Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

Morrison closed his eyes and, for a moment, he was back in Jerusalem, feeling the desert heat on his face, staring at the old city and understanding, for the first time, how small it all was. That the real Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, was smaller than an English country town.

Their guide, a lean, leathery woman in her fifties, pointed. ‘That’s where the sermon on the mount would have been given. That’s where Jesus was arrested. He was imprisoned there. Tried before Pilate there, at the far end of the Temple. Crucified on that hill.’ She pointed matter-of-factly down the slopes and up again. It was a few hours’ walk at most.

Delores took photos. She and their guide had hit it off immediately. Morrison had not wanted to visit Jerusalem. He had wanted to go to Greece for his holidays, but Delores had insisted. Jerusalem was biblical, she told him. It was part of history.

They walked through the old town, starting in the Jewish Quarter. Stone steps. Closed shops. Cheap souvenirs. A man walked past them wearing a huge black fur hat, and a thick coat. Morrison winced. ‘He must be boiling.’

‘It’s what they used to wear in Russia,’ said the guide. ‘They wear it here. The fur hats are for holidays. Some of them wear hats even bigger than that.’

Delores put a cup of tea down in front of him. ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she said.

‘Remembering the holiday.’

‘You don’t want to brood on it,’ she said. ‘Best to let it go. Why don’t you take the dog for a nice walk?’

He drank the tea. The dog looked at him expectantly when he went to put the lead on it, as if it were about to say something. ‘Come on, boy,’ said Morrison.

He went left, down the avenue, heading for the Heath. It was green. Jerusalem had been golden: a city of sand and rock. They walked from the Jewish Quarter to the Muslim Quarter, passing bustling shops piled high with sweet things to eat, with fruits or with bright clothes.

‘Then the sheets are gone,’ their guide had said to Delores. ‘Jerusalem syndrome.’

‘Never heard of it,’ she said. Then, to Morrison, ‘Have you ever heard of it?’

‘I was miles away,’ said Morrison. ‘What does that mean? That door, with all the stencils on it?’

‘It welcomes someone back from a pilgrimage to Mecca.’

‘There you go,’ said Delores. ‘For us, it was going to Jerusalem. Someone else goes somewhere else. Even in the Holy Land, there’s still pilgrims.’

‘Nobody comes to London,’ said Morrison. ‘Not for that.’

Delores ignored him. ‘So, they’re gone,’ she said to the guide. ‘The wife comes back from a shopping trip, or the museum, and there’s the sheets gone.’

‘Exactly,’ said the guide. ‘She goes to the front desk, and tells them she does not know where the husband is.’

Delores put her hand around Morrison’s arm, as if assuring herself that he was there. ‘And where is he?’

‘He has Jerusalem syndrome. He is on the street corner, wearing nothing but a toga. That’s the sheets. He is preaching – normally about being good, obeying God. Loving each other.’

‘Come to Jerusalem and go mad,’ said Morrison. ‘Not much of an advertising slogan.’

Their guide looked at him sternly. ‘It is,’ she said, with what Morrison thought might actually be pride, ‘the only location-specific mental illness. And it is the only easily curable mental illness. You know what the cure is?’

‘Take away their sheets?’

The guide hesitated. Then she smiled. ‘Close. You take the person out of Jerusalem. They get better immediately.’

‘Afternoon,’ said the man at the end of his road. They’d been nodding to each other for eleven years now, and he still had no idea of the man’s name. ‘Bit of a tan. Been on holiday, have we?’

‘Jerusalem,’ said Morrison.

‘Brrr. Wouldn’t catch me going there. Get blown up or kidnapped soon as look at you.’

‘That didn’t happen to us,’ said Morrison.

‘Still. Safer at home. Eh?’

Morrison hesitated. Then he said, in a rush, ‘We went through a youth hostel, down to an underground, um . . .’ He lost the word. ‘Water storage place. From Herod’s time. They stored the rainwater underground, so it wouldn’t evaporate. A hundred years ago someone rowed a boat all the way through underground Jerusalem.’

The lost word hovered at the edge of his consciousness like a hole in a dictionary. Two syllables, begins with a C, means deep echoing underground place where they store water.

‘Well, then,’ said his neighbour.

‘Right,’ said Morrison.

The Heath was green and it rolled in gentle slopes, interrupted by oak and beech, by chestnut and poplar. He imagined a world in which London was divided, in which London was a city crusaded against, lost and won and lost again, over and over.

Perhaps, he thought, it isn’t madness. Perhaps the cracks are just deeper there, or the sky is thin enough that you can hear, when God talks to His prophets. But nobody stops to listen any longer.

‘Cistern,’ he said, aloud.

The green of the Heath became dry and golden, and the heat burned his skin like the opening of an oven door. It was as if he had never left.

‘My feet hurt,’ Delores was saying. And then she said, ‘I’m going back to the hotel.’

Their guide looked concerned.

‘I just want to put my feet up for a bit,’ said Delores. ‘It’s just all so much to take in.’

They were passing the Christ prison shop. It sold souvenirs and carpets. ‘I’ll bathe my feet. You two carry on without me. Pick me up after lunch.’

Morrison would have argued, but they had hired the guide for the whole day. Her skin was dark and weathered. She had an extraordinarily white smile, when she smiled. She led him to a café.

‘So,’ said Morrison. ‘Business good?’

‘We do not see as many tourists,’ she said. ‘Not since the intifada began.’

‘Delores. My wife. She’s always wanted to come here. See the holy sights.’

‘We have so many of them here. Whatever you believe. Christian or Muslim or Jew. It’s still the Holy City. I’ve lived here all my life.’

‘I suppose you must be looking forward to them sorting all this out,’ he said. ‘Er. The Palestinian situation. The politics.’

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter to Jerusalem,’ she said. ‘The people come. The people believe. Then they kill each other, to prove that God loves them.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘How would you fix it?’

She smiled her whitest smile. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think it would be best if it was bombed. If it was bombed back to a radioactive desert. Then who would want it? But then I think, they would come here and collect the radioactive dust that might contain atoms of the Dome of the Rock, or of the Temple, or a wall that Christ leaned against on his way to the Cross. People would fight over who owns a poisonous desert, if that desert was Jerusalem.’

‘You don’t like it here?’

‘You should be glad there is no Jerusalem where you come from. Nobody wants to partition London. Nobody goes on pilgrimages to the holy city of Liverpool. No prophets walked in Birmingham. Your country is too young. It is still green.’

‘England’s not young.’

‘Here, they still struggle over decisions made two thousand years ago. They have been fighting about who owns this city for over three thousand years, when King David took it in battle from the Jebusites.’

He was drowning in the Time, could feel it crushing him, like an ancient forest being crushed into oil.

She said, ‘Do you have any children?’

The question took Morrison by surprise. ‘We wanted kids. It didn’t work out that way.’