I, Judas

by James Reich

  In my earliest childhood and at boarding school in Zevenbergen when I was ten, I suffered terrible dreams. I saw my brother Theo, or one of his remote children’s children, shot in the back eight times, the red fish gape of his slashed throat, and knives plunged into his body like a crucifixion and almost two hundred years passed in Amsterdam, his head lolled back under the remains of a starry night; and I decided that strange deaths and betrayals are all around us, a million martyrdoms to keep the sun and houses and wheat fields yellow, and many are the myths perpetuated about us. Once, I held my left hand in the flame of an oil lamp to make myself forget everything.

  Isleworth, June 25, 1876. In April, I had been in Ramsgate with the Reverend William Stokes before moving on to the borough of Isleworth, within the span of London, tutoring and composing sermons at the school of the Reverend T. Slade Jones. Isleworth had been a place of monasteries and orchards, but now I skulked in the shadow of the soap factory on the London Road and sought out gin and solitude in a black city more terrible than any of the engravings I had seen of it. London was a city of suicides. And in France and abroad it was understood that the English were almost supernaturally inclined by temperament and coerced by their Moloch cities and shroud of weather into self-murder; the living went about Isleworth enshrouded in the green glow of death, embroidered with worms. The living dead copulated on Twickenham Road. The radiance of All Saints Church drove men and women into madness. If there was one place to chance to catch the sickness, it was here. The germ of my death was there, and in the struggle to comprehend the simultaneity that made this skull a place of many skulls.

  My seminary position was the same as it had been at Ramsgate. My sermons were for dozens of boys who would otherwise smoke, drink, and masturbate through their puberty. I read them Blake’s Samson and tried to make them afraid, but it was I who was afraid. When I looked into the boys’ eyes, there was reflected the glitter of whores rolling in Judea like sparks on blue Galilee. In the confused whorls of my brain, as Vincent van Gogh, I knew that I was powerless in the face of primal sins. There was another in my head, another swinging from a tree in the sunlight, his intestines flooding a red desert. My nerves formed into a bright bouquet in my chest and threatened a vomit of flowers whenever I thought of the hypocrisy I felt trying to force virtue into these boys. The words were weak and not my own. At night, I shivered beneath a black woolen blanket and struggled to read by candlelight. There I devoured Dante and Milton and found myself to be jealous of the engravings of Gustave Doré, particularly of beautiful Lucifer the Morning Star.

  Little Big Horn, June 25, 1876. That same night, in London as Vincent, I dreamed of a man named George Armstrong Custer. The Indians called him Son of the Morning Star. Custer was known for his long hair that shone red and scented with cinnamon oil. Vincent saw their faces overlap, his own and Custer’s, for now on the day of his doom, Custer’s hair was short.

  The Cheyenne had sent their suicide boys Little Whirlwind, Cut Belly, Closed Hand, and Noisy Walking into the skirmish line, and the soldiers had cut them down. The Lakota surrounded them like a wall of fire. All was chaos. What had happened to Major Reno and Captain Benteen? Had they betrayed him? Crazy Horse, Gall, and Sitting Bull were somewhere in the howling smoke, and Custer’s last men were horrified beyond breath. They put pistols to their own horses’ heads and made defenses from their boiling bodies. The sky screamed and poured. The earth exploded upward to meet it. Far away, in England, Vincent van Gogh twisted in his bedclothes, his heart pounding. Custer’s right arm took a bullet, and he felt as though a swarm of wasps had filled the wound. White Bull called out in triumph. Pretty Bird, a woman with hair as deep as a starless night, went through the soldiers’ bullets like a ghost, and scalps blew in the tattered wind. Twenty-eight of Custer’s last men fled without their weapons toward a black gulch full of Bibles, lace, and flags. The Indians swarmed about him. Custer took his revolver in his left hand and probed for his heart beneath his tan jacket. He refused to die at the hands of the Indians and had saved a bullet for himself; this was one of the laws of the plains. The grass of the hill was greasy beneath his boots. For a moment, the war was gone, and he saw nothing but the empty fields.

  “I wish I could pass away like this,” he said.

  Custer shot himself through the chest.

  I awoke to my cold room at dawn.

  A single star remained visible through the dirty window.

  ONE YEAR later, on December 23, 1889, I suffered a fit in which I felt like a man swinging in a noose, kicking my legs, dancing and dying over a field. Exactly one year had passed, like the distance between me and the other Vincent, and my hanging self. Time is a machine.

  Auvers, July 27, 1890. “La tristesse durera toujours.” The sadness will last forever. I took my paints and shouldered my easel for my last stand. Whatever had entered me, possessed me, or occurred to me in England had finally surfaced like an image previously lost in a poem. I am my own Judas Iscariot. The field rippled. Vincent took his revolver in his left hand and probed for his heart beneath his tan jacket. A tear ran down his cheek as he thought of Paul Gauguin and the Indians. For a moment, the war was gone, and he saw nothing but the empty fields. I am a rebel angel, he thought.

  “I wish I could pass away like this,” he said.

  Vincent van Gogh shot himself through the chest.

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND GÉRARD DE NERVAL AS ILLUSTRATED BY GUSTAVE DORÉ

  1855. La rue de la Vieille Lanterne. My name is Gérard de Nerval. My lobster blushes and clacks on its leash as we take in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the crustacean dancing on its ribbon, tied to my wrist. I am for the color black, the subterranean, the tenebrous carpet of the sea, the tar inside the world, hashish, and fingers moving into wet soil, as they would into a bulbous skull found beside a rotten tree. I am also for nature, her luminous breasts and weird angels, for the moth, the millipede, and the peacock. Ah, here come some children to mock my lobster and me as we walk. I shoot them, run them through, and mutilate them with my brain. But, still they come, the snot faces. They are no angels. My lobster raises a dismissive claw, I think. That must have frightened them. Then, as we pass a strip of roses, a terrier barks at us, and a bureaucrat calls us filthy.

  “My lobster is clean from the sea,” I tell him. “Your dog contributes nothing to this garden but shit, piss, and noise. Its stinking asshole runs around your house, and you let it onto your sheets and upholstery. You call my lobster dirty? Your dog can only defecate on your shoes in devotion. My lobster informs me of the mysteries of the deep!”

  Such are my miserable days.

  MY NIGHTS are spent beneath a wheel of mad stars. But everything is black and white, and it is quite clear. That is how night is, if you look at it with the right eyes. Another occupies my body, my frame, and ooze: it is a snarling errant spirit, flapping spastic from the pages of a Bible. That spirit fell into me as though it had fallen from the sky, through a hangman’s trap, smash! The coordinates of my body were the end of his rope, strap! And it brought with it a roulette of foreign memories. I push him down as though we are two drowning fishermen, and he is my leverage to the skiff. He looks at me through the near-black water of our struggle, his eyes bulbous yet full of pity and scorn. “You think that breathing will keep you alive?” I know that he has been dead for centuries, but he is alive in me. We are two voices, fighting to be heard. We are one chimera. We are without time. My lobster and I are going for one last look at the Hôtel de Lauzon. We used to call it Le Club de Hachichin, and I was its treasurer, on the island of Dr. Moreau, the name we had given to the Île Saint-Louis, after Jean-Jacques Moreau, about whom we disciples would convene, loosely, Baudelaire, Gautier, Delacroix, and myself, in a rich, gaseous whorehouse of the brain. A fragment of paper blows between the slabs and flowers of Père Lachaise: Do not wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white. I wrote a book of madness and poetry entitled Les Chimères and will have an urn upon a pillar. I remember m
y travels in Judea.

  With my hair in copper coils, my skull is the pornography of electricians, my features indistinct as a stone in slow weather. My suit is charcoal black, and I stand upright in Judea like a lightning rod for flies, fish wafts, and barbarism. The wind cracks my face like a wafer. The sun is my face reflected in an empty chalice, or a sphinx. The Judas trees roll across the hillsides, a net of blood and blossom. The sky is the blue of drugs, of sharp signs in smoke or crystal. Who will be my Mephistopheles, my temptation? No, I am he, and Jesus is my Faust adoring my mirage. I point out golden cities to him. His eyes follow my arm, wrist, fingers, to an event at the edge of our sight, where I inform him of his dominion, which is only the small yellow house of his birth. I am essential to his definition in ways that he is not to mine.

  He is my blind rabbit.

  When, finally, I come to die it will be by hanging. I will hang from a grating with an apron string around my neck that I will say was the garter of the Queen of Sheba. The dancing girls stripped off their seamed nylon stockings and threw slingshot shapes, sending them slowly down to the desert floor like scented black angels. Legionnaires snatched at them and wiped them across their lips.

  THE KISS OF JUDAS

  Here is a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley entitled The Kiss of Judas from Pall Mall Magazine, July 1893. Jesus feels his feminine shoulders melting into the hard and prickly bark of the tree where he reclines like a prince, long-haired and beautiful. We are in languor. The tree whispers his old trade back into his flesh. His mother’s voice is in the breeze. Yet, as I lie down with him, he hears neither.

  His lips are wet and insipid. They are like spoiled fruit. He listens to the gently conceited echo of his Self as the wood folds like a fleece around his neck and back, and a dutiful sleep descends for him. His robes lap about him. All is peaceful with him. Aubrey Beardsley—since I have entered into ambiguity and anachronism—draws me as a child, or rather as a man deformed and shrunken, stunted in the banality of childhood, tilting my grotesque bald head at Jesus’ groin. At the same time as they seem to show us, these figures do not. The child in Beardsley’s illustration is not me but my descendant, one of the “children of Judas,” the atavistic traitors. Aubrey Beardsley died after twenty-five years of life, the same age as Jesus and I. The truth is that I had no children. Nothing gathers so well, or is as pregnant, as a lie. I become the opiates in Beardsley, the spatter of grease from the bacon pan as he finds breakfast, the tight knot in his black tie.

  The buildings of the city of London flowed like a torrent of black oil toward the heavens, leaving only scuffed ankle-high white snow on the streets. As he walked, Aubrey Beardsley lifted his knees high and flicked the ice from his shoes with sharp motions of his toes. He gave the impression of a fussy pony trained to wear tight suits and to walk upright, fastidious and awkward, old manners impressed upon a raunchy recalcitrant brain. Rising, dressing, bathing—all were imposed upon him. To look into Aubrey Beardsley’s eyes was to gaze into satanic India ink, a swirl of loins and poisoned wells curling down into the bowels of the planet. All of the sex words bleached out of the Scripture scrolled like a pale, near-invisible dragon around his balls, the lozenge of his perineum, and the dripping catacombs of his skin. What hair remained on his body after his toilet was merely a fine smoke, an opiate auburn-black. His wrist was his reputation, the eroticist with the sunken face illustrating coils of sperm and stiff gods. Because his desires were terrible and shivering as thin dogs in the London snow, his copulations were monstrous and ornate. He saw all human bonds as lethal and treacherous. The world was without sympathy and as violent as he could imagine.

  The gaslight fell on him through the snow. Beardsley was a sissy and a coward. His character had remained inchoate and suspended in the slime of his childhood, where he was thrashed for his filthy drawings. “So cold I shall perish before the front door.” The syringe in his coat pocket would freeze solid and be ruined before he could shoot it. Moments later, he was home. The black door to his house shone like a mausoleum of rook wings. The dogs, Gog and Magog, barked at either end of the street when he opened it, and the smell of flesh poured out. He took in the street once more, the occult layers of it shifting beneath the ice, the wrought iron, the gas flares, the serpent of cobbles, the Gethsemane of soot, the Golgotha of bloody corsets, the many veils of Hell. He slammed the door with a flourish of relief. “I am still young to have seen what I have seen.” He climbed his unlit stairs. “Such fevers.”

  When Beardsley was thirteen, he had stolen in to see a spiritualist. She had laid cards upon the rotting straw of the mews where she had set up. He touched himself through the material of his trouser pockets and caught the flash in the woman’s lips. She stood over the cards and lifted her skirt and petticoats. The spiritualist pissed on the cards until they began to curl. The first card that she turned over depicted the image of a goat, wandering in a blasted desert. “Ah, the Scapegoat,” the woman said. The second card was the Hanged Man. Something shook and seemed to kick Beardsley in the stomach, and the first seed of his life squirmed into his underclothes. For a moment, he saw the twitching obscene feet of a suicide suspended over rosy dirt.

  The spiritualist came closer to him, piss steam around her ankles, brass bells and gypsy things shifting with her steps. “You are an Outsider,” she said. “You will be anathema.”

  “I want to be an artist.”

  “You will only be trash, but a kind of spectacular, significant trash. Everything that you are, everything that you do, will be sick and dirty.”

  Everything that the spiritualist suggested came true because she had suggested it to him. Thus formed the noose of solipsism from which he would never escape.

  Now, he collapsed on his bed, balancing a port and lemon on his skinny chest. The walls of his room were covered with pornographic drawings, images from the Bible, and romances of Judaic dust, chivalric and warped children. “I was ruined before I ever slopped out of my mother’s inkwell,” he reminded himself. He shot up and tried to draw, quickly, before oblivion took him.

  The following morning, he breakfasted with Wilde at the Pall Mall Club. The early drinkers fanned and coughed through clots of smoke, waiters limped, and kippers steamed on white plates. A stuffed monkey swung by its neck in the strange rigging above the bar, surrounded by jaundiced portraits and picaresque paintings of naval or hunting follies.

  “Ugh, my eggs are cold, again,” Beardsley complained.

  “Oh, do calm down, Aubrey. You sound like an old prostitute. Here, look at this.” Wilde gestured to an advertisement in the newspaper that lay between them on the table. Wilde read the headline aloud. “It says Spiritualist Medium Will Summon Biblical Witnesses. It says that this fellow relays the voices of characters from the New Testament.”

  “Not the Old Testament, though?”

  “No. Too untidy, I suspect. But, according to this, he does Paul, Doubting Thomas, and a bevy of tax collectors and cripples.”

  “I wonder if he would do Judas Iscariot?”

  “Aubrey, come, that would be too easy. After all, the Church has insisted on giving us all a little bit of Judas and, signally, the likes of you and me. The Gospels, dreary as they are, make it clear that Jesus was strictly on loan—he has come, been, and gone. Whereas, you and I recognize implicitly that Judas Iscariot is of no place, no time, no race, no planetary space. He is ubiquitous in our spirit and, therefore, is the only thing in the wretched book, beyond the fornications and brutish sacrifices, that is truly ours.”

  Beardsley eyed Wilde across the table, the arrogant flop of his hair and the tight purse of his lips. “Go on.”

  Wilde spoke solemnly. “To be an anachronism, to betray one’s time and place, is the highest of all the arts.”

  “We are all the children of Judas.”

  Later.

  “Oscar? Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to hang myself?” As they exited the revolving door of the club into the freezing Soho streets, Beardsley let
his fingers drift over the Irishman’s flanks.

  “You never did.”

  AUBREY BEARDSLEY pulled his ratty fur collar closer around his throat:

  “I once convinced myself—although now I recognize that this is common in a certain caste of young men—that the universe existed merely as an ornate embroidery about me, that I was its agent, its concentration, and its scapegoat, that all else had been created by God as symbols and ciphers to surround me. Each experience became a message. Each sight, sound, and conversation became a code for something else. I was the only object in God’s creation that was not a phantom. And all these phantoms, eidolons, and angels existed about me for the singular purpose of examining me and of watching me examine myself under God’s awful lens. Every flame, birth, conflagration, worm, city, imagining, everything was an artifice, a moral burlesque . . . fucking, vomiting, dying, and conspiring about Aubrey Beardsley, whose trajectory was that of an artist. And in that scapegoat theatre, Wilde, I despaired.

  “So, I fastened a rope to the cistern above my lavatory and pushed my face through the noose. I drank and drank until I was certain to lose consciousness, slump and fall, hang myself there. But the pipe was rusted and broke away. The deluge from the cistern washed over me, and, wretched as I was, I did not manage to die. I just sat there in the sobering slosh of my toilet. Ironically, that may have been the final proof that the universe really is set about me, and my affairs, and that even you are merely a cipher for my tuition. Or, rather, as I deduced, God is full of shit.”