Devolution

Celeste’s apartment was directly from the pages of Vogue. Tastefully appointed in the latest fashion colors, with furniture, artworks and other accessories all matching, it was a beautifully warm and welcoming place. Joshua couldn’t believe he was here with this gorgeous woman. He had to remind himself quickly that she was in fact a spy and not his friend or ever likely to be.

That being the case why had she brought him to her apartment.

‘This is your place is it?’

‘Yes, do you want something to drink?’ She disappeared from the living room presumably into the kitchen, so Joshua followed.

‘You obviously do well out of this spying business. This place is really nice.’

‘I’m not a spy,’ she protested as though her feelings were hurt by such a suggestion.

‘Call it what you like Celeste. I say you are a spy.’

She stood staring into the open refrigerator as though waiting to be served.

‘Water will be okay for me thanks.’

Celeste pulled a bottle of Eternal from the shelf and handed it to Joshua then looked at her watch.

‘Close to time is it?’

A strange look came over her face as Celeste stepped close to Joshua and said, ‘We’ve got over half an hour yet. What would you like to do?’

With her breasts lightly touching his chest and her warm sweet breath in his nostrils, Joshua couldn’t help but be aroused and clear in understanding what Celeste was suggesting. He stepped back nervously only to find a wall blocking his escape.

‘What’s up Joshua?’ she said, pushing her body harder against his and nuzzling his neck and ear. ‘It doesn’t have to be all be business between us does it?’

Although he felt uncomfortable, Joshua was paralyzed by lust and made no attempt to stop her hand which after slowly climbing his thigh settled on his genitals and squeezed them gently. He swallowed and tried to say no, but his voice was lost in the atmosphere of heated passion.

The phone rang just as Celeste’s thumb and forefinger combined efficiently to lower his zipper. At half mast, she left him without a word and Joshua began to breathe again, letting the air imprisoned in his lungs rush out in a powerful stream of relief. He pulled his zipper back up and cracked open the bottle of Eternal as he walked out of the hot kitchen into the living room. He couldn’t stand the heat!

Joshua could hear Celeste’s voice, too soft to make out what she was saying, but he followed it to the source and found her in her bedroom. He decided not to go in, but to stand at the threshold and listen. She was unaware of his presence as she talked.

The last thing she said was ‘ten minutes is not enough time’ before she hung up and turned to see Joshua standing and watching her.

‘How much of that did you hear?’ she asked.

‘Ten minutes is not enough time for what?’

‘To complete my assignment.’

Joshua watched her rise from her bed and marveled again at the perfection of her body, the poetically fluid way she moved, the pleasure she offered, as she drew close to him once more.

‘Where were we?’ she said going straight for Joshua’s fly again.

Joshua grabbed her hand and pushed it away angrily. ‘You’re not going to help me are you?’

She looked genuinely disappointed. ‘It’s not my job to help you, Joshua.’

‘So today, after I found out who you were and thwarted plan A, was all about seducing me- plan B- bringing me to the point where I would surrender and tell you all you need to know?’

‘Joshua, come on, it’s like I said. We don’t have to be enemies.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes. And if you aren’t going to willingly help me then I’m not going to force you.’

Joshua turned to leave but she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him close. ‘Please Joshua, it’s nothing personal.’

‘Where’s your self respect, Celeste?’

He didn’t wait for her to answer, and she let him go without another word. Joshua rode the elevator down from the seventh floor and considered how close he had just come to prostituting himself, shuddering as the pictures replayed in his mind. He wondered what he should do next. Realizing he had been naïve to think Celeste would help him-so far he had been the one taking all the orders and directions and doing exactly what he was told-he decided to stick to the rules of the mission. What precisely they were, Joshua didn’t know but he would simply have to wait until his next set of instructions and take it from there. This thought led to another, more disturbing one. If Celeste was not his official contact at Circular Quay, then he had definitely missed whoever it was whom he was supposed to meet. What repercussions that might hold were too unnerving to think about.

Upstairs in Celeste’s apartment she tearfully picked up the videophone handset and voice dialed the number.

‘He’s gone,’ she said staring into the blank screen of the videophone and wishing she could put a face to this voice. A pause was followed by her reply, ‘No, I didn’t.’

The voice told her that Joshua would be taken care of. He was no longer Celeste’s assignment and she was forbidden to attempt any further contact with him.

Terminating the connection, she asked herself the same question Joshua had asked her before he left. ‘Where is your self respect?’

The taxi swung into the driveway of the Sydney City Local Area Command headquarters and slowly approached the security gates. Five meters from the gate, the taxi was immobilized as the engine shut down and the doors locked from the outside. Through the car radio a digitized male voice spoke these words, ’SCLAC requests your patience as your vehicle is checked for dangerous goods. The process will take three to four minutes. Please remove all sunglasses and head coverings, as you will be required to submit to a retinal scan and official visit logging procedures.

‘Please state your name and the purpose of your visit after the tone.’

The driver answered, ‘Premium taxi service. Driver Ed Barnes, Authority number DZ9740. Delivering two passengers for purposes unknown.’

The taxi shook slightly, then the engine refired and the vehicle crept forward to the security gate, where it stopped again. A metallic sphere the size of a tennis ball appeared beside the driver’s window while the digitized voice instructed the driver to look directly out of his side window to facilitate retinal scanning. The process was repeated for the old man and 3, where after the sphere spun away and the voice asked for the passengers to state the purpose of their visit.

‘I have just escaped unlawful imprisonment. I am injured and still being chased. I want to report this crime and also the disappearance of two friends of mine. My name is 3-11-15, visiting Sydney from Mumbai, India.’

The gate opened and the taxi moved forward again, taking them to the main entry at the top of a set of marble stairs. Ramps ran up either side of the steps. The taxi stopped and 3’s door was unlocked, while the others stayed closed. Before he left the cab, 3 turned to thank the old man who nodded and said, ‘No worries, mate.’

As he watched the taxi leave, 3 suddenly felt dizzy as a new surge of pain came over him. He looked at the police station entry, at the stairs, at the ramp, at the police officer coming towards him, at the sky, then the grass as his hoverchair plopped to the ground and overturned.

Shortly afterwards, he felt himself being lifted and carried, floating for a while more roughly than he would have done in his hoverchair. There were warm hands on him, fading lights, brightening then dimming once more. Voices jumbled, unintelligible. 3 didn’t know if he was alive or dead, or if time was passing or standing still. Then there was the ever-present pain which punctuated the ebb and flow of his consciousness.

Sometime later 3 awoke to the sound of a man’s voice, it sounded familiar at first but he lost the thought and simply concentrated on trying to wake up fully and regain his senses.

‘Ted, it’s Chief Inspector Jacobssen here. Can you hear me?’

That name sounded familiar too but from where? Back home in Mumbai? Yes, Inspector Jacobssen from Mumbai.

‘Am I home in India?’

‘No Ted. You’re in Sydney at St.Vincents Hospital. You were hurt.’

‘I need to go to the police station not the hospital.’

‘Ted, we brought you here from the station. You arrived at local area command headquarters in a taxi. You were badly hurt and had lost a lot of blood. You passed out before we could get you inside.’

The world was starting to come together. ‘Okay, what are you doing here?’

Jacobssen looked quickly at Hatsis who was standing beside him. The latter nodded so Jacobssen said, ‘I’m here looking for you, Ted and Veena and Joshua.’

‘Have you found them? I escaped but I wasn’t with them, I don’t know where they are.’

It was Hatsis who spoke next. ‘We haven’t found them. Actually we were hoping you could help us with that.’

3 looked at Hatsis then back at Jacobssen, then back at Hatsis. ‘Who are you?’

‘Detective Hatsis, Sydney City Local Area Command. Inspector Jacobssen and I are working together on this case.’

‘I don’t know where they are. I told you I was imprisoned alone.’

‘Listen Ted,’ said Jacobssen, noting the anxiety drenching 3’s voice. ‘Let’s just take this one step at a time, okay? When you are feeling a bit better we can talk some more. We’ll need to know everything that’s happened right back to before you came to Sydney. Then…well, like I said we have plenty of questions for you and perhaps not much time, so how about we come back in the morning after you’ve had a chance to eat something and rest some more, and we’ll talk then?’

Suddenly sick of talking and sick of playing this game, 3 nodded weakly. Jacobssen and Hatsis left quietly, allowing him to think about what had happened over the last hour or two, or was it longer. He didn’t know how much time he had spent in the hospital or how long it took him to affect his daring escape and flee down the main street to only God knew where. When was it that he crashed into the information kiosk, and was nearly recaptured as he sat stunned on the dirty sidewalk surrounded by strangers? How long after that did he reach the Education building and finally end up in the back of a taxi with the help of an old man? So many questions, everything so foggy.

The old man’s voice appeared in his mind and 3 wondered about him. At the time he was too freaked out, hyped up, worried and scared for his life to think about it, but now alone in his hospital bed watching the light emptying from his room as the sun went down, he remembered something Joshua had said some time ago about men called prophets.

If the old man was just another one of the city’s dejected vagrants, one of many in all the cities of the world, he would not have helped 3. Bums looked out for themselves first and occasionally others of their ilk, fellow homeless, second. They shunned mainstream society. This old man went out of his way for 3 and had in fact saved his life. Where did he come from and how did he know 3 was in trouble? Where was he now?

3 searched his mind’s file on Joshua. One afternoon in Mumbai, walking home from school, Joshua had stopped to talk to a beggar. This was not surprising as Joshua treated all people as equals, believing that God was colorblind. Veena and 3 had waited patiently for Joshua as he squatted beside the one armed beggar who appeared blind. A quiet conversation followed which lasted only a few minutes before Joshua stood and bowed slightly to the beggar then turned away to rejoin Veena and 3.

‘What was that about?’ asked Veena.

‘He’s a prophet,’ said Joshua matter-of-factly. ‘He had a word of knowledge for me.’

Veena and 3 asked different questions simultaneously. Somehow Joshua caught them both and answered each in turn.

‘Something told me to approach him. A kind of quiet voice inside.’

‘That’s the Holy Spirit you talk about sometimes, right?’ asked Veena.

‘Yes.’

Joshua looked at 3. ‘A word of knowledge is a gift from God through his servants on earth. It can be a prediction or a present revelation. It can be an answer to an unspoken question, or a question to be pondered, and in due course answered.’

‘That’s as clear as mud,’ said 3. ‘Why can’t God speak to you or any believer directly?’

‘He can and he has done in the past but it’s not the usual way he communicates with his people, believers or not. I think the prophets’ purity of heart and their dedication to the perfect will, allow the communication lines to be clear, uncluttered.’

‘So what did he say to you?’ asked Veena.

The trio walked on in silence for a moment as Joshua appeared to consider how to answer the question if at all.

‘He told me I should prepare myself to leave home and travel to Australia where I would come close to death on more than one occasion.’

Veena and 3 glanced at each other as 3 exclaimed, ‘Near death in Australia? That sounds like advice to stay home, doesn’t it?’

Veena added a query, ‘Why Australia?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He’s a glorified fortune teller right, this prophet?’ said 3.

’You could call him that but the prophets are much more than just fortune tellers. The whole New Age movement which ballooned at the beginning of the twenty first century awakened everyone to the spiritual aspects of life but for every genuine gifted person there were five or more cranks, pretending and scamming their way into people’s confidence and defrauding them. There was no such thing as a free reading, whether of palms, cards, tea leaves, irises or whatever. The majority of people lapped it up because it had nothing to do with truth and everything to do with self justification. Sin could be excused easily by ascribing blame to someone else.

’True prophets never approach anyone offering their services and when they do prophesy after being asked specifically to do so they never ask for anything in return. Their predictions are always specific and faultless, and their insight is unquestionably divinely inspired.

‘Prophets eschew the comforts of modern life. Never own anything but the clothes they wear on their backs and even those are mostly borrowed or gifted. They live without attachment to any person or anything, dedicating themselves entirely to the perfect will of God.’

‘I have never met one or talked to one,’ said Veena. She stopped. ‘Can I go back and ask that guy for a message for me?’

Joshua was saying no, it doesn’t work that way even as his strong willed friend was marching back to the beggar. He had to let her go. He and 3 stood and watched Veena approach the beggar and squat beside him just as Joshua had done. After less than a minute, she rose and walked quickly back to them with her pretty face marred by a frown.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked 3. ‘What did he say?’

Veena was biting her lip, anger threatening to tear the skin off her face. ‘Money for bread? Money for bread!’

3 couldn’t help but laugh which made Veena even angrier. She stormed again failing to hear Joshua’s words, “I tried to tell you it doesn’t work that way!’

‘I get it,’ said 3 as they began to follow Veena. ‘At least I think I do.’

A knock on the door, brought 3 unceremoniously back to the present in a darkened room where he lay uncomfortably on his back.

The nurse said, ‘Why are you lying there in the dark? There’s a lamp beside your bed there?’

Silently, 3 twisted slightly to reach the switch even as the nurse ordered on the main room lights. He did not respond to her question. A more burning issue was the old man, who he was beginning to see must certainly have been a prophet. Remembering the way he was kind and gently spoken to 3 but loud and abrasively course with the taxi driver, and how he had appeared at 3’s time of desperate need without explanation and had helped 3 without hesitation, it seemed the only conclusion to draw. He had met a prophet.

His mind began to rush, a stream of thoughts crowding into his conscious, jostling each other for preeminence, begging his attention. With increasing clarity, answers, came; though not all.

The prophet worked for God, that’s what Joshua said, and God therefore had helped 3 even though he did not believe in him and had never spoken to him or paid him any attention-for why would you give thought to someone who in your eyes was not just irrelevant but nonexistent?

The gray shirted security guards were not on 3’s side and by virtue of his new status-albeit self appointed-as God’s friend, not on God’s side either.

Jacobssen could be trusted. Could he? Yes, but why? Reputation alone would have been enough to convince most, but 3 also had a strong assurance, something inside, something strange and compelling urging him to trust the inspector and whomever he said should be trusted. For now that meant his sidekick, Detective Hatsis.

As for Joshua and Veena, the beggar in Mumbai had told Joshua he would have near death experiences in Australia and 3 now accepted that as truth, grabbing hold of it with the hands of newly born virtue, faith. Why, he further reasoned, should I not believe that Veena also would be safe and that eventually the trio of friends would be reunited?

A supernatural peace wrapped 3 in a soft and warm blanket protecting him from doubt and inoculating from the cold tentacles of fear. Was it imagination that projected a quiet voice into his mind saying, ‘Rest in me,’ or was it the voice of a God he had denied all his life?