Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

the ages the wall was known as the Ostentatious and Unpleasant Wall of China. At least I hope that’s what happened. It’s not on my Friendly Flyer Miles map, so I can’t be sure.

    We could see the mountain where Gaspar’s monastery lay long before we reached it. Like the other peaks around it, it cut the sky like a huge tooth. Below the mountain was a village surrounded by high pasture. We stopped there to rest and water our camels. The people of the village all came out to greet us and they marveled at our strange eyes and Joshua’s curly hair as if we were gods that had been lowered out of the heavens (which I guess was true in Josh’s case, but you forget about that when you’re around someone a lot). An old toothless woman who spoke a dialect of Chinese similar to the one we had learned from Joy convinced us to leave the camels in the village. She traced the path up the mountain with a craggy finger and it was obvious that the path was both too narrow and too steep to accommodate the animals.
    The villagers served us a spicy meat dish with frothy bowls of milk to wash it down. I hesitated and looked at Joshua. The Torah forbade us to eat meat and dairy at the same meal.
    “I’m thinking this is a lot like the bacon thing,” Joshua said. “I really don’t feel that the Lord cares if we wash down our yak with a bowl of milk.”
    “Yak?”
    “That’s what this is. The old woman told me.”
    “Well, sin or not, I’m not eating it. I’ll just drink the milk.”
    “It’s yak milk too.”
    “I’m not drinking it.”
    “Use your own judgment, it served you so well in the past, like, oh, when you decided we should go around the wall.”
    “You know,” I said, weary of having the whole wall thing brought up again, “I never said you could use sarcasm whenever you wanted to. I think you’re using my invention in ways that it was never intended to be used.”
    “Like against you?”
    “See? See what I mean?”

    We left the village early the next morning, carrying only some rice balls, our waterskins, and what little money we had left. We left our three camels in the care of the toothless old woman, who promised to take care of them until we returned. I would miss them. They were the spiffy double-humpers we’d picked up in Kabul and they were comfortable to ride, but more important, none of them had ever tried to bite me.
    “They’re going to eat our camels, you know? We won’t be gone an hour before one of them is turning on a spit.”
    “They won’t eat the camels.” Joshua, forever believing in the goodness of human beings.
    “They don’t know what they are. They think that they’re just tall food. They’re going to eat them. The only meat they ever get is yak.”
    “You don’t even know what a yak is.”
    “Do too,” I said, but the air was getting thin and I was too tired to prove myself at the time.
    The sun was going down behind the mountains when we finally reached the monastery. Except for a huge wooden gate with a small hatch in it, it was constructed entirely of the same black basalt as the mountain on which it stood. It looked more like a fortress than a place of worship.
    “Makes you wonder if all three of your magi live in fortresses, doesn’t it?”
    “Hit the gong,” said Joshua. There was a bronze gong hanging outside the door with a padded drumstick standing next to it and a sign in a language that we couldn’t read.
    I hit the gong. We waited. I hit the gong again. And we waited. The sun went down and it began to get very cold on the mountainside. I rang the gong three times loud. We ate our rice balls and drank most of our water and waited. I pounded the bejezus out of the gong and the hatch opened. A dim light from inside the gate illuminated the smooth cheeks of a Chinese man about our age. “What?” he said in Chinese.
    “We are here to see Gaspar,” I said. “Balthasar sent us.”
    “Gaspar sees no one. Your aspect is dim and your eyes are too round.” He slammed the little hatch.
    This time Joshua pounded on the gong until the monk returned.
    “Let me see that drumstick,” the monk said, holding his hand out through the little port.
    Joshua gave him the drumstick and stepped back.
    “Go away and come back in the morning,” the monk said.
    “But we’ve traveled all day,” Joshua said. “We’re cold and hungry.”
    “Life is suffering,” the monk said. He slammed the little door, leaving us in almost total darkness.
    “Maybe