Authors: Angella Graff
With a sigh, Mark folded his hands over his knee and studied her. Her dark eyes were narrow, determined, and though she'd been presented with the most impossible information, she was taking it well and comfortably.
“I don't want to get rid of you, Abby, I promise. It's been a long day and I need to sort out my thoughts.”
“Well, so do I,” she retorted. “You drop this bombshell on me, how you're sort of immortal, not blind, and Judas Iscariot is still alive, walking around with Jesus powers. Frankly, Mark, I don't think I can just go home and head to bed.”
“I understand,” Mark said, meaning it completely. “Is there anything I can do to help ease your mind?”
“I don't know,” Abby said, giving a helpless shrug. She fell into a silence, staring at him for a while, and then she asked, “Can you see with those contacts on?”
Mark smiled and shook his head. “Just the difference between light and dark, for the most part. They are thick and heavy and cover the whole of my eye.”
“So with them on you really are kind of blind?”
“I am.”
“And you really read Braille?”
Mark laughed, though he knew the question wasn't mean to sound so absurd. “I do. I mastered the writing the year that Mr. Louis Braille presented it as an option for the visually impaired. Quite ingenious it is, if I may say so.”
“Um, so... is this the first time you've seen me?” she asked after a pregnant pause.
Mark hesitated before he answered. “From time to time you've caught me unawares here in my apartment, and I was not wearing the contacts.”
“Ah, the glasses,” she said, pointing her finger at him.
“Yes, when I don’t have my contacts handy, I use the glasses.” he replied with a nod. “So no, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen you.”
She gave a little laugh and shrugged. “I bet Ben feels pretty stupid now after making fun of me for getting all dressed up today.” Mark cocked his head to the side in confusion so she elaborated. “I like you, obviously, and so I kind of went out of my way to try and look nice. Of course I didn't know that you were some sort of immortal guy or I probably wouldn't have wasted my time.”
Mark winced a little at the bitterness in her tone. “I apologize if I misled you, it was not my intention. I’ve been aware of your feelings and honestly I’d hoped that in our friendship they would subside naturally.”
Abby waved her hand. “It's not a big deal. I think I'm a little more shaken up and honestly, not quite sure if I fully grasp everything you've told me.”
“I expect not,” Mark said with a little shrug. Instead of letting her continue, Mark got up and went to the kitchen, putting the kettle on. As Abby sat on the couch waiting, Mark leaned against the counter as the kettle boiled, and he closed his eyes.
He hadn't felt Yehuda's presence in the city, not until he was in the room with him, and that frightened him. He had never been so close to Yehuda before and not sensed his presence. Now, Yehuda was unconscious, trapped in his own nightmares, restrained in a hospital, and Mark had no idea how he was going to go about in getting him released.
He knew that if he had to, if it came down to it, he could break Yehuda out and disappear, but he didn't want it to come to that. He was happy at Sacred Heart, and frankly he was tired of running. He was tired of living in hiding, living terrified that any time he wrote down his name, the paper was going to burn, and some religion was going to spring out of the ashes.
The whistling kettle startled Mark out of his thoughts. Grabbing two cups and his container of teas, he walked back out to the couch and set everything down on the small table. Abby was watching him with a hooded expression, only her wide eyes giving away her feelings of confusion and struggle to believe him.
Mark offered her a small smile as she picked out her tea. “Questions?”
“Are you the Mark from the Bible?” she blurted.
Mark wasn't expecting that question, despite it being the most logical. In fact, the few times he had revealed his identity, no one had thought to ask him that. He smiled and gave a little shrug. “Yes and no. The words in the gospel attributed to my name are a very warped version of what I produced in my time. The original manuscript is indeed my handwriting, but not my words.”
Abby frowned in confusion. “So... none of what the Bible says is true?”
“Not everything,” Mark said. “The Bible exists as a guide for people following the words of Christ, however that guide has misrepresented the very words and ideals of the man known as Yeshua, or Jesus as his name was Latinized. The Bible, like so many other books represented as historical fact, has to be combed through, with only fragments of truth remaining in its pages.”
“If you wrote the Bible, but none of what is in the Bible is the truth…” Abby trailed off and shook her head. “Sorry, I'm just completely confused.”
Mark let out a breath and rubbed his face. He was exhausted and anxious, and absolutely terrified of what might happen if modern science properly got their hands on the make-up of Judas Iscariot. Time was ticking, and Mark was not in a position to take Yehuda from that bed and whisk him away as he had done many times in the past.
He looked over at the inquisitive face of Abby and felt this pressing need to just tell her. To just tell her everything, their past, their present, what the future might hold. The confusion and the curse, and the never ending loneliness and pain that came with absolute immortality. He wanted to tell Abby every truth that had been manipulated into a blood-spilling lie under the guise of religion. He desperately wanted to tell her what it felt like to try and take your life, only to wake up in pain, and even more alone, cursed to walk the earth without any sense of real purpose, identity or destination.
Yet, Mark realized as he stared back at her, he couldn't do any of those things. He could not bear to watch yet another false religion spring up and populate the world under his words that had been twisted until they could not be recognized as his own.
“I wish I could tell you everything,” Mark eventually said into the echoing silence of his little apartment. “I wish I could just sit you down and explain to you everything I have ever learned in the two thousand years I have been walking this earth, but I can't.”
“Can you tell me why not?” she asked, her voice tinged with hurt.
“Because every time I sit down and tell my story, Abby, people die. Religions spring up and fanatics are born and people are persecuted and murdered all in the name of a God that doesn't really exist the way people think he does.”
“But I wouldn't do that!” Abby insisted, jabbing her finger at herself. “Mark, you know me! You know that I would trust and believe everything you say!”
“I have no control over this curse, Abby, and I have no control over who it effects. All I know is that not a single soul who knew the truth was able to resist the curse, and in the end there was always blood and war. I care about you too much, Abby. Just trust me when I say that, okay?”
Abby let out a breath and gave a small nod. “Okay. I won't ask you about the Bible anymore, but I just hope one day I can understand everything that's going on.”
“Perhaps one day you will. Perhaps one day this curse will end and I'll figure out how to stop the chaos, and then everyone can know.”
Abby sipped her tea, staring at Mark out of the corner of her eye. She gave a small laugh and shook her head. “You're really telling me the truth, aren't you? You're actually a man from Biblical times.”
Mark gave a little shrug and a half smile, a little frightened that she was able to believe that much. “I'm afraid so.”
“And you really knew Jesus?”
“I did. I knew his entire family.”
Abby shook her head and gave another laugh. “I literally don't even know how to wrap my mind around that concept. If anyone knew they'll think that I've gone completely around the bend. My brother is probably plotting some kind of intervention for me right now, knowing that I'm with you and probably eating up everything you say.”
“Your brother is a good man and he loves you, and he only wants the best for you,” Mark corrected. He'd seen that kind of love and protection between siblings before, and in his age he knew that sort of thing was rare.
“My brother is an idiot,” Abby said sharply. “I mean, he's a smart guy, obviously. He's head detective, he graduated in the top tenth percentile in his class, and his deductive reasoning skills are better than most detectives around. But he's also a close-minded fool who won't consider that there are other things out there besides what we can see, and touch, and smell, and hear. He refuses to accept that there is more out there, whatever that more may be.”
“Your brother is merely accepting the world that he knows, and that in itself is its own path to enlightenment,” Mark said with a shrug. “Don't dismiss his way of believing in things so readily, just because they're different from yours.”
Abby cocked her head to the side. “So you don't mind that even though you've looked Jesus Christ in the eye, touched him, spoken with him, Ben doesn't even believe the man actually existed?”
“Jesus is now portrayed as a sort of Hebrew Herculean character; a demi-God, all powerful, able to transcend death and bodily rose to the right hand of God Almighty. I don't blame any person with any amount of reasoning to reject the idea that man existed.” Abby opened her mouth to respond, but Mark held up a hand, “Forgive me for cutting this short, but today has made me exhausted and I have a lot of things to work out for the near future.” He was desperate to end this line of discussion. It was growing too close to the truth for Mark’s comfort, and Abby was the sort who would have absorbed every word.
Abby set her cup down and met Mark’s eyes. “Are you really going to leave?”
“I can't say for certain. All I know is that Yehuda can't stay in that hospital long. Eventually people are going to start noticing him, and the things he can do, and when that happens, bad things happen. I appreciate all your help today, Abby, and Ben's as well. When you speak to him next, express my thanks and I hope we might all see each other once more in the future.”
Abby's face was pained as Mark walked her to the door, and she paused before opening it. “Just, would it be too bad if you kept in touch... if you really had to disappear?”
“I can't make any promises except the promise to try,” Mark lied. He knew perfectly well if he had to go, he would go, and that would be the end of knowing Abby, and Ben, and this gorgeous city. The thought pained Mark, but it was a pain of loss he was used to after so many years.
With a sigh, Abby stepped into the hall, but paused and turned, leaning to give Mark a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for everything.”
Mark nodded, his eyes closed to keep up his ruse should anyone walk by, and as he heard her footsteps start to disappear down the hall, he shut the door and leaned against it. He wished again, as he did so often in his many centuries, that this curse came with a disconnect; with an ability to turn off mortal feelings, to be numb to the sufferings of humans, and to not connect to them at all.
Had it been another life, had he been another man, he would have married Abby and loved her until the day she died. But Mark had walked down that road before. He had married, had children, and from afar he had to watch them grow up and grow old without him. He had to leave them alone, and watch over the years as the women he loved moved on to another man, and eventually forgot him. His children forgetting his face, forgetting his name as they entered the winter of their lives, being lowered into the ground for their eternal sleep as he now walked over their graves.
Mark wouldn't do that again, but it didn't make the loneliness lessen, or the pain of loss hurt less. With a heavy sigh, he cleared up the cups of tea, went into his bedroom, turned out his lights and lay on his bed, wondering how exactly he was going to get Yehuda out of this situation yet again.