  Joe's brow wrinkled as he tried to understand the concept, but he found that he couldn't manage it in his present state.

  'Why would they do that?' he finally asked.

  'Don't you get it? Join the dots. You wash your sheets in that stuff and then when you're sleeping at night it seeps into your system. It poisons you, see? They've been doing it for years. People get sick and they don't know why, so they go to the hospital and the doctors tell them they've got kidney failure. Then they take them out. They've got thousands of them.'

  'Kidneys? What do they do with them?'

  'Do with them?' Sid said feeling his logic starting to collapse around him. 'Well I don't know. They keep them in a big warehouse somewhere or something. I don't know. Why you asking me? Who sent you here anyway?'

  The man was clearly a schizophrenic and ordinarily Joe would have felt sorry for him. He was generally fairly concerned with those people in the world who were worse off than him. It was a source of comfort to think that things could be worse, but at the moment he was actually struggling to see how things could be much worse.

  'Of course, I don't eat their food either. That stuff they package. It's got microchips in it. They sit in your stomach. You can't digest silicon, so it just stays there and then they can track you. All the food you buy has it. Even fruit and vegetables they sell. That's why I don't eat nothing that hasn't fallen off the tree and I seen it with me own eyes. That's the only way you can be sure. They haven't worked out a way to get 'em to grow straight out of the tree yet. You haven't been eating their food have you?'

  'I had a sandwich yesterday. From the convenience store.'

  Sid's eyes suddenly filled with fear, and he lunged forward and grabbed Joe by the arm. As he tried to jostle him to his feet, Joe felt a tearing in his back again and screamed in rage so loudly that Sid jumped back.

  'They've already got to you, haven't they?' he said fearfully.

  Joe rubbed his back and his fingers came away wet with blood.

  'I don't need this right now,' he said through teeth clenched in pain, 'Even when I'm sleeping I can't get any rest from this attack.'

  Sid cocked his head like a curious cocker-spaniel hearing a tin being opened.

  'Sleeping, you say? So you've been to the Underworld?'

  'The Underworld?'

  Sid leaned closer in a conspiratorial manner, and took Joe by the forearm with his filthy digits.

  'The Underworld. I go there. Doctors said it was delusion, but I know it's not.'

  Joe's interest was piqued now, despite the nature of the speaker, and he found himself prompting Sid to keep talking. Sid did so delightedly, as it had been many years since people had done anything but make their excuses and try to get away from him.

  'It's just like here, see, only different. There's people there just like us, but it's all, you know, it's all in a different place. It's here but it's not here. It's underneath this world, but it's just as real. More than real.'

  'This is the Underworld? So what's the point of it? What is it?'

  'It's the next life!' declared Sid. 'These bodies of ours, they're nothing but vehicles. They're not what we are. We can come back and get it right. Eventually, we can get it right.'

  'You're talking about reincarnation.'

  'Sure, whatever you want to call it. But we have to find a way out. It don't just happen. You need to be sick to find the cure. Them that aren't sick, they don't go.'

  Joe had seen enough televised specials about the Dalai Llama to have heard at least the ruminants of such a theory before, but it was difficult to give it credence in this situation. After all, Sid was clearly insane, and was unlikely to be able to provide any kind of evidence of his claim. Still, as the note had not-very-clearly stated;

  THE MULE IS A VEHICLE

  So the Meakes' were Grey's mules, smuggling in his viruses (which made people sick), and the mule was a vehicle. Joe decided to try a little experiment to see if Sid's opinion had any validity at all, or if this particular idea just happened to overlap with his own insane delusions. Sid seemed pretty capable of ranting at length on any subject, and it was just possible that Joe had somehow put the idea in his head.

  'Sid, what do you think of books?'

  Sid shook his head, running his fingers over his beard in some distress at the mention of the word.

  'No, no, no,' he muttered. 'Don't borrow books from the library, you hear? They pass through so many hands. The publishers are just making them so that the government can spread diseases more easily. Any book by Stephen King, you rent it, and a few days later you've got scurvy. Barbara Cartland is for herpes, and Salman Rushdie they use for leukaemia. It's an experiment, see. They been doing it for years.'

  Joe sighed and was embarrassed at having been drawn in for even a second by this pitiful specimen. He detached Sid's blackened fingers from his arm, gently but firmly. It appeared that they were both crazy, but Sid was just at a much more advanced stage. It was only to be expected; he'd been doing it a lot longer. It did clarify one thing. His hallucinations were becoming more real. He could not only see them, he could also feel them and talk to them. It was only a matter of time before he truly believed them, as Sid did. Joe had no wish to degenerate to that kind of a level and, with a heavy heart, he made a decision.

  'Sid, I've spent the last month going crazy myself, so I'm really not concerned with somebody else's delusions. I hope you're happy here under your tree, but I think it's time I took some action.'

  Sid nodded vigorously.

  'Yeah, yeah that's
good. You go away and take some action. Go away and do that. What you gonna do?'

  'I've built a guillotine in my back shed. I think now is the appropriate time for the revolution to begin,' Joe replied, and he left Sid to continue nodding, his head perched on a spring made out of crazy.

  'Gabriel Garcia Marquez gives you AIDS!' he shouted after Joe who ignored him, so Sid nestled back amongst the roots of his tree, muttering.

  It's quite difficult for a man wearing nothing but a towel and with multiple open wounds to hail a taxi, which was something that Joe discovered the hard way. After several failed attempts, he decided that he had no choice but to walk, and it took him almost two hours to find his way back home. His feet were sore and bleeding by the time he arrived from walking over asphalt and concrete, but when he finally saw his house he felt a sense of immense relief. It faded quickly, because out the front was a police car. It was empty, but there was no doubt in Joe's mind where its occupants were. He hurried quickly up a side street and then down the street parallel to his own. Counting down the numbers, he decided he had found the house that lay directly behind his own. The front room was lit, but the curtains were drawn, so he very quietly made his way across the lawn, cursing as he tripped over a plastic flamingo that was decorating the grass. As he got to his feet, throwing the offending bird aside, he saw somebody peeking through the curtain so he made a dash up towards the side of the house.

  'There's someone on the lawn...' he heard a frightened woman's voice say as he ran, but he kept going and soon he was in the back yard, looking at the fence that divided their two properties.

  Just as he got to it, he heard the back door open.

  'Hey you! What are you doing? I'm calling the police!'

  Joe hoisted himself up and turned back to look at the dark mass that stood in the lit doorway.

  'No thanks, I've already got some,' he said and threw himself over, landing awkwardly and rolling on the grass, stifling a yelp of pain.

  The key to the shed was hidden underneath a brick in the flowerbed, and he retrieved it quickly and unlocked the shed. He was about to go in, but something stopped him. The light was on in his bedroom, and through the drawn curtain Joe could see the silhouette of at least three people upstairs. He decided to go inside. The back door was unlocked, and he pulled it open slowly, wincing as it creaked. For some reason, he just needed to see the house again one last time and he went in, peering around the doorway to the kitchen where the light was still on. There was nobody there except the picture of the duck and the basket of pinecones. On the bench next to the telephone was a thick black marker and the pad of paper for taking messages. Joe stepped gingerly towards them and picked them up. What was there to say at this point? No matter what he wrote, there would be no way that he could truly make anybody understand why he was doing what he was doing. In the end he scrawled a short note.

  MARY. GONE TO HELL. I HAVE BORROWED YOUR HANDBASKET.

  As he looked at the writing he was struck by the similarity to the anonymous notes he had been receiving. He had checked his writing against it before, but what was written in front of him now was something else. The advice he had been getting had all come from him. He had known all along what had to happen. He picked up the basket of pinecones and crept back towards the back door, but as he passed the stairs, the floorboard beneath him creaked.

  'Joe?' said Mary's voice from upstairs.

  There was no time to think and Joe simply ran, leaping out of the back door and spilling pinecones on the wet lawn as he rushed towards the shed. He glanced back once and standing in the doorway of the house was the unambiguous silhouette of a policeman.

  'Mr Finch? Stay where you are,' he said authoritatively.

  Joe considered the suggestion, but ultimately decided against it and kept going.

  He reached the door of the shed and opened it as the policeman came barrelling across the lawn towards him.

  'Mr Finch! I'm not going to hurt you! I just need to ask you a few questions,' he said, drawing his nightstick as he approached.

  Joe slammed the door shut behind him and bolted it, just as the bulk of the man hit the shed and the whole structure shook.

  'Fine, ask away,' he called through the wood.

  The guillotine was as he had left it, a shaking, fragile structure, but it was missing one vital ingredient. Underneath an old car cover, Joe pulled out a metal toolbox and opened it. Nestled inside was a lawnmower blade that he had weighted with some heavy iron weights from an exercise machine he had bought years before and never used. It was a crude blade, and quite dull, but it would have to do. He had intended to sharpen it before putting it in position, but the policeman was now ramming the door with his shoulder so violently that the wood was starting to splinter. Joe put it on the workbench and then carefully placed the now-empty basket at the base of the machine in the perfect position to catch his head.

  'Joe! Please come out. We only want to help you!'

  It was Mary's voice, and the sound of it gave him pause for a second. She sounded so desperate and scared, but when the next blow to the door tore loose one of the screws from the bolt he was triggered back into action. He climbed up on the fragile base of the machine and fitted the blade into its grooves. It moved quite easily, because he had made them far too large and there was a lot of sideways motion as it slid up and down. He then took the rope that he had prepared and tied it on, gripping it tightly as he clambered back down. With a deep sigh, he knelt down and put his head in position, with his wounded hand holding the rope that in turn held his fate. With impeccable timing the door burst open and the policeman fell inside and onto the ground, his eyes swivelling up to look at the contraption in front of him. Mary rushed in immediately after him.

  'What the...' began the policeman but his voice trailed away.

  'Joe? What is that thing? It looks like...' her voice in turn trailed away.

  'It's not very good I know. I never was much of a carpenter, Mary,' said Joe, his hand trembling as he held the rope.

  His neck was resting on the base, still red from where the garbageman had choked him and the sweat and blood were oozing slowly from his body. Mary had her hand over her mouth, which was a perfect circle of horror but the policeman was more responsive and had gotten to his feet. He put his arms out in front of him as he edged forwards.

  'Now, Mr Finch. Let's not do anything stupid.'

  'Well it's a bit late for that, isn't it? I've done every other stupid thing, so this is all I've got left. Mary could you keep an eye out for the Scarlet Pimpernel? I'd like this to go off without a hitch.'

  Mary couldn't speak and she could hardly see with so many tears in her eyes as the policeman inched ever closer. Joe's trembling hand suddenly stopped trembling as the weight of the blade became nothing. He had made his decision. He would not become like Sid, muttering and alone, and he released the rope. The blade trundled down its track picking up speed as both the policeman and Mary screamed and then, to Joe's surprise, it found its mark.

  At the point of impact he could have sworn that he heard a child laughing.

  23