“I don’t usually kill myself on the first date.” The boy sips wine with a fervor i found somehow less then charming. <Jude is drinking from a communion chalice, getting drunk on the eucharist.>

<Jude is pitching to someone, and she’s pitching someone to him, and its delicate. there is a goddess involved.>

“your disciples say that you jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on the eve of B-Day, and that you re-appeared three days later carrying a toddler who was photographed at at ground zero. His body was whole, his eyes bright and alert, he was, impossibly, alive.”

<The chalice is empty now, and he rolls of the heavy oak altar, falls flat on his face at the table’s base, where words GLORY GLORY GLORY are carved into the wood so red it is almost black. He pushes himself to his hands and knees, almost vomits but controls himself, and crawls round to the back of the altar. When he stands, he has another bottle ready and corked in his right hand, another by the neck in his left. They land with an unsteady thud on the surface of the alter—the chaplain shudders audibly but everyone else, the small crowd gathered in the pews unsure whether to stand or sit and I in the choir’s box—ignore her. The words, the gestures, replete with seven fully body prostrations—even fall-over drunk he remains a ultra-conservative in his commitment to the Old Rites—are dispensed with, and whether he does not meet our eyes because this is a ritual aimed at the transcendent and not us mere spectators, or because his eyes along with the rest of his face from his upper lip northwards is concelaed by a plain black veil, or because (as rumor has it) above the bridge of his nose he has no eyes, but only empty sockets which it is impossible to look away from once you’ve had even a glance at them—is not for us to know.” the ceremony takes at least seven minutes, not counting the two intervals during which leans heavily on the altar and dry heaves into a dog dish from the churchyard and, the second time, slams his head on the sacred table hard enough to make me jump. at the end, the wine has been transubstantiated into the blood of the martyr, which he gulps down with a desperation that again makes me cringe.>

“my disciples say many things.” he throws his head back and the veil is flung to the side as he downs glug after glug. i almost cover my own eyes with both hands, like a little kid in response to a holographic jump scare, only to realize at the last split-second he has another bolt of black cloth tied more securely over where his eyes may or may not be.

“I have seen the photos, the holo-graphic replay. If you are a magician, then you are the greatest magician alive and I would be honored to fall under your spell. but I do not think you are a magician. I think you can do what I say you can do.”

“fine, lets stipulate that I can. that doesn’t change the fact that there are costs—”

//and what do you say i can do.//

//i believe you can reverse death.//

//reverse death? ha. wish it were that simple. no, it would be closer to say i can pay death off. cut a deal, take on some debt.

“I’m willing to pay whatever you ask. If I cannot provide it now I will spend the rest of my life serving—”

“Debt to Death. What do you think that means? Dying is still dying, after all. Forget any there and back again nonesense I tell you what. you might come back and not be yourself at all. you might get someone back but only the parts they kept hidden and hateful from the world survived the braintrauma and deathtrauma and the burning gales of Heaven, the infinite stockyards of Hell.” he speaks as if quoting from something, but if it is scripture i do not recognize it. Just as easily it could be a conjure to set us all into the dream he’s breathing hot and red and incense-curled about us.

he speaks as if he hadn’t heard me, and maybe he hasn’t. how much wine has this kid drunk? how are none of us calling an ambulance right now? i wonder this for not the first time, and not the last. a hand runs with minimal coordination across his chin and comes away stained dark red. as if warming to his theme, he turns to face me head on for the first time in this whole business. for my part i can’t pull my gaze away from that hand. Just like he’s been finger-painting is the absurdist interpretation that my brain offers up and then obstentently clings to with the same intensity that the boy-prophet grips his bottle.

“have you ever died? come close to dying? played chess with old Scratch? danced the six-foot tango with la Flaquita?” (he has the lazy perfect spanish accent of one born to the language more than once)—”gone over the hill and down into the pit and tunnled your way back out of the pitt? when you sawthe white light, did you know whether walk towards it or run like hell in the opposite direction? ‘near-death-experience’ is the pseudo-mystical pseudo therapeutic jargon term they use now, give or take a long century. let me tell you, nothing about it feels so merely “near” when you’re in the midst of it. Its real and its costly and ohbytheway it is by definition fatal and a I certainly am not going to throw away the time and energy and risk a full blown failed visitation for a petition to the destroying angel with and/or on behalf of someone who isn’t psychologically prepared to act as acolyte—”

“but you can do it? you confirm that?”

“ughk, damn, fuck, saints in Hell” <the grunt of annoyance, he’s pissed that he’s dropped his bottle off the altar. he scrambles down again and makes a clicking sound, managing to grab it upright, uses his veil to mop up wine from the thick red velvet carpet, which, disgusted, i watch him ring out like a sponge into and around his mouth.>

§

<Jude is a ghost doctor, he can die with a client and see the dead before bringing themselves back. its a dangerous, generally difficult to socially regulate, philosophically/metaphysically suspect, fiercely opposed and categorization as ‘sin’ by Church’s factional dominations within and rival faiths without. He deals in hypnotism, past life recollection, animal magnetism, mulitiplying of selves.>

<The client? a rich and sufficiently desperate woman, last heir to the family fortune before falling back to the lumpen-aristocracy with only a few trinkets and titles to remind them of their wealth, a grieving parent? &/or an investigator on behalf of a government agency which suspects Jude as the public front of a money laundering program for the rich? (which he totally is by the way, its not like he’s got the time or energy for ethics committees and oversight and filing the apropriate forms, nor the opportunity as of yet to take the time to on-board the people who do. if he stays in this cycle another 5, 6 years, maybe, he’ll transfer some of his own cut from a couple off shore accounts and create a charitable front. he’s done it before, once or twice, on a couple particularly long and stable runs. either way, its usually worth it to endow a couple professorships he can trade on elselife to get hired on as an indefinite grad student.>..

<he’s the real deal, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t also a scam artist. he takes a lot and he gives a lot, he’s austere to the point of guilt of pride, prince among the cardinal sins.

<,oh really, he’s austere? that’s not just the regular eucharist wine? well it is eucharist wine all right but the bottle he’s drinking from cost several hundred dollars and he’s spilling most of itdown his face.

“you make your money before the job even gets started, by quite a bit more.

<she’s talked to his private scheduler, or else heard the rumors-cum-soft advertisement from past customers. weeks or months stretched onward, occasionally with demands of second- or third-retainers or he would walk away from them requirement, and what were they supposed to do, go to the police to complain that the kid from their 10-year-old’s montessaury class

<living in an monastery in the rockies divided between guerrillas and fundementalists and lamas , they probably break the laws of two-plus sovieregin recognized states just getting through border control…>

had conned you out of the sticker price of an uper epsoholon liberal arts tuition by claiming he can talk to the dead and can help you talk to them too?

<who contacts the dead? the dreams of your daughter, your grandson, occasionally (but much more rarely then some elders desperate for post- visitation they lacked immiediately pre-mortem) mothers and the odd grandfather, very often siblings if there were siblings to seek a commission. appears to you in dreams, you wake up next to his business card, which you vaguely remember designing in a fevered/marijuana haze in N(nanosoft)S paint or the chatsnap filter. it has no phone number, but there is a hyperlink 60 lines long in your messy scrawl, but when you type it into google search you find a purple result and you think maybe you NS painted this card as a way of transcribing a website you were on. the services are outlandish, the miraculous events loose on definitions and vagueglorious on guarantees. but you find out your stepbrother-in-law has heard of this program and that its legit, as these things go, and your mutual gym posse member this older fireman no-nonsense kinda uptight deputy-patriarch has even commisioned services, and he’s the last guy you would expect to fall for a cult or any kind of predatory scam-type thing.>

<Jude has silver hair, he’s blind with a headband over his eyes, he clicks his tongue and gets drunk on eucharist wine, he has a parrot that was given to him by the emperor of brazil himself.>

..