by James Reich
“Amen. Aubrey, I am writing a new erotic play called Salome. In the play, Herod has John the Baptist imprisoned in a cistern. I want you to illustrate my play. Will you do it?”
Beardsley’s blunt hairstyle dripped with tubercular sweats, and he fought to steady his fingers as he inked the stripping of Salome and the destruction of John the Baptist. If there was to be Scripture, it should be illustrated with decadence. For, if it was anything, it was decadent. He dreamed in black and white. He was afraid that he was going to die young.
JUDAS ISCARIOT AND SKULLHEAD
1922. According to the politely folded invoices of the Agence Générale du Suicide of the Boulevard Montparnasse and its principal director, Jacques Rigaut, suicide by hanging, the suicide of the impoverished, could be administered for five francs. Should additional rope be required, it could be purchased at a price of twenty francs for the initial meter, and five francs for each subsequent ten centimeters. Other variations on suicide à la mode could be obtained, from low-end drowning through poison, revolver, and electrocution to the luxurious perfumed death that perhaps Samson and John the Baptist discovered something of. The agency toiled to sustain the dignity of the suicide, to arrange forbidden burials, prevent vandalism, dilute hysteria, and minimize contagion. It was against contagion that Augustine, the Papacy, the Church, and the Apostles set my stolen image. The hypocritical religious councils of sixth-century Europe, at Orleans, Braga, and beyond, denied us funeral rites as the demonizing of my death gathered force with grotesques in illuminated manuscripts, stone relief, tapestry, and deathpaint. The Agence Générale du Suicide agitated and advocated on our behalf. The Dadaists and Surrealists, exhuming the memory of Gérard de Nerval, elevated the discussion of suicide in the newspapers of the Left Bank. Rigaut crossed his scuffed shoes on the surface of his writing desk and ran his nicotined fingers across his brow. Notions formed connections behind his face, which was as handsome as a gleaming snowplow blade. He lowered his feet and began to write.
Skullhead, the mawkish savage youth described in Rigaut’s Un Brilliant Sujet (A Brilliant Subject/Individual), experienced dislocated apparitions of himself as a side effect of experimentation with time travel. At first, Skullhead’s intention was to compel as many iterations of himself upon space-time as were necessary to seduce his mistress, who had abandoned him seven years before. Inside the slick and pulsing egg that was his time machine, Skullhead’s audacity ran amok. He ventured deeper into the past, threatening to bring anarchy to the Book of Genesis. Skullhead experienced ancient Judea for months before locating the young Jesus of Nazareth slumbering beneath a tree. Skullhead injected potassium cyanide into Jesus’ skinny arm. In Egypt, he disfigured Cleopatra, attacking her nose with a pair of pliers, leaving her to resemble a disintegrating sphinx until her suicide. His ubiquity caused him to appear as a god, worshipped in South America in bloody sacrificial rites and all across the heathen continents. Eventually, Skullhead declared a universal law mandating suicide for all attaining twenty years of age. At least three science fiction writers unwittingly plagiarized Skullhead in the twentieth century.
It was 1929. For five years, Jacques Rigaut had existed—as he says—“on the other side of the mirror,” which is to say that his suicide had become inevitable. Jacques Rigaut had suicide in his blood and set his face into the wind of his destiny with something close to joy, like a mariner enraptured by brilliant chimeras of polar ice. In the drawing room of a house in Oyster Bay, on July 20, 1924, Rigaut rushed headlong at an expensive art deco mirror, his fury growing and mimicking him, until the sleek silver frame passed behind his vision like a noose. The mirror cracked against the wall with the sound of a discharging revolver. But, Rigaut sustained only a slight gash to his forehead and seemed to stagger slightly back into the room, across the clay-colored rugs, while the damaged mirror swung on its hangings, as a guillotine would. In truth, he had transcended the mirror and, like myself, entered into anachronism and ambiguity. From that moment on, he had passed beyond the mirror. Perhaps he was already dead. From that dispassionate vantage, he watched the world until, quite reasonably, he exhausted it.
Rigaut’s most extensive work was called Lord Patchogue, and it concerned that life beyond the mirror. Here, again, we mirrored one another: his Lord Patchogue, like my Lord Jesus, was the lord of an imaginary kingdom. The bourgeois critic prefers art to be mimetic; to present a mirror to life; to mimic its routines, surfaces, and costumes. Artists like Jacques Rigaut or myself—those who have transcended the mirror—care for it only insofar as it may be used to ridicule and offend. Rigaut once said: “Try, if you can, to stop a man who travels with suicide in his buttonhole.” And Rigaut’s mission, his mock passion, was as suicidal as mine or that of Jesus, my brother. Once passion is set in motion, it cannot be apprehended.
Uncertain of meeting God and powerless to modify a past from which he himself was issued, Skullhead concentrates on creating new versions of himself which are just different enough to perplex those of his contemporaries who might subsequently venture back into the past only to find nothing there any longer that corresponded with their historical expectations. Toward the end of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, Skullhead, after roaming the province of Judea for six months, stumbles across a child who is Jesus of Nazareth asleep under an olive tree: he injects potassium cyanide into the child’s veins.
November 6, 1929. The Clinic at Châtenay-Malabry is close to where Chateaubriand, writer, explorer, and lover of flesh, lived and died clutching his wooden crucifix. Jacques Rigaut wandered within the gardens of the clinic, bearing with him a valise containing the necessary tools of his trade. His arm ached from needle punctures at the crease of his elbow. The pain was familiar and as much a part of his experience now as the blinking of his eyes. The grass was wet, and sometimes the earth curled through it like minced meat. The floral beds were without color. A light rain was beginning to fall as he stood beneath one of the chestnut trees. In that moment, he thought of me, and my death, swaying gently and terribly from a bough, and of how Chateaubriand had, at first, experienced Judea with revulsion. Rigaut had not experienced revulsion in half a decade, at least.
He shook his valise, and his tools rattled inside. He opened it slightly, but so as not to let the rain inside, and retrieved his metal flask of cognac. His innards leapt magnetically toward it as he flipped the cap with his thumb and poured the contents into his throat. Then, he crossed the swollen lawn to the doors of the clinic where he had a room, idly discarding a pocketful of morphine syrettes from his soft coat pocket onto the grass, like a trail back to the tree where he imagined me—that is to say, Judas—hanging. He was admitted with familiarity. He walked the pale corridors to his room, noting the smell of medical alcohol all around him.
Rigaut appraised his room from behind the mirror, which was screwed to the wall above the washbasin. His valise was open on the bed, where he had pulled back the sheets. He had taken the precaution of fitting one of the rubber sheets that the clinic kept to the bed. He lay there, with a draughtsman’s ruler held in his left hand, measuring the precise location of his heart. In his right hand, he held the revolver, which he had declared to be the only literature on his bedside table. The pillow with which he had intended to silence the discharge was obliterated and feathers fell through the room, sticking to the little scorched black vortex in his chest. It was as profound and beautiful a scene as he had ever witnessed. He had cleaned his teeth and nails several times, and his hair was shining and immaculate. The Ruler and the Revolver, the Revolver and the Ruler.
IN TRUTH, we envy the fierce clarity of the death note on the dashboard, the doubtless soliloquy on the leather upholstery, the wedding band in the ashtray, the rejection on the mantel. We are jealous of the end of deliberation; God is in his prison amid the cinders of an immolated bush, dragged back down into the roots and soil of fear and imagination. They are done with vanity and pride. The details are a board game: the Pop Star with the Rope in the Kitchen;
the Poet with the Oven in the Kitchen; the Painter with the Razor in the Studio; Ian Curtis in the Tombs of Mancunia; Sylvia Plath sniffing out Lazarus in London; Mark Rothko’s armpits filling with blood on the Painting Floor of New York. The preparations and artifacts, the milk and bread set out; the rubber sheet spread across the bed; the ruler to measure the distance to the heart; I am the shadow that swings out over all of these.
LADY LAZARUS, A SELF-PORTRAIT
In the gnarls and pits of Bethany, we first encountered Lazarus. When I was still young, I had a job in Bethany as a peanut seller. Bethany was close to Jerusalem on one of the southerly slopes of the Mount of Olives. Mary Magdalene would return to her home there after a night’s whoring. I would meet her in the lamplight in a miasma of oil and the perfumes of sex, and she would disclose what she had learned of the scandals and events of the following day; if there was to be a crucifixion, a stoning, the assassination of a Roman soldier by guerrilla fighters, Mary would know of it, and I could be at hand to earn my money.
Lazarus as painted by Vincent van Gogh from the sanatorium at Saint Rémy in 1890, a moribund redhead propped upon his elbows as his sister Martha screams outside the tomb and I, Judas, look on; Lazarus is played by Vincent van Gogh. It is a self-portrait. Lazarus was subject to epilepsy, worsened by periods of hunger strike against the Occupation and a hysterical imagination. He would take to his bed for weeks at a time, starving, febrile, and tormented by paranoia. It was here that we would rehearse the miracle that Jesus would administer ten years later.
“Do you know the red-haired painter, the queer fox-face that lives here in Bethany?” Mary Magdalene asked me as she took peanuts from my bag in the insect-filled night.
Vincent stared at the window from his sickbed, watching his reflection and the lampshade that was the color of skin reclaimed by a factory. One fraction of his skull told him to rise from his cot, but his nerves and muscles would not obey him.
Lazarus did not fear his sickness itself; he had come to understand it as a mode of catharsis. A violent pressure would generate within him and finally explode, sending him into spastic convulsions and an oblivion that was kin to death. It was darkness with lightning storms and luminous worms, distant voices that spoke poetry like women, and a quiet shivering of orgasm. Slowly, he would arise, red as a phoenix, the taste of his decay on his lips. He knew that there would be one convulsion from which he would not return, and he had spoken of it to his sisters Martha and Mary. It seemed that it had come. Lazarus lay in the blank of his extinction, listening to the eerie silence of his cave. One fraction of his skull told him to rise from his pallet, but his nerves and muscles would not obey him.
I arrived at the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary with my bags of peanuts. As the whore had predicted, a small crowd had gathered, expecting the death of their neighbor; there were few examples of sorrow but much spite and relief.
A tax collector named Matthew said: “Martha is crying wolf again.”
“No, this time I think he’ll die.” Bartholomew picked at his skin, and then he cupped his hands at his mouth to be heard shouting into the house. “Just kill yourself, Lazarus, and be done!”
Dreadful birds hung in the trees.
Before noon, I did excellent business.
“But he does this all the time,” a cynical Pharisee complained. “His constitution is petrified. The only things he does not fear are these blackouts. Lazarus is weak and believes himself entitled. He calls himself an artist and so believes that God should exempt him from hard work, taxes, and engagements with reality. Here, I’ll take some peanuts, boy.” I handed the Pharisee a small bag. “When God does not fulfill his wishes, Lazarus here throws fits, tantrums, retreats and pretends to die, only to begin afresh with his delusions. Lazarus is a selfmurderer by means of his overweening self-pity.” He stuffed a fistful of peanuts through his beard into his curled mouth and peered through the window to see the redhead corpsing in his sheets. “Bastard!”
Others cried out, also.
“Charlatan!”
“Coward!”
And I too: “Get up, Lazarus!”
Martha, her fists clenched above her head, screamed for silence.
And then Lazarus awoke.
His draped skeleton pushed itself onto its elbows, and he slowly pulled the white cloth from his brow.
“I have done it again,” he said to himself.
Ten years later, Jesus and I would return.
LIVE AT THE WITCH TRIALS
Massachusetts. 1977. They remained like that for some time, the Sylvia doll and the Anne doll, silent as dumbbells strung on the transparent umbilicus of jealousy and desire that twitched between them across the dining table. They were like twins. I stood behind them in turn, lowering my nostrils into the oblivion of their hair, Sylvia still scented from her small Auschwitz, Anne retaining her scent of imploding racetracks. Sylvia cast me a glance that she did not want me to see, but in that glance Bibles wrecked on black Atlantic rocks like black dresses torn on broken cocktail glasses and ravens rolled in white, empty tombs. She hadn’t even touched her sandwiches. I kissed Anne full on the mouth, even though she was only eighteen inches tall, and I knew it wasn’t going to work.
The second time I meant to write it out. Anne and I lit matches and struggled with our memories to pick our way through a blacked-out city. We were in the part of the city where the trucks are vented for screaming animals. But the city was still. We fought to hold the yellow glimpses we caught of it, like beer running through cupped hands. She handed me her cigarette as I slid my hand into her flank, pushing nylon into the exclamation mark of her ass. The dark was terrible. This is how it is before you commit suicide, she explained. Everyone else appears to be dead before you. There is no light.
We made our way inside the cocktail lounge of a hotel where dead people lolled against pianos, their bodies like splitting fruit, entire parties suspended in gas. We stole a bottle of gin and swam out into the street, climbing through the window of a parked car. Her glossy heels tore the headliner as I lay on top of her, spraying stars into her mouth. But Sylvia was missing. She stared at what I had written as though her eyelids were fanned with teeth.
Poets are more interesting than poetry. You probably think of me as blasphemous, and the truth is that I am not much of a reader. I do not like to read. Reading is like finishing someone else’s painting. But a painting or a television will radiate into a room unbidden. There is nothing worse than the sneer of closed books. A book is a dead bird that you are expected to bury. I remember when Sylvia and I watched From Here to Eternity on television, and we lay down on the carpet in front of the scrolling metallic waves that flashed over Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr as they rolled on the beach; we were their mirror. She pulled my cock out and milked it all over her tweed skirt, her blouse open over one raging fuchsia nipple, and her skin subterranean pale beneath the coal mist of her stockings. She was something I had pulled from beneath the earth. The wind blew in from the white-hearted water. Anne thrashed at a typewriter in the next room, a firing squad of words.
It seems so distant from me now. But I do remember. They disintegrated in their quiet way, the way dolls will, without hysteria. I became ashamed of playing with suicides, waiting for the dolls to act while I was out of the room. I once put a wine glass outside on the window ledge of my apartment, above the street. It stayed there for a long time, as I would go out on my errands, and otherwise turn my back on it. I knew one day it would fall, and perhaps it would fall and do great damage, raining viciously into a baby carriage, or, perhaps, it would fall on me, the stem protruding from my brow beside the hot dog stand. Eventually, I brought the glass back in from the ledge. I wanted awful things to happen to people or, rather, to me. Nothing ever did. I never got caught fucking my poet dolls. I was never fired from work for masturbating with them in the ladies’ room. I lived in my mind, like you do, in Smith College or Glenside Hospital.
BROOKLYN. 1977. Inside the perfumed coa
t, in the shadow cast by mannerisms and mode, under the fur collar, behind the monocle of shilling gin, I negotiated the snowy barbarism of the city. I was nothing more than a stem of glass, transparent, hollow, and skinny. The city threatened me because he was a narcissist, a flower blooming in frosted black tar. I waited in restaurants like Lucifer in a church, goosing boys and sucking paté from my fingers. Fear perforated my lungs. My coat pockets were plump with my latest sex drawings, and my hair betrayed me. My hair was awful because I was an artist. I carried little flesh, just angles and bone. My eyes faced inward, showing their backs, mother-of-pearl, a few coils of gore and a flash of blue. Because I was an artist, no one ever saw my eyes. Because I was a coward, involuntarily I closed my eyelids when I spoke.
JUDAS ISCARIOT, SALOME, AND THE DECLINE AND BETRAYAL OF JOHN THE BAPTIST
As Salome, I was a clutch of caprice and spite. Within the span of those years, I betrayed my friend the Baptist, John, who was also our blueprint for messianism, eschatology, and the single-minded pursuit of one’s own death. In those days, the Baptist was imprisoned. My father, that was Herod Antipas, held him in a cess tank below our grandiose palace. The cess tank and the labyrinth of pipes echoed with the prisoner’s obscure nasal songs, like the plumbing of the Manchester Free Trade Hall where the sleet had been in my hair. The way he sang kept the stink out of his nose. Herod liked the Baptist, but my mother, that was Herodias, loathed and feared him, as though he were a tarantula.
