* * * *
“You see now,” the counselor says to me, “that you are clearly in need of help. There is no shame in it; there is precedent for this; it has all happened before. We know exactly how to treat the condition, so if you will merely lie quietly and cooperate, we should have you on your way before long. The fact that you are back in focus now, for instance, is a very promising sign. Just a few hours ago we despaired of this, but you are responding nicely.”
I rear up on my elbows. “Let me out of here,” I say. “I demand to be let out of here. You have no right to detain me in this fashion; I have a mission to perform, and I assure you that you will suffer greatly for what you have done. This is a serious business; it is not to be trifled with. Detention will not solve your problems; you are in grave difficulty.”
“I urge you to be calm.”
“I am perfectly calm.” I note that I appear to be lashed to the table by several painless but well contrived restraints, which pass across my torso, digging in only when I flail. It is a painless but humiliating business and I subside, grumbling. “Very well,” I said. “You will find what happens when you adopt such measures, and that judgment will sit upon you throughout eternity.”
The counselor sighs. He murmurs something about many of them at the beginning not being reasonable, and I do not remind him that this is exactly as Joseph had warned.
* * * *
Tormented by the anguish on the Magdalene’s face, the tears which leak unbidden down her cheeks, he says, “It is all right. The past does not matter; All that matters is what happens in the timeless present, the eternal future.” He lifts a hand, strokes her cheeks, feeling a strange and budding tenderness working which surprises him in its intensity; it is of a different sort from the more generalized tenderness he has felt through his earlier travels. “Come,” he said. “You can join me.”
She puts her hand against his. “You don’t understand,” she says. “This is not what I want.”
“What?”
“Talk of paradise, of your father, of salvation; I don’t understand any of it. I don’t know what you think they want.”
“I know what they want.”
“You don’t know anything,” she says. “You are a kind man but of these people you know nothing.” She smooths her garments with a free hand. “To them you are merely a diversion, an entertaining element in their lives, someone who amuses them, whereas you think in passionate terms. You will be deeply hurt.”
“Of course.”
“No,” she says, “not in the way you think. Martyrdom will not hurt you; that is, after all, what you seek. It will be something else.” Something else, he thinks. Something else, I think.
She is an attractive woman not without elements of sympathy, but staring at her I remember that she was, until very recently, a prostitute who committed perhaps even darker acts, and that it is an insolent thing which she, of all people, is doing in granting her Savior such rebuke. “Come,” I say to her. I should note that, we have been having this dialogue by a river bank, the muddy waters of the river arching over the concealed stones, the little subterranean animals of the river whisking their way somewhere toward the north, the stunted trees of this time holding clumps of birds which eye us mournfully. “It is time to get back to the town.”
“Why?”
“Because if we remain out here talking like this much longer some will misconceive. They will not understand why we have been gone so long.”
“You are a strange, strange man.”
“I am not a man. I am?”
“I would not take all of this so seriously,” she says, and reaches toward me, a seductive impact in the brush of her band, seductive clatter in her breath, and oh my Father it is a strange feeling indeed to see what passes between us then, and with halt and stuttering breath I hurl myself upright, thrust her away, and run toward Galilee. Behind me, it cannot be the sound of her laughter which trails. It cannot, it cannot.
* * * *
“Fools,” I say, my fingers hurtling through the sacred, impenetrable text, looking for the proper citation. “Can’t you understand that you are living at the end of time” The chronologies of the Book of Daniel clearly indicate that the seven beasts emerge from the seven gates in the year 2222, the numbers aligned; it is this generation which will see the gathering of the light.” They stare at me with interest but without conviction. “You had better attend,” I say. “You have little time, little enough time to repent, and it will go easier for you if you do at the outset.”
One of the congregants raises his hand and steps toward me. “Rabbi,” he says, “you are suffering from a terrible misapprehension?”
“So are you all,” I say with finality, “but misapprehension can itself become a kind of knowledge.”
“This is not Bruck Linn and the Book of Daniel has nothing to do with what is happening.”
“Fool,” I say, lunging against my restraining cords, “you may conceive of a pogrom, but that cannot alter the truth. All of your murders will not stop the progress of apocalypse for a single moment.”
“There is no apocalypse, rabbi,” the congregant says, “and you are not a rabbi.”
I scream with rage, lunging against the restraints once again and they back away with terror on their solemn faces. I grip the Pentauch firmly and hurl it at them, the pages opening like a bird’s wing in flight, but it misses, spatters against an opposing wall, falls in spatters of light. “I have my duties,” I say, “my obligations. You had better let me go out and deliver the summons to the world; keeping me here will not keep back the truth. It cannot be masked, and I assure you that it will go better for you if you cooperate.”
“You are sick, rabbi,” he says very gently. “You are a sick man. Thankfully you are getting the treatment that you so desperately need and you will be better.”
“The great snake,” I point out, “the great snake which lies coiled in guard of the gates is slowly rising; he is shaking off the sleep of ten thousand years.”
“To throw a holy book?”
“No books are holy. At the end of time, awaiting the pitiless and terrible judgment even the sacred texts fall away. All that is left is judgment, mercy, the high winds rising.”
“If you will relax, rabbi?”
“I want to walk to and fro upon the earth and up and down upon it!” I scream. “From all of these wanderings I will come to a fuller knowledge, crouching then at the end of time with the old antagonist to cast lots over the vestments of the saved and the damned alike, bargaining for their garments out of a better world?”
“If you will only be quiet…”
“The snake is quiet too,” I say, “quiet and waiting for the time of judgment, but let me tell you that the silence which you will demand is the silence of the void?”
And so on and so forth, je ne sais pas. It is wearying to recount all of those admonitions which continue to rave through the spaces of the room at this time. If there is one thing to say about a Talmudic authority in heat, it is that once launched upon a point he can hardly pause; pauses would form interstices where the golem itself might worm. And of the golem, of course, little more need be said.
* * * *
“Will you yield?” Satan says to me, putting me into an untenable position upon the sands. His face looms near mine like a lover’s; he might be about to implant the most sustained and ominous of kisses. “Yield and it will go easier with you.”
“No,” I say, “never. I will not yield.” The French has fled, likewise the depersonalization, I feel at one with the persona, which is a very good sign, surely a sign that I am moving closer to the accomplishment of my great mission. “You may torture me; you may bring all of your strength to bear; it is possible that you will bend and break me, but you will never hear renunciation.” I grab purchase with my ankles, manage to open up a little bit of space, which of course I do not share with my ancient antagonist, and then with a sly wrench drag him toward me, defy his sense of
balance and send him tumbling beside. He gasps, the exhalation of breath full as dead flowers in my face, and it is possible for me now to hurl myself all the way over him, pressing him into the sands. Gasping, he attempts to fling me, but as I collapse on top of him my knee strikes his horned and shaven head, administering a stunning blow and from the opening I see leaching the delicate, discolored blood of Satan. His eyes flutter to attention and then astonishment as I close upon him and my strength is legion. “Do you see?” I say to him. “Do you see now what you have done? You cannot win against the force of light,” and I prepare myself to deliver the blow of vanquishment. Open to all touch he lies beneath me; his mouth opens.
“Stop!” he says weakly, and to my surprise I do so. There is no hurry, after all; he is completely within my power. “That’s better,” he says. His respiration is florid. “Stop this nonsense at once. Help me arise.”
“No,” I say, “absolutely not.”
“You don’t understand, you fool. This dispute was supposed to be purely dialectical; there was no need to raise arms.” Ali, the cunning of Satan! Defeated on his own terms he would Shift to others, but I have been warned against this too, I have been fully prepared for all the flounderings of the ancient enemy; there is nothing that he can do now to dissuade me, and so I laugh at him, secure in my own power and say, “Dialectical! No, it was a struggle unto the death; those were clearly the terms and you know that as well as I.”
“No,” he says, twitching his head. “No, absolutely not, you never saw this right. There was never the matter of murder; don’t you realize that? We aren’t antagonists at all! We are two aspects of the overwhelming one; our search was for fusion in these spaces, and that is what we are now prepared to do.” His head sinks down; he is clearly exhausted. Still he continues muttering. “You fool,” he says. “There is no way that one of us can vanquish the other. To kill either is to kill the self.”
Sophistry! Sophistry! I am so sick of it; I intimate a life, a dark passageway through to the end lit only by the flickering and evil little candles of half-knowledge and witticism, casting ugly pictures on the stones, and the image enrages me; I cannot bear the thought of a life which I contain little more than small alterations of language or perception to make it bearable, reconsideration of a constant rather than changing the unbearable constant itself, but this is to what I have been condemned. Not only Satan, but I will have to live by rhetoric; there will be nothing else.
But at least, this first time on the desert, rhetoric will not have to prevail. Perhaps for the only time in my life I will have the opportunity to undertake the one purposive act, an act of circumstance rather than intellection.
And so, without wishing to withhold that moment any longer, I wheel fiercely upon Satan. “I’ve had enough of this shit,” I say. “I’ve got to deal with it; I cannot go on like this forever; there has to be a time for confrontation.” The words seem a bit confused, but my action is not; I plunge a foot into his face. It yields in a splatter of bone, and in that sudden rearrangement I look upon his truest form.
“Well,” says Satan through flopping jaw. “Well, well.” He puts a claw to a slipped cheekbone, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Oh, yes,” I say, “but you don’t have to take all of us with you.”
His eyes, surprisingly mild, radiate, of all things, compassion. “You don’t understand,” he says. He falls to his knees like a great, stricken bird. “You don’t understand anything at all.”
“I do enough.”
“I’m not here by choice,” Satan murmurs. “I’m here because you want me. Do you think that this is easy” Being thrown out of Heaven and walking up and down the spaces of the earth, and to and fro upon it, and the plagues and the cattle and the boils? I’ve just been so busy, but it was you who brought me into being, or again?” Satan says, drawing up his knees to a less anguished posture, fluttering on the desert floor, “is this merely rationalization? I am very good at sophistry, you know, but this isn’t easy; there’s a great deal of genuine pain in it. I have feelings too.”
I stand, considering him. What he is saying is very complex and doubtless I should attend to it more closely (I sense that it would save me the most atrocious difficulty later on if only I would) but there is a low sense of accomplishment in having dealt with this assignment so effectively, and I do not want to lose it so easily. It may be one of the least equivocal moments in a life riven, as we all know, with conflicts. “I’m dying,” Satan says. “Won’t you at least reach out a hand to comfort me?”
The appeal is grotesque and yet I am moved. He is, after all, a creature of circumstance no less than any of the rest of us. I kneel beside him, trying not to show my revulsion at the smell of leaking mortality from him. Satan extends a hand. “Hold me,” he says. “Hold me; you owe me at least that. You called me into being; you have to take responsibility for my vanquishment. Or are you denying complicity?”
“No,” I say, “I can hardly do that.” I extend my hand. His claw, my fingers, interlock.
“You see,” Satan says gratefully, “you know at least that you’re implicated. There may be some hope in that for all of us and now if you will permit me, I believe that I am going to die.”
Grey and greenish blood spills from his mouth, his nasal passages, eyes and ears. It vaults into the desert and as I stare fascinated, he dies with quick muffled little sighs not unlike the sounds of love. It is an enormous and dignified accomplishment not noted in all the Scripture, and I am held by the spectacle for more than a few moments.
But as his claw slips away, as touch is abandoned, I have a vision and in that vision I see what I should have known before going through all of this. I see what might have saved me all of this passage, which is to say that knowing he is dead there is a consequent wrench in my own corpus indicating an echoing, smaller death, and as I realize that he has told me the truth, that the divestment of Satan has resulted only in my own reduction, I stand in the desert stunned, knowing that none of this, and I am here to testify, gentlemen, I am here to testify!, is going to be as simple as I thought.
* * * *
“Even the minor prophets have problems,” I point out in the mosque. “The fact that I am not famous and that many of my judgments are vague does not mean that they are not deeply felt or that I will not suffer the fate of Isaiah; Jeremiah, Zephaniah, had their problems. Ezekiel had a limp and was tormented by self-hatred. Hosea had blood visions too.”
They took at me bleakly, those fifteen. This is what my flock has dwindled into, and I should be grateful to have them, what with all of the efforts to discredit and those many threats of violence made toward those who would yet remain with me. They are quite stupid, the intelligent ones long since having responded to the pressure, but they are all I have, and I am grateful, I suppose, to have them. “Attend,” I say. “The institutions cannot remain in this condition. Their oppression is already the source of its own decay; they panic, they can no longer control the uprising. The inheritors of these institutions are stupid; they do not know why they work or how, but just mechanically reiterate the processes for their own fulfillment, massacre to protect themselves, oppress because oppression is all they know of the machinery. But their time is limited; the wind is rising and the revolution will be heard,” and so on and so forth, the usual rhetorical turns and flourishes done so skillfully that they occupy only the most fleeting part of my attention. Actually I am looking at the door. It is the door which I consider; from the left enter three men in the dress of the sect, but I have never seen them before and by some furtive, heightened expressions of their eyes I know that they have not come here on a merciful business.
They consult with one another against the wall and it is all that I can do to continue speaking. I must not show a lapse of rhetoric, I must not let them know that I suspect them, because all that I hold is the prospect of my inattention, but as my customary prose rolls and thunders I am already considering the way out of here. My alternatives
are very limited. The windows are barred, the walls are blank behind me, there only exits are at the edge of the hall and what has happened to the guards? Did they not screen this group? Are they not supposed to protect me, or are they all part of the plot? “Be strong, be brave,” I am telling my followers, but I do not feel strong or brave myself; I feel instead utterly perplexed and filled with a fear which is very close to self-loathing. Their conference concluded, the men scatter, one going for a seat in the center, the other two parting and sliding against the walls. They fumble inside their clothing; I am sure they have firearms.
I am sure that the assassins, on my trail for so very long, have at last stalked me to this point; but I am in a very unique and difficult position because, if I show any fear whatsoever, if I react to their presence, they will doubtless slay me in the mosque, causing the most unusual consternation to my followers assembled; but on the other hand, if I proceed through the speech and toward an orderly dismissal, all that will happen is that I will make the slaying more convenient and allow for less witnesses, to say nothing of giving them an easier escape. Anything I do, in short, is calculated to work against me, and yet I am a man who has always believed in dignity, the dignity of position, that is to say, taking a stand, following it through whatever the implications; and so I continue, my rhetoric perhaps a shade florid now, my sentences not as routinely parsed as I would wish but it is no go, no go at all; they have a different method, I see, as the seated one arises and moves briskly toward me. “This is not right,” I say as he comes up to me, takes me by an elbow. “You could at least have let me finished; if I was willing to take this through, then you could have gone along with me.” The congregants murmur.
“You’d better come with me, Harold,” he says. “You need help.”
“Take your hands off me.”
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 33