Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Do you believe in god’s plan?” spoke the voice of a man, leaning down in the further dark and patting the small dog that sat beside him which lifted its snout high so that the man’s massive fingers and coarse nails could scratch against his skin in a fashion that his own could not.

  Joao knew the voice immediately.

  It was loud and booming, like the sound of rolling thunder, muted by the guarding of hands, clasped over frightened ears.

  “Come here son, let me show you something.”

  The man stepped out from the retreat of shadows with the dog tailing by his feet. He swept the fearful Joao up in his arms and rested his assuring hand on the boy’s shoulder in a way that maybe his father might have done had he ever assumed the rank of a good man or half descent father. Regardless, it took some of the paint off his red hand and he walked with The 13th Apostle into the construction.

  “You see this here,” he said, waving his arm around to point out an empty part of the site. “This is going to seat twenty thousand people and outside, we’re building a space with enough standing room for fifty thousand more. That will make us the biggest church in the known world, in god’s world. That’s his plan, to set his stage for the lord’s return and the apocalypse and you can be a part of that Joao” said The 13th Apostle.

  ‘The apocalypse?”

  “In building that stage.”

  The 13th Apostle turned and held his two great hands on Joao’s shoulder and the warmth that exuded from him filled Joao with a kindly confidence that made him swell with intrigue. The Apostle looked him in the eye without discipline, without disappointment and without disregard; a look that felt as foreign to him as his was to The Apostle, as he scrunched and grimaced his face in estranged appreciation.

  “Are you ok son? You’re not retarded are you? Charity said you were a little strange.”

  “I’m sorry sir. I’ve been feeling really strange in the past days. Real funny and stuff. Not retarded or nothing, just kind of funny, kind of sad. Do you think people can be saved? That Jesus can save everyone?”

  “Well I know he can or I wouldn’t be here doing this now would I, dedicating my life to his word, singing his name and turning to him like the flowers do, the morning sun. Do you have a question in your faith?”

  “No sir. I love Jesus. I just wonder… why he loves us, you know?”

  The Apostle leaned down on one knee and even now as he lowered himself to the ground, he still towered over Joao, casting his shadow behind him like a fisherman’s net.

  “All Jesus wants is for us to pass this test. And it’s never too late for any man, no matter how deep his wrong, to find Christ in his heart and be saved. That’s where people like us come into the equation, Joao. It’s our job to help them open their eyes. Once they have Christ in their heart, and you know this,” he said adamantly, “their lives will find meaning and they can start to make better, all the hurt that they done. But Jesus, he is a patient man and he’ll wait an eternity; if that’s the time a man needs, he’ll wait that eternity, to answer that man’s prayer and when that man calls out the Lord’s name, when he’s down on his knees under the banner of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, when he gives his heart and soul into the hands of the son of god, when he casts off his fear, when he lays that first stone himself, you know what Jesus says?”

  Joao wanted to shake his head, but he stood dumbfounded.

  “He says, welcome home my son. That’s what he says.”

  Joao smiled.

  “So everyone can be saved?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everywhere? I mean, on the hill too?”

  “Everyone can be saved Joao, but not everywhere. You can’t strike a match in the middle of a hurricane. You gotta hold onto that match until the storm passes and then you can do what needs to be done. That hill, it’s not part of god’s plan. Nobody on that hill wants to be saved; you gotta get em when they come down. Here is the only place we can save them” said The 13th Apostle.

  “My daddy, he drinks a lot; a lot more than he did, since we moved onto the hill.”

  “Is he violent? Is he out of control?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see him much anymore. He’s out most of the night and he’s drunk and asleep when I get up in the morning. I just clean up a bit before I leave. I think he’s real sad. He wanted to be like you and Jesus. He wanted to be a good man, to be famous.”

  “And what about you Joao? What do you want?”

  “I want to matter,” he said.

  “You matter to someone.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said.

  “You matter to your mother and father, your family, you matter to them.”

  “They’re mean, all of them. I’m no use on the farm and here, I can’t do anything right. My daddy drinks and he’s using drugs and I can’t stop him. And I think he might be seeing a girl, from one of the bars.”

  “You sit in the desert too long and you’re gonna thirst.”

  “I think about dying sometimes.”

  Joao wept as The 13th Apostle took his great arms and pulled Joao close to his chest with such force that it felt as he if might squeeze all of the sadness and disbelief from his pores like an old and worn sponge.

  “What if I told you that Jesus has a plan for you? What if this is your plan?” said The 13th Apostle.

  Joao didn’t respond. His tears spoke of his despondence. The Apostle squeezed him tighter, pressing his firm hand against the back of Joao’s head, almost smothering him as he wept against him cathartically.

  “Your coffee,” said The 13th Apostle, pausing slightly so Joao could silence the flight of his sniffling and tears, “how do you do what you do?” he asked.

  Joao gripped The Apostle’s waist and pulled his head away from his chest. His nose was running horribly and there was a long wet stream along The Apostle’s chest, but The Apostle didn’t seem to care. Joao wiped away the hanging snot from his nose and sniffed heavily of what beckoned to follow from his wiping hand.

  “I close my eyes and I just imagine stuff. I see stuff. I feel stuff” said Joao.

  “Don’t be modest Joao. That’s not just stuff that you see, is it? It’s the truth. You see the truth in people and you show it to them. I’ve been asking around. There’s a lot of people talking about you, about what you do. They’re calling you a witch” said The 13 Apostle in an indicting manner with his words ejected short and sharp like a pointing finger.

  “I’m not a witch,” said Joao, “it’s just coffee,” he said desperately as he had to The Nervous Lady, unsure why people were reacting as they were. “Why can’t people just see that? It’s just coffee.”

  “That’s not entirely true now is it? I’ve had your coffee and it’s not just coffee, in fact, it’s not like anything else. It doesn’t taste like any coffee I’ve had before and trust me, I’ve tried everything” he said with a lizard’s lick of his tongue.

  “I swear, I’m not a witch. I’m just me. Am I in trouble?” he asked worriedly.

  “No Joao, you are not and I don’t think you’re a witch. I don’t believe in witches or fairies or wizards or goblins, but I do believe in the light of our lord and I believe that he’s shining his light through you and I believe that we need to point that light onto the right stage” said The 13th Apostle.

  “You want me to make you a coffee?”

  “Me? No, not just me. My congregation. The city. The world” said The Apostle, lifting himself; like an inspiring emperor to a spiring stance as his chest heaved and his arms stretched out wide with his palms curled and rising upwards as if some great invisible weight were being held in his hands and kept from crushing the world below and he didn’t speak his words, he expulsed them out as the heavens would a thunder bolt or a mother would, her new born child.

  “I don’t know if I can,” said Joao.

  “Of course you can my boy. Jesus chose you for a reason. Those people on the hill, the one’s that cannot be
saved, the one’s that cannot find their way down; with your light shining on my stage, they will find their way and together, we can save them” said The 13th Apostle, falling once again to one knee and resting a kind and gentle hand on Joao’s shoulder, speaking in a softened, congealing tone, less like a mongering emperor and more like the consoling and assuring father speaking without threat in his voice; finding a better approach.

  “What if it’s not good for them?”

  “You’ve seen how the people react. How could it be anything but?”

  “I’ve seen them change too. They become angry and they scare me. They only offer their want and need as payment, giving me their guilt, their sadness and the bad things that will happen if I don’t help them. They frighten me with their prayer and I get so sad thinking that they might do something bad if I don’t listen to them if I don’t answer their prayer.”

  “I know exactly what you mean Joao. And Jesus; he knows what you mean too. Our work is not easy, to have to attend to the prayer of many, but it is our work. We never chose this work, for it was the choice of god that we were chosen” said The 13th Apostle, inviting Joao into a spell of confusion.

  “I used to pray to Jesus. At first on the farm for him to bring rain, for him to make Mother happy, for him to make my brothers and my sisters happy and less cruel and now, for him to find my daddy cause I can’t see my daddy in those eyes anymore. He’s good and happy only when he uses the drugs and I pray to Jesus every day that if we can’t save these people, if he can’t help us build a good church, if daddy can’t be famous like you then if he can only do one thing for me, if only one of my prayers can get through, I pray that he can help my daddy. Do I sound like them when I pray? Am I a beggar? Does Jesus run away like me? Is that why he doesn’t answer? Is he hiding behind a fence on a deserted street, somewhere in heaven?”

  “Jesus hears every prayer. He doesn’t just change things. He fills your heart with love and belief, to give you the courage to change things yourself.”

  “But I don’t think I want to change anything, not anymore. You change something; someone and they just change right back. Maybe not straight away, but they always change back and then they come back hungrier and angrier and they want you to change them again. They’re like babies” said Joao.

  “But this is our work; it is the nature of our trial. They will come to us hungry and weak and we will feed them and when they are fed, they will go off and starve themselves again until they can take no more and then they come back hungrier and hungrier. They can’t feed themselves. They; and god, need us to portion Christ’s heart, his passion and his forgiveness.”

  Joao looked spent and defeated as if he had accepted there were no fight in negating his promise and use.

  “There will be a place for you here, in this congregation, when it is done. Your work is here, with me” said The 13th Apostle.

  “But the reason I am here is to help my daddy, with his church, with our church, on the hill.”

  “Nobody will ever step foot in that church. Do you understand?”

  “What about my daddy, The Bishop?”

  “Bishop what? What is his name? Bishop John? Bishop Valdemir? Bishop?” asked The 13th Apostle with his massive brows raised, his suspicious eyes wide with the white around his iris lighting up the room as much as when he smiled.

  “The Bishop,” said Joao simply.

  “The Bishop, just that? The; as in, the one and only? We’ll see. Bishops are a dime a dozen in my pocket. It’s you though Joao, who are special, who is chosen.”

  Joao felt an odd sensation engage with his mind and swim through his blood, filling his veins and lifting his stare.

  It was pride.

  “I want to show you something. It’s yours if you want it.”

  The 13th Apostle took Joao under the expanse of his branching arm and they; with the dog in tow, stepped around the construction and passed the men in plastic hats who hammered nails into wooden boards and passed the men in blue collared shirts, who shouted orders at the hammering men. And they passed the men in suited clothes, who read off of charts and documents and pointed their fingers and waved their hands around the site, expertising tasks of which they had no comprehension and even lesser dialect, but of whom, a stroke of their pen could re-assemble, re-arrange and re-structure so as to resemble whatever may be that the suited man might wish then to see.

  They entered an area of the construction that was being plastered, painted and even furnished; a room in the back of a long hallway unto which The 13th Apostle lead the pair, pointing and smiling triumphantly.

  “This can be yours, if you wish, of course, to come to the side of the lord and ruffle your feathers from his divine perch,” said The 13th Apostle.

  Joao stood in amazement. He had never been invited into a room of this stature with such fine belongings hanging from the walls, leaning against the backs of chairs, nestled upon such glistening tables, draping across polished wooden floors and poured into glasses of which one alone could fend off their style of poverty for an entire year.

  There was so much wealth here and he felt uncomfortable, constantly vexed, thinking as if he may lean against something and it might fall to the ground and smash into pieces, that he may brush against something and the disparity from his fingertips might just leave a stain that could never be cleaned and that the room alone, seemed poorer simply with him being in it.

  “Sit here,” said The Apostle holding his massive hands on the back of a leather bound chair that could have kept a giant in abiding comfort and regality.

  Joao sat in the chair and disappeared. His back was hunched, his head low, his hands pulled into his lap and hanging limply over the tips of his wobbly knees. The Apostle rested his hand on Joao’s shoulder and lifted his head up lightly so that he caught his own reflection in the mirror in front of him.

  He saw himself looking back.

  Nervous.

  “You belong here” whispered The Apostle in Joao’s ears as he stepped away from the chair, flicking a switch on a radio that sat on a table and pardoning himself from the room.

  Joao, gripping the handles of the chair dumbfoundingly and yelled out loud but not a sound at all escaped from his gaping mouth.

  The radio was playing a news broadcast. The broadcaster spoke in a heavy country accent. Joao thought for a second that it might have been someone he knew, but then he thought, what would be the odds of that?

  He sat back into the chair and waited uncomfortably while the news played out, trying to ignore the flight in his mind by concentrating on something that was bigger than him but at no point as real as the height of his current dilemma.

  He tried to casually focus on the football results as if they mattered and concern himself with the reports of a travelling psychopath kidnapping and murdering single men throughout the country.

  He stared at his reflection.

  He looked miniscule and almost ridiculous in this massive chair. Understandably for someone like The 13th Apostle who was so grand and marvelous and whose wavy hair was always more like a storm cloud, so high up above his head, catching his wandering, desiderate attention.

  Joao took a breath and thought of Charity lifting that brush to guide him into her retreat and in his mind; as his fearful self longed and willed her to invite him away, she; under the loosely hanging branch, pressed her finger against her lips and shushed away his concern, smiling at him infectiously so that as she lowered her arm and closed herself off to his imagination and returned him to his dreaming, heavyset stare, his temperament changed.

  He put his hands firmly on the arm rests and pushed out his chest and started to pose and turn his face to the mirror, blowing air into his mouth to push out his cheeks and fill his face, then making concerned and adoring expressions, imagining himself as being admired and worshipped and important and affecting and belonged.

  And as he moved his body around in the chair and fed the belly of his ego, the newscaster sounding out of
the radio beside him debated the effect of social conditioning with a well-credentialed psychiatrist who believed entirely that this type of sexually violent, predacious serial murderer was an extension of the sensuality of a moralized conditional society and that the good moral people were watching; in scathing audacity, nothing more than the starved and weakened lioness mauling on a stray calf and; though in apparent debate, the broadcaster ummed and aahed in a manner that assumed he were shaking his head in feigned and mythical understanding so as not to pepper his sweet presentation with a less than knowledgeable defense of his listeners who took to his voice as the truth because after all, it was spoken from the radio, just as the truth could also be found written in a book.

  The broadcaster wanted to baste the profile of the serial killer as some kind of immoral beast that could be wrestled into submission, of whom wore scars and markings and of whose existence was but a trial of humanity’s growing condition in a world beset upon by the devil’s ideals and moral findings.

  He used the words monster and devil, and used adjectives like lone and forsaken and immoral and ungodly and decrepit and he made his case that even though this killer was the effect of god not being in every home, he willed his listeners to calm in knowing that this monster was not in every home for it was a monster and not a man, whereas the psychiatrist wanted to paint that every man is a monster and has yet to hunger enough to stumble upon his wandering calf.

  Then; as the radio fizzled with scathing debate, a golden handle lightly clicked as it slowly turned and the door pushed open.

  Startled, Joao blew out the air in his expanding cheeks and sat upright in the chair, looking down at his hands once again pressed between in skinny legs and then, sheepishly tilting his head to the left to see a beautiful woman; a seductress, dressed scantily in black, lace bra, panties and suspenders and carrying in her hand, an empty, black porcelain cup with the word Jesus painted in white along one side, the side that faced him as he sat in stupefied wonder and adamant fear, feeling every bit like the calf as the starving lioness preyed upon him, dressed in fleeting lingerie and feathered stilettos with every sound of her heels clapping against the floor feeling like conscious nails, hammering into his mind and keeping him stupendously still; his pounding heart sounding out his jittery arousal.

  The door behind The Seductress pulled shut and a lock turned as Joao’s reflection and his escaping sight were confounded with a woman’s near perfect, naked body.

  Joao tried to look away but when he tilted or turned his head, the woman touched; ever so gently, her long fingers against the tilt of his head and leaned his eyes towards hers where she cast a spell on him that had him willing his sight back to his wobbly knees where maybe he could imagine mundane and ordinary thoughts in his mind to further himself from the fervor that boiled in his blood, pounded in his mind and swelled in places that had him horrifically uncomfortable and terribly embarrassed.

  The Seductress lowered her widened hungry and salivating eyes to the affrighted retreat of her prey; the weak and forborne calf, clinging to the fine black leather with his nails outstretched scratching at the arms of the chair.

  She leaned her hands onto his so that he couldn’t escape and brought her face down to his shoulders so that her fringe swished against his eyelids and then his nose, tickling his reason as she exhaled her warm and insatiably irreligious breath at the base of his ear so that it trickled down his neck and shivered at his spine, ordering the tiny white hairs that lay on his lower back into rising attention.

  “If I show you my body, will you show me my soul?” she whispered into his ear, so soft and sensual, biting down with her teeth; gentle but firm on the edge of his ear and purging a sigh of wanting stress across his quaking lips as one of her hands reached down to his legs, pulled his clamped and clammy hands from between them and slid her own considerate touch along the inside of his quaking thigh.

  ‘How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?” she sang in his ear and it felt as if her voice were like smoke, entering his body and wrapping itself around the tiny fight left in his soul, defusing the last remnant of logic and reason in his mind.

  He looked past The Seductress or at least tried to, tilting his head away from her bulging bust and her swishing hair, catching an inch of the mirror in front where he caught a refection behind, something calming and escaping; the sight of a welcomed hand, opening a passage to his desertion.

  The Seductress pinned her muscular legs tight, straddling Joao so that he couldn’t move, even if he managed the will to do so. In her mouth, she bit on the handle to the cup, holding it in her teeth. The word Jesus ran out of her mouth like some salivating and scandalous tongue, folding over her mouth and running down where her chin might have been, hidden behind the turn of the porcelain cup.

  Joao was without word and without definition.

  He felt entirely strange as though he were engorging with shame that could explode at any moment. He tried thinking of Jesus but as he did, he was reminded of the licking tongue of this harlot who sat perched upon his body like a vulture upon a tiny infant’s withering carcass and it excited him in a fearing and powerless kind of way.

  He tried to think of Mother, the great, gargantuan insulter, she whose abrasive regard could confuse sandpaper for a sponge in how she caressed the need in one’s heart and soul.

  He imagined her sitting on the wooden bench with the hot afternoon breeze swishing at her floral dress of which fluttered in the gusting wind as she fought in a reserved and educated, womanly manner to pin to her knees with her axe man’s hands. Her skin drank of the hot sun like air into a vacuum and from her pores; she sweated her hope, resilience and consternation into the life that she tried to mend; the seeds beneath the dried earth and her children who stamped about upon it.

  As he imagined her sitting there looking at him all weathered, worn and emotionally droughted; as she did in her only photo, he felt again an uncomfortable and shameful warmth engorge in his loins as outside of his delusion, The Seductress slid her body tight and warming against his, pressing her lips against his ear, her hot breath running down his neck like hot wax from a dripping candle as her silken whisper crept into his mind and pulled apart the image of his mother, pixel by pixel, until her body exploded into a billion particles of dust and vanished from his conscious sight, leaving only The Seductress; in her black lingerie, occupying his every fright, clasping the cup in her teeth and undoing the straps to her bra with her free hands while her raping eyes kept him prostrated and conceding.

  . “Show me, my soul, I’ll pay any price. You can do whatever you want to me. Anything you want. Anything at all. I won’t tell” she said, pausing between her tease to speak and then, making good her promise, taking his clammy hands and pressing them against her breasts as if they were some garment.

  Joao closed his eyes and tried to disengage the senses on his finger tips that were burning and tickling against The Seductress’ breasts and making him feel as if he were committing a wrong. He tried to think of anything that would help him to disengage.

  He thought of his father, standing in front of him with his disappointed smirk; where his brow furrowed, his bottom lip rose up till it wet the tip of his nose, the nostrils on his nose flared inwards almost closing entirely and his left hand pinned a black leather bag to his shoulder while his right hand pulled from his pocket with what might just become a lecturing hand and he expected his father; the surveyor of truth and example, to be usual in his disinfecting emotional resonance, washing Joao clean of his partiality and impurity and returning him to a disheveled but accepting zeroed state.

  As he felt The Seductress writhing over his cowardice, he watched in dissention as his father smiled and took from his pocket, a pair of women’s panties, like the pair he had folded when he left his house this morning.

  The Bishop; in his delusion, still with one hand clasping his black leather bag to his shoulder, smiled deviously as he took the panties in his right hand and pr
essed them against his face, inhaling prophetically while choking black smoke swirled around him which turned to roasting flames and then the image of his father vanished and when the flames receded, he was left again, a victim of the harlot on his lap, using his hands like a divine and lustrating scrubbing brush, all over her sinful body.

  “Stop” screamed Joao, his voice crackling as his parched throat fought to turn this weaken vice in his stomach into a visceral retaliation, using every last inch of his defending reserves to invert his repression into striking everyone and anyone within an earshot of his chastising, oral fist.

  The Seductress stopped, unfastened her prowling stare and let go of his hands so that they dropped heavily and slapped against his tensing legs. The cup in her teeth fell from her mouth and bounced off of Joao’s body and smashed to pieces on the floor, along with the will of her seduction.

  ‘What the fuck wrong with you? Whatever” she said as she covered her breasts with one hand as if she had just broken from some trance and was akin to the disrepute of her self-esteem, seeing the wrong in the reflection of her doing.

  “Apostle, hey Apostle” she screamed.

  The lock on the door clicked and the handle turned and the great man himself walked into the room with a less than concerned look in his eye.

  He was smiling with his arms wide and embracing.

  “Did he resist?” The 13th Apostle asked Joao and The Seductress who stepped passed The Apostle, gently brushing her open palm against his heaving chest, closing her eyes just enough so that her eyes just peered through the lustre of her long black lashes, looking upwards at The Apostle in a sexing glare.

  “Do I look satisfied?” she said, leaving the room with her hand still draped across her breasts.

  The Apostle watched her leaving the room with a degenerate and hungered groan expelling from the pit of his belly as the door slammed shut behind her.

  Joao looked every bit the trembling calf that had just been picked from the gnashing jaws of a lioness. He was shaking and breathing fast, overcome by a tidal wave of unfamiliar, toxic emotions.

  He looked up and saw The 13th Apostle standing behind him about to lay his massive hands on his shoulder consolingly and beside him; he saw the small dog sitting politely on its rump looking at him with the same look he just gave himself as if to say, “I’ve known; in times past, how you feel.”

  “Our closeness to the lord should take us no further from the wrongs that make us human, that define our religious corroboration. Every man has in him the abundant will to accomplish many things and our desires and our depressions, they are the triggers unto which the devil sets his traps. Even Jesus felt the thirst of temptation, for the flesh is does weaken; it suffocates the soul, so much that sometimes most people forget that the soul is even there. They get so caught up in their skin, in the packaging; painting it and making it sparkle, that they forget the reason for it, that their body is a package, it is a parcel, it is a gift from god. And they forget to look inside; to see themselves, to see their spirit, to see their purity, to see their Christian heart. Their sciences try to prove that it doesn’t exist at all so they can keep this swill and swell of desire and depression at the fingertips of each Christian, to lure them, away from the embrace of Jesus Christ and smooth their depressions with saturnine delight” said The 13th Apostle.

  Joao shook his head in ignorant acceptance as if every word were from his own tongue.

  “I didn’t understand the first word, corroborrobor or something. I’m sorry” he said, looking frightfully confused, no longer nodding in concordance, and feeling like a donkey in horses shoes.

  The 13th Apostle smiled generously and squeezed his hands tight over Joao’s shoulders, pressing his fingers firmly between the linkages of his bones, his hands almost tearing through the boy’s skin like a claw hammer though butter.

  “You are a pure Christian heart. This is what I dressed in my message. Forgive me my Joao, sometimes I get carried away by my own words, forgetting that they are just that, just sounds and its rude of me, rude and uneducated, to use words that you wouldn’t know. It doesn’t make me any smarter than you are in your misunderstanding. This was a test and I’m sorry you had to endure this but to serve the lord; we must accept that his will is for us to love and to suffer so that others may be led by our lightened hand towards the pastures of heaven. Let me show you something” said The 13th Apostle, lifting his weighty hands and guiding Joao out of the illustrious room, back through the construction where men signed papers and checked boxes while other men coursed their voices hoarse and crackly, inspiring through threat, the other men, who worked tired and laboring with their tools beating against wooden boards, picking splinters from their skin, wiping large beads of sweat from their brows and clearing phlegm from their throats, casting out large clumps of their swallowed pride; enveloped in dust, dirt and intimidation.

  The 13th Apostle guided Joao through a series of rooms, one being a massive auditorium, so big it looked like they could build a city inside.

  “This will be the new center of evangelism in the world. When this is finished, it will house over one hundred thousand people in every cult service. A place without war, where Christians from all over the world can migrate and join their hands as one, to finally worship Jesus Christ away from the tyranny of political injustice, away from the fear of bullets, away from corruption and away from the speck of false idols; a new Jerusalem, just for Christians” said The 13 Apostle, looking proud and almost coming to a tear as he looked around the massive auditorium, speaking in prolific zest and imagining the extent of his work and belief, living, breathing and praying before his eyes.

  Joao felt magnificent and insignificant in the same breath, under the wing of The Apostle, imagining as he imagined thinking only that The Bishop would so love to experience what he was now experiencing and that he couldn’t wait to tell him where he was and what he had seen.

  “You see that large cage over there?” said The 13 Apostle, pointing to the back of the auditorium where a large metal cage stepped out from the wall and stood all the way to the rooftop above.

  “That’s where we record, edit and send the word of god around the world. This will be the largest functional studio in the city, bigger than the TV studios” The Apostle said.

  Joao’s eyes were wide and impressing.

  “But it doesn’t come cheap Joao. The work we are doing here, to rebuild the temple of Jesus Christ, it aint cheap. We’ve made an emotional plea to our disciples, making it easy for them to donate to the building of the church and being a part of something so grand and universally important. But it’s not enough Joao. We still need another eleven million dollars to finish the works and I can only do so much and that’s where I need you, Jesus needs you´” said The Apostle.

  Joao felt a great imaginary weight collapse upon his shoulders.

  “What can I do? I am poor. I have no money” he said.

  “You’re coffee,” said The 13th Apostle, grinning so that his lips peeled back over his massive white teeth, lighting up the room and the will to favour in the young boy.

  The 13th Apostle took Joao again out of the auditorium and into a smaller room, passing many more that looked like an endless cavern of hallways that opened into large open areas, kitchens, bathrooms, small closets and many, many, many rooms.

  They entered a small room at the rear of the complex. It was shabby, with poorly laid carpet that was pulled up and fraying on all the edges, no window and no circulation whatsoever with a small table on one side with a small computer; nothing flashy, just something old and functional and a gallon of water sitting open and collecting dust in the corner.

  “This is my room,” said The 13th Apostle, “this is where I spend all of my days, thinking and praying. I don’t have riches. I don’t have plush seats and big screen televisions. All of that; the comfort, I give for my disciples and for the millions of Christians in this world who need this. I have my work and my dedication to Chri
st. It’s not easy work, but it is my life and my love, it is my passion. People like us Joao, we are not meant to be comfortable in what we do. Our work is to save souls and sometimes we have to give a little more and for us, to take a little less for us to be able to do our jobs. What did you want to be when you were a boy?” asked The 13th Apostle.

  “Useful,” said Joao, thinking only in his mind of having spent the whole of his youth watching how his life should have or could have been from the retreat of a broken window or a loose slat, hidden from the haggard expense of his busied and burdened family.

  “I wanted to be a race car driver,” said The 13th Apostle.

  The Apostle lifted his head lightly towards where the horizon might be sitting were they outside of these walls, flickered his left nostril like a hungered rabbit and feigned a light tear to almost look as if it might well in his eye and run down his cheek.

  He cleared an imaginary lump in his throat and lifted his left palm into the air as if he were setting the stage for a burden to lift itself with heavenly wings and fly free from the weighing repression of his silencing obligation.

  The two men stared pensively at the small table pushed against the wall and the small metal seat folded against it. Joao wondered how a man so big could sit at something so small.

  “What we want or what we wish of ourselves is not always what god intends. But we must listen to his word and make best our promise to serve. Jesus is calling you now. Do you hear his word?” he asked.

  “I think so, maybe. What is he saying?” said Joao.

  “He wants you to help him, to build his temple, to send his message to the people,” said The Apostle.

  “He wants me to pray, to lead a service’ asked Joao meekly.

  “He wants you to make coffee,” said The Apostle.

  Joao inhaled deeply as if trying to extinguish a fire in his belly, one set alight by his faith.

  “For who?” he asked, feeling as if he had no choice.

  The Apostle smiled generously again, this time to himself, keeping one of his hands clamped onto Joao’s shoulder, squeezing firmly and pushing the boy downwards in a strange and upsetting kind of dominating condolence.

  “Let us put to test, the gift that god has given you,” The 13th Apostle said, turning to Joao and taking his small, feeble hand in a firm, crushing grasp, almost swinging the boy like an empty bucket as he shook firm and with winning vigour.

  As The Apostle’s hand enveloped his own, Joao sank into the nightmare of his doubts and fears and saw in his mind and felt against the smoothness of his skin, the coarse abrasion of The Apostle’s bitter struggle. As the prodigious man; in personality, stature and size, stood before him with the crooked corners of his mouth almost touching his dangly ears and his white teeth glimmering in the dull light of the small office, Joao thought only of the handshake this man had made with an impervious dark figure.

  ”Is the devil real?” asked Joao.

  “He most surely is,” said The Apostle, “he is as real as you and I. Does that frighten you?” he asked.

  “Yes, it does,” said Joao.

  The Apostle pulled Joao close to his chest.

  “My son you have nothing to fear. You are in the house of god and now, you are one of his servants, one of his disciples. The devil cannot get your soul, my boy, as long as it is with god, as long as it is with us, here” The Apostle said, but the only words Joao could hear in his mind were; ‘any price’, words that he kept hearing over and over; what anyone would do or what anyone would give for their desire.

  “Grace, would you call in our guests,” said The Apostle to his receptionist, almost breaking the tiny buttons on the phone with his club-like finger.

  Joao had a worried look embossed in his eyes. He looked like he was willing himself to run, but that he was outside of his own body, unable to enact his will; defenseless, submitting, servile.

  “What did you see?” asked The 13th Apostle.

  “What?” said Joao, as if pulled from suspicion.

  “When you made my coffee. What did you see?”

  An image flashed before him, one that set a storm of impassable dread in his mind that had him feel isolated and his protest, censured. He didn’t know what to say; that he had seen him, a man of god, The 13th Apostle, shaking hands with the devil? And that this man had promised to collect the soul of every man, woman and child as the ‘any’ price that he was willing to pay.

  In his mind, this image lit up by flashes of lightning from the coming storm and the coming together of the two hands in concordance was met with the clapping of heavenly thunder, sounding out in dissention for what had just become.

  What would he say?

  “My apologies sir, your guests are here” spoke a small and tidy looking woman with a simple floral dress, cheap flat heeled shoes; her hair tied in a bob and; like a stray dog, dressed with the stricken look of poverty in her apologetic eyes.

  The Apostle, with his eyes, fated on Joao’s waiting for what truth the boy had to account for, lifted and shook his left hand, inviting the guests into the room.

  “Welcome,” he said to the guests, “before we discuss investment, can I offer you a coffee?”