Bone Box

by Jay Amberg

  Altay slides the computer onto Travers’ lap, but she remains close to him on the ledge. The screen is bright, and he glances at the sheered oval.

  “We’re near the top of the cliff,” she says. “Light only escapes up from here. No one can see anything.”

  This manuscript, he thinks, is illuminated in a way that would shock medieval monks.

  “There are two documents,” she says. “This one was written before Jesus of Nazareth died. I don’t know if he dictated it to a scribe or if someone there in the Garden recorded the words.”

  Feeling her breathing next to him, he begins to read.

  Hear, O Israel! Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your strength. Hear me, all of you, and understand. Fear the Lord. The Kingdom of God is at Hand. The Day of God’s vengeance is upon us.

  I have come to deliver you, O Israel. I am the Son of Man. I am God’s hand. I have rebuked the wind and stilled the seas. I have made the blind see and the deaf hear and the lame walk. I have forgiven sins. I have cleansed lepers and cast out demons. I have raised the dead.

  Serve no Lord but God. Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Beware of the teachers of the law. The deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things choke the words of the Scribes and the Pharisees. This is a wicked generation. Caiaphas and the high priests are a brood of vipers. The men of Ninaveh will stand up at the Judgment with this generation and condemn it. The Pharisees who nullify the word of God for the sake of tradition will be punished most severely. The Temple is called a house of prayer, but they make it a den of robbery. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you snakes!

  When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites who love to pray standing in synagogues and on street corners. Be careful not to practice righteousness in front of others. When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as do the hypocrites in the synogogues.

  Serve no earthly master. Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. Do not suppose I have come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to bring fire on earth.

  A prophet is not without honor except in his own town. Whoever is not with me is against me. They have hated me without reason. Woe to the man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. Whoever disowns me before others will be disowned before the angels of God.

  You will be betrayed even by parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.

  They will seize you and persecute you. Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning. If you do not have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. The Son of Man is coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.

  When Travers finishes reading, his eyes burn. He takes a breath that hitches twice, and then he exhales through his nose, a sound to him like steam escaping. Altay’s eyes are on him, gauging his response. He meets her gaze but doesn’t immediately say anything. These words, revolutionary two millennia ago, are probably even more inflammatory now. Their release will cause controversy, maybe even chaos. “And you’re sure it’s authentic?” he asks, nodding to the screen.

  “Absolutely!” Her eyes narrow. “You know it is.”

  He feels the tight, stitched burning in his thigh and the scorched spot on his calf, whose pain he didn’t notice while he was reading. His mind flashes to his dealings with Monuglu and Kirchburg and Lee and Schmidt and the smaller man who cut him. “Where’s the original?”

  “Safe.” Her lips purse. “I have it in a safe place.” The finality in her voice, like that when they first spoke on the Blue Hotel’s rooftop and when she was about to flee from her house’s veranda, shuts him out once more.

  He skims the print on the screen, stopping at, I have come to bring fire on earth. “Who else has read this?” he asks.

  “Abrahim.” She takes a breath. “Leopold, if you’re right about him having the files. He reads some Aramaic.”

  He bites his lower lip. “And you’re going to release it when it’s authenticated?”

  “It’s authentic,” she snaps. “I will disseminate it as soon as I safely can.” She shifts her weight away from him.

  He stares at the final sentence. The Son of Man is coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. “Sophia…,” he starts but then stops himself. He runs his tongue over his front teeth. “Won’t it stir up a firestorm of would-be prophets and self-styled saviors?”

  She turns from him and says to the cave’s darkness, “It is the truth.” In the computer’s light, the muscles around her jaw look like they are knotting. “I have discovered it. It must come out.”

  His mind races through a tumult of images—Israeli hardliners on the attack, Palestinian rockets and suicide bombers, Middle Eastern messiahs and caliphs rising in the desert, inciting tens of thousands, and jihadists rallying to destroy the enemy of Allah. Anyone who feels directly ordained by God—or pretends to—will use these words as a righteous call for insurgency. The Talaban and other tyrants will justify the oppressive terrors of their theocracies. Demagogues will rain death on infidels, and, in fact, anyone who disagrees with them. Christian fundamentalists everywhere, but especially in America, will declare the End Times at hand and call for the creation of the New Jerusalem. And those already paranoid political, religious, and economic power-brokers will suppress dissent—everywhere. His voice low, he asks, “Have you thought through the possible consequences?”

  As she turns, her eyes lock on him. “I have.” Her voice is sharp. “And I’ve thought of the consequences of not releasing the truth.” Her eyes narrow. “Rumors about the ossuary’s contents are already flooding the internet.”

  “Impia fama,” he says.

  She cocks her head.

  “Evil rumors spread fast.”

  “They will be much worse than the truth.”

  He’s not sure. He doesn’t necessarily disagree with her—he just doesn’t know. He needs to walk, to think. Turning the computer screen, he asks, “When did Abrahim read this?”

  “Last night when he came to see me.” She clasps her hands. “He was distraught. I thought it—or at least John the Apostle’s letter—would settle him down. They only made it worse. I did not know what he…what had happened.”

  “Does he know where the original is?”

  She shakes her head. “I am the only one.”

  Her face is olive in the light from the screen, and her eyes are the green of sea glass. People will kill—have killed—to possess this document. And people will kill—have killed?—to suppress it. Kill her, and the voice is silenced. He gazes up through the slashed rock at the night sky, the scimitar of stars. “What are you going to do?”

  She takes the computer from his lap. “I was going to talk that over with Monsieur Glavine.”

  “But you don’t want to email the translation?”

  “I do not trust the internet.”

  He looks into her eyes, now otherworldly in the computer’s light.

  “I trust neither those eavesdropping on the web,” she adds, “nor those in the Glavine Foundation offices.”

  “But you’ve already made English and Turkish translatations?”

  “And French and Spanish.”

  He takes a long, slow breath. “Whom do you trust?”

  Her eyes glint, as if to say, I trusted you.

  “Sophia?”

  “I don’t know. Certainly no one from the Aegean Association or the Eagle Consortium. I mistrust government officials. And all reporters.” Her smile is fleeting. “I would t
rust a few of my mother’s colleagues and friends, but they’re all gone. Two of my retired dons at Cambridge, whom I’ve been unable to reach.”

  “And what about the bone box’s other contents?”

  “Abrahim hid the bones, even from me. He believes they are the Christ’s. But the femurs are broken.”

  “Are they Christ’s?”

  “The ossuary is authentic, but I have not seen the bones. Even if I had, I lack the expertise…”

  Travers looks into her eyes again. “And the other document, John the Apostle’s letter. Have you translated it?”

  “It is of less import.”

  “Still, I need to read it, too.”

  50

  As Altay closes the file and opens another, he watches the light play across the saints on the walls and ceiling. When she slides the computer back onto his lap, she says, “This, Joseph, was written later. The papyrus is different. The hand is less hurried, but more uncertain. Each word is carefully wrought, as though writing were learned only late in life.”

  He rubs his eyes, takes a breath, and begins to read once more.

  I am John, the one Jesus, the Nazarean, loved. He called my brother, James, and me the Sons of Thunder, but now I am old. I have lived almost three times again as long as I did before I stood on Golgotha. All of the disciples with whom I broke bread are gone, betrayed and persecuted and martyred in the name of the Nazarean. Saul of Tarsis and Timothy and so many others are gone, too. But I am still here in this world. Jesus said of me, “If I want him to live until I come, what is it to you?” So reports spread among his followers, Hebrews and gentiles, that I would not die. But I have come to understand that he will not return. He will not rescue me. His time is not our time.

  When he hung on the cross, he said to his mother as I stood there, “He is your son.” He said to me, “She is your mother.” While his brother, James the Just, was alive, I took vengeance upon those who crucified him. To watch him suffer and die on that tree was the most painful moment of my life. I was never again with man or woman. We are meant to lie with others, but I lay alone for the rest of my days. I despaired, and out of despair came malice.

  I took vengeance on the Pharisees, one by one. Cloaked, I went about like the Sicarii taking revenge. I was truly, as he said, the Son of Thunder. I was the terrific silence between lightning and thunder. I did not cease until Jonathan lay in his own blood on the Temple floor.

  ”The Sicarii?” he asks.

  “Religious fanatics. Assassins.”

  “Jonathan?”

  “The Jerusalem Temple’s High Priest, killed in 55 CE.” She taps his arm with her index and middle fingers. “Keep reading.”

  Others, the Sicarii and disciples and strangers, paid for my acts. I suffered for what I did, but only at my own hand. Neither his mother nor mine nor my brother James nor James the Just nor any of the others ever knew what was in my heart.

  I was never caught, except in my own heart. Jesus came to accept men and women like me. He believed in those who believed in him. I strayed from that path into despair and loathing. With time comes understanding. Over the years I came to understand the hollowness of my acts.

  I have seen years of persecution, years of hatred. I have seen women stoned and boys thrown from the Temple roof for what they believed. I have seen crowds, at the bidding of the Sanhedrin, tear people apart. I have seen Roman burnings and beheadings and crucifictions. I have hid from the Pharisees and fled from the Roman wrath. I will never honor Caesar. I will never offer sacrifices to Roman gods or to any emperor. I worship the Lord my God and serve Him only.

  My brother James was beheaded. When Ananus and the Sanhedrin had James the Just stoned to death for blasphemy, I finally took their mother away from Jerusalem. We came to Ephesus, far from the revolt and the coming slaughter and destruction and annihilation. I cared for her all these years as a son will. We lived among the gentiles near this city but apart from it. She died slowly, her breath becoming more shallow over many days until she no longer breathed. After I buried her under the trees near the spring she loved so much, I moved from that hill to this that I love. I can look down across the city and harbor at the shining sea. I can watch the fishing boats come and go. Each morning is my prayer. Every day is a blessing. The light among these trees bathes me in God’s love every moment.

  I have seen light as well as darkness. I have seen years of charity, years of love. I have seen men share their last loaves of bread. I have seen women suckle the newborn and bathe the dying. I have been broken not by the cruelty of the Pharisees or the brutality of the Romans but by my own acts. Only love has made me whole again. This I have, over time, learned, and this I have taught. It is difficult, as my brothers and sisters have learned. In the end, there is no other way. I have come to love my neighbor and my enemy. I have come to understand the truth of this and many other things since Golgotha.

  I, like Jesus the Nazarean, have been betrayed. The fierce storms, the lightning and thunder of my youth, are gone from me. I will neither de-nounce the gentiles to the Hebrews nor the Hebrews to the gentiles. I will denounce no one to the Romans. Because I will not take sides in the discord here, my time has come. I will not live to see the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem. I will never see the one who loved me come upon the clouds of heaven.

  Travers stops biting his lip when he tastes blood. Jesus of Nazareth was messianic, and he died brutally for his zealotry. John, his disciple, was more complicated, a vengeful murderer who survived the calamitous machinations of his generation—the Jewish revolt, internecine fighting among the Jewish sects, the Romans’ obliteration of Judaea, the sack of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, the extermination or enslavement of the Jews, the diaspora of the survivors. He eventually found some balance, even meaning, in the world. But he was apparently betrayed and murdered, too. The statements I have seen light as well as darkness and Each morning is my prayer and Only love has made me whole again—all echo. Altay is right that Saint John’s is the less important historical document, but it speaks more deeply to him, providing something of a counterbalance to the revolutionary zeal of Jesus. He feels for just a moment as though he’s on a hill among the ruins of a cathedral as well as in a cave church carved high in an escarpment. On a path along a creek in sunlight and wind and birdsong as well as in quiet darkness lit by a computer screen.

  He rereads the final two paragraphs. It is difficult as my brothers and sisters have learned. In the end there is no other way…. Finally, he clears his throat and asks, “Where’s the original?”

  “I told you, safe.”

  “And you’re going to release it? Go public with both of them? Both letters together?”

  “I intend to.” She moves her hand close to his leg so that they are almost touching. As she gazes across the cave rather than at him, she adds, “But I have to get them verified without getting myself killed.”

  “And you’re not worried that their release will cause havoc?”

  “Yes, Joseph, I am.” She turns so that their knees touch and their eyes meet. “Of course, it worries me.”

  “But you’ll release them no matter what?”

  She turns off and shuts the computer, causing the cave around them to vanish. “The ossuary and its contents belong to the world.” She lifts her hand, barely visible, and waves it between them.

  “Yes, but…”

  “No!” she interrupts him. “No buts…” Her eyes are firing in the scant, shadowy light of the cave. “These documents are real. I discovered them. The world must know the truth.”

  His palms itch; his mouth tastes like copper. “But people will distort…”

  “People,” she interrupts him again, “have always distorted truth.” Her tone is caustic. “Religious…political fanatics.” As she shakes her head vigorously, her energy ripples around him in waves. “B
ut that never means that truth should be withheld or suppressed. Or annihilated.”

  Her hair is darkness flowing through deeper darkness. When she stops moving, he can see almost nothing. The burn’s pain pulses up his leg and mixes with other aching and fatigue, but he’s lightheaded. Monuglu and Kirchburg and Lee and the media and the military are marshalling. She neither needed nor wanted his help, but with Abrahim out of touch and her lifelines to William Glavine, Sr., and her archeological mentors cut, she can’t go it alone. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

  “I have no one else, Joseph,” she says, her voice less harsh.

  “I guess not,” he answers, aware that her last statement may be disingenuous. It’s possible that she choreographed the whole meeting so that he would volunteer to do something, but he doesn’t care. It no longer matters whether he can trust her. He has a sense—an irrational notion—that he is doing it more for himself and for John the Apostle than for Sophia.

  “The reporters,” she says, “want a story.” She places her hand on his forearm. “You’ll deliver one. The more the media gathers, the less likely….” Her voice, softer still, trails off.

  “They won’t believe me.”

  Brushing her fingers along his wrist and down the back of his hand, she says, “They want to believe.”

  He knows, historically, what has happened to messengers, but he stepped into harm’s way when he accepted the flash drive, or earlier when he looked down at Kenan’s corpse, or much earlier than that—even as the 737 tore down through the clouds toward Atatürk International Airport. Though a deep sense of loss and of isolation persists, his penchant for life has never been stronger. This is it, his necessity here and now.