by Rena Rossner
He advances slowly, jerking. His arms are reaching for her. She’s unable to move. Even the stench and the whiteness of the worms turning in the right eye can’t force her nerves to shock her into motion. The child emits guttural syllables, indecipherable. He’s almost upon her; his nails are ready to cut her flesh.
And Shlomo pushes her aside and hits the creature with the stool. The blow is muted, not even the sound of a crushing bone, just a heavy note, the note of an object sinking in soft mud, in clay. The neck is crooked, the head lies on the left shoulder. His stretched lips stay the same and he keeps on moving forward in a rigid, stubborn walk.
Shlomo stands between her and the creature, blocks her view, but she knows nothing will stop it, that what drives it is beyond the decaying flesh, that the flesh is but a realization of a will. She knows that as well as she knows the origin of the organs that have been made into this shape, Hosea, and the baby she helped deliver just a while ago. Shlomo hits it again. Something like a fart escapes its body. The stench grows. The child-thing starts to shrill, a high pitched, ear-shattering shrill, like the cry of a prisoner being tortured in a concealed, underground cell. And Shlomo hits it again and calls to her. He says, get out of here Sultana, run.
27.
From: Tiberia Assido
To: Doron Aflalo
RE: Rose of Judea
It’s awful, Doron. I’m here, in the storage room of the lab, with all the pieces of useless equipment.
I’ve just arrived at the lab. Akko was crouched over his keyboard, motionless. I didn’t understand what he was waiting for. I haven’t seen him for a couple of days and he didn’t even turn his head to look at me. Then I realized the screens were all displaying the same words ARRGG, GRRR, ARRGGG, GRRRR, GRRR and some animation of a viscous liquid, a green-yellow jelly, shaking, oozing down the screen, the inside of the screen.
I approached Akko and touched his shoulder. His small body was rigid. His head moved, turned, like it was revolving on the spine. His eyes were opaque, and the skin bloodless, the face without expression. The smile, it had nothing to with the facial muscles. It terrified me. He didn’t say anything.
I retreated, stupid me, to the first door in my sight. The storage room.
It’s terrible. But the panic I felt before, when I walked around the institute, weakened. I’ve already dreamed this scene. I’ve seen it to its last detail, and I know the blows on the door are coming next.
In spite of Akko’s warnings, I connected ARRGGG the laptop to the lab’s intranet. So my GRRRR time is short. The ruined computers here start to hum*%*$#_)++
I’m thinking hard – Rose of Judea, the revelation of Ben-Zoma, the retrieval of the knowledge in Rabbi Shlomo Benbenishi’s era, in the 16th century. I’ve always been bad at pattern&$&$*%( recognition. There must be something ARGGRRR you can tell, some detail you observed, in the story GRRRRG that escaped me.
&what is in our investigation that raise the dead&
&and how to put them back to the dust&
&even the digital ones&
He###########lp me, Do***************ron.
Don’t leave me ARRGGG alone again, in half-light, as you did ARGGGRRR years ago.
Please, DoARRGGG GRRR ARRRRG ARRRG
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
28.
[Clear sky, in which huge stars are buried. The moon is like a Chinese brush stroke. Dark trees. A wind is passing through them. Light rustle, like a buzz. Sultana is running out of a hut. She’s terrified. She stops. A Man comes out from the shadow of trees.]
Sultana: Halt, you stranger, tell me who you are.
A Man: I am who I am. Though not whom you assume.
Sultana: And yet, someone you are, whoever that be.
Tell me who.
A Man: The shape, the speech
Are nothing but skin.
Sultana: Now I know, now
Sevenfold my fear grows. You are deceased.
A Man: I told you, body, looks, are but a skin
Which entities would wear to come here.
Sultana: Here. Where is here?
A Man: The Humilitas.
Sultana: My beloved’s flesh you wear, and he is not you.
Who you are, you stranger, tell me.
A Man: Centuries will pass before I’m born and for millennia
I’ve lived, I walked this world, the Humilitas.
Its paths of time are clear to me, I am at home
But this is not my home. The chains of human voices
Of human cries, I left behind, and even then
I’m force to cloak myself with them
If my will is to find my kind’s place within the Worlds.
Sultana: Your kind? Who are they? Who are you? The man
Who spoke from shadows, in this house. What
Was the faith of the dead infant?
Why was my boy snatched from me, and you show
Yourself in semblance of his dead dad?
A Man: Faith,
Conspiracy, simple and transparent, but as for you
Sultana: It’s wrapped in mystery. I do not wish to hear.
What do you strive for, devil?
A Man (laughs): devil I’m not.
Sultana (aside): Nor man he is. Oh Lord
Who torture us, who draw a line
Between the living and the dead which we
Crave to transgress.
A Man: Hush. Soon you’ll see.
Sultana: But Hosea, my son, and the unnamed child
You control them, the boy whose organs
You assembled and your will drives.
For what end?
A Man: I roamed Humilitas
In the third millennium I wore the body of
A Jewish sage, Rabba bar bar Hanna, I
Spoke through his lips, I thought warlocks
And magicians, I weaved my nets in silence
Now comes an hour I put to test
Will he transfer the knowledge destined
To give us life, if we chose wisely –
A child who was prevented from
The realms of death and a child dead
From womb.
Sultana: not a child was he
But demon.
A Man: There are no demons. Just folktales
Claiming them to be. No plan is fertile
Without misguiding and mischiefs, tricks
As old as humanity.
Sultana: Nonsense. Insanity.
A Man: My part I’ve done, woman, and so did you
It is my time to go back to my shelter in the shadows.
[Man exits. Sultana falls to her knees with a howl.]
29.
Sultana’s face is streaked with dust when she looks up. Shlomo is coming towards her. His face bears an expression of elation. His arms are stretched and the sleeves of his galabia are torn. The arms are covered in bite marks, small circles, tiny imprints of teeth, and shiny beads of blood. His hands are cupped, as if he is carrying a precious gem, but to Sultana the hands look empty. He gazes from the invisible content of his hands to Sultana and back. His features are washed with glamour. He says, Rose of Judea. He repeats the enigmatic phrase, Rose of Judea, Rose of Judea, till Sultana is back on her feet and puts her hand on his mouth.
30.
I would have helped you, Tiberia. I would have left everything and rushed to you. But Miriam is filling my dreams, and my mother walks the house. I’m sure she put a tap on my heart beats.
But what it is I wish to say and can’t convey any other way, is that the words in Hebrew, they had been through fire and water, they were killed by the sword and by strangulation. And we salvaged them from their grave.
They carry knowledge from beyond death, Tiberia, maybe the knowledge we need to retrieve Ben-Zoma’s method. But in what form they are coming back and what they ask of the living, this we will have to find out the hard way.
* * *
1 There are demons in this house (Jewish Moroccan
)
2 May God protect us (Jewish Moroccan)
3 I wished to spend with the baby night after night To be with him a full 12 months like this night
And the sun might not rise, the moon won’t shine
Only darkness all around
And the baby and I would sleep like a coin entrusted in faith. (Jewish Moroccan)
4 The name of your master binds you (Aramaic)
TEN FOR SODOM
DANIEL POLANSKY
They had reached Classon, and Ben was thinking about G-d.
Ben was a Jew to the extent that at one point he would have been put in an oven. He was cut but never bar Mitzvahed. He had not recited the prayer over the wine since he had been old enough to legally drink it. The point being there was not much there to work with, in his efforts considering the Almighty, little grist for the mill. But still he was trying; he was doing his best. This was the time to be thinking about G-d; if ever there was a time, this was it. And in fact he was surprised to discover that there was one portion of the Torah which he could suddenly recall with perfect clarity, as if printed on the back of his eyelids, and this was the wording of the covenant that Noah, socks still wet, had wrung from his Creator, after he had laid waste to everything that he had thus far created. “Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
The Lord was a righteous god, the Lord was an honest god, the Lord had stayed true to his words. Though standing on the roof of his building, watching them shamble eastward, the breeze carrying with it odors which were indescribably fetid, Ben could not bring himself to feel grateful. Noah’s world had been destroyed by a rising tide of water; his would be a consumed in an infinite deluge of flesh.
Ben was not sure why he was the only one on the roof – he had expected there would be others. It seemed like the obvious choice, under the circumstances. If he’d had a gun or enough of the right sort of narcotics to make sure of the matter he would have used those, but all he’d had was some hash and a kitchen knife. The kitchen knife could barely cut a tomato and anyway the thought of all that sawing made him sick. He’d rolled the rest of the hash into a joint and grabbed his emergency stash of gin from behind the cereal, thinking that this most certainly qualified as that. Then he had climbed out of the window and up the fire escape.
G-d have not provided 40 days to prepare for the end this time, not even 40 hours. The night before there had been some strange reports on the news from Central Asia, but Ben hadn’t been paying attention: he had a date to prepare for and what he was hearing was obviously too crazy to be believed. When he had woken up late the next morning the power was off, and there was chaos in the streets, and people were trying to leave the city. But now it was early evening, and things were very quiet, and no one was trying to go anywhere.
They were at Franklin now, and after Franklin was Bedford, and after Bedford was Rodgers, and Rodgers was Ben’s intersection. The best West Indian restaurant in the neighborhood had been on Franklin, they had done this conch roti that was out of this world, and the owners were always friendly. Ben would never eat West Indian food again, or sushi, or pizza, or bread and tepid water, and no one would ever be friendly to him again either, and those people who had been, friends and family and lovers, they were all dead or wishing that they were. It was enough to make a man want to take another swallow of gin.
Which he did, though after some consideration he decided not to light the joint. It would have been the James Dean thing to do, but Benjamin was not feeling very James Dean at the moment, just terrified near to madness and unspeakably sad.
And also, he didn’t think the hash would help when it was time to make the jump.
Because the roof meant that he couldn’t punk out at the last moment, needed to make sure he went clear over with enough force to do the job proper. At a party some months earlier a doctor had told him that a fall from the fourth floor of a building would kill 50 per cent of the people that tried it. The roof of Benjamin’s building was five floors up, so it was a little better than even odds, but far from a sure thing. And if he stumbled, if he landed upright, maybe only breaking his legs or severing his spine, he’d be down there amongst the sea of them, amongst their teeth that bit and their fingers that pulled…
So he had better not flinch, Ben told himself. They were at Bedford.
It wasn’t like the movies. They didn’t wail or moan, there had been plenty of screaming that day but not from any of them. Still they had their own sound, one that arose from sheer mass, a river of tissue oozing through the streets of Brooklyn, bottlenecking thicker and thicker, submerging the buildings like ants on carrion. He had seen quickly that escape was more than impossible, was incomprehensible – like trying to run away from a sudden change of weather, sprinting from a rain cloud across an open field.
He remembered now that the Hasids had been acting crazy these last few weeks, though he hadn’t paid them any attention. So far as Ben was concerned, the Hasids were always acting crazy, to each their own but still Benjamin was glad theirs wasn’t his. At least you didn’t need to worry about them mugging you, which was more than he could have said for some of the residents of his neighborhood, back when he had lived in a neighborhood and not an abattoir. But anyway, they’d been posting themselves in packets all up and down Eastern Parkway – the men of course, even the coming of the apocalypse wasn’t enough to break their sexual segregation – and they’d been flagging down Jewish-looking passersby, like he’d seen them do in the past during the High Holidays. But this time they didn’t look happy, and they weren’t trying to blow the shofar for him.
Benjamin didn’t really believe in G-d – or at least he hadn’t last week – but still he felt it incumbent on himself to at least deal with their beliefs honestly. “I am not a Jew by the standards you use,” he would tell them, politely but briskly, “and thus it would be a waste of your time to continue. But I wish you a pleasant evening all the same.”
In the past that had been enough to gain release, but not this time. They insisted that it didn’t matter anymore, that he needed to throw himself on the mercy of G-d, to beg for it, that it was too late but he needed to beg anyway. Benjamin had found the whole thing unseemly. They might as well be Jehova’s Witnesses, he had thought to himself, with that vague sense of contempt that the assimilated has for the sore thumb, the city mouse for the country. One of them, a boy really, probably not 16 though it was hard to tell with their dress, began to cry uncontrollably, and had to be hustled away by the elders – though even the graybeards, solemn-eyed men no strangers to misfortune, seemed to be close to breaking as well.
By the time Benjamin snapped out of his reverie they were at Rogers, and he figured he had about five minutes to live. He swigged heavy from the bottle of gin, felt it do the things that liquor does. How many righteous had the Lord demanded of Sodom? It had been 10 at the end, hadn’t it? New York was bigger than Sodom had ever been; only reasonable that He would want more. A hundred? A thousand? Whatever it was, Ben supposed they had not made it.
Ben leaned out over the side, felt his head wobble from the drink. What was it that let them know to stop eating, that the thing they were chewing on had become one of them? It didn’t seem to be uniform. Amongst the legion below there were specimens that had gotten it very bad; a businessman with rich red raw flesh, a boy in girl’s jeans whose forehead was open to his brain, an indecipherable mass of meat devoured nearly from head to waist, the spine and the skull sticking out of a limping bag of pulp.
Stop looking, Ben told himself, taking another swallow of gin. Don’t look at them. Look at the sky, look at the bricks, look anywhere but don’t look down at them. He only had to be brave for a few minutes longer, he told himself. Anyone could be brave for a few minutes.
He heard them break into the front of the building. He did not think they had any exact notion of where he was, or even that they were coming after him exactly, so much as sim
ply spreading themselves across everything, like the swell of evening. No, it wasn’t like the movies at all, really. They did not make noise, and they had come quicker than anyone had imagined, could possibly have imagined – but mostly what Hollywood had got wrong was that the movies were about survivors, or people trying to survive, and there would be no survivors, and indeed there was no point even making the attempt. G-d had decided to overturn the board, and you were not going to escape his wrath by holing up in some rural compound with an assault rifle and a few thousand cans of spam, no sir you were not.
The bottle of gin had done its work. He thanked G-d – for the first time in his life he really did, truly and with all of his heart – that he had kept enough of it around to make this last leap a little easier. They were coming up through the building now, the Indian couple on the first floor who never ever smiled at him, the Trinidadian Rasta who was always smoking grass on the stoop, the various hipsters who had constituted the borough’s second-most recent invasion.
Without giving himself time to think, Benjamin broke the bottle against the edge of the roof and brought the shard swiftly across his chest, shredding the logo on his T-shirt and cutting through the baseball sleeves. A sharp spike of adrenaline came through the pain, one he would ride to a reasonably painless death, G-d willing, all glory to G-d, no that wasn’t Judaism at all, was it? He was getting his children of Abraham confused. Benjamin laughed and discovered that he had broken what was left of the bottle in his hand, the glass cutting through his fingers and his palm. He rubbed his face and his hands with it, painting himself, working his mind into madness.
“One good leap, you motherfucker!” Benjamin screamed, unsure if doing so would draw their attention but knowing it did not matter. “One good leap!”
The blood was flowing fast and free now, and it wasn’t as bad as he had imagined. Maybe the last snap wouldn’t be so bad either. Don’t lie, the last snap would be bad, the last snap would be the worst pain he had ever experienced, but the last snap would be nothing compared to what happened if he stumbled.
