Artie the Pearl

and the last testament of Christ

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
10/17/05
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

The problem was that I kept shooting my alarm clock.

Creeping Jimmy was miffed at me, and when Creeping Jimmy is annoyed, it’s a good idea to keep a gun handy, just in case his annoyance might manifest itself at 3am one morning. Or so Paulie Five Fingers told me, and he probably knew Jimmy about as well as any carbon-based life form could hope to. Or want to.

So Paulie gave me a .45 (“clean background on this one”) and I went out to the range and learned how to fire it without taking the top of my own head off, and started sleeping with it on my nightstand.

That’s when I learned that my habit of mumbling a few well-chosen obscenities at the infernal devices translated into something far more lethal if I was armed. I had just slaughtered my third Baby Ben in the first week when it occurred to me that I owned cats. Cats that moved around at night, as cats do, and jump up on beds, as cats do, and startle people, as cats do. I didn’t want to have to explain to my neighbors why one of my cats was missing an ear, or why I was missing a cat. The good old logger-town days when people shot cats for amusement were long past, and I would get talked about.

So, Jimmy or no Jimmy, I decided that for the sake of my cats, and anything else in the line of fire in my bedroom, the gun would have to live up in the top shelf of my closet, and if there came a thunderous hammering at my door at three in the morning, I was just going to have to take my chances and hope I got to my gun before Jimmy got through the door.

At three o’clock the next morning, there was a thunderous hammering at my door.

“Who is it?” I called, sidling.

“Open up, Zepp. I have some amazing news to share with you!”

I felt my shoulders slump in sudden relaxation. It was Artie the Pearl, and as far as I knew, he had no reason to assassinate me.

I opened the door and looked down. Artie stood 4'6", weighed about 78 pounds, and had a face much like the Indian’s on the old Indian-head nickels, and a huge mane of flowing white hair. The overall effect was a cross between Henry Gibson and Jehovah. The long silk magician’s robe with the stars and planets and the conical white cap tended to help mark Artie as being somewhat different from your run-of-the-mill suburbanite.

“Artie, why are you wearing that robe and that silly hat?”

“Just got off work. Didn’t have time to change.”

“Work? I thought you were at some convention in LA.”

“The SpiritFaire?” Artie shrugged. “There were only 15 Ascended Masters there, and nobody from above the 8th dimension. They really need to lower their booth rental prices if they want to get the top masters. I left after the first day.”

“And found work as, um, a stand-in for Gandalf the Grey?”

“No, I went to Cairo.”

“Cairo?”

“Hot, dry. Smells like old camel dung...”

“Cairo, Egypt?”

Artie beamed, eyes sparkling. “You see, Zepp? I knew that some day repeating the third grade would pay off for you!”

Only Artie could come banging on my door at 3am, and then mouth off at me. I glared down at him with what I hoped was asperity but was probably the hang-dog look of someone woken four hours too early and sassed at. I rubbed a temple and squinted. “Fooking Christ. Look, Artie, you want to come in?”

“Would I have knocked on your door if I didn’t?” I pulled my mouth to one side, a lip-shrug, and waved him in. No sign of Jimmy, at least. Closing the door, I regarded Artie. For a guy who didn’t even have a valid drivers’ licence a year ago, he sure got around a lot. Cairo. Sheesh.

Artie was sniffing the air. He gave me a quizzical look. “Cordite?”

“New alarm clock. They smell like that. So. You’ve been to Egypt. Did you see the pyramids?”

“You forget I helped build them. I have no desire to be reminded of that particular life.”

Oh, yeah. The reincarnation thing. Don’t mention the fourth century AD to Artie. He gets really pissy and won’t tell you what happened. I added the pyramids to the Peasants’ Rebellion, the Civil War, the fall of the T’Ing Dynasty, and mastodons as historic events that Artie took personally and didn’t like to talk about.

One minute of talk, and we had managed to tick each other off. At three in the morning, and to top it off, Artie had no idea how close he had come to getting shot at in my home – again. I really didn’t think that was a healthy pattern to encourage. Someone eventually might hit him.

Ah. “So Artie, you said something about amazing news?”

Artie smiled, pyramids forgotten. By way of an answer, he pulled a fat manila folder out from under his robes and opened it on the table in front of me. I saw a thick pile of paper, evidently from a copy machine. The top sheet was covered nearly margin to margin in Artie’s precise handwriting.

“You are the first person in America to see this.” Artie drew himself up dramatically. “I am proud to present to you the Gospel According to Lebbaeus!”

Oh. Another Artie gospel. I leafed through it, glancing at the density of script. “Yeah, I can type this up for you.” Normally I would charge Artie for something like that, but I owed him some favors and didn’t mind getting them called in through a little light secretarial. Although doing it at 3am was pushing it a bit.

“Zepp, didn’t you hear me? This is an entire new gospel to the New Testament!”

“Yes, I heard you. But this is the third one you’ve written of these. The sense of wonder tends to abate through familiarity.”

“I didn’t write this.”

“OK, channeled it, then.”

“I didn’t channel it. This is a translation from original documents.”

I peered at Artie, confused.

There’s two things you need to know about Artie. The first is that he doesn’t lie. I’m not sure he can. He can get pretty divorced from standard perceptions, and his idealism leads to schemes that, from anyone else, I would consider to be scams, but he doesn’t lie. He would save himself a lot of trouble if he could. When he does say something that turns out to be false, it turns out that Artie believed it to be true when he said it.

The second thing to know about Artie is that the more preposterous or fantastic something Artie says is, the more likely it is to be true.

This usually meant that I wound up asking Artie a lot of questions that I would have preferred not to ask. Like this one: “What original documents?”

“Papyrus scrolls that turned up at the University of Cairo. They found some scrolls that had been encased in wax in vases in some fissures at the Qumram site. They chipped away the wax, and found about twenty meters of papyrus covered with what they thought would be pseudepigrapha.”

“I see,” I said, seeing nothing. “Is this near where the Dead Sea scrolls were found?”

“That IS where the Dead Sea scrolls were found. Same hill.”

“They’ve been going over that site for – what? – 60 years or so?” At Artie’s nod, I continued, “And they’re still finding new stuff there? I find that hard to believe.”

“They found this about 1960 or so. Like I said, they figured it was just pseudepigrapha, so the Israel Antiquities Authority stashed it away and basically forgot about it. They didn’t even look to see what was in it. The only reason they had kept it was they thought the vases themselves might be of some interest. After Camp David, they gave it to Cairo as a gesture of good will. It wasn’t until 1978 someone decided to take a crack at it. Someone decided to weigh it, and discovered that whatever was inside had to be more than just papyrus. So they broke the seal, and looked in, and saw the vase had been filled with paraffin.”

“Is that unusual?”

Artie considered the question for a moment, clicking the tip of his tongue on his front teeth. “Yes” he finally decided. “That is unusual. Usually they just painted it on the contents of the vase as a way of preserving the writing. Paraffin wasn’t easy to make back then, and it was a lot of extra time and effort.”

It sounded like a severe case of Somebody Else’s Problem to me, but I suspected the story was going to get better. I got up and moved around, making coffee. “Go on,” I encouraged over my shoulder.

“They could see a package in there wrapped in cloth, so they chipped away most of the paraffin, and then heated the vase just enough to soften the wax so they could pull the package out. If it was papyrus with writing on it, the melted wax could damage the ink impressions. And they figured that anything preserved in an anaerobic state might be very well preserved.”

“Arobic?”

“Anaerobic. No oxygen.” I nodded, and Artie continued, “It seemed like a lot of hassle for a bit of pseudepigrapha.”

“You keep using that word, and I’ve no idea what it means.”

“Pseudepigrapha?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Noncanonical Bible writings. Some are fakes, others are just too hot for the Church to handle. There were a bunch of those found at Qumram. Most were supposedly first hand accounts of various historical things from the days of Moses and even Adam and Eve, but which testing showed to have been actually written around 1 AD, give or take two hundred years.”

“Fakes, then?”

“Some of them. Some of them were covered up by the church.” In Artie’s estimation, the Church was the spawn of Satan, an entity designed by dark workers to keep humans poor, ignorant, and morally bankrupt. This didn’t strike me as a particularly unreasonable opinion of the church, considering. “A lot of them were apocalyptic stuff, supposedly written by Moses or Adam or King David, dealing with the end days. There was a Jewish doomsday cult in the area back then, and they wanted to – ahem – buttress their case that Jawa was coming and He was ticked off. The trouble is, they ALL date from around the time of Jesus.”

“But this one wasn’t a sue dough pig o graph, right?”

“Pseudepigrapha,” Artie corrected absent mindedly. Show off. “No. Not only do I believe this is a real Testament of Yeshua bin Josef, but I believe it was actually written by one of his disciples, Thaddeus, and much of it well before his death.”

I turned the coffee pot on and sat down facing Artie. “So this was written around 25 AD or so?” I might not be able to name the gospels – a childhood friend told me they were John, George, Paul and Ringo and I believed it until I was about 20 years old – but at least I knew that Jesus lived right around the start of the calendar. Never mind that they punted it by at least six years, or that he was never born on December 25th, let alone January 1st, or that the calendar had Roman names for the months and all different pagan names for the days of the week – it’s the thought that counts. But I always liked the logic of the names of the months: the first seven were named after various gods and caesars – Janus, Februa, Mars, Aphrodite, Maia, Juno, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, and the remaining five failed to notice a couple of summer interlopers had been stuck in, and were called, simply, seventh month, eighth month, ninth month and tenth month.

“No, he died in 85 AD, near Glastonbury in England. Most of this was written in the years after he and Thaddeus went back to England after the crucifixion.”

I was pretty sure that wasn’t the version I had heard. And none of the movies I saw about him ever showed him having an English accent, either.

“Artie, how did you get involved in this?”

“Remember the translations I did in Nepal of the neolithic cave poems?”

Vaguely. Artie spoke five different dialects of Nepalese, and also knew, of all things, Polynesian. That last, unlikely language, from a culture a world away, proved to be a Rosetta stone that allowed Artie to make sense of the glyphs. He then used the common elements of Nepalese that he spoke to divine an archaic Nepalese that had slipped from useage some 2,500 years earlier. I had read in a National Geographics that angry academics from all over the world were trying to prove Artie was full of shit and probably made it all up, but that so far all they had been able to do was strengthen his case. Artie could be kind of impressive sometimes.

“Let me guess. They got the papyrus out, and discovered it was covered in strange characters that made no sense, and decided that maybe lightning could strike twice, and called you in.”

“How’d you know that?” Artie always found it incredible that I could reason things out for myself.

“Lucky guess. So what did you find?”

“Well, it was in Coptic and Aramaic writing, which was no surprise for that place and time, but it looked like gibberish at first. I realized right away that it had to be a transliteration from some other language. Not a translation: this would be a straight-across literal transcription that would move the rules of grammar and idiom across as well.”

“Like Shakespere done word-for-word into French?” I suggested.

“Only more so. Imagine it done into Russian, in Russian letters. The actors wouldn’t be able to make sense of it, and neither could an English speaker. The author – or someone fluent in both languages – would be the only ones who could figure out what it said.”

“Sounds like the author didn’t want his neighbors or his boss knowing what he was up to.”

“I kept looking at it, and it kept staying gibberish. I was about to admit defeat, when I realized that there was a place in the world where the natives DELIBERATELY used gibberish to confuse the rest of the world.

Artie and I looked at each other. “Cornwall!” we chorused.

“It was Pictish, which was the language spoken around Glastonbury in those days. Fortunately, I’ve had the fortune to have encountered it from time to time in casual reading...” Artie’s idea of casual reading usually involved national museums and upset universities “...so it was simple to read it as Pictish, translate it to Aramaic, and then take that and make sense out of it.”

“Hmm. How ‘bout that. And you’re convinced this is the real thing?”

“Oh, yes. Cairo dated the vase to about 50 to 90 AD, which is just about right, and the Papyrus dated out about the same. The ink wasn’t of a type used in the middle east, but a variety the Romans made in Gaul and England. Plus there were a few details in the narrative that are unknown to modern scholars that I can verify personally.”

Um. Yeah. Artie says he lived in that time era, and while he never bumped into Jesus, he DID know his grandmother. On the mother’s side of the family, I’m assuming. The old biddy would go on about darling grandson like he was the second coming or something. Bored Artie to tears, I’m guessing, even though Artie was much too polite to say anything.

I shrugged and fluffed the manuscript through my hands. One hundred fifty pages, give or take. “I can have it for you in three weeks.”

“Thaddeus probably wrote it on the papyrus faster than that,” Artie complained.

“Fine. Have him do it, then.” It seemed Artie was fresh out of Thaddeuses , so I got begifted with typing it up. “And I’m typing this up because...?”

Artie shrugged. “You get a portion of the royalties, same deal as before. I don’t guess you’ll mind a few extra million dollars.”

With global warming, it was my dream to move to the coast of Hudson’s Bay on the Quebec side and start a banana plantation. A few extra million wouldn’t hurt achieve that dream. I took the papers out of the folder, and tapped them straight on the counter top. “Three weeks ok?”

“Oh, sure.” We exchanged pleasantries, and Artie gave me a jewel-encrusted scarab he found while cleaning out his chimney, and assured me that as long as I had it, I never had to worry about locust attacks. It hadn’t been a major concern of mine, but I thought it was a nice gesture.

Stopping only to watch the Cartoon Network for a couple of hours while the coffee worked its way in, I set to work on Artie’s testament.

A fortnight passed uneventfully. No sign of Creeping Jimmy, who seemed content to sulk in Dunsmuir. Paulie called once to let me know he would have to skip the Greasy Fish Meeting for the month because of business in New Jersey, which helped assure a quiet month. Artie’s answering machine informed me that he had transcended to the 14th dimension and wouldn’t be back until next Wednesday, so who knows where he was or what he was up to. I got the manuscript typed in, and stuck extra copies on various on-line safe spots I had just in case my computer caught one of those charming subroutines that cause your monitor to catch fire and so on. After that it was just editing, and as usual, the errors were all mine; Artie never made spelling or grammatical errors in his writing. Even when what he wrote made no sense at all, it made no sense in perfect English.

Then one afternoon, there came a timid knock at my door. “Door’s open!” I shouted. “Come on in.”

I glanced up as he walked into my study. It was Creeping Jimmy. But you knew that was coming, didn’t you?

Jimmy was smiling in a strained kind of way, and didn’t appear to be holding a gun. Since my gun was upstairs not threatening the cats, if he had been holding a gun, there wouldn’t have been much of anything I could do about it.

He sat down across from me and placed his hands on the table. “Zepp, I just came by to tell you that I have given considerable thought to your role in the destruction of the bulletin board at the church, and I have concluded that since you did not order the destruction of the board, you cannot be blamed for it.”

Fingers splayed on the wood surface. “Therefore, Zepp, I do not have a beef with you.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Jimmy. I did not want a beef with you.” That was putting it mildly. Since the person who WAS responsible for the destruction of the board, which targeted members of the community for unbelief, was Paulie Five Fingers, I wondered how Jimmy was going to handle that. Even Jimmy wasn’t about to start a war with Paulie, I reckoned.

Under the best of circumstances, Jimmy wasn’t good at chit chat, and these probably weren’t the best of circumstances for him. I tried to imagine Jimmy being introspective and couldn’t. Maybe Paulie leaned on him to back off my case, I didn’t know. Jimmy stood up, didn’t offer to shake hands. “I hope, Zepp,” he said stiffly, “you will come down and join us in fellowship one Sunday.”

Yeah, when polar bears dance a can-can. Jimmy got up and walked toward the door, back ramrod stiff. At the door, he paused, and looked back. “Zepp, I believe I left something here the last time I visited.”

I paused to recollect. Oh, right. His gun. He dropped it after trying to shoot Artie. I really need to start hanging out with people who have a less sharply defined sense of drama. I briefly considered the wisdom of handing Jimmy a gun, and then recalled that it was unloaded. “Sure, just a minute.” I ran upstairs to get Jimmy’s gun, which was right next to mine. Sticking my own in my pants pocket – yes, I know that sounds paranoid, but you don’t know Jimmy – I brought his down and handed it to him. He flicked a cartridge out of his coat pocket, and with an expert gesture, snicked it in his piece and put the gun in his vest holder in one smooth motion. He nodded, tried smiling and decided it really wasn’t his thing, turned and left.

About a half hour later, after my heart stopped hammering in my chest, and I reflected that he could have killed me and didn’t, and so I wouldn’t die today, I sat down to resume polishing Artie’s piece.

I went to pick up the DVD which had the latest back up, and discovered it wasn’t where I left it, which was right on my desk. I shrugged, wondered if I had simply forgotten to make a back up, and stuffed a disk in and made a new one. As I was writing the title on the front, I realized that I had made one the night before, and it had been on my desk, clearly marked “The Last Testament of Lord Jesus according to Saint Lebbaeus.”

I looked under the desk, in various drawers, in among the papers scattered around. It was gone. That lousy son of a bitch.

The original xeroxes were right where I left them in the active box.

Nobody else had been in. The disk must have walked out with Jimmy. I felt a surge of anger, which quickly passed. I was out two minutes’ work and a 30 cent disk. I didn’t like someone coming in my place and stealing from me, but it was pretty unlikely that Jimmy would ever be in here again. Few close friendships are based on one party sourly acknowledging that he doesn’t have grounds to kill the other.

But then I considered Jimmy reading a narrative about Jesus going to England at age 25, coming back at age 30, getting in Dutch with the Roman authorities, a botched execution, and his rise to power in southern England, leading to the Romans eventually deserting the island. That title, written clearly on the disk and out in plain sight, must have been irresistible to Jimmy.

The disk had copies of digital images of authenticity from the University of Cairo and the Israeli Antiquities people. I didn’t know what Artie had, but it clearly wasn’t just new age moonshine. And it was going to cause a bit of a stir in the Christian community. As Greywolf, the town drunk, likes to declare with loud relish, “Shit and FEATHERS all over de place!”

Calling Artie was out of the question. The twelfth dimension didn’t have an area code that I knew about. He would be back in a few days. With luck, Jimmy would decide it was bullshit and throw it out. And stave off the storm.

For a fundamentalist, it would be a disturbing narrative.

I only wished I could see the expression on his face as he read it.