by James Reich
Now, I lived inside the echo chamber of his arrogance and had no other home. The dogs let me lie down with them, and some nights I would sleep with one and some the other. There were nights when the dogs would share their meat with me, or I might have starved.
Jesus still had his family home, although Joseph was weak and bedridden now. Decades of sawdust had shredded the lining of his lungs, and he breathed with great labor and regret. The workshop was no longer a part of their home, which meant that his mother and father had a separate room to sleep in. Jesus kept the abandoned workshop as his bedroom, while Mary and Joseph kept the room with the kitchen and latrine. Jesus’ room retained the miasma of sweat and shavings, even though the tools and lumber had long since been sold to another local artisan. He managed to keep the room locked, and on the small, high windowsill was the wooden theatre mask that I had seen his father carving that night in our childhood. To regard us now, you might think that our fortunes had reversed, and where I had been his Virgil, I was now but the shadow to his blinding light, but you would be mistaken; Jesus’ lamp was only as bright as Judas’ oil. I threw grit at Jesus’ bedroom window to awaken him, and we made our way to the shore where the fishermen were preparing for the morning’s toil.
“These are the blue hours,” I said, feeling the spectral chill of morning, with the sun still not risen, the atmosphere on the edge of disturbance, the pale gulls mute.
Simon and Andrew were at their skiff before us, with a breakfast of warm bread and goats’ milk that they shared with us. The two fishermen looked very much alike, both with receding whorls of dark brown hair, powerful shoulders, and strong wrists from pulling in nets, except that Andrew had lost the sight in his right eye to a gull when he was a boy, and there was now only a torn milky anemone of an eyeball beneath the half-closed slit of his lids. Andrew was the more cavalier of the two, where Simon was cool as a stone and measured in his every gesture.
“Simon was worried,” Andrew announced, brushing the sand from a piece of bread that he had dropped and retrieved. “He’s like an old fishwife over you.”
“Worried?” asked Jesus.
“Judas, I don’t like the idea that we might make you sick. The water will doubtless be choppy when we get out.” Simon looked out at the low, serrated waves.
“What’s a little vomit between friends?” I pretended to heave at Jesus.
“That’s the spirit!” said Andrew. “Come!”
We hauled the skiff over the shale and out into the Galilee shallows, clambering aboard as the freezing water reached our thighs. The sun began to rise but was obscured by oily clouds at the horizon. The fishermen raised their small triangular sail, and the dawn breeze took us creaking out into the deeper water.
“I have been meditating on the subject of the occupation of our lands by Rome,” Jesus told us.
“Are you to become a zealot like Judas’ father?” Andrew turned on his narrow wooden seat. “Strangle legionnaires in the dangerous quarters of Jerusalem?”
“That man is not my father.”
“No, no. Listen to me, Simon, Andrew, and you also, Judas. The spread of men across the world is like ink dropping upon a cloth. The blots of ink spread and overlap, and some are lost within others.”
“Are you saying that this is desirable?”
“It is natural,” Jesus said. “We should not resist. Rome, despite all sophistication and declarations of intent and Empire, is merely a dripping quill. It is not a mind, a strategy, or volition. The ink that is Rome will dry up, and more ink will fall upon it and subsume it. Rome is not even an animal; it is an abstraction.”
“But what of us, here, now?”
“Rather, give yourself over to he who holds the quill. To God.”
“God should be more careful with his ink!”
“Damn you, Judas.” Simon was finally irritated. “It’s an analogy.”
“So what? You think that because an analogy can be imagined, that it has any currency in the world?”
“Judas is right, Simon,” Andrew said. “You hate to rock the boat.” He winked his ruined white eye.
We were held between vast beating black wings. It seemed that the storm had come from nowhere. We had not even had a chance to put out our nets. “Thank God that our nets are in; they would pull us under!” Simon called out as the wind began to shred the sail. “Get it down!” I grabbed the ropes, and blood seeped from my hands. “I have never seen the water so violent! Your blasphemy!” Simon cried in terror.
Jesus stood up in the boat, and Andrew called for him to sit down. I saw it at the same time that Jesus did: a sandbar just beyond the skiff’s splintering rail, just a glimpse of pale sand before it was washed over with the tenebrous waves. With absolute calm on his face, meeting the eyes of the fishermen who huddled aghast and sickening in the prow, Jesus stepped from the boat into the rain and chaos that was like the beginning of the world. To Simon and Andrew, he seemed to have stepped upon the surface of the water.
“Do not be afraid,” he told them, outstretching his arms, his soaking white shirt a dripping ghost in the vortex, his hair whipping about his face. “God is with you. He breathes through the salt sea and overwhelms it; he breathes through your best and most rotten nets; he breathes through this skiff, the bark of your survival; he breathes black across the sun and brilliance upon the moon, and he breathes placid daylight after thunderstorms; he breathes through the eyes of the fish you will catch; he breathes here, but he will not blow you down.”
Simon called him Rabbi, and Andrew called him Master.
I remained silent.
Jesus waited for his moment and stepped back into the boat, where the fishermen wept and embraced him, forgetting the howling gale and the vicious sting of the rain, until the tempest passed us by, and we were left with glassy blue water. And a miracle.
We reclined beneath an olive tree in the chill Bethsaida night. Jesus pulled ropes of his long dark hair across his face, inhaling the scented halo of salt and grease that hung about him. The bull’s eye Aldebaran blinked though eons of dust. The belt of Orion glowed half-exhausted by toil, hung about with the shawls of beasts and skulls of dragons. I recalled the way my mother would speak of the stars, how they were set in chain, and of how men and women were controlled by them. I did not believe her. “But,” I told myself, “we have set our most stellar deaths in motion.”
THE FOLLOWING morning, in Bethany, our brows aching from alcohol, we circled the bazaar in search of goat meat and bread. The sun was fierce, and the fishwives and slaughterhouse children who were made to work passed out water as we hesitated at their stalls. A camel weighted down with sweating ziggurats of dynamite was driven through the narrow alleys by weeping children, each of whom wore a scarlet fez and beat the camel with a cane. The canes whistled in the hot wind, and the camel bellowed and spat thick saliva across a tray of insects. They were heading for the Etemenanki Hotel. After that, we went to see John the Baptist, and we sat beside the river and drank water from paper cones. Simon and Andrew the fishermen were there, and they sat close to us. John was standing in the river, as always. We watched him push the heads of men and women beneath the water, as we had watched him as children. I had not yet become Salome nor betrayed him with my striptease.
Jesus pointed out some Levites, parking their motorcycles across the shale. They were letting their engines cool when a cluster of priests approached them, gesturing urgently, as though the motorcycles were still kicked into noise. “They are gesturing at John,” I told Jesus, from the side of my mouth. The Levites were a homeless gang who wore a golden star upon the back of their black leather jackets. I liked the Levites because they were rootless like myself. Mary Magdalene had introduced me to them. They had come to drink at the river. Their presence there made the people who had come to be baptized shirk away, quietly gathering their clothes and sandals, covering their faces from mute shame. Jesus became nervous, and I saw water tremble from the lips of his paper cup. It reminded me of the s
torm water overflowing the rim of our fishing boat as Simon and Andrew bailed and cried out. We remained, not deserting our brother John.
The priests brought the reluctant Levites over to the edge of the water, close to where John stood washing his sunburnt shoulders and where we sat watching him. The priests shielded themselves behind bikers. One of the priests whispered in the ear of one of the Levites. I knew the Levite as Nitzan, or Bud, which was his gang name. He pulled off his leather cap and unzipped his jacket, revealing a sweat-stained T-shirt.
“Who’s your friend, Judas?” Bud asked, and I was about to answer him when John stood forward out of the river, scuffing the gravel with his naked feet.
“I can answer the priests directly,” he said.
“Who are you?” one of the priests, an old man with a broken nose, demanded from behind the line of Levites. The priest was named Zeev.
“I know what you want, but I am not the Christ,” John said.
The priest was indignant. “What then? Are you Elijah?” Two of the Levites, Dan and Gershon, wearily stood aside and let the old man with his prodding finger through to stand in front of the Baptist.
“No. I do not think that I am the prophet Elijah, old man. I am just another voice crying in the wilderness, making straight the way of the Lord, as the prophet Isaiah said.”
“Judas,” Bud addressed me, “the Pharisees want to know why your friend is baptizing our men and women if he is not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the prophet.” Bud the Levite and John the Baptist looked like a Tom of Finland cartoon.
“I’ll tell you,” said John. “I baptize these people with river water, but among you is one, whom you do not know, who comes after me.” Unnoticed by the inquisition, John flashed an eye at Jesus, who froze as though a lightning bolt had penetrated him; his whole system stopped dead for that moment before he was able to lower his head to his cup again and slurp in panic for distraction. “He who comes after me, I am not worthy enough to untie one thong of his sandals.”
“We will go back and inform the Pharisees, and Herod Antipas, the tetrarch, also.” Zeev folded his arms petulantly.
“Hey, motherfucker.” Bud grasped him by his shawl. “You didn’t tell us this was a squealing trap.” Bud shoved Zeev down onto the wet stones. The old man’s head cracked upon the ground, and blood began to flow into the river. “Let’s stomp this bastard!” Zeev is a name that means wolf, but when the pack of Levites fell upon him, he split apart like a beetle, his skin desiccating in the noon sun as his corpse flowed away and the Baptist watched, passive, as did Jesus, Simon, and Andrew, as though they believed the lies of my mother, that all men are doomed by the stars. My plans required such passive drones. The Levites washed their boots in the river and returned to their motorcycles; twelve yellow stars upon their twelve leather jackets, they roared away in a cloud of dirt and gasoline fumes. I was aroused by the violence.
John came over to the place where we were sitting, and he indicated Jesus. “Behold, the face of the Lamb of God, who strips sin from the world. It is he, my general, the man who goes before and after me, whom I saw in a dream. He alone is the reason that I came to mission with baptisms of water, to reveal my commander to Israel.” I watched the currents of madness and arrogance swirling together between my brothers, John and Jesus, and I seized my chance to agitate.
I demanded of John: “What dream?”
“I witnessed the Spirit, incarnate as a dove, descend from Heaven, and I saw that it remained over him, although I did not know him well then. It happened when you pulled him from the river, Judas.”
I complained. “A hawk, surely. A dove cannot hang over a man.”
“A voice without a voice instructed me that he on whom you witnessed the dove descend and remain, this is he who will baptize with greater than water, with the Holy Spirit, and I have seen the bird above this man, our brother Jesus, the Nazarene.” And the sun shone upon the water so that we were all nearly blinded, and Jesus heard the beat of certain wings in his brain. Where he heard the translucent, bone-white comfort of the dove, I saw the falcon of my malice.
This flex of John’s madness met the aristocratic narcissism of the carpenter’s son, as it will in any such collision, with profound agreement. The petty cruelties I had set upon Jesus’ confidence in our childhood had convinced him, as he grew better than I, that I was jealous of him. I set him up to believe that I was a runt fox, envious of his lion’s power, but, in truth, until John—sunblind, crippled by frustrated sexual desires, and insane from the white noise of the Jordan and the river at Bethany—gave his final flattery, Jesus had not known how to sustain this belief. He required others, vindication. I realized that he would now take it from whoever would offer it, and that the previous night where he had stepped onto the sandbar and fabricated a miracle meant, he would do anything to foster it. He also knew that I was his problem.
“I saw the sandbar,” I whispered to him as we walked that evening. Letting Jesus have that first miracle set all else in chain. I could have told Simon and Andrew, he realized. He wondered why I did not. As it was, he would have to keep me close. Therefore, he made me treasurer of his disciples. I held the purse strings in his kingdom come.
“John told us that you are the Lamb and the Son of God,” Simon enthused as they hurried along behind us, after we had left the Baptist and the spattered pulp that had been the priest Zeev. “Andrew says that we have found the Messiah.”
“What do you want from me?” Jesus turned around and opened his arms, spreading out his palms at the level of his hips, as he would continue to do at such moments.
“Rabbi, we wish to stay with you. Where are you staying?”
“I will show you where we will stay.” Already, he had Simon, whom he called Cephas or Peter—which means rock—and Andrew, and with money from their fish sold at market, Jesus rented a new house in Bethany.
The following morning, while Peter and Andrew were out in their skiff, I walked again with Jesus on the shore of Galilee. It was a beautiful morning, with white gulls floating on the sea. A man came shimmering out of the heat haze and started toward us, as if to speak. Jesus traced the shape of a fish in the sand with his toes. The man stared at it for a moment, and then he removed his sandals and extended his foot, drawing an eye in the simple outline of the fish. It was our code, agreed with Peter and Andrew, that meant I am He. And the opening of the eye meant I recognize you. Jesus looked at the man who had drawn the eye and said: “Follow me?” Wordlessly, the man fell in beside us as we walked. His name was Philip, and he was also of Bethsaida and known to the fishermen. The purse was heavy when we had sold the morning’s catch and were roasting some of the remnants in our clay oven back at the new place where we were staying. The house was rich with new fish. We passed wine around, and our minds became full of inert erotica, passions that pulled like toothache, ambitions and myths of our endurance. Unconsciously, we pouted, fidgeted, and tested ourselves as the wine sank in, making fists inside the cuffs of our clothes, harkening to the kestrels in our blood, and seeing something in our futures other than abject horror as we soared above the earth.
Philip sat cross-legged close to the oven, pinching the yellowing blisters on his feet, letting the water out of them. He ran his hands through his black hair, sweeping it back from his face, which that was as round as a moon. He passed me the gourd and said: “Is it true that your father is a zealot, Judas? Has he killed many men?”
“Perhaps. But who of us really knows their father, or their mother?”
“Do you know the son of Talemai? Nathaniel?”
“The idiot savant. I see him almost every day beneath his fig trees, sweating and counting the fruit.”
“He told me once that your father had killed nine Romans, and that boy can count.” Philip smiled. “He can keep a secret too, when required, it would seem.”
“What man are you talking about?” Jesus came over to us and sat down on the clean floor of the house. His eyelids were rosy from wine, b
ut his gaze was still and unblinking, like a painted puppet of himself.
“Nathaniel. A young man who would follow you.”
“Then we’ll fetch him tomorrow. Will you bring him, Philip?”
“Yes, Rabbi.”
When Philip found Nathaniel, he was beneath his fig trees, his lips moving softly in the dawn light. “Nathaniel, I have something to tell you. We have discovered him of whom Moses and the prophets wrote. He is Jesus of Nazareth, son of the carpenter, Joseph.”
“Nothing good comes out of Nazareth, Philip. It’s a cess pit.”
“Why don’t you come and see for yourself?”
I opened the door to Philip’s knocking, and as the new man entered, Jesus took his hand and said: “Behold, Judas, here is an Israelite in whom there is no guile!”
“How is it that you know me?”
“I have seen you beneath your fig trees. I dreamed of needing men like you, Nathaniel.” And Jesus spoke these things as though none of us had ever seen the young man before in our waking life.
“You are the Son of God, King of Israel.”
Jesus said to him: “I told you that I saw you beneath your fig trees and so you believe in me? You will see greater than this. You will see the pastures beyond the brilliant bloodstained gates of Heaven where the cunning fail to enter. You will see angels cast men down and drag men up. And you will see a host of them descend upon the Son of Man.” Between John the Baptist and this idiot, I reflected that things were going swimmingly, almost too good to be true.
