From a distance unkempt old men can look alike. Up close the differences between Gallio and John become more apparent: Gallio has fierce blue eyes while John is blind, but Gallio also has a slackness at the sides of his mouth. Arthritis has dried his knees and knuckles, and last night a useful tooth loosened in his head.
Gallio coughs up phlegm, spits to the side of the path. Jesus has not come back, though John hears voices that insist on their daily walk. From the cave past the mulberry tree along the path to the cliff edge, where Cassius Gallio and John the last disciple of Jesus stand exposed to the eye of god.
‘Sorry,’ Gallio says. Another morning, another beautiful day on which to break the discouraging news. ‘Not a cloud to be seen in the sky.’
When they first arrived on the island, years ago, they lived more confidently in hope than now. Gallio kept John close because after so much time, such intense speculation, he was jealous of his right to encounter Jesus. Jesus has promised to return in the lifetime of his beloved disciple, and John is the only disciple left alive. Therefore he is the beloved.
Cassius Gallio used to watch the clouds on John’s behalf, each as eager as the other for the weather of Jesus to cover the sun. Mostly, on a Greek island, the clouds stay away, or appear as distant lines like text in an unknown language, gradually washed out as dawn becomes day. The early morning Aegean sea, Gallio thinks, is more lovely against the blue Aegean sky than seems strictly necessary.
As a group of three they had left the Circus Maximus after dark, half a moon slipping onto its back over the lights of the eternal city. John was the beloved disciple, and as the taxi found a thread through the post-stadium streets John said kill me now. Those were the words he used.
‘Please. Now is as good a time as any.’
‘You expected Jesus to appear, didn’t you?’
‘The set-up was perfect,’ John said.
Claudia had to lean round from the front seat, so that unlike in England she could hear every word.
‘The Circus was a piece of theatre like the crucifixion,’ she filled in the gaps left by John, ‘only this time the important people, the rulers of the world, could have witnessed the power of Jesus.’
‘But Jesus couldn’t save Peter,’ Gallio said. ‘Evidently.’
From Claudia’s kitchen to Alma’s orphanage to the Circus Maximus, for Cassius Gallio this had been the longest day. ‘You’re the last disciple, John, and Jesus promised to come back in your lifetime.’
‘So kill me and bring him down. Hurry him up. I’ll join the others and you’ll find Jesus. That’s what you set out to do.’
‘Why rely on us?’ Claudia said. ‘Get your own hands dirty. If you want to die then kill yourself, like James did.’
‘James was bludgeoned to death in the street.’
‘Do it now.’ Claudia taunted him from the front seat. ‘Force Jesus to show himself. Throw yourself out of a moving car.’
Gallio reached across and pushed open the door, because he could appreciate Claudia’s speculative logic. The wind of the city rushed in. The driver braked.
‘It’s not my life to take,’ John said. He reached for the door, missed the handle, grabbed again and pulled it shut. Outside the car, after the driver had activated the central locking, monuments gathered pace, back to the speed limit and beyond. Life will go on.
‘Out of the question,’ John said. ‘I might be wrong about the time and place. Jesus makes the decisions, knows when and where.’
‘Not to mention how,’ Claudia said. ‘Falling out of a Roman taxi can’t contend with crucifixion.’
‘Or skinned alive,’ Gallio said. ‘Or sawn in two.’
‘Jesus needs someone else to provide the requisite horror, doesn’t he? None of you act alone. To push your religion forward you need some of us, those who aren’t disciples, to be assassins.’
Cassius Gallio had once heard Lazarus make the same complaint about his best friend Jesus. He could never do anything by himself.
‘Jesus used me to stage his execution,’ Gallio said, not as an accusation but as a statement of sad fact. ‘I took responsibility for killing him. I lived with the guilt of crucifying a man whose record never warranted a charge of terrorism. Then it turns out he may not have died. Jesus hasn’t been fair on me, and neither have you, his disciples. Including you, John. You collude in the various deceptions.’
‘But today is John’s lucky day,’ Claudia said. ‘We can give him what he wants. John, we’re taking you to your killer.’
‘Fate will do the rest,’ Gallio said, giving up on his training, on every pledge he’d made to civilisation. He could do no more. He would deliver John alive, which would go some way to atoning for his desertion, even though it meant Valeria came out ahead. Valeria was always the winner, but Cassius Gallio was fatalistic about that, too.
‘I appreciate your kindness,’ John said. ‘I’m grateful to you both.’
The tour-boats started as dots on the horizon, the dots became ships, and from the ships came landing-boats heavy with pilgrims in search of John the beloved disciple. Cassius Gallio assured these earnest believers that they were misinformed. John the former disciple of Jesus was last seen in Ephesus. He had been assassinated like the others, yes, equally horribly — boiled in a vat of pagan cooking oil, according to widespread reports.
‘We found a man not far from here who lives in a cave. He says his name is John.’
Gallio insisted the John on the island of Patmos was another John. This John believed in Jesus, true, but he was not the beloved disciple. Not after all this time. And John is a common name. Some of the pilgrims were disheartened, made their excuses and left. Others believed what they wanted to believe, and competed to show their devotion.
‘We too are disciples of Jesus,’ they said. ‘But we are the least of all the disciples.’
The pilgrims shared food and soap and images of Jude impaled by arrows against a verdant pastoral background. Gallio couldn’t begin to explain in how many ways their version of Jude’s death was wrong. They had woodcuts of Simon sawn in half crossways with a manual bow saw, and Bartholomew on a beach carrying his skin in his hands. They believed whatever pleased them, and as disciples the next generation of Christians, and the next, were impostors. No one could replace the original twelve, individually selected by Jesus. The Patmos visitors were aware of this, Gallio thought, because they were unrelenting in their pursuit of John. He could stand in for Jesus. He could pick out a new set of exceptional disciples, who would be only too willing to serve.
In his failure to do this, John of Patmos was a disappointment. He sat in his cave and waited. He waited some more and he continues to wait, until the pilgrims and more recently the professors can’t be sure it’s him. Is the disciple John here? Is Jesus here? The questioners want the comfort of being certain, but to this day Cassius Gallio refuses to compromise. He concedes that both John and Jesus may once have visited Patmos, but neither is here right now.
‘And Satan?’
Gallio despairs, almost, but despair is unproductive so occasionally he’ll throw out a story, disinformation in the tradition of Jesus. A myth hides the man himself from sight, Jesus knows this, and Gallio will freely admit that here on Patmos he once saw, with his own eyes, the disciple John collect an armful of hay from a field. John knelt down in front of the hay and prayed, and the hay was transformed into the purest gold. Yes John did exactly that, here on the island of Patmos. John melted the gold down and minted an armful of golden coins.