I, Judas

by James Reich

  “This was the city of Nebuchadnezzar, who waged war on our tribes,” said Jude Thaddeus. “The same king who set up gold as his god, and whose fornications rotted his sex and sent him mad into the caves and dung of his old age, dog-nailed and ruined. He became part wolf, like the vile suckling twins of Rome. This tower, unfinished, is testament to the righteousness and power of our Lord against all of those who would oppose us.”

  “Yet, Jesus hesitates. He meanders and shrugs close to the wall like a virgin ignored at a wedding.” Simon grazed his knife along the granite balcony, keening the edge. “I think that we were chosen because he wanted us, with a stomach for the fight, to run where he feared to walk. To dirty our hands, in contrast to his continual anointments.”

  “He sends his followers back to the synagogue, when he should be sending them to war. For better or worse, the fist changes more than philosophy.” And holding out his club, Thaddeus said: “There is no better argument than this.”

  “Tomorrow, we will seek and destroy the two Abyssinian sorcerers Aphraxat and Zaroes. Now we are assassins for the word,” Simon determined.

  The following morning, Thaddeus and Simon came down from the tower and went quietly to the hanging gardens that were a wonder of Babylon. They moved softly through the figs and fly traps, the tuberose and orchids. The vines pulsed ichors about them. There, in the gardens, Aphraxat and Zaroes kept a pair of tigers in a gilded cage. The sorcerers extracted milk and bile from the tigers with long, delicate needles that they would extend between the bars. When Thaddeus and Simon came upon the tigers, they were sleeping in the dawn sun. Their bodies heaved slow fire. Their breath was strong. The floor of the cage was stained with dried blood. With his thin dirk of a knife, Simon tampered with the locks on the cage, weakening them before he climbed into the canopy of creepers and flora, where Judas Thaddeus had already made cover.

  When the Abyssinians came to the clearing where their tiger cage was, Simon whispered that they were as black as coals. The men had gashed rivulets in their cheeks and ivory hanging from their earlobes, and they wore cloaks of bright orange and black. Aphraxat approached the sleeping tigers, trailing his long fingers against the hardwood bars that held them from him. The animals raised their heads and flexed their feet, rising slowly. They walked with a bright and awful power, as of a forest fire. The Abyssinian pulled a key on a thong from within his cloak. Zaroes carried a sack of goat meat, buzzed with flies. The fly traps mouthed at them from across the arcade. It was the custom of the Abyssinians, each morning, to open the cage and to step inside to feed the tigers. Aphraxat opened the locks, barely noticing the way that the key felt looser inside the mechanism. The sorcerers stepped inside, and the tigers ate the meat from the men’s hands, licking at their fingers. As usual, they stepped back outside the cage as soon as possible, before the appetite of the animals could increase. Aphraxat put his key back into the first lock. The key turned, but the mechanism did not. The dark men exchanged a look of confusion and disbelief. Again, the key turned uselessly in the lock, and the men began to speak rapidly. The tigers moved closer to the bars and the broken locks. Zaroes grabbed at the key to try it in another lock, and in doing so, he pulled the gate open and screamed. The pair of tigers roared from their prison, falling upon the two men and tearing them to pieces. Then they went about the gardens and streets of Babylon killing anyone that crossed their path. Simon and Jude Thaddeus ran behind them, crying out in joy and finishing off the wounded men, women, and children by club and dagger.

  The pair of tigers fled the city, bloodied and sated. Some, in their terror, confused them with the disciples, who yet remained, shrouded in a miasma of gore and mystery. They came to the palace of the Duke Baradach. They panted at the palace walls.

  “It was more than I imagined.”

  “It was a bloodbath.”

  Both men began to weep, exhausted.

  They let themselves be seized by the palace guard and brought before the duke. The palace was filled with black idols. Baradach was engrossed in study of a large battle map that was spread out across most of the floor. Figurines of elephants and legions of soldiers were arranged upon it. His face was contracted with frustration. Without taking his eyes from the map that ranged into India, he extended his arm and pointed his finger at his captives.

  “You set tigers upon my city and rendered my idols mute when I need to hear them most! Nothing speaks to me, not the ebony statues that house the gods, nor the priests, nor my generals, nor the beetles on the floor. You have set my city in shock. I am about to go to war, and you have put a silent plague upon us.”

  “Your idols never spoke to you,” said Simon the Zealot. “You heard voices, but they were your own fancy. There are no voices but Jesus, the Nazarene.”

  “Liar! Let me set my cuff about your filthy mouth.” Baradach walked across the map and struck each of them with the back of his hand. “What do you want?”

  Jude spoke: “We could have gone on killing. We might have slain every beating heart in Babylon. But we come to you to die, murdering ourselves. You and your priests will live, and you will crucify us, knowing and fearing what we might have done, had we not chosen our death over yours. A holy war cannot be won. Therefore, martyrdom.” And so the two were crucified, hanging from trees in Babylon.

  THE ETEMENANKI HOTEL

  Something had gone before us, a kind of notoriety, so that we passed easily through the checkpoint into the DMZ. Jesus and I enjoyed the streets. Journalists reclined in deck chairs or pivoted on cane seats, arranging themselves between the palm trees, where electric lights had been strung, and the graffiti metal barricades. They dressed in creamy linen suits, Panama hats, and sunglasses. They sipped coffee and cocktails, wiped sweat from their rosy necks, and looked nervously toward the slightest friction, as though waiting for the first detonation of the hydrogen bomb. A naked Persian boy moved between the geometries of deck chairs and outstretched espadrilles, shaking a mortar-shell casing filled with ice. “Martini, Martini, Singapore Sling strong enough to take down Goliath!”

  A tank round had struck the Etemenanki Hotel during the night, and the literate internationals had been forced to lounge elsewhere. Part of the ziggurat structure of the hotel gaped and let in the indifferent morning sunlight, torn red drapes flapping from the fissure like strange tongues. Several ladies and gentlemen of the press, aid organizations, and political monitors had been killed in the blast, and now it was a somber morning of sunburn and stoicism. There were no miracles in the DMZ, no repeal of leper skin, no multiplication of food or unraveling of twisted limbs, only the louche certainty that the universe was without pity and that wine was less expensive than water.

  And so, Jesus stood up before the journalists.

  “The utterances of dark rooms shall be heard in the light,” he said. “Privation’s whispers shall be yelled from rooftops, the hypocrisy of Pharisees exposed. Of this world, report you well and truly. Comrades, do not fear the murderers of flesh, for when flesh is gone, what more can they do? Instead, fear the caretaker and harvester of all flesh who after he has killed has yet the power to cast it into Hell. He counts your eyelashes, the fronds of hair against your brow, weighs you, and wants to find you valuable. Yet, he will not always find you so. The angels of God will bar and prevent you if you do not follow me. Though you may libel me, this flesh Son of Man, you will be forgiven. But, blaspheme against the Holy Ghost and you will be tortured and torn asunder in eternity, as was Prometheus.” A flock of black birds hung over the wreckage of the Etemenanki Hotel. “Consider ravens that neither reap nor sow. Yet, God feeds them.”

  “Are we to be as those carrion birds?” asked a young woman stenographer, adjusting her pencil skirt in the desert heat.

  “And gamble the integrity of our bodies and brains on your afterlife?” spoke another.

  “Nihilist,” muttered an embedded military journalist.

  I lit a cigarette and sat down in a vacant deck chair as Jesus continued to improvise
for the multitude.

  “Faithless ones. Do not ask whence your next meal, next drink, or your clothing will come, nor be wracked with anxieties over your survival in this world. These concerns are so universal as to be trivial. Surely, you have witnessed the hungry banality of all the nations of the earth? Instead, seek the Kingdom of the Lord. Sell your possessions and renounce kith and kin. Be a purse of flesh filled with an immutable currency that no thief may steal, nor no moth devour. For the end will come when you least expect it.”

  “Look at the hotel, Nazarene. Go and insult the dead there.”

  Then, as Luke tells it, Jesus in fury said: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and I wish that it were already burning! Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you! I have come to bring division! Father will be divided against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother; all men against all women and all women against all men; skin versus skin! I will bring down tall buildings of flame upon your heads as I did at Siloam. I will permit no DMZ on this planet! Let the war be brought into every home and heart!”

  With that, Jesus abandoned the journalists and swept on, deeper into the city of Jerusalem. He went hurried and sweating, and moreover, as the Gospels recall, he turned back over his shoulder and called out: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, if he does not hate his very own life, then he cannot be my disciple!” Some who were walking after us halted in their tracks. “The law and the prophets were until John. Since then, the good news of the Kingdom of God is preached, and every one enters it violently.”

  “Rabbi,” a young man called out, “if I hate my wife, should I divorce her?”

  “Any man who divorces his wife and marries again is an adulterer. And any man who marries a divorced woman also commits the sin of adultery.”

  The young man also fell away in confusion and disappointment.

  Some Pharisees who did not love bloodshed approached from the wings of the market, scattering monkeys and peacocks and spilling fresh figs from baskets. “Sir, you must get out of Jerusalem at once. Herod wants to kill you.”

  “Herod wants to kill me? That fox!”

  “Forgive me,” one of them said, in a tone of sympathy, “but I have witnessed prophets with scattershot revolutionary manifestos before, and you need not die here for such whimsical, violent talk.”

  “I will remain here in spite of Herod, the coward. For it cannot be that a prophet die away from his own land, even if it hears him not. O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, murderer of prophets, stoning the messengers dispatched to your vaulted ears and womb. I would gather your forsaken children beneath my great wings like a mother hen gathering her brood about her.” Simon Peter and Andrew, who had been fishermen and were strong, caught up with us and pulled Jesus into a narrow side street, away from the crowds. “Master, please be careful.”

  “The days are coming when you will desire to see me,” Jesus said, “but you will not. It is necessary that I suffer many torments and be rejected by this generation, right, Judas? Then, suddenly, I will bring apocalypse. It will be as it was in the time of Noah, when the world turned softly, and people lived their lives, ate, drank, married, bore children, and were content, until Noah closed the cargo doors on the ark and the Flood killed every one of the soft, drifting people. Noah did not look back. In the days of Lot, when the city of Sodom was destroyed with unspeakable righteous fire and rains of brimstone, so it will be when I unveil my apocalypse. It will be sudden. Remember Lot’s wife. Do not look back. Do not try to save anything. He who seeks to gain his life will forfeit it. Of two identical men in the same bed, only one will be taken. Of twin sisters, one will remain. There will be such a night there.”

  “Where, Lord?” asked Andrew.

  “Where the body is, there the vultures will gather.”

  In truth, the remaining disciples did not understand, but each feared to appear ignorant, and since Jesus had already told them that one of them would betray him, all feared the appearance of dissent.

  THE EMPTY HOUSE

  We went about the city after nightfall, seeking an empty house to squat in, and we went to the district of the whores, where the chained hounds Gog and Magog kept guard at either end of the street. Where there were no lamps burning, I listened at the latches and windows, squinted through keyholes. Several times I found the lightless house to be occupied with sleeping whores, sometimes twenty sprawled upon pallets, glistening in the moonlight, a silver mist of sex rising from their bodies.

  Finally, we found an empty building. I used my knife to pick the lock, and we hastened inside. Matthew, who had been a tax collector, put red veils in the windows, and James and John, the sons of Zebedee, poured oils into the empty lamp vessels. Thomas, who was also called Judas the Twin, found stale bread in a cupboard. Peter and Andrew worked with the cold coals of the fireplace. Nathaniel found some wine in a filthy bottle that he cleaned with his spittle and a portion of his clothing before pulling out the cork. Jesus reclined upon a pallet, watching. “We will need more food than this. Judas, you are treasurer. Will you go out and buy whatever you can? Tomorrow night will be our last supper together.” I closed the door behind me and listened to the sounds of a chair being dragged against it as I inhaled the patchouli, wines, oils, and sweat of the night.

  “Judas!” A voice came from the darkness in a stage whisper.

  “Mary.” Suddenly, I knew what I might buy.

  I would proffer Magdalene all the money that we had in that tight purse, and in the morning, returning to Jesus and the remaining disciples almost empty-handed, I would recount how I had been robbed by drunken Levites and all the money had been stolen. Jesus would have no use for denarii, shekels, or silver soon, and I could always get more. Besides, did not his madness demand the surrender of wealth, property, materials, and the dissolution of earthly evidence? His words were that men should pass though the narrowest of doors, the eyes of needles and slits of fire, to deserve him. Magdalene took me to her new house where a redbud tree grew in a small courtyard, bloody blossoms spilling about and blowing against the low walls. She began to work with a series of locks that rattled in the moonlight. When I closed the door behind me, I heard eagles pouring through the smoking night toward roosts in the far hills.

  Mary Magdalene’s home was like a Gustave Moreau painting; I thought of his retellings of Salome dancing before Herod and the apparition of the decapitated head of John the Baptist, our friend, floating like a gory silver coin. It was a shrine to her sex, glistening with pearlescent light, tiger skin rugs from Babylon, black panthers, phallic ivory totems from Abyssinia, silver platters from Herod’s landfill, Nazi lampshades of skin, Vatican censers hanging from golden chains fuming ghosts across the upholstery of the cherry divan. The room was perfumed with French neroli and hashish. An apron string hung from one of the iron bars of her skylight; I recognized it as the garter of the Queen of Sheba, swinging like a skinny serpent in the night breeze, a blue stripe across the bloodstained moon. There was a moth-eaten edition of Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man lying in a pile of pornographic magazines, Beardsley illustrations, and piss-smelling tarot cards. A platinum blonde wig hung beside a pink and blue Chanel suit. I ran my fingers through the dust on one of the cabinets. There was a carved wooden dove that Jesus had given her during our childhood. Beside it, a carved wooden whale named Leviathan and a painted wooden fly that she called Beelzebub. The whore stirred the embers of her fireplace, which flared and illuminated the blue and white Delft tiles surrounding it, Saul falling upon his sword. I sat down on the cherry divan, close to a stuffed black panther.

  “That is some of Thomas’ work,” she told me.

  “Judas Thomas, the twin and taxidermist. He will be useful in preserving Jesus’ body.”

  She sat beside me, the red upholstery curling around her thighs like gelatin. Her hair was black and streaked with red henna, her skin pa
le but luminescent as a dying star, her eyes brown old coins. In her lap, she played with a length of milky cord, making knots and coils. Across the room, a phonograph played, scratched and clicking like a Geiger counter.

  At another time, my name was Bob Dylan. I was—and am, and will be—a time machine of stolen skin, an arachnid, and the skinny black face in your wallpaper pattern. I was the secret sneer of God with a sheaf of psalms that you heard about. You have collected evidence of me. You remember me well as the wisp of gas across the president’s desk, the glug of the coffee percolator at the Village Voice, the jizz in Ginsberg’s beard, and every suicide note ever written. My story began centuries ago, just a few years before I saw my best friend, my brother, spidered on the cross. But in 1966, I was your brothel-brained Jew-boy, spitting out anachronisms and Bible characters, and the sleet of Manchester, England, stuck in my hair like diamonds. My skull was a slot machine in Babel. That night, I was still putting people on, flirting with disaster. I was a singer of songs, and I had been planning to sing a new song, about my lost brother, Jesus. I had it tattooed on my lips, and the vine of it stained my tongue. The lights roamed around the auditorium, and I felt that I was in prison. But, before I could sing it, someone fingered me with a name, and they cried out: “Judas!” So, it is necessary to return to the beginning. I heard myself saying: “Play it fucking loud!” like a rolling stone.