I, Judas

by James Reich

  “Turn that off. I can’t listen to it anymore,” I said to Mary Magdalene. She stood up from the divan and went to change the record.

  “How about this?”

  Love will tear us apart, again . . .

  Mary returned and knelt in front of me, stellar and foxy, working at her knots. “Did you hear about Lazarus?” she asked.

  Lazarus had become an albatross about the neck of the peasant town of Bethany, east of Jerusalem, where fig and olive trees were wrought in twists from the sloping soil. His little deaths, half-deaths, zombie dances, and somnambulist seizures brought fascination, terror, and a morbid tourism. “When my father was very ill,” one of the Sanhedrin reflected, “in the poisoned places of my heart, I wished that he would die, and that the burden of his sickness be lifted from me. All Bethany must feel the same way toward Lazarus. He is an animated corpse, a taxidermist’s toy, one piece of decaying meat.” Mary Magdalene explained the anger toward Jesus, who it was said had intervened in the crisis and exacerbated the undead problem.

  Lazarus staggered into the marketplace in his soiled bedclothes, his red hair terrible as a cockatrice, his breath of tombs fogging in the early morning chill. The fishmongers waved filleting knives at him and told him to leave. Women covered their baskets of figs for fear of contamination. He appeared more ancient than ever. One of his teeth dangled from his lower lip, and a stained bandage was wrapped about his skull, holding one of his ears to his head. A stone struck him full in the face, knocking him down. Then, more stones fell upon him as the men and women of the marketplace cast their repulsion and rage at him. He lay in the dirt, a cloud forming about him as the stones thumped against his body. His sisters, Mary and Martha, who had been searching for him since they found his sickbed empty, came screaming upon the stoning.

  “Leave him alone!”

  “We know you want him dead to make yourselves feel better! Bastards!”

  “Cowards!”

  The two women ran into the rain of stones and pulled their brother away, dragging his smashed form into a narrow street, before picking him up and carrying him between their shoulders, his feet pawing dumbly at the ground as though trying to walk. Lazarus groaned and cried, unrelenting tears pouring from his eyes, such was his pain and grief for himself and the world. He was death within his own body; he was his own iron maiden. Finally, Mary and Martha took Lazarus to the West Bank, his skin cracking like an old Van Gogh painting, fish-scale layers of bruises. From there two Egyptian fishermen who associated him with the myth of Osiris bore the broken body of Lazarus like crockery in their skiff to the island of Cyprus, where he died again. And across the Mediterranean, on Easter Eve, they smash crockery to stone Judas also.

  I was still with Mary Magdalene, the night before the last supper. She put the milk-white noose that she had been making around my neck and threw the length of cord over a metal pipe that led to her cistern. The noose was soft and silken. She licked her bright red lips. With one hand she pulled lightly on the cord, tightening it about my throat, and with her other hand she expertly loosened my clothes on the cherry divan.

  “Judas, how did you make Jesus follow you like this, to this suicidal Jerusalem?” Magdalene asked.

  “Jesus is the passenger to my passion. I am the whip that moves the animal he rides on.”

  “What of the things he says?”

  “He wants to hurt his parents. He is confused about his desires. Everything he has known—scraps of old prophecy, mockery, failures, beatings, the vagaries of his birth, rumors of his brother, the spell of John the Baptist that I exposed him to, the luxuriant deaths of his childhood idols—everything has given him a false sense that a life so abject must be secretly anointed.”

  “But what about you, Judas?”

  “One only truly describes one’s own heart by attributing it to another, and the greater part of genius is composed of memories.” I was quoting Chateaubriand, writer, explorer, and lover of flesh, who had at first experienced Judea with revulsion.

  As I said this, Magdalene’s lips closed over me, and the fingers of one hand groped for the octopus of swollen tissue, desire, and agony that rolled and swelled behind my balls and at the bright nub of pleasure pulsing at my perineum. Translucent inks began to jerk through my loins as she rolled her tongue about me, and she increased the gentle pressure that she applied to the white noose about my throat. The noose sent me outside myself.

  “In this world,” she murmured, “sex and death are for time travel. Notoriety is time travel, permanence, to be at all times and all places simultaneously.” She pulled harder and faster upon me, and the cord became tighter, closing my windpipe. I leaned forward to kiss her, cupping her breasts and wanting to wrap my legs around her head and to drag her back down to suck at me again. Desperation poured through my flesh. I desired only to explode in her mouth and hang in the blackout.

  And I thought: they say that hanging is the death for women, witches, the treacherous, or for those men who forfeit their masculinity by base betrayals or murders in a cold rain of cowardice. The dangling man traverses the sexes. Suicide obliterates all gender and casts each corpse equal. The suicide is the necrophile’s honey, each cadaver filled with sweetness, and hope spilling out, mysterious, erotic, unrequited . . . the pain in my throat disappeared. My head swam with sparks and dying stars, and come splashed white heat across Mary Magdalene’s hands, wrists, and breasts . . . It smeared on my cheek as she loosed the cord and held herself to me. I knew that I was trying to die.

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE DANGLING WOMEN

  May 9, Mother’s Day, 1976. “It is time to join the ranks of dangling women. From Macedon to Salem, few of us achieve it by our own hands anymore. Instead, it is the penalty passed down in the guerrilla war against God, whose name is Capitalism, and who killed more innocent children at Passover than the RAF at Dresden; and who is the destroyer of women. We have lost the war against money and shame. I ran away from my children, so I was called a witch. Later, I tried to kidnap my children and to smuggle them to Palestine for special education, but they were apprehended in Sicily. And I was called a terrorist.”

  Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide by hanging in her prison cell at Stammheim, Stuttgart. She fashioned a noose from the shreds of a towel and threaded it through the window grate. She hesitated a moment before kicking the stool from beneath her feet. She was an anti-Semite who justified herself by holding the fiction of Judas, the Treasurer, in her mind as if I were real.

  Then, I was called Erigone, daughter of the Athenian shepherd Icarius. My father, who was an old man, slender and dark with the sun, tended his flock on the hill called Pnyka, above the plain of Attica and the city of Athens. The sheep and goats grazed between the cypress and olive trees, bleating in the bright days that bore my father gently toward the night. Eleven other shepherds worked the hill also, and my father was beloved among them. His was a sweet paternity, and the younger men would heed his advice. One morning, a young man approached my father as he steered his animals about. The beautiful stranger was such that at first my father could not discern if it was a boy or a girl. With the dawn sun at its back, the stranger addressed him, knowingly.

  “Icarius, fond father of this slope . . .”

  “I am he. Good morning, be welcome,” my father said, extending his hand.

  “I am grateful to you.” When the stranger took Icarius’ hand, the old man experienced a faint rolling and swelling in his loins, a sultry movement like an octopus in a cave of warmer water.

  “I do not know you.”

  “My name is Dionysus, and I come to teach with the vine.”

  Icarius looked upon the radiant youth, whose hair was as black as coal and whose eyes shone like a swarm of bees in brilliant sunlight, all sparks and energies, and fell in beside him. They walked, and one of the goats nuzzled at Dionysus’ hip.

  “You know of the ichors that flow as blood in the veins of the immortals?” Dionysus began, and my father nodded like a sheep at th
e dun grass. “Within the grapes of the vine is such a liquor. He who drinks of it tastes, if you will, the blood of immortality, swims within it, and his spirit is disentangled from the petty snares of the earth. It is funny how the vines resemble traps and nooses, but through them is the transport to eternity. I am a teacher of the vine, and I have come to initiate you, if you would have me, Icarius.”

  As contented as my father had been, the opulent temptations shown him by Dionysus swayed him. “I would have you show me everything,” he confessed to the radiant youth. And when he took communion with Dionysus, he felt the agility and promiscuity of a mountain goat start within him. He could traverse the crags of Pnyka with arrogance and haste. He felt himself potent as a black storm wheeling in a pale sky. While my father entreated the other eleven shepherds of the hill to know the truth of the vine also, Dionysus retired to a cave to masturbate.

  But the shepherds awoke vomiting and with great pains in their brows, as though they had been struck with stones and briar. Their few possessions, their clothes and money purses, were somehow scattered about the slopes. “Icarius has poisoned us to steal our flocks!” they cried.

  “The old man has betrayed us!”

  When my father did not return home that night, I, Erigone, sat upright on my pallet in the darkness after the candles had burned down, unable to fight my terror and my tears. In the morning, I took my hound Maera, and we went into the hills to find my father.

  We found his body, and the sound of our mourning screamed and howled down to the white streets of Athens. He had been pursued into the high crags and bludgeoned with stones and whipped with vines. His pitiful frame was contorted and broken open. His hair had been ripped from his scalp. Suddenly, I saw one of the shepherds crouching near a cypress tree. He was trying to wipe gore from his hands with grass.

  “You did this, bastard!”

  “No!” He denied it, and twice more as I ran toward him and was about to set Maera at his throat, he ran from me. I could not chase him, for I wanted to remain with my father.

  Dionysus, who had heard our grief, awoke from his cave and tried to come to us, but he would be too late.

  From the vines that had whipped my father, I fashioned a noose and threw it over a bough of the cypress tree. Standing upon a pile of grinding stones, I pushed my face through the noose, like a baby emerging from a womb. And I began to kick at the stones, making them fall away from me, until the rope bit my throat and I knew that I would die. Maera whimpered at my ankles, leapt and barked at me as I began to swing in the morning sunlight, cracking noises strangled from my throat. Then, the hound turned and raced toward the edge of the high crags and threw itself down to die.

  When Dionysus found us, he was enraged. He set madness inside any woman who was wife, daughter, lover, or otherwise beloved of the eleven shepherds. Across the plain of Attica, women began to hang themselves in terrible contagion. They dropped like tears.

  THE CONNING TOWER

  I left Magdalene’s house and stepped outside into the raw street.

  In that prurient night, Passover haunted the city like a flock of angry birds. Whatever the capricious nature of man toward man that was embedded in the split and struggling heart of Jesus of Nazareth, this was also in the Passover. The night when angels become vultures. It folded its wings around the city. A baby cried from an unlit room as I made my way. I shuddered to hear it. I was pleased that the next night would be the last time that we would have to endure this cruel feast. I was relieved to be apart from the others, but I knew that I would have to return to them. I felt like a ghost between the chill houses.

  “Judas!” It seemed that my name was forever being called out from the darkness. I whipped about, finding myself surrounded by a pack of Roman soldiers, their black hair glistening in the torchlight borne by the man who led them. He stepped forward and I recognized him as Malchus, the slave-spy of Pontius Pilate. “We have come unarmed, Judas,” he said. “Put away your knife.” Malchus’ red hair blazed.

  “So, all of Pilate’s premonitions have come to be. Look at us; we are like mirrors, you and I. We must have shared a body once.”

  “The knife, Judas, sheath it. I assure you, you see that our men have come without helmets or weapons. Pilate wishes for a reunion with you, and I think that you should oblige.” Malchus swept his torch flames to illuminate his mob.

  We went by a strange path through Jerusalem that took us through the Phrygian quarter. Fireworks exploded above us, raining lurid sparks. “It is the solstice, for the cult of Attis,” Malchus explained with contempt. “The eunuch god! Look at this insanity.” His lips curled into a snarl of repulsion. A date stall had been made into a temporary stage and was surrounded by naked men and women who crushed toward it. A tall eunuch cavorted above them. He held a hollow boar’s head high in the full moonlight, and blackening blood poured from the stitches at its mouth and snout. The blood flushed down on the crowd, who cried out in pleasure, smearing the gore on their breasts and brows. “Attis baptizes with blood,” said Malchus as another crude rocket detonated over the plaza. “Tomorrow, they will nail a mutilated effigy of their good shepherd to a pine tree. They will cut him down and seal him in a tomb. Priests will secretly remove the effigy, but at the end of the festival the disciples of Attis will return to the tomb, open it, and find the eunuch god vanished, resurrected and gone beyond. And spring will begin for the young Turks. They will gorge themselves on scented jellies and make for the hillsides to fuck each other. It is all a charade, but Pilate asks me to keep an eye on it. What good is a eunuch god? But what is a religion without genital mutilation, eh, Judas?”

  “You seem to enjoy it, in your own way.”

  “Things are more intriguing since we are no longer stationed on the coast. Although, ironically, Pilate’s promotion inland meant trading the mansion for a ship.”

  We found Pilate in the conning tower of the USS Eldritch.

  High in the tower, Pilate lowered his rusting binoculars from watching the chaos outside and turned from the window to face me. He smiled and extended his hand to me. “Depressing, isn’t it?” he said. As I made to shake his hand, Pilate took my wrists and turned my palms up, examining the broken glass scars there from when I escaped from the walled gardens of his mansion as a boy. “I see that you still bear the stigma of working for me.”

  The green lights of the instrument panels glowed about us as Pilate poured wine from a crystal decanter. A map of the city was projected upon a glass screen, and small clusters of light moved across it, showing the movements of different factions within Jerusalem. “We are enforcing the no-fly zone,” Pilate announced wearily, “and are building more checkpoints around the city. The solstice is like a tinderbox, Judas. Jerusalem is a city of a thousand provocations. Do you know the only thing that I can do to keep a semblance of order here?”

  “What?”

  “I must shrug my shoulders. That is all I do, day and night. Malchus, you may leave us alone now. Go back to your studies.”

  “Sir.” Malchus closed the heavy bomb door behind him.

  “It strikes me, Judas, that power is indifference to suffering. You can drink, Judas; it’s not poison or blood.” Pilate laughed.

  “So, I am not your prisoner?” I asked.

  “I told you, I shrug my shoulders. I don’t care that you betrayed my care of you, when I found you washed up and half-dead on my beach, over common gossip. And I am indifferent to your friend, Jesus of Nazareth.” Pilate put his arm around my shoulders, and with his other hand, he gently moved my wine glass toward my lips. I drank as he went on. “But Jerusalem, whatever Jerusalem means, is not indifferent to him, even if he is content to arouse, obfuscate, confuse, and foment their little minds. It strikes me, also, that your friend is beginning to experience the indifference of tangible power. I hear that he discourages rich and poor in equal measure, that he is ambivalent and aloof, that he gives and takes offense arbitrarily. We have clear eyes and sensitive ears. And further, I susp
ect . . .” Pilate fell silent and put his finger to his pursed lips, as though he had finally discovered a way to articulate a problem that had long vexed him, and now, he wanted to chew and savor his inspiration.

  “You suspect?”

  “Judas, I suspect that this man seems not to be of his own mind, because you are behind everything that he does.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  Pilate laughed again and poured us more wine, his brown eyes sparkling. “Oh, I’m not worried about a little dissent, here and there. This city feeds on dissent. What worries me is the extraordinary manner in which he is uniting people, not with him, but against him. I’ve never seen it like this. He assumes such immodest aristocracy for himself, not just over the whores of the city, but also over the entire world, that I fear a homicidal revolt against him. If I could hold him in the public balance against even the most venal criminal in Jerusalem, I can tell you that the crowd would be for the criminal, not Jesus.”