by James Reich
A gelatinous spectral fist took my intestines, crushed them, and flung them toward the street. They hung like seaweed in the revolving doors and spattered the shins of a camel. Another hand pressed upward from beneath my chin and forced me through the ornate ceiling into one of the red rooms of the hotel. Eberhardt witnessed my distress. “None of this is really happening,” he insisted. I stared back at him with my eyes turning black. I knew that he was right. It was one of the contraindications of expatriation, absence from the world, disinterest, and abstraction. My heart shook from its vessels and floated somewhere. “Let’s get outside.”
We regarded the flickering whites of eyes in the amorphous shifting of the black burkas outside, thick kohl sending strange hexes and admonitions, as though deadly fish swam into our air from another universe, piercing the clear membranes of time and space. The Olmec boy who trailed beside us through the market opened his mouth, baring one hundred tiny teeth and laughing like a can opener. He wore a piece of jade around his neck that was fashioned like a duck’s bill. Soon, the sun would set, and the women would be compelled indoors. The dark was strange and masculine in a way that darkness had never been in Europe, voided. There were only café tables, detuned radios, tarot cards, magazines, small thefts, a cruel sinless boredom. Our hearts beat violently as we struggled toward the abandoned airport. We limped between the hangers and the dying candles of the runway. Searchlights tracked across the minefield. We clambered into a fire-gutted DC-10 and tried to fall asleep.
We were in the jungle. Emerald fronds fell over our eyes as we shielded our mouths from insects. Mist shrouded and ran us over. Eberhardt, naked and slimed with mud, hacked forward with his machete. We were climbing a sinus of flowers and filth. Leeches dripped from every surface. Rays of light dialed in from a sky that we could not see. The plane lay behind us, thousands of feet down on the jungle floor, smoldering in the seething earth, snakes and contorted foliage. Finally, we broke the canopy and found ourselves on the open mesa before the ziggurat. In moments, we were engulfed. Yet, for a few terrible seconds, it was as though we had entered a kind of vacuum, and no sound reached us from the appalling ceremonies that we witnessed. The fine back of Eberhardt’s hand touched mine. “It’s not real, of course.” Then, the silence broke with an obscene gnashing of agonies and awe. It was as though every National Geographic image of Mesoamerica, every film set, every tourist photograph from a chartered helicopter, every single representation had been dragged through a developing tray of blood and coated with feathers. Blood flowed from the steps as thousands of ducks were torn apart, heads twisted off, wings rent and scattered into the desperate, joyous thrall of the crowd. The ziggurat was covered in gore and down, and the people, some of whom wore bird masks and crude wings, hurried from place to place, searching for organ meat, crouching, or prostrating themselves in visionary seizures. The brown confetti of feathers blown from the bodies of ruined birds clung to our bodies. Eyes began to fix upon us. Suddenly, we were taken. Eberhardt was thrown face down across a green slab of stone and bound to it. The people at the temple used jade utensils to scoop from the livers and carnage. The Olmec boy who trailed beside us through the market opened his mouth, baring one hundred tiny teeth and laughing like a can opener. He wore a piece of jade around his neck that was fashioned like a duck’s bill. He chewed like a machine through Eberhardt’s flesh until he reached his liver. With his duck’s bill spoon he began to eat, pushing it into the flowing cavity, a tiny piranha moving into a current of blood. The moon rose and fell, illuminating the endless ceremony of duck, man, ziggurat.
When I awoke, Eberhardt was beside me in the charred cockpit of the DC-10; the sun rose over the minefield before us and glazed the dewy runway and the dripping barbed wire. A thin crust of vomit surrounded his lifeless lips and his eyes stared directly into the sun, registering nothing. I clambered out of the plane, leaving him there, and wandered back toward the Etemenanki. I would take his room. We had sought the Promethean in the bars, hotels, pits, deserts, and jungles of the mind and it had killed him; we had grasped at the cold flame of our anonymity, stolen ourselves back from religions, states, and territories, but we were still afraid of the terrible mysteries that surrounded us or fell from the pages of magazines or glowed from newsreels. I have thought about it many times. There are things that I know beyond doubt. The languid expatriatism that belonged to the twenties and thirties had melted away, and I sensed in that which had been, a terror that had been subdued and concealed beneath the shades and that lingered with us still. It was a kind of failure, the notion that fear was everywhere and that no amount of coffee, cigarettes, or morning alcohol had removed the anxiety. The perfume of the flower bomb remained in the foyer of the hotel. The elevator was broken, and so I climbed the marble stairs to what would be my room.
Betrayal without end, the sacrifice of friends.
THE ACTORS PREPARE
The schism between guise and reality, between the actor and his prosaic life away from the conventions of drama, generates his sense of the absurd, and so the challenge of despair and death versus life. Albert Camus, who finally went by automobile when he should have gone by locomotive, was another who asked whether suicide was the appropriate response to absurdity. Despite my arguments nagging in his skull, the ineffable wisp of me in his Gitanes smoke, his own doubts as his pomade dampened his pillow, and my invisible jostling at the railway ticket office, Camus crashed on the wrong side of the question. Au contraire, Sisyphus, Prometheus, Lucifer! Grin and bear it! said Camus. The idiot.
Jesus of Nazareth lived with his parents, Mary and Joseph, in a shitty house in Bethany, on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, close to the city wall of Jerusalem. The whore, Mary Magdalene, who was our age and our friend, lived nearby. It was a two-room dwelling, with one of the rooms sacrificed to Joseph’s carpentry workshop, and the other room was kitchen, bedroom, and latrine, all in one space. The odors of sweat and shaved wood became indistinguishable. Joseph made crosses for the Roman garrison to crucify the seditious, the criminal, and the awkward. Jesus’ father may have been the only man in Judea to loathe himself as profoundly as I did myself. He suspected the infidelity of his wife and the illegitimacy of his son. He was emasculated physically and politically.
One night, when I called upon Jesus at their home, I saw Joseph in his workshop, toiling over something, holding it briefly in the candlelight, but secretive and guilty. I knew that this was one of the rare times when Joseph created something for himself, alone in the blue-black shadows, when no one came calling for the apparatus of torture and death that sustained his family. I pressed myself into the gloom beside the doorframe and tried to observe him. I heard his knife scraping away at the wood, but my eyes could not adjust to the candlelight, and his great fists obscured his work. Then, fleetingly, I saw the misshapen features on its convex surface. Jesus’ father was fashioning theatre masks for the city’s Roman actors. I had seen them many times. The actors arranged themselves and hustled against the Western Wall of the city in the shadow of the hull of the dislocated ship that projected from the stones. There, they practiced their riffs, cons, and impersonations. In years to come they might act the plays of suicidal Seneca. But, in the hierarchies of the Occupation, their position was aligned with the petty criminal and the prostitute and was almost as dangerous. Their wooden carnival masks concealed the blooms of violence on their faces, where stones had been thrown at their performances. Such were the risks and injuries accumulated with assuming false identities, of being another.
Jesus’ hand fell upon my shoulder, and he tried to drag me from the house. The shadow of the latest mask poured black over the yellow-lit ceiling as Joseph moved to test it against his own face. It was the mask of a tragedian with sculpted tears, curled lips issuing a terrible violence and revenge against the world that had destroyed him. Despite being a pariah to the meaningless men and women of Bethany, Jesus’ father was pleased to make crosses for the Roman Empire; there was a chance that he migh
t make the instrument of the death of his wife’s lover. It sickened him to pretend that the boy Jesus was his son, to protect her, to maintain illusions, and to sustain hypocrisy. He would make an army of such masks and animate them in his darkest and most hopeful dreams. Jesus, I reasoned, must know that his father was an actor.
JESUS AND I walked to the city gates. A wedding party was continuing into the early hours of the morning. A tall, hairless eunuch with skin painted gold had lifted one of the bridesmaids so that her legs were spread around his shoulders; naked, he held her there with her back against the wall of the city while he licked and sucked upon her sex. The bridesmaid held her arms out like a cross against the wall and let her orgasm pump into the gold man’s mouth. Another couple were dressed as angels. They removed their wings and lay them down on the sand. The bed of feathers slowly disintegrated as they fucked in the searchlights.
“I want that,” I said, pointing at the lovers in the chaos of the Jerusalem DMZ. “To be a rebel angel, to behave as if rebelling against the universe were not just as facile as refusing to abide by illusions. I want the facts of my passion and my hatred to matter.”
“My mother once told me that I was born because an angel visited her.”
“At least she’s not a spiritualist like mine pretends to be. Then again, my mother pretends intercourse with the supernatural too.”
“Fuck yourself, Judas! Men are aroused by mentally disintegrating women; why should angels be any different?”
“You’re right, Jesus. They probably prey on the weak and sexually frustrated. Well, idiot brother, for how long did you believe her?”
“I’m not certain that I have stopped believing her.”
Jesus, even then, had a spectacular ability to superimpose absurdities, moral evasions, and wish fulfillment upon the landscape. He had an arrested desire to see another reality. He was frozen in that landscape, like a man in a painting. Disinterestedly, I provoked and experimented. Now, decades later, transfigured by my suicide, our suicidal mission, I have embarked toward a final confrontation on the frozen plateau of Judecca that bears my name, submerged in the winter of Hell.
That is how it began.
WHEN WE were teenagers, it seemed that Jesus’ heart was a black hole of solipsistic compassion, inexorably drawing the universe inside it with a romantic agony that is only so painfully experienced in adolescence. That scarlet beat of self-absorption, self-pity, and selfishness disguised as comprehension would pull everything inside its beautiful depression. First it would drag his left nipple across his breast, then his collarbone would dip toward it, and then his neck and chin would dowse for the hole, followed by his lips, teeth, eyes, skull; and when he succumbed, the junk of Jerusalem would be dragged in by a flash of appalling gravity, the Sea of Galilee would leap like a fish into him, and then the entire world; and all because he believed the force and depth of his passion could overwhelm all being. The ferocious blows of his sanctimony against the world would be too heavy for survival. Where I felt this as a cynic, he felt it as the Messiah. Yet, rather than trying to disabuse him of his feeling that the universe began and ended in his breast, I let him run with it, relentlessly and without restraint. Where we might have had other friends, we had only the whore Mary Magdalene. She seemed to be falling in love with Jesus, the only boy in Bethany who hadn’t fucked her. When I screwed her, she would beg me to tell her more about the night when Jesus nearly drowned, when we visited John the Baptist, who had since been beheaded. “You gave him the kiss of life, Judas. Thank God that you put your breath into him! Let me put your lips on mine, so that I can feel as close to Jesus as you were the night when you saved his poor life.”
“Sometimes, I wonder if I did the right thing.” I kissed her, and our hips slapped together in the darkness of the alley.
“How could you say that?”
“Don’t you see how seriously he takes his autonomy, now that he is old enough to stay out of the house, now that he has his affectations and feels that he can make changes to things?”
“It’s good, Judas, it is good.”
“No, you’ll see. Autonomy for Jesus will mean despair for us.”
“Please don’t despair of him, Judas. Indulge him, if you must, be patient, and it will run its course. I know that the fantasy that I have of him, and that he has of himself, is just that.” She heaved against me, her thighs shivering. “Let one lamb remain ignorant of this slaughterhouse for a while longer, please.”
I know that she saw his face when I emptied myself into her.
I revisit this often, even against my will, particularly as I am crossing Judecca. It is all as known to me, as rehearsed and replayed as the soliloquy of Hamlet. The words and gestures come as though from machines. I stalk the galleries, witness the poles of our representation, paintings, engravings, stained-glass windows, haunt the wormy theatres, celluloid, listen to the whip crack of typewriters, both of us frozen: Jesus ascending from the boughs of his crucifixion, Judas descending from the limbs and noose of his suicide; Jesus’ death the apotheosis, Judas’ the nadir. These are the proofs of our fictionalization, the dramatic persuasion of death to prove a point, as gaudy, brutal, and stupid as an opera. How is the defeat of death known? It is not, unless you are I, journeying within the Plutonian cold of Hell.
It was Édouard Riou, a disciple of Gustave Doré, the great engraver of Dante’s Inferno and of the suicidal hanging of Gérard de Nerval, who illustrated Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. Vincent van Gogh and George Armstrong Custer shiver over their oil lamps, watching prehistoric monsters devouring one another in a fathomless subterranean sea.
STELLAR DEATHS IN MOTION
As Pontius Pilate had foreseen in his nightmare, Jesus and I were to gather eleven further disciples: Simon, who was also known as Cephas, whom Jesus called Peter, and his brother, Andrew, the fishermen; James and John, the sons of Zebedee, whom Mark called the sons of thunder; Philip; Matthew, the tax collector; Nathaniel, the son of Talemai; Thomas, who was also called Judas Thomas Didymus, the twin; James, the son of Alphaeus; Thaddeus, who was also called Jude and the son of James; and Simon the Zealot, who may or may not have been my father, according to the Gospel of John.
Jesus and I would walk the shores of Galilee, sharing a bottle of wine and watching the dawn stars fading as the fishermen went out. The last to disappear we called Lucifer, the morning star. Jesus was now taller than I, and his hair was as dark and lustrous as the moonlit sea. Sometimes, we would help the fishermen haul their nets from their boats, but the wounds in my hands from my escape from Pilate’s mansion had never healed properly, and they would bleed easily when I hauled the salty rope; not so Jesus, whose wiry musculature concealed a rude strength. The gloss of his beard caught the sun as he laughed with Simon and Andrew, who were not yet our disciples.
“Pity poor Judas! Pilate had him half-crucified by mistake, but he was cut down in time. He has the marks in his hands and feet!” Jesus had a laugh that was as forceful as the roar of a lion.
Things had changed.
“And a lifetime’s whoring has made him weak and redheaded,” Jesus went on, and our friends laughed with him.
“Still,” said Simon, “you would both be welcome to fish with us tomorrow. Have you ever steered a fishing skiff, Judas? I bet you would be a natural.”
“I never did.”
“But you’ll come with us, friend?” Andrew asked.
I nodded.
“He will be seasick!” Jesus laughed at me again.
By this time, I was living on the streets, my mother having succumbed to uremic poisoning, perishing in a yellow cloud of acid that surrounded her death pallet, the paraphernalia of her scams, tarot cards, voodoo dolls, scrying glass, and stained Ouija board scattered about her as relics; and my father having gone underground as a guerrilla fighter, refusing to acknowledge me when I would encounter him in the darkness of the city, garroting wire hanging from his black leather belt and a dagger cover
ed in oxidized blood, like the corroded night in Italianate murder paintings. I did not grieve so much, since they were not my real parents. The shades of my real parents hung amorphous and tantalizing in my dreams.
I slept rough in the red light district of Jerusalem and was often overwrought with nostalgia born of suffering. Scripture is nostalgia, and Judea was addicted to it. Like the distant sound of looms, the sense of wool underfoot in a lightless room, or the slow curl of a hashish cloud, the people of the city and the wild lands around drew some ineffable comfort from it. The homes hummed with it, for it was a means of looking inward, away from the hard truth of the Occupation. Scripture promised them an altered state, a different order that was mysteriously withheld. It illustrated their yearning for the absolute by means of veiled revelations, like a striptease. Therefore, they were more compelled by its weaving motions. Through obscurity Scripture offered them certainty. It resembled the practice of life well enough yet also remained sufficiently detached and strange to make them envy its fantasies. Scripture is for those who ask why we live. This is not a serious question. With the passing of each day, there were more prohibitions and prescriptions. I saw people immobilized in the vortex of a sandstorm of laws, encircled by laws and more laws. And I wondered if the only way to manifest progress in them was to halt this endless scrawl and sprawl of Scripture. They were imprisoned by illusion and complicity. But, if I could take such a man and throw him back into the mechanism, if I could take Jesus and throw him into that loom, he might knot it and strangle its perpetual threads.
