Book of Judas--A Novel

by Linda Stasi

  Pantera would usually leave at night and return the next morning without managing to get caught on camera by even one of the paps on stakeout (the supermarket tabloids were offering big money for a clear shot—double if they got us coming and going together). They couldn’t get one of me, because I never left the hospital, but him? How did they miss catching even one shot? Oh right. He’s never been seen unless he wanted to be seen.

  During that first week, a few journos occasionally managed to sneak inside the hospital, but the cops made swift work of them. While chasing my colleagues out did make me feel guilty, seeing as how I am a member of the working press myself, it also made me feel enormously relieved to be left alone as a desperate mother in pain.

  I had no desire to report on or to explain to my colleagues what I/we had been through. Usually people like me resented people like me. People like me prevented people like me from doing my job: i.e., reporting the news, getting the “get.”

  My big “gets” went to Dona, the only person I’d talk to. She was freelancing video feeds to The Standard, which went up on the Web instantly. Even though our outlets were rivals, the only way they could get Dona, contractually, would be to share the feed with Fox.

  My boss, Bob, didn’t pressure me, and he and his wife, Carrie—who were on the approved list of visitors—came by the hospital to sit with us. They are staunch Catholics, so they’d stop by St. Pat’s every day and light candles for Terry, while my Jewish friends prayed, my Hindu friends made offerings to Ganesh and Kali, my Muslim friends prayed to Allah, and my Protestant friends, well, they drank to Terry’s health. In other words we pretty well had it covered for every god anybody could think of.

  On the fourth day, as Pantera and I sat beside Terry’s crib, he checking his phone, I finally brought up the unspeakable “what if?” elephant in the room.

  “Yusef, I need to talk about something.” He looked at me like I was going to ask him to move in with my parents.

  When I found it harder to actually ask than I thought it would be, he said, “Whatever it is, it can’t be as bad as what you’ve been through.” It was nice that he never put himself in my equation, respectfully understanding that genetics aside, I was the one who had given birth to and single-parented Terry.

  So I tried to include him by making a joke, but it was slimmer than a new iPhone. “Yes, we have been through hell and back. And—hey!—we have to be the only two people who’ve been through this much and have only had sex once!” What a knee slapper that wasn’t.

  “There’s Roy. We lost the tube, which means I lost his get-out-of-jail-free card. I not only gave up the secret of resurrection to the worst human on the planet, I gave up Roy’s life as well.”

  “Roy’s good,” Pantera said.

  “What? You went to see him?”

  “No.”

  “So how do you know?”

  “His bail is paid. He gets out today. By tomorrow things should begin to be cleared up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “His bail is paid,” he repeated. “Within probably a week or so evidence will be found that will exonerate him and reveal the real serial murderer. DNA for each of the dead prostitutes.” I just stared at him. He’d done this somehow.

  “You’re paying the bail?”

  “No.”

  “Who, then?”

  Instead of answering, he said, “He will be released, that’s what’s important.”

  “But that doesn’t mean they won’t still accuse him of killing his dad, right?”

  “It’s all fine,” he answered.

  I stared at him, sick. “You didn’t plant…”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  I didn’t believe him. “But he’s not cleared?”

  “Not yet. But the evidence will be so compelling that they’ll drop the charges. Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless something else happens.”

  “Well, clearly nothing else will happen because Roy had nothing to do with murdering anybody.”

  “Perhaps,” Pantera said in his offhand, maddening way.

  I was grateful that Roy was going to be freed, but I needed to know: “Who the hell is going to pay the bail?”

  “His lawyer can’t give up that information.”

  “Hold on a minute, bub,” I seethed. “You are talking to my friend—Mad Dog—who I got to take Roy’s case? And neither of you thought to talk to me first?” I was furious.

  Pantera placated me. “We both thought you had more important issues to deal with, and we wanted to come to you with good news for a change.” OK, placated, but not fully on board with the story. “A confidential bail angel? Right.”

  “So, baby,” Pantera countered, calling me a name that had only come out of his mouth once before—that night we made love in Carcassonne—and clearly aimed at getting me off the subject, “I wanted to discuss something else with you.”

  “Isn’t one bombshell per day enough? And by the way? I want to discuss something with you, too.”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “Not a great choice of words, by the way,” I said, giving him a sideways wise-guy glance. “So, the Judsons. I mean, how in hell did they end up on the same floor as me? I mean, was it planned from day one, do you think?”

  “It’s a stretch to think they would know about Roy one day inheriting the pages, but … who knows what and who they knew?”

  “But they apparently did. The bastards. In fact, they were just lying in wait for the old man to kick off. Now that I think about it, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, you know Roy was up at my apartment a thousand times—I even introduced him to the Judsons several times casually in the elevator or whatever.”

  “Nothing they did was casual.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? I’ve kicked myself a million times over it. How did I not see that at the time?”

  “You weren’t looking for it. They gave you no reason to even look.”

  “Good con artists never do,” I spat out.

  He smiled. “No, they never do. That’s why they’re good.”

  He grabbed my hand and said, “On another note entirely? I’ve been looking over what we’ve got. The missing pages aren’t the only pages that contain, or once contained, secret esoteric information. It’s just that the others are rotted out. But—and here’s what has never been known—Judas says he did not hang himself as it says in Matthew, nor did he fall down and explode as it says in Acts. The thirty pieces of silver? Never used for his grave in Potter’s Field.”

  “My God. Are you saying Judas was resurrected as well?”

  “I’m saying perhaps he just went to the ‘realm of Barbelo.’”

  Was that a joke? Hilarious.

  He ignored me and continued, “I don’t think that the man who is now in possession of the pages will necessarily be able to interpret them or carry out the resurrection ritual alone. That’s why there was a whole cabal of them plotting this together.”

  “But fedora man can sell those pages or collaborate with someone.”

  “They are so hot now, he may die well before even a low-life black market antiquities dealer would touch them. And personally? I don’t believe he has much longer to live.”

  “I doubt if he’ll just keel over and die.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that he would.”

  “Neither was I.”

  “Anyway, back to the topic at hand,” he said, maddeningly. “I believe Judas was speaking about other realms, other dimensions, other solar systems.”

  “Coming from the mouth of a physicist, or so you claim.”

  “Yes, I do and so I am,” he answered. With that one you could never tell if he was being sarcastic or just speaking the truth. Then, “But I often take breaks from stargazing to spy, kill, and do other soldier-of-fortune errands as I may have mentioned to you.” That was definitely sarcasm, and even I reluctantly smiled. Sometimes I hated him for making me feel the opposite of what
I absolutely knew I shouldn’t feel, which is how I ended up in that horrible spot to begin with. He was just so freaking smart. And tough. So of course, I was beginning to hate him all over again. Or so I told myself.

  On a roll, he continued, “It’s interesting, in light of all this, that history has turned the men who were with Jesus at Gethsemane into martyrs, but in fact, they weren’t heroes. They scattered at His arrest. According to the accepted Gospels, none of the male disciples were mentioned as witnessing the crucifixion. Apparently they didn’t have the balls to stand by their Lord. The Gospel of John says there was one unnamed ‘beloved disciple’ present. Why is this disciple unnamed when Mary Magdalene, and Mary, mother of Jesus, and several other women are clearly mentioned?”

  “Wait. So you think…”

  “Yes, I think the unnamed beloved disciple was Judas. I am convinced of it, in fact.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “The early Church fathers who, by the way, even pushed out Jesus’ own family to gain control—especially when Paul came along—rewrote history. It’s almost one hundred percent certain that Paul never even met Jesus—he lived in Turkey—although he supposedly resided in Jerusalem as a child. Yes, the disciples had horrible deaths but they weren’t brave martyrs. They are considered martyrs because they died for Christ, but they didn’t live for Him, despite becoming the Church’s embodiment of Him.”

  Terry awoke just then, and began to cry. I stroked him, still not able to hold him for all the IVs in his little body. “The only secret I need to know right now,” I said, “is how to get Terry out of the hospital and back home. And I think that’s strictly medical.”

  “Ah, ye of little faith.”

  “Actually, faith in the medical profession is all I’ve got. Remember we’re agnostics and my mother’s a doctor.”

  “So am I,” he answered. “Of the scientific kind, but also an agnostic, meaning one who questions everything. I believe nothing. And everything.”

  37

  I thought about what he’d said. “What I believe now is in my love for her little boy. I sit here willing Terry to get better, and, yes, I’m sending up prayers to whatever god I hope is listening to me. But I also know I made a pact with the devil. My son for everyone else.”

  He looked down. “Do you trust me?”

  Did I? Yes. I actually did, so I nodded my head.

  “Then I have to ask you to trust me one more time,” he said. “This will be made right.”

  An awkward silence followed, so I really didn’t expect what happened next. Pantera leaned into me, tilted my head back, and kissed me, his tongue just slightly exploring my mouth. I let him engulf me, let his arms surround me. I wanted to stop him, I really did, but instead I pulled him in even tighter and kissed him like I’d never kissed a man before. He kissed me with all the power and passion of a man who’d kissed too many women before, but somehow had never kissed anyone he loved before. Was I fooling myself?

  I kissed him with the kind of abandon I hadn’t known in a very long time because for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, our precious son, our Terry, was getting stronger, right next to us—even if he was in a little hospital crib.

  Even though life in the cocoon of that pediatric hospital room was still moment-to-moment for us, and the unknown was too frightening for me to contemplate, that one moment, at least, was a good moment. A very good moment.

  As week one entered into week two, the crowds of reporters outside the hospital thinned, and the flood of paparazzi that’d been trying to sneak in slowed to a trickle. The media was on to the next story, the next Hollywood scandal, the next tragedy that wouldn’t, with any luck, touch them personally.

  Pantera showed up early to the hospital on day nine, just as Terry had gone down for a nap. He hadn’t asked and I hadn’t offered my apartment, and I had no idea where he went after he left the hospital each day. I just didn’t want him or anyone in our home until Terry was back home with me. At any rate, Pantera showed up that morning with warm croissants, espresso, and some fresh-cut fruit.

  “I really need to teach you the concept of the New York bagel with a schmear,” I said. “And I don’t mean pineapple bagels or some other abomination of nature.” Then I told him why no bagels in the world tasted like New York bagels: it’s our water, stupid!

  “Then, why,” he asked sarcastically, “do New Yorkers pay three bucks for a pollution-causing, plastic bottle filled with French water?”

  “Because they are misguided fools who’ve never met you, so they buy all that French hype,” I teased. “I, however, know the truth!” I was definitely feeling lighter. I was actually sort of back to my old self. “I will never give Terry anything but New York tap,” I finished, somewhat triumphantly.

  “Before we get any deeper into the merits of fake mineral water versus tap water,” he said, bringing my dissertation to an unceremonious halt, “I want to go over something with you.”

  “This sounds serious. Leave it to you to bring a grenade to the party.”

  He shook his head and grinned. “You are such a pain in the ass. Maybe Peter was right about women.”

  “Peter who? Some spy friend of yours?”

  “No, actually in the Gospel of Thomas, Peter says to Jesus, ‘Tell Mary’—that would be Magdalene—‘to leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ He must have meant spiritual life,” he joked. Sort of.

  “So I heard. You know, that’s what’s so great about you—you sure know how to tell a joke!”

  “Anyway, moving on,” he continued in that way he had of cutting you off while still not making you feel cut off. “Forget Thomas’s Gospel. I have again been studying the pages of the Gospel of Judas.”

  My heart leapt. “You got them back?” I asked, so excited I almost did the happy dance right there and then.

  “Oh God, no. Sorry. I have been studying the old pages. And I think I came across something that the scholars missed. Or just overlooked. They weren’t looking for a code, they were too busy trying desperately to interpret what was not rotted away.”

  “Well, of course…” I said, as he pulled his laptop and a hardcover copy of The Gospel of Judas out of his bag. “Please get out your iPad,” he said.

  I unplugged my iPad. He pulled his chair next to mine. “Here, look where Judas tells Jesus, ‘I know who you are and which place you came from. You came from the realm of the immortal Barbelo.’”

  I pulled the quote up on my Kindle version. “Got it. Yes, I’d read that portion before.”

  “Well, I have been looking for a code, something that was missing: a reason that the disciples who were the possible real betrayers of Jesus didn’t want this Gospel to ever be spread.” He showed me his screen. There was an equation of some kind. “Look at this. I believe the letters in the word ‘Barbelo,’ B-A-R-B-E-L-O, are encoded. Each letter stands for another letter.”

  “Well, in theory that’s great, but that’s English—and Jesus and Judas spoke Aramaic.”

  “If the Gospel had been found back then, nobody would be able to understand it. Perhaps that was the whole point.”

  “I for one don’t understand it two thousand years later! Sorry, but it sounds like a stretch.”

  “Not really.”

  He continued, unfazed as usual. “Anyway, if you believe in the very concept of life—that we’re here right now, that we and everything around us exists as a reality, well then, imagining that an evolved being such as Jesus would be able to map a code in a language not spoken during his manifestation on Earth? Light stuff—the time/space continuum.”

  “OK, so just say I do buy this code business. Have you figured out these so-called encoded words?”

  He showed me the equation on paper. It read: B=S, A=I, R=R, E=I, L=U, O=S.

  “I’m sorry I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Decoded, ‘Barbelo’ stands for ‘Sirius.’ Aside from that, the suffix of ‘Barbelo’ is ‘E.L.O.,’ as in ‘elohim,’ which is found
over two thousand times in the Old Testament. It means ‘gods.’ Plural. In Genesis, for example, when God says, ‘Let us make man in our image.’ Not my image, but ‘our image.’”

  “I’m getting this…”

  “The suffix for ‘Sirius’ is ‘U.S.,’ as in ‘we.’ In short, ‘God is us.’ As Jesus said in Luke: ‘The kingdom of God is in the midst of you.’”

  “Interesting…”

  “Yes, and it gets more so. Take the roots of the words. The root word of ‘Sirius’ is ‘Siri,’ which means ‘secret’ in Swahili. God’s secret? Jesus spoke in parables to the others, but I believe he spoke in code to Judas.”

  “Code? Like, ‘Hey, buddy, you’re going to take the hit for this whole crucifixion thing’?”

  Pantera pointed to a page in the Judas Gospel. “See? Look here: ‘And the Aeon then appeared with his generation, in whom the cloud of knowledge and the angel is called El…’”

  Clearly the O had rotted away to complete the word “Elo.”

  “So you believe that this ‘realm Barbelo’—where Judas says Jesus comes from—is actually the star, ‘Sirius’?”

  “It certainly appears that way.”

  “So, we’re back to the Dog Star, the one that was the key to unlocking the tomb door that led into Acevedo’s house!” I said, knocking my hand against my head in a “duh” gesture.

  “Right you are,” he said. “Sirius A, the Dog Star, the brightest star in our night sky. Remember the Dogon tribe that I told you about, who knew about the stars of Sirius, which were not visible to the naked eye?”

  I nodded, remembering.

  He opened a screen and pointed to an image of their rotation, saying, “That pattern of rotation that they described? Well, the rotation of one around the other forms an almost perfect double helix—the human DNA pattern!”

  “Are you telling me that Jesus and Judas were somehow identifying Sirius as the star where human creation began?”

  “I am. Have you ever heard of ‘panspermia’?”

  “Pan-sperm-ia? If I have, it certainly had nothing to do with the universe and more to do with wannabe lover boys!”