A short while later I stormed into the vicarage. I wanted some answers from Gabriel and no cryptic waffle that would get me into any more embarrassing ‘Oops, I thought you were a homosexual’ situations.
But Gabriel wasn’t there. I stormed out of the vicarage and into the empty church. For a moment I just stood there enjoying the cool air. It was quite humid outside as it can be on a late summer’s evening. I looked at Jesus on the cross again, reflecting that if Joshua really had been through all that, then he had a remarkably friendly disposition…
What I kept to myself was that I was actually starting to believe this whole ‘Saviour of the World’ business!
Then I suddenly heard Gabriel’s voice coming from the crypt. At first, I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but then, as I came closer to the entrance of the crypt, I heard: ‘You’re wonderful…’
Oh no! He wasn’t doing it with my mother in the crypt, was he?
‘…Our Father which art in heaven…’
Phew, it was a prayer.
I plucked up my courage, went down the steps into the dank, musty old cave. It had a low ceiling; basketball players would certainly not have been able to stand upright in here. Then I saw Gabriel on his knees, praying. He noticed me, but carried on with his prayer. Was he expecting me to kneel down next to him? But then what? I didn’t know any of the official church prayers; only my own improvised ‘Please, dear Lord, make…’ version.
I decided to keep schtum until Gabriel had finished.
I’d always found it quite weird that people knelt to pray. Why did God require that? Why did you have to kneel in front of him? Why did you have to submit to him like that? Was the Almighty in need of something to boost his self-esteem? That would make for an interesting therapy session. ‘Dear God, please lie down on the couch… and now tell me, why do you want everyone to kneel before you?’
I was still imaging the therapist asking God about his childhood (an interesting proposition: who had created God? Did he create himself? How did that work?) when Gabriel looked up. ‘Why didn’t you kneel down next to me?’ he demanded
I explained to him that I had minor textual insecurity when it came to prayers.
‘Everyone can speak to God, however they like,’ Gabriel replied.
I also shared my thoughts on the matter of kneeling down.
‘God is concerned with more important things than how people pay homage to him, or even, whether people do so at all.’
‘And what things would those be?’ I asked, not entirely uninterested.
‘Maybe you’ll find out one day,’ Gabriel answered. But judging by his tone, he seemed to think that this was unlikely. I changed the subject and excitedly began telling him about Joshua – his linguistic capabilities and the miracle healing.
‘What was going on there?’ I demanded an explanation.
Gabriel didn’t say anything for a while. Then he asked me a question. ‘What would you say if I told you that the carpenter really is Jesus?’
‘I would say that you were bullshitting me,’ I said sounding annoyed.
‘Good,’ Gabriel smiled. ‘Then I’ll tell you that the carpenter really is Jesus.’
I grimaced.
‘How many more signs do you need?’ Gabriel said. ‘Joshua speaks all the languages of the world and has performed a miracle healing. The only thing that speaks against it, is…’
‘Common sense?’ I suggested.
‘No, your lack of faith.’
‘I can bullshit myself,’ I snapped.
‘Yep. I saw that at your wedding,’ Gabriel responded drily.
His attempts at humour were beginning to get on my nerves.
‘Let me give you some advice,’ said Gabriel.
‘What would that be?’ My interest in his advice was minimal.
‘Find faith,’ he said very, very insistently, almost like a warning. ‘Quickly.’
‘Faith, schmaith,’ I cursed, sitting on a pedalo in the middle of the lake. I didn’t want to go home because Joshua was there, as was Svetlana and her child, who thought my father was far too old. I couldn’t go to Michi’s either, because after hours the video store was always filled with shifty-looking customers who came to rent porn films. As I was also unable to reach Kata on her mobile – what was going on there? – I decided to hop on a pedalo, something that I’d last done as a teenager. Back then, I used to pedal out into the lake whenever I was feeling a bit down. So pretty much every other day.
I had the lake to myself. The holidays were almost over and nowadays depressed teenagers obviously had better things to do than take pedalos for a spin, like searching the web for instructions on how to build bombs. It had also become unbearably humid, and it felt like there was thunder in the air, which I hadn’t really paid any attention to with all my ‘Who the hell have I fallen for?’ thoughts. Not even when the first raindrops started falling. That’s how confused I’d been because of Joshua and my conversation with Gabriel. But then the thunder made me jump. I looked to the skies and saw black clouds approaching at lightning speed. An icy wind was blowing my face. I quickly looked towards the shore and thought that it would have been nice if it were a bit closer.
I put my foot down, so to speak. I couldn’t be on the lake when the lightning started. The thunder came ever closer, unlike the shore, which was still quite far away. I should have noticed this storm earlier. To hell with love! It just confuses you.
Suddenly the rain set in. It lashed against my face. Within just a few seconds, I was completely soaked. I was becoming increasingly out of breath from all the pedalling. My lungs were aching, not to mention my legs, and no matter how hard I tried, I just wasn’t getting anywhere. The waves kept pulling my pedalo back. The next thunderclap was deafening and I was scared shitless. It was quite obvious that I wasn’t going to make it to the shore. Hopefully the lightning wouldn’t strike on the lake!
I was terrified and wanted to pray to God. For a second I even considered kneeling, since it made him so happy. But it isn’t that easy to kneel down in a pedalo, so I decided just to clasp my hands together. But before I could begin with my prayer, a lightning bolt struck the other side of the lake. There was an almighty bang and I was momentarily dazzled. The pedalo tipped over and I fell into the water.
I was overcome by panic and a fear of death. But I tried to calm down. I could swim after all. Even if not particularly well. My sports teacher at school had always made derogatory comments like ‘Oh well, I’m sure you have other talents’ (although none of us had a clue what those talents might be). But paddling up to the surface seemed feasible. If I could make it up before I ran out of air, and then hurl myself into the pedalo, I might actually survive. With all my might I kicked my legs and tried to swim upwards. Just when I had almost reached the surface, I got cramp in my leg. I screamed, which isn’t a clever thing to do underwater. My lungs filled up and burned so much that I thought they were going to explode. The air escaped through my mouth and I saw bubbles rise to the surface as I sank deep down into the lake. I frantically kicked my legs, but I didn’t have enough strength to swim to the top with my burning lungs and a cramp-incapacitated leg. Suddenly the realisation hit me – I was going to die.
I was no longer able to struggle against my fate. I stopped fighting and sank further down. Pain and panic flashed through my body and soul, but it only felt like a faint echo.
I wondered whether I would go to heaven. Or to hell. I’d actually never done anything really bad in my life, except leaving Sven at the altar. Which was pretty bad, of course – I felt incredibly guilty about it. But what about all the good things I’d done in my life?
I couldn’t think of anything particularly impressive. I’d never done any aid work or volunteering in a third-world country. I wasn’t even a particularly charitable person. Saint Peter probably wouldn’t be rejoicing at the gates of heaven: ‘Welcome Marie, you who always gave your small change to the beggars on the high street.’
The b
ubbles had actually stopped coming out of my mouth. I lost consciousness, and everything around me went black. My feet were touching the bottom of the lake. I closed my eyes. I was about to find out whether heaven and hell existed.
And then someone grabbed my hand.
I was pulled up to the surface and gasped for air. My lungs were burning even more now. The water from the churned up lake was beating against my face. It was still raining, and I heard loud claps of thunder. Bolts of lightning dazzled me. And in the middle of this inferno, I saw who was holding my hand.
It was Joshua.
And he was standing on the water.
Chapter Sixteen
Joshua carried me over the lake.
Yes, he really carried me over the lake. I remember thinking ‘He’s carrying me over the lake’.
Of course, I could have thought a lot more about what just happened like, ‘Joshua pulled me up from the bottom of the lake’, or ‘He saved my life’, and more than anything ‘Holy shit, he really is Jesus!’
But my brain didn’t get any further than, ‘He’s carrying me over the lake’. It got stuck on this thought like a computer program that is ‘not responding’. It was not able to compute thoughts like ‘Holy shit, he really is Jesus’.
When my brain finally made some baby steps in the right direction, it decided to stick to harmless stuff like, ‘No man has ever managed to carry me before’. When Sven had once tried to carry me over the threshold in a burst of romance, he almost slipped a slipped disc.
The wind and rain continued to lash against my face until Joshua threatened the skies and shouted ‘Silence, be still!’ at the lake.
The wind settled and a serene calm befell the scene. This man did not need oilskin or an umbrella.
When Joshua stepped onto the shore with me five minutes later, all the dark clouds had yielded to dusk. He put me down on a bench. I was completely drenched, unlike Joshua, and I’m not sure I’d ever been that cold. My lungs were still burning. ‘I can take away your pain,’ Joshua said calmly.
He wanted to touch me, like he had touched Svetlana’s daughter. But I just screamed: ‘Noooooo!’ I didn’t want him to touch me. This was all too much for me already. Far too much!
Joshua paused. He didn’t let on whether he was confused by my hysterical shouting. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re completely frozen.’ He tried to touch me again.
‘Don’t!’ I yelled at him. I was so afraid of him, probably quite a natural reaction to a supernatural being.
‘You’re afraid of me?’
He was pretty quick on the uptake…
‘Fear thou not,’ he said gently. But it had no effect on my panicked state.
‘Don’t touch me!’
He nodded. ‘As you wish.’
‘Go away!’ I shouted at him with my last remaining energy, before succumbing to a coughing fit.
Joshua was still looking at me with great concern. Did I mean something to him or was he just caring to anyone whom he’d saved from drowning.
‘By “go away” I meant “piss off”.’ I was desperately gasping for air and carried on coughing.
‘As you wish,’ he repeated calmly and respectfully. Then he left. He’d left me alone on a bench, completely soaked, because that’s what I’d wanted.
Joshua disappeared from view around the corner. The rain had disappeared thanks to his invocation, but I was trembling much more than before, and this cough was unbearable. Somehow I had to get home. Otherwise I’d die of hypothermia here on the park bench. Bravely, I sat up. I would almost certainly make it home. This was a piece of cake. I stood up, took one step, and collapsed in a heap.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Beep, beep, beep,’ I heard as I woke up. I was lying in a hospital bed. I was attached to a ‘beep, beep, beep’ machine. Why on earth was it so loud? Should sick people be plagued by such beeping? Shouldn’t they be left in peace? I looked down at myself. I was wearing a hospital gown, so somebody had clearly undressed and dressed me. It was already dark outside, and I wondered whether I should call the nurse.
The first thing I did was to hit the machine until it finally stopped beeping. Only then did the thoughts that should have occurred to me on the lake start flashing through my head. He had saved my life. And most important of all – holy shit, he really was Jesus.
And another even more important thought struck me. ‘Oh my goodness! I wanted to nibble Jesus’ bum!’
I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Maybe I’d just imagined the whole thing. Maybe I was injured and I’d been hallucinating. Then it would not have been Joshua who’d saved me; I’d have saved myself. No idea how. Just somehow. But how would I have saved myself? There’s no way in hell I was fit enough to swim to the shore. But what was the alternative? If I hadn’t been hallucinating, then Joshua really was Jesus. And if that was the case, then I could be very happy that I hadn’t drowned, since I would definitely have ended up in hell, as I’d almost asked Jesus to come up to my room to sleep with me.
Well, most likely he would have rejected me.
But I was sure that it would not be considered meritorious at the gates of heaven to have been hitting on the Saviour of the World.
And to make matters worse I’d now gone and told him to ‘piss off’.
Good Lord, if this was a matter of life and death, things were not looking good!
Then the door opened. For a moment I feared that it might be Joshua entering the room. Or floating in. But it was Sven. This was the hospital where he worked, and he was doing the night shift. Had he changed my clothes? I really didn’t like the idea of that.
Sven looked at me compassionately. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No! Nothing is all right. Either I’m completely mad or I’ve seen Jesus and I am going mad because of that!’ is what I would have liked to have replied. But instead I just nodded slightly.
Sven approached my bed. ‘A passer-by found you by the lake, completely soaked. What happened?’
I told him about the pedalo, nothing more. He smiled sweetly and sang an old Neue Deutsche Welle song by Fräulein Menke about sinking pedalos and sunsets.
‘I’d forgotten that song for a reason,’ I replied cattily.
Sven took my hand. ‘I’m here for you. I even made sure that you got the only single room available.’
It felt so wrong for him to be holding my hand. The only hand I should have been holding was Joshua’s – that’s what I felt, anyway.
I pulled my hand away from Sven and asked him not to touch me again. That shocked him. It seemed that he’d hoped I would find my way back to him in my moment of weakness. He no longer hoped that now. In fact he looked offended. ‘Fine. Now it’s time for your injection,’ he declared in a professional voice.
‘Injection?’ I asked in a panic.
‘You need an injection in your bum. Doctor’s orders.’ He pulled back the plunger of a syringe that had been lying on my nightstand.
I gulped. Injections aren’t exactly a cause for jubilation, particularly not if your ex is the one administering them…
Reluctantly I turned over onto my front. If holding hands with Sven had felt wrong, then this was far worse. I squeezed my eyes shut, and things got even more uncomfortable, because Sven hit a cramped up muscle. I yelped.
‘Oooops, sorry, I missed,’ he said innocently. ‘I’ll have to go again.’
He stuck the needle into my bum again.
‘Ahhhhh!’ I yelped again.
‘And I’ve missed again. Silly, silly me,’ said Sven.
I looked at him. ‘The doctor… the doctor hasn’t asked you to give me an injection, has he?’
He didn’t even try to act innocent. ‘If I do it twice more you’ll almost have a smiley on your arse,’ he smirked and stuck the needle in again.
‘Ouch!’
I jumped out of bed and screamed ‘You’re sick’ at him.
Then I ran to the door, but Sven stood in my way. ‘We’re not done yet. T
he doctor wanted me to give you some laxatives, too.’
It was a precarious situation. My leaving him at the altar had clearly unleashed some dark side from deep within him. But I remembered the advice that my sister had given me about such situations. ‘There’s no problem that can’t be resolved with a swift kick in the balls.’
Sven squealed and I ran out of the hospital onto the street, which was still wet after all the rain. I didn’t stop until I couldn’t run any further. Sven hadn’t followed me. He was probably still wailing like a moonstruck coyote.
I hastened through Malente in a hospital gown in the middle of the night. My bare feet were almost completely numb from the cold and my whole body was shaking. When I’d finally reached my father’s house I had no other option but to ring the doorbell. Fortunately it was not my father who opened the door, but Kata. She looked at me with great astonishment.
‘Don’t ask,’ I said quietly.
‘OK,’ she answered, but immediately asked, ‘What happened?’
I told her about the pedalo and Sven, but obviously didn’t say a word about Joshua walking on water. I wanted to avoid my sister having me committed to a mental asylum.
Kata took me into the bathroom for me to wash away the smell of the lake. She told me that Dad, Svetlana and her little girl were already asleep. But I didn’t want to go to sleep. I was still in an emotional state between heaven (Joshua) and hell (Sven). I showered, got changed and went into Kata’s room. She had just finished drawing a new comic strip:
It was a surprising comic. Little Kata was never quite so self-pitying. God only appeared in her comics when she was particularly frustrated with life. It was clear that something was bothering her.
‘You went to see the doctor,’ I realised anxiously.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I need to wait for the test results,’ she said, trying to play it cool.
‘Is there any cause for concern?’
Apocalypse Next Tuesday Page 8