For John these were golden days but he already knew, for Jesus had already told him, that things were only at the beginning of the beginning, that he would be called away again.
“This time I will go with you,” John insisted.
“But this first time you must not,” Jesus said. “No one will go with me. I will be alone.”
“What is the good of that?” John said. “Who wants to be lost and alone?”
“Lost? But maybe I will be lost, and maybe that is the truth of it. I am terrified of being alone. Having returned here, having come back into the company of family, of friends, of warm love, the last thing I wish to do is go out into the darkness like Azazel.
“And yet,” Jesus said. “I am Azazel.”
In the night, as they traveled south, he would say these things and turn from the mouth of the cave or the little hut where they stayed, and look out into the darkness of the night.
Now, as they traveled again to the Salt Sea, Jesus walked beside Yochanon in his grey, unbleached robe, the two of them leaning on their staffs like prophets of old, and John and Magdalene both observed that Jesus often spoke no more than anyone else when Yochanon taught, but it was the things he opened his mouth to say, when they sat quietly eating, which surprised them.
When Andrew spoke of how many people came to listen to John, but went back to their normal lives, Jesus responded:
“Whoever seeks shouldn’t stop until they find. But when they find what they seek, they are disturbed.”
“Disturbed?” said Mary.
“Aye, as you were disturbed the day you saw me arrive at the river. As I was disturbed when finally I listened to the voice of God and came here. As I am disturbed even now, troubled and battered about by the power of God. Seekers will be disturbed, troubled out of their mind. But having been disturbed, they will be amazed, and reign over all.”
In the first days when he had come, John had been full of trepidation. Jesus was like a pillar of fire. He had followed him to the river to bathe, thinking it would be as Moses before the Burning Bush, for he had taken off his shoes, not because it was holy ground, but because it was wet ground, and stood naked in the Jordan and thought, surely now he will baptize me with fire. But he baptized him with kisses and embraces and they made love in the grass, and there was no gentleness to it. Jesus consumed him, but then he consumed him, working out his loneliness and his rage until he broke the night with his strangled cry, orgasm curling his toes, bunching his body and making the veins stick out in John’s neck. They lay together, trembling and breathing hard, and John told him of Sebastian, and Jesus said, “Did he bring you comfort?”
“I think. I am not sure. Can sin bring comfort?”
“Why did you call it sin?” Jesus asked. They lay naked, face to face, chest to chest, and Jesus’ hand ran down John’s side, stopping at his lip. His hand touched the soft cloud of hair around his sex, lazily stroked his penis to life.
“Am I sin?” Jesus asked him in the dark. “Sin is death,” he said, “and I am life.”
Discussion led always to argument, and all around Yochanon they argued about the kingdom of God and what it would be, but suddenly Jesus said, plainly, and without raising his voice: “If your leaders tell you, 'Look, the kingdom is in heaven,' then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they tell you, 'It's in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and outside of you.”
“You know a lot,” said one called Simon, who was not as impressed with Jesus as he knew Yochanon would have him be.
Not receiving the insult, Jesus simply said “I know myself, and when you know yourself, then you’ll be known, and you will realize that you’re the children of the living Father. But if you don’t know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”
The first night they finally camped near the shores of the Salt Sea, Magdalene sat down beside Jesus.
“Mary.”
“Before us is your desert. I know it is your time.”
“I fear it, but I cannot stay away. These days have been the seeds of things, but when I return, be you ready, for that is when we will get to work.”
“I know who you are,” Mary said, “but I cannot make that mean what it means. I cannot understand it. I understand only that I love you more than a brother or a husband, or even myself, and so I will continue to know that, and love you completely.”
That night, after the evening meal, Jesus and John retired, and in their solitude they made love in every position they could, stopped to breathe in each others arms, to love slowly in that build up to great passion until they fell asleep on the pile of their clothes, limbs twisted in the sandy ground before the caves as night came on.
The night was loud with crickets, and with the howling dogs and maybe, John fancied, the demons, for the demons blew out from the desert and he woke to see Jesus looking out of the cave.
“Do you see him?” Jesus said without looking back at John.
There was a man, not tall, maybe John’s height, well made, handsome, and he was nude. His sex was heavy, and he had a little beard and short dark hair. But across his eyes was painted a band of white, and out of his head grew, small like those of a baby goat or maybe a calf, horns.
“Yes.”
Jesus rose, and he reached down for his robe, his staff, his sandals, but he did not put them on. Naked, bundle in one hand, staff in the other, he left John and the cave.
“Who are you?” John heard Jesus cry, though John himself could say nothing.
“Are you the Devil? Or are you my God?”
The horned man answered nothing, but turned around, the firelight on his shoulders, blacking his back, shining full on his haunches. He departed into the night and Jesus looked back on John.
“The moment is here,” he said,
Walking into the dark, Jesus followed.
So this was temptation. The horned man walked swiftly, not too swiftly to follow, but so swiftly that often his nude form was lost in darkness. Like a goat, the rocks and rises meant nothing to him, and he loped across the wilderness as if it were nothing. Jesus, in time, stopped to fasten his sandals, lamenting how far away the man was getting, but knowing he would never travel too far. Across the wastes he followed him, longing for him, and when he saw, in the pale light of morning, the back of the man and his rounded buttocks, he wanted to fuck him.
He had no food. That was intentional, but neither did he have any water. As the sun approached he saw it reflecting on the Dead Salt Sea like a brass mirror. The whole country was white like diamonds, or like the fields of snow he’d heard of. The salt had turned all of the land to crystal. Crags rose all around and there was no life here save the life in his cock and the pulsing in his balls.
Find a place to cover.
He’d known wilderness in his travels, but not desert wilderness, not the wilderness of the overwhelming heat. And he knew it was on its way. Even if he went back in the direction of the camp, the heat was on its way. It would catch him.
“I cannot return,” Jesus said. “Not till I come back with what I went for.”
What did he come out here for?
As the sun rose orange over the mountains of Moab, Jesus made his way to a defile that led to a great shelf and beneath it he found the entrance of a cave. He hoped it was deep enough. He hoped, fervently, that there were no animals or for that matter no men. He made his way to the cave, and outside of it was a rough pile of bones and inside of it was scrawled a horned and naked man with a large penis. Over him was scrawled in messy cut letters YHWH. And this was much to reflect on, only Jesus was tired and frustrated, a little hungry. He couldn’t keep from yawning. He couldn’t even begin thinking.
In the cave, exhausted as he was, he knelt, and with his staff he traced a circle, and then in the midst of the circle he placed a stone. He took out a knife and nicked his finger, letting the blood fall, and so, as cool bits of light entered the cave with its great portico of rock, Jesus lay down, drawing his knees to his chest and, in the circle gripping his staff.
He dreamed all day, exhausted from lack of food and walking through the night, thirsty with no water, his body took matters into its own hands. He was with green eyed Judas again, Judas of the broad waist and sloping shoulders, long arms and laughing smile under that moustache. Judas who had led him into the temple of Eshmun and shown him pleasure for three nights, Judas whom he went hiking with after John and the others had departed. The hills were high and green and steep in the Lebanon, and the trees fanned out, making terraced layer after terraced layer of green, rising into the sky, and here he saw for the first time, the shrine to the wild, hoofed and horned one.
“They call him Pan,” Judas said. “And in some stories he is the son of Greek Hermes, who is the son of Zeus. But in others stories he is before all, even a childhood companion of Zeus. Some say the stories about him cover the truth of him, that his name, Pan, means all, for he is the Lord of All. See how gently he smiles,” Judas touched the cheek of the Horned God who held a row of pipes in his hand.
“They would call him a devil back home,” Jesus said.
“And he may be one. The upsetter, the changer of things, the reminder of lust and desire. They call it panic when people loose their minds. When they are thrown into disorder. A disorderly god this one, surely.”
They were now in a forest, or in a temple, or forested temple, and all about there were torches that consumed the light. One of those torches glinted and shone on Judas’s fierce teeth, and he kissed Jesus full on the mouth, so deeply a thrill went into his toes as he pulled Judas to him. They were a clump of flesh and clothing and then only flesh.
In the morning Judas, for once looking like a sad man, said, “I have to go. I can’t stay gone forever. People are waiting for me.”
Jesus thought, his body aching, the nights of sex had told him, that Judas was the companion who would not go away.
Now Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their dead. You stay with me.”
“What?”
“Nevermind,” Jesus said. “It’s just a…”
Little cracks like that had come all of his life, times when the visible world cracked and showed something else far more real, something which had always been there. Now words came out from there, half bits of story with no context.
Please do not miss the Christmas time drive around my downtown. Give what you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Fundraisingforhousing
