17.

One night when Joshua was a teen a dream came to him, and in it he saw the Christ, a Negroid Jesus who seemed to be from Africa--old Africa, not the place of depressed masses and disease. No, he came from an ancient Africa, a prosperous Africa, an Africa of potbellies and double chins, a place that Joshua knew must have been filled not with poverty but with bounties of the hunter's catch, the fruit of trees, an easy and even lazy place. And he went to Jesus, who wore a mane of feathers, face paint, and a crown of thorns. The man looked stern and troubled, someone given to anguishing contemplations, nightmares. "Shall I renounce my art for thy sake, and the sake of God?" asked Joshua. He did not know why he asked this, for it never occurred to him in waking life that he ought to renounce his art. But Jesus would not answer him, but frowned, as if agitated, and said, "Why dost thou ask me? Why dost all the world ask me these petty questions? Your God hath given you brains so that you may decide matters for yourselves--you even ask me what to eat, what to wear, how to spend your afternoons--certainly these things are minor affairs, better decided by yourselves." Joshua felt somehow sorrowful for the man, who seemed vexed and harassed.

Then Jesus said to him, "I have done a terrible thing, a terrible thing--I have asked thee to take up thy cross and follow me--a terrible thing." "Is suffering for the greater good terrible?" asked Joshua, to whom to do so seemed the noblest thing. "And what if everyone did so?" asked Jesus. "Then there would be all the world, hanging murdered upon crosses--the entire world would be in hell, since each renounced himself and died--died for all the others who also died--the world a mass of crucified souls, not one escaping." And Joshua awoke from his dream, and felt some measure of discomfort at it; and he shook his head, and wiped the vision from his eyes. He looked to the sunlight, and wondered how a yellow sun could paint everything in whites and greens and even blacks, as if the sun were yellow and yet gave off light that was not yellow. And his thoughts on the dream troubled him further, so that he said, "Certainly there is a truth under some stone somewhere, which, were men to know it, they would cry out all at once in their death throes; and the entire world would be covered over in agony. Certainly there is a truth somewhere that, should I discover it, my very guts would burst out from my skin, my organs would explode in blood, and I would fall down, a corpse, for what I have learnt."