Life Times Stories

Second Coming


Christians await the return that will raise the dead from the grave as He was raised. They rehearse this each Easter. Kafka records in his diaries ‘On Friday evening two angels accompany each pious man from the synagogue to his home; the master of the house stands while he greets them in the dining room.’ Every Friday night Seder an extra place is laid at table. Maybe the one the Jews are expecting is not an angel but the Messiah, the lost son. Muslims don’t anticipate the final physical presence of the Prophet Mohammed, they bless his name as if he were always among them.





He was clothed like any other man in the rough denim jeans that were the garb of men of any age in the era of the twenty-first millennium. No robes provided. And the return to the mortal state meant that the weals of nail-driven wounds came back, were there scarred under the shirt, and on the feet and hands. It’s of no account where he arrived. Apparently no one was about to claim a vision, now that there was a reality. Many over centuries had been sanctified for declaring a manifestation of him or his mother, celebrated in more recent times graphically, digitally, by all the successive technological means of disseminating announcement of miracles, or were exposed as fraudulent hysterical girls and adults in a dubious mental condition of religious exaltation. The sandals that he wore in the carpenter’s shop were the same as, himself ageless, he set out in now, the same as any young man might have been wearing if there were to have been any young men around. But no disciples appeared. No Romans manifest in their mutation as riot police with AK-47s, out to deal with suspicious immigrants of rebel reputation.

His sandalled feet took him along the ways he had to go, some of which had a surface hard and blue-black glinting, exploded, strange to the soles, and others receiving them sinking into familiar sand, the feel of the desert land come to be known as Holy, because of him. There were hulks of what must be some kind of chariot, unlike the ones the Romans used, but anyway too buckled and contorted to form a coherent image; a mass of sword-sharp glass shards, peeling colours, bent plates like some form of shielding, and hubs that must have held wheels as such objects have served since the power of the rolling circle was discovered, these in rounds of a black substance that had apparently disintegrated viscid, and set. He looked to someone to be regarding this – a consequence of what – as he did. But he was alone.

He found himself entering a city, recognisable as one because of the layout for human concourse that he had known, has existed in some design or another, in one era back behind another. Streets. Jerusalem. Streets; his way was barred by tumbles of rubble risen against great blocks of stone and brick conglomerates thrust about together. Lifted to his eyes he followed constructions that must have been the containments of this time he had come to in fulfilment of faith: fallen, half-fallen under some sort of quake (what evil power has challenged his Father’s Creation). As once there had been a flood on earth. Disaster. Cosmic; or some unthinkable disintegration, brought about by human acts, attrition beyond the wars they had sinned against their own kind?

The Romans had constructions, palaces, barracks, great walls, temples of the gods, tall premises of power. Here were premises evidently once so aspiring as to be lost in the sky. Fallen into the shaft of such a ruin, its empty stagger to heaven, there was something part never-covered grave pit, part ordure heap. A confusion cast without respect. Scraps of unrecognisable coded script: Gordon’s Dry, Dom Perignon: needles carrying no thread but pointing from small containers reduced to shapes of glass dust, from which, picked up, there is sensed a faint trace of something that was there, transporting essence, an agent of ecstasy not of the transports of the Faith. Where are the people to whom all this belongs, on whose possessions this disrespect was performed?

There are towers and steeples toppled, cast from what were his homes, each one his Father’s house. The cross on which his First Coming ended in agony – yes, reproduced in dirt-smeared trinket gold, in rusted iron, and the sacrilege of the cruciform hideously distorted, the arms twisted, wrenched at the ends into an emblem of atrocities. Wherever they were, the people who awaited him, what desecrated heritage had they left as the detritus of their years?

Someone must have survived to bear witness. Surely he would come upon some of his Father’s flock, hidden in the countryside.

There was the beginning of open spaces near the streets he had quit. No ruins but fallen icons flung supine or poking up, 7TH HOLE, 18TH HOLE; dead bushes, roots in the air, the condition of growth reversed, from under which he took a hard small object, a dimpled ball, it fits in his cupped palm on the scars. Dead trees, as beggar figures arrested against the line of sky, but then the fragile intricacy of beak-woven bird nests suggests there will be calls to be heard although there are no children playing whom he can tenderly summon.

The wind brings no cry, only stirs rasping branches in a movement he’s alert to as that of a bird; no bird hiding from him. But on a measured stretch of open land there are what must be gigantic birds of inconceivable size, outside his Father’s Creation, without bones, flesh and feathers, lying in the charred deformation of some self-consuming violent end, fires of hell. The broken skeletons of a kind of throne they evidently had inside them in place of the vital organs of birds and beasts lie within and spewed about them.





On and on. Where are fields of grain, terrace of vines?

The straps of the sandals curl worn, dragging between the toes, abrading the skin. No matter. There must be an encounter soon with the people of God who have waited so long. Everywhere animal and human bones – the feet stop, of their own volition, at the sight – the relics of life are indistinguishable except for the rise of hope that is faith, for here is a jaw that could only belong to one who could speak, and the wonder of a skull so magnificent it must testify to the continual resumption of life in that of a pachyderm mutated through the millennia, survived until – what? What catastrophe?

O Lord have you forsaken them? What have your people done to the beautiful earthly abode you gave them, that you have forsaken them?

Where are they, his Father’s people to whom He has sent his son, come at last to save from the death sentence of Time itself; to save them from themselves? Always there have been some survivors. Receiving manna in the form of a plague of locusts become sustenance, consumed as food. Men, women, children, animals somehow clinging to a rock on Ararat. The Flood. Water: yes, he must direct himself to the waters, the sea, fishermen use an element of his Father’s Creation other than earth, from which to take and sustain life. In this Coming as again a mortal, the paths he makes for himself, the mountain pass he climbs and descends are of a long duration, maybe more than two risings and fallings of the light and day ordained in the Beginning. Emptiness. Still no one, nothing walking, grazing, crawling, flying, scuttling from his footsteps, no one hearing his weary intake and release of breath, no face to meet with the sweat bleeding down his brow, the scars wakening under the sweat-soaked shirt. His thick-tongued thirst. The pools where he stumbled to quench it are so putrid they hold no reflected image of what bent to them and the swallows he took were vomited in rejection from his body. The pains the flesh is heir to that he took on for himself with human existence, the first Coming.

And here they are, the waters. The sea spread in peace down there. Certainly soon, the scent of it to pass a cool tongue over the sweat. The seas of the world, of Creation. The sandals slipped and slid taking him to fisherfolk, that steadfast flock who master the wild elements, land, wind and water as everyday circumstance; they would be there for him as they had been since he was among them and in what has been measured while awaiting him. Whatever had befallen, they would be there to begin again, with life netted from the sea.

There are no huts, no boats, no spread nets. Scatters and heaps of what once were these, half-buried by the smoothing hands of sand dunes, half-fumbled through by water along with bones of rotted men, sea creatures on a piled tideline.

He wades in, the sandals which have brought him so far from so long ago are hooked off his feet by the vast decay that clutches at him, thrusts at him. Breast heaves; no cleansing smell of salt to draw into it. Through the shallows, up to his waist, his armpits, and to rocks where mussel and sea urchin shells are fallen choking pools where fingerlings should find shelter from predators. The decomposed corpses of seals buffet against him. No salt scent but a suffocating charnelhouse stink of decay, putrescence.

This was where he achieved the miracle of loaves and fishes.

This water, the day of his Coming, has no properties of transfiguration.

He brings himself in desperate desolation even to consider the heresy (may he be forgiven), the possibilities of the theory which denies the Creation of human life formed divinely in the image of the Father; a belief that a fish struggled out of this element, the waters, to learn to breathe in another, and transform fins into legs that propelled, to walk on earth. But there is no life in the seas. No fish to come a second time, begin again evolution, become human, on one of the planets of the six-day Creation.

The sea is dead.