I, Judas

by James Reich

  “Some of you are going to die. Even cities will be damned where I am not heard.”

  And a wave of pain and disgust passed through them all, as wind passes through a field of grass. It was a morning of great disillusionment and confusion, and it was the morning when the twelve were scattered. In the chaos and incongruity of that grassy knoll, we had gone as far as we could without a script. All conspiracies flowed into one river of turbulent screaming. I swam within it. Attending closely to him, I sensed Jesus beginning to swoon. I reached for him, wrapping one arm about his waist and pushing my shoulder under his, so that he hung on me in half cruciform as he spoke. “This is an evil generation.” He tried to call out, yet fear constricted his throat so that these words came as a whisper to my ears alone. Jesus stared out over the multitude. To him, they had become a jellied swarming of eyes and a gnashing of teeth. He saw the demonic lump of thousands of men, women, and children spreading beneath him over the lilied grass. It was a tumor congregation of scorpions, serpents, and fish with parched mouths. He was struggling for new words. I perceived the ache in him to cast a net of compassion and love over the mass, and his shame at the bile that rose within him with each new attempt. Jesus raged against the realization that love had its limits, even in he who desired to treat the world in a way that he had not been treated. And I knew that his fear and suspicion of me had grown into a fear and suspicion of all.

  “I am confused, Judas,” he said. He spoke the word with the disbelief that I had heard actors portray when they say I am poisoned, or I am dying, or I am killed. Upon the green hill, he was like a wounded man with no one to seek sympathy from, save for the one who wounded him. A silence engulfed us, sealing us in like a transparent eggshell while the world roiled outside. Jesus’ face contorted with hatred against me. He gritted his teeth so fiercely that I thought I heard them cracking. And his tearing eyes asked: How did I get here? Judas, you brought me to this!

  THE MOTORCADE

  The first of twin American catastrophes that would hold the world on a pin: Marilyn rode him like a hurricane of silk, the cranium exploding like a shower of silver coins, traces of red in her hair as she blew him a kiss from the scaffolded birthday. I have his brains in my hand. Bob Dylan whined on a distant transistor radio. Abraham! Autumn shades of his scalp, the fall and flow of blood-soaked ticker tape. Shell casing shucked from moon rocket and bullet. Lincoln’s scalp flapping like the hood of some blue-black automobile that bore his name.

  In Dallas, jackals careened about the passenger door. Scarlet broth ran down her sunglasses. His back brace held him corseted to his cross, and the shot pealed again. Sometimes I forget that I am flying and then look out the aircraft window. The motorcade was a rolling tombstone. Traveling slower than the bullet, the sound arrived late, after his throat had opened like a Bible. The audience contracted and began to split, a serpent skin of Mylar, nylon, denim, fabrics of the future. The sky is as blue as old meat. No matter how many times I fly into New York, the atrocities still catch me in the intake of sky. The sun has died many times; the night is cold—what technique. Do the dead know what time it is? How many dead or alive?

  Time is overlain, superimposed; mariners are fused disgustingly with the bulkheads and cupolas as the ship materializes again. Planes fly into buildings; firemen swim like cripples in dry rubble; policemen weep in some lunar landscape; fully grown we send our groggy spawn into the wasteland, stumbling from the wreck in asbestos crowns—the difference being that the Kennedy assassination, the Zapruder film, is a historical event; the crucifixion of Christ is a literary event; the testament is an exquisite corpse, the edited and confused messianic body. Out of the ash I come with my red hair.

  The myths must be domesticated.

  THE BROTHEL IN BETHESDA

  The autopsy of John F. Kennedy took place at Bethesda

  Naval Hospital, Friday, November 22, 1963. He was embalmed at Bethesda. When I think of Jesus, I remind myself: “I have his brain in my hands.” Sometimes, I think of Oswald’s biblical opacity:

  REPORTER: “Did you shoot the President?”

  OSWALD: “I have not been accused of that.”

  Jacob Rubenstein ran a brothel in Bethesda, frequented by Pharisees and Levite gang members. His favored moll was named Candy Barr. The brothel had a saloon area downstairs. I, Judas, and my brother Jesus were seated at the bar close to Rubenstein—behind it, tending—and his girl crooning at him over an untouched martini.

  “Ruby, this drink is so dry. Is there nothing sweet behind your bar?”

  “Oh, she’s a smartalek, see?” he said to us, nodding in her direction. “Here.” He dropped a cherry into her glass. “And here are some Turkish sweets from the fucking Arabs. Sheesh! I swear they’re smothering me.”

  Candy Barr looked through Jesus as though he were a transparency, her eyes doleful and despondent, a woman frustrated by a half-glimpsed ghost, not suspecting how fully she would one day realize him when incarceration and fear had beaten her down. The dirt floor was strewn with disintegrating rose petals. The bar was painted yellow to crudely suggest gold. Behind it, behind Rubenstein, was a mural of a black stallion. Rubenstein called Candy Barr “the foxiest piece of ass in the Levant,” a platinum blonde possessed of a Babylonian voluptuousness.

  Jacob Rubenstein was riddled with cancer, bright spores foregathered in his lungs, silent, unknown. His hair was thin yet neatly palmed back from his brow, which joined the arc of his nose, hooking down like some stylized bird or one of the harpies of William Blake. His mood swung like a hanged man from the comedic to the violently grotesque. The unconscious suspicion that his death was not to be a distant episode rendered him by turns fearful, paranoid, and gregarious.

  “You know who has the shortest life expectancy in any Roman legion?” he asked. “It’s the schmuck who carries the Eagle!” He laughed and threw his large head back, coughing.

  “Last week,” he began, subtly indicating a shadowy gang in the corner of the room as he wiped a glass, “I heard a rumor that some Levites were ambushed up in the hills, surrounded by bandits. The bandits told the Levites that they might be spared and allowed to go free if they surrendered the leader of the gang.”

  “What became of them?” Jesus asked.

  “You know that the leader of the pack wears the fanciest leather jacket, right? Well, he knew, and most of the others conceded that he had worked too hard to get that beautiful leather jacket. So, the Levites secretly drew lots and swapped their jackets, so that one of the whelps was taken instead. They dressed him up like the main man, and the bandits were satisfied in killing him. They flogged and shot him with stones against a tree.”

  “They were satisfied,” Jesus said.

  “The feebleminded make totems of other men. Wars are waged against abstract kings, leaders, and the notional states of man. Yet, it is true that the death of a king can assuage all the pain, the unremitting fears and disgusts of entire nations. Or, like the Romans pursuing zealous guerrillas into the mountain caves, they want the figurehead, as if killing him would avenge the worst insults and end the carnage of all their superstitions. Kill the king, smash the designated figurine, and all the foul enigmas of war and violence and conspiracy might end. So go the dreams.”

  I held Jesus by his elbow and explained to him: “What men desire is a King of kings.”

  Jacob said: “One final schmuck to bear the Eagle into Eternity.”

  But Jesus’ eyes were fixed upon the television images jerking to and fro from the dying set across the high corner of the bar. On the grimy screen, a motorcade flashed in and out of existence.

  “What a thing it would be to arrive in Jerusalem like that!” he said.

  “Yes, you on a donkey!” Ruby laughed again.

  “What the world desires is a scapegoat,” I said. “When one of the boys from Bethesda took out a centurion’s eyeball with his slingshot, the tetrarch made certain that a boy, any boy, was arrested immediately and his eye put out in kind: atonement
not by the culprit but by the innocent. It has a potent hold over the people. It calms the garrison’s nerves to have taken an eye for their eye. You see, Jesus, at times, the more meaningless and misplaced the retribution, the sacrifice of whatever lamb is at hand, the better to still the blood of the offended and to cancel the guilt of the many. What the world demands is a universal scapegoat.”

  A voice called out from the television static above the bar, sounding like a man drowning in ants. “They’re taking me in because I lived in the Soviet Union. I’m just a patsy!”

  And so, at dawn, we entered Jerusalem in triumph. The Levite gang leader Nitzan, or Bud, rode a Triumph Tiger: the kind of wild horse that had thrown Bob Dylan and that had lain burning bright in the forests of Woodstock. The large cyclopean headlamp of his machine probed into the remaining shadows of the night, and the 500cc engine roared our arrival. Others in the gang rode motorcycles called Trophy, the same ridden by James Dean. The chrome machines of the Levites reared up like furious horses as they cranked their throttles open, hosts of studded leather jackets shining in the sanguine morning sun. Some would roar ahead and then bank sharply, rear wheels sending wings and waves of dust into the air before returning to the pack. I walked at the front. Jesus was back in the midst of it, riding a young donkey, swathed in a blanket of red, white, and blue. For the moment, he was invisible, obfuscated by the grit of the road, the smoke and mirrors of the motorcade. I remembered the imaginary city that I had teased Jesus with in our childhood. The titanic glowing blocks of the Western Wall were interspersed with scripts and weeds.

  The ticker tape began to fall, at first a few flakes and coils and then a steady stream of paper fragments. It filled the streets, resembling the chaff-covered floor of the carpenter’s studio in our memories. It blew in clouds behind the Levite motorcycles. I bent down and grasped a fistful of it, all shreds threshed off the bodies of liturgy, as soon Jesus’ flesh would be strapped and scourged from his torso.

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE SUICIDES OF SAUL AND HIS ARMOR BEARER

  I stared out across the battlefield from borrowed eyes. One thousand years before, since I had traversed into anachronism through hanging, I was Saul, first and cardinal king of the Israelites, a leader of donkeys but anointed to become leader of men by Samuel, the rebel judge.

  “Saul, King.” It was the voice of my armor bearer, high and thin on the wind beside me, barely more than a child. “Please, my Lord, let our eyes be sharp.”

  Mount Gilboa was awash with blood, scrawled with entrails, and blocked with corpses. Within the gore and trampled irises of the slopes, three of my elder sons, Abinadab, Jonathan, and Malchishua, lay dead. Though I was still abstracted from them, I was aware of the grip of grief in my chest. Philistine arrows stuck from their graying bodies. I could hear my armor bearer pleading with me again as my eyes flickered between the falling ticker tape as Jesus and I entered Jerusalem, and the cascade of deadly splints raining from the Philistine archers massed about us on Mount Gilboa. Suddenly, they set in place, and with that a terrible awareness of my existence as Saul, leader of the Israelites, flooded me with pain and confusion.

  “Lord,” the youth entreated me again, “though the Philistines have defeated you, remain, and be as our king, with strength and dignity in warring. Take heart.”

  “Boy, do you not see that despair has entered my pores?”

  “Saul, King, I see only the bloodstained face of my Lord, once a herder of the tribe of Benjamin, and I remember well the ruthlessness of my king who massacred the Ammonites, who wiped out the Amalekites!”

  “Yes, I remember the work. The placenta was still wet on the babies as we slew them and their mothers and as we killed the men, the runt animals, and the aged.”

  “You were king, in spite of God! And you stood with and also firm against the agent David, whom God sent from the treacherous tribe of Judah.”

  “True, I lent him my armor to face the monster from Gath, Goliath. We loved and hated David, held him close, and hunted him in exile. He brought me two hundred Philistine foreskins to buy marriage to my daughter.”

  “And he sought to murder you! He failed, and here, you live, despite God. Live now, and live again.”

  “I cannot.”

  “My Lord.” The boy began to weep.

  The Philistines massed about us, teeth frothed with spittle, short swords dripping upon the scarlet grass.

  I took the boy’s shoulder. “Last night, I consulted the Witch of Endor, in the black trees of the summit. She summoned the shade of the judge-prophet Samuel. And the hag and the ghost told me that I would die here today.” I thought of the engraving of my collaboration with the witch by Gustave Doré. I thought of Custer, the red-haired Son of the Morning Star, surrounded by the Cheyenne and Lakota, putting his revolver to his heart. “Now, take my sword and run me through the chest,” I commanded the boy, knowing that he could not do it. The boy shook his head silently. An arrow tugged through my sword arm, and the boy cried out. I passed my sword into my left hand, pressing the hilt against a stone, and I pushed and pulled myself onto it. Impaled on sorrow, like Ajax, I watched the boy do the same. And then I saw the witch, hanging in the darkness.

  Bud, leader of the Levite motorcycle gang, called back over his black leather shoulder: “Rabbi, you can’t say that Jerusalem doesn’t love you.” From all vantages there was celebration, and the Roman soldiers let us enter unmolested, despite the orgy of joy inspired by our engines. All the while, in the center of the motorcade, Jesus rode solemnly on his donkey.

  As the motorcade went on into Jerusalem, I thought also of the suicidal King Abimelech at the siege of Thebes. I saw him running at the burning Theban gates at the brink of taking the city, when at last a woman forces a millstone over the ramparts, which smashes the king’s skull like clay beneath a hammer. His armor bearer hastens to his side, staring stricken at the hanks of bloody hair and the hemisphere of bone hanging at his master’s face. “Boy, you must help me take my own life. Help me with this sword; I am too weak, but let me not die by a woman’s hand . . .” I thought also of Ahithophel, astrologer at the court of King David and grandfather of Bathsheba, hanging himself in despair; and of Zimri, who betrayed and murdered his master King Elah to become king of Israel for seven days before immolating his own palace and burning himself to death inside it. Market traders came forward and gave us food and wine.

  “This will be a good supper, eh, Judas?” Nathaniel said.

  We stayed several days in Jerusalem before the end came.

  There were several suppers, where I told the others who remained of the twelve of acts of their master that only I had witnessed, since I was his brother.

  THE OCCUPATION OF GERASENES

  One time, we went to Gerasenes in the east, where Jesus had learned of a man possessed by a profound darkness. At the edge of the city was a great necropolis, with innumerable tombs and graves slanting in the vivid sunlight. The city itself, a place of pale amphitheatres and columns erected under the Roman Occupation, was haunted by the possessed man who, by night, howled in the graveyard, clawing up clots of earth and snapping the bones he found beneath with grotesque muscles and terrible strength. Sometimes, it was rumored, he would run as fast as men imagined that an angel may move, his blackened loins beating against his foul powerful thighs and abdomen. His arms appeared to be filled with ships’ ropes, and his eyes wheeled a hurricane of grief, a vortex of dying stars. He was a necrophile and a cannibal. All hope of imprisoning him had been abandoned. He had ripped garrison soldiers’ arms from their sockets, and he spread his excrement on the pale tombs in the moonlight. He broke any chain that could be put upon him. The citizens of Gerasenes entreated us not to visit the sepulchers after sundown.

  As we passed between the white stone columns that marked the gate, we smelled the human soil that had been spattered upon them. The moon lit a cloudless sky, so that despite the late hour, it was as dusk to us. Jesus abandoned his lantern, as I did mine. He moved with del
iberate heavy footsteps, scuffing the dirt, intent on arousing the possessed man from his reeking cave. And soon, he was upon us. He was as tall as Samson and black with the decay he cavorted in. I felt for my dagger. But Jesus lunged forward and gripped the man by his hair.

  “Are you possessed of an evil spirit?” Jesus demanded.

  The giant roared, rolled his head, and stepped back, leaving Jesus clutching the revolting hair that had pulled from his scalp. Without another sound, the creature fell at Jesus’ knees.

  “Demon inside this man, tell me your name!”

  “My name is Legion, because we are so many.” He was possessed a thousand times, and he was a metaphor for Rome. The bats clung inside the belfry of his head and chewed the fat on the rungs of his ribs and did not want to be expelled from their occupation.

  “Demons! I send you out of this man in the name of God, my father!”

  At this, the demons exploded from the man’s mouth and sought new refuge, entering a large herd of pigs that was close at hand. Jesus then pursued them until the animals fell from the crags to a lake far below, where they were drowned in the moonlight.

  I taught Jesus to look below the surface, to look behind mirrors, to be witness to his own exquisite passion, without exposing it as mine. In this way, he might be the revolutionary to destroy the Roman Occupation, to drive the legions out. But the people of the city were afraid and angry that their pigs had been driven to their death, all to leave one hapless man shivering in the graveyard.

  THE ASSASSINS AT BABYLON

  Meanwhile, Jude Thaddeus had become dispirited and confused. He left us and went east to Babylon, the city between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates that is also called Babel. He sojourned in the hanging gardens of the feral King Nebuchadnezzar II, who had once driven the Jews from Jerusalem, five hundred years before. This was also the place of the abandoned great ziggurat of Etemenanki that some know as the Tower of Babel. Simon the Zealot also came there, since both men sought confrontation and were not patient with the narrative trajectory of Jesus. Jude Thaddeus went with his nail-studded club and Simon the Zealot with his skinny knife and belt of kill notches. They climbed high inside the ziggurat and camped there, watching the lamplights of the city, the Persian lanterns in the arched and vaulted gardens, and the candlelight in the mud homes. They lit no fire but remained warm inside black fleeces and shawls, hidden in the night, plotting from the decaying balustrades and promontories of the tower. They spoke in whispers, careful that their words were not amplified by the resounding stones.