Angel by Todd Young

Author:Todd Young [Young, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mercurial Avenue
Published: 2014-07-29T23:00:00+00:00

50

Outside, the sun was brilliant, the day golden.

After a block or two, Angel said, “The traffic’s pretty light.”

Cole lifted his head inquisitively and glanced along the street.

“And I’m not seeing many dark fuckers.”

“Yeah,” Cole said, “I figured this might happen.”

“You — what?”

“That guy I was telling you about. The John Finn was in love with. He used to speak of the light, of how it was all around us. He used to say it was right here, but we couldn’t see it.”

Angel frowned, uncertain of what Cole meant. He lifted his head at the sound of an engine. A Studebaker Avanti passed, a car he hadn’t seen since he was a child, though this one seemed to be a new model, an updated version of the original, updated in the same way they had updated the Fiat 500. Angel wondered how or when it had been made. It seemed to have slipped into the city from a different world.

Cole was still speaking, speaking of the John who had had some love for Finn. “… and he was a religious nut. He had all this stuff, all these parts of the bible that they’d found sometime — I don’t know, in the 1940s or something.”

“The Nag Hammadi Library.”

“The what?”

“The Nag Hammadi Library. One of the greatest finds of ancient texts. Gnostic gospels, mainly, I think.”

“Gnostic what?”

“Gospels. You know, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Except they found these other gospels that these people, the Gnostics, had used. The Gospel of Philip. The Gospel of Truth.”

“That’s it. The Gospel of Thomas. That’s what he was always talking about. And there’s this one part he used to say so often that I can quote the whole thing.”

They crossed the street.

“Go on, then,” Angel said.

“What?”

“Tell me what he said.”

Cole put his hand on Angel’s arm and pulled him up the staircase of an old stone building. He stepped backwards, away from the pedestrians and into the shade of the stone veranda. Even here it was hot, and Cole unzipped his jacket, revealing his naked chest. Then he told Angel what the John had said, quoting Jesus from The Gospel of Thomas.

“If those who lead you say, ‘See, the Realm is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Realm is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

“Poverty? It sounds like a description of the dark.”

“Yeah. But the thing I mean about everything looking better right now is this: ‘Jesus says, The Realm will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying “Here it is” or “There it is.” Rather, the Realm of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see it.

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