Christopher Moore - Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Some discomfort,” she had said. For the better part of ten days I’d had no sensation in my body at all, then suddenly things started to work again. Imagine rolling out of your warm bed in the morning into—oh, I don’t know—a lake of burning oil.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, Joshua, I’m about to crawl out of my skin here.” We were in our quarters, about an hour after I’d taken the antidote. Balthasar had sent Joshua to find me and bring me to the library, supposedly to see how I was doing.

Josh put his hand on my forehead, but instead of the usual calm that accompanied that gesture, it felt as if he’d lain a hot branding iron across my skin. I knocked his hand aside. “Thanks, but it’s not helping.”

“Maybe a bath,” Joshua suggested.

“Tried it. Jeez, this is driving me mad!” I hopped around in a circle because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Maybe Balthasar has something that can help,” Joshua said.

“Lead on,” I said. “I can’t just sit here.”

We headed off down the corridor, going down several levels on the way to the library. As we descended one of the spiral ramps I grabbed Joshua’s arm.

“Josh, look at this ramp, you notice anything?”

He considered the surface and leaned out to look at the sides of the tread. “No. Should I?”

“How about the walls and ceilings, the floors, you notice anything?”

Joshua looked around. “They’re all solid rock?”

“Yes, but what else? Look hard. Think of the houses we built in Sepphoris. Now do you notice anything?”

“No tool marks?”

“Exactly,” I said. “I spent a lot of time over the last two weeks staring at walls and ceilings with nothing much else to look at. There’s not the slightest evidence of a chisel, a pick, a hammer, anything. It’s as if these chambers had been carved by the wind over a thousand years, but you know that’s not the case.”

“So what’s your point?” Joshua said.

“My point is that there’s more going on with Balthasar and his girls than he lets on.”

“We should ask them.”

“No, we shouldn’t, Josh. Don’t you get it? We need to find out what’s going on without them knowing that we know.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why? Because the last time I asked a question I was poisoned, that’s why. And I believe that if Balthasar didn’t think you had something that he wants, I’d have never seen the antidote.”

“But I don’t have anything,” said Joshua, honestly.

“You might have something you don’t know you have, but you can’t just go asking what it is. We need to be devious. Tricky. Sneaky.”

“But I’m not good at any of those things.”

I put my arm around my friend’s shoulders. “Not always so great being the Messiah, huh?”

“I could kick that punk’s punk ass,” the angel said, jumping on the bed, shaking a fist at the television screen.

“Raziel,” I said, “you are an angel of the Lord, he is a professional wrestler, I think it’s understood that you could kick his punk ass.” This has gone on for a couple of days now. The angel has found a new passion. The front desk has called a dozen times and sent a bellman up twice to tell the angel to quiet down. “Besides, it’s just pretend.”

Raziel looked at me as if I had slapped him. “Don’t start with that again, these are not actors.” The angel back flipped on the bed. “Ooo, ooo, you see that? Ho popped him with a chair. Thaz right, you go girl. She nasty.”

It’s like that now. Talk shows featuring the screaming ignorant, soap operas, and wrestling. And the angel guards the remote control like it’s the Ark of the Covenant.

“This,” I told him, “is why the angels were never given free will. This right here. Because you would spend your time watching this.”

“Really?” Raziel said, and he muted the TV for what seemed like the first time in days. “Then tell me, Levi who is called Biff, if by watching this I am abusing the little freedom I’ve been given while carrying out this task, then what would you say of your people?”

“By my people you mean human beings?” I was stalling. I didn’t remember the angel ever making a valid point before and I wasn’t prepared for it. “Hey, don’t blame me, I’ve been dead for two thousand years. I wouldn’t have let this sort of thing happen.”

“Uh-huh,” said the angel, crossing his arms and striking a pose of incredulity that he had learned from a gangster rapper on MTV.

If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes. Oh, that and don’t piss off Salome, that was a big one too. “Okay, we’ve fucked up,” I said.

“Thaz whut I’m talkin’ about,” said the angel, entirely too satisfied with himself.

Yeah? Where was he when we needed him and his sword of justice at Balthasar’s fortress? Probably in Greece, watching wrestling.

Meanwhile, when we got to the library, Balthasar was sitting before the heavy dragon table, eating a bit of cheese and sipping wine while Tunnels and Pea Pods poured a sticky yellow wax on his bald head, then spread it around with small wooden paddles. The easels and slates from my lessons had been stacked out of the way against the shelves full of scrolls and codices.

“You look good blue,” Balthasar said.

“Yeah, everybody says that.” The paint, once set, didn’t wash off, but at least my skin had stopped itching.

“Come in, sit. Have wine. They brought cheese from Kabul this morning. Try some.”

Joshua and I sat in chairs across the table from the magus. Josh, completely true to form, disregarded my advice and asked Balthasar outright about the iron door.

The aspect of the jolly wizard became suddenly grave. “There are some mysteries one must learn to live with. Did not your own God tell Moses that no one must look upon his face, and the prophet accepted that? So you must accept that you cannot know what is in the room with the iron door.”

“He knows his Torah, and Prophets and Writings too,” Joshua said to me. “Balthasar knows more about Solomon than any of the rabbis or priests in Israel.”

“That’s swell, Josh.” I handed him a hunk of cheese to keep him amused. To Balthasar I said, “But you forget God’s butt.” You don’t hang out with the Messiah for most of your life without picking up a little Torah knowledge yourself.

“What?” said the magus. Just then the girls grabbed the edges of the hardened wax shell they’d made on Balthasar’s head and ripped it off in one swift movement. “Ouch, you vicious harpies! Can’t you warn me when you’re going to do that? Get out.”

The girls tittered and hid their satisfied grins behind delicate fans painted with pheasants and plum blossoms. They fled the library leaving a trail of girlish laughter in the hall as they passed.

“Isn’t there an easier way to do that?” asked Joshua.

Balthasar scowled at him. “Don’t you think that after two hundred years, if there was an easier way to do it I would have found it?”

Joshua dropped his cheese. “Two hundred years?”

I chimed in. “You get a hairstyle you like, stick with it. Not that you could call that hair, per se.”

Balthasar wasn’t amused. “What’s this about God’s butt?”

“Or that you could call that style, for that matter,” I added, rising and going to a copy of the Torah that I’d seen on the shelves. Fortunately it was a codex—like a modern book—otherwise I’d have been unwinding a scroll for twenty minutes and the drama would have been lost. I quickly flipped to Exodus. “Right, here’s the part you were talking about. ‘And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.’ Right? Well, then God puts his hand over Moses as he passes, but he says, ‘I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’”