John

by Niall Williams

  But I will need another sign. Something of the cost of intercession. That it is not the business of mortals, but only those who can touch the Divine.

  A wound. I should have a wound.

  From where he kneels, Matthias looks into the shadowed room. Upon the table is a short metal spike, holed one end as a needle. It is within his reach. How the Divine provides for his own.

  Matthias waits. He listens into the whirl of the wind for the bell ring and for those who will be coming. He is perfectly poised. Papias breathes easily now and soon will wake. He may hear or not, it is of no import. The others will let him know Matthias wrestled him back from death.

  Then, faintly, like a distant bird lost, the bell sounds. There is no light. No daybreak is apparent to Matthias, but must be. He takes the metal spike, touches its tip to the candle flame, then he brings it to the corner of his eye.

  I will weep blood.

  With one hand holding the spike to the outer corner of his eye and the other raised behind it, he begins to press. The needle burns minutely. With a sudden blow, he smacks hard the hand that holds it, and it pops with blood spurt in past the corner of his eye socket. He shrieks out, pulls and lets fall the spike, then must fumble in the dirt to find it quickly and throw it out of view. The pain is wild. Blood blurs his seeing, but he finds the needle and flings it away. Roughly he pokes at the wound, the pulpy blood and watery leakage of himself, draws a weep line on to his cheek. His teeth chatter and he has to bite hard to keep from weakness. Their footsteps approach. He throws himself forward, lays both hands on the youth's forehead, and says aloud the prayers in a voice not his own.

  Then John and the disciples step inside. They see the shocking figure of the kneeling mourner, the blood flowing freely from his eye. Then Linus sees the chest of Papias rise.

  'He lives!' he cries out. 'Papias lives! Look. Behold, he is brought back!'

  15

  The younger disciples fall to their knees. The Apostle stands.

  'Papias lives?' he asks.

  'He does,' Auster says. 'Praise the Divine.'

  There is the murmuring of prayer. The door being ajar and the gathering both inside and out, the storm blows amongst them. The framing of the hut creaks, the cloth tenting slaps and snaps angrily. A beaker rolls on the floor.

  'Bring me to him,' John says.

  Ioseph leads him. Auster and Linus offer their arms to lift Matthias from his kneeling, his bloodied eye-weep making the others look away.

  'God has answered my prayers,' Matthias says aloud. 'Praise him.'

  'Look how he has prayed himself into the ground,' Linus whispers, pointing to the imprints.

  John reaches his hand, pats the dark until his outstretched fingers descend to find the face of the youth. He kneels then. His fingers lie flat against the cheek of Papias and he bows his head. He says nothing. He touches the ravaged ear and a shudder passes through him. His blind eyes he shuts tightly.

  O Lord. O Lord Jesus.

  I am a poor shepherd who loses his sheep.

  Forgive me.

  His lips do not move; his prayers are unheard. Some leave to accompany Matthias and to dress his wound. Others kneel on their uncertainty. John stays, and in his staying suffers the pain of self-knowledge. He sees his weakness, his withdrawal, his waiting. He sees how ineffectual he has become, how the community itself falls away to nothing. How day by day time erodes what had been built with blood and suffering. It is his fault, vanity that made him believe his work was over and the Lord Jesus would respond by coming now. He has been blind in all ways, not merely in sight. But above all, he has forgotten the essence that returns so powerfully to him now. He has forgotten love.

  On his knees by the side of Papias it suffuses him. He feels it like a course of water coming, sluicing from gates unlocked. It roars into the very blood of him, his ancient arteries quickened, laved. Love. Love. His eyes weep. He draws his hands together. The knuckles whiten in fierce clasp. Love. What comes pouring, flowing to every end of him is the awareness of love. And within it sorrow. Here flows and intermingles the sorrows of failed love, of untold love, of love afraid and perishing, of love twisted by pride, made silent, destroyed. He loves Papias, as he loves Ioseph, as he did Prochorus, but feels he has failed all. He weeps, his shoulders shudder. Ioseph kneels down at the Apostle's side, as do others of the elder disciples. The wind whirls in the little dwelling, the day breaking with little light. Still John is bowed, his heart inundated. We are nothing lest we love. We are of God, who is love. Therefore let us.

  The thoughts course, swollen with feeling, carrying in bright effluvium flotsam of phrases, things he might say. Antique channels of him open, wildly irrigated and overflowing. Comes the vivid recall of the love he felt for Jesus, the absolute, the unconditional. This is light and water both. Flowing, flowing, and he a vessel. Love. How a man might be filled and overfilled and feel the radiance of all creation to be the radiance of love, the daylight itself awash, dazed, deluged. How he might be humbled so to feel himself connected to the everlasting, the infinite flood of love, the bounty therein. And feel himself taken, carried, helpless but hopeful, full, filled. A man filled, light-filled, touched like the wick of a candle with flame so he trembles. Love. And knows a bliss of gratitude, an ecstasy of soul to witness himself so capable of such light, such water. Water of life itself. We are nothing lest we love. We are of God, who is love. Therefore let us.

  John's frame is bent over, his brows knitted, his white hair a gleam waterfall over the prone figure of the youth. He is other than himself. Not yet is he thinking of what happened to Papias, of the fire or the woman or what Matthias claims. Not yet is he considering the straying of the community, the meaning of what happened, or what must follow. For he is breathed into with spirit, in-spired and at one with what was from the beginning.

  At the fifth hour Papias opens his eyes. He lies still. He sees the host of elders gathered around and wonders if he attends his own funeral. Does his spirit float free? The faces are grave, heavy-featured, the room dimly shadowed. There is a noise like the sea that is not the sea. Has he drowned? Has his body drowned and he been thrown up on the shore to be laid out before burial? The waves whisper.

  The elders move their mouths. Papias falls back beneath the sea.

  The pain in the eye is exquisite. It shoots in from the corner, needling deeper than the needle with the slightest movement of the head. Matthias's vision is smeared as with ointment. The pain pierces. He would shriek if it were not for the others. Baltsaros dabs at it, then lays a poultice he has prepared. It stings fiercely. Matthias feels holed into the back of his mind.

  But it was worth it. How they look upon me now. Pain is proof. How the ignorant love suffering in another.

  He lies with his back rested against a goatskin cushion of lambswool. (Who of them harbours such a thing?) Linus points Phineas to the reddened knees, but Matthias waves him away, a movement that causes a wince, as though a hook embeds in the jelly of his eye. He sips the thinned winter-berry wine, its sourness recalling him from the hurt. There are figs; there is a bowl of raisins swollen in honey. There are dried pieces of goat meat.

  Such dreary offerings. My disciples.

  'Master, you saw the devil?' Auster asks, kneeling, his plump face pale and his eyes watering like one fevered.

  'The devil had taken the youth; I had to pursue him,' Matthias says.

  'He was a serpent?'

  'He was serpent in form, but greater than a serpent. He twisted in the youth's eyes, two-headed.' Matthias pauses. They want more. They hunger for detail. Struggling against weariness and the pain, he continues. 'He had taken possession of the spirit, and he rose out and up above me, in size enormous, as to sink his venom in me.'

  There is a hush. His twelve, and Auster and Linus attend. He sips the sour wine.

  'I called to him to be gone. I opened my arms wide like so, and in my hands were swords of silver. Light shone from them and lit the room and dazzled the devil,
but he twisted upon himself and spat and became then a creature breathing fire. "Be gone," I cried out. "Be gone. You know not who I am." The fire he breathed burned me not. I was as one bathed in light divine and he cowered back. One head sucked at the youth for the last of his spirit, the other spat skyward, and a flock of birds it seemed fell from the sky slain. I raised my sword and plunged it to him. It sunk into the hardened scale as though in hide. Black blood of him, hot, flowed. Verily it did. He was wounded, and my sword plunged again and again till he twisted back from me and the youth and departed into darkness.'

  Matthias allows a pause. None speaks. The pain in the eye pulses from the telling. He touches the poultice, tries to mask the shudder that passes through him.

  'Papias?' Baltsaros asks. 'He was dead?'

  'The youth was dead. Auster saw. But his spirit was not taken. It hovered still between this world and the next.'

  There is nodding. There is a murmur. There is reverence.

  'I knelt then,' Matthias tells them. 'I knelt then to pray that I might be able to intercede on the youth's behalf, that he not leave this world yet. That he be spared to me and returned from death. I summoned the Divine, and found it within me, and touched Papias's forehead, and behold! he lived again.'

  There is a gasp. Matthias bows his head. The others do the same.

  Wonderful. The power of a story to the credulous.

  When Papias wakes a second time, he sees the face of the Apostle. John is bent low over him and must feel the moment, for he turns his head at once.

  'Papias?'

  'Master.'

  'Praise God.' The Apostle reaches his two hands to lay them on the forehead of the youth. The fever is gone.

  'Can you hear, Papias?' Ioseph asks.

  Tenderly the youth touches his ruined ear, as if his fingers recollect, he nods. 'Yes.'

  'Come, we will bear you to the cave,' John says.

  'Master, I can walk.'

  'You will be weak, Papias,' Ioseph counsels, 'let them bring a litter.'

  'No. I will walk. And guide my master. Please.'

  And so Papias stands and seems at once to the elder disciples as though he has aged greatly. There is in his bearing the prudent air of one who has come through peril, as if a traveller from lands of plague and famine. He is slow and deliberate where once sudden. He offers his arm to the Apostle. 'Master?'

  They go out into the day. Though the storm has moved to the west, the sky is overhung with clouds and the light poor. The disciples progress silently from the dwelling across the smooth rock face polished with wind. The slain seabirds lie where they fell, but none make comment. The dark sea throws itself about, unsettled yet. On the stone steps Papias takes care to attend the Apostle, offering both hands. Wind whirls the white hair and beard. The elders stop and wait. They do not voice opinion on what Matthias seems to have brought to pass; they will wait to hear the word from the Apostle. They have the reverence of ones aware they are in a presence, and though each feels turn inside him the tireless wheel of human questioning, they keep silence. Something is happening, and has happened, but it is not for them to know yet, they believe. All will be revealed. Their faith now is founded as before on the telling of the acts of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, and the Apostle is as a roadway leading back to that reality and onwards to the Second Coming. He will tell them when he has considered it. He will tell them if Matthias has worked a miracle.

  At the cave entrance they stop.

  'You must rest now, Papias,' Ioseph says. 'We thank God that you have come back to us.'

  'Back? I have not been gone.'

  The elders exchange looks, some lower their eyes to the stone path.

  'Before the dawn bell you were announced dead,' John says.

  Papias looks at him. 'Master, I was not dead.'

  None speak. John holds on to the youth's hands, a frail bridge-way, windblown. The illumination of the night is about the Apostle still. We are nothing lest we love. He finds himself welling like a spring struck. His chin trembles with emotion. He fears he may weep with gratitude, may seem the oldest of old men to the elders and buckle with love. It keeps coursing through him. The poor daylight, the sealight, the sounds and smells carried on the wind, these, the disciples who have followed him in banishment all these years, the loyal youth: all are touched with the same blessing. He cannot think of one without feeling love. It is as if he has been rescued and returned to himself, to a time long ago when he felt so. This is his understanding of it now. It is love that informs all. Nor is this love a thing soft or immature like a new bud, but rather that which comes coursing through the vine itself and makes it strong, durable, pliable, makes it spread to encompass more and more ground, cling to the wall, bear fruit. He has been weak, and foolish, and forgotten love, but no more.

  'Come. Come all of you. Come inside,' the Apostle says. His blind head at an upward tilt, he releases Papias and waves both hands. 'Come. All. Be with me.'

  When they are entered and sit around on rush mats and stools, and Papias has been given a lambswool blanket for his shoulders, the Apostle speaks to them. He speaks as he has not in a long time, and from his first words all of the elders feel a shiver of knowledge, understanding the words he speaks will outlive time.

  'Beloved,' he says, 'we must believe not every spirit, but try all spirits whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world.' He touches his tongue to his lips, raises his voice louder and stronger still.

  'Hereby know ye the spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of Antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.'

  None speak. The elders and the youth look at the blind apostle as though at a column of light.

  'But ye,' John says, 'ye are of God, my children, and have overcome them, because greater is he that is in you than he that is the world.

  'They are of the world; therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.

  'We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us.

  'Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.'

  He pauses. The phrases are like platforms in his mind, the construction building one upon the next, rising as steps he discovers just as he arrives at each one. It proceeds with perfect logic, as if out of a natural pre-existent order. The words are there just before he needs to find them. He raises his head, his whitened eyes, his arms he holds outwards.

  'Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

  'He that loveth not, knoweth not God.' Again he pauses, as if he is in flight and discovers a higher plane of purer air, then flies up into it. He says aloud the four words that seem carved on the invisible: 'For God is love.'

  His speech has the quality of truth, beyond dispute, and the disciples need no persuasion. Some nod silently, others stare as if at a marvel. The Apostle draws to him his arms, presses together his hands. None have heard him speak so before, for this is not the telling of the acts of Jesus, there is no narrative. This is not the preaching Ioseph heard from the Apostle many times when they wandered in the dusted lands of Bithynia or Troas or the stony fields of Thessalonica. This is other. This seems a pure distillation.

  'Beloved,'John repeats, 'he that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is love.

  'In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only begotten son into the world, that we might live through him.

  'Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.'

  The cave catches the wind; the air sings like the sea. Light and cloud-shadow cross. The old apostle raises his hands a last time.

  'Beloved,' he says, 'if God so loved us, we ought a
lso to love one another.

  'No man had seen God at any time. But if we love one another, God dwells in us and his love is perfected in us.

  'Let us pray that it will be so.'

  John bows his head, the others likewise. In the cave on Patmos they kneel in the darkness, flooded with light.

  16

  Now is the moment.

  Matthias stands on the seashore, before him a great mound of the dead seabirds that Auster and Linus have gathered and now set alight. Lamp oil takes flame, sea faggots, flotsam of storm wrack, timbering. Black smoke in a banner unfurls.

  Now is the moment. I will win to me no more but Papias. He alone of the others would be of value. Testament. Eyewitness. My own Lazarus. How quickly they carried him away! It will matter not. I will confront him: You were dead; I went after and brought you back. How deny that? Arise and follow.

  The bird fire burns poorly. Smoke smudge thickens against the daylight. The grey sea twists as though in chains. In the near distance some few fishers are about, starting late because of the storm, hoping to bring home a heavy catch of fish foolish to seek sanctuary in the shallow waters. The boats cut across the waves on quick wind till the nets grow heavy. Auster and Linus stand by the pyre. They are in open-eyed amazement still at the discovery of the seabirds after Matthias had told of them in his struggle with the devil. When Linus saw them, he vomited, Auster wanted to clap his hands. The birds were a brilliant display, all the more awesome for the substantial weight of each as Linus and Auster dragged them over the sand. What power it took to strike them from the sky! What flash of mind forked into the night to plunge them headlong! The two disciples watch the smoke rise and curve in upon itself and uncoil, caught by the wind. Matthias walks away down the stony shore, stands.

  The storm will have passed by this evening. At daybreak we will leave.

  Lemuel comes with the news. The Apostle has announced the community will take supper together. There will be a communion before sunset. Matthias returns to his dwelling, his eye pulsing with pain. He removes the poultice, palms water on to his face from a bowl. The hour is near. His heart is quickened at the thought. He palms the water a second time, touches gingerly the throbbing, winces. Still, the wound has its worth. He sits to consider how things must proceed. After a time he sends Auster and Linus to tell the others to come to his dwelling before the supper.