‘You are the same angel that came to my mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because my brother is special.’
‘Your brother is the Son of God.’
The sun beat down upon me. I did not doubt it. I doubted nothing of my brother. Not then. ‘What about me?’ I said softly.
‘You were… left over,’ the angel sighed. ‘The Word of God displaces mass. Something of Him was left over. Which is to say: The Lord God conceived Yeshua. Maryam conceived you.’ The angel shrugged apologetically. ‘These things are unpredictable.’
‘God could not predict it?’
‘God enjoys surprises. Incarnation is… complex. It is not a straight path.’ The angel paused abruptly and joined his hands together. His fingers were very long. ‘You love your brother.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps that was what was left over. It’s all love, Thomas. That’s all. Just love, and death, and the striving toward one or the other.’ He turned away from me, and I called out:
‘If he is a man, but has within him the Word of God, like a bone or a heart… do I?’
The angel smiled, so slightly that I almost thought he frowned. His black eyes blazed like iron. ‘I don’t know, Thomas. Do you?’
And he left the garden. The rich and bitter smell vanished with him, and I was left alone.
When Yeshua died, I held our mother while she vomited and clawed her cheeks. Her eyes were empty; she had forgotten who she was. We felt as though a great weight had suddenly fallen between all of us, and we all stood staring at the hole it made, we who were now only twelve, twelve and Maryam, which I suppose made thirteen again. Nothing would be the same. He had been the weight, and where he fell he distorted the fabric of the world, before and behind, so that nothing could run smooth again.
And then, one day, his friend Maryam, who shared her name with our mother and whom Yeshua loved dearly, came leading a man into Peter’s house. I did not recognize him—he was so thin and sick, with bony limbs and lanky hair, and the light in his eyes had gone out. He looked so much like me there might have been a mirror between us. Only now I was full, and he was empty. I began to tremble. The man put out his hand to steady himself, and I caught him, by instinct, by habit, because he was my brother, and he lived.
I did not believe it. Anything else, but not this. I missed him too much. I could not believe it. God would not give me this; He would not be so kind as to let me know my brother again under the sun. For Yeshua, the gifts of God. Not Thomas.
‘Thomas,’ Yeshua croaked, weak, for he still bled from his wounds. ‘Embrace me, it is your brother, and I love you.’
‘No,’ I said. I could not believe.
And he took my hands and pressed them to his wounds. He winced, but I felt the blood there, blood, and also a soft kind of light, a light that was not light, and I was weeping, horrible, childlike weeping, huge gulps of air and sobbing as I held my brother to me one last time, and he gripped my shoulder, and kissed my brow.
‘But you are so weak,’ I said. ‘How can you be weak?’
‘Incarnation is not a straight path,’ he said wryly, and the man I had known to be more full of life than any was helped by twelve men to a table, and there we shared wine and bread, but he ate none, for he had not the strength. But we laughed, and shared old jokes, and I loved him so profoundly that day that I did not notice when he went. I simply turned and he was gone, and his chair stood empty, but his glass stood full.”
[And before my eyes it swam and swelled, the moldering amber, the wavering hairs speckling the surface of that pool of corruption, seething in from the spine, from the corners, from the center. It moved faster than I could read, faster than I could copy, and my hands sobbed with agony, trying to outrace it, trying to defeat it. It devoured words just as my eyes grazed them, and I could not breathe, I could not breathe—the book was dying, dying before my eyes, decaying into gold, passages winking out like stars in the dawn. I caught fragments: from the far side of the great tree spoke suddenly another head, and then another, and three Thomases looked at me with pitying eyes, and Hajji-or-Imtithal kissed them all, one by one, on the lips, with her whole mouth. And another: I remember Vyala the pale lion opening her mouth, and how it was red inside her, and as I shuddered, insensate on the long gras
s, the lion-mother picked me up by the scruff, like a kitten—
From the moldering page little orange spores puffed up, wetting words down through the next pages, and I turned them as fast as I could, but I was not fast enough, I could not stop it, it was too fast, and John’s book was disintegrating in my hands. I chased it down, down, through the pages, so many left, and I was not fast enough. The words shivered away, the fungal rot snapping at their heels until they were little more than epigrams: you should not believe a thing just because a tree said it.
A streak of hungry yellow swallowed even that, and set its teeth to the next lines, each letter vanishing as I read it, turning to golden sludge, hot and horrible, staining my fingers:
Hajji-or-Imtithal went on: he told me these stories on our bridal bed, too. I half-believe them. Why not? I know winged men live and walk and speak very seriously, I know children can be born different, without any living father. I know the body can die, and return when a green leaf breaks the soil. None of those things require a God to occur. They happen every day. Why should they not have happened to him? I think you would find it remarkably freeing to leave religion aside. When you believe no one thing, everything can be true.
The gold darkened like dusk. I peeled back wet, sopping pages; I saw: in the crook of the white lion’s paw Hagia slept, headless, serene. I saw: I said to her, with her breasts heavy above me, her eyes burning: yes, yes, I will drink from the Fountain. Take me, take me, I will drink.
The rest dissolved. With a wet sigh it sloughed over my palms and no more remained except this, wriggling, black on the gold, as if the letters moved and breathed and struggled for life:
I wept.
I wept.