I, Judas

by James Reich

  JUDAS ISCARIOT, DELILAH, AND THE SUICIDE OF SAMSON

  At another time, I was called Samson. Even as a child in the wasp-infested town of Zorah, west of Jerusalem, I wore my hair long and flaming about me, and my skin bore the red glaze of the sun. I was vulpine, petulant, and mighty as a rose-colored star.

  Now, Samson had been enslaved by the Philistines and was prey to a woman voluptuous as quicksand, her tar-black tresses reeling in the breeze like copulating serpents, her ankles nubs of ivory and her brow of awful white, her lips a red smear across a menstrual moon, everything glowing, radiating the ornate gifts of her sex. Samson dreamed of crucifixion beneath her painted fingernails, her hips working on him, a demon exhausting a horse. Samson rolled like a boulder in his dreams. The pallet where he slept creaked beneath him, and his sheets drifted aside, revealing a granite giant delineated by the moonlight. The halls were silent, save for the coughing of the Philistine sentinels in the cold night or the scrape of a spear shaft on a flagstone. Since his capture, he had also fallen further under the luxuriant spell of the Philistines and their arts than he had been as a young man. He touched vases, imagining cool breasts beneath his palms. He traced smooth facets in the vaginal walls of the Temple that was also his prison. His desires, his bulging eyes, had always marked him out, even as a young man.

  This woman was not the first Philistine woman he had desired. At seventeen, his wandering eyes had taken him to the seaport city of Ashqelon, to the north of Gaza. He encountered her between fishnets and rocket shells, flaming tires and effigies. A teenage boy had hesitated in front of the coffee shop before detonating, smithereens of glass and torn flesh sending a corona over the markets. From the rubble and olive shreds of skin Samson had pulled the young woman. Like him, she was a tourist, but she was from Timnah, closer to Jerusalem. They shivered on the sandstone ramparts and watched garlands being hung about the necks of metal bulls that remained since the Canaanites. Since Samson was vain and easily swayed, he decided that he should marry her, even without knowing her name. When he returned to his home, she remained in a hotel that overlooked the sea. In Zorah, he lusted for her and raged against his parents. Samson’s father was named Manoah. Manoah was more afraid of the world than he had been before the birth of his son, since it was surrounded with auspices of angels exploding in fire and a disemboweled goat swinging beneath the tree in his courtyard. Manoah relented and told his son to return to Ashqelon and marry the girl.

  When Samson was a mile from the seaport, he felt a terrible blow fall across his ear, almost tearing it from his head, and a claw that ripped into his cheek and nearly put out his right eye. It was a Persian lioness, stunning and golden with violence. Samson opened his mouth and brought it down upon her muzzle, and gripping one front leg and one rear leg, he tore the animal open, splitting the hide as though it were paper. Then he collapsed in pity and grief, for himself and for the lioness. As he wept, a cloud of wasps filled the open carcass with spoiled fruit, flower heads, and honey from a beehive that they had destroyed. In the gore, they made a crystalline cave of bright sugars. He made a gift of the sugars to his bride, but each wasp gilded his guilt, his awful strength, and his fear of himself.

  A delirium fell upon him. He became morbid, and obscenities shadowed his thought. He sought provocations and murders, spoke in non sequiturs and riddles, set up his wife as a golden heifer, and in a river of strange killings, the vengeful Philistines poured tar upon his wife and her father and set them aflame. Samson dipped the tails of one hundred foxes in the same tar, the tar that mended the fishing boats of Ashqelon, and set the foxes burning and barking through the Philistines’ wheat fields. The cries of the burning foxes could be heard far out to sea, where skiffs rolled and lamented. And as men, women, and children poured from their benighted homes to extinguish the flames, he tore their torsos from their hips and smashed their legs against the ramparts and great arched gate of the city, as he had treated the lion. Then, as a man awakening from a drunken fever, Samson fled toward the bloodstained light of dawn. Exhausted, he came to the rock formation of Etam that rose like a majestic city of bone toward the Judean sky. His breath drew blood from his lungs, and his huge muscles were sodden rope under his skin. And it was with pristine ropes that the Philistines finally captured him there. His last act as a young man was to slip from the knots and massacre one thousand more with the jawbone of an ass, tears pouring from his bulging eyes, his skin radiant as the sun with blood and his long hair streaming about him.

  He took solace in whores in Gaza but was infamous everywhere.

  By the time he met Delilah, he was thirty-seven years old.

  “You will not take wine?” she crooned like a junkie over a spoon.

  “I am bound by my Nazarite oath.”

  “For a Nazarite, you have associated with many, many corpses. You have even taken sugared fruits from a cadaver.”

  “The oath was given by my father, before I was born, and it endures, my strength with it.”

  “Therefore, your hair is long, because you are forbidden to cut it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have broken most of your oath already, I think, my necrophile.” At this, she let her transparent black raiment slip from her breasts, and her red lips opened. Samson felt himself to be staring into a galaxy of sheens and glitter, of wet and rolling flesh, of erotic tombs and the afterglows of sacrifice.

  “Should you cut my hair, I will be deserted by God.”

  “There is no God, my sweet.” Delilah gestured into the candlelit room and the shadows thrown from the roaring fireplace. The lovers lay on a series of goatskin rugs. The wine goblets shone and fumed. “Look at these walls, the images and flatteries. You are in the Temple of Dagon, the god who was supposed to have flapped impotently on the sand before the ark of your Noah. The people here no longer know whether Dagon is a grain god or a fish god, and if he is a fish god now, it is only because we are closer to the sea. Now, let me help you with your lion’s mane.”

  As his hair fell about him, and Delilah moved the soaped blade across his scalp, Samson was enervated and destitute. The angel of fire and his Lord deserted him. He felt like Seneca in his bath, as though his very blood were draining from his body. Delilah climbed upon him. He saw stars, foxes, and constellations of himself. She sucked on his near-flaccid cock until he ejaculated without joy or expression. Then, she put out his eyes with a glowing poker from the fire.

  Now, blind, Samson felt that his life had already been extinguished. He moved in the coal-black as a corpse in the channels of the earth. He fell against the Philistine furniture, stumbled in the ornate catacombs of the Temple of Dagon, and although his tear ducts were gone, he sobbed with despair and the certainty of a sacrificial bull. When he could finally bear to touch the sockets where his eyes had been, Samson found only scorched anemones and appalling tendrils and flashes of skin that had fused with his face. The wounds were septic and burrowing into his brain. The other thing that he felt for was the stubble of red hair upon his head. Now that his eyes were such a horror, no one noticed that it was returning. For days he moved about the Temple, calling for Delilah. Finally, Samson resolved to murder himself, and everyone else within the confines of that darkness within him and without. The Philistines held a panic festival; all he knew was the heat, the noise and the whirlwind of it. Somewhere inside the vortex was Delilah, men and women collapsing in and out of her. Samson looked in vain for the image of it in his mind. When he finally found it, it was as though he was staring his death in the face. He saw Delilah. He found himself between two pillars . . .

  This conjunction with Samson, one of the once-heroic selfkillings of the Old Testament, was the first instance in which I, Judas, became aware that a composite of my life and death had become a lens for the reappraisal of the lives and deaths of others. Something about my death with Jesus of Nazareth had consequences that other deaths did not. The sensations of being thrown into another being return to me, yet the sensations are not entir
ely physical; they are aesthetic, moral, a manifold judgment, a sense of being watched, of being the ghost and the haunted. The sorrowful transgressions alleged against me are contracted in one brow, and now through compulsion I am seen in others, and through compulsion, therefore, I attend. The world, before and after me, is strangely tainted. This is not fair to any of us. Claims of my preeminence are false. I remember that Jesus was being interrogated:

  “They say that you are a king? Are you a king?”

  “I am what you say that I am,” Jesus answered.

  Jesus was wrong.

  To be, or not to be . . . It is the most significant question of all. For a moment, an ice storm breaks glass against my face as I am back on the frozen plateau of Judecca that is at the eye of Hell, the subarctic sea behind me. There I am, as though in a dream, opposing, ending.

  THE FIRST DEATH OF JESUS OF NAZARETH

  The voice of my brother was calling me from my sleep. I awoke on the bank of the river where John the Baptist slumbered beside the embers of his fire. It was the dead of night. My mouth tasted disgusting from the wine. At first, I could not open my eyes. I had been dreaming of strange elevated tracks of metal, coiling like serpents through a monumental city whose buildings blasted toward the sky. I recognized it as New York.

  “Judas! Over here!”

  Jesus was standing in the river, and the moonlight on his denuded body gave him the appearance of a figure carved from pale wood. The water foamed violently around his hips. I could see that he was struggling to maintain his footing in the torrent of river and darkness. Eels, weeds, and slime moved against him; stones receded like razor crabs; distant lightning.

  “What are you doing?” I called to him as I rose and hurried across the shale to the edge of the water. It was startlingly cold.

  “I’m going to baptize you!”

  “No, you are not.” I tried to call to John, but the Baptist could not hear me. His huge satyr’s legs moved languidly within his dream, and his sex stood out, as red as a dog’s. I knew that he was dreaming of Herodias’ greedy daughter.

  “Look at me, Judas! I am like a fisherman. I can fish you!”

  “You can barely stand!” I took a stride into the river toward him.

  “My feet are bleeding,” he laughed.

  Something in his eyes changed, just at the moment when he knew he had exposed himself, uncalculated, to the vicious lens of the universe. Some years later, I saw it again. I was in Greenwich Village watching a woman strip in a bar.

  Suddenly, Jesus was swept away, and I found myself running down the jagged banks to reach him as the current dragged him under and through frozen sheets of mortality, his body careening through glass. I ran with my soul exploding in panic. My flesh was as a swarm of bees. I moved across the surface of the crashing water and took his hand as it projected through the film of the river one final time. My face passed through knots of weeds.

  When I pulled him out, Jesus was dead.

  His blue-gray corpse lay bloated and naked on the bank as I forced my hands into his mouth, dragging out hanks of slime and filth. His hair was filled with grit and snails. I pressed my mouth to his and exhaled hard into his lungs. He began to cough and vomit as I pushed my breath inside him. The Baptist went on sleeping, as though we were his dream.

  “I thought I had lost everything!” I told him. “For a moment, everything was undone, and we had failed.” Jesus lay like a fish on the moonlit stones. He was translucent with death, yet I had revived him.

  “It is a miracle,” he said.

  “Swear upon your life that you will never speak of this to anyone.”

  In those days, I knew not to trust him, but I did not know how his soul would spread and infiltrate by word and rumor, how these secret things would be retold by tangent and distortion. I was his commander still. Sometimes, when I recall these episodes, I am struck by our childishness, our ways of finding trouble, as if a mission like ours could have only been born of children, of recklessness. The child’s love of danger is called faith. These were the days before my name was lightning striking the neon dusk of Hollywood and orchestras crying out in shame.

  THE PIGS

  Once, we were hired to drive some pigs from market to their new sty, in the purple evening foothills, from where Galilee glimmered like a coin. Aaron, the farmer, a hypocrite who sold unclean animals to the garrison, had promised us such a coin and a sip of wine, should we bring all of the dozen swine to his farm. He could not do it himself, because he was weak. “My shins are weak as candles. I can’t hurry across the stones in this heat,” he told us.

  “Don’t worry, master,” Jesus assured him. “This is the kind of thing that Judas and I do best.”

  When Aaron had gone, hobbling with his cane, I turned to Jesus, saying: “Master? What’s this ‘master’ nonsense, eh?”

  “He’s the one with the coins, Judas, or did you forget?”

  “I like this new insolence of yours, brother. Did you get it when I brought you back from the dead?”

  “We’re of one breath, aren’t we?” The sun was behind his head, a blinding corona spilling out. The pigs were noisy and panicked as we drove them through the narrow streets. We beat them with sticks and cried at them. Jesus had a small goatherd’s horn that he trumpeted sometimes.

  He tried to trip one of them by putting his ankle beneath its back legs. One of its hooves hit his knee, and he became even more enraged. “Let’s drive them into the sea! Filth. Filth!” Spittle flew from his mouth. “This one is like my father, this one is like my mother, this one is like Mary Magdalene, and this one is like a rabbi who is always masturbating, and this one a cowardly soldier, and this one is an idle fisherman, tax collector, fiend! They are full of ugly spirits.” So it went.

  By the time we reached the sty, we were spent, and the pigs were panting and heaving in the dusk, swaying through the small gate and slumping in the straw and dry soil. I poured water on them from their trough and fetched more for them to drink. I felt disgusted by the way we had treated them, even though some of it seemed necessary to get them to move between the people, dogs, carts, stalls, and din of the streets. I pushed their food at them, hoping that they would eat and recover from the driving. One had a trickle of blood coming from its snout. The others were making terrible sounds, the kind of sounds that a fish might make as it lay in a boat staring incredulous and mad into the sun. Jesus sat on the fence, grinning. When Aaron saw his pigs, he was distraught and made to raise his cane at me.

  “No, master! I tried to help!”

  He stopped, partly because he believed me and partly because he feared for his balance as the cane swung up around his ear.

  “What in the name of God did you two do with these pigs?”

  “It was Jesus, sir.”

  “Answer me, boy!” The old man turned to my brother.

  “Your pigs are unclean,” said Jesus, lolling down into the sty. “And he,” he pointed at me, “is a traitor. He was crueler than anyone to these animals, and now he is full of self-pity and remorse. It makes me sick.”

  It was the first time that I had heard Jesus lie, and he lied about me. Later, as his mood flattened and he became melancholy, I understood that the transgression had come at great cost to his conscience. He had inflicted a wound upon himself. I sought to console him and gripped him to my pulsing breast after we had retired to a rooftop to sleep. Yet, if I were to make of him what I wanted, Jesus would need to inure himself against the bleats of a false conscience and to learn how to incubate falsehood in his heart, to deceive himself as well as others. The hooks and lines, the vines and intoxications of an ineffable god would thread through his ribs, inspire his lungs, and confuse his vision with briar, until the fisher of men and the envoy of the great deceit would be inseparable in him. He who was meek, I would make mighty by deception. He would believe such things of himself that only a drunkard may dream. He had also betrayed me and called me traitor, and I was impressed. For as much as accusations of b
etrayal are the refuge tongue of the weak who fear change, they are also the currency of the entitled that believe that nothing can move against them.

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE SUICIDES OF VINCENT VAN GOGH AND GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

  The second time that I was born as Vincent van Gogh, it was on March 30, 1853, precisely one year since the first abortive attempt, when I was hung in the noose of my mother’s umbilicus and came out stiff and blue as a tile. I am the Judas child of my own memory, the strangler of my own conscience, an endlessly looped half-truth. Time to remember my life then. When I died again, I was thirty-seven years old, the same age as Samson, my hair as short and flaming and my strength as desolate.

  1860. Groot Zundert, the Netherlands. The old fireplace of our home was surrounded with Delft tiles. The flame shivered and meandered before my eyes and cast beautiful shadows across the blue illustrations on the tiles like a sailor’s tattoos at sunset, rippling with exhausted flesh. These pictures were among my first stories: the tale of Saul falling upon his sword in suicide after the black magic of the Witch of Endor and defeat at Gilboa, his armor bearer following suit. Saul murdered himself like Ajax, and Ajax had lost his mind like Samson and had gone thrashing through a flock of sheep with his weeping sword. My first measures of men were these; narcissists hanging between the hemispheres of their own skulls, erotic, violent, and insane. I imagined their luxuriance, the feeling of their orgasm defeating their mechanisms of selfprotection; they rolled in their concubines like foxes in carrion, and so was my desire.