by James Reich
He was without guile and stayed with us.
This was in the days when Jesus would still acknowledge Mary, his mother. Nevertheless, he was irritated and ashamed when she apprehended us on the street of whores. She looked like an emaciated bird in her blue dress and ivory scarf. The narrow bridge of her nose was red and flecked with scorched brown spots; it curled slightly toward her lips.
“J-Jesus! I have been trying to catch up with you for an hour now.” She was breathless. “Did you forget your promise?”
“Woman, what in hell do you want?” he snarled.
“This afternoon is the wedding of Adiel and Chemda at Cana. You were invited weeks ago. Please do not embarrass me with your absence. Attend as you gave your word that you would, please.”
“What is this wedding, and what are you or it to me?” His breath hissed through his clenched teeth as he gestured along the street of harlots.
“I am afraid of you, son.” Mary looked at me then and asked: “Judas, is this cruelty, this dispassion, your influence?”
A wave of pity broke across my throat, and I strangled a strange and sudden sob that kicked there like a goat. The soles of my feet swung, for a moment, across a black and frozen abyss filled with all the despair of the universe. Poor woman to have such a son, I thought.
“The wedding, Jesus,” I said. “We were invited, so we should attend.” I regarded the tears streaming down his mother’s face, the broken gleam of spittle on her lips. A million portraits and pieces of lurid trash graven with her image would never show her as she truly was: wracked with suffering, heartbroken, raving. In time, the truth of her womb would be removed by the terrifying hysterectomy of the New Testament, usurped by the dead uterus that Sylvia Plath called Vatican.
DOUBT AT CANA
We were late arriving at Cana. As the Gospel of John recalls, six urns of thirty gallons were consumed before Jesus and the disciples entered the scene. The trees were strung with garlands and lanterns, and the floor was spattered with vomit; the remnants of music were discordant, and the men and women had mutated into stained beasts. Adiel’s family and guests numbered sixty, and Chemda’s were forty; each had invited elderly grandparents, siblings, friends, and their children. That the large, resonant urns were dry meant that many of the wedding party had drunk two and a half gallons of wine each. The desire of these monsters for more poisonous vines came in terrible erotic convulsions; their teeth were black with it and their lendings abandoned to it, disheveled and torn. I thought of Hamlet describing his mother’s love for his dead father: She would hang on him, as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. So hung the wedding party from red tendrils of wine.
“There is no more,” Mary, Jesus’ mother, informed us.
“We have brought some,” he said. “Fill the urns with water, and we will dilute our wine into it. Take some to the steward of the feast. He will not know the difference.”
We discovered the steward dressed in the soiled uniform of the steward of the USS Eldritch. The brass cuff buttons had been chewed off by the girl he was with, who was now bent over a desk, splaying torn nautical maps and India ink, smashed instruments as their sex went on. The steward tried to pull up his white trousers but could not. The girl—Mary Magdalene in a platinum blonde wig, dressed as a cowgirl—shoved her flanks back against him, twisting her ornate boot heels into the dirt, as her sequined breasts swung and her Colt pistols and holsters floated about her hips. I handed the steward a flask more of wine, and he put it to his lips, saying, “This party just gets better and better.” So it was with the others.
Later, as the disciples slumbered in pools of diluted wine, the rose hue of it absorbed into their clothes, I picked my path across the piles of entangled limbs, seeking Jesus but finding him nowhere. For a moment, as I exhausted the sockets of the building, I considered that he might have left us, soberly. I discovered him concealed alone inside the closet of the bridegroom. As I opened the door, light from the master bedroom clawed in over him. He was sitting in the dark, his arms folded around his knees, his head bowed beneath the curtains of hanging robes surrounding him. He looked up.
“Judas? The festivities are done? I—I was afraid they would find me out.” I extended my hand, gripped his wrist, and pulled him to his feet.
“Find you out?” As he emerged squinting into the light, I smiled at him as though I did not understand his fear. I wanted to fill him with certainty. I brushed confetti from his shoulders, and Jesus scoffed also and shook his head.
WE STOLE donkeys from the paralyzed wedding and rode back to Capernaum, the Marys with us, and there we slept beneath the stars on the shore of Galilee where the moon was as grave as the omens in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, a shining menstrual skirt with silver upon the water. When there was a wind, we sheltered beneath upturned boats: beetles in skulls. Mary cast her platinum blonde wig and green contact lenses across the water. I saw the Baptist’s head on a platter and had many inspirations watching her gorgeous legs in the surf.
The Feast of Passover was close at hand, and Jesus spoke of spending it at Jerusalem, the axis mundi, the city of chaos, since Passover is the commemoration of the barbarism of the Lord. “I will not go with you for Passover,” I told Jesus. “I am against it. It offends me that you can look in the eye of the God who will send an angel of death to pass over the homes of the Egyptians and kill all of their firstborn children. Slavery does not excuse such a vile massacre. Our land is now occupied by Rome, but I could have no God that would commit a spectral genocide against so many innocents in the name of my freedom. How dare you show gratitude for that? How dare you claim that privilege? You cannot turn a blind eye to it: we have no use for him.”
Jesus went to Jerusalem. But in Jerusalem, his conscience was pricked. It was distasteful to take Scripture at its word, and if it were mere words, then there was even less reason to cling to it, committing sins of omission by not confronting the sickness within its decorous liturgy. The texts would be brought out, and the hallowed ghostly massacre of the Egyptian babies and children itself would be passed over like a haunted guilty secret. The children of Jerusalem would play Passover games of memory and counting plagues, but their parents would conceal the truth of the tenth plague from them. And so, he went to the Temple with great fury and confusion. My disgust was ringing in his ears.
“You trade on this?”
As Jesus passed into the Court of the Gentiles at the Temple, where mordant men sold pigeon meat and pungent spices, his voice was almost nothing more than a question unto himself. But by the time he had moved through the Court of the Women, where bright textiles flowed between jars of myrrh and trays of sweet baklava, into the Court of the Israelites, his voice was a scream. “You trade on this?” he cried until blood gathered in his larynx. Inside the hive of men there, some auctioned bloated oxen and sheep, others made loans and exchanged currencies, and others offered fried fish and street food. With a golden cord he had snatched from a stall in the Court of the Women, he fashioned a whip and thrashed at the oxen. The beasts ran riot, trampling bodies and smashing the market stalls. From the vortex of his fury, Jesus called out: “You will not make my father’s house a place of commerce!”
“Bastard, your father was a carpenter!”
“This place will eat you alive!” Pharisees spat in his face as they fought to escape the stampede. “Blasphemy out of Nazareth, you will not be forgiven this. Two score years of building this Temple and you want to play blind Samson and pull it down on our heads! God and Herod will destroy you!”
Jesus punched his own chest. “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up again!”
Self-resurrection?
Jesus had gone too far beyond the bounds where I might indulge him. Yet, these regrettable theatrics informed me that he was, at last, absolutely convinced of himself and that his inferiority had gestated and swollen into this ultimate rejection of reality. His tormentor was but a shimmering smear at the periphery of his conscious
ness. He had almost forgotten that I dangled there, taunting, manipulating the strings of his puppet miracles. From the slights and insecurities of his childhood, I had constructed and coaxed a monster from those remains. Was he challenging me to murder him, to finish his abdicated self-killing? This Jesus labored beneath the misapprehension that he was the master of his own destiny and of mine. When disillusionment reached him, it would come brutally, mercilessly. I anticipated it with something close to joy.
JUDAS ISCARIOT, THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK, AND THE SUICIDES OF MONROE AND HEMINGWAY
November 22, 1988. The Vegas Club, a strip club in Dallas, Texas. Two writers, Norman Mailer and Barry Nathaniel Malzberg, are bivouacking there after fighting through the picket lines at the movie theatre to see The Last Temptation of Christ and Harvey Keitel’s flame-haired Judas Iscariot. On this of all days, it seems appropriate. Previously, Malzberg has caused scandals with the almost simultaneous publication of his dystopian novels, the suicidal Guernica Night, where “the final trip” is offered to all reaching the age of twenty-one, and The Destruction of the Temple, revisiting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Later, Mailer will almost simultaneously publish his Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man and Oswald’s Tale. Unconsciously, in the blacks of his unconscious, Mailer thinks of a novel that he will call The Gospel According to the Son. Dead presidents, classical composers, and religious figures were the meat of science fiction writers, appearing as automata and simulacra in the novels of 1960s and 1970s radicals. Bourbon is flowing. Cigarette smoke fills the lounge as “All Along the Watchtower” plays on the jukebox.
“Here is to Abraham, father of all of us lost Brooklyn Jews.”
“Yes, a toast to Abraham Zapruder.”
“Abraham Zapruder, who came from the Soviet Union to Brooklyn, and then here to Dallas with his 8mm camera, to accidentally film the assassination of our greatest president, Jack Kennedy, on this day twenty-five years ago.”
“And while Abraham Zapruder was settling in Dallas, after New York, Lee Harvey Oswald was unconsciously, inexorably, following him. I believe that in ’42, Oswald was in foster care in New York before enlisting with the marines and defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959. Like the prodigal son, Oswald returned to Dallas in 1962 and found himself a job at the Book Depository.”
“He was a marine who married a girl named Marina.”
“He beat the shit out of her, too.”
“Did you know that the Judas of Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan, his father was named Abraham, and he died of a heart attack on Jack Kennedy’s birthday, five years after the assassination?”
“Kennedy was wearing a back brace that afternoon, so that when the first shot struck him and passed through his throat, he could not fall.”
“This is the bar where Jacob Rubenstein met Candy Barr. Jack Ruby liked to carry a gun in a holster, a Colt .38, and Candy Barr’s stripper shtick was a cowgirl gig, with holsters, boots, six-shooters, and platinum blonde hair like Marilyn.”
“Monroe commits suicide three months after singing at Jack’s birthday party; some say she had a secret abortion right after. Dead, she’s apparently full of pills, but there was no running water in her room, and no glass. One year later Jack is killed, twenty-five years ago today.”
“When Ruby shot Oswald, he was supposed to be jacked up on Preludin. Ruby thought he was injected with cancer cells in custody, and he died of a pulmonary embolism and was riddled with cancer.”
“JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby all laid out in Parkland Hospital.”
“Behold the narrow gurney of the world!”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“Pernod!”
1998. PROVINCETOWN to Armageddon. Before letting it fall, Norman Mailer pinched the shining nickel coin between his thumb and forefinger, leaning over into the black funnel where the full panoply of his ghosts spun roaring like motorcyclists upon the wall of death. He wondered: How close can one get without jeopardy to the soul, sucking the teat, hammering in the nails? Why should I write this? Where is the audacity in the known course? Is there a sting of vigor in sparring with the crude styles of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the southpaw John, one piece of fiction taking on another for the provenance of the skull? Or is it all death? The novelist, like a pugilist winning on points as the rain thrashes his windowpanes in Provincetown, raising the penitent belt over his head, asks if the writer is cheapened by repetition where the painter is not. I am not afraid; what is one more portrait of Christ? The coin kept falling and made no splash. The well was truly without end. He felt a quiet fizzing in his kidneys and a momentary souring of his breath. He thought of tall buildings in Brooklyn Heights, Washington, D.C., filthy machine gun mountains in the Philippines, the Texas School Book Depository, and the glass mountain of his reputation, of Lucifer haunting the high peaks, Lucifer the bright star of the artist and the egomaniac. Mailer thought of his Judas: Jack Henry Abbott stabbing a waiter in the heart in the East Village, secretly suspecting and willing that Abbott would one day hang himself inside a prison that moaned like a whale. The contracted belly of the universe, a song of infinite pain, stalled in Mailer’s mind as he thought of how he might fail and write Jesus into heaven. Mailer poured a measure of orange juice from a cardboard carton into his glass of red wine. He was exhausted. After working at his words, writing about Judas, he fell asleep and dreamed of his idol, Ernest Hemingway. He felt himself switching skin.
Contemplating the moon-blue barrels of his shotgun, the old man recalled the fiestas of violence that his flesh had known. He saw bulls shift like black tornadoes, marlins opening the white waters of the capes, and virile shrapnel spread upon the hills of Europe like wasted youth. He had become an aficionado of death. He could hear the spooks closing in, the FBI rattling at his doors, the CIA tapping his telephone. The world was conducting a séance in his head. The metal of the gun tasted like old money.
THE GLITTERING SNAKE
Our wooden doors beat together in a storm, and rain wept through the lintel. Inside, by oil lamp, we—Jesus, Peter, Andrew, Philip, Nathaniel, and I, Judas—put our palms toward the small stove. Jesus told us of the violence at the Temple. Nathaniel, who remembered many things, recalled that it was written in the Psalms: “For the zeal of thine house hath devoured me, and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me,” and we were much confused by the sense of the words. Lightning hung in the charged sky, and I regarded the single white hair that had appeared on Jesus’ scalp.
“Do we have money for the market tomorrow, Judas?”
“Not much.”
“If the storm continues, we will not be able to fish.”
“Judas can pick pockets.”
There came a knock upon our door. At first we took it to be the wind, but then it came again, regular and fleshy from the fist in the street. And then we heard a man’s voice, low in register, calling: “Rabbi, I am Nicodemus of the Sanhedrin; please permit me to enter.”
I reached for my knife and whispered to Jesus: “The Judiciary, they have come after the outrage at the Temple.”
“Rabbi, we know that you are sent by God. Signs and wonders—” Before Nicodemus could finish, Jesus strode across the room, tore open the door, and dragged him in, as though he were a shepherd yanking a sheep though a narrow gate. Nicodemus was a perfumed and beautiful man in middle age. “Master,” he said, “master, no one can do these things, save you. God is with you.”
“This is a glittering snake,” I warned. “A flatterer from the Pharisees. They will draw you out.”
“Nicodemus,” Jesus spoke with infinite tenderness, as though he were soothing a child with fever. He placed both of his hands upon the Jew’s shoulders, purple-black silk flowing between his fingers, myrrh emanating from Nicodemus’ oiled and powdered skin; he reminded me of Herod with less money. “Favored Sanhedrin, known to all, I tell you that it is not enough to witness signals. Unless a man is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom.”
“Be born? Return to my mother’s womb? I cannot.”
“You must be born twice, once into the red slime of the world, and then again, through clear water and the Holy Spirit. That which is born flesh remains flesh and cannot enter the kingdom of God. See the bloodstained gates. Only that which is delivered Spirit may enter as Spirit. I am midwife to history.”
“I do not understand,” Nicodemus complained.
“And you call yourself a teacher.” Jesus spun on his heels and strode about the room. His chest heaved with contempt. Then he turned back and leveled his index finger at Nicodemus. “You comprehend not. Listen. None have ascended to heaven, save he who descended from heaven, the very Son of Man. And as your Moses lifted up the serpent in the wasteland, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have life eternal. He is not here as a weapon. He is here to save the world. But not to believe in him is death, the most abject death and a slaughter of the spirit, forever. The world is shrouded in the dark of men’s evil. He has not time for stories. Believe . . . or die.”
I watched a moth and her babies pour into our candle flame.
Now, John the Baptist was at Aenon, close to Salim, where the fronds of tall trees cast flickering light and shadow upon the tents and homes. Aenon was plentiful with water, where springs illuminated the yellow rocks and soft algae sent tendrils into the Jordan. John spent his nights in the cave Sapsaphas, where his shadow haunted him. His shadow was my brother Jesus, who also baptized close by. One night, Jesus and I visited John in his cave, lying down in the straw that he had spread there and eating bread and honey together.
