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Jesus The Time Traveller
Jesus The Time Traveller
Jesus The Time Traveller
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Jesus The Time Traveller

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A man finds himself in an unfamiliar space and time, becoming a subject of a radical self-interrogation and dramatic self-reinvention as he fights for his life and sanity. Rich with Biblical allegory and uniquely imbued with South African imagery, this visceral and imaginative novel takes the reader on an unforgettable journey across the external and internal landscape.

JESUS THE TIME TRAVELLER is an accomplished debut by a South African author Roberta-Leigh Boud that evokes the style of Nobel Prize winner J.M Coetzee; a treasured discovery for a sophisticated reader of fine literary fiction who is not afraid of controversial themes and brutally honest psychological inquiry.

Is our hero really from the future? Is he meeting the real historical Jesus? Or is it all a dying vision of a failed scientific experiment's victim?

LanguageEnglish
PublisherAnanke Press
Release dateDec 14, 2020
ISBN9781734172058
Jesus The Time Traveller

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    Jesus The Time Traveller - Roberta-Leigh Boud

    DAY ONE:

    The very first flicker, the very first minuscule moment of thought as my eyes opened and adjusted to that brilliant light all around me: Jesus was a time traveller! And then, an adjustment, stumbling quickly after: Jesus is a time traveller—because there he was, presently, in front of me. A man disconnected from time and squashed through into an unknown present. Just like me, I thought. Just like me; and so my mind had already made its inevitable leap into a wished for connection.

    I was terrified, and unprepared. Beyond his hard edges, the world was overexposed, the details all burnt out and brilliant white. His brown eyes held on to me. They plummeted into a deep liquid black and made me think strangely, and slowly, of rivers I’d known as a boy. My brother and I, my mom and dad, we’d spend days travelling down, down, down towards the sea, a rushing, gurgling, boisterous surge moving us relentlessly forward, only to suddenly stop in a dark deep chasm, the water there so still and so dark that it was terrifying.

    In the stillness, we’d clamber out of our canoes and then get into the water, to swim, and I would keep my knees tucked up close to my chest, keeping my body in the thinner sun-warmed layer at the top, afraid to spread out too much, or to move. If you spread your legs out, those errant limbs of yours would suddenly move through that barrier of warmth into the chilling black below. That dark and that deep was unknowable. And awful.

    Now, as I lay there looking up into Christ the Seeming Time Traveller’s eyes, my consciousness feeling like all that had come before this moment had been scrubbed clean and bright, I had that urge again to keep my limbs close to my body, to keep my legs from dropping down into the depths below me.

    He’s got brown eyes, I thought to myself, a simplicity in that statement that brought me some comfort. He’s got brown eyes...and I can imagine this moment almost as a baby seeing its mother’s eyes for the first time—a new world, breathing itself into existence in the singularity of her gaze. I breathed deeply then, keenly aware of how little I knew or understood. I was like the baby in this new world—and instantly I wondered, would he care for me? Would he comfort me? Would he hold me close, and keep me warm, and promise me that I would always be safe?

    Then I tried to stop thinking. I knew I was not yet fully myself; I knew I had not yet fully emerged into this new world and this new time, and between him and me the separation felt molecule thin. I was troubled by the porousness of my being. I drew my legs in towards myself, and from somewhere came further fear: Was he seeing my thoughts, like bubbles, as they floated upward? In my head I thought I heard a voice say, Oh no, no, no. That’s not the way we do things, but I suspected myself merely of a willful imagination, and a deep tiredness after all my journeying.

    I had never before felt closer to death, or so strangely truncated, as if a cleaver had come down and neatly severed some vital part of myself that made me feel whole.

    I smiled—much like a cat purrs when it is dying—perhaps in resignation? perhaps in acceptance? maybe just sheer delirium? The man in front of me was beautiful. There was no other word for it. I felt in awe of his deep solidity within this luminous landscape. Can you read my thoughts? I asked him. But he just sat and stared at me, waiting for something—I’m not sure what.

    So? I said. He tilted his head. Waiting. Enigmatic.


    But so was a whole world away, a whole other province of possibilities that was no longer open to me. Like a patient waking from the ether, I had forgotten who I was, and why I was, and what the hell it was that I was meant to be doing. Here, in front of me, now, was a microcosm, a second split infinitely, a breathing in and a breathing out, a heady realisation that I was still alive, despite any feeling to the contrary.


    So, I said again, and then, do you have water?—it felt like I hadn’t had anything to drink in days. My cupped hand went to my mouth, my voice inflected upward for the universal question. He smiled and beckoned me into the brightness and up, onto the top of a rise. I stumbled to my feet and followed, the ground packed hard with dust and stone: there were two grey donkeys covered in dust. They came into view from out of the brilliant blur. The desert, with its scrub and stunted brush, seemed to render harsh edges invisible, making the colossal space around us seem boundless and bare.

    But it was not bare. Hidden in the brilliance of that washed out haze were the folds and crevasses of a crazy landscape. Later those hills and valleys would become all consuming in my attempt to map a path to safety. But for now, on the top of that scrubbed out mound, his little world of footprints and donkeys became an oasis of form and solidity within that monstrous barrenness; it was a space that could be touched and felt.

    He indicated a spot on the sand. Make yourself at home his gesture seemed to say—mi casa su casa. Can you speak Spanish? I asked. But of course, I laughed, you can speak all languages. He shared my laugh.

    And then, I passed out.


    I woke at times, feverish and disconnected. I think I was aware of him tilting my head back, and was I aware of him moving my arms and my legs—maybe straightening me out where I lay?

    The sun went down.

    In between waking and sleeping, I could feel the TravelSuit struggling to calibrate. I was hot; the air was freezing, and the suit kept trying to compensate, going from hot to cold to in-between. I was delirious much of the night, trying to understand what was going on and where I was, but there was so little in my understanding that was solid that I could hold on to. The edges of my world had slipped away, and here I was, a foreigner in a foreign land and a foreign time, with merely the vaguest of purposes: to figure out what crazy world I’d been pushed out into.

    In the morning the vomiting started. The day wasn’t even warm yet and the air was still crisp and cool, and the milky liquid that was projecting out of my guts steamed slightly as it arced through the air. My muscles felt so incredibly weary and my head felt like a hangover had removed my very being from my body. That quintessential part of me that was me was somewhere about two feet beyond my physical form. I looked, and saw the world through a distant fog of skull and eyes and it hurt all the way down to the pit of my stomach.

    After a time, my consciousness came crawling back. There I was: lying on my side and watching him kick sand over my puke. I’d never before been so aware of such minutiae—the small, the precise, the trivial details: the sand grains sticking into my kotch and eventually covering it, the flies coming and crawling over the spots he’d covered, over my mouth, my hands, my eyes.

    And then the shits hit me. Like a ton of bricks. I hugged my knees to my chest and cried. I’d never felt pain like that wracking through my body. Wave after wave after wave running down my legs and flooding the fucking TravelSuit. The TravelSuit that had never actually been planned for this eventuality, even though they’d planned for so much fucking else.

    I passed out again.

    Jesus, they had gotten so much wrong!

    DAY TWO:

    The shitting and the puking stopped. And this too shall pass,

    I thought. Was that biblical? There was a lot of that going around. I chortled, and smelled the dead bitterness of my breath.

    Christ.

    I was alone, and deeply so, in that way where you wonder if this isn’t in fact how you’ve always been, drifting aimlessly as a cloud. I don’t know how I knew that I was alone, because my eyes were closed. But I knew it the way that you know where your hands and your feet are, even when you’re not looking at them, and so you simply accept their presence—or in this case Jesus’ absence—and you carry on.

    I sighed and tried tiredly to bury my head deeper into my arms, but then, despite the grafted vacuum seals and the billion dollar suit, all I could smell was the terrible evil of my own shit. My god it was vile.

    Tears started. I cried for all the things that I’d left behind. For my son. For my wife. For the goddamn dog. For my legs and my arse and my balls all covered in my crap. For the feeling of my arms wrapped around my head, which felt like the only feeling of safety I’d ever feel again.

    I can’t say that the tears lasted all that long though. That was why I’d been chosen, after all. I had resilience. I have resilience. I bounce back. I take stock. I plan. I implement. It is both a blessing and a curse: in looking so constantly forwards towards what is to come, I seldom live truly in the present. The here, the now—it is always a hurdle to overcome, an obstacle in the path of that siren song, the future. The irony of having gone so far backward, and of being so much more removed from the future, was not lost on me.


    So. I was nowhere near where I was supposed to be. Where I should have been was all alone, in a locked down warehouse—me and just the basic necessities: food and water and a place to sleep, and the windows and the doors all boarded up so that no one could see into our momentous little project: a man being born again in time, exploring those shadowy vagaries of a past made present. But that wasn’t where I was. Where I was had no walls, and no doors, and no windows, just an infinity of tumbling terrain spreading out in all directions. And from this I would have to find my way. I would have to take stock; I would have to plan:

    I was hungry, and I was thirsty. I didn’t have my stockpiles of food, my barrels of water. The suit could actually take care of both—a back-up plan, a built in redundancy for precisely if I should end up god knows where—but apparently it couldn’t really do either while flooded in my shit.

    I really didn’t know where I was. I was surrounded by folded hills and jagged valleys, all pinkish-grey and dry as fuck. In the valleys were rocks and boulders seemingly scattered in the wake of violent floods in this crazy cortex-like landscape. And while the lode-line on the suit could tell me where north was—a soft prickling line that ran up and down my torso whenever I faced toward that magical magnetic field—there was nothing much else I had with me for finding my way. Even the lode-line had been added as an ‘in case of’, and not really because they thought I would ever need it.

    I didn’t even know when I was, other than the guess that it was probably pre-industrial, a tentative conclusion at best based purely on the only other person I had happened to see so far. So all told, I didn’t really have much to go on. I felt exhausted, and weak, and thirsty—clear signs that the suit wasn’t working properly. And if I wanted to survive I had better shut the fuck up and figure it all out.

    I needed to clean the suit—that much was terrifyingly clear. It wasn’t designed to be taken off and put back on. Each suit only ever got one wear; but if I was thirsty, then it wasn’t working properly—and so it had to be cleaned and I would just have to pray that I didn’t completely destroy it—there was only so long I would survive out here without water.

    I needed to conserve energy. I needed to make sure that I survived this wilderness long enough to be pulled back into time and into living. I didn’t know—we didn’t know—how time would move here relative to time there. And I didn’t know—they didn’t know—how far I could move from the landing zone...not that it was technically a landing zone; I suppose you could say it

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