I, Judas
Page 16
True to his word, Pilate was to weigh Jesus in the public balance. First, Jesus was brought before Pilate and Herod. High in the conning tower, Herod’s chair hovered on a cushion of steam jets as he considered the man standing before him, between the glowing instrument panels of the Eldritch. As Luke tells it, Herod had Jesus arrayed in gorgeous apparel, for such was his humor. Herod hovered closer. “I fear,” he began, before sipping at his bloody wine, “that as my rule grows longer in experience, so that experience of the world becomes more repetitive. Are we to have another John the Baptist on our hands, Pilate?” And then, to Jesus, he asked: “They say that you are the King of the Jews. Is that so, carpenter’s son?”
“You have said it.”
“You are the very Son of God? Will you do us no sign, commit no miracle?” This, Jesus did not answer.
Herod grew impatient. “Oh, why must they be so obtuse? Their world hangs in the balance. Not even the fate of the universe can make them speak plainly. Still, you call others satanic? Can this kingdom of yours not withstand truth and direct address? Is not the rule of Herod emphatic? Could you not take a leaf from my book, Nazarene? I tell you that your circumlocutions are the real sin against man. Smoke and mirrors. The sheep need a dog! Let us discover what the people think of this King of the Jews. Bring him out, Pilate.” They took Jesus upon the deck of the aircraft carrier and another man also, an anarchist named Barabbas.
“Barabbas,” Pilate mulled, “tell me, what does the name Barabbas mean?”
The prisoner, who was covered in the excrement of his confinement and gory with tortures, replied through his broken teeth and tar-black beard: “It means Son of the Father.”
“Then,” Pilate said to Herod, “we cannot win.” Herod returned to the interior of the conning tower.
Pilate took up a microphone to address the crowd that assembled far below, all about the hull of the landlocked vessel that controlled the city. Herod could hear the trial outside on the deck and the mob surrounding the ship calling out for Barabbas. Alone in the metal room, listening to the dim pulse of the sonar, Herod told himself: “It is accomplished.”
When Pilate returned, he shrugged and lowered the microphone, letting it swing on its rubber cable.
I watched the trial from within the mob. Spoilt fruit pelted the hull of the ship. The Romans held the roaring crowd back with lances and shields. I too cried out for Barabbas, holding in my mind’s eye the image of Jesus conniving to destroy me with his pathetic morsel of bread and whispering with Simon Peter. I saw Pilate strutting with his microphone, playing up the drama of the trial for the crowd, resplendent in his Roman livery, and I was struck by what might have been. Mary Magdalene was there somewhere, selling bags of peanuts. Barabbas was set free. Jesus was sentenced to be crucified and was to be taken to the hill Golgotha, the place where we had met as children.
JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE SCAPEGOAT
In the tattered aftermath, I returned to the wreckage of Akeldama, the field of blood, the place where two brothers had sought to annihilate the evidence of their former degradation, washing the base clay from their hands. So it had been with Jesus and I, Judas. I had with me the same amount of money as the urn-makers had possessed when they made their escape: thirty pieces of silver. The sun that was a coin of blood rose slowly, and vultures flew over the distant place of skulls, where the bulldozers worked at the landfill of flesh. Red dirt and smashed clay extended all about me. The rain had opened cracks in the earth, and a thousand worms had split out from it to eat, and in turn ravens fell upon them.
The money weighed heavy with me as I held the final portrait of Jesus in my mind. I had delivered him. His skin had been flayed from him, his head had been shaved, and his loins were black from beatings. He had gone through the uneven streets, scourged and insulted. At Akeldama, I could still hear the creak of the rope as his cross was hauled upright and the grinding before it fell into its socket, and the cracking of his ribs as his weight fell forward and down, asphyxiating him. I wondered if it was one of the crosses that his father had made for the Romans. Joseph the carpenter had made no appearance for his son’s death. Before he reached the summit of Golgotha, still in the labyrinthine streets, Mary, his mother, had forced her face between the brawling lines of soldiers and citizens, but when she called out to him, he did not know her. High on the crucifix, he endured in the rain, crying out to the impenetrable sky. One of the soldiers thrust his lance between Jesus’ heaving ribs to finish him. And for his ineffable kingdom, which I had convinced him of, there was a crown of thorns wrapped about his bald and bloody head. There was a wooden sign nailed above him bearing a single word that had been scratched into the grain with a dagger and illuminated with waste from his own body.
IRONY.
In the rising sun and the shadows cast by the remaining storm clouds, I saw a movement at the horizon. It was moving painfully, inexorably, toward me. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and tried to make it out more clearly. At first, I thought it to be a man. Then it was close enough for me to make out its form. The goat struggled across the wasteland, its front legs buckling as it stumbled in the awful earth. Sometimes it appeared white and sometimes black as the clouds, and strange light traced across it. I began to walk across the field toward the animal, loosening the gourd at my belt to find water for it. I remembered him. His left hind hoof was misshapen. His hair was pale with strokes of copper. There was a rope around his neck, so that I was able to pull him to the shade of the single cypress tree that grew in the field, surrounded by the red dirt. I held the water, and the goat sucked at the nozzle, drinking for its life. For some hours, I sat beneath the tree, and the goat lay with its head in my lap. Mine would be the self-murder about which all others would be reconsidered. I was in possession of myself for the last time.
When it was time, I took the rope from the neck of the goat and fixed the purse of silver pieces to its horns instead. I stared one final time into the coin slots of its eyes before it left me there.
JUDAS WAS dreaming, and the soil fell tightly over the world. He would stagger up against the trees laden with black insects and small heat and lurch toward collapse. Move through the rope, eyebrows and beard. Move through the rope into fury. Exhibit the burbles of a vicious smile, the soil screaming, the sky a dense inversion of sun and moon, the cypress dead at the roots. He stretched, breathing, yanking the lifelike flesh skillfully wrapped around his neck, and swallowed. His anger eclipsed everything. It eclipsed everything that had been said in streams of sweat and blood. Fire drank the light, the darkness like a wrinkled mouth around him, his genius and his odor falling limpidly from him, from his armpits, the pit of his groin, abandoned. His steaming neck moved through the rope, dissolved the Temple in a sheer outcry of love and wretchedness, one-half of the crucified, causing the same effect. He left them behind and set himself against their vineyards and fig trees and the mountain of their will. Silently they forced him. And saying this, imagining himself struggling like a butterfly against being a spy in the grove, he looked around. His sweat came, and he growled to beat it down. The brain is trapped in the bone as a hungry jackal muffled in the rubble of Brooklyn. Who had been running after him?
Memories of solitude and then not of solitude, light passing over his forehead as he shuddered. Bare feet dangling over worms, his cock spiritless, letting go. The stars were strings of stains. He was not afraid.
Look at it: his neck fleshed out, tightening his belt, suspended, budding; one gigantic voice reaching into his feet, hanging, jumping through his noose and neck. His neck is a work of art. It is a testament to the sound of the desert. Judas had been in the desert alone, bare feet dangling over. The goats shifted masks, nuzzling wet pigment.
The stars were strings of stains. He was not afraid.
| EPILOGUE |
JUDECCA
I,Judas, am the paragon of suicides.
I, Judas, am the ghost hand of your faith.
I, Judas, am your suspended disbelief.
>
Lucifer was there, his immense torso projecting from the ice of Judecca, like a man waist deep in arctic water. Even from a distance, he was colossal, surrounded by hundreds of frozen corpses that draped the cold, impenetrable slabs. The permanent ice held him and was made thicker by his tears as his gargantuan wings beat weakly, torn and bloodied where he tried to free himself. At the center of the earth, his wings cast one final shadow of futility.
I beheld the goat horns that grew from the brow of his leonine head, bowed in the half-light of the cavern. The rope of his red hair ran over his shoulders. I witnessed the churning of faces in the glassy ice beneath my feet as my crampons bit the surface. My presence there unleashed a siren scream as the corpses on the slabs began to split open like stitched mouths breaking their twine, coiling blue-black entrails over the frost, and the spectral noise reverberated in the halls of all death.
Lucifer looked up.
In the muscular vortices of his fists he gripped the decapitated corpses of the traitors Brutus and Cassius, their legs flapping like rubber. I thought of Malchus and imagined pushing my revolver into the soft plate of his mouth. I pictured the muzzle flash suppressed by his tongue, a shard of his skull exploding off like smashed bloody crockery, and his corpse falling silently into a transparent ravine. Lucifer’s mouth chewed the heads of the traitors like an obscene child chewing a pair of dolls. He closed his teeth on their hair and let them hang there. A tar of black lipstick slipped from the maw that called me like a return to an unknowable womb. I made my way across the ice, breathing in the stench of he who died as slow as a star, Lucifer, from the back of the heavens.
The pain in my throat increased from the effort of breathing again. Lucifer’s breath came like a storm. The smell of it was the same as the smell of the rope that I had taken from the animal to make my death and my transfiguration. He reached down to me and opened his bloody fingers. His long nails scraped and whined across the permafrost.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
JAMES REICH is a writer and co-founder of post-punk band Venus Bogardus. He appears in fictionalized form as “Jude” in Julie Powell’s memoir Julie & Julia. He was born in England and relocated to New Mexico in 2009. He is currently a contributing faculty member at Santa Fe University of Art and Design and is at work on his second novel.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS |
THE AUTHOR gratefully acknowledges the support and wisdom of Will Lippincott, Christina Shideler, Jack Shoemaker, and Dan Smetanka.
With thanks to Alastair Brotchie for his kind permission to quote from Jacques Rigaut’s Lord Patchogue & Other Texts. Translated by Terry Hale, Atlas Press, London, 1993.
This novel is dedicated to Hannah and our family.
Copyright © 2011 by James Reich. All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reich, James, 1971–
I, Judas : a novel / James Reich.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-593-76469-2
1. Judas Iscariot—Fiction. 2. Bible. N.T.—History of Biblical events—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.E5237I33 2011
813’.6—dc23
2011025223
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