Call Me Joe

by Martin Van Es

  “Good plan,” Joe said. “I wonder who organised this hotel. Do you suppose it was Yung?”

  “I expect the Twelve have a war chest for this sort of thing,” Sophie said as the van went over a bump, throwing them together, defusing the tension and making them both laugh. “Do you mind me tagging along on your coat-tails like this? You can tell me if you want me to go.”

  “No, no” – he was obviously genuinely horrified at the thought – “please don’t go. I am going to need your help with what is to come.”

  “So it’s okay for me to stay at this hotel with you?”

  “Of course.” He put his arm around her to steady her against the swaying of the van and she rested her head against his chest. For a moment, Sophie couldn’t imagine how it would be possible to feel any more elated.

  The van was able to drive right inside the service area of the hotel before helping hands opened the doors and released them. The manager was waiting for them with an elegantly attired bell boy in attendance to carry the bin bags.

  “Fortunately we have been able to give you the whole of the top floor,” the manager gushed as he led them to a service lift. “You will have complete privacy and the security people will be able to keep an eye on anyone coming and going through the main lobby.”

  “You realise we have no money?” Sophie said, aware that such a mundane issue would not even occur to Joe.

  “That is not a problem, madam,” he assured her. “It is being taken care of by well-wishers. And a driver delivered your luggage, which has been taken up to the suite.”

  When they reached the top floor, the manager triumphantly threw open the double doors to reveal a huge suite with views over the city and parkland. Every surface seemed covered with baskets of fruit and flowers.

  “These just keep arriving,” he said.

  Sophie looked at the labels on the various gifts and saw that they were all from people they had met over the weekend. It seemed that the Twelve were now looking after them. The cases which had been in the boot of the car they had last seen in the crowd were standing by the door. The bin sacks containing her life’s possessions were being brought up from the grocer’s van and discreetly emptied into wardrobes.

  “Please take them,” Joe said, gesturing to the gifts, “and redistribute them among the staff. Just leave us with one fruit bowl. We couldn’t possibly eat all this.”

  “Maybe leave one bunch of flowers too?” Sophie suggested.

  “Whichever one you like the best,” Joe laughed as Sophie pointed to the biggest vase of pink lilies she had ever seen.

  Once the manager and his team had finally backed out of the room, still bowing despite their arms being full of flowers and fruit, Sophie and Joe collapsed onto one of the many sofas with the remaining fruit bowl between them.

  “This is the sort of thing I thought I had warned them about,” Joe said. “Conspicuous extravagance. There must be much cheaper hotels than this.”

  “I suspect it’s the sort of place people like Yung and Lalit and Simon live in all the time,” Sophie said. “They wouldn’t know how to do it any differently.”

  “They too have a lot to learn,” he said. “But we must be grateful for their kindness and it is nice to be away from the crowds for a few moments.”

  “I think that is exactly what these sorts of places are designed for,” Sophie said, unzipping herself a banana. “While we are on our own, I have a favour to ask.”

  “Really?” Joe bit into a ripe fig.

  “I’ve never been baptised. My parents were both atheists and they brought me up to be the same.”

  “Would you like to be baptised?”

  “I never thought I would hear myself saying such a thing, but now that I have met you – yes I would.”

  “Where would you like to do it?”

  “There is a cardboard cathedral in Christchurch, which was built to be a temporary replacement after an earthquake damaged the original cathedral. There were three earthquakes in just two years and the worst one, which damaged the original cathedral, killed 165 people. The memories are still painful for many people and the cardboard cathedral is like a symbol of remembrance.”

  “Cardboard?”

  “It was designed by a Japanese architect. It was only supposed to be temporary but it has been there for seven years already. It is kind of a cool space and not too ‘churchy’, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. Since you are not joining any particular religious community I can perform the same ceremony as in the days when I wandered in the desert. Shall we see if the concierge can set it up for us? That would be an interesting challenge for them.”

  “Thank you,” she said, unable to stop herself from leaning across and kissing him. His lips tasted of fig and to her joy he responded to her tongue, cupping her chin in his hand and gently tilting her head back. Without saying a word he lifted her effortlessly from the sofa and carried her to the bedroom, never taking his mouth from hers as he laid her gently down and made love to her.

  Over the years, Sophie had managed to convince herself that sex was always going to be mildly disappointing, but with Joe she felt that she had truly made love with someone for the first time in her life. That evening she knew that she had experienced the sort of ecstasy that she had heard other women talk about but which, after numerous anticlimaxes in her past, she had come to assume was a myth.

  Although Joe had been half-joking in his suggestion, the hotel’s concierge actually was able to get permission for him to baptise Sophie in the cardboard cathedral late that night. They were smuggled out of the back entrance of the hotel to a waiting car and the lights inside the triangular structure glowed through the multicoloured stained glass windows as if to welcome them as they approached the huge cardboard cross at the front. The driver kept watch outside once they had gone in. A puzzled-looking young priest, who had obviously been roused from his bed with the instruction to open the cathedral but had been given no explanation as to why, welcomed them and asked if he could help in any way.

  “Thank you for your trouble,” Joe said, “but there is no need for you to stay.”

  The priest nodded, as if he understood who they were and what was going on, although he obviously didn’t, and left them.

  “Safe to say,” Sophie whispered as he left, “that I don’t think he spends much time watching the news or surfing the internet.”

  “A man perhaps who has decided to dedicate his life to higher matters,” Joe smiled.

  Silence fell with the disappearance of the priest’s footsteps. The lights were low and there was just the two of them beside the font. As he cradled her in one strong arm, sprinkled water on her forehead and gently caressed her hair, she felt an electricity pass between them as if they had become one person, indivisible, but she had no way of knowing if he felt the same as he gazed down at her with his kind eyes. They stood silently at the font for several minutes, allowing the night-time atmosphere of the cathedral to seep into their souls.

  Back at the hotel, she offered to sleep in a different bedroom in the suite but he simply placed a finger on her lips to stop her talking and led her back into the master bedroom where they had made love. Was he confirming that they were now a couple? She couldn’t tell and she couldn’t find the right words to ask.

  The following morning they both woke from a deep sleep and made love again as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When Sophie finally ventured out of the bedroom she found that someone from room service had fanned out the day’s newspapers on a table in the sitting room. Across all the front pages was the story of Joe’s mass public healings outside the school, although the various editors seemed unsure whether to praise Joe as the Son of God or accuse him of being some sort of clever charlatan and rabble-rouser. There were dramatic pictures of him carrying Hug
o through the crowd and of the girl from the wheelchair who had been trampled, which gave an accurate idea of how frightening it had been to be at the centre of the storm. Sophie carried the papers back to the bedroom and threw them onto the crumpled sheets, settling down, cross-legged, to read them.

  “Don’t waste your time reading other people’s opinions of this,” Joe said, kindly. “They will either flatter you or annoy you. You know what happened; you don’t need to know what other people think about it.”

  She considered his words for a moment, part of her still wanting to read stories about herself written by other people, even if some of them did annoy her, but finally nodded her agreement.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to start believing our own press cuttings, would we?”

  “Exactly!” he laughed. “Spoken like a true superstar.”

  They ordered breakfast and Sophie flicked idly through the inside pages of the papers as she ate, trying to show an interest in what else might have been happening in the world while she had been so engrossed in her own immediate adventures. Buried deep inside one of the more serious papers she spotted a headline about some ancient scrolls which had been discovered in al-Eizariya, formerly called Bethany, a village near Jerusalem on the south-eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives. As she read on she felt her heartbeat increasing dramatically, thumping like a drum in her temples. The scrolls had been found in jars in a niche in the rock under the tomb of Lazarus, which is connected to his house.

  “This is exactly like my vision,” she said, dropping the paper in front of Joe and searching through some of the others to see if they had the same story. Joe glanced at the article.

  “Lazarus was my best friend,” he said. “I often stayed in that house in Bethany with him and his sisters, Mary and Martha. It was my base when I was in Jerusalem. I have such fond memories of those times. It is the most wonderful city.”

  “I would like to go there one day,” Sophie said.

  “We can go together,” he said, but she couldn’t tell if he was teasing her.

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I would love to share it with you.”

  “Is that a promise?” Now she was half-teasing and half-hoping.

  “Yes,” he laughed. “I promise.”

  “So this is the same Lazarus that you raised from the dead in the Bible story, right?” She returned to the story.

  “That is the same man, but it wasn’t anything like how they wrote about it. Our friendship was extremely close and the Romans knew that, so they arrested Lazarus and tortured him in order to get him to tell them where I was. He refused to talk. I should have gone to help him earlier but I was afraid for my own life and delayed the journey by a few days. By the time I got there with the disciples it was too late and Lazarus had already died from his injuries. We buried him there in that tomb. I would not have been able to bring him back to life by then. I felt deeply sad and also guilty that I left it so long to go to him. I would dearly love to go back there and pay my respects now that I am back on Earth.”

  “So, how did the scrolls get to be there?” Sophie asked, trying to get a clear picture in her mind of what had happened all those years ago.

  “We had the scrolls with us. They were written by a scribe called Amos, who was always with us, watching and listening to everything; seldom speaking but chronicling everything he witnessed or heard. We hid the scrolls deep inside the floor beneath Lazarus. I’m amazed they managed to find them. I guess there have been technological developments which have helped them in their excavations.”

  “But don’t you think it’s weird that I dreamed exactly this?”

  “I said we were a team, didn’t I?” he said over his shoulder as he made his way into the shower.

  “Doesn’t this change everything?” she asked, but he had already turned on the water and didn’t hear.

  Sophie woke up her computer and fed the information from the story into the search bar. By the time Joe had finished in the bathroom she had fired an email off to the professor who had been quoted in the article, explaining who she was and describing the dream which she had experienced before Joe’s arrival. She asked if he would be good enough to keep her informed of any progress they might make with their research. She didn’t really expect to receive a response but she felt better for having reached out.

  Twenty-Three

  The paper cup that Joe drank from in the crowd was being examined like no other cup before it. Clive, the newspaper reporter who had taken it, left the crowd immediately with his prize and drove directly to a nearby university campus where a distinguished, if sceptical, group of international forensic scientists and pharmacologists had been ensconced in secret for two days. These normally impatient experts were aware that their findings from the item they were about to analyse could make their reputations for life and they were therefore willing to wait. They had also been well paid for their time and were intrigued by the challenge they had been set.

  The operation had been planned to the smallest detail. Once Clive had handed over the plastic bag containing the cup, he went to the university cafeteria to wait to be informed of the results. That was the deal. Whatever they found in their tests, he would be the first one outside their erudite circle to know about it. It would be his world exclusive – hopefully the greatest scoop of his career. After that the scientists, or their paymasters, would be free to use the findings in any way they saw fit. The adrenalin was making Clive feel physically sick as he tried to sit still and attract as little attention to himself as possible from the students coming and going around him. Their youth reminded him of just how long he had been waiting for a story this big. He wished, not for the first time, that he had not given up smoking.

  His doctor had told him that he had no choice, but it had been as hard as he imagined giving up eating or sex would be. He had been getting through at least two packs a day since he was sixteen and first went to work in Fleet Street as a junior reporter. Initially he had taken it up to try to make himself look older and to make out he was as hard and cynical as all the world-weary senior reporters whom he admired so much and wanted to impress. He suspected now that in their eyes it had probably merely served to accentuate how young and green he was. He had loved the image of the dogged investigative reporter staying up all night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, maybe even taking occasional hits from a hip flask as he winkled stories out of people with secrets to hide; only finally sleeping once the first editions had hit the streets. He had learned to play the part so well it had eventually become who he actually was, but forty years later he could feel that the cigarettes were actively trying to kill him and he wasn’t ready yet to give up the pleasures of chasing the hottest stories around the globe, particularly this one, which promised to lead to the whole world order being transformed almost overnight.

  He was tired of having young people tell him that printed newspapers were dead and that old-fashioned investigative reporters had had their day. He wanted one more chance to prove them wrong. He hated the internet but he could also see its potential for spreading a story fast once it had appeared in print. If he was able to break this story first they would all be forced to follow and his piece would go global on a scale he would never have been able to dream about when he first became a journalist. All these thoughts and feelings churned through his mind as the time ticked by and every second he imagined how good it would feel to go outside and join the group of smokers he could see gathered outside the canteen windows.

  It was several long hours before two of the scientists came to look for him. They had puzzled expressions and were still deep in debate when they found him imbibing his sixth shot of caffeine.

  “Well?” Clive snapped, the coffee having exacerbated his already high levels of impatience. He couldn’t believe the slowness with which members of other professions chos
e to impart information. “What did you find?”

  “Very hard to say at this stage,” one of them replied.

  “It’s undoubtedly very interesting,” her colleague added.

  “Just give me the top line,” the reporter snapped, his phone already recording as he steered them across the room to a quiet area where he could be confident no one would be listening in.

  “Whoever drank from this cup has different DNA.”

  “Different to who?”

  “Different to human.”

  “Go on.”

  “Under the UV lamps, the DNA bands lit up in a way we have never seen before. The only possible explanation is that the subject has male mitochondrial DNA.”

  “In plain English?” Clive could barely contain his excitement. Had he actually found a real, genuine alien?

  “Mitochondria are the power plants of a cell and although most of the human DNA is in the cell nucleus, the mitochondria also contain a part. The male mtDNA is always in the tail of the sperm cell and is normally lost when the sperm cell fuses with the egg cell. As a result, only the female mtDNA is retained in the offspring. The fact that the subject has male mtDNA is unusual.”

  “Unusual?”

  “You could say miraculous,” the second scientist added.

  “So is this guy some kind of alien? Could he be the Son of God?”

  “These findings endorse his potential divine identity and go some way to explaining his many special abilities.”

  “That’s a ‘yes’ then?”

  Neither of the scientists could quite bring themselves to agree that their findings proved that there was a God and that he was now back on Earth, but nor could they deny the evidence which they had seen with their own eyes. They handed a sheet of paper with the findings over to the reporter who was already calling his editor in London.

  “The scientists say he is the Son of God,” he shouted, “the DNA proves it.”

  He proceeded to read out the scientific details from the sheet as the two scientists exchanged worried looks and left the room to rejoin their colleagues, so that they could perform more tests and discuss the matter in greater depth. They had discharged their side of the deal with the media owner who had arranged for the cup to be brought to them, and now they were free to do what they loved more than anything: in-depth research into a phenomenon that none of their competitors yet had access to.