by James Reich
The palace of Herod Antipas was a place of flesh, and the walls were embedded with lost hubcaps, jeweled lobsters, and blue and white latrine tiles. It pulsed to a slow rhythm as Herod would heave and ooze his fat body down its halls. It was as though the massive structure were masturbating. Herod had bowel cancer, and his finger would idly return to his anus, drifting up his glittering skirts; he was like a child discovering his smell for the first time. A white parrot sat always upon his sunburnt shoulders, preening demonic advices and increasing Herod’s appetites, or so his wife believed. One of his appetites was for me, Salome.
I cast myself in the figure drawn by Aubrey Beardsley and dictated by Oscar Wilde. I was as ripe as my father’s cancer, a beautiful bleeding star, part delicate china and part machine gun. Dressed in my peacock skirt, I made my way down to the cistern to see John. He was chained to a pipe in the gloom.
“My sweet Iokanaan, precious John, you know you could be released if only you swore to stop the baptisms and calls for the end of the universe.”
John had deteriorated. The lightless prison had infected his skin with pallor. The girth of his thighs had diminished, and the broad, definite shafts of his muscles had turned to thin threads of milk. Some distant hand had rendered him down. John was fading and vulnerable, like Samson. His hair was lank on his shoulders. His eyes were all but emptied of the bright promise that had drawn men and women to his baptisms. All about us, the prison was without color. The swelling of the river had been replaced by the tedious dripping of the cistern. Anxiety and arousal were drawn in monochrome whorls. Even the voice of John the Baptist had receded and came like a weak echo from a shell.
“I am a dissident,” he sighed. “I sing dissent, but I am only part of a mechanism, like a part of your father’s latrines. I serve no other function than to presage the coming of the mightiest, the father of all orphans, the probing lightning and the sun and the moon.”
“The moon is furious tonight. Do you see her? She stands close at hand, here.” Slowly, I peeled the corset from my breasts.
“I will not look at you, monster.” His blood quickened.
“I am snow; there is dew beneath my peacock skirts.”
“Take your poisonous eyes away from me. Look away from me, harlot.” John’s eyes were subterranean black, absolute.
“But you will regard me. Your head will stare at me from a silver plate. Listen to that noise above, where the Jews are quarrelling over your prophecies. There are some gamblers who believe in you, but the others think you mad.”
“Whore, you will not make me afraid. Look away from me.”
“Would you rather be strangled? That is what happened to the last prisoner down here. My real father, Herod Philip, was throttled at the command of his brother Antipas before the tetrarch married my mother. A colossal Nubian garroted him until blood sprayed from his neck. I know that you condemn the marriage of Herod Antipas and my mother Herodias. In silence, I would do the same. Can you not be your own conscience, rather than seeking to be the conscience of Jerusalem and the entire world?”
The Baptist’s voice grew tender. “Salome, daughter of death, you are living on the edge of a knife yourself. With a sweep of his palm, the mighty one who comes after me will declare the end, the end, of all myths and the supremacy of one estate. The false gods of dirt, blood, oceans, and storms shall be obliterated; Zeus, Tiamat, Quetzalcoatl, Ra, and with them Shiva, Thor, Pan, and the rutting lesser gods, and with them, the lies of centaurs, hermaphrodites, sphinx, and nymphs, Minotaur and djinn and magic will be benighted. He will work miracles, but all else will be death.”
“I hear my mother Herodias calling for me.”
“Then good. Be gone.”
“Does the fever of your arrogance ever let you sleep, John?”
He did not answer me, but rested his cheek upon the wall that echoed like a metal ship with the sounds of the palace of Herod.
My parents, as I will call them, subsisted in a perpetual state of drunkenness and were dictated to by violent whims. Sometimes, Herodias would storm into my bedroom and tear down my posters of punk rock bands. Herod would steal my underwear from the steamy laundry and jerk off with it. My body was the battleground where they would fight out their next divorce. Only an evil man or a capitalist will tell his own daughter that she should become a stripper.
“How do you obtain what you desire?” Herod inquired of me.
“By performing that which you least desire,” I said.
“By prostration, sacrifice, compromise, and humiliation?”
“Heaven’s gates are oiled with abasement and abjection,” I explained.
“Does the prisoner, this Baptist, tell you this?” Herod’s lips curled into an envious snarl, full of the erotic violence he intended toward all of us.
“He has his head in the lion’s mouth, and he begs you to bite.”
“Ah, well, I will not. Now tell me, Salome, daughter, what do you most desire from my glistering estate?”
“I would have the Baptist’s head on a plate of silver.”
“That is too much!”
“Really? Too much, you say?” I shook my shoulders, and my breasts shivered beneath the argent gauze of my shift.
“Perhaps . . .”
I stripped away my seven veils, and they fell to the floor in the smoky applause of Greenwich Village. Cigarettes dangled from terrified lips as I held the severed head in my hands and kissed the dead lips, pushing my tongue inside the surreal skull, as I would in Gethsemane. Men bought me drinks and gave me money because I was a traitor to my sex.
I was the female Judas.
THE TERMINAL RACETRACK: JUDAS FINDS PILATE IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
Judecca: the terminal racetrack. Hell spiraled down in concentric circles and walls of death. I pulled down my goggles against the phosphorous snow drifting against the spires of ice that rose out of the gashed floor. A dying sperm whale gaped on the plateau, hollowed out by terrible birds. The tail had been torn away, turning the creature into a vile funnel that still connected two shelves of ice across a black ravine. The creature made no sound, but a dismal fountain of gore piped from its blowhole. Ravens dipped their beaks into it and pulled off sheets of skin. The only way to cross the ravine was to walk through the innards of the whale. I ignited a flare from my pack and stepped into the creature’s mouth. Silver sparks and smoke filled the cavity and then receded and gave a less blinding light. From farther inside the whale, I heard a man whimpering. I strode into the belly of the beast. When I discovered him, the man was wiping his hands against the flesh walls of the tunnel as though it could make them clean; instead they became more slathered in blood.
“Please, give me something. Help me rid my hands of this blood.”
“Pilate.”
“Is that Judas that was once my page?”
“The same.”
“But grown! Oh, marvelous boy, surely you can help me. This is the whale Doubt who spans the ravine. This confinement is one of my punishments.”
“But you are not confined, Pilate. Both the mouth and the tail are open to either side of the ravine. This belly sags over the abyss and will probably fall, in time.”
“I could walk out of the mouth, yes, but the birds would come down for the blood on my hands, and they would rip my fingers and knuckles from my palms. Tell me what I should do! No, that is why I am here. I abdicated and a man was scourged and crucified.”
“I sent him to you, Pilate.”
I recalled the manner in which I became page to Pontius Pilate.
The fishing skiff that I had stolen to escape the island of Korkyra, after the accidental hanging of the aristocrats’ girl, came aground on a sandbar, and seeing only a malnourished and sea-wrecked child aboard, a Roman soldier waded out to rescue me. The stink and shape of the skiff were like a ruined whale. The mast had sheared off in a black storm, and the sail had howled away into the night like a ghost. The soldier saw that my eyes were bare slits, like a goat’s eyes
, and that my skin was burnt and cracking and my red hair knotted and wild from the sea. His armor flashed in the scarlet dawn, and when I tried to speak, flecks of salt powdered from my lips. Gulls poured out of the sky to fight over the fish scraps littering the bottom of the boat. My cheek fell against his breastplate as he bore me back to the shores of Judea. His purple-red skirt shifted like the tendrils of a jellyfish. I drifted in and out of consciousness, glimpsing my mother Cyborea in a stable stall, laying out tarot cards and urinating on them; I saw a guillotine falling upon the neck of a man I recognized; I saw a goat staggering in the blooded soil of an alien planet; I saw the whole world bewitched by the image of a young prince contemplating suicide on a stage.
In those days, Pontius Pilate was stationed on the coast. It was to his mansion I was taken by the man who plucked me from a reeking skiff on the sandbar.
“Malchus, loyal Malchus, you have brought me a drowned fox,” Pilate said to his slave. I had been mistaken in my delirium, and the man was not a soldier, but he did wear the livery of Pilate’s retinue.
“My lord, I found him washed aground, alone in a fishing boat.”
“Alone, you say?”
“He must have been at sea for weeks. The skiff was named Corcyra, and from its decoration, I think it must have come from there.”
“Corcyra. That name reminds me of Cocytus, river of wailing, deep in Hell. Fetch water for the boy, and let us hear what he might have to say.” Pilate put his hand to my brow and pushed the hair from my eyes. I remember that he made a show of needing to scratch his nose, suddenly curious of the scent on his fingers, in the same sly manner in which I had seen Herod sniff at his fingernails. “And I must wash my hands, also,” he whispered. “He smells like fish and carrion.” The slave Malchus laid me out on a divan. With the water, he brought aloe and treated my sunburn. Days later, when I had recovered a little and had managed to eat without vomiting, I sat with Pilate on his balcony above the vineyard.
“I want to keep you here, Judas,” he said.
“I have nowhere else to go.”
“I will employ you, as I do Malchus. I can retain you here at my home, and Malchus can return to the vital business of listening.”
“Listening to what?” I asked.
“Malchus has very sensitive hearing. He heard you crying in your boat before he rescued you. Dressed as a native, disguised, he moves freely among people and listens to their plots against us, their gossip, and their vendettas and morale. His ears keep my territory safe. I probably know more of the petty intrigues and affairs of this place than any housewife, whore, or innkeeper.” Pilate’s smile was bright.
“Malchus is a spy?”
“If you like.” Pilate handed me a small plate with bread and goat butter and a glass of red wine. He was relaxed in my company because he assumed that I had come from across the sea and knew nothing of Judea. “Now, Judas, my drowned fox, you can work for me, also. But we will brook no intrigue. You will become my page, which means that you can bring my wine, arrange my clothes, and so on. I awake frequently in the nights and will often require you to bring me wine, then to help me sleep again. Do you ever have dreams, nightmares?”
“All the time, my lord.”
“As do I. As a matter of fact, you were attendant in a dream of mine last night. I dreamed that we had been promoted. Jerusalem was my station.”
“A premonition!”
“Let us hope not.”
“But why?”
“That is merely part of my dream. For the rest, I had crucified a man, a pathetic, innocent man, and two other criminals were with him upon the hill Golgotha, the place of skulls. As the evening came, so did a terrible storm. It rained so heavily that the ground became infirm, and the cross of the innocent man began to lose its foundation. It came down, slow and terrible as the mast of a sinking ship, until the man was being splashed by the bloodstained mud that had been far beneath him, now only inches from his face. And he was not yet dead. In the ghastly moonlight of my dream, eleven comrades of the innocent man pulled the spikes from his broken wrists and feet and stole him off the cross. The man came to my quarters like a ghost, and he opened his mouth, gaping and awful as though he had risen out of a tomb. His breath was a million deaths, and from his open mouth a sword blade extended that pierced me through my heart, as I lay paralyzed in my bed. You stood beside him, the twelfth comrade, Judas, with the keys to my palace.”
“That is not possible, my lord!” I lied because I wanted to belong, but since my mother Cyborea had been a spiritualist, I recognized that Pilate’s dream was the patina that embellished the mere truth.
“That is why I must keep you close.”
I wanted to belong.
Weeks passed before Malchus approached me in one of the tiled corridors of the mansion. His whispers hissed furiously as he dragged me by the hair into an antechamber. “To think that I dragged you from the course of your death!” He clamped his hand over my mouth, as I was about to scream. “There is talk,” he said. “There is talk, and there are stories of a boy who raped the daughter of aristocrats on the island of Korkyra and fled in a stolen fishing boat after the girl hanged herself in shame. The little rapist was a fox-faced bastard, like you. What do you say, Judas? Is this you?”
“No! I did not rape her! We were in love, but she fell from a tree where we were hiding and caught her neck in vines . . .”
“Liar.” Malchus pushed his fist into my chest, and I fell back against a tapestry. It fell upon me, like the sail of the skiff had done in the night wrap of the storms. In my rage, I hurled it into the slave spy’s face and punched at him while he could not see. I bit at his exposed cheek and sank my teeth into his ear. I kicked his groin and ran for the door. I climbed the mansion walls in panic, slashing my hands on the spikes of glass, as Malchus swashed through the vineyard with his sword. On the island of Corfu, at Easter, they still smash plates as though they are stoning me.
I would see neither Malchus nor Pilate for many years, until Pilate had received his promotion to Jerusalem, and Malchus would lose his wounded ear at Gethsemane. Pilate had a way of referring to Jerusalem. He called it axis mundi, by which he meant that it was a confusion of worlds.
THE DMZ
Recall the sand careening through the white hooded streets, a storm of sharp teeth and posthuman music, capsule monkeys incinerated in falling orbits, hookahs erupting, and writers drinking ash in the DMZ. I had heard they were serving duck livers at the Etemenanki Hotel that afternoon, the hotel where I had first met Conrad Eberhardt in its purple tiled foyer. Now, I found him asleep on a black damask chaise longue, a damp newspaper tented across his face. He was using it as a bug filter. His suit, like mine, was streaked with work. Eberhardt had described himself to me, when we first met a year ago, as “an orphan of both the fascismas and the judaicos, once of a wealthy family, then the child of Europe, and now, utterly deracinated except for the verdigris of my name and my passport.” He pulled the newspaper from his face and rolled onto his elbows, appearing somehow, despite the conditions, immaculate and dapper as a sphinx. His sandy hair was waxed at an angle from his brow, and his lips were pursed in an attitude of concentration of which I knew him to be incapable. Despite that, Conrad Eberhardt was the best writer in the city and, since none of us would ever get out, the world. I would try to imitate him. He reached into his jacket and retrieved a small round tin. “It’s just the one tin, I’m afraid.”
“Duck livers. Conrad, how on earth did you get them?”
“I picked them up near the airport, where the minefield begins, while I was covering that story on the photojournalist.”
“Flynn?”
“Yes. They must have been dropped or ditched by smugglers, but there they were in the weeds beside my left shoe. At first, I thought it might be an APM, but then I could see the blue label on the side: Mesoamerican Duck Livers. So, I put my foot over it and stood there until all the drama was over, which, as you know by now, was considerable.”<
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“How long did Flynn last?”
“He was very drunk. I would say he ran for about thirteen seconds shooting film constantly and screaming, straight out, into the minefield. His flashbulbs flared the whole place up, and we all cheered, for some reason. I think he took a small hit after about six seconds, but the mine was compromised and just sort of nibbled at him like a piranha, rather unlike the last one, which took his legs clean off. Pieces of him showered down on us for several seconds, a kind of cannibal confetti. It was ironic, me standing there with my foot on the shiny tin. Shall we have them now? I’ll get them cooked up. Yallah!”
Eberhardt clapped his hands together, and a pale Etonite child in a batik shirt scuttled out from behind the violet drapes and made off with the tin like a ball boy in tennis. Moments later, we were sitting together around a small Bunsen burner as the livers fried in a black pan, sharp organ smoke leaking into the room, until Eberhardt raised his finger and the boy switched off the gas lung and retired. “He won’t tell anyone.” The boy set off a flower bomb in the foyer: pink smoke and roses.
“He doesn’t want this place closed down,” I suggested.
“Neither do we.” He raised his tumbler of coffee and I raised mine.
“Hear, hear.”
We were both entirely apolitical, an orientation made necessary and easy to maintain by the fact that politics had ceased to exist; all that remained were the Tiresian games of government: the exchange, every seven years, of sissies for toughs, hawks for doves, that passed for progress in the DMZ. The Etemenanki Hotel was our underground, our safe place of the spirit. Eberhardt explained about the duck livers. “These livers contain a toxin closely related to dimethyltryptamine. These South American ducks squeeze the poison from the glands of toads with their beaks. Some years ago, a series of Mayan or Olmec—I don’t remember which—relief works was unearthed, and they showed these Mayans wearing duck masks and worshipping these birds because they could ingest the toad poison safely, and, well, their livers became reservoirs of hallucinogens. In a few moments, you and I could be anywhere.”
