At first they had been patient. After all, they didn’t know what Jesus was looking for or where he was intending to go.
“But where? Where now?” they’d call out and Jesus, closing his eyes as if in deep concentration, would say, quietly, “Vienna,” or “Zurich.” And so the haphazard journey continued.
It was almost as if Jesus was intent on seeing every motorway in Western Europe. Even ring roads did not escape his rapt interest: Frankfurt, Berlin, London, and Paris were all circumnavigated, and service stations sampled for their cafés and shops.
“Jesus, do you actually like pizza?” Michael asked once, as they sat at a red Formica table one evening on the outskirts of Hamburg.
“Liking or not is unimportant. I need to eat a pizza so I know what a pizza is, and once I know what it is I can then decide if it is good or not,” said Jesus. “But for my part it seems little more than bread and meat. In my day there would have been little call for it, although outside the temple or the market there were usually one or two vendors’ stalls.” He shrugged. “They sold fava beans and chopped herbs or perhaps liver or falafel. People were less prepared to waste money in those days. Every piece had value. But they were fond of tittle-tattle even back in my day; they did not have televisions and not newspapers, either. So they liked to gossip instead.” With an amused smile he held up a celebrity magazine and shook it in the air. “Rihanna,” he said. “She seems a nice little girl; what a pity to give her so much attention.”
At night, when they retired to their bunks, Jesus would lie in his bunk singing along to whatever music was playing on his portable hi-fi. His favorites were Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, and Janis Joplin, but he also had a sneaking regard for early U2 and knew most of their songs by heart.
He seemed impervious to boredom. He could spend all day throwing dice or rearranging some peanuts in a bowl.
There were days when Michael looked at him and thought to himself, “Is this the same Jesus who changed the history of the world?”
Even Ariel, with her customary good humor, found little to entertain her in the garish sweet shops where they spent hours so that Jesus could stock up on magazines and chocolate.
His interest in minutiae was enormous. For instance, he was capable of reading food labels almost infinitely, wanting to know what folic acid was, or emulsifier, E331, Omega 3, and B6.
Tension was building up.
Ariel started snapping at Michael. “Don’t be so bloody presumptuous,” she told him. “The Master has a plan, and we don’t know what it is. Not yet. We have to be patient.”
“But what’s the bloody plan? Eating sweets is not going to do much good, is it?” he protested. “I just wish I could understand.”
Only once did Jesus allay Michael’s doubts. He put his hand on Michael’s shoulder and said, “You think you must do something. But you are a mechanism, my friend. You think work is done by turning the handle. I tell you, this handle you turn with so much energy is not attached to anything; it merely spins in the air, and the machine remains idle in spite of everything you do.”
One morning as they lay in their bunks like sailors becalmed in the middle of some ocean, Jesus opened his eyes and sat bolt upright in his bunk.
“Enough of this,” he said. “Time to go south.”
His words brought immense relief. Immediately the trade winds seemed to stir among their idle sails. They were parked in a truckers’ lay-by just west of Strasbourg, close enough to the nearside motorway lane to feel a slight tremor every time a roaring juggernaut passed on the other side of a narrow skirt of what looked like plastic trees. The landscape on both sides of the motorway was more or less flat to the edge of the horizon and seemed productive only in so far as it was covered in short, green blades of chemically enhanced growth.
Over their heads hung an indistinct gray sky too inert even to produce rain. Its sole purpose was to bathe the planet in a murky, wearisome light.
Michael turned the ignition and hoped there would not be too many detours on the way.
As they headed south, Jesus did not often move from his upholstered sofa by the window. By now he’d amassed a great pile of books and magazines which he flicked through, occasionally looking up and analyzing the scenery outside. Or asking impossible questions. He tended not to be moralistic, but occasionally his sensibilities were hurt by something he saw or read.
Once, while flicking through a copy of Vogue, his face contorted with pain and he said, “So a supermodel is considered more beautiful than other women, is she?” Then frowning, added, “Young women always have beauty because they are loaded with physical destiny. But this beauty cannot be captured on a photographic plate; everybody knows this. The makers — so many makers you have in this world of yours — persevere with the impossible task because they can’t think of anything else to do with their weary hands.”
Another time he commented on some lyrics by Bob Dylan:
“But he just smoked my eyelids
And punched my cigarette…”
“This Bob is correct in his thinking,” said Jesus, smiling with recognition as if he had come across a kindred spirit. “Sometimes the thing that is can only be described by saying exactly what it is not.”
“Actually, that’s just the Chicago School of Disembodied Poetics. There’s nothing very profound about it,” said Ariel. Jesus told her she was mistaken. Most so-called profundity was about as illuminating as a cowpat in the grass. And yet, he added, when one actually considered a cowpat in the grass it was not as simple as it seemed. Who would have thought that, in some obscure corner of the universe, a large hairy four-legged beast would lift its tail and deposit a lump of digested organic material on the ground?
Frequently his words were obscure or there seemed to be very little method in his ramblings. “Well, what did you expect?” Ariel whispered to Michael one night after the Master had gone to sleep. “I mean nobody actually knows what he was like. The people who told his story were basically poets or mystics — may-be they just liked a decent yarn and they jazzed it up a bit? Whatever happened in Palestine two thousand years ago has been mythologized.”
The days passed and still Jesus did not reveal his intentions, thus prompting the question: was this just an extended sightseeing trip?
One day in the south of France, Jesus spent the afternoon walking, singing, and watching clouds while Ariel and Michael sat in the camper bus playing cards. When Michael articulated his disquiet, Jesus looked at him sternly and for the first time Michael felt directly challenged by his words:
“How can I give you purpose, a thing you will not give yourself nor even ask for?”
“I’m sorry,” said Michael. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I just want to know if there’s a plan.”
“Plans are for fools.”
Later that night, when Michael and Ariel lay in their double-bunk, Michael wondered about his purpose in life. He tried to explain his hopes and dreams to Ariel, but he found to his own surprise that he had none — although he didn’t admit so much to her. Ariel listened with interest although it was abundantly clear to her that Michael was a typical twenty-first century man with an ethos of materialism as the oxygen of his blood.
Besides, the very notion of “a dream” had something plasti-cized about it. Dreams were mostly actions involving a purchase: an airline ticket, a house, a horse, some land. Michael’s generation did not say, “I am a player of the drums; hear me.” Michael’s generation said, “I want to buy a drum kit.” Having acquired the physical, defining object, there was the whole problem of turning oneself into someone else, a rock star, film director, deep-sea diver, astrophysicist, martial arts expert, poker player, tycoon.