Killing the Buddha

by Peter Manseau

  Above, in the cabin, where the windows had all been shattered, where passengers bled and moaned and gnashed their teeth and huddled in a small maintenance closet, the captain laid out his vision for orderly abandonment of the craft: I have a number of these matchsticks that I use for toothpicks, and I have busted one of these very matchsticks down to a nub, and we are going to draw lots from these—one person, one matchstick. I propose that we outfit with these remaining orange life jackets all those who manage to avoid the accursed nub. Of the twelve miserable gamblers in the maintenance closet, all agreed to the plan, naturally, as it had a betting aspect. They cast lots, and the nub, as if the captain had fixed the game, fell to Jonah Feldman. Gamblers are readers first and foremost, they are readers of the skies, readers of the faces of dealers, readers of auguries, of birds, of dates, of numbers, of names; gamblers are diviners, no flock passes overhead that is not portentous to them. These gamblers had their schemes, therefore, they had their racing forms, they had their ideas about the order of things, they knew prophets and prophecy, and when Jonah Feldman was revealed, through instantaneous possession of the nub, as a man of particularly dark luck, the gamblers fell upon him in a fierce inquiry into his significance. An older man with cracked spectacles and excessive amounts of cologne offered a brief kind word before demanding, Just clue us in here, what’s with the instantaneous hurricane, and what’s your job, and where do you come from, and where are you going, and what is your ethnic and racial self-description and why have you brought us to this dark place?

  Jonah Feldman cried out to them all, I’m a Jew and I’m a homosexual person, I am both, and I won’t dissemble here, even if you should throw me over the side. And I fear the Lord, I mean the actual God in actual Heaven, author of both sea and the dry land, also author of the results of all games of chance and presidential elections, likewise author of the stars and equations of physics, including Planck’s constant. The gamblers saw immediately, at least according to their Manichaean philosophies, that having a Kosher Fag onboard their boat was a very bad omen, even if in public settings they professed a certain acceptance of both categories attested to by Feldman’s ethnic, political, and religious self-designation. They didn’t want to throw Jonah to his doom, because they figured it too would be impossibly bad luck, and because it seemed morally dubious, but neither did they want him on the boat. So Jonah said to them, Take me up and throw me into the sea, since it’s for my sake that this tempest is upon you. By which he meant that there’s always a tempest, and always a culpable party, and he was willing to be done with the brief interval of his promising life and proofreading job at Price Waterhouse, he was willing now to be courageous and dead, for tempests are full of revelation. He had done what he ought not, he had avoided his duty, and so he must perish. Just then there was a violent rolling of the craft and a wave of such magnitude that it was as if a sheet were drawn over them, and gamblers and crew and captain alike knew that their destruction was imminent. They picked up Jonah Feldman, humbled and resigned, and they shoved him through a shattered portal, into the fathomless deep, into the dark draperies of the underworld, and he was gone.

  Whereupon the sea ceased from raging.

  Immediately, the high-speed ferry, the Ledyard, in its grim, senseless course, came to a halt, too. Ahead were the splendid cliffs of Block Island. Gulls fluttered above the breakers, sentries at the entrance to this more pacifickingdom. Twenty miles or more the mariners must have come by chance, buffeted by the tempest, soon to wash up on the rocks here had not the storm vanished. The sun peeked from behind a riot of clouds. The gamblers were prepared to cash out. There would be no five-card stud today. No blackjack. No craps.

  In the meantime, the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. It is possible, of course, that the Lord might have beached him on Plum Island, nearby, where the federal government was torturing monkeys and baboons with Bacillus anthracis, where they refined and aerosolized dengue fever and hantavirus and Ebola and plague. This would have been appropriate recompense, but it did not come to pass. The Lord did not beach him there, did not let him wonder about grace and mercy while scraping off ulcerated nodules in the twilight of some hemorrhagic swoon. Likewise, the Lord might have imprisoned him in a nearby East Hampton restaurant, working without benefits alongside a number of foreign nationals, washing dishes and bunking with these foreign nationals in a trailer park. There he would have had time to re-think his resistance to the Lord, his disinclination to undertake the work that had been given to him to perform. Or the Lord might have allowed him to be gored by a deer buck, or set upon by the ticks feasting themselves on this deer buck, or the Lord might have condemned him to live in Bridgeport or New London for many seasons. Instead, the Lord prepared a great fish.

  Into the water Jonah Feldman tumbled, into that tempestuous water according to which there was no up and down, nor east and west, just expanses of darkness, which compassed about him even to his soul, and he felt the last bit of air in him bubbling forth, he saw the jumble of images from his life, his tuckus smacked in the Long Island Jewish hospital; his bar mitzvah, and the speech he gave there on the subject of the New York Yankees and their relation to certain passages from the Talmud (such as: It is forbidden to live in a town that does not have a green garden); the first older man who, behind a druggist’s in Maspeth, Queens, begged to be allowed to part the mysterious folds of Jonah’s trousers; likewise the girl his parents nervously found to be his associate, perhaps one day to be his bride; then her contemptuous whispers to him at a temple dance; an incredibly good jar of spicy pickles opened like it was a prize on a summer night in the mountains; weeping one night after taunts from school yard friends; awake later, wandering the second floor of his house in Maspeth, Queens, encountering his grandmother, her hair uncoiled about her shoulders, whispering of the war; male prostitutes solicited on the avenue down by the subway, some of them gentle and loving; a hundred dates refused; remonstrances from his bosses at Price Waterhouse; and then, again, dancing with Carolina, until the voice came to him, the recollection of it, Arise! Arise!

  The fish was leviathan; in particular, it was the blessed blue whale, hunted to the edge of its elimination from this world, and it bore down upon him. Preliminarily, the Lord had actually contacted the blue whale, asking for indulgence in this matter, Friend Whale, can I bother you to swallow this particular human being for a brief interval? I know you are an eater of plants and a peaceful being, and I know you fear for your life, as there are anglers in pursuit of you, but this human being needs some three days to reflect and atone, and I would prefer him to spend time where the surroundings provide for both revelation and the great delicacy known as fish cheese, which in the northern countries is considered a delicacy.

  The whale replied, Happy to serve, as I must, its melancholy eyes downcast. Taking a mighty breath into its awesome lungs, the fish dove deep toward the arc of Jonah’s fall and swallowed him up, sweeping in alongside Jonah a healthy portion of plankton and some automobile tires. Its teeth were not so much knives as brushes, Jonah recognized, or so he felt coming out of the reverie of his afterlife, that purple corridor populated by dead acquaintances described on television programs. The throat of the fish was not so much gullet as waterfall, in which whole swamps of vegetal life swirled and mixed in a stew of nutrition. Before he even had a chance, he was swept over these falls and pummeled by the squeezing and dousing of fish peristalsis. It was an hour or so in that esophageal coil, and it reminded him of the time he had the MRI, though without sedative. But the entertainment had not even begun, for after the hour of acid-drenched peristaltic massage, he fell end over end into an unlit room about the size of a domestic recreational vehicle, spongy floors, about one-third full of liquid as well as marine life and plants and man-made plastics. Among the finds: a shortwave radio, still functioning; a cardboard box, containing red rubber gymnasium balls; a beach cooler, housing a six-pack of a bland domestic beer; and one human skeleton. Before long, h
e resigned himself to the temperature of the mixture, to yet another shower of surprises that would rain down upon his head from above, including the occasional muffler, or other injurious missile, as well as live eel or skate or harvest of seaweed.

  And there was the smell! The rankness of the fish cheese, of death, of eternal decay, where every fishy thing began its decomposition, where living things were scorched and liquidated into a sequence of vitamins and protein chains. It was an awful smell. Jonah Feldman had been in a nightclub in the West Village only the night before, where every man looked like an angel, where the lighting was low and the promises perfect, and now he was in the belly of a whale that ate auto parts and shat them into the North Atlantic when the spirit moved. It would be only so long before he was himself excretory. A miracle that he lived thus far, to be sure, that he lived inside the stomach of the whale, but what good is a story of prophecy if it doesn’t have a miracle in it? Prophecy is a kind of language, and language is a kind of imagination, and imagination is a kind of desire, and desire knows no containment, wants what it cannot have, and in wanting it sees. So Jonah Feldman, having three days in the belly of a fish in which to think, reflected.

  On the first day, after being bitten by something, some predator that he had to squeeze to death with his bare hands, Jonah reflected, and in the night he likewise reflected, though strictly speaking there were no days or nights there. At first, these reflections had the cast of his own life, and he saw the silhouettes of the Catskills, he saw his parents playing cards, he recalled the night on which he was assaulted on 21st Street, he saw various academic contests, from elementary school, from Hebrew school. Then the cast of these reflections took on, instead, the rosy tones of desire, the physiques of certain boys and then certain men, the curve just above the hip of a man when he is no longer wearing any clothes, likewise the lips of men, and the tendons in the necks of men busy about their exertion, calves of men, abdominal musculature, and these particular reflections were good and many hours passed according to them. But then, without companion with whom to commiserate, he thought of the Lord, conceived of that thing inconceivable; he worked around the edges of the Lord, felt the impossible heft, or at least pointed in the direction of the Lord, by enumerating such things as the no-hitter, the paintings of Mark Rothko, the film performances of Judy Davis, all of which seemed to suggest the Lord, and amid his reflections he composed a prayer for the forsaken, memorizing it until he could call out the words in his foul-smelling imprisonment:

  Thou celestial agency,

  Who smiles on boys beaten senseless in the gymnasiums of America, Cleave near;

  Cleave near to the contused, both those who in their disgrace tell tell tell

  And those who mutter nothing and enfold memories deep in the filing cabinets

  Of dark juvenilia, thou celestial agency,

  Perform not thy vanishing act again;

  Shower infinite compassion on those who know polysyllabs

  But rarely utter them;

  Love all lovers in exile;

  Love the impossibly obese, love the leprous, love the homely, love the

  Embittered, love transsexuals, love eunuchs and pedophiles,

  Love all abdicators and deniers;

  Love all those with unusual gaits and bad speech defects,

  Love Jews and Armenians,

  Palestinians and Tibetans, love Chechens and Albanians;

  Let the names of hatred be made into names of Delight,

  Thou celestial agency,

  Until all degradation is past;

  Bear up accretions of words and names of disgust,

  And build a new ocean to contain them;

  Thou celestial agency;

  Thy ideas are sometimes bunk,

  But thou hast bisected day and night and thus fabricated the dusk and the dawn, the perfect

  Poise between things;

  Love thou the disenfranchised who crowd around thy absent shadow, unable to

  Finish their business;

  For thou hast made masculine power and made the football coaches and

  Posturing, steroid-addicted simians who are drunk with it, Bear up those who lie awake at night, pacing the floor in convulsions of

  Exile, who weep such torrents that dry fields everywhere are irrigated with the

  Floods of their misery—which tears are more numerous?

  Give the batterers a stern talking-to, thou celestial agency,

  For they have bilked every shareholder;

  For they have staffed and directed every army,

  For they have directed every dictatorship,

  For they have purged every dissenter,

  For they have applied the electrodes to every political prisoner,

  For they have committed every genocide.

  How the hour grows short, celestial agency, there will soon be only the batterers

  And their veiled wives,

  Show us thy justice and we will lay down our vanities.

  When Jonah had finished his prayer, there was a sigh in the world, and the Lord caucused with the blue whale and gave him instructions, and the fish then vomited up Jonah Feldman on the coast of Virginia, next to an expensive and ill-decorated hotel. The whale, now beached, was immediately photographed for the nightly news. However, the man at the site in the fouled terry-cloth robe went unseen into the bush, with no camera nor reporter to demand of him that he tell the story of the miracle of three days in the entrails of a North Atlantic whale.

  What is the greatness of a great person? That person is not ashamed to say, I don’t know. This was the predicament of Jonah Feldman, of Maspeth, Queens, who now smelled like the secret life of a bulimic! Whose slippers were torn! Whose beard was three days grown out! Whose thinning hair was matted against his scalp! Jonah Feldman, prophet of the Lord, now resembled most a deinstitutionalized schizophrenic, and the citizens of the commonwealth where he had washed up knew not what to think of this, a St. Jerome in the wilderness, a holy man whose martyrdom is to make known the word of the Lord. And they therefore feared this new ghostly presence in the countryside. Nevertheless, the fashion stylings of the itinerant psychotic were favored by the Lord, and if man were indeed made in the image of the Lord, might one not conjecture that the raver in the countryside was most what the Lord Himself looked like, or else why such a prevalence among men?

  In the course of his march, Jonah meanwhile chanced upon the most beautiful place he had ever seen, for there were not many beautiful places in the borough of Queens, not like this wilderness at the seaside, with its wild horses. It seemed scarcely possible that he could have come from the belly of a fish, only to walk but two or three miles away from an ill-decorated hotel to find himself in pristine wilderness, where horses gamboled and galloped and did not take the bit. He saw the pack of them, their manes stirred in the breezes, their haunches as sleek and perfect as anything made by the Lord, rearing up onto their hind legs, so that the adolescent stallions could engage in tests of skill and disport with the females. They trampled an open meadow, and then the males and their mares disappeared into a coniferous wood, thundering across accumulations of soft pine needles. What better emblem of the imperial reign of the Lord, the movement of noble beasts upon their free ramble? Jonah Feldman was sure he was dreaming by reason of his ordeal. For in a moment, Jonah again heard the word of the Lord, almost as if the voice came from a talking horse, although he was pretty sure that talking horses were confined to television situation comedies: Arise! And go to Lynchburg, Jonah Feldman, for I believe that we had an agreement that you did not honor. Go and preach to the failed readers and interpreters. Do as I have bid thee.

  Jonah, the prophet of the Lord, had not had a decent meal in days, excepting sea scallops that he had eaten in the Japanese style while inside the fish, and he was hoping to have some Chinese takeout, or perhaps a curry, anything but seafood. Yet now he understood that ignoring the voice in the wilderness was no longer an option, that is, unless he wi
shed to see earthquake, flood, volcanic eruption, bioterror incident, et cetera. Through a variety of means of transport, including rowboat, freight train, eighteen-wheel truck, and of course the lowly pedestrian means, Jonah, in three days’ time, traveled directly from the islands of the mighty ocean, across the bay, past crabbing operations, shrimp boats, deep-sea rigs, past the naval mariners in their crafts, inland, across the James River, past hunters and moonshiners, farmers of tobacco, farmers of dairy, truck farmers, agriculturalists of all varieties, through counties with names like Dinwiddie and Amelia and Appomattox, until he was in the interior of the state, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge peaks. Then along a county road strewn with franchises, he came to the city of Lynchburg. Here he recognized a fiendish cloudbank above him. He felt rain begin to fall. Around Jonah Feldman there were the portents of the imminent destruction of Lynchburg. He could see. For he was a prophet. He made his way directly to a certain chain store that specialized in office supplies, and there he begged for a felt-tip marker and such items as might be fashioned into signage, and then he walked into the town. He commandeered a milk crate at the rear entrance to a supermarket. Farther he walked.