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

Finally I worked up the courage to ask Gaspar what was going on and he said, “It is a special meditation. You are not ready. Go sit.”

Gaspar’s answer to most of my questions was “Go sit,” and my resentment meant that I wasn’t losing the attachment to my ego, and therefore I wasn’t going anywhere in my meditation. Joshua, on the other hand, seemed completely at peace with what we were doing. He could sit for hours, not moving, and then perform the exercise on the posts as if he’d spent an hour limbering up.

“How do you do it?” I asked him. “How do you think of nothing and not fall asleep?” That had been one of the major barriers to my enlightenment. If I sat still for too long, I fell asleep, and evidently, the sound of snoring echoing through the temple disturbed the meditations of the other monks. The recommended cure for this condition was to drink huge quantities of green tea, which did, indeed, keep me alert, but also replaced my “no mind” state with constant thoughts of my bladder. In fact, in less than a year, I attained total bladder conciousness. Joshua, on the other hand, was able to completely let go of his ego, as he had been instructed. It was in our ninth month at the monastery, in the midst of the most bitter winter I can even imagine, when Joshua, having let go of all constructions of self and vanity, became invisible.

I have been out among you, eating and talking and walking and walking and walking, for hours without having to turn because of a wall in my way. The angel woke me this morning with a new set of clothes, strange to the feel but familiar to the sight (from television). Jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers, as well as some socks and boxer shorts.

“Put these on. I’m taking you out for a walk,” said Raziel.

“As if I were a dog,” I said.

“Exactly as if you were a dog.”

The angel was also wearing modern American garb, and although he was still strikingly handsome, he looked so uncomfortable that the clothes might have been held to his body with flaming spikes.

“Where are we going?”

“I told you, out.”

“Where did you get the clothes?”

“I called down and Jesus brought them up. There is a clothing store in the hotel. Come now.”

Raziel closed the door behind us and put the room key in his jeans pocket with the money. I wondered if he’d ever had pockets before. I wouldn’t have thought to use them. I didn’t say a word as we rode the elevator down to the lobby and made our way out the front doors. I didn’t want to ruin it, to say something that would bring the angel to his senses. The noise in the street was glorious: the cars, the jackhammers, the insane people babbling to themselves. The light! The smells! I felt as if I must have been in shock when we first traveled here from Jerusalem. I didn’t remember it being so vivid.

I started to skip down the street and the angel caught me by the shoulder; his fingers dug into my muscles like talons. “You know that you can’t get away, that if you run I can catch you and snap your legs so you will never run again. You know that if you should escape even for a few minutes, you cannot hide from me. You know that I can find you, as I once found everyone of your kind? You know these things?”

“Yes, let go of me. Let’s walk.”

“I hate walking. Have you ever seen an eagle look at a pigeon? That’s how I feel about you and your walking.”

I should point out, I suppose, what Raziel was talking about when he said that he once found everyone of my kind. It seems that he did a stint, centuries ago, as the Angel of Death, but was relieved of his duties because he was not particularly good at them. He admits that he’s a sucker for a hard-luck story (perhaps that explains his fascination with soap operas). Anyway, when you read in the Torah about Noah living to be nine hundred and Moses living to be a hundred and forty, well, guess who led the chorus line in the “Off This Mortal Coil” shuffle? That’s where he got the black-winged aspect that I’ve talked about before. Even though they fired him, they let him keep the outfit. (Can you believe that Noah was able to postpone death for eight hundred years by telling the angel that he was behind in his paperwork? Would that Raziel could be that incompetent at his current task.)

“Look, Raziel! Pizza!” I pointed to a sign. “Buy us pizza!”

He took some money out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You do it. You can do it, right?”

“Yes, we had commerce in my time,” I said sarcastically. “We didn’t have pizza, but we had commerce.”

“Good, can you use that machine?” He pointed to a box that held newspapers behind glass.

“If it doesn’t open with that little handle, then no.”

The angel looked perturbed. “How is it that you can receive the gift of tongues and suddenly understand all languages, and there is no gift that can tell you how things work in this time? Tell me that.”

“Look, maybe if you didn’t hog the remote all the time I would learn how to use these things.” I meant that I could have learned more about the outside world from television, but Raziel thought I meant that I needed more practice pushing the channel buttons.

“Knowing how to use the television isn’t enough. You have to know how everything in this world works.” And with that the angel turned and stared through the window of the pizza place at the men tossing disks of dough into the air.

“Why, Raziel? Why do I need to know about how this world works? If anything, you’ve tried to keep me from learning anything.”

“Not anymore. Let’s go eat pizza.”

“Raziel?”

He wouldn’t explain any further, but for the rest of the day we wandered the city, spending money, talking to people, learning. In the late afternoon Raziel inquired of a bus driver as to where we might go to meet Spider-Man. I could have gone another two thousand years without seeing the kind of disappointment I saw on Raziel’s face when the bus driver gave his answer. We returned here to the room where Raziel said, “I miss destroying cities full of humans.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, even though it was my best friend who had caused that sort of thing to go out of fashion, and not a moment too soon. But the angel needed to hear it. There’s a difference between bearing false witness and saving someone’s feelings. Even Joshua knew that.

“Joshua, you’re scaring me,” I said, talking to the disembodied voice that floated before me in the temple. “Where are you?”

“I am everywhere and nowhere,” Joshua’s voice said.

“How come your voice is in front of me then?” I didn’t like this at all. Yes, my years with Joshua had jaded me in regard to supernatural experiences, but my meditation hadn’t yet brought me to the place where I wouldn’t react to my friend being invisible.

“I suppose it is the nature of a voice that it must come from somewhere, but only so that it may be let go.”

Gaspar had been sitting in the temple and at the sound of our voices he rose and came over to me. He didn’t appear to be angry, but then, he never did. “Why?” Gaspar said to me, meaning, Why are you talking and disturbing everyone’s meditation with your infernal noise, you barbarian?

“Joshua has attained enlightenment,” I said.

Gaspar said nothing, meaning, So? That’s the idea, you unworthy spawn of a razor-burned yak. I could tell that’s what he meant by the tone in his voice.

“So he’s invisible.”

“Mu,” Joshua’s voice said. Mu meaning nothing beyond nothingness in Chinese.

In an act of distinctly uncontrolled spontaneity, Gaspar screamed like a little girl and jumped four feet straight in the air. Monks stopped chanting and looked up. “What was that?”