Imaginary Jesus

by Matt Mikalatos

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not taking orders from imaginary people anymore.”

  Pete’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m not imaginary.” He picked up the bread and tore off another chunk. “I noticed your imaginary Jesus didn’t eat anything at the restaurant.” He filled his mouth with bread. “I eat, just like you.”

  “So you’re real.” I raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Let’s just say that I’m both alive and active,” Pete said, grinning and flexing his muscles. “But we’re off topic.” He walked over to me and bent in close, the smell of fish and sweat infused with wine now. “If I were to take a swipe at you with an imaginary sword, friend, what would you do?”

  I nervously scooted my chair back a few inches. “Laugh. And. Um. Feel uncomfortable?”

  He grabbed my chair. “No. An imaginary sword that causes real wounds. How would you defend yourself?”

  “An imaginary shield.”

  “That’s right.” Pete clapped me on the shoulder. “Well said, my friend.” He lifted my wine and held it to my lips. “Drink up.”

  I tried to lean back, but I couldn’t get away from him. I closed my eyes and took a sip.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads in Them

  I opened my eyes and found myself in Flying Colors. That’s the name of the comic book store I worked at ten years ago. The same glass door stood at the entrance, smeared with ice cream from countless faces and hands, the consequence of being next door to Baskin-Robbins. A glassed-in counter full of cards held the cash register, and aisles of four-color comics stretched toward the back of the place, where the rarer comics perched on the wall, stretching up toward the ceiling. Books, ink, toys. A revolving rack of kids’ comics up front, walls full of graphic novels. One of the best comic book shops in the world.

  “My robot!” I said. Standing next to the register was my little windup robot, his tiny silver body, dome head, and red feet ready to be wound up and sent into action. No one was in the store. I picked it up and showed it to Pete. “When Joe, my boss, did television commercials, I always snuck this little guy into them.”

  Pete nodded and picked up an issue of Superman and flipped through it. “This is the closest thing I could find in your memories to an understanding of what it means to be invited to follow someone.”

  Just then I saw the Frog of Hate. I grabbed the little plastic frog and held it up triumphantly. “The FROG OF HATE!” How I loved the Frog of Hate. He was a little green frog with a yellow belly. On his stomach in Magic Marker we had written the word HATE and drawn an arrow pointed toward his mouth. I showed it to Pete. “Did you ever work retail?” He shook his head. “When customers were driving us crazy, we would take the Frog of Hate and set it out on the register. If they really drove us nuts, we’d make him turn and follow them with his beady little eyes.” I cupped him in my hands. “And on rare occasions, when the hate grew to be too much, we would offer to let someone hold him.”

  I had forgotten how much fun the Hate Club was. A pleasant glow of valued memories shone off the frog. I slipped him into my pocket. Sweet, sweet Frog of Hate.

  You are probably wondering why I didn’t immediately fall into a pile of gibbering confusion upon taking a sip of wine and opening my eyes to find myself ten years into my own past, standing in a comic book store. You have to understand that a comic book store is a nexus of weirdness. You come to expect that perhaps a dimensional rift will tear open and suck you into it, and you’ll find yourself fighting a giant worm bent on universal domination. That’s just the sort of thing comic book fans are trained to anticipate. So a little dissociative vision after a sip of wine, that’s squaresville, baby. No big deal.

  Okay, I was freaking out. “Where are we, Pete?”

  “Imaginary gardens,” he said, “with real toads in them.”

  “Marianne Moore.”

  “Yeah. I’ve used your imagination to kick-start a memory of yours. It should start up in a minute.”

  I grabbed a plastic eyeball from a container on the counter and rolled it down the aisle. I wondered idly where the Spock doll was hiding and whether I could sneak some Spawn stickers onto someone’s car or something while no one was around. “You can do that?”

  “You’re so afraid of your imagination,” Pete said. “You never use it for good things because you’re worried you’ll end up imagining something pornographic. You need to get control of yourself. The imagination can be purified like any other part of you.”

  Just then Sam walked in. Shorter than me, dark hair, olive skin. People sometimes thought we were brothers. He had a wit I lacked and a deep bitterness that made him a favorite among the coworkers. Like some World War II sergeant in a comic book. We knew he was so tough on us because deep down he loved us. So to show our love, we would torture him and one another in return. Strange social misfits often wandered in, and sometimes one of them fixated on one of us. For me it was Hercules Guy, who came in with his creepy, greasy, long hair and would tell me about his collection of Hercules paraphernalia. He never bothered anyone else. But me he would corner.

  “I have a sword from episode thirty-five,” he would say.

  “I just don’t care,” I would say.

  “I have a signed Xena: Warrior Princess script,” he would say.

  “Please, God, make it stop,” I would say.

  Sam’s “Hercules Guy” was Ruth. She came into the store looking for him all the time. We would tell her when he worked so she could drop by and surprise him. And when she came in, we would politely step away so they could have some alone time. One time she came in to show Sam pictures from her open-heart surgery. Pictures! Sam stood at the counter in mute horror as we watched from the back of the store. For some inexplicable reason she loved him and wanted to share her life with him.

  Now, Sam stood behind the counter, flipping through a comic book.

  “You’re on.” Pete nudged me forward.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you better get up there next to him. Ruth is about to walk in.”

  The door swung open and Ruth did just that. She was dumpy, overweight, and she wore baggy, mismatched clothes. She walked straight to Sam. I stood beside him behind the counter, boxes of reserved comics behind us at our feet, the phone hanging on the wall, the Frog of Hate in my pocket.

  “Sam,” she said, her round face quivering with emotion. “I’ve come to say good-bye.”

  Sam looked up from his comic, his face filled with wonder. He gave a mighty effort to keep the glee from showing on his face. “Good-bye? Why good-bye, Ruth?”

  Ruth rummaged through her purse and flattened a piece of crumpled paper on the counter. She looked around the store, giving me a long glance and leaning toward Sam to make it clear the conversation wasn’t for me. I set a Starman comic book on the counter and pretended to look at it. “On August 28th,” she said in a low voice, “Atlantis will rise from the sea.” This pronouncement of weird shook me and Sam. Even for a comic book store, this was an exceptional moment of the profoundly bizarre. “There will be tidal waves. The entire western seaboard will be destroyed.”

  Sam leaned toward her despite himself, and I found that I, too, was eager to hear what strange tidings she bore. She quickly sketched out a map on the piece of paper, filling in highways and cross streets and circling a spot in Montana. “This ranch in Montana will be safe.” She grabbed hold of Sam’s hand, and he was so surprised that he didn’t flinch. “If you come with me, Sam, you’ll be safe. I’ll be waiting for you.” She let go of his hand and ran out the door, sobbing.

  Sam, shell-shocked, reached mechanically for the map and held it in trembling hands. I moved closer to him, and together we studied it in silent fascination. “So,” I said, and Sam tore his gaze from the map and looked up at me. “Are you going on a trip?”

  Without a smile or hint of amusement, Sam looked at me and spoke with complete certainty. “I would rather drown.” He folded the
map, opened the drawer in front of him, and stuck the paper in the Stupid Book, the place where we recorded the extremes of human folly that presented themselves to us at Flying Colors. Sam went on break soon after that, and Pete came up to the counter, a giant pile of comics between his meaty paws.

  “Spire comics.” Pete held one up. “Strange comic book adaptations of Christian books from the seventies. I kind of like them.”

  “I had that Cross and the Switchblade one when I was a kid,” I said. “I liked it. Not as much as Spider-Man or anything, though.” I started ringing Pete up. “Thirty-five cents apiece back in the seventies, Pete. Can you believe that? Didn’t cost much back then.”

  “How much would it have cost Sam to go with Ruth?”

  “Everything, I guess. He would have had to quit his job, leave all his stuff. If he really believed her, anyway. Oh, hey, I didn’t know there was a Johnny Cash comic.”

  “And she made an implicit promise of relationship to Sam.”

  “But he didn’t want that.” I paused, a copy of the 1979 Jesus comic by Al Hartley in my hand. I flipped it open to the first page, where a bearded man and his friends listened to Jesus—a Jesus who looked a lot like my imaginary Jesus, but with a red sash—commanding that they throw in their nets. The bearded man looked like a Caucasian, whitewashed version of Pete. I showed it to him. “Is that you?” I laughed. “Jesus just walks up and shows you some fish and you ditch your boat and follow him?”

  Pete took the comic book from me and looked at it for a long time, a smile twitching at the ends of his lips. “That’s not how it happened,” he said. “Not at all.” He looked up at me. “We should be on our way. Your imaginary Jesus has quite a head start on us.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I have a friend named Daisy with exceptional spiritual discernment. I’d like to introduce you.”

  “I don’t want to leave Flying Colors, though.”

  He pointed at the door. Hercules Guy was pushing it open. “Matt!” he said. Oh, please. Not this guy. I closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again I was standing on a dusty, crowded street. People rushed by in Universal Studios Moses outfits. Donkeys. Chickens. Stalls selling fish. “Please tell me this isn’t ancient Judea,” I said to Pete. But when I looked around, Pete wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In One Year and Out the Other

  The first century smelled like what Christians call a “men’s retreat.” This is when men leave their wives and children for several days, go to the mountains, and yell at each other, “Stop neglecting your wife and children!” The unique stench of a men’s retreat comes from the close company of men at high altitude eating only beans, steak, and onions, combined with a lack of bathing and shaving. The entire first-century culture revolved around the men’s retreat concept. Every man in sight sported a beard that doubled as a napkin, and you could close your eyes and smell where each person was standing. The main difference between the first century and a twenty-first-century men’s retreat was that all the men here wore dresses. Scratchy, modest dresses.

  I did a 360 looking for Pete. I saw a synagogue, a donkey tied to a post, a crowded market street, a synagogue again, a donkey again, and then I stopped. I suspected that the people around me spoke Aramaic or Hebrew, and not English, which I knew hadn’t been invented yet. I racked my brain for any trace of Aramaic and came up with something. I grabbed a man walking by and said, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.”

  He jumped, his eyes wide and his beard quivering, and pulled his arm away. “If you’re going to live in Judea, you ought to learn the language.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, “you speak . . . uh . . . the same language as me.” But he was gone by then. I tried to act like I belonged by leaning against the post where the donkey was tied up. She looked like a local. She stared at me with her big black eyes. She appeared friendly enough, with her dusty brown fur and a white star on her muzzle. I asked her, “You seen a guy named Pete around here anywhere?”

  “I think you hurt his feelings,” the donkey said.

  I gasped. “Good grief. The apostle Peter totally drugged me.” I figured if the donkey could talk, maybe the post could too. “Did you hear that donkey speak to me?” The post didn’t say anything. But posts are known for being stuck-up.

  “Are you talking to that post?” the donkey asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you a talking donkey?”

  The donkey blew a raspberry out through her lips. “You tell me, smart guy. My name is Bellis Perennis, but you can call me Daisy. Pete sent me here to help you out.”

  “I assumed that Daisy would be a, uh, person.”

  The donkey snorted. “Well, you know what assuming does. Look, you’re going to be back in Portland soon, Matt, so you don’t have much time. You need to walk into the synagogue over there, because Y’shua is about to give a speech. Pete wants you to see it.”

  “Y’shua, like Jesus?”

  “Right.”

  The thought of walking into the synagogue made me feel out of place. I wasn’t even Jewish. I couldn’t remember how to cross myself or where the holy water was or anything. I felt awkward, like a fourteen-year-old on his first date with a real live girl. “Could you come in with me?” Daisy stared up at me with her big black eyes and furry face as if to say, No donkeys in the synagogue. Fine then, I would do it myself.

  I walked into the synagogue and took a place toward the back, crowded in with the other men. The man standing in front held out his hand and was given a scroll. He was short, balding, dark-skinned, and hunched over. His mouth was far too wide, like a frog’s. He wore a brown robe, covered in dirt. I kept looking around for Jesus, but I didn’t see him anywhere. The man’s dark eyes flashed over the words on the scroll, and he held it high before the men gathered in the room.

  I leaned over to the guy next to me. “Have you seen a teacher named Y’shua around here?” He pointed to the bent man in front of us with his chin. “That’s not him,” I said, outraged. His face was thin, little more than skin laid on bone. He looked unhealthy. He looked weak.

  “He’s been fasting in the wilderness,” the man next to me explained. “Alone but for the adversary and the angels and the Spirit of God.”

  As if on cue, the man began to read. “‘The Spirit of Adonai is on me, because the Lord has chosen me to bring good news to the poor.’” He paused here and looked down to the scroll, a smile curling up from his too-wide lips. “‘He has sent me to repair the brokenhearted. He has sent me to tell the slaves that they are free. He has sent me to release the prisoners from their darkness and to proclaim . . . !’” He raised his voice, and we all gasped, leaning in to hear his next words. “‘To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’” The way he savored the word made me want it desperately—the Lord’s favor. God’s approval or well-wishes or whatever it meant, I knew it was something good. Although the twisted little man didn’t move, it was as if he were walking among us, placing his hands on our shoulders, speaking to us individually. He opened his mouth as if to speak another word, but then he rolled up the scroll and handed it back to the attendant. I wanted to shout, “More!” I wanted him to explain what it meant. But he simply said, “The words of this prophecy have been fulfilled today, while you listened.” Then he stepped down from the platform and took his seat.

  No sermon followed. The words from the scroll bounced around in my head, looking for a place to perch. The crowd of men burst out of the synagogue, carrying me along with them. I kept looking over my shoulder, trying to get another look at the man. He read the Scripture so that it spoke without commentary. He acted like he understood what he read, as if the meaning was plain to see and meant to be understood by any one of us. At the same time I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that this strange little man might actually be Jesus. He simply didn’t match my picture of Jesus and the internal dissonance was giving me a headache.

  I walked over to the donkey at the post.
“So you’re telling me that ugly guy was Jesus.”

  The donkey didn’t say anything. I looked at her more closely. Or rather, him. Good grief, someone stole my talking donkey. A man carrying a crate full of chickens was walking by. “Excuse me, sir, have you seen a donkey?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “Many times.”

  “What I mean is, have you seen my donkey?”

  The man stopped, looked around, and then pointed to the donkey beside me. “There is a donkey.”

  “That’s not my donkey,” I told him, “but I left her tied up right here.”

  The man stroked his beard. “Are there any distinguishing characteristics of your donkey, sir, which might help us ascertain her whereabouts?”

  I looked carefully at the chickens. Was it possible that they could help me more than this man? Could they perhaps be talking chickens? I decided no. And let’s be honest, if chickens could talk, they would be very hard to understand due to the fact that they have no lips.

  “She is a girl donkey named Daisy,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “She was tied to this post.”

  “And?”

  “And she can talk. Like a person.”

  The man bowed his head politely. “I assure you, sir, that if I come across a talking donkey, you will be the first to know.” Then he walked quickly away.

  So there I was, lost in first-century Judea. No apostle and no talking donkey. I thought about praying for help, but I was concerned about praying to ugly Jesus, and also concerned that God might be mad at me for drinking the wine, which Peter had apparently spiked. I had just about decided to lie down in the street and wait for the wine to wear off when I saw a familiar face moving into the market. It was Pete! Younger, thinner, and wearing a scratchy dress, which was apparently all the rage this century.

  I ran up to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. “There you are, Pete! I was getting worried!”