I Was Bitten By a Radioactive Jesus

(continued from 8: The Pirate Plague, part two)

This young man, whom I quickly came to think of as my First Mate, perhaps indicating that the Pirate Plague had begun to affect even me, stayed by me throughout the action that followed, bravely and skillfully protecting me from innumerable dangers by means of a combination of cheerful ruthlessness and Brazilian Jujutsu.

For the next two and a half hours I rushed about the airfield, the hangers, and other nearby parts of the Facility, curing illness in anyone who staggered about on her sea-legs, anyone who carried a nail file like a knife in his teeth, and anyone who just looked way too hairy and grizzled for their gender and age. I laid healing hands on anyone singing Sea Chanties, which a good policy at any time, really. I became exhausted but kept on going. I wished fervently for the car-catching speed of Steve Austin himself, or the indomitable courage and goodwill of his bionic female counterpart Jaime Sommers, winner of the California Teacher of the Year award in 1977, and now, as everyone knows, the US Secretary of Education.

It was the hardest thing I had ever had to do, but in the end I succeeded. I couldn’t help the fact that the Thunderbirds, perhaps retaining some of their Cold War ideological upbringing, had fallen on the little Russian Sukhoi SU-29 and sacked it to bits, nor could I repair the damage to the several antique wooden propellers that had been broken apart to make cutlasses and sabers, but I could help pretty much all of the people.

The initial step of achieving one hundred percent depiratization was only the beginning. I then had to attend to the hundreds of moderately- to seriously-wounded spectators, pilots, and others who had tried so hard to hack each other up and to sink each other’s cars, trucks, and planes. There were broken bones, cuts, contusions, and abrasions beyond number, as well as a few really ugly cases. Hundreds of women and children still looked like they needed to shave. One man had somehow been impaled upon the eight foot-high endpost of a chain link fence, and I had to enlist the help of six uninjured air show enthusiasts to lift him off there before I could do my thing. A large, red-haired man had found a way to remove his hand and had passed out from blood loss while running around screaming “My hook! Where is my Hook, you swabs?”

There seemed to be far more to do than one person could manage, and I wished my brother had been there to help. As far as I know he doesn’t have super Jesus powers, but he’s a pretty capable guy. I would have seen him approaching from the other side of the crowd, and I would have moved off to meet him, my First Mate helping to clear the way. We would have faced each other for a moment, and after an appropriate interval I would have said “Stephen, you magnificent bastard!” to which he would have cooly responded with “You have some trouble here, it looks like. Can you use a hand?” At that moment the red-haired guy’s hand would probably have flown through the space between us, just to lighten the mood. “Could I ever!” I would have answered, and we would have embraced. Then Stephen would have brought to bear the formidable powers of organization which had allowed him to have the most mathematically sophisticated sock drawer in Baltimore, and which led him to assign player numbers, team names, and contract amounts to all the neighborhood kids when they played Nerf football in Wyman Park. He would have organized the healthy and the walking wounded into teams for clearing debris and transporting victims. He would have identified the doctors and nurses in the crowd and set them up to perform triage. He would have done all kinds of good stuff, if he had been there.

But even my brother’s assistance would not have lightened what happened next. There was a middle-aged woman whose head had been caved in by one of the cannon-flung jeep wheels. It was incredibly difficult to look at her, in part due to a superficial resemblance to our mother. There was no hint of movement in her body. When the small but vital motions of pumping lungs and rushing blood of which we are subliminally aware are gone, a human body becomes something altogether different and terrible. Her skin was not grey, but somehow her utter stillness made it seem grey.

I lay my hands upon her and summoned up my super Jesus powers. Really the term “super” is rather redundant in this expression, although I have been able to turn water into wine in much greater amounts than is recorded in the Bible. But on this occasion I was not super. I poured so much life energy into her that my head thrummed deafeningly with the flow, and bystanders had to look away because of the brilliance of the light radiating from my whole body. I pushed so much life in the direction of this poor woman that in the end I could feel myself beginning to die – my own flickering essence being drawn out with the torrent of radioactively-induced holiness.

Of course, it was not enough. She was dead, and I’m not Jesus. At the time I felt I was not much of anything. I was just a freakish little blip in mankind’s techno-socio-spiritual history that would never make much of a difference. She was dead, and it was not for me to bring her back. Maybe with time I could learn to do it, I don’t know. It’s not clear to me that even if I could gain such an ability I should. She was dead, I was a waste of skin, and nothing more needed to be said.

to be continued…