Mission Read Free Page A

act, we withdrew into silence. I think we both thought that if we did not talk about the problem it would go away. A well-known tactic which, as you’ve probably discovered, doesn’t work. Deep down, of course, we were both trying to figure out some kind of explanation that our dazed minds could accept. After all, we were normal people, leading normal lives, with a firm belief in the normal scheme of things. We both knew that thin air disappearances just did not happen. And yet – there it was.
    In the third act, when the words came, it was in the form of small talk that touched upon our lives but carefully side-stepped what had happened at the hospital. It was as if the event was a concealed Claymore mine which, if triggered by one careless word, might explode and blow our lives to pieces. So we kept our distance until finally we could no longer resist playing the verbal equivalent of chicken. Jumping in with both feet but protecting ourselves by jokes – the New Yorker’s defence against calamity. At least, I did. And we might have managed to laugh off the event if we’d been dealing with the inexplicable disappearance of an unknown Hispanic too poor to buy himself a pair of shoes. But all the black humour and scepticism I was able to muster could not shake Miriam’s deep inner conviction that she had bandaged the wrists and feet of you-know-Who. And that really had me worried. Because on top of being a very down-to-earth doctor, this was a girl who had no time for religion. She came from a good solid family background, so naturally, like any nice Jewish girl, she had had a grounding in the faith. But, like me, she had left all that behind a long time ago. And again, like me, she was a very together person. She needed a religious experience like a hole in the head. But if she was right about who had done that Houdini act in the hospital morgue, there was only one possible explanation.
    Somehow, at the instant of the purported Resurrection, the body of the man known as Jesus had been transported forward through time and had materialised for at least seventy-five minutes in Manhattan on Easter Saturday of the eighty-first year of the twentieth century.
    â€˜Instead of where?’ I asked, when we reached this conclusion.
    â€˜Wherever he went to when he disappeared from the morgue,’ said Miriam.
    â€˜What kind of an answer is that?’ I huffed.
    â€˜The kind you get when you ask that kind of question.’
    Now I am sure that some of you who have been following this may already have spotted what seems to be a deliberate mistake and maybe have even checked to see what it says in the Book. And the question you’re asking is – if he rose on the third day, what was he doing in Manhattan on Saturday night? The answer is that the time in Jerusalem is seven hours ahead of New York. It was already Sunday over there.
    I mention this now, but it didn’t occur to me on that first fateful night. As I’ve said, we were both trying to find a way to dismiss the whole thing because, even if one set aside the nut-and-bolt practicalities of the time-travel hypothesis, it raised other issues which strained the limits of credibility.
    To begin with, it meant accepting that the event described in the New Testament Gospels and which formed the cornerstone of the Christian faith actually took place. Until quite recently, I’d never taken that part of the story seriously but, after the publication of the latest scientific investigations of the Turin Shroud, I was prepared to accept the possibility that something quite extraordinary might have occurred. And if, as rumoured, the alleged image of Christ had been sealed into the linen by some process involving cosmic radiation then, clearly, we were into a whole new ball game.
    For it meant accepting not only the reality of time-travel, but also the simultaneity of time. Which meant, as I understood it, that Einstein had got it wrong. For