by James Reich
“I am a friend to the bridegroom and rejoice to be overshadowed,” John said. “More will come to you, and I will diminish, and this is as it must be. The Levite, Bud, informs me that the Pharisees already ask how you baptize, and they are concerned that you not become an influence. They intend to come here, warranted from Herod, and therefore you should leave, purchase more time.”
“It is a pity, John,” I told him.
Jesus left before dawn, traveling to Galilee, through Shechem, which is also known as Nablus, Samaria. Angled slabs tore out of the soil; trees splintered and blossoms sifted through the air; stone pillars projected from pools of fetid black water, and wolves howled in gardens of broken glass; and altars of gore buzzed in the morning sun. This had been the place where Abraham was given the land of Canaan, and the place where the children of Jacob avenged the rape of their sister, killing every inhabitant. On a small hill of grass, frame 313 of the Zapruder film was projected onto a fleece, stretched from ropes extending from the boughs of tall pistachio trees, and the trees were surrounded by disintegrating cigars, dollar bills, slimming pills, and strips of underwear. A woman was lying beside the well that was the well of Jacob. Jesus did not want to approach her, but his thirst was great.
“Woman,” he called out, “draw me some water from the well.”
The woman, who had been asleep, raised her face and squinted into the sunlight that was behind him. “Who are you to demand that of a Samaritan woman?”
“You should not ask, but you should give him water that asks, so that you may receive the living water of the Holy Spirit. Then, thirst will end. Go and fetch your husband and tell him this also.”
“I have no husband,” the woman told him, pulling her clothes about her.
“That is true. You can marry as many times as you have and still have no husband. All women are the brides of the Christ and not of men, or they are whores.”
“How many husbands have I had?”
“Five.”
“Huh. Is the Christ in Samaria, then?”
“I am he.”
The disciples arrived at that same place then, and Peter was distressed to find his teacher conversing with the Samaritan woman. “Rabbi, John has been arrested, and we left Aenon in terrible haste, not even bringing food. Why do you tarry with a woman here? We must go!” I saw to it that the woman spread word of our passing there. The woman, who was as superstitious as my mother, told everyone she met that the Messiah had baptized her with the moisture of his breath, and that he had known deep into her heart. And, as Shechem was ruptured by a thousand woes, drought, massacres, and disaster, there were many who wanted to believe her.
When we returned to Cana, where the wedding had been, a man accosted us in the street. I knew him as the rope-maker Marcus. His face was streaked blue and bruised with tears. “Judas, Judas, which of these men is the one who turned the water into wine at the wedding of Adiel and Chemda?”
“It is he, the one who looks like a sleepwalker.” I pointed to Jesus, who moved exhaustedly between the parrot stalls and the insect trays. “I will take you to him.”
“Blessings upon you, Judas. My son, they say, will die of his fever within the hour! I cannot bear it.”
“Jesus, this man is Marcus, the rope-maker. His son is sick. Dying.”
Jesus flashed me a look that only I could see, because I was anticipating it. With his eyes he asked me: dare I do this?
“Marcus,” I said softly, turning his body slightly away from Jesus with the crook of my arm, “who is the doctor who told you that your son will die within the hour?”
“Asa, the son of Eliezer.”
“Ah, yes, I know Asa,” I told him. Then, I knew that this was a coin toss. Asa was a pessimistic young man, inexperienced with fever, and one wont to hedge his bets. I steered the rope-maker back toward Jesus and said: “My master will see to this,” the words like bitter vomit in my throat, and I gave Jesus a delicate signal that told him that he had nothing to fear in projecting a miracle.
“Please come to my house before my son dies.”
You dare do this.
“I do not need to. Your son will live, because you believe in me.”
THE BATHS OF BETHZATHA
On Shabbat, we came to Jerusalem from the east, to the baths of Bethzatha with five porticoes. A blackening panther turned on a spit, sliced by the presiding Roman guards; a freckled man in a corset floated on his back, brain tissue protruded like a hernia from the right side of his skull, adrenal hemorrhaging killing his attempts to swim back to the tiled banks as he floated between the bloody heads of sheep that glared across the water; mutilations of failed suicides, leprosy, the half-murdered, a woman with a tumor bulging from her armpit with milk teeth and stiff black hairs; children with infected circumcision wounds swam ashamedly in the filthy currents; syphilitics smashed their brows against the stone pillars and collapsed unconscious into the shallows to heal or drown like witches; an algae of choleric vomit trailed below the surface, and excrement disintegrated in slow ripples behind the deformed, the diseased, and the dying. Several slumbered on collapsing piles of pallets, arranged with whatever towels and bedding that they could find.
I beheld him then at the midnight of his doubt.
“I cannot heal this!” Jesus gasped into my ear.
“You do not want to,” I reassured him. “You are not here to heal the sick, for the truly sick you cannot touch.”
Therefore, reflecting Skullhead, he went among them with his cyanide needles.
And certainly, there were many malingerers who, seeing the angel of death approaching, rose from their disgusting pallets and started away from him with cries of anguish. And he banished them from Bethzatha, calling: “Take thy bed and be gone!” And others he removed from their crippled misery by injecting them with cold, fatal potassium cyanide. This, I told him, was the crux of his aristocracy: one does not consort with whores and tax collectors for their own sake; one only does so because one believes that the shocking force of one’s will, or violence, will stop them from being whores and tax collectors; this is not tolerance. As the malingerers fled from the screaming porticoes, they passed Jews who pleaded with them: “It is unlawful for you to carry your pallet on the Sabbath!” And the malingerers replied that they had been made to leave their place of sickness by a tall and terrible blackhaired angel. The Jews resolved to discover this angel, but when they arrived in the bathing house, where the diseased lay dead upon the surface of the waters, Jesus had gone, and a wailing, red-eyed crowd was in his place. We fled into an alleyway where flies shot like pellets through the meat fumes, dust, and shadows. And in the same alleyway, we cornered one of the malingerers. Jesus stepped forward and the man forced himself into a crack between two houses.
“You see, you are not sick,” he said, and his words trailed with soundless but furious screaming as the tail of the comet that hung over his birth. “Abandon sin, that nothing worse than I visit you.”
“Master, I will, but who are you to clean out the cesspool?”
“I am the lamp at the summit of the earth, and where my light falls, all burn.”
Later, in the early evening, we were accosted by one of the black insects of the Sanhedrin, saying: “I believe that I know you. Myself, I mean you no malice, but if you work on the Sabbath, you cannot but bring the wrath of the Jews.”
“My father works still, and I am working.”
“You do not mean Joseph the carpenter.”
“No. And I tell you that I do nothing, nothing, by my own volition. I am a shuttle in the loom. Another hand moves me. For the hand loves the shuttle, and the shuttle knows nothing but the hand. For, as the Father raises the dead from the soil and gives them life, so the Son lets live whom he will. All judgment and disgust are in the Son who does his Father’s work. Therefore, those that honor the Son honor the Father. I stand at the sheep gate and let few beyond. And the hour is close where the sheeted dead will gibber in the streets of Jerusalem, and ac
ross the earth, splitting forth like grass, and I will move amongst them with a scythe. The entombed will claw from their discrete canyons, and I will part the field of the good and the evil without mercy.”
“You do not bear false witness?”
“Should I bear false witness and play the unfaithful bridegroom, my blade will be blunt and I shall be overwhelmed. Carrion birds will chew me off the altar. The one who sent John the Baptist sent me, as prophesied. John was one lamp that burned bright in the wasteland, and for a time, there was much rejoicing in his radius. There is a lighthouse at Alexandria. My gaze, that is a million suns, as an annihilating passion, makes this lighthouse a dull and fleeting spark from one poor anvil of man. You have not yet seen light. When a false prophet announces himself in the name of man, you are lenient and even tempted to follow him. Yet, when the Son announces himself in the name of the Father, you scurry from the lamplight to the shadows, seeking solace in the scriptures of man. Moses warned you about me, and now Moses condemns you in your disbelief! I will accuse you to the Father, for if you cannot believe the writing of Moses, then you cannot believe in my words. You pay lip service to Scripture and secretly hope that all is false while you live in the aristocracy of your false spirit! As you scorn me this moment, you will be scorned eternal.”
“Rabbi, you are right, and I do not desire the end of the world. I have witnessed many men claim to be the Messiah, and each time, I rejoice in his delusion, for I know that we are truly saved, not by his coming, but by his absence. It cannot and must not be true. I do not believe that you are the Messiah, but I suffer that you are the closest and latest.”
And Jesus said: “That is not enough.”
And the Sanhedrin said: “It will suffice. I will grow into an old man, and keep a quiet counsel, long after you are crucified for sedition.”
THE BIRTH OF JESUS
That night, as I slept in the bed beside him in the house that we rented, Jesus shivered in his dreams and the blood-straw circumstances of his birth, the death plunge of the comet, the hot breath of the oxen, the luxuries his father had stolen in order to build a new life for Mary and himself, Joseph, master carpenter and cheap cuckold. There he lay, born between beasts and the sparkling promise of the occult in the night sky. My mother had watched the comet also . . . Sweet Judas, she crooned, as I began to slip from her womb. The umbilicus was about my throat, the guilty cable of her body seeking its moment. Her cunt contracted on my neck. My feet kicked and my body twisted there, and I escaped the death that some perverse part of the world desired for me. And one escape demands another, and even the asphyxia of Houdini does not kill the spectacle, the revolt against the casts and caskets of our being.
We went to the house of Zebedee, an old man full of rage at his coming death, and his wife Salome, who was the sister of Jesus’ mother Mary and midwife at his birth. We would have their twin sons James and John follow us.
“Please do not take my sons with you,” Salome pleaded. “In a dream I saw the sword of another Herod cutting them down, and Jesus too. I saw your corpse in a wet cave, and I was anointing you with spices and oil because you had been crucified and lay in the poverty of death. Why would you destroy your mother?”
“I have none. I am come to end the work of women.”
But Zebedee railed: “Take them! Make more than ash of them, and let one or both be martyred so that they will not fade and palsy like their father.”
“I will give your sons the power to cast out demons,” by which Jesus meant to forget their earthly parents and to see the world as ghostly and damned.
And the sons of thunder were desperate to leave their house.
We found Thomas, who had also been called Judas Thomas, the twin, working at his taxidermy business, where he fingered and stitched the wounds of the dead. A small bell sounded as we opened his splintered wooden door. A Levite gang had smashed their way in and stolen his scalpels and most of his savings, and now the floor was littered with mutilated owls, torn cats, and hanks of the fleece stuffing that he used to preserve the animals. He was called T’oma, or twin, after rumors concerning the ghastly effigy of himself that he constructed by night. The floor was slick with embalming fluids.
“I have no more faith in men,” he said, “but I will go with you, since there is nothing left for me here. Would that I had constructed a mannequin of myself; then I would have made it keep vigil from my window by a single lamp to threaten the bastards in the streets while I am gone!”
Also, we found Jude Thaddeus. We discovered him in one of the bleak and labyrinthine places of the city, beating a Roman sentry to death with his club. Alcohol fumes shrouded him. “Be careful that none of us are seen here,” Jesus warned. Jesus loved him, for Jude Thaddeus would follow a raindrop to the floor of the sea and drown trying.
The rest of the twelve were Matthew the tax collector, whom we kidnapped as he came rattling our door one night seeking tithes for the Occupation; Simon the Zealot, who wore a knife belt carved with the notches of the dead; and James, the son of Alphaeus, who was simple and quiet as a shadow.
THE ENDLESS FEAST
To my discomfort, word of the carpenter’s son who could work miracles and who spoke with the obscurity and violent determination of a prophet spread rapidly as ink; the indelible and confused Rorschach of his reputation went out before him, so that when we went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias, a vast and muttering crowd followed behind us, believing that they had seen and would see the lifting of disease, the straightening of twisted limbs, and the washing clear of cataracts with a breath. We looked back at the city, the jaundiced abutments and projections, the soft and crumbling sandstone, and the red dirt blown up from the marketplace. I walked at the head of our twelve, and many of those behind us assumed that I must be the Messiah and would call out and wave their arms at me in supplication. “Lord, thou art beautiful,” they cried. “Stop and speak with us.”
In silence, I climbed a great hill, listening to rubble cracking and falling down behind, and the multitude went after me, until I reached the summit with the twelve, and all others fell still before sitting down on the hard and gritted slope. Then we also were seated on the ground, except for Jesus, who stretched out his arms and in the rising sun sent a black shadow down into the valley. The people who had called out to me were ashamed and experienced the fear that came suddenly to the goats that had followed my traitor goat to the killing place, the bloody tree in Kerioth where I had come from.
“Judas here is our treasurer,” Jesus addressed them, pointing to me. “How much money do we have, Judas?”
“None,” I said, shaking my empty pouch.
“How much would it take to feed these who hunger?”
From below us on the slope, an aged voice called out: “That boy there, he has a spit of six dried fish on his shoulder. And I have one hunk of bread in my sleeve!” The boy stood up and danced in place, waving his spit of fish over his head. The people laughed together. And when the old man held up his fistful of stale bread, the people cheered him.
Another in the crowd cried: “You see: even if we had two hundred denarii we would all still go hungry. And besides, comfort does not go where it should.”
“Sit down, sit down,” Jesus urged, and as the old man crossed his feet again, he wondered how he had not noticed the luxurious grass beneath him before. “Man deceives himself with so much concern for nourishing his flesh. Let each of you take one flake of fish from this boy and one crumb of bread from this old man here and know that the soft and watery sounds from your bellies are as nothing to the crying and howling of your hungry ghosts in flames if you do not feed your spirit. Gather the fragments, and let nothing be wasted here! I am the bread of life, and he who believes in me shall know not hunger nor any thirst.”
Simon the Zealot whispered: “Rabbi, there are spies here, a glint of metal in the crowd.”
“A sword?”
“Perhaps.”
A wom
an called out: “Some of us here know you as the son of Mary and Joseph. How do you now tell us that you are descended from heaven?”
“You who speak of mothers and fathers,” he answered, “your mothers and fathers ate manna in the terrible wilderness and they perished in knots of empty agony. Here is the bread of heaven, sent that those who eat of it shall know life eternal. If anyone eats of this bread, they shall shirk death and live forever. The bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh!” The morning sun sent a red smear across his face.
The Jews did not understand.
“Cannibalism?” They knew of the mythology of the god Pan, who also taught with wine and who was torn in pieces and devoured by his disciples, blood flowing through their teeth as they hunted him on the mountainside. “How can you give us skin and blood to eat?”
“Truly, truly, I tell you: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life here or hereafter. But he who eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood will be raised up on the last day of the universe. Repeat this when you return to your synagogues at Capernaum.”
“This man is a demon!”
Jesus climbed upon a rock to better cast his eyes over the multitude. “There are some of you who do not believe. You are so made that you never shall. You are not at fault, because the Father does not allow all men to believe.”
“Why?” The boy who had brought the fish heard this and asked with great concern and sadness. “Why is this?”
