A week passed, and the next meeting was ready to start. Galen came in late. He looked more rumpled than usual, as if he’d slept in his clothes. Frank didn’t wait for him to find a seat.
“You got pretty bashed in last time,” he said. “Rough week?”
“Sort of,” Galen replied guardedly.
There was silent tension in the room. Why is it focused on me? he wondered. For the first time, everyone sat together. To Galen it looked like a jury watching him, the reluctant witness giving suspicious testimony. Meg sat back impartially, her hands folded in her lap. Only Mare seemed to look at him with sympathetic eyes, so he sat next to her, in case he needed an ally.
“What’s going on?” Galen asked. “I haven’t done anything to you people.”
“True, but something was done through you,” Meg said. She swept her hand over the group. “What you experienced when you touched the shrine spread to everyone.”
“Like a virus,” Frank added. “And you’re the carrier.”
This was totally unfair, but Galen felt a grim kind of satisfaction.
“What are you smiling at?” asked Frank sharply.
“Nothing.”
Lilith spoke up. “We can’t start until somebody explains things.”
When no one else volunteered Mare said, “I can only speak for myself. Right after the last meeting, I was on edge. It felt like I was in danger. When I got home, I kept checking to make sure my door was locked. The slightest sound made me jump, and then—” She was on the brink of revealing something, but couldn’t.
Jimmy looked the most agitated. “All week I wasn’t myself. I felt, like, empty. When I passed myself in the mirror, it was like looking at a zombie. I can’t believe you did this to us, man.”
Galen was taken aback. He had experienced the same emptiness, but he thought he was alone.
“You don’t have a clue what this is about, do you?” asked Frank with disgust. “He’s not going to cop to anything.”
Meg turned to Frank, and for such a gentle person, her tone was severe. “And what are you ready to cop to?”
Frank sat back in his chair. “I didn’t mean—” he stammered.
Frank was getting close to something important—Meg’s antennae were always out. Nothing slipped by her. He looked at Mare for support, but she felt helpless about her own situation.
Every night when she went to bed, Mare couldn’t close her eyes without feeling that she was suspended over a bottomless pit. Below her she saw only blackness. By Wednesday, she was so anxious and bleary-eyed that she called Frank. He came over. He sat up in bed holding her until she fell into a fitful sleep. He waited to kiss her cheek until she nodded off. It was the tenderest moment between them so far, but what if coming back this evening only made things worse for her?
After an uncomfortable moment Meg said, “Frank is as afraid to show weakness as Galen. But it’s not about who’s weak or strong. All of you have had a terrible week. It’s to be expected. Remember, when a door is opened, we all walk through it.”
“Including you?” asked Mare.
It was the first personal question anyone had put to Meg. She took no offense. “I didn’t suffer with the rest of you, no,” she admitted. “That’s not my role.”
“You seem to know everything. So why didn’t you protect us?” Jimmy asked.
Lilith replied before Meg could. “Don’t be childish. She’s not your mommy.” Jimmy’s face colored red, something that happened too easily.
“It’s all right,” said Meg. “Galen didn’t like his experience; none of you did. But you had to experience the zero point. There was no other way.”
“You said that reaching the zero point was positive,” Mare reminded her.
“And it will be, I promise. At some level we all want to be protected. We crave love. We cling to life as something precious. The zero point strips those things away. The loss is just the same as losing God.”
Meg’s presence was reassuring, but at the same time she kept aloof. No one had seen her outside the meetings. She stayed apart from Lilith, despite their old friendship. Even Mare hadn’t heard from her, and when Mare left messages on her phone, they weren’t returned. On Thursday her mother phoned.
“I heard from my dead sister at last,” she began. “Your Aunt Meg ran away because she’d had enough of the convent, plain and simple. She waited long enough, I’ll say that.”
Mare was cautious. “Did she tell you anything else? Will we see her?”
“No, she’s rid of us. There’s some trip she has to take right away. She might call when she comes back. Don’t hold your breath.” Mare’s mother sounded irritated rather than distressed.
So Meg’s intuition had been correct. The family wasn’t greeting her return as good news, and when she excused herself from visiting them, they didn’t insist. They were more comfortable with an empty place at the table.
The mood in the room was darker than it had ever been. “I don’t think we’re going to make it,” Jimmy mumbled.
“The zero point is very bleak,” Meg said. “But it’s not the end. It’s a prelude.”
“To what?”
“To being filled with grace.”
Jimmy’s eyes widened, but Frank was still disgruntled. “What about me? I don’t care about God. Why do I deserve to go through hell?”
“I think that’s the point I’m making,” Meg said. “The disciple pulled the rug out from everyone. Fair is fair.”
He let it rest there. Mare wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to reveal what had happened to them. On Monday Frank was sent on assignment to interview homeless single mothers. Beneath an overpass on the edge of town, he found an encampment. The women looked shattered; their kids were gaunt and forlorn.
The photographer who came along was upset. “I gotta shoot all of this,” he said. “Some of these kids need a doctor really bad. That little guy over there, his teeth are falling out. Nobody cares.”
“Yeah, it’s a crime,” Frank muttered. He stood back, not taking the tape recorder out of his pocket.
“So where should we start?” the photographer asked.
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter,” Frank replied. He felt strangely detached. The roar of overhead traffic on the interstate jangled his nerves. He wanted to get out of there.
The photographer was furiously snapping candid shots. When Frank didn’t move, he said, “Something up with you, man?”
“No, I’m fine.” Rousing himself, Frank approached one of the gaunt-eyed mothers, who was huddled inside a filthy blanket with a two-year-old wrapped in her arms. She glared at him suspiciously—visitors to the camp meant that social services would be following close behind, or the police.
“Why are you hassling us?” she demanded.
“I’m not hassling anybody. I’m just a reporter.” She told him to buzz off. Frank shrugged and moved on to the next one.
The photographer kept shooting, but he was growing annoyed. “You have to get them to open up.”
“I know my job; you just do yours,” Frank snapped. He continued to go through the motions a while longer; they got back in the car and left when a cold drizzle started to come down.
The city editor frowned when he read Frank’s copy, which was about as emotional as the transcript of a water-board meeting. “Bighearted, that’s you,” he said. Frank was sent back twice until his story began to show some empathy. He didn’t dare reveal how little he actually cared or how frightened this made him feel.
Frank didn’t tell his story to anyone, but Meg seemed to see through him.
“Let me tell you what you’ve all been feeling,” she said. “In the absence of God, there’s a hole inside you.”
Frank felt himself shrinking inside. So that was what it meant when he looked on those homeless mothers without a shred of pity. The memory sent a chill through him.
Galen objected. “There’s another explanation. Feeling empty exposes how alone we are. God has nothing to do with it.”
To everyone’s surprise, Lilith was almost as doubtful. “I want to believe you, Meg. You say fair is fair. A pretty cruel fairness, if you ask me.”
Unlike the others, Lilith wasn’t referring to a rough week. No one could have guessed what she’d gone through before they met her. She’d kept faith for almost thirty years. Not a word escaped her lips about the strange dream of the Black Death or the golden light that appeared in her bedroom. Lilith had kept up a good front—marriage, kids, career, all of it—while inside she was secretly in turmoil. This turmoil never completely left her, even during her happiest moments. Her heart always felt like a cave with a cold wind blowing through it, terrifying.
She was comforted by the fact that her husband didn’t have a clue about what she was going through. He worked in the insurance business. He carried a card with a slogan he’d made up: “Insure and be sure.” Lilith thought this was feeble, but didn’t criticize, just as he never criticized her for being too strict with their two daughters.
One Sunday in front of the television he put the golf tournament he was watching on pause. The girls were off to college now. No one was at home except Lilith.
“I wonder who you are,” he said. His tone wasn’t accusatory, but bemused. “I don’t know you.”
She was flabbergasted. “I haven’t changed, Herb.”
“All right.” He clicked the golf back on. “But if you ever want to tell me, I’m here.”
Lilith felt unmasked and nearly trembled. She grabbed the remote from his hand and turned the TV off. “What are you saying? Do you want a divorce? Are you going to sleep in the spare bedroom from now on?”
Her husband looked bewildered. “Of course not. I love you.”
They kept sleeping in the same bed, but Lilith doubled her armor plating. She wasn’t about to lose everything. Her life was going to look ordinary if it killed her. Letting Herb in on her secret was unthinkable, like asking him to fly with her to Neptune.
But hiding out wasn’t working well enough. She began a lonely search for the truth. Her only clue was the golden object that had appeared in her bedroom so many years earlier. She started to haunt the university library, poring over books about the plague years. Nothing similar to her dream of the six bodies radiating out in a circle was ever recorded.
What next? The golden object was in the shape of a church. Lilith knew what a reliquary was, so she researched pilgrims in the Middle Ages. She discovered hundreds of accounts, then thousands, and tens of thousands, most of them written in foreign languages. That route proved impossible, like everything else she had tried. Lilith remembered the exact moment when she gave up her search.
She was sitting at a long oak table in the library reading room. Before her tottered a tower of volumes devoted to Paris in the eleventh century. They smelled of dust and wilted scholars who never got married.
I’m lost, Lilith thought.
Then from over her shoulder a creaky voice said, “I didn’t know I had competition.”
She turned around to find an old man with a white goatee, a polka-dot bow tie, and suspenders.
“I study the period too, you see,” he explained. “But I’m not selfish. If you need more books on mystery schools, I’ll return mine forthwith. I keep them too long anyway.”
“Mystery schools?” Lilith said, baffled.
He pointed to the leather-bound volume at the top of the pile. “I peeked at the title. Mystery Schools, the Ecclesia, and the Role of Magic. I hope you don’t mind.”
Lilith’s puzzled expression made him hesitate. “You don’t think his thesis is sound? I quite agree. Magic indeed.”
With a squinty smile the stranger began to walk away, humming to himself. Lilith wanted to run after him. She had never heard of mystery schools, but the words gave off an electric charge. She’d stumbled on some kind of clue, she was sure of it. She started to bolt from her chair, but immediately something stopped her. Scholars like him would be no help to her. She wouldn’t even get over the first hurdle, making them believe in her dream, so strange and so long ago. Yet she wasn’t discouraged. Pure instinct would lead her to the next clue. Being the only road left, it was the one she had to follow.
The remaining clues didn’t come quickly. They arrived at long intervals usually by happenstance, like a falling autumn leaf landing in your hair or the shadow of a raven crossing your path. Each clue made her excited; each long lapse until the next clue was given drove her mad with frustration. But Lilith was dogged, and when the haul was finally gathered in her net—a flotsam of overheard remarks, chance encounters, and arcane discoveries—she finally understood. It could only be the thirteenth disciple who was leading her on. No biblical historian believed in such a personage. The two Aramaic sources hidden in the depths of the Vatican library had been completely discredited. Yet Lilith believed, and when she found Meg, she felt vindicated—no, triumphant. Everything was real, if you only knew where to look.
So why would the disciple now throw her into desolation all over again? The others might have a hole inside, but not her. It was unfair, cosmically unfair.
Yet only one thing mattered now. If the group fell apart, things would only get worse. “I apologize for my moment of weakness. The zero point is where we have to start,” Lilith affirmed.
Galen spoke wearily. “We’ve chewed this thing to death.” He pointed at the shrine in the middle of the table. “I went first. Who’s next? We need a volunteer.”
When no one made a move, Meg threw up her hands. “The disciple made you feel uncomfortable for a week, and now you’re ready to run away?” No one looked happy.
“So what do you want us to do?” asked Mare.
Meg’s answer was unexpected. “We’re going to start acting like a real mystery school. Touch the shrine.”
“All of us?” Mare asked.
“Yes. Follow my lead.” Meg lightly touched the roof of the golden chapel with her fingertips. “She’s been awaiting us for centuries. We have to show her she didn’t make a mistake.” One by one they followed Meg’s example, even Galen. The shrine started to glow again.
It wasn’t dead; the presence inside had been listening. The glow pulsated faintly, sending out waves of peace. For all their hands to fit on the shrine, their fingers had to intertwine.
“Our Kumbaya moment. I knew it was coming,” Galen joked. But his words were lost as the walls of the room melted away. A breeze ruffled their hair.
“I know where we are!” Mare exclaimed. This seemed improbable, because it was a moonless night. She didn’t need moonlight to recognize the man standing in the narrow cobbled alley. He was always there. She said Jesus’s name, but as before no sound came out. Mare pointed, and the others looked in his direction, silent presences to an unfolding scene. For Mare it was different this time—she was living the scene with him, from inside his mind.
It was cold for spring, even sheltered by the walls of Jerusalem. Jesus’s hands were trembling. He could barely see them in the dark, but he felt their fear. Sunrise would be his death sentence, and even his body knew it. What his hands dreaded were the nails. He could do nothing about that. Maybe he should spend the last few hours before dawn asking his hands for forgiveness, then his heart, his eyes.
Instead, he kept walking through the city’s labyrinth of hidden streets and alleys, which wove through Jerusalem like arteries and veins. He asked for peace. He prayed, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” but the fear wouldn’t leave his body.
Just hours before, his hands and heart obeyed his will. It was possible to remain calm at the Passover seder with his disciples. Jesus recited the ritual text but added, “When you eat this bread, you partake of my body. When you drink this wine, you partake of my blood.”
The words had just come to him, as if out of God’s mouth. The disciples looked bewildered. Every part of the seder existed to remind them that they were Jews. The meal brought Moses and Abraham into the room. It made the exodus from Egypt a living memory, even though their ancestors fled from captivity centuries ago. At Passover, with Roman soldiers, clubs in hand, patrolling Jerusalem, the Jews were reminded again that they had no power in their own land except the power of memory. It was the one thing the hated occupiers couldn’t seize and control.
How could Jesus say, “This meal is about me”? It was beyond outrageous. If there had been a Pharisee in the room, he would have run back and told the temple priests that they had a dangerous zealot in their midst.
The disciples were following a miracle rabbi, and such men were inspired by God. (The Pharisee would have condemned them simply for thinking such a thing.) Jesus’s words always meant more than they seemed. He was constantly pushing the disciples to grasp his meaning. They rarely succeeded, but at least they could argue about it. To be Jewish is to argue endlessly, and so the room grew full of questions and doubts. This time Jesus didn’t give them any answers. He sat silently watching. The flickering candles made his shadow quiver on the wall. And then he jumped to his feet.
“There’s a spy in this room. He knows who he is, but I won’t remain in his presence.”
“Master, stay and point him out,” Peter cried, his voice rising above the din of the confusion.
“Why, so you can attack him?”
“Shouldn’t we?” asked Judas in the calmest of voices. “We’d be carrying out the will of God.”
Jesus looked away. “I’m going.”
The disciples sprang to their feet, blocking the door so he couldn’t leave.
“Please, master, think of us. Stay and teach us,” Judas pleaded. “This is a holy night.”
When a man contemplating suicide has made up his mind, he goes calmly about the small tasks that attend death. He buys a coil of rope and borrows a stool of the right height. He bars the door with a heavy table and sits down to carefully tie the noose. A kind of fatal courage descends on him. It’s the same with traitors. The closer they approach their sin, the more brazen they become.
“Let me leave this place,” Jesus insisted.
The disciples moved aside except for Iscariot. He put his face close to the master’s so that the others couldn’t see him smiling. “You are the son of God. You can’t be afraid of one of us.”
Without reply Jesus quitted the place. He descended the narrow stairs that led from the cramped upper room to the street and was gone. In his mind he now saw every moment of what lay ahead. The Father had granted him that. Judas would flee the room on a feeble pretext. The disciples would wait in bewilderment until the master returned, and after midnight Jesus would ask them to pray in the garden.
Aimlessly his footsteps had taken him to an alley walled in by tall houses, leaving only a sliver of night sky overhead. The closeness pressed in on him, and he stopped wandering. “Thy will be done” gave him no strength. He rebelled against his sacrifice. Father, I implore you. If you love me, listen to me now.
The moment the words escaped him, Jesus’s face grew hot despite the chill of the night. He was begging. It was the one thing he had taught his disciples never to do. A Jew never begs from a loving God. The Father knows everything his children need and gives it out of his loving grace.
But Jesus’s mind was panicking. Save me, save me!
The plea was too late. From the far end of the alley, which was hidden by a winding curve, he spied a glimmer of light approaching. Judas’s betrayal must have happened earlier than Jesus saw, and the rough hands of soldiers would be dragging him away. The miracle rabbi faced his worst fear. It was not the dying, but dying in doubt.
The light came closer, rounding the curve. Strangely, there was no sound of tramping boots. And the light didn’t flicker like torches.
“Oh,” a woman’s voice said. The light stopped moving closer.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you,” Jesus said. His heart was racing, the way it always did when a mystery sought him out. He hadn’t run into a prostitute, who would have boldly approached a man walking alone at night. There was a hesitation; then the woman moved toward him, and in the light he saw that she was just a girl.
“Let me pass. I’m needed,” she said. The girl groped her way, as if there were no light. Jesus was transfixed with amazement. “My father was injured when a brick wall fell,” she said. “They couldn’t move him for hours. I ran to get medicine for his wounds.”
She told all this with a slight nervousness in her voice. Otherwise, she seemed unafraid. “I wish I had a torch to see you by. I carried one, but it went out.”
She doesn’t know, Jesus thought.
There was light everywhere, and it emanated from her. This was what amazed him.
“You are blessed,” he said.
“Thank you, rebbe.” No one had ever blessed her outside of the temple, which meant this stranger must be a priest.
Jesus hesitated. He knew this light. It was the Shekinah of the scriptures, the light of the soul. For it to shine radiantly from the girl meant something. He waited for God to tell him what to do.
And then he did.
“May I speak with you?” Jesus asked.
“I would, but the medicine—” she replied doubtfully, holding up the packet of herbs that were nestled in the sleeve of her gown.
“Your father is healed.”
“What?” The girl felt the chill air creep down the alley, making her shiver.
“Your father doesn’t need you, but God does.” Jesus didn’t wait for her to object. The urgency of the hour was upon him. “I have a teaching for you. Pay attention. The Jews prove that they are God’s children by two means. What are they?”
The girl wasn’t poor. Her family had hired religious tutors for her brothers, and she was allowed to listen in from the other side of a curtain.
“The word and the temple,” she replied. “The word binds God to us. Making sacrifice in the temple binds us to him.”
Jesus shook his head. “Is that enough? Words are not eternal, and the temple may fall into ruins.”
“Pardon me, rebbe, but the word is eternal.”
Jesus smiled to himself. The Father had led him to the right person. He said, “Yes, the word is eternal, but it can be forgotten among men. I tell you a mystery. There is one thing beyond the word—the light. Death cannot touch it. I am the light. Be sure of it. This truth will lead you to heaven.”
The girl was baffled, and she still couldn’t see the face of the stranger. He turned to walk away, and at that she felt a sharp pang in her heart. She cried out, but he kept walking. She ran to catch up, but a second pain shot through her chest, and she stumbled.
Overhead a window opened, and someone leaned out, waving an oil lamp.
“Who’s down there?” he cried, irritated and sleepy.
By then the stranger had reached the end of the alley and disappeared into the night.
The scene was cut off like a broken movie reel, and their hands sprang away from the shrine. Eyes opened. The group gazed at the golden glow, still faintly pulsating.
“Don’t speak,” Meg warned. “The thirteenth disciple was a young girl, an innocent. She was entrusted with a mystery. Now the same mystery has been passed on to us.”
After a moment the golden glow faded. It took away the disciple’s presence. Everyone had felt it.
Galen got in the first word. “We’ve been asses, all of us.”
“Definitely,” Jimmy seconded.
Meg smiled. “You couldn’t help yourselves.” She didn’t say how close they’d come to failing. Now the fear in their hearts was losing its grip.
“We have one last thing to discuss,” Meg said. “We stepped through time tonight. What was the lesson waiting for us?”
Their answers overlapped.
“Jesus is real.”
“We’re not crazy.”
“The light.”
The last was from Lilith, and Meg agreed. “Our only salvation is the light. This coming week, I want you to go into the light on your own.” There was a murmur of assent. They could feel the protection that encircled them like enfolding arms.
Mare had a question. “How will we know what to do?”
“It can’t be planned in advance,” Meg replied. “Give in to the light. That’s my best advice.”
“I don’t mean to be a buzzkill,” said Frank, “but giving in led to a pretty horrible week last time.”
“Then give in more,” said Meg. “The disciple knew absolutely nothing. She was sent into the light blindly, if I can put it that way.”
Just like me, Lilith thought to herself. What she had considered a curse was a blessing in disguise.
They dispersed in a mood very different from the way the meeting had begun. Meg stayed behind to lock up. Trusting in the thirteenth disciple meant that the group trusted her. She knew that, and it made her keep some secrets to herself.
“Everything looks good so far,” she said to the empty room. Her charges had passed through an invisible veil.
Who really knew what a mystery school should be? Monks in hooded robes kneeling before the cross. Heavy incense in the air. The shields of Crusaders and their dulled swords lining the walls. There was something to be said for stage props.
A mystery school couldn’t be ordinary people in an ugly basement meeting room, with greenish skin from the cheap fluorescent lighting.
But this time it was.