Year Zero

by Jeff Long

  “We start over,” said Nathan Lee.

  “Why?” said Izzy. “Why put them through it again? Maybe they’re better off buried in their cells.”

  “No,” said Nathan Lee. “They’re not.”

  They tried to lead by example, walking past the clones’ open cell doors. “You see?” Izzy told them, “It’s safe.”

  “No,” men insisted. “The demons are waiting for us.”

  Near the end of the day, as the shadows turned purple, Ben came out into the yard. Nathan Lee was squatting by the fire. A cold front was passing through. The yard looked bleak, like an arena with its walls blackened with smoke. Leaves swirled on the circular breeze.

  Ben stood above him. “Where is that thing?” he asked. He meant the cross.

  Sparks rose among the pine boughs. “In the fire,” said Nathan Lee. Part of it had fallen into the dirt. He jabbed at it with a stick. “There.”

  “Why aren’t you afraid?”

  Nathan Lee reached for the words, something suitable to his role as a scribe. “God writes our life.”

  “If we let Him,” Ben said. Or perhaps he said, “Not if we don’t let Him,” or something like that. Nathan Lee’s Aramaic was elementary. Ben continued standing for another minute. Then he hunkered beside Nathan Lee at the edge of the fire pit. He found a stick of his own, and poked at the embers and flames.

  Izzy appeared in the doorway and came hurrying over, his sandals flapping. “Here you are,” he said.

  “Here we are,” said Nathan Lee. He motioned with his eyes for Izzy to join them. Izzy took his station to one side.

  Ben pointed his stick at Nathan Lee’s missing toes. “They say you tried to escape,” he said.

  “Like you,” said Nathan Lee. He gestured with his own stick at Ben’s scars and the missing tip of his ear.

  Ben grunted. “We’re alike, I think.” The seams on his ripped face were purple from the cold, or the flames. They lay on his skin like vines.

  “Two handsome men?” said Nathan Lee.

  Another grunt. “That must be it,” Ben said.

  Izzy looked from one to the other, trying to catch up with them. Or slow down. There was a rhythm here. He waited.

  “I see you listening. And listening,” Ben continued. He plucked at sparks as if they were insects. “Once that was me. Throwing my net in the air. Pulling the stories from the wind.”

  Nathan Lee didn’t say anything. He let Ben draw himself out. It was him who had searched Nathan Lee out, for some reason.

  “I used to gather stories, too,” he said. “From men like these.”

  “Our poor brothers?” said Nathan Lee.

  Ben’s eyes glittered. “Damned men,” he said. “Men on their trees.”

  The crucifix.

  “At the age of fifteen, I left my family to go wandering,” said Ben. “You know how young men are. Full of questions. Impatient for the world.”

  “Ask him,” Nathan Lee said in English. “Where did he go?” Time to bring Izzy into the loop. He didn’t want to miss the story.

  Izzy made himself transparent. He had become the best of translators. Their words flowed through him.

  “I roamed along the River,” said Ben. “I meandered south to the Dead Sea. It took me years. Along the way, I would stray for a week or a month, sometimes alone, sometimes working in a village. There were many people on foot, going here and there. Sometimes I would join one band or another. I studied with Pharisees and Saduccees. With heretics and pagans. I saw magic. Wandering Stoics shared their campfires. A colony of Essenes took me in. They fed me and taught me to read and write. At the end of three years, I left them. My teacher wanted me to stay. He was angry, not without reason, I suppose. But I had my own path to find.”

  He fell silent. Nathan Lee added another log to the fire. He poked it to a blaze. “What path?”

  “Through the emptiest place I could find. Into the desert,” Ben said, but he patted his heart. “It was a dangerous place, crawling with bandits and prophets and wild animals. I thought such a bare land could not possibly hide the truth. But I found no answers. And so I climbed out from the valley. I went up into the land of the damned.”

  Izzy finished quietly. They waited some more. When Ben spoke again, there was no need for translation. “Golgotha,” he said.

  Nathan Lee felt his blood racing. He glanced up at the walls, and every camera was trained on them. He could almost see them through the lenses, three men perched by a fire melted into a parking lot.

  “Have you been there?” Ben asked lightly.

  Nathan Lee met his eyes. “A long time ago.” He didn’t offer details.

  Ben went on. “I made it my home.”

  “Jerusalem?”

  “No,” said Ben. “In the garden. Among the trees.”

  Golgotha? Nathan Lee was careful. He kept his eyes on the fire. What was Ben telling him?

  “I lived there for an entire year. I slept in empty tombs that had been carved and were waiting for their wealthy owners. When one was filled, I would find another.”

  “You slept in tombs?”

  “You couldn’t stay in the open. It was cold. There were dogs. I learned to sleep with stones near at hand.”

  “To throw at the dogs?” asked Nathan Lee. He remembered Asia.

  Ben nodded. “And also at the women. The widows and mothers of crucified men. They were possessed by demons and roamed at night. Even the soldiers were afraid of them.”

  The flames made images. Resin hissed and snapped.

  “It was a different kind of wilderness,” Ben said. He spoke in bursts. “Further along the path stood the walls of Jerusalem. But you know that.” He stopped.

  “Not like you are telling,” said Nathan Lee.

  Ben grunted. He flicked at the fire. “At night you could hear the sounds of babies crying and people talking and laughing. The smell of food drifted over the walls on the breeze. You couldn’t see the cook fires and lamps, but they cast a light as gold as butter.

  “The crucified men would think they were dreaming. But, of course, they were not. To sleep was to die.”

  He meant it literally. The process of dying on a cross had become lost in the mists of time. In the centuries after crucifixion fell from use, artists had begun depicting Christ in heroic poses with a nail through each palm. Even after Leonardo da Vinci experimented with cadavers and learned that the weight of a human body would have torn the palms free, the nail through the hand had remained a popular fiction. In the same way, misled by artists and storytelling priests, people had come to believe death came from the bleeding and torture, even from a broken heart. Not until a twentieth-century physician conducted a medical reconstruction was it realized that death resulted from asphyxiation. Once your legs gave out and you hung from your arms, the diaphragm was quickly overtaxed and you suffocated.

  “When the moon came up,” Ben continued, “their shadows were like a forest. I remember lightning playing along the faraway sea. I remember a man’s dog that came and lay at his feet and starved there, guarding his body. Sometimes they would sing to each other on their crosses. Village songs. Prayers. It could be very beautiful.”

  He stopped again. He squinted as if peering into a deep hole.

  “Why?” asked Nathan Lee.

  Ben noticed him with a start.

  “Why did you live with the dead?”

  Nathan Lee already had a hunch. He’d visited the burning ghats along rivers in India and Nepal. Since long before Siddhartha, ascetics had gathered like vultures around the sick and dying and dead to meditate upon impermanence and suffering. Two thousand years ago, it wasn’t only spices and silk that flowed along the trade routes, but philosophies, too.

  “Not the dead,” Ben corrected him, “the dying. Each morning the sun rose up from the desert, over the crest of the Mount of Olives.” His hand moved in the air, describing the arc. “Then I would start my circle. I went from cross to cross and to the trees where they were tied and n
ailed. I talked to the dying men. They would live for days on their piece of wood. If a man was strong, he might last a week up there. I sat by their feet and we would talk like you and I are talking now.

  “Oh, they told me everything. About their families and crops, their animals, their failures and triumphs, the weather, their first time with a woman, how many shekels or denarii their neighbors still owed them or they owed their neighbors. What a blessing it was when a cloud crossed the sun. They talked about weakness and temptation and evil. And they talked about their hopes.”

  “Hopes?” said Nathan Lee.

  “Yes. Even with the wood against their spines, even drying out in the white sun, they held onto their hopes. They talked about the future. Their plans. How they would improve their field or build a new room onto their house. How their sons would prosper. How their daughters would be beautiful. All day long I visited them. When they were near the end, I would stand on a rock and watch their eyes.” He held one finger up, inches from his face. He stared at it.

  “Slept in graves,” Izzy muttered in English. “Hung around with dying prisoners. Hitchhiked on their death experience.”

  “Let him speak,” said Nathan Lee.

  “Have you ever followed a man on his cross?” Ben asked.

  “How do you mean?” evaded Nathan Lee.

  A log burned through just then, collapsing the others in a spray of sparks. Its heat foundered. The cold and dusk surged against their backs. The men added more wood. Nathan Lee crouched and pursed his lips and blew. The flames leapt high and warm again. Ben squatted in his place again. Nathan Lee went back to his perch along the edge. It took a few more minutes to resume.

  “It’s like watching a man build a fire,” Ben commented. He had the storyteller’s gift of borrowing from what was at hand, in this case their fire. “His journey on the cross. At first there is smoke and your eyes sting. Then the heat and light appear. At last the smoke clears away.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Nathan Lee.

  “At first you resist,” Ben said. “You struggle. It goes on that way for a very long time. But near the end, there are openings in the pain. There is clarity. After all that violence, there is peace. God creeps in.”

  “Is that what you saw in their eyes?”

  “Yes, like in the eyes of a newborn infant. God.”

  High in the tree, they heard a rustling sound. It was a bird, trapped in one of Joab’s nets. God would be getting a snack in the morning.

  “These dying men,” said Nathan Lee, “what did they think of you?”

  “Some cursed me. Others begged me to stay. It is very lonely on the cross. They called me many things. In their minds I was their friend and their enemy. I was God’s servant and I was the devil. They called me brother and son and father and rru-bee.”

  “Is that how you saw yourself? A rabbi?”

  “No. I was the student. They were my masters.”

  “Were you there to save them?” he pressed.

  “Some asked the same thing.”

  “Then why did you torment them?”

  “Why do you torment us?” But Ben’s tone was not hostile. Only clever.

  He knows what we are, thought Nathan Lee. He’s been out among us. “To learn,” he said.

  Ben smiled, a gruesome contortion. “You see, we are the same. We search for the common thread, the thing that connects kings and thieves and infants and dying men.”

  Ben swam his stick back and forth through the flames as if tracing distant words.

  “Didn’t the soldiers drive you away?” asked Nathan Lee.

  “Sometimes. Mostly they were glad to have me there. It could be lonely for them, too. They were far from home. Also, for some, they had no one else to see their cruelty at work. Or their kindness. Oh yes, the soldiers could be compassionate. For a price, they would mix gall with the water and give the poison on a sponge on a stick. Some did it for free. Or they broke the men’s legs before the suffering went on too long. Or cut their knees with a knife.” He made a slicing gesture with his stick across the front tendon on Nathan Lee’s knee.

  “After that, they could not stand. The end might take another hour. But they would be spared the days and nights.”

  “Did you bring those kinds of mercy to dying men?” Nathan Lee asked. “Gall. And the knife.” Was that that what this was, a confession? Had he been a killer angel?

  In the firelight, the scars seemed to crawl across Ben’s face. “No. I was afraid. The soldiers would have put me on the cross in their place. Those bodies were the property of the emperor.”

  “Did you help bury them, then?”

  “Not that, either. They were left hanging. Or were pulled down and thrown into the quarries. Food for the birds and flies and animals. Even their names were eaten.”

  “But some of the bodies were buried.”

  “Few. I remember one. His family bribed the soldiers. The body was taken down that night. They had to work quickly. A slave’s body was dug up and tied in his place, otherwise the soldiers would have been crucified themselves. I was new to Golgotha, then. It shocked me. It seemed unjust. Even dead, the poor have no place in this world.”

  Izzy spoke. “Did you know a man they called the m-shee-haa?” Nathan Lee was surprised by the abrupt question, by his solemnity. Then he realized Izzy was setting the man up.

  “Yes.” Ben answered.

  “You saw him?”

  “There were many messiahs.”

  Izzy laughed with relief. Ben did not look offended. To the contrary, he seemed amused by Izzy’s amusement.

  “At the end of your year at Golgotha, what happened to you?” asked Nathan Lee.

  “I left.”

  “But you returned.”

  “Not for ten years more.”

  “Why? Why ever go back to that place again?”

  “Yes, why?” said Ben. He ran his fingers through the flames.

  Nathan Lee glanced at Izzy, and he looked suspicious, even cynical. He didn’t believe in messiah claptrap. Ben didn’t speak for a full minute. Nathan Lee didn’t prod him. He was willing to let the story go at that. He didn’t believe either.

  Then Ben resumed. “I went off through the land. I thought I would never have to go back to Jerusalem again. But the land shrank. My path circled. I don’t know how it happened. My eyes were wide open. I had command of my feet. But one day I found myself there again. And this time they gave me my own tree.”

  He finished matter of factly, and stood up. He moved around the fire to go inside.

  “Was it the way you thought it would be?” Nathan Lee asked him. Clarity. Peace. God.

  “No. None of it,” Ben said. “I looked out from up there, and the world is so beautiful.” He looked at Nathan Lee through the flames. “I never wanted to leave.”

  28

  Revelation

  OCTOBER

  An afternoon squall rose up from the valley and lashed the mesa, a storm made for lovers. The rain drove the birds to roost, and people fled the streets. Lightning snaked, thunder rolled. Hail rattled against her bedroom window.

  Nathan Lee and Miranda barely noticed. They hardly surfaced from her house anymore, so it seemed. Alpha Lab was mostly just as an interlude, a place to catch their breath. Then they would find themselves here all over again.

  Riding him, she seemed to be looking down from a great height. He kept reaching for her. She ground at him. She pinned him in place. He raised her high.

  The storm kept pace with them. They finished together, the rain and them. Soon the low sun came out and cast colors across the far range.

  Night took its time. They rested in each other’s arms and watched out her window, softly talking, as much to breathe their scents as trade thoughts. On the sea, he had discovered, sunset was like a light switch, on then off. But here in the mountains the light tarried. The colors seeped like cold honey.

  Beneath the quilt, their hands traveled from here to there with no urgency or end, mem
orizing the landmarks on their own, the shape of a hip, the places with hair, the grooves and mounds. Their fingers traced miles along their spines. They had run off with each other. The forbidden country was theirs to own.

  Neither had time for this. They had talked about it. They had higher priorities. They were ten years apart in age. He was too old for her by a lifetime. She was barely twenty, practically jailbait. Each was a loner. It was a temporary arrangement, they assured each other. I will leave you, they warned. For now it seemed they could go on forever.

  Finally it was dark, night proper. Stars came out. They ebbed into sleep, warm against each other.

  Her phone woke them. Miranda reached for it. “Yes,” she said. “Yeah, he’s here, too.” Still listening, she mouthed, “The Captain.”

  “He did what?” she finally asked. “But that’s crazy. Don’t we feed them enough?”

  Them, thought Nathan Lee. Something had happened to the clones. He recalled their escape talk. One of them must have gone for the wall. Which one would it be, Ben again?

  Miranda glanced at her clock. “That’s that, then,” she said to the Captain. “We knew it would happen eventually. What’s to say, so what? No one will take it seriously.” The Captain went on. She sat up and bent over the phone, her long back bare. “Is this some kind of joke?” she said. “How could that happen?”

  The Captain’s voice went on.

  “Never mind,” Miranda snapped, “we’re on our way.”

  She hung up. “You’ll love this,” she said, standing to dress. “One of our lost boys decided he’s the savior.” She threw Nathan Lee his shirt. “The word’s out. We’ve got Jesus Christ in a cage in our basement.”

  “HERE WE GO,” Nathan Lee said as he and Miranda approached Alpha Lab.