I, Judas

by James Reich

  I shrugged once more. I felt like a child without a ready answer to a worried father. But, finally, I asked him: “Why do you care so much about that to bring me here?”

  “Judas, the point is that I don’t care what happens to him. I care what happens to you. I have no children. When we found you as a boy in your wrecked skiff, I took you in as my drowned little fox. You were my page, but had you stayed, I wanted to make you my son. I know that Malchus attacked you and that he slandered you with lies that might have had you crucified. He was jealous, since he knew he would only ever be a slave in my retinue. His back is so deeply cut with welts and stripes from the lashing he received, he will never forget it. You were different, Judas, but we never had time.” Pilate looked into my eyes, and I saw the tears in his. “I chanced upon an orphan, and he was taken from me by doubt. My fear is that a mob will come for your friend Jesus, and you and all of his allies will be murdered with him.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Let me take him in. Let me weigh him in public balance for the people.”

  “He already thinks that I will betray him.”

  “Then, you have nothing to lose. We can make it look as though you were not involved. If I can have him, then I might save the others. What do you say, Judas? One life for a dozen, or a thousand, is that so terrible?”

  “I feel sick. I want no reward for this.”

  “None.” Pilate agreed. He crossed the room to a water cooler and opened its chrome faucet. The water ran through his fingers and splashed the floor as he washed his hands. He filled a glass and handed it to me. “For your nausea, and our covenant.”

  I was not, as others would later ascribe in retrospect, a zealot or a political assassin. I was not a disillusioned revolutionary patriot, riven with conflict. These passions are superimposed upon me when men cannot accept that it is enough to act from experimental malice alone or to be a psychopath, however philosophical, driven by abstract desires, survival instincts, and a brutal sense of the world. Perhaps it did matter that I had been betrayed by Malchus and denied my rightful life with a new father in Pilate—another sentimental explanation. Cannot the killer be merely cruel? Must the inhumane be humanized and the beast rationalized? No, brother. The revolution will not be televised with a script by Gore Vidal wearing an embroidered bathrobe from a Mediterranean aerie, or broadcast to a soundtrack of blueeyed soul on Clear Channel. It will not be mass-produced in airport lounge editions or turned into a major motion picture. It will not be captured in the deteriorating paint job of Leonardo da Vinci, and my model will not be a small, misshapen black man with his elbow on the one-sided table. But as the moment of final betrayal drew near, had I been something other than apolitical, had I been more sentimental, then I might have anticipated the appalling threat that Jesus was about to pose to me.

  THE LAST SUPPER

  When I returned to Jesus and the disciples at the squat they had made their home for the last days, my throat was bruised from the asphyxiation from Magdalene and my head was light from Pilate’s wine. I told them that all the money was gone. I was now treasurer of nothing but Jesus’ skin and bones, and even those I was about to surrender.

  “I was worried,” said Jesus. “The food does not matter. The money is without consequence, only that you are here. We can make a supper with the wine and sops of bread that we still have.”

  I told Jesus about what I had learned of Lazarus during the night.

  Jesus wept.

  The following day was accelerated and compressed. We went outside only briefly, but when we did, a woman clawed from the gutter, tearing a fragment of Jesus’ clothing to stanch her nosebleed. I alone saw Jesus’ lip curl in revulsion. It was as though she had stolen a part of his being, violated him, and blackened him with contamination. A blind man claimed to see him. Lepers rolled after us on creaking trolleys, so that Jesus quickened his step, even through the crowded bazaar. The aristocrat always experiences the common city as a crowd of corpses, animated, sightless things that still watch him as though transfixed by the radiance of the sun, a ball of lightning moving elegantly through their grotesque darkness. He was but another fantasy of the living dead.

  That night, we made our last supper together. The atmosphere in the home we had taken in the red light district was solemn. We moved about one another as though ashamed. There was little food, and the oil lamps were weak.

  “Look at us, retreated into this single black room,” Jesus said as he poured the last of the wine into our cups. “We are like a king and his retinue, who have exhausted the palace. We are tired of going into the world, weary of hunting, filling our cellars, and slowly the world has died outside, taken over by thorny wilderness without our stewardship. We have gone from room to room, taking what we can, as the lights die, and we have no more treasure and no more food. We might be cringing inside a fractured boat, listening to the sharks circling us in the moonlight. This one lamp remains but is dying. There is a time of man when, inexplicably, his passion leaves him. Suddenly, the world promises nothing. And watching such a man, you might invent reasons for it. If you sing of it or whisper it with aches to a crowded auditorium, then it might seem tragic. But it is not. It is just finished.”

  “But, Rabbi,” Simon Peter said, “what about what we have accomplished, and what is yet to be accomplished?”

  “It has not worked. Look at us, how few we really are, how we are something in our minds that we are not as men.” Jesus was sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor, a low table extending before him, at which we all sat. There were tears in his eyes. He stared at a beetle crawling across the wooden surface, its legs sticking in the wine spills. Jesus began tearing up a dry loaf of bread. “Each one of you that looks at me sees a different Lord, distorted by your own passion and manifold reflection. Here, if we bow our heads close to this beetle struggling in the wine, in the ripples we will all see him differently. Here he looks brittle, and here he resembles a mighty stag, and upon each you impose a mystery, something so humble that it must conceal great power, or something so powerful that it must conceal great humility. You do this to me. Those who wish me dead do this to me.”

  “Master, we are not the same as them!” Simon Peter protested.

  “Yes, you are, but you do not know it.”

  “Then we cannot leave this room. It is as you said. This is the last room in the palace.” Nathaniel sipped his wine with trembling lips.

  “In the eyes of men, I am not so unlike the possessed man, Legion. My words confound as though they come from several tongues within the same mouth. Have none of you had doubt or experienced confusion?”

  Silence.

  “I came from sawdust and adultery,” Jesus said. “Now, I am King. My kingdom is behind the stars, through the eye of the needle, beyond the veil of the Temple. But, if you know the stories of kings, you will know that kings’ needs must be betrayed.”

  “No, my Lord!”

  “It will be one of you. One closest to me.” At this, there was a beat of wings, and a carrion bird landed heavily upon the roof, talons raking the dust.

  Jesus filled a small basin with water from a pitcher that he had found in the strange house. Encircled by the disciples—Simon Peter and his half-blind brother Andrew with the gullripped eye, Philip the moon-face, Nathaniel who was without guile, Judas Thomas the taxidermist, Matthew the tax collector, James and John the sons of thunder, and silent James the son of Alphaeus, but without Jude Thaddeus or Simon the Zealot, who had gone to guerrilla war in Babylon—Jesus sat upon a studded casket. There, he began to discard his garments, which were stained with blood and soil. All eyes were upon him, fascinated. Beside the vines of blue veins in his wrist, I watched the rapid bulge of his pulse. When he was almost naked, Simon Peter made to hand him a clean white towel to cover himself. But Jesus took the towel to the basin and soaked it there. His narrow form wove through the half-light. Silently, he returned to his makeshift throne, the casket. I thought of Osiris locked in the ir
on maiden trap contrived by his brother Seth. I thought it right that Egyptian myths would surface and clash with Passover. With the drenched towel, Jesus began to wash the feet of those around me, and they protested.

  “Lord, why do you wash my feet when I should wash yours?” Simon Peter asked.

  Jesus said: “This is your exoneration. I can do this for you, but you cannot do this for me. Only I.”

  “But, Lord,” Andrew’s voice rose. “We do not wish to be separate from you.”

  “If this is not done,” Jesus labored with his explanation, “you can have no part in me. Therefore, let me clean you. The master is the servant also.”

  “I am thinking of John the Baptist,” Philip said, unfastening his threadbare sandals.

  “Still, I say that one of you will lift his heel against me.” At these words, they studied guiltily at their glistening feet, not seeing that Jesus had chosen not to wash mine. “Put your sandals back on. We must be ready to go out.” Jesus gathered his clothes and dressed himself.

  Nathaniel was able to make a broth. One fish head floated within it, one shocked eye staring from the grayish brine. As the bowl steamed over a lamp flame, it released a weak aroma. Then, I saw the sycophant Simon Peter leaning close to Jesus’ breast, and then his mouth was at his ear. I shifted about the room and listened with extreme care to the whispering between them.

  “Lord, Son of God, tell us of whom you speak. Who could betray you?”

  And Jesus answered softly. “This morsel of bread, watch he to whom I give it after I have dipped it in the broth.”

  So, this was how my straw prince would seek to turn tables on me and to recast me at this final supper in the greatest of infamies. This I would not permit! Now, I took Jesus aside.

  I remembered the child Jesus. I recalled standing in the desert with him and pretending that I was showing him a gilded kingdom as I pointed to a tempting blank space at the hot horizon. So desperate to please, he told me that he saw the kingdom that did not exist. This illusory kingdom he now inhabited fully. He would be the king of the unreachable, set upon a throne of my imagination. But, had not this perverse passion of his always been my intention and my fault?

  Jesus knew it. And he was ashamed.

  Here, he sought to manipulate me in his spiteful revenge. He had resolved to remove any sense of my will having been stronger than his. He was set to remove all moral agency from me. He sought to make a patsy of me. I gripped him by his skinny elbow, feeling the nub through his robes, and I led him into a shadowed corner. I did not take a morsel of bread with me. Instead, I had broken off a fistful, and I had pushed it into the boiling brine. Scales from the fish head clung to it as I stirred the eye about. In the salty scent, I thought of the symbols that Jesus had drawn in the sand for the fishermen, and I remembered being washed up on many shores.

  “Judas, what is this?” Jesus was incredulous, yet a smile snaked across his lips as I forced the soddened bread into his hand and wiped my hand on his shoulder.

  “It is the sop that you wished to pass to me. Outrageous fortune.”

  Jesus was shaken. He mouthed silently, searching for words.

  “You were right, Jesus. I did bring you to this.”

  We stood together in the shadows.

  Finally, Jesus said: “What you must do, do it quickly.”

  Jesus strode back to his waiting disciples. In their flattering presence, his words came fast, with determination that concealed his panic. His eyes flashed at each of them and at me. “This bread, you devour as if it were my flesh. This wine you drink, you swallow as if it were my blood. You will not forget this taste, this fear of betraying me. As I give, I renounce the body.”

  I heard the dogs, Gog and Magog, barking and yanking at their chains at either end of the street of whores. Sandaled feet scuffed in the street. Then, a bronze battering ram crashed against the door, sending splinters flashing into the room, but the furniture piled behind the door held it firm for a moment. A young Roman legionnaire called from the street. “Nazarene! Come out! You have broken into this house! In the name of Pilate, we have come to arrest you!” The battering ram came again. I took Jesus’ arm, dragging him to his feet and pulling him toward the small door at the back of the house. All of us ran outside, into the sweat of the Jerusalem night. They had followed me.

  THE PASSION OF JUDAS

  In Gethsemane, beneath the gibbous moon, Jesus and his disciples felt themselves lost within the dolorous trees and no longer heard the metal pursuit of the Romans, or the black cloaks of the Sanhedrin, or the rage of the Pharisees, or the tumult of the multitudes whom Jesus observed from his new aristocracy. They had been forced to the last corner of the garden. I had seen the olive and cypress trees of the Garden of Gethsemane many times before, in the premonitions of Cyborea, the woman who claimed to be my mother in Kerioth, and in the oily vortices of Vincent van Gogh, where all was dread and the solipsistic curls of impending self-murder. In the midst of the night, I felt the oil beneath his feet, smearing through the grass and fallen red blossom. I plucked at one of the branches, and a trail of blood ran into my sleeve and toward my breast. The flight from the barricaded hovel had left some of the disciples euphoric at having escaped so narrowly. They lay back upon the ground and laughed with relief, their chests rising and falling hard and heavy. But soon they heard Jesus’ despair and were much afraid. They went near to him, half-concealing themselves like guilty shades behind the black trees, listening. And they saw that I was kneeling beside him.

  “I know that it seems that I have been weeping for so much of my life, Judas, but my thoughts and my heart are heavy as millstones and always have been so. I live with despair upon despair, and I cannot find the kernel of it inside me.”

  And Jesus stood up, staggering slightly, and gripped one of the olive trees for support, swinging there for a moment before collapsing to his knees again, like an actor working a stage. A noise came from his throat. The disciples gathered about him in the swollen dirt.

  The sons of Zebedee urged him, “Despair not, my master.”

  “It is more than despair,” he answered. “It is a passionate chasing of death.”

  “Help us to understand what we are to do, for we would follow you to prisons and unto death, even.”

  “No, this is not so. You would not.” The disciples were wounded by these words. Simon’s cheekbones shone with brilliant tears.

  “Lord, I am ready.”

  “No, Simon. The cockerel will not crow this morning until you have thrice denied that you know me. The morning star will hang in the dawn, and Lucifer will sift you aside like wheat.”

  “He will fail, Lord!”

  “No, he will not. So, I have prayed for you, that you will turn away from him again and make these others stronger.” And then Jesus clawed against the olive tree and rose to his feet. “I say unto you all, when I stripped you of your possessions, when you were without a purse, without sandals, did you lack anything?” His pointed finger moved from man to man.

  “Nothing.”

  “Now, you will need these things again. Take back your purse from the nail where you hung it in your darkened home, far away. Take up your sword. If you lack a sword, then buy one.”

  I wondered at the continual reversals and strange mirrors in my brother’s mind.

  “We will,” they said, but they were wracked with confusion and doubt. Yet, Jesus’ permission for them to carry money and swords and to assimilate with the middle class also gave them great relief. “Between us we have two swords and will buy more.” The disciples, who were exhausted, lay down to rest in the moonlight.

  Jesus tried to smile, but a spectral agony was at work within him. He withdrew from them, but I shadowed him. Jesus prayed, and his tears fell upon the soil, heavy as blood from his eyes.

  “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup from me. Still, I know that it is not my will that moves the world. If you will not remove the cup, if the only way for me to be rid of it is
to drink it down, then I will.”

  And I whispered “Drink, Jesus.”

  “They are golden in the moonlight, like a cadre of angels.”

  It was Malchus and Pilate’s soldiers.

  My mouth moved inside the needles of his beard, not to identify him—because by this time, everyone knew Jesus of Nazareth by his somnambulant walk and dreaming words—but to inspire him for the last time, to breathe the remnants of my passion into him, and to finish what we had begun when we were children, to give him the strength to finish it. His brown eyes, as whorled and abandoned as snail shells, were closed, his pungent mouth disbelieving as the serpent of my breath hissed through his aching teeth, then passed over his tongue, into the shining purses of his flesh. I brought him here, constructed him from fleece, bone, blood, dust, wine, seed, straw, my occluded desires, my orphanage, the endless art of my fury. His disciples, his ineffectual mirrors, shivered between the soldiers and the knotted trees of Gethsemane. By this time, he could not resist anything that I suggested to him. It had been that way for so long that I did not have to witness him being led away.

  Malchus reached inside his red cloak and tossed something at me. From reflex, I could not prevent my hand from reaching up to catch it before it struck me in the face. Malchus’ eyes glowed with jealousy and ancient hatred. The purse hit my hand, and my fingers closed around it. The coins inside it rattled like bones. I struck fast with my dagger, cutting off Malchus’ ear, and he fell to the ground howling in a foxy arc of blood.

  “Bastard, I wanted no reward!”

  “Judas!” The voices of the disciples rose against me.

  Lightning struck in the black sky.

  And I bolted.

  THE TRIAL OF JESUS