The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

by Peter Roman

  You’re thinking I can’t really be him. Christ. And you’re right. I’m not him—or Him, if that’s your preference. I’m what he left behind, the body that he used for his earthly incarnation and then abandoned when he died. The afterbirth, if you will.

  I’m who woke up in the burial cave after Christ shuffled off this mortal coil. I’m who left that cave and went out into the world to wreak more mayhem than miracles. Not Christ, but a lost soul trapped in Christ’s resurrected body.

  Whose lost soul? I don’t know. I woke up in Christ’s body in the cave with no memories. No memories of my own, at least. I still had some of Christ’s memories. They came to me as I lay there on the cave floor in the first moments of my life.

  I remembered Christ sitting with Judas at a wooden table in a small room somewhere. A few lamps burning olive oil and some cups of wine. No one else though—no apostles, no serving staff, no painters taking down the scene to preserve it for the ages. Just Judas and Christ. Only I remembered it as Judas and me, because that’s just the way things work in this body of mine.

  I hadn’t known what Judas was when I was Christ. I had thought him to be just another mortal in search of meaning to his empty life. He’d shown up at a speech I’d given outside a temple, about the evils of moneylenders. A lot of good that accomplished. When I was done and the crowd had wandered back to their market stalls, Judas came to me and offered his hands for whatever work I needed. And so I put him to work. And he was loyal and faithful to the cause, and he quickly became my hands in the world. He arranged the public events and brought out the crowds, first in the dozens and then the hundreds. He paid the soldiers to look the other way. And we spread the gospel and converted the followers of the dead and dying gods to my growing army of the faithful. And it was good.

  Until there we were, sharing wine I’d made, resting after a long day Judas had arranged of impressing my followers by having me walk on water and raise the dead. I was out of grace thanks to the day’s activities, but when I was the real Christ I just had to wait for it to regenerate. If you’re one of those who is supposed to have it, like I used to be, it comes back on its own. You don’t have to get involved in all the messy business of slaying angels and such.

  But Judas had left me no time to replenish my grace.

  “You’re going to fall,” he told me in the room that night, gazing into his wine like he was reading entrails. “Just like all the others who believed themselves eternal.”

  I thought I knew what he was talking about. My job as Christ was to save humanity. I wasn’t supposed to die for their sins—that’s just empty revisionism. I was supposed to convert them all and spread the Garden out over the Earth. Yes, there used to be a Garden of Eden and it was on the Earth. Still is. An airport is in its place now.

  “Patience, my friend,” I said. “This is just the beginning of the voyage. We’ll reach our hallowed destination in time.”

  Yeah, that was the way I used to talk. Unbearable.

  “No, I mean I’m not going to let you do it,” Judas said and chuckled. He looked at me and showed me his true self for the first time. His eyes went black, like a serpent’s, only even darker. His skin took on the hue of a corpse. Even his shape changed, twisting into something gaunt and skeletal that was not quite human. And his voice became a thousand different voices, all whispering in unison. “I will turn your dreams to ash and dust, just like the dreams of all the saviours who have come before you.”

  I pushed myself away from the table, from him. “What manner of abomination are you?” I cried. But I knew the answer from his words even as I asked the question. He was something older than me, something older than the Father and the seraphim. Perhaps even older than the demons. But I wasn’t exactly sure what. A minor god of a people long dead, perhaps. One of the countless tricksters who roamed the earth, wreaking mischief and havoc. Or perhaps something even more ancient and alien. Something the world had forgotten.

  “I am the serpent in your garden,” Judas said. And thus the sound of armoured hands pounding on the door, and I knew I was betrayed. And I didn’t have so much as a breath of grace to defend myself.

  “But I could have saved even you,” I told him.

  Judas toasted me with the wine. “The thing you need to learn,” he said, “is that not everyone wants your salvation.” And then he got up as a human once again and opened the door. And the rest, so they say, is history.

  If ruining things for all of humanity wasn’t bad enough, Judas also came to me in the form of the Roman legionnaire who stuck the spear in my side while I was on the cross, dying that first time. He tried to get the other legionnaires to join him in poking me, but they were too busy betting who would die first: me, the thief on my left, or the political agitator on my right. The agitator was preaching an early form of communism, if you must know, but, obviously, the world wasn’t ready for it yet.

  There were more crosses planted around the hill. Skeletons hung from them, picked clean by the birds. Skulls littered the ground underfoot. The very earth seemed to be made of bones. A sign of what we were to become. From dust I was born and now, it seemed, to dust I would return.

  The angels were there, of course. Perched on the crosses in the hundreds, watching me die. They had cast sleights so no one would notice them, but I saw them. They were there for me, after all.

  They could have stopped the entire event. They could have rescued me from the cross. They could have slaughtered the Romans and put Judas in my place. But they did none of these things. They just looked on and did nothing. I have no idea why they didn’t save me. Perhaps because I was human, in a way. Perhaps because it was the Father’s will. Perhaps because they were already fallen.

  When the other legionnaires got bored of waiting for us to expire and went off in search of some wine and camp whores, Judas climbed up the cross to look at me face to face. And there were those black eyes again.

  “I see you have an honour guard,” he said in that chorus of voices, glancing around at all the angels. “Or are they here for one of the others?”

  “You have damned the world,” I said. “When I would have redeemed it.”

  He spat on the bones beneath us. “You and your kind damned my world many ages ago,” he said. “Now I’m damning yours. I will spread chaos where you would have spread your precious garden.”

  “You cannot bring back that which is gone,” I said. “This is meaningless.”

  He leaned in close enough I could smell his breath. Meat and blood and all things nice.

  “You are preaching to the converted on that front,” he said.

  “Soon I will be nothing,” I said. “And humanity along with me. But your kind, whatever they may have been, will still be nothing as well.”

  “We are all nothing in the end,” Judas said. “Just like the beginning. It’s what we do in between that matters. And today I have done something that matters a great deal.”

  “I curse you for all the ages,” I told him. “You will never know peace again. Everything you love will be taken from you.”

  Judas kissed me on the lips. “And you, little monkey,” he breathed.

  Then he gouged out my eyes and threw himself off the cross, and I went painfully and tediously into that good night.

  And that should have been it, except that I woke up in that cave some time later, about as far from paradise as you can get, not knowing who I was, not knowing where I was, with nothing in my mind but those memories. I should have been dead, but instead I was born.

  I used to be Christ, but now I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t him in the same way you know a dream wasn’t real when you wake. I woke in that cave trapped in a body that wasn’t mine, a lost soul with no memories of my own. I didn’t know how I’d got there, or where or even what I had been before, but I knew I wasn’t Christ.

  I was born and I yearned for something to fill the void inside me. The void that Christ h
ad left. I was born and I hated. I hated Judas instinctively. Perhaps because of the memories of what he had done to Christ. Perhaps because I suspected he played some role in me being trapped in Christ’s body. That hate has never faded, even now, but then he’s given me plenty of reasons over the centuries to keep on hating.

  I had hoped Judas dead after our last encounter, after Penelope, but if what Cassiel told me was true, then it seemed Judas was still alive. And Cassiel didn’t strike me as the type to make things up.

  Cassiel probably knew I’d do anything to get my hands on Judas, to corner him in a little chamber like I’d cornered Remiel. Remiel wasn’t personal. Remiel was just grace.

  But Judas. Judas was personal.

  A VISIT WITH THE MONA LISA

  AND OTHER CURIOSITIES

  Every quest has to start somewhere, but luckily this one had an obvious starting point: the Mona Lisa in Paris. The one that Cassiel seemed to think wasn’t the real Mona Lisa.

  So I took Remiel’s money from his shoulder bag and I slept on a bench in the Barcelona train station. Only one pickpocket tried to take the money from my pants during the night, and I caught a couple of his fingers and broke them without opening my eyes. After that, no one else bothered me.

  I took the first train to Paris in the morning. As we pulled out of the station we passed an old steam locomotive with a single passenger car sitting on one of the side tracks, empty of travellers or crew. Both locomotive and car were painted white, with crimson wheels. They were waiting for someone to board. I knew this because I’d been warned about the train once by a Spanish sculptor I’d raised from the dead to ask about some of his missing works. I thought maybe if he knew where they were I could find them and sell them to afford more wine and women. I’d tell you his name but I’ve forgotten it. Just like history has forgotten him.

  The sculptor didn’t know what had happened to the missing works, and he no longer cared. But he did tell me about the white train, maybe because a railway ran past the cemetery where I raised him, and maybe because I’d brought wine with me to the cemetery. He said the white train went to Paris, but a different Paris. The Paris of people’s dreams and fantasies, the perfect Paris. The Paris that didn’t exist and you would never find unless you were on that train. He said you wouldn’t want to go there, though, because the white train only makes one-way trips. I don’t know how he knew that. I’m still not even sure if he was telling the truth or just making it up. But ever since then I’ve avoided white trains. He said there were trains like it all around the world, making trips to impossible cities. I left him in his grave with the wine and a promise to raise him again for more drinks some day, although I never did. It wasn’t the first promise I’d broken to the dead, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  So I took the regular train to Paris. Once there, I stopped at a café by the river Seine and enjoyed a croissant and espresso on the patio. Anyone can do espresso well, but only the French can make a proper croissant. I watched the river and the traffic, the flow of people along the streets. I returned the smile of the waitress who brought me the bill and gave her a large tip, because, why not? I watched the tourists holding hands and laughing as they looked for the best places along the riverbank to pose for photos. They wouldn’t have thought it quite so romantic during the Robespierre days, but what city worth visiting didn’t have a troubled past? I thought of all the women I’d loved over the centuries who hadn’t loved me in return, not once they found out what I was. And I thought of the one that had loved me back. I took in the sight of the Notre Dame church again. Paris has changed a great deal over the centuries, but it always feels familiar to me thanks to landmarks like Notre Dame. Although, even many landmarks are different now. Remind me to tell you the story sometime about what happened to the original Arc de Triomphe.

  When I felt ready, I got up and wandered along the sidewalks bordering the river, to the Louvre. I stopped to look at vendors’ paintings and old books every now and then, but seeing as I was currently homeless I refrained from buying anything. However, I was tempted by a chess set with hand-carved pieces. Napoleon and his troops on one side, Wellington and his cannon fodder on the other. Guess which side was black.

  When I finally reached the Louvre I stood in line like any other tourist and let the guard at the entrance search my bag. I’d left the knife back in Remiel’s chamber as a mystery to anyone who might one day find their way up there, which meant my backpack didn’t hold anything more suspicious than my dirty laundry now.

  I didn’t think there was any need for haste, so I wandered the wings for a while, re-acquainting myself with old friends. I sat on a bench and studied Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa for what had to be the thousandth time. You just couldn’t find a better example of the human condition than that.

  Then I steeled myself and joined the crowd struggling to get into the room holding the Mona Lisa. I couldn’t even see the painting on account of all the people holding up phones and cameras to take pictures. There was barely space to move, so I just pulled my hat lower over my face and inched forward whenever I could. What the place really needs is one of those Japanese subway station attendants to push people through.

  Eventually I made my way close enough to the front of the crowd that I could look over people’s shoulders and see the Mona Lisa in its protective casing. It looked the same as the last time I’d seen it. It looked the same as all the images you’ve ever seen of it, although most of the posters are usually larger than the real thing. I’ve never seen the reason for all the fuss, to be honest. Sure, she has that thing going on with her smile, but it’s hardly enough to warrant all the attention. The people around me seemed to share my sentiments, judging from their body language and their muttered comments to each other in various languages. I didn’t need to hear their words to understand what they were saying: the language of disappointment is a universal one. And I certainly couldn’t see anything special enough about the painting to warrant an angel’s interest.

  I wondered if the painting we were looking at was a fake, if it had been switched with the original during one of the many times the Mona Lisa had been stolen. But surely the curators would know if that were the case. Unless, of course, they had some reason for not admitting to such a thing.

  I sighed and pushed my way past the painting and into the next exhibit room. I was never going to figure this one out on my own. I needed help.

  I kept walking and doing my best impression of a lost tourist until I reached a hall with an impressive staircase, with an even more impressive statue of a winged woman at the top. She’d probably be the most impressive thing in the Louvre if she had a head and arms, but she didn’t. They’d been knocked off and lost long ago. Her official name is Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the official story is she’s some deity or another in the religion of a lost Greek cult. As usual, though, the official history corresponds to the truth about as much as the real Paris resembles the dream one. If the Louvre staff knew what they really had on their hands, they’d have taken her out to some quarry and blown her up with explosives a long time ago. Or maybe dropped her off the edge of some tanker in the middle of an ocean. All right, maybe not. Curators being what they are, they’d probably just lock her in some crate somewhere in the basement, to be opened only during drunken staff Christmas parties. Which would make it much harder for me to ask her questions about the Mona Lisa, so all’s well that ends well.

  I stepped to the side of a pillar and used a bit of Remiel’s grace to conceal myself with a sleight. Now if people looked at me they’d think I was just a bit of dust in their eye. I used that cover to climb up on to a window ledge away from anything that anybody would want to photograph. I leaned back against the wall of the ledge and soaked up the sunlight coming in through the window. I dozed a little but I made sure not to drift off too much. I didn’t want to fall from the ledge and onto someone walking by. Things could get awkward.

  I waited for
the museum to close, surrounded by dead memories.

  Naturally, I dreamed of Judas.

  ATER THE RESURRECTION

  The Romans had thrown my body into a cave and then sealed the entrance with rocks. Or maybe Judas had done it. I don’t know why I hadn’t been left on the hillside where I’d been crucified with all the other dead. I guess someone wanted me to disappear forever. But, as I’ve since learned, the world is full of surprises.

  Once I learned how to sit up and then walk again, I pushed the rocks aside until there was enough room for me to wriggle out, into the light. I left the cave where I was born and went out into the world. I didn’t know how long my body had lain in that cave, but I discovered I was now a stranger in a strange land. My body had been transported far from where I had wandered in Christ’s days, to a region where no one knew me or had heard tales of the miracles he had performed. I was just another anonymous drifter.

  I wandered from village to village in those days, hiring myself out for whatever jobs were available for a man with no past. A man who didn’t know who he was. Sometimes I was a shepherd or a common labourer. They were good jobs for someone with no skills. At least I knew a couple of languages, thanks to Christ’s memories.

  I didn’t try to follow in his footsteps and preach the word of God. Look where that had got him. Besides, whatever I was, I knew I was a man, and I wasn’t the sort of man Christ ever would have been able to convert.

  Mostly, I worked as extra muscle in the militia of some chieftain or another. I learned how to fight, and I discovered that my body healed fast, which was handy in that line of work. This was back before I knew all the tricks of grace. Hell, this was before I even knew what grace was. All I knew was that I was always hungry, I always felt an emptiness inside that drove me from one place to another, searching for something to fill it. I didn’t know then it was hunger for what I’d lost with Christ.