Coffee and Sugar

CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Relax Joao. This is nothing different to what you normally do, except instead of showing them themselves, you’re going to show them something else” said The 13th Apostle.

  Joao wanted to run, but he couldn’t voice his concern to his legs.

  “How do you normally make it?” The 13th Apostle asked.

  “I put my hands in the grains, I close my eyes and I see things and when I open my eyes again, it’s done,” Joao said.

  “Well, you just do the same thing except I am going to tell you something and I want you to visualize that, I want you to see that and I want you to make them feel that, each of them, all the same,” said The 13th Apostle convincingly.

  “Ok,” he said, wishing he had the gall to say the contrary.

  Joao stared at the men and women who sat in a circle around a table, pointing their appropriated fingers at figures and statistics, shaking their heads in concurrence and abrogated disapproval. He couldn’t hear what they were saying because he had The 13th Apostle hunched over his shoulder, leaning close to the side of his face and whispering into his ear.

  As his fingers swam through the fine dark powder; running past and through every grain, he visualized in his mind a sea of infinite sadness that swelled within him, its currents pulling him deeper than he had ever been, so deep that he felt that the infantine breath to which he clung, might surely be his last.

  Every word from The 13th Apostle’s tongue sank him further and further until he was shipwrecked; weighed by such an incredible depression that spilled of him, the mount of his treasures, out into the open sea and his fingers picked at each one, placing them considerately into a filter before his reach.

  Still, The 13th Apostle whispered more and more horrific truths and the more he listened and the more he imagined, the more Joao wept. He wept like he had never wept before, like no man had ever wept before and he felt as Judas must have felt, knowing the wrong he must do, for the love of his brother so that the Christian truth could avail; the sadness of becoming the true martyr of Christendom, the sacrificed lamb in Christ’s heart whilst being the eternal villain in his worship of his word, to service the lesson of love and betrayal to all of humanity.

  Joao felt this kind of sadness and he wept as the truth laid itself bare before his eyes, shaped by The 13th Apostle’s words.

  The men and women at the table; The Apostle’s guests, paid no mind to the suffering played out behind them as they toiled over superficial importances; those of greater magnitude and determinable effect than the upsetting of a poor boy.

  Then, as an appalling, dismal image burned in his mind; making him scream in sheer terror and disbelief, The 13th Apostle released the tense grip on his shoulder, unrigging his finger tips from between his weak bones and lifting the anchor from his bed of woe.

  Joao stood still in his body, but he was shaking in his mind as if his soul had broken loose of its binds and was rattling about like an old engine, held by weak and rusted spiritual screws and bolts, undone by some equivocal intention. He titled his hand and poured the boiling water over the grains and watered his surmounting grief as if from this saddened earth would flower some worth of kindness, hope and purpose.

  The 13th Apostle whispered into his ear once more as his fingers worked their way through the fine white grains and an uneasy smile became Joao, becoming quickly, a widened grin that spread warmth and sunshine through his body and it grew with more bridging joy, stretching out the grief as his arms would do every morning when he stretched out his slumber and opened his eyes like a flower’s petals to kiss the morning sun.

  “There, it’s done,” he said, retracting his hands.

  The 13th Apostle smiled greedily and took the coffees over to where his guests sat in negative debate over parting with their money.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, if you will. I think before we make any decisions, we should wet our lips and warm our bellies” The 13th Apostle said, handing each of his guests a cup and inviting them into a toast.

  “To charity, to profit and to Jesus Christ. May our discord be, not what divides us, but what brings us together” he said, raising his cup.

  His guests looked vaguely at his wavering arms and lifted their cups out of educated prudence, nothing more. And as they touched their lips against the rim of the porcelain, their perspectives changed, along with the condition of their engagement and focus and whatever decision they thought they had come to, dissipated in the measure of decision they would all uniformly make, without schismatic debate.

  Joao thought about the things he had seen, the truths whispered to him and while looking at The Apostle and his guests shaking hands, he thought again of the devil, and he cried and when he snuck away, he went unnoticed for The 13th Apostle and his guests were busy; undressing one another.