“Coffee Crossing” Chapter two

I Zoomed With Jesus

A man and his ass

Jesus crashed my Zoom call yesterday. I thought they’d fixed that security issue, but there he was.

“Hello,” said Leo, our Creative Director. “New face! Who’s this?”

“Ah, Jesus,” I said. “Friend of mine. A specialist on the Middle East. From Texas.”

“Hazes,” Leo said, mystifying us. “It’s Mexican.”

“Hello everyone, Jesus here, I wanted to speak to Britni, but I didn’t know she was working.” He pronounced it Jeezus, causing Leo’s brow to furrow.

“I think we’re just about done now,” he said. “Same time next week? Ben’s turn to host, yes? Deliverables in Dropbox, comments on Slack, punch it out at the end of the month, suggestions for the next project open.”

We watched everyone wave or blow kisses or offer elbows before their bits of the screen vanished. I like Zoom; it’s a peek into peoples’ souls, and a chance to see who has a bookshelf full of Harry Potter or Terry Pratchett, and how much latitude they allow their cats.

“Coffee?” offered Jesus, holding up a Starbucks takeaway cup.

“I thought you were in Melbourne for the love of coffee?”

“Relax,” Jesus said. “I made this myself. AeroPress in a travel mug. See, it’s the Christmas edition!”

My birthday’s in the middle of April. It’s rarely a public holiday for me, though occasionally I get Easter eggs. I set that particular thought aside.

“Hang on a tick. I’ll make myself a cup. Unless you can magick one over?”

“Not through wi-fi. I’ll wait.”

I left Jesus and Princess Fluffypants regarding each other.

Patting the paws button

“Your cat tried to catch my eyebrows,” Jesus complained, when I returned and hoisted my mug at him.

“You were tempting her, I’m sure. Your beard needs a chainsaw as well.”

“All the barbers have shut up shop. And I’d have to wear a mask.”

Since I’d last seen Jesus, there’d been a Covid-45 disaster in Melbourne, and we’d not only gone into lockdown again, we’d scored a curfew, and there were troops on the streets hassling joggers and Pokemon Go zealots.

“They weren’t your eyebrows, anyway. Just patches of pixels on the screen. Sometimes she chases the cursor around, and my spellchecker goes berserk.” I thought of something. “Hey, someone used a computer to make a picture of you.”

Jesus groaned. “Tall, blond, blue-eyed, white?”

“Not this time. Hang on, I’ll flash you the link.”

I watched Jesus gaze at his AI-generated face. The modern-day version looked a lot shaggier, and the cheekbones had moved a little higher, but he was still a cute brute. “One of my girlfriends said she wouldn’t push you out of bed.”

“Really? Which one?”

“Forget it, mate. She’s married.”

Jesus raised an eyebrow.

“Oh yeah,” I desperately went on, thinking of the potential for emotional carnage in my social circle, “she said that in her Bible, you had red eyes.”

“Funny…” Jesus didn’t look amused, and I found myself searching his pupils for any hint of colour. I wouldn’t boot him out of my bed either, come to think of it. Of course, with the lockdown, I’d probably be hanging a “Help Wanted” sign on the door soon. “I don’t think the Bible describes me at all.”

“Oh, ha ha,” he frowned as he got the joke. “You know, I didn’t say any of that stuff at all.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Well, for one thing, I didn’t speak English, so if you want the literal words of Jesus, they aren’t in the King James Version!”

“But fair translations?”

“Some,” he allowed. “But pages and pages are sentimental rubbish. Of course, I made up some of my own material as I went along. The Good Samaritan, for example.”

“No!” I was genuinely shocked. “I love that story!”

“They put me on the spot, there in the Temple. I had to come up with something!”

“But an accurate reporting of your story, surely?”

“They got the guts of it right. I didn’t say Samaritan, I said his name was Shimron, but that seems to have gotten lost when they wrote it down for the Greeks. They censored some of the other details too; it was a great story the way I told it!”

Snail-trial

I was disappointed, and it must have shown on my face. That story is the basis of so much of what we admire about Jesus. It’s also the foundation of modern torts law, if you ever want to look up the case of the snail in the bottle of ginger beer.

“Think about it,” Jesus said. “What’s more important? The details of the story or the truth it carries? My point about loving your neighbour certainly shone out, and it doesn’t matter what language it’s in, everybody understands that.”

He waggled his eyebrows, and Princess Fluffypants, now sitting in my lap, tensed. Nearby parts of me tensed as well.

“Is my face on the screen the real me? Of course not; it’s just bits of light, and the same screen might show a video of a cat doing something funny, or a salacious website.”

Oh boy, had he gotten my number! I wondered what else he was picking up.

“And even if I were in the same room as you, like when we had coffee together a few weeks ago, is my face and my body the real me? Or just the thing that holds my soul?”

Wow, this was deep. But then, what did I expect, zooming with Jesus?

“Fair enough,” I said. “So, how do we know which parts of the Bible to trust?”

“Good question. What’s the purpose of a Zen koan?”

Irritating man. A koan is a story or question with no obvious answer. The suffering listener has to puzzle it out for themselves.

On that note, here’s something to ponder. If a man makes a triumphal entrance into the capital, which is more important: the man, or the donkey he rides?

Britni

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