Behold the Man
( Karl Glogauer - 1 )
Michael John Moorcock
Behold the Man
Michael Moorcock
I
The time machine was a sphere full of milky fluid in which the traveler floated, enclosed in a rubber suit, breathing through a mask attached to a hose leading to the wall of the machine. The sphere cracked as it landed and the fluid spilled into the dust and was soaked up. Instinctively, Glogauer curled himself into a ball as the level of the liquid fell and he sank to the yielding plastic of the sphere's inner lining. The instruments, cryptographic, unconventional, were still and silent. The sphere shifted and rolled as the last of the liquid dripped from the great gash in its side.
Momentarily, Glogauer's eyes opened and closed, then his mouth stretched in a kind of yawn and his tongue fluttered and he uttered a groan that turned into a ululation.
He heard himself. The Voice of Tongues, he thought.
The language of the unconscious. But he could not guess what he was saying.
His body became numb and he shivered. His passage through time had not been easy and even the thick fluid had not wholly protected him, though it had doubtless saved his life. Some ribs were certainly broken. Painfully, he straightened his arms and legs and began to crawl over the slippery plastic towards the crack in the machine. He could see harsh sunlight, a sky like shimmering steel. He pulled himself half-way through the crack, closing his eyes as the full strength of the sunlight struck then). He lost consciousness.
Christmas term, 1949. He was nine years old, born two years after his father had reached England from Austria.
The other children were screaming with laughter in the gravel of the playground. The game had begun earnestly enough and somewhat nervously Karl had joined in in the same spirit. Now he was crying.
"Let me down! Please, Mervyn, stop it!" They had tied him with his arms spread-eagled against the wire-netting of the playground fence. It bulged outwards under his weight and one of the posts threatened to come loose. Mervyn Williams, the boy who had proposed the game, began, to shake the post so that Karl was swung heavily back and forth on the netting.
"Stop it!" He saw that his cries only encouraged them and he clenched his teeth, becoming silent.
He slumped, pretending unconsciousness; the school ties they had used as bonds cut into his wrists. He heard the children's voices drop.
"Is he all right?" Molly Turner was whispering.
"He's only kidding." Williams replied uncertainly.
He felt them untying him, their fingers fumbling with the knots. Deliberately, he sagged, then fell to his knees, grazing them on the gravel, and dropped face down to the ground.
Distantly, for he was half-convinced by his own deception, he heard their worried voices.
Williams shook him.
"Wake up, Karl. Stop mucking about." He stayed where he was, losing his sense of time until he heard Mr. Matson's voice over the general babble.
"What on earth were you doing, Williams?"
"It was a play, sir, about Jesus. Karl was being Jesus.
We tied him to the fence. It was his idea, sir. It was only a game, sir." Karl's body was stiff, but he managed to stay still, breathing shallowly.
"He's not a strong boy like you, Williams. You should have known better."
"I'm sorry, sir. I'm really sorry." Williams sounded as if he were crying.
Karl felt himself lifted; felt the triumph...
He was being carried along. His head and side were so painful that he felt sick. He had had no chance to discover where exactly the time machine had brought him, but, turning his head now, he could see by the way the man on his right was dressed that he was at least m the Middle East.
He had meant to land in the year 29 A.D. in the wilderness beyond Jerusalem, near Bethlehem. Were they taking him to Jerusalem now?
He was on a stretcher that was apparently made of animal skins; this indicated that he was probably in the past, at any rate. Two men were carrying the stretcher on their shoulders.
Others walked on both sides. There was a smell of sweat and animal fat and a musty smell he could not identify.
They were walking towards a line of hills in the distance.
He winced as the stretcher lurched and the pain in his side increased. For the second time he passed out.
He woke up briefly, hearing voices. They were speaking what was evidently some form of Aramaic. It was night, perhaps, for it seemed very dark. They were no longer moving.
There was straw beneath him. He was relieved. He slept.
In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying. The voice of one crying in the - wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey. Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judaea, and all the region round about Jordan, And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.
(Matthew 3:1-6).
II
They were washing him. He felt the cold water running over his naked body. They had managed to strip off his protective suit. There were now thick layers of cloth against his ribs on the right, and bands of leather bound them to him.
He felt very weak now, and hot, but there was less pain.
He was in a building or perhaps a cave; it was too gloomy to tellying on a heap of straw that was saturated by the water. Above him, two men continued to sluice water down on him from their earthenware pots. They were stern-faced, heavily-bearded men, in cotton robes.
He wondered if he could form a sentence they might understand. His knowledge of written Aramaic was good, but he was not sure of certain pronunciations.
He cleared his throat. "Where be this place?" They frowned, shaking their heads and lowering their water jars.
"Iseeka Nazarene Jesus..."
"Nazarene. Jesus." One of the men repeated the words, but they did not seem to mean anything to him. He shrugged.
The other, however, only repeated the word Nazarene, speaking it slowly as if it had some special significance for him. He muttered a few words to the other man and went towards the entrance of the room.
Karl Glogauer continued to try to say something the remaining man would understand.
"What year do the Roman Emperorsitin Rome?" It was a confusing question to ask, he realized. He knew Christ had been crucified in the fifteenth year of Tiberius' reign, and that was why he had asked the question. He tried to phrase it better.
"How many years does Tiberius rule?"
"Tiberius?" The man frowned.
Glogauer's ear was adjusting to the accent now and he tried to simulate it better. "Tiberius. The emperor of the Romans. How many years has he ruled?"
"How many?" The man shook his head. "I know not." At least Glogauer had managed to make himself understood.
"Where is this place?" he asked.
"It is the wilderness beyond Machaerus," the man replied.
"Know you not that?" Machaerus lay to the southeast of Jerusalem, on the other side of the Dead Sea. There was no doubt that he was in the past and that the period was sometime in the reign of Tiberius, for the man had recognized the name easily enough.
His companion was now returning, bringing with him a huge fellow with heavily muscled hairy arms and a great barrel chest. He carried a big staff in one hand. He was dressed in animal skins and was well over six feet tall. His black, curly hair was long and he had a black, bushy beard that covered the upper half of his chest. He moved like an animal and his lar
ge, piercing brown eyes looked reflectively at Glogauer.
When he spoke, it was in a deep voice, but too rapidly for Glogauer to follow. It was Glogauer's turn to shake his head.
The big man squatted down beside him. "Who art thou?" Glogauer paused. He had not planned to be found in this way. He had intended to disguise himself as a traveler from Syria, hoping that the local accents would be different enough to explain his own unfamiliarity with the language. He decided that it was best to stick to this story and hope for the best.
"I am from the north," he said.
"Not from Egypt?" the big man asked. It -was as if he had expected Glogauer to be from there. Glogauer decided that if this was what the big man thought, he might just as well agree to it.
"I came out of Egypt two years since," he said.
The big man nodded, apparently satisfied. "So you are a magus from Egypt. That is what we thought. And your name is Jesus, and you are the Nazarene."
"I seek Jesus, the Nazarene," Glogauer said.
"Then what is your name?" The man seemed disappointed.
Glogauer could not give his own name. It would sound too strange to them. On impulse, he gave his father's first name. "Emmanuel," he said.
The man nodded, again satisfied. "Emmanuel." Glogauer realized belatedly that the choice of name had been an unfortunate one in the circumstances, for Emmanuel meant in Hebrew "God with us" and doubtless had a mystic significance for his questioner.
"And what is your name?" he asked.
The man straightened up, looking broodingly down on Glogauer. "You do not know me? You have not heard of John, called the Baptist?" Glogauer tried to hide his surprise, but evidently John the Baptist .saw that his name was familiar. He nodded his shaggy bead. "You do know of me, I see. Well, magus, now I must decide, eh?"
"What must you decide?" Glogauer asked nervously.
"If you be the friend of the prophecies or the false one . we have been warned against by Adonai. The Romans would deliver me into the hands of mine enemies, the children of Herod."
"Why is that?"
"You must know why, for I speak against the Romans who enslave Judaea, and I speak against the unlawful things that Herod does, and I prophesy the time when all those who are not righteous shall be destroyed and Adonai's kingdom will be restored on Earth as the old prophets said it would be. I say to the people, 'Be ready for that day when ye shall take up the sword to do Adonai's will.' The unrighteous know that they will perish on this day, and they would destroy me." Despite the intensity of his words, John's tone was matter of fact. There was no hint of insanity or fanaticism in his face or bearing. He sounded most of all like an Anglican vicar reading a sermon whose meaning for him had lost its edge.
The essence of what he said, Karl Glogauer realized, was that he was arousing the people to throw out the Romans and their puppet Herod and establish a more "righteous" regime. The attributing of this plan to "Adonai" (one of the spoken names of Jahweh and meaning The Lord) seemed, as many scholars had guessed in the 20th century, a means of giving the plan extra weight. In a world where politics and religion, even in the west, were inextricably bound together, it was necessary to ascribe a supernatural origin to the plan.
Indeed, Glogauer thought, it was more than likely that John believed his idea had been inspired by God, for the Greeks on the other side of the Mediterranean had not yet stopped arguing about the origins of inspiration whether it originated in a man's head or was placed there by the gods.
That John accepted him as an Egyptian magician of some kind did not surprise Glogauer particularly, either. The circumstances of his arrival must have seemed extraordinarily miraculous and at the same time acceptable, particularly to a sect like the Essenes who practiced self-mortification and starvation and must be quite used to seeing visions in this hot wilderness. There was no doubt now that these people were the neurotic Essenes, whose ritual washing baptism and self-deprivation, coupled with the almost paranoiac mysticism that led them to invent secret languages and the like, was a sure indication of their mentally unbalanced condition. All this occurred to Glogauer the psychiatrist manquй, but Glogauer the man was torn between the poles of extreme rationalism and the desire to be convinced by the mysticism itself.
"I must meditate," John said, turning towards the cave entrance. "I must pray. You will remain here until guidance is sent to me." He left the cave, striding rapidly away.
Glogauer sank back on the wet straw. He was without doubt in a limestone cave, and the atmosphere in the cave was surprisingly humid. It must be very hot outside. He felt drowsy.
II
Five years in the past. Nearly two thousand in the future.
Lying in the hot, sweaty bed with Monica. Once again, another attempt to make normal love had metamorphosed into the performance of minor aberrations which seemed to satisfy her better than anything else.
Their real courtship and fulfillment was yet to come. As usual, it would be verbal. As usual, it would find its climax in argumentative anger.
"I suppose you're going to tell me you're not satisfied again." She accepted the lighted cigarette he handed to her in the darkness.
"I'm all right," he said.
There was silence for a while as they smoked.
Eventually, and in spite of knowing what the result would be if he did so, he found himself talking.
"It's ironic, isn't it?" he began.
He waited for her reply. She would delay for a little while yet.
"What is?" she said at last.
"All this. You spend all day trying to help sexual neurotics to become normal. You spend your nights doing what they do."
"Not to the same extent. You know it's all a matter of degree."
"So you say." He turned his head and looked at her face in the starlight from the window. She was a gaunt-featured redhead, with the calm, professional seducer's voice of the psychiatric social worker that she was. It was a voice that was soft, reasonable and insincere. Only occasionally, when she became particularly agitated, did her voice begin to indicate her real character. Her features never seemed to be in repose, even when she slept. Her eyes were forever wary, her movements rarely spontaneous. Every inch of her was protected, which was probably why she got so little pleasure from ordinary love-making.
"You just can't let yourself go, can you?" he said.
"Oh, shut up, Karl. Have a look at yourself if you're looking for a neurotic mess." Both were amateur psychiatrists she a psychiatric social worker, he merely a reader, a dabbler, though he had done a year's study some time ago when he had planned to become a psychiatrist. They used the terminology of psychiatry freely. They felt happier if they could name something.
He rolled away from her, groping for the ashtray on the bedside table, catching a glance of himself in the dressing table mirror. He was a sallow, intense, moody Jewish book-seller, with a head full of images and unresolved obsessions, a body full of emotions. He always lost these arguments with Monica. Verbally, she was the dominant one. This kind of exchange often seemed to him more perverse than their lovemaking, where usually at least his role was masculine.
Essentially, he realized, he was passive, masochistic, indecisive. Even his anger, which came frequently, was impotent. Monica was ten years older than he was, ten years more bitter. As an individual, of course, she had far more dynamism than he had; but as a psychiatric social worker she had had just as many failures. She plugged on, becoming increasingly cynical on the surface but still, perhaps, hoping for a few spectacular successes with patients. They tried to do too much, that was the trouble, he thought. The priests in the confessional supplied a panacea; the psychiatrists tried to cure, and most of the time they failed. But at least they tried, he thought, and then wondered if that was, after all, a virtue.
"I did look at myself," he said.
Was she sleeping? He turned. Her wary eyes were still open, looking out of the window.
"I did look at myself," he repeated. "The way Jun
g did. 'How can I help those persons if I am myself a fugitive and perhaps also suffer from the morbus sacer of a neurosis?' That's what Jung asked himself..."
"That old sensationalist. That old rationalizer of his own mysticism. No wonder you never became a psychiatrist."
"I wouldn't have been any good. It was nothing to do with Jung..."
"Don't take it out on me..."
"You've told me yourself that you feel the same you think it's useless..."
"After a hard week's work, I might say that. Give me another fag." He opened the packet on the bedside table and put two cigarettes in his mouth, lighting them and handing one to her.
Almost abstractedly, he noticed that the tension was increasing. The argument was, as ever, pointless. But it was not the argument that was the important thing; it was simply the expression of the essential relationship. He wondered if that was in any way important, either.
"You're not telling the truth." He realized that there was no stopping now that the ritual was in full swing.
"I'm telling the practical truth. I've no compulsion to give up my work. I've no wish to be a failure..."
"Failure? You're more melodramatic than I am."
"You're too earnest, Karl. You want to get out of yourself a bit." He sneered. "If I were you, I'd give up my work, Monica.
You're no more suited for it than I was." She shrugged. "You're a petty bastard."
"I'm not jealous of you, if that's what you think. You'll never understand what I'm looking for." Her laugh was artificial, brittle. "Modem man in search of a soul, eh? Modern man in search of a crutch, I'd say.
And you can take that any way you like."
"We're destroying the myths that make the world go round."
"Now you say 'And what are we putting in their place?' You're stale and stupid, Karl. You've never looked rationally at anything including yourself."
"What of it? You say the myth is unimportant."
"The reality that creates it is important."
Behold the Man kg-1 Page 1