In practice, ideas were far more interesting and accessible as nuggets of speculation than the grind of their attainment.
After listening to Ariel’s arguments, Michael told her he wanted to live on a farm, grow vegetables, keep animals, and learn some carpentry. She found herself slightly disheartened.
“What you’re describing is nothing. It’s not a dream.”
He sat up on his elbow and stared at her. “What is it, then?”
“A description.”
“Well, in that case I don’t have any dreams.”
“Good. Be honest. Spit it out. Life is bloody meaningless. The only things people actually like, and I agree with them, is dancing and making love. That only works while you’re young. Everything else is a bore from beginning to end.” She sighed deeply, glancing towards Jesus’s cabin, where the lights were still on.
Since that luminous day outside the Master’s tomb in the catacombs, their sexual intimacy had once again died a slow death. A feeling of ennui had begun to permeate their hurried lovemaking whenever Jesus left the camper bus for one of his meandering walks.
That night, Michael had nightmares about Ariel dying all over again.
In the morning when they woke up, Jesus was standing over them, squinting down at them with a slightly bemused expression on his face. “You’re only here for the struggle to live,” he said. “Not to mystify or complicate.”
He put his hands on Ariel’s temples and looked into her eyes. “Busy yourself,” he said. “Accept my gift.”
And to Michael he said “Rise into the light, my umbrageous son. Go forth.”
That same evening they crossed the frontier and made their way down tiny roads into the Pyrenean massif, until they found a remote valley with a crumbling, semi-abandoned village at one end. The road climbed to the top of a steep hill covered in scree.
“Park it here,” said Jesus. “Park it straight and well, for it shall never move again.”
Michael was puzzled, but he did as he was told.
Over the next few days he followed with growing interest the news bulletins on their radio and television, brought to them courtesy of the satellite dish on the roof of their vehicle. The world had started picking itself apart while they had been loafing about in Europe. Stock exchanges everywhere were in meltdown because of malfunctioning computers. Scientists were being hired to solve the problem, but the problem was not in the programming or the hardware. The problem, in the words of one fascinated Nobel laureate, was that “the logos has changed; the laws of the universe have scrambled themselves so that we have to reinvent mathematics, physics, and chemistry using a new set of rules.” It seemed beyond their capacities and they admitted as much.
Banks were having problems establishing what monies were held in their deposits. Customers didn’t know from one day to another whether they were millionaires or paupers.
Cars wouldn’t start.
Aircraft had turned into dinosaur-proportioned lumps of metal no more likely to fly than stones.
Even power stations refused to generate electricity. In effect they had become very large, wasteful log fires pumping heat into the night, and there seemed little point in turning them on at all.
Everywhere there was a run on candles and paraffin. Junk shops were raided for brass lamps and candlesticks.
Gardens were ploughed up and turned into vegetable patches.
A crisis meeting of the G8 was convened. The gold standard was reintroduced about one hundred years after it had been phased out. The banking system was reformed. Letters of conveyance would henceforth be used rather than electronic transfer, which no longer worked. Hundreds of thousands of clerks were employed to write out balance sheets, copy documents, and manually post all correspondence.
The whole notion of trading in shares had to be abandoned.
In spite of enormous efforts to underpin the system, money lost its value. In the newspapers there was a lot of clever talk about “the new Weimar Republic.” People would rather have a bag of potatoes than a pile of money.
Meanwhile, in silos all over the world, missile systems lay moldering, and tanks, aircraft and rifles were mothballed.
The “travel industry,” as it had once politely been named, was disbanded overnight. No one was willing to take the risk of going on holiday, in case they were unable to come home again. The available modes of transportation were also so limited that from then on, a “holiday” was usually something one undertook with a tent on one’s back and a pair of walking boots on one’s feet.
“Out of service” became a commonplace sign, posted here, there, and everywhere.
Armies, called out on the streets to maintain order, found themselves impotent to stop looting and fighting — although such tendencies were almost nonexistent. Before long, even elite regiments had been disbanded. There was nothing to pay them with anyway. And besides, their guns and missiles were so cranky that it was pointless pretending that they had a use on the battlefield. Even that word, “battlefield,” became quaint and archaic.
National newspapers were no longer published as there was no effective way of distributing them. Only local newspapers were printed in small editions, and then delivered by urchins on bicycles.
Credit card companies, lending institutions and other financial bodies simply disappeared overnight. Records no longer existed, and governments everywhere discovered the awful truth: it was not possible to maintain control over the populace without recourse to the silicon chip.
These changes were global, immediate and universal.
About a week after they had arrived, Michael found one morning that neither his radio nor his television worked.
Jesus watched as Michael stood there cursing, flicking the buttons of his remote. Eventually he commented with a slight note of hilarity: “Do you miss it, Michael? Can’t you use your own eyes and ears?”
Michael stared at Jesus, his long, unkempt locks framing his face, his long lean arms with the sinewy biceps and triceps, and, on his left inside forearm, the tattooed symbol of a fish. “Did you do this, Jesus?”
But Jesus never answered direct questions. They seemed to amuse him, as if they were somehow off the point. “It’s not what I do that matters,” he said. “The world has changed, it is true. But do you really have time to wonder why? Do you not have enough troubles of your own? The question is, what are you going to do today?”
He went outside and waved at a group of peasants coming up the hill with a horse. Soon they were at work, plowing.
As Michael stood there watching their plowshare opening a long gash in the ground, it occurred to him that this — the plow, the sweat of labor — was the only thing there had ever been. Everything else had been an illusion, and the illusion had passed.
While he and Ariel had been agonizing and theorizing, Jesus had enlisted groups of loyal followers. Men built hundreds of shelters or prepared the soil for planting. Women sheared sheep, spun wool, picked fruit, baked and slaughtered and brewed enormous quantities of beer. Jesus liked to sit in the evenings sharing a tipple with the hundreds of people who seemed to be living with them.
Michael did not enjoy his own skepticism, nor could he deny his conclusion: that Jesus had somehow dismantled all the apparatus of the modern world, and now that it had all gone, they would henceforth have to live like peasants intent only on the simplest of tasks — and the reality of wind and rain.