Imaginary Jesus

by Matt Mikalatos

  Jesus jumped from the bow and began walking along the lake again. Some in the crowd followed, and the fishermen started to sort the fish. But Pete stood like a man in a trance. “Come on,” he said to his crew. James and John had already started after the teacher.

  “But the fish,” one of the men protested.

  Pete glanced down at them. “The teacher can get more whenever it pleases him.” And he walked off, leaving his boats and the nets and the fish behind him.

  I turned to follow, but Daisy caught hold of my shirt and I noticed Old Pete sitting on a rock, the cup of wine in his hand. He took a drink and smiled at me.

  “That’s not the Jesus from the Red and Black Café,” I said.

  Pete shook his head.

  “Let’s go.” I said. “I want to see what he does next. Forget Imaginary Jesus.”

  Pete shook his head again. “Have you forgotten what I told you back at your house? Every time you think about Jesus, you picture your imaginary one. For you to see him—” he gestured down the beach—“we need to eliminate your imaginary Jesus.”

  I shrugged. “If you say so. Let’s do it.” I looked back toward the retreating shape of the ugly Jesus.

  “Can I point out one thing to you, friend? Did you notice that in all Y’shua’s teachings so far, he had never yet said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father but by me?’ Do you see that when I threw down my nets it had nothing to do with eternal life? I wanted to be like that man.” He pointed at the teacher. “Pure and simple. I saw his life, not his future. I knew he was an amazing teacher and a person of power, but I didn’t know he was God. Not yet. Do you see that?”

  “Yeah, I can see why. I would want to be like him too. He’s not the Jesus I’ve seen in a lot of churches. The way he talked about freedom for the oppressed in the synagogue . . . and the healings at your house. The way he teaches is amazing too. I can tell he knows what he’s talking about, not just throwing out theories.”

  Pete said, “Even without the promise of eternal life, I gave up everything to follow him. I didn’t know him well. But I knew him well enough.”

  I kicked over a rock on the sand. “So, what’s the next step? How do we find my imaginary Jesus?”

  “You ought to look where you usually see him,” Daisy suggested. “We could try a church. They hang around there like flies.”

  Pete shook his head. “Matt’s imaginary Jesus is on the run. He’s going to be hiding. So the better trick would be to think of places he definitely would not be. That’s where we start. The question right now, Matt, is where would your Jesus never go?”

  I thought about this. There were a lot of places my Jesus didn’t like. All-you-can-eat buffets. R-rated movies. Scary neighborhoods at night. But I knew there was one place my Jesus would never go, not in a million years. Not in infinity years, and then some. If I were my imaginary Jesus, this is precisely where I would hide out.

  I cleared my throat. I felt a little color creeping up my neck and into my ears. “Um,” I said, “with a lady of the night?”

  “Like a lady night watchman?” Daisy asked. “Is that what you mean?”

  “No, I mean he would never be alone with a prostitute.”

  “Ah.” Pete steepled his fingers like the top of a church. “I wondered when this would come up.” He stood. “Come along then, Matt.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re off to find a whore.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Something’s Going On Down the Road over Yonder

  You might think that meeting Jesus in the first century would be the climactic moment of a story like this one. But when my eyes fluttered open, I found myself sitting in my own dining room, Pete’s cup of wine making a perspiration ring on my wife’s table. It felt like an extended hallucination in which I had been more of an observer than a participant. It was like going backstage after a play about Jesus and meeting the actor. But I already knew Jesus’ story. . . . I wanted to know more about his role in my own. I didn’t feel that Jesus had given me answers. He hadn’t even let me ask a question.

  Which is why, I guess, Pete and I wedged into the cab of my truck and he directed me to a modest apartment near downtown Portland. Within ten minutes, we sat at the fold-out kitchen table of a former prostitute named Sandy. I told her and Pete that I had—accidentally—picked up a prostitute once before. I was in Seattle, I explained, and had taken the Forty-fifth/Fiftieth Street exit off of Highway 5. It was cold and late at night, and as it happens I was on my way home from helping out with a big Christian meeting with Christian college students.

  She was standing on the side of the road, and while I sat at the red light she ran up to the passenger window. When I rolled it down, she said, “Hey, my car ran out of gas, and it’s cold out. Could you give me a lift back to my car?”

  In retrospect, this question made no sense. Could you give me a lift back to my car that has no gas? At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. And it was cold. The only issue was that my wife and I had this rule about never being alone with people of the opposite gender, even in a car, ever since our encounter with a woman who disguised herself as a young boy so she could lure youth workers into being alone with her and then blackmail them by saying that they had attacked her. Which is another story entirely. Point is, the family rule said I shouldn’t be alone with a woman in my car.

  On the other hand, the woman was cold. She was rubbing her arms. The air churned through the window like cubes of ice falling into a glass. “It’s just a couple of blocks,” she told me, which in retrospect also made no sense, especially when I nodded for her to get in the car and she said, “Get back on the freeway.”

  She had long, dirty blonde hair and was wearing tight jeans and a puffy parka. She smelled like a hundred cigarettes and car exhaust. I pulled onto the freeway. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Matt.”

  “John?”

  “No, Matt.”

  “Nice to meet you, John.”

  Great, I thought, I just picked up a crazy lady.

  “How far is your car, anyway?” I asked. And then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and thanked me for the ride. As the smell of cigarettes followed her back to her side of the car, a little voice in the back of my head asked, Don’t prostitutes call their customers “johns”?

  My eyes widened in terror. At the same time I felt a deep sense of thankfulness for television cop shows, where I had learned this important piece of slang. Who knows when I would have figured it out otherwise? “Miss,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I just figured out what it is you do, and I’m going to need to let you out of the car.”

  “Oh.” She barely paused. “Is it because you’re a Christian or something?”

  “Yes.” I let out a deep breath. Now we understood each other.

  She put her hand on my knee. “Relax. I’ve been with lots of Christians. I’ve even been with pastors.”

  All the little fight-or-flight critters in my head started sounding the emergency klaxons and sending messengers to my brain: YOU MIGHT HAVE TO FIGHT THIS WOMAN, they said. OR YOU COULD THROW OPEN THE CAR DOOR AND ROLL TO SAFETY. I am on the highway, I told them. That could kill me. I took a look at her out of the corner of my eye. And I am pretty sure this woman could take me in a fight. WE WILL INCREASE YOUR ADRENALINE AND YOU WILL FEEL NO PAIN, they said.

  I moved her hand. I pulled off the highway at the next exit and into the parking lot of a bank. “You’ll have to get out here.” When she didn’t move I added, “Sorry.”

  “How am I going to get to work now, sweetie?”

  “Maybe someone else will come along and accidentally give you a ride.”

  She folded her arms. “I’m not getting out of this car without some money.”

  “I haven’t got any.”

  “You’re the one who picked me up,” she insisted, making it clear that this was all my fault.

  “I thought you needed a
ride to your car.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t be naive.”

  “That should be much easier after tonight.”

  “There’s a bank right there. Go get some cash.”

  I suddenly thought of the ATM cameras. Then I imagined the newspapers the next day: “Mikalatos Caught with Prostitute.” Front-page news, I thought. I wondered if those little ATM cameras could see across the parking lot.

  A glance at my empty wallet finally convinced her to get out, and I left her standing alone in the pooled light of a lamppost, shivering and rubbing her arms and shouting after me. I arrived home freaked out, told my wife about it, and couldn’t sleep.

  Sandy stirred a spoon in her coffee. Her short blonde hair had red tips, and she wore a black, high-necked dress, a green army jacket over it, and knee-high army boots. “So if your Jesus found himself in an awkward position with a woman, he would drive her to the middle of nowhere and abandon her.”

  I grinned sheepishly. “I guess so. I was panicking.”

  Pete grunted and took another bite of chocolate pie. “You do have to consider the way it looked, of course. It wasn’t wise to pick her up alone in a car.”

  “He wasn’t like that with me,” Sandy said. “On the outskirts of the worst part of town, and he struck up a conversation. I told him he shouldn’t be talking to someone like me. He just laughed and said I didn’t know him very well.”

  “We found him in a situation like that once, too,” Pete said. “Alone and talking with a woman. We were shocked, but we didn’t ask him what he was doing. I was afraid of what he might answer.”

  Sandy nodded. “I tried to throw him off the trail. I threw politics at him, theology, culture—nothing worked. He kept watching me with those big black eyes and I could tell that . . .” Her voice trailed off and she blushed. “I could tell that he loved me.” She cleared her throat and took a sip of coffee. “He didn’t care that people were watching. He didn’t stop talking to me. He looked at me in a different way than the johns. As if sex was the farthest thing from his mind.”

  I still felt a little awkward around Sandy. She had left prostitution behind three years ago, and she went to a church that Pete knew about. She was clean and sober, and she worked downtown at a coffee shop called Stumptown.

  “Thanks for helping tonight,” I said, and I meant it. “I’ve never really met a prostitute before, and you’re so nice.”

  She laughed. “We were all whores before we met him.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I didn’t ask any questions. I felt awkward about implying that she was still a prostitute and apologized. She laughed and told me to get over it. “I made money from sex. It was my job. It’s not glamorous. It’s not exciting. You just want the day to be over so you can watch television.”

  Pete said Sandy knew the streets and the broken-down little apartments out here pretty well, and he trusted her. She still had some friends out this way, and he thought she would be great for getting us around and into the neighborhood where Imaginary Jesus was most likely to be holed up.

  “There may be more than one,” Pete said.

  “More than one neighborhood?” I asked.

  “More than one Jesus. They tend to multiply when they’re on the run. . . .”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lamb on the Lam

  “Here’s the place,” Sandy said. It looked like a squalid tenement. I didn’t even know there were places like this in Portland, though I suppose every city has them somewhere. “My friends say this place is chock-full of people in hiding. Judy said she saw a couple guys who matched your description of Jesus, Matt. Third floor.”

  We went in through the front door and heard angry voices coming from down the hall. We walked up the stairs and saw a Jesus in a loincloth with bleeding hands crouched in the stairwell. “Gross,” I said, being careful not to touch him as we walked by.

  “Some people prefer Jesus mostly dead.” Pete stepped over the man like he’d seen this hundreds of times.

  “Not dead yet,” said the man in the loincloth.

  We came to the third floor, and Pete carefully put his ear against several doors. On the fifth one he gave us a thumbs-up. “I’ll knock. Matt, you rush when they open. Sandy, you guard the hallway. I think there are three of them in there. Catch who you can. If your Jesus isn’t in there, maybe they can lead us to him.”

  Pete knocked.

  “Who is it?” came a muffled voice from the other side.

  “The Virgin Mary,” Pete said.

  An angry exclamation came through the door. “Are you disrespecting my mom?” The door flung open and Pete reached in, grabbed Jesus by the robe, and yanked him into the hallway. I barreled past them into the apartment, where two more Jesuses sat at a table covered in poker chips, empty beer bottles, and cigar butts. One of them wore a black sash over his robe, and the other had the precise look of someone who followed the Law perfectly. Except for the pile of sausage pizza at his elbow.

  For a moment, nobody moved. I locked eyes with Legalist Jesus and he stared at me for a long time, saying nothing. He frantically put his cigar out, then pushed the pizza across the table. I kept staring at him and finally he burst, cigar smoke venting from his mouth. “I didn’t inhale,” he said, and then he jumped to his feet, knocking me backward into the wall. He pushed past Pete and the other Jesus wrestling in the doorway and headed out into the hallway. I heard a crash and anguished cries of “UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN,” which I took to mean that Sandy had tackled him.

  The last Jesus—the one with the black sash—stood calmly at the table. The window behind him was open, but there was no fire escape. “Looks like you’re trapped,” I said. But Jesus didn’t say anything. He stepped slowly back toward the window.

  I took another step toward him. “That’s a three-story drop,” I said. “You don’t want that, do you?”

  He glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes darted back to me. In a sudden swirl of cloaks he dove for the window, but I was right behind him. I grabbed hold of his ankle just as he ascended toward the top of the building. I forgot Jesus could fly. I wedged my legs against the wall and wrapped my fingers into his robe, yanking hard. He still lifted, and my torso moved out of the building. I struggled with my free hand to pull myself back inside, hooking my legs onto the windowsill.

  “Hold on,” Sandy said, and I could hear her rummaging around in the apartment. A moment later she returned with some rope and told me to wrap it around Jesus’ foot. I was losing my grip. After a moment’s struggle we got the rope around his ankle, tied it tight, and together yanked him back into the apartment.

  I grabbed him by the robe and shook him hard. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about Imaginary Jesus!” I shouted.

  He scowled at me and said, “Don’t count on it.”

  I shook him again. “What makes you think I won’t smash you to bits?”

  “My sources say no.”

  I shoved him into a chair, and Sandy started tying him down. “You know how this is going to end, don’t you?”

  “Reply hazy, try again.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “You may rely on it,” he said. I grabbed his black sash and looked at it more closely. Under a fold of the cloth was a white circle with a black number eight in the center. He was a Magic 8 Ball Jesus.

  Pete came in, his shirt torn and chest heaving. “Mine walked through a wall.” He pounded the table with his fist. “I chased him outside but he got away.”

  “Mine got away too,” Sandy said. “He bit me!”

  Pete sauntered over to our captive Jesus. “Magic 8 Ball Jesus. A lot more common than you would think. People pray to Jesus and then wait to see what answer they’ll get. It’s interesting. A Magic 8 Ball Jesus only has twenty replies: ten positive, five negative, and five neutral. It’s not a great way to plan your life. He’s more horoscope than person.”

  “Ask again later,” Jesus said.

  “Is he going to be any help?” I
asked.

  “The only way he’ll give us solid answers is by accident.” Pete waved him off.

  “But we could use him as a hostage,” Sandy said.

  “I’ll barricade the door,” I said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jesus Will Never Leave You (If You Tie the Knots Tight Enough)

  Pete left me and Sandy alone with 8 Ball so he could put the word on the street about our hostage. We played Go Fish for a while. (I can never remember all the rules for poker and Sandy got sick of beating me at it.) Then we entertained ourselves by asking 8 Ball questions.

  “Predestination or free will?”

  “Concentrate and ask again.”

  “Should I kill my firstborn son as a sacrifice on a mountain?” Sandy said. She didn’t have any kids.

  “Outlook not so good.”

  “If Jesus and some ninjas got in a fight, who would win?”

  “Better not tell you now.”

  That got old pretty quick. I settled back into a broken easy chair and asked Sandy, “What was it like when you first met Jesus?”

  Sandy rummaged around in the fridge for a drink, but it was mostly filled with beer. She managed to find one can of soda, and she popped the tab and took a drink. “Surprisingly nice. I thought he would hate me. Here I was, a prostitute, strung out, living with my boyfriend. And we talked about that. Mostly he told me that I didn’t have to live my life that way anymore, and that he could help make a way out. And that’s what he did.”

  “Can I ask how you, uh, got into that line of work?”

  She looked out the window, like she was looking out into another time. “My boyfriend. He started talking about how much his best friend wanted to sleep with me. He said his friend would give us a hundred bucks and it would be no big deal and we would use the money to go buy me a new dress. He just kept picking at me and picking at me and finally I said okay.” She rubbed her knuckles across her eyes. “Afterward, I was crying and he rubbed my back and told me it would be okay, and he took me out and bought me two hundred bucks’ worth of clothes.” She took a long drink of her soda. “And about a year later I realized he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. He was my pimp. He took care of me, he bought me clothes and food and a place to live and drugs, and I slept with his ‘friends’ and never saw any money.”