The shark’s been following him for days, he thinks out of curiosity more than anything. Every time it comes too close he kicks it right in the fin. It doesn’t make any difference, but it gives him something to do: the middle of the Pacific Ocean is the most boring place on earth, hands down. He’s been making a graph in his head for over a month. It’s pretty complex.

There’s a trick to walking on water — not how to do it, since it’s not like that’s a secret or anything, but how to do it well. It’s a neat trick if you want to make a point about how rad you are, but it’s less efficient than just waiting for the damn ferry. He’s been kicking himself for the last two weeks, but what the hell. It’s not like he has anything else to do.

“Trouble?” purrs the shark, looking either malicious or concerned. It’s hard to tell with sharks — it’s not like their eyes tell you anything, and that smile isn’t exactly reassuring, though of course it’s not like he has anything to worry about except that the stomach of a shark is almost exactly as boring as the middle of the ocean.

There’s a period there in the seventh century where he lets himself go and just drifts without trying to make sense of any of it. He shuns cities and people and takes to the wild spaces. He stops eating, just to see what happens. His bones push through his skin and his veins run with fire, but that’s it. He lays down one night thinking maybe he’ll die, maybe this is it, but when he wakes up covered with a light bready sort of a substance he knows that isn’t going to work. The manna keeps coming, a little more each morning, until he’s back to his fighting weight, 110 pounds soaking wet. “Still one of the people, ha,” he says, and shakes his head at the sky.

When the isolation gets to him, he buttonholes some rube and spins wild-eyed, disconnected tales of impossible beasts and booming prophetic voices, of fiery skies and invisible servants serving lavish banquets. All bunk. He doesn’t go for much in the way of miracles, except for the basic one of his continued breathing. Some days he pretends he’s an atheist.

One afternoon as he’s picking his way through the Caucasus, he comes across a floating hand writing his name in burning letters a cubit high on the side of the mountain. “Tacky,” he grumbles, “very tacky.”

Render unto Caesar: the Longinus side

Later, he can’t remember the first couple of days. The last thing he remembers is that face turned to him, long and sorrowful and bloody under its mocking crown, the forked beard streaked with white and draggled with sweat, and that voice saying, may you know no rest until I see you again. It wasn’t angry, and that kills him at first. He was so mild about it, maybe a little sad, no stronger emotions as he stripped the leather apron from him with those words and drove him out into the world. After that – nothing. He might have slept.

When he starts to take an interest in things again, he’s somewhere in Asia Minor. He doesn’t speak the language and everyone he sees chases after him and throws stones at him. “Please,” he shouts, again and again. “Please!” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for – forgiveness, maybe, or maybe just understanding.

It takes him a hundred and fifty years to get back to any place where he speaks the language. By that time, of course, everyone’s dead and long buried; he spends a day walking down streets he only half-remembers before he’s driven out of Jerusalem again, wailing and gnashing his teeth.

He bumps into a man in Des Moines and the man turns a face dark with fury to him and stabs him. It’s all very sudden. He doesn’t die, obviously, but it takes him a while to pull himself back together and by that time the angry man is gone. He follows after him, his footprints bloody and uncertain.

When the angry man sees him standing across the street he panics, flashes Ahasuerus the whites of his eyes and takes off running. Running. Ahasuerus laughs to himself. Running. Running is easy, running is moving, and he’s had lots of practice at that. So he follows along behind him, hands stuck any-which-way into his pockets, no hurry at all.

He doesn’t come very close to the angry man, but makes sure that he’s always there, looking through the window, watching the flashing lights of the pinball machines, smoking a cigarette under a streetlamp on a rainy night. They keep it up for years, Ahasuerus always there to keep the angry man running.

When he stumbles at last and lies dying, Ahasuerus strolls up to him and looks down at the ancient face of the angry man. “You’ve got me now,” says the man. “Take me, then, you devil!”

Ahasuerus laughs. “What do I want with you? I just wanted to see who you were.” He presses the angry man’s shoulder sympathetically. “No hard feelings, man,” he says, and leaves.

In the puddles the birds are flying and he watches them sailing overhead that way. It’s been a bear of a day, spitting a thin rain that never gets heavy enough for an umbrella but soaks into everything and leaves the buildings and the streets greasy and sweating. He could put up with anything but he hates the damp. It’s been almost a century since he was anywhere near a desert but he can still feel that perfect dryness complaining in his bones.

He doesn’t remember what city this is, Amsterdam, Prague, Pilsen, somewhere gray and cloudy with gray and clouded people. He stays in the alleyways and the ghetto, circling around the Jews like a weathered, tattered moon. Now and then he sees faces peeping at him from upper-story windows, worried faces and beautiful, heavy-lidded and dark. He’s looking for something forever elusive, something not to be found in the crabbed shops or the rows of identical houses, a small shoemaker’s building near the road to Gulgoleth.

He watches the birds in the puddles and wishes he could stop, just for a day, a week, a month, forever. It’s the rain, he tells himself, it’s always the rain that does this.