Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  The preacher looked a question at Melda. She said, "Looks like it's not just my decision after all."

  Chesney restated the questions he had asked on the phone. Hardacre said, "Short answer is: I don't know. With me, I keep all my drafts – first, second, third. Maybe they'll be of interest to somebody doing my literary autobiography fifty years from now, though I doubt it." He shrugged. "Or maybe I'm just a sentimental pack rat."

  "So the old worlds, they might be around somewhere," Melda said. "Limbo is. Chesney was there."

  "Really?" said Hardacre.

  "But it's empty," said Chesney.

  The preacher quirked his lips. "Interesting."

  "I have to know what happened."

  "We could ask the angel."

  "He might not know," Chesney said. "He didn't even know about the great book until you told him."

  Chesney's mother had been sitting in a corner of the study, her face a portrait in disapproval. "Take your questions to the Lord," she said, "and he will answer them."

  "Please, Letty," Hardacre said, "I think He wants us to work this out for ourselves."

  "No," said Chesney, "I think Mother's right." He didn't know which of the three faces looking back at him was more surprised. But he had just seen a new path through the darkness. "Xaphan," he called, "we're going somewhere."

  The demon appeared over by the drinks cabinet. "Gimme a minute," it said, reaching for a decanter. As it poured, it said, "Where?"

  Chesney's answer made it spill several drops.

  First they had to go back to Chesney's room in Hell. Then the demon said, "Wait a minute. A thing like this, I gotta ask."

  "You just told me that the Devil said you should do whatever I want," Chesney said.

  "That ain't it. I gotta get directions."

  "You don't know where it is?"

  The demon elevated its padded shoulders and let them drop. It counted on its stubby fingers. "Hell, I know. Anywhere on Earth, I know. Probably, I could still find my way around Heaven – it don't change. Even Limbo, now that I been there. So, wait here, while I go ask."

  Xaphan disappeared. Chesney expected him to be right back, but as the seconds swelled into a minute with no sign of his assistant, he took a seat in one of the comfortable armchairs with which the demon had furnished the room and sat listening to the faint sound of cold, stinking winds rushing past the thick stone walls of his waystation. His mind returned to the discussion at Hardacre's – but then his thoughts slid to the topic of his own behavior there.

  Chesney was not prone to introspection. He knew who he was and accepted himself as given. In his boyhood, the therapists who had labored to make him aware of the behaviors that made him different from other children, so he could moderate them – at least in public – had eventually settled for achieving some essential modifications. They had never really gotten their patient to turn the spotlight of his unusual intellect inward, to examine his own motivations and mental mechanisms.

  Chesney always knew what he thought; he did not actually know how he came to his conclusions. Presented with a problem in math, for example, he first recognized its parameters, then the answer appeared, as if from behind some dark curtain at the back of his mind. Occasionally, a math problem might be so complex as to require him to break it down into two or three steps, but even so, the process meant only that he had to make two or three appeals to the obscuring curtain – he still knew nothing of what went on behind it.

  Pools of light, surrounded by acres of dimness and murk – that was how he saw the world. For what went on within his own head, he had not even those simple images. "You don't think," one of the consultants had said to him, after an exhaustive month of tests and experiments. "You either know or you don't know, and you've no idea how you get from one state of mind to the other."

  But now he had at least an inkling of what it might be like to have a normal mental apparatus. He had actually pursued a line of thought through the darkness, managed at least to keep an eye on it as it followed some invisible, twisting trail, always threatening to disappear into the shadows. And he had come to a conclusion. Even if the conclusion was only that he needed more information, he had, for the first time in his life, genuinely worked something out.

  He didn't know whether to feel proud or worried. And even that ambiguity was another source of concern.

  Xaphan reappeared, reloaded its tumbler of rum and took a couple of Havanas from the humidor. It tucked the cigars into its breast pocket, drained the glass and said, "Okay, here we go."

  Chesney stood up as the room disappeared. For a long moment they were… nowhere. Gray nothingness lay in every direction, with not the slightest evidence – not so much as a dust mote – to show scale. He might have been looking out into infinity, or the no-place might have ended an inch beyond his reach. He might have been hanging in the emptiness or traveling at the speed of light.

  "What–" he began, but no sound emerged. He looked at his assistant, saw Xaphan's furred brows draw down in what appeared to be a weasel's version of disorientation. The demon tentatively reached out one short arm, stubby fingers spread, as if patting fog for something that might be hidden. Then it seemed to push.

  A moment later, Chesney sensed gentle pressure against his face and the front of his body, as if he had drifted up against a pliable barrier. Then the resistance abruptly ceased and he burst through nothingness into bright sunshine.

  Xaphan and he were standing on a hillside under a blue sky. The ground beneath their feet was dry and sparsely thatched with stalks of even drier grass and some dusty-leafed ground-hugging plant. A few inches from the young man's right big toe was a heap of small, brown, pebbly objects, like a handful of glossette raisins, only darker. It took a moment for Chesney to realize that the reason why he was seeing them near to his toe was that he was no longer wearing the pair of loafers he had put on when they went out to Billy Lee Hardacre's. His naked toes protruded from under a strap of coarse, woven fiber.

  Sandals, he thought, I'm wearing sandals. And when he stretched out his arms, his first thought was of a striped blanket, none too clean. Then he realized he was wearing some kind of woolen robe, belted at the waist with a rope. He took a step back from the glossettes, having suddenly made a connection between them and the half-dozen raggedy-fleeced sheep he saw farther down the hill, down where the slope leveled off to flatter land. There were mud-walled houses, a scattering of them, with the ends of wooden poles sticking out of the walls just beneath the flat roofs. At the door to one of the hovels, a swarthy bearded man with dark, curly hair and a ten-year beard was shading his eyes from the sun, looking up at them.

  No, Chesney thought, at me. The sight of a fanged weasel in a pinstriped suit would surely have wrung more of a reaction out of the observer. The young man raised an arm and hand in greeting. The man in the doorway continued to regard him for a few more seconds, then replicated the gesture and followed it with a beckoning of one brown hand.

  "You're not from around here," said the man when they arrived in the dusty yard.

  Chesney was scraping the edge of his sandal against the ground. It had turned out to be impossible to walk a straight line without stepping in sheep's leavings. "No," he said, when he'd cleaned as much as possible and coated the remnant in dust.

  "That's what I thought," said the other. He looked straight at Xaphan and Chesney realized he could see the demon. "Didn't I cast you out once?"

  "Not me," said the fiend.

  "You're sure?"

  "It's the kinda thing you'd remember."

  "I suppose," said the man, then turned to Chesney. "I can rid you of that if you want. At least, I think I can. Used to do a lot of it, but of course there's no call for it anymore."

  "No, thank you," said the young man. "Xaphan is on special assignment."

  The bearded man looked at the demon again, then more carefully at Chesney, shrugged and said, "I suppose he must be. You don't have the earmarks."

  "The earm
arks?"

  "Not literally," said the other, touching a hand to one of his ears, half-buried in curls. "It's just a kind of look the demon-haunted get. I can usually spot it."

  "I'm more demon-assisted," Chesney said. "It's a long story."

  The man rubbed his beard. "And you've come to tell it to me?" He shrugged again. Chesney thought it might be a characteristic gesture. "I suppose it makes a change."

  "I haven't really come to tell it to you," said the young man. "I've mostly come to ask you some questions."

  The bearded man looked them over again and said, "Well, then, you might as well come in."

  Inside, the house was dim, lit mostly by the light from the open door and a square hole in the roof, positioned to let out the smoke that rose from a brick hearth set against the wall opposite the door. There was only one room, with an archway in one of the side walls, half-covered by a hanging blanket. Beyond it was an alcove just big enough for a man to sleep in; on its floor of beaten earth was a rolled-up leather pallet and a clay pot.

  The main room was furnished only with a rough wooden table and two equally utilitarian stools. Some shelves against one wall held pots and bowls of unglazed pottery, and an iron cauldron was hanging from a frame fashioned from the same metal above the hearth. A charcoal fire was smoldering beneath the pot.

  Chesney took in the sparse furnishings at a glance, noticing also a shepherd's crook that leaned against the wall beside the door, which was of rough planks indifferently nailed together. "No carpenter's tools?" he said.

  "No," the householder said, "my family's always been in sheep."

  "But this is Nazareth?" Chesney said. "And you are Jesus?"

  EIGHT

  Chesney's mind formed the name as he had always known it, but when he heard his voice speaking it, what emerged from his lips sounded more like Joshua, only with a Y instead of a J. Also, the vowels sounded strange. He tried saying it again, more slowly, but still what he heard was something like Yesh-wa.

  However it sounded, the man nodded his head. "That's me," he said, then gestured generally towards the huddle of mud-walled houses and sheds visible through the open door. "And out there's Nazareth, for what it's worth."

  "I thought you were a carpenter. Everybody says so."

  "No, definitely sheep. A carpenter would starve in Nazareth. There's no trees." He gestured upwards, where poles as thick as Chesney's wrist held up the ceiling of mud and woven reeds. "Even the roof beams had to be brought up from Gaza."

  "But you are the Messiah?" Chesney was coming to understand that he had not stepped into the pool of light he had been expecting. "I mean, you talked about casting out demons."

  Understanding dawned in Joshua's face. "Oh," he said, "I see. You've come to the wrong one. You want the other part of me." When he saw that the young man was still floundering, he added, "The divine part."

  Chesney sat down on one of the stools. He looked to Xaphan for a moment, before he realized that the demon was studiously ignoring the conversation. "I thought you were supposed to be like… a blend."

  There was a clay jug on a shelf and a wooden cup on the table. Joshua stepped past Chesney and got the container, poured a stream of dark liquid into the cup and handed it to his visitor. Their fingers touched and the young man felt a brief sensation, not electric but some kind of energy, pass through him.

  "Drink up," said the bearded man, upending the jug. A spill of the contents ran down from the one side of his mouth into his beard. Chesney sniffed the contents of the cup; it smelled like sour wine, and when he tasted it, it was even sourer than it smelled.

  The other man sat down too. "A blend," he said. "Well, in the end, that's how it worked out. After they had that big confab at Nicaea. So now he's up in Heaven."

  Joshua wiped his mouth and said, "At first, after the Romans nailed me up and I died, I was up there, too. Just like anybody else. But down here they kept working on the story, especially the Greeks, who were always eager for half-gods and virgin births. Finally, and it took hundreds of years, they got it all worked out the way they wanted it – I mean the bishops and the emperor; they talked it all over for days, made up their minds."

  "What happened?" Chesney said. The wine tasted better – not actually good, but better – on a second sip.

  "Somewhere along the way, they'd decided that my body had come back to life and gone up into Heaven, wounds and all. How they worked that out, I never did understand. But suddenly, the new reality came into effect. I was in Heaven, but I was made of flesh. Worse, they had decided that I was Himself, or at least one part of the Lord, who was now a trio. Blasphemy, but the Greeks and Romans were writing the new books, and that was now the way it had to be."

  He drank from the jug again and shook his head. "I had become an anomaly – one of their words, of course – a leftover. An angel came to see me and told me that I was – how did he put it? – 'being let go.' Next thing I knew, I was here, back where I'd started." He drank a little more from the jug then said, "Oh, and I was just myself again. Look." He showed Chesney his hands. "No holes."

  "The Council of Nicaea," Chesney said, more to himself than to the other man, "where they put the Bible into its final shape." Courtesy of his mother, he had received a very thorough grounding in the history of the early church before he'd decided that he didn't believe half of it.

  Now the pool of light was reforming around him. This place, this little house in Nazareth, was from an older draft of the continuing story. The man across from him had been a sheep farmer, like just about everybody else in the tiny village. He'd become a preacher and a wonderworker, doing some faith-healing and casting out demons. Then he'd gone up to Jerusalem and fallen afoul of the authorities, ending up being crucified by the Romans.

  He'd arrived in Heaven and settled in. But back on Earth, his story had continued to evolve and intensify as his disciples kept spreading the word about what he'd done and what he'd said. Years went by, then decades. Other people got involved – people who could read and write, instead of the group of illiterates who had begun to follow Joshua in his wanderings around the Galilee. The stories and sayings, augmented now by tales of walking on water, raising the dead, confounding Satan, began to be written down. The texts were passed around, so they could be added to and rewritten by believers who had their own particular slants on the issues.

  After three hundred years of literary fervency, there were many conflicting biographies and gospels. Joshua the itinerant preacher had become Jesus the Christ, and more than that, he had become first the son of God, then he'd been promoted to the rank of God himself. Or a coequal part of a divine trinity, along with the original and his holy breath.

  Of course, this led to disputes among the faithful, some of which were conducted by passionate argument, others by knives and clubs and arson. Meanwhile, the Emperor Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the empire after seeing a vision that said converting to the hitherto-despised cult would bring him victory in one of the civil wars that Roman politics regularly threw up. The emperor called all the warring factions together at Nicaea, a Greek city in Asia Minor, and they thrashed out which of the competing texts would go into the authorized Bible, and while they were at it, they established the true nature of the Christ.

  It would have been then that the original version would have become unuseful – indeed, Joshua would clearly have become an element of a soon-to-be discarded draft of the evolving big story. So an angel had eased him out of Heaven. Chesney wondered if the process was similar to what happened at Paxton Life and Casualty when a fired employee put his odds and ends into a cardboard box and was escorted out by a security guard. And the former Messiah had wound up back in Nazareth.

  While Chesney had been running this scenario through his mind, Joshua had been watching him, throwing occasional glances at Xaphan. Finally, the bearded man showed a worried expression and said, "So, have you two come to take me somewhere else?"

  The question confused
Chesney. "Such as where?" he said.

  Joshua cast a meaningful glance at the dirt floor, then at the demon. "Special assignment, you said."

  Light dawned again in the young man's mind. "You think we've come to throw you out of here? No, no, no." He was shaking his head. "No, I came to find out what happened to you. And to…" he gestured toward the door, "your world."

  Relief showed on Joshua's face. "Well," he said, "what happened to me, you can plainly see. What happened to the world, I have no idea. All that my neighbors know about is sheep and gossip. And it's always the same gossip, because it's always the same day."

  He paused as if expecting Chesney to pose a question, but the young man had already had the experience of watching Melda's favorite Bill Murray movie. In fact, he'd seen it three times since they'd become a couple, although when he'd tried to point out the irony in that situation he had discovered that it had somehow eluded his girlfriend.