like the sleeves of a dress,
and pulls at the stitches when she must.)
I went out from the city of Uruk, whose streets cloud with the dust of black-flanked horses and ash-wheeled carts. I went out from the city of Uruk, whose walls were like the moon - they waxed and waned with the whim of Gilgamesh. I went out from the city of Uruk, which languished in the summer heat, panting like a fat dog. I went out from the lion-torches of the Ishtar Gate, into the wild and the wold.
I could not perform my womb-dialogue in the sling of the city, with tenements as my witnesses and the snorting of oxen to time the rhythm of my hips. I sought out the steppe, the wood, the bed of branches. I needed no guide, no man to force open my legs - that is a lie of Gilgamesh, who could not bear that I went out to Enkidu in eagerness, and Enkidu came into me with eagerness, and there was no thought of the King in that place.
I sought out the smell of the clay-spattered Nephil, the unfinished man - I knew instinctively how he would smell, how the musk of his hair would remember itself to my white nose, how the sour tang of his sweat would not be unlike the incense of my clean-stepped temple, how he would crawl among the greenery like a salamander seeking the cool of a muddy creek-bed.
The flowers of our arboreal stage were deep and red, so red as to be black, and the surface of the rippled lake was blue as paint. Primal colors: green and dirt and the grass-blades waving, the white-misted sky bruised by tips of cypress and pine whose bark smelled of skin. Into all this I walked with my scarlet veils streaming, into all this I walked with my hair trailing black against my calves, into all this I walked with silver rings on my toes, brown as dust but not as earth. Would the animals be afraid, touched by harlot-fingers, the perfumed forearms of the finished woman, her tongue all tattooed with arcana and codes of conduct?
They looked up, fawn and tortoise, crow and fox, lazy alligator sunning its cretaceous stomach, hare with ears like cubits, infant lion, grouse and quail and quill-tailed pheasant. They looked up, a constellation of liquid eyes, and looked away again, without concern. The fox lapped at the pool, the crocodile eyed the fox in hunger, the crow hopped from one grey foot to the other. Why should beasts who rut in seed-blown rye run from the red-veiled mare in heat?
The giant, boulder-backed and moss-shouldered, shadowed himself in the wood, thirsty, but wary of the new thing haunting the water. Enkidu sniffed the air for me, his beard tangled with sap and berries. He tried to taste the smell with the tip of his untried tongue. He peered from the patterned pine-shade and his eyes drank my red.
(The harlot holds her second body
before her first.
It is the second body,
with its confused limbs,
that makes men love her,
makes their singular,
undoubled bodies
turn towards her like compass-needles.
They could not love her
if she held her eyes in her face,
only when she secrets them
away in her nipples,
blinking from atavistic lids.
They could not love her
if she arranged her flesh like theirs.
The original body is too terrifying -
the artificial self is reassuring.
The harlot is, after all, not like them.
She is feline, cephalopod, arachnid.
She is all wrong, inhuman.
Thus can men loathe her enough
to love her safely.)
I pulled veils from my limbs like husks, like blood washed clean.
I know I am beautiful - the harlot must be absolutely honest about such things. When I am naked, my skin shines very softly with the nacreous light of Ishtar, my calves curve like the slats of a lyre, my lips part slightly and exhale the night-breath of welcome. When I was a girl, the temple-women would sigh over my hair, its black-bright length. Now it is the chief organ of my second body, its curls have their own mouths, whisper their own litanies. Enkidu’s muscled hands twitched to pull it like the rope of a bell, to silence the mouths and feel them rustle over his savage thighs.
He came out of the cedar thatch hesitantly, like a sparrow hopping. The bristle-furred lion nuzzled up under his hand, snuffling for spare bits of food, but he ignored it, reaching his colossal arms out to me, ridiculously like a baby groping for its mother. His mouth hung open helplessly, but of course he had no language, no speech to beg me to fasten my legs around him. He was not even sure what it was he wanted - he was an infant, a son suckling at my breast. And indeed, he loped across the whistling grass and dropped to his scabbed knees, pushing his lips at me with the instinctive greed of a newborn turning its head towards the warm flow of milk. I tousled his hair; my hand came away sticky with loam and brackish sweat.
(The harlot’s second body is an amphora—
it exudes all liquid.
Blood, sweat, spit, come, milk—
all of these are layered in her
like sedimentary rock.
This is part of her mystery.
Her body is a flooded world,
a world without sleep,
a sea of fluid without land.
She is a city in the midst of this sea,
and her miraculous flesh
divides the waters.)
The first time he came right away. I pulled him over me and the red-tailed birds scattered up to the sky. His eyes closed and opened, closed and opened, and on his forehead I wrote the names of his parents, his first selves. His teeth quivered in his prognathous jaw, feeling suddenly the echo of his mother in him - and who could have been the mother of this rough-molded beast? What giantess crouched in the hills and tore his umbilicus with her teeth? Gilgamesh proclaimed that he was shaped from clay, that he alone of men was never clutched by the shadows of the womb - but the harlot knows better. No one escapes that blackness.
The record of his blood I scribed over his skull: Aruru, Anu, Ninurta.
This was the First Tablet.
The second time, I lay over him and the hare leapt up from the singing water. His nostrils flared and he pressed his face into my hair. My oiled mouths stamped out the code of law on his cheek: Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. Shall is the law of the harlot, the law of the second body - shalt not is the law of Gilgamesh-who-let-the-walls-fall. My tongue traced out the ideographs of Hammurabi, of Solon, of Moses - and he groaned with the weight of the golden letters, left on his skin like the tracks of a jeweled snail. For the first time he felt as though he should not touch me, that the second body was wicked and dank - and he grinned with the pleasure as he broke the clay law slabs by the bucking of my hips.
This was the Second Tablet.
The third time, he drew the milk from my breast and clamped his teeth upon me. The lion sniffed the air with a dripping muzzle and drew away from the water’s edge. My tongue gave his tongue breath - a door opened in my womb and from it came the strands of cuneiform, delicate as insects, triangular heads bobbing with grace. I gave him hieroglyphs and pictograms and vowels with toes of glass. Phonemes, consonants like scarabs, and halting glottals poured from me to him, salt passed from vessel to vessel. I gave him 22 symbols, then 24, then 26. He became pregnant with my seed, fat with words, verses, stanza-zygotes fluttering next to his heart. On his chest the thin-stroked alphabet burned, and he spoke into the ear of my tongue, his voice thick and creaking as a new wheel, and the first word of the Edenic monster was my name:
Shamhat. Shamhat. Shamhat.
This was the Third Tablet.
The fourth time, he lay his head on my belly and his babbling drove the grouse and the fox underground. His beard shriveled into his face, dying like grass. His hair grew sleek and scented with cinnamon, his gnarled body smoothed itself into beauty. On his flesh sprouted leather and cotton, deerskin and silver bracelets like vines twisting up from quenched soil. His eyes lost their pupil-less gleam, their feral boil, and became soft as a hide, smudged with ink, lashes curled. His
feet sandaled themselves and his calves greaved in bronze. He was become beautiful, like me, and the mark of me was on him like a weal, and he was not angry to lose innocence, but threw it off with a horse-like laugh, proud to be like I was.
Shamhat, take me with you into Uruk-Haven, and never leave me.
This was the Fourth Tablet.
The fifth time, the alligator slipped under the surface of the pool. I took him in my mouth and chanted the liturgy of numbers, so that he could count out seven jars of black beer, eleven copper coins, four cubits and five, two measures of honey and two of oil, seventeen slaves with golden eyes, nine silver fish on a line, three chairs at a single table, eleven tablets of clay, two gates to the city, six days and seven nights in the grip of my body, one Shamhat, one Enkidu. I taught him what zero was, the great secret Gilgamesh and all his sons could not touch, and showed him how his navel made this sign. I showed him how my mouth made this sign, and my womb made it, and his irises made it, and how his skull made it, and all his bones.
This was the Fifth Tablet.
The sixth time, I stretched out my body over his head and made of my skin a roof, and he dwelled within the house of me, safe from the prickling rain. He hid from the sky which wore its stars like a spray of blood. He hid from the trees and the eyes of the animals. He closed the doors of my thighs behind him and lay within a hut spattered with his voice, which he tried on everything like a teething child: Wall. Woman. Fire. Mine. Enkidu. And Shamhat, always Shamhat, his aleph, his first and favorite word. He closed himself away inside me and his scent changed. The animals did not hate him - what should they care that a beast mated with another beast? This was a lie of Gilgamesh, so that Enkidu would think I poisoned the wild against him, and love only his King in the warm and the dark. They thought it strange that he slept in a house, and no longer smelled of the moist soil and the rain puddling below the cypress boughs. He went into another herd, and smelled of the musk of its mare. But that was a thing the wild understood, and they nosed for their own mates under thickets and behind stones.
This was the Sixth Tablet.
The seventh time, I took his hands and placed them between my second body and my first, and the tortoise slept in its shell.
(The second body lies over the first.
It is not a shield, but a cloud.
It surrounds the first body,
conceals it so that the fingers
which stroke the misplaced limbs
of the second body
never penetrate to the first.
The space between them is filled with rain.
It is filled with fur and seeds.
It is filled with star-wattle.
The bodies are connected, they move
together, like twins within their mother.
Within them, only the cunt remains
in its right place.
It is the sun, and the bodies, planetary,
revolve around its light.
The space between them is the source
of the harlot’s power. In the play
of the two bodies, the touch of heel to hair,
she creates herself over and over
like the breathing of air
into a clay pot.)
In the space between the bodies, strewn with seed and stars, I traced words with his fist clamped in mine, shaping the letters with him, so that he learned to write for himself and to make words out of space, to initiate the first stroke of his own characters, which is the last of all things he learned:
I will go into Uruk for Uruk is the body of man, and when I have left the body of woman, Uruk will take me in and close me off from her, and I will know what it is to serve and to follow, I will know what it is to kill great things, and perform the change of Shamhat on the King of Uruk, who is Gilgamesh, who is son of Rimat-Ninsun, who will crack the horns of the Bull of Heaven, for no man shall have horns more splendid than his. I will go into Uruk for Uruk is the body of man, and I will wrap myself in its limbs, and I will forget the wild and the wold.
This was the Seventh Tablet.
For seven nights Enkidu did not sleep, but drank and drank until he was full of the draughts of Uruk, which passed through me and down his throat like sighs. He rolled in his satisfaction, the juices of language dribbling down his chest.
(Only the second body
can perform this metamorphosis.
The body of Ishtar
the harlot holds before her like a mirror—
Gilgamesh,
who has but one flesh,
envies it and loathes it
and dreams of crushing it
between his fingers.
He could not teach the golem-giant
to fashion words like stone hammers,
could not teach him to belong to Uruk.
He would never forget that he had to use me to bring a brother behind the crumbling walls.)
Enkidu followed me like a patient dog, though the beasts nosed his flanks and whimpered for him to stay and breed, now that his mare had come. Enkidu did not look at them. He followed me into the Uruk-Haven, into the market where jugs of black beer were sold, and measures of honey, he followed me out of the wild and the wold. He had no thought but to lie over me again, until Gilgamesh descended in gold and myrrh, and paid my temple in silver coin for the taming of Enkidu. Then the eyes of the giant were full of the muscled king, and between them they wrote over my tablets until even my name, first of all his words, had gone into the wet clay and vanished. It was scraped from his tongue and in its place Gilgamesh wrote curses and guilt with his kisses, for no man should have horns more splendid than his own.
This is what was scratched from the tablets of Gilgamesh. I am Genesis; I am the creation of man in the garden-crucible. I am initiation, I am expulsion. But this is not enough - room must be made for the brother-heroes and their quests. Room must be made for the destruction of the world by water, and the cursing of my name by the creature I fashioned on the anvil of my body. Room must be made for Gilgamesh to love Enkidu. The harlot has only one story, after all, and the hero has many—why let her into the tale at all?
Gilgamesh sprawls—and I disappear.
(The taming done, I went into the temple
in the shadow of the cedar slats of the Ishtar Gate.
I went into the hall where harlots dwell,
and their perfumes hung in the air
like banners of victory.
But the smell of the golem was on me,
and the sour-milk smell of Gilgamesh.
My sisters did not know me,
and they turned from me in fear.
They saw me and sprang away.
My knees longed to go among them,
but they wore only their second bodies to me,
and would not call me Shamhat again.)
This was the Last Tablet.
Judgment at Naioth
by Elissa Malcohn
The road to Naioth lay like a razor's edge upon the land, a straight-shot cut into the valley. Some say the road had crested a hilltop before everything had turned inside-out. Others say it was once a river - and then a wadi - and then just a faint line in the desert before the line got paved, one lane in each direction with waves of heat shimmering off the tar. Enough puddle mirages collected to suggest a year's rain, or the hand of God reaching down when the sun climbed high enough to bleach the macadam and melt Route 18 into the sky.
Tamar gunned her Dromedary bike away from the pastel kitsch of downtown Ramah. The black leather on her back soaked up twilight's fading warmth. Wind chill from the East made her cheekbones feel sharper and lifted her short, spiky hair to blend with the encroaching night.
Main Street dropped farther behind, leaving warehouse blocks to either side of 18. The cameras caught Tamar in blips of reflection, a blur streaking across empty sheets. Her engine roar echoed against aluminum siding. Behind the buildings rose mountains; the scars of clear-cut eclipsing the heavens.
&nb
sp; In another world, the warehouse called Naioth would have been like any other building, a nondescript blot on the barren landscape, its dented metal dressed in rusted padlocks. To hear the prophets talk, that Naioth existed in that other world. In another world still, it was a moon base, or an abandoned subway tunnel, or a dusty street corner mapped only in repeating dreams. It depended on whom you listened to, if you could untangle the slurred tongues the druggies used to spout their ecstasies. In the end they all said the same thing.
Naioth was the navel of Yahweh.
Tamar listened to them because of the light in their eyes. The light told her that they didn't need the drugs. The remains of their wasted bodies told her they did.
She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror Page 5