David Epperson - The Third Day

“We’re not going to pick fights,” Markowitz added. “We’ve got nothing against any of those people.”

This prompted Lavon to repeat his earlier warning.

“Just because we don’t have anything against anyone two thousand years ago doesn’t mean that the reverse will be true,” he said. “I still don’t think any of you grasp what we might be getting ourselves into.”

The others, though, had ceased paying attention.

“We’ve been over that — time and again. I’m going, and that’s final,” said Markowitz.

“Me, too,” said Bergfeld. “Don’t try to stop us.”

***

Lavon did, however, make one last attempt.

“What about the time paradox?” he asked, “the notion that we could accidentally kill one of our ancestors, and thus never be born.”

“We debated that for a while,” Juliet replied, “but we never came up with a good answer. Given that both of our families originated in northern Europe, we decided that the possibility of Henry encountering one of our ancestors in ancient Judea was so remote that we shouldn’t worry about it.”

Lavon gestured towards Markowitz.

“What about him?” he said. “His ancestors — ”

Markowitz cut him off.

“By the first century, Jews lived all across the Mediterranean world,” he snapped. “The odds are extremely remote that I could do myself any harm in that regard.”

Whatever the outcome, the paradox struck me as something easy to test.

“Couldn’t we take a handful of newly hatched chicks back a few days with their mother, kill the hen, and watch whether the chicks disappear?” I asked.

The others, though, greeted my contribution to scientific progress with stony silence. Either they considered the idea cruel, or most likely, they realized that such an experiment would only delay our departure.

Finally, Juliet shrugged.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “But I’d think about it — at least one more night.”

Of course, no one reconsidered, so at five o’clock the next morning, we followed Juliet — coffee in hand — down narrow corridors whose eerie green-glow reminded me of a movie set’s haunted house.

We had gone about a hundred meters when she finally stopped and opened an electrical box that looked old enough to have been installed by Thomas Edison himself.

A gleaming metallic panel popped up. Juliet punched a code and placed her right eye on the scanner. A second later, the panel light turned green, and we heard a whoosh as a section of the floor in front of us dropped, exposing a ladder leading to a chamber below.

“We need to keep the prep room away from prying eyes,” she said by way of explanation. “Our staffers are very bright; curiosity is part of their job description.”

Fluorescent lights came on automatically as we descended into a room about twenty-five feet square. The ubiquitous industrial tiles made up the ceiling, while several wooden benches had been bolted to the floor. Apart from a few spots of exposed cinder block, a variety of lockers and storage cabinets covered the walls.

I helped Lavon lower the boxes he had brought from Georgia. Once we had climbed down and closed the entrance above, Lavon opened the nearest box and removed three thigh-length brown tunics. He kept the darkest one for himself, then handed the others to Markowitz.

“Take your pick.”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

Markowitz selected the tan one, and after he had put it on, Lavon opened a second box and extracted a long brown-striped robe. Markowitz donned it, shook a couple of times to adjust the fit, and then stood in front of the mirror, quite pleased with himself.

“We’ll fit right in,” he said.

Lavon warned us that he couldn’t entirely be sure. Even with years of training and field experience, he had to admit that much of what he “knew” about the ancient world was more informed conjecture than a true comprehension of the facts.

So few articles of clothing from the first century had survived that he couldn’t help but wonder whether we could suffer the fate of the occasional tourist in Miami or Los Angeles who got murdered because he unwittingly wandered into the wrong part of town wearing the colors of a rival gang.

“Hey, what about underwear?” asked Markowitz. “All I have are my Fruit of the Looms.”

“That should be fine,” Lavon mumbled as his eyes dropped to the floor.

“One more unknowable,” he said to me, out of the earshot of the others.

I glanced over to Sharon, who had laid out five different robes and head coverings, and sat in deep contemplation trying to pick the one she liked best.

“What about her?” I asked.

The modern notion of an independent single woman was inconceivable in the time of Christ. A woman belonged to someone — to a father, a husband, or to some other male relative. As for those who didn’t, who were truly alone in the world, they didn’t call it the oldest profession for nothing.

“I’m working on it,” he said. “For her own protection, she needs to be noble.”

“Makes sense.”

“The trouble is, — ”

“Hey, what about this one?” Markowitz interrupted in a loud voice.

We looked up to see that he had opened another box and taken out a gleaming white robe, bordered with a deep purple stripe.

Lavon shook his head. “No, Ray, leave that one here.”

“Why?” he asked as he held it up to the mirror. “It makes me look dignified.”

“We’re not trying to look dignified. We’re trying to blend in, as best we can. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves if we can help it.”

***

While Lavon checked on the others, I waited until Juliet’s back was turned and then stuffed a few items — well, maybe more than a few — from my gym bag into my travel pouch, just in case we had to stay longer than we had planned.

I also took a more careful look at my traveling companions. For obvious reasons, we’d have to defer to Lavon’s judgment; and I took comfort in the fact that over the past few days, he had struck me as competent and efficient.

Still, I couldn’t be sure who would fall apart if our venture didn’t proceed according to expectation — if, for instance, the others had to witness a man being eviscerated in front of their own eyes, as I once had.

Our modern world is so incongruous in this regard.

On one hand, our televisions beam a constant barrage of twenty-first century atrocities into our living rooms, ranging from mass rape as an instrument of policy in parts of Africa, to youthful militias routinely hacking off the limbs of members of rival tribes, to women, even to this day, being stoned.

Yet the viewers watching these horrors buy their meat from grocery stores in shrink-wrapped plastic, and inhabit a society where leading animal training schools have to ensure that incoming students won’t be traumatized by having to kill rats of all things, in order to feed the snakes and birds of prey at their zoos.

***

The more I considered our party, the more I realized that it was my client’s son who worried me most. Though sober and level-headed in comparison to many of his peers, Markowitz had never quite shaken the attitude common to men born into great wealth — a superficial acknowledgement of authority that only partially concealed a central belief that the rules did not apply to them.

I walked over and pulled him away from the others.

“Ray, you do understand the seriousness of what we’re about to undertake?”

“Sure.”

My stern gaze did not change.

“Relax, Bill. It’ll be just like Everest. A man could get killed there, too, if he wasn’t careful.”