by Ladies
Samson talked about Delilah to his friend Jason all the time. He told him Delilah was a peephole to God, that Delilah was what music looked like. He tried to get Jason to agree.
“She’s alright,” Jason would say.
Samson begged Jason to tell him stories about Delilah because Jason was a storyteller. Jason invented long, complex epics about her, the things that she ate, the places she went. Samson would get all excited. He would lie on his stomach, his feet crisscrossed above him.
One day, Samson decided to start sending Jason to Delilah’s. He was too shy to speak with her, but Jason had a gift with words.
“Go forth and tell her of the deeds of good strength I have performed to honor her. Speak of the falcon whose beak I bit off, but make it sound like poetry.”
Jason, who loved Samson, did as his friend bade him. While he sat with Delilah, he would play his lyre. He would make up songs about the great things that Samson did.
“You play some lyre,” said Delilah.
As their visits together went on, Delilah and Jason saw that they had a great deal in common. They both loved traditional Philistine folk ballads and found avocado pits, when clutched in one’s hand, to be of inexplicable comfort. They began to speak less of Samson, and more of Jason and Delilah.
While Jason was with Delilah, Samson waited anxiously, curling great weights to pass the time. When Jason returned, Samson would ambush him.
“What did she say?”
“She is mightily impressed,” said Jason.
“Does she love me yet?”
“No, but she likes you, though. A lot. As a friend. She told me that underneath all the tough-guy antics you’re probably a big softy.”
“That is true,” said Samson. “What else did she say?”
Jason looked at him for a couple seconds.
“She said she loves me. I love her, too. We want to get married.”
Samson took a moment to consider Jason’s words, and then, as matter-of-factly as he would lace up a sandal, he wrapped his long hair around Jason’s neck and strangled his friend to death.
It was after killing Jason that Samson started to change. He moved out of his father’s house and became less satisfied lifting and maiming animals. He felt it was time to move on to people. Philistine people. Some Israelites had approached him in the past about leading their uprising.
“You’re a Jew, Samson,” the emissaries would tell him. “Come let us conquer the land of the uncircumcised.”
“No, thank you,” Samson would say. “I have no beef with the Philistines. They treat me just fine, and make great music.”
He knew his father would fly off the handle if he saw Samson so much as talking to one of those “uprising” guys.
Now, though, he decided he wanted to deliver the Jews. When asked about the change of heart, he would say, “Personal reasons.” Samson was not a political animal. He just wanted to hit people, hard enough to make them die. It would be like making Jason die again and again. Once was not enough.
News of Samson’s God-like power spread like wild. He was no longer a sideshow. He became famous. Men would pat his arms, nod, and say, “Nice,” while women longed to know him in the biblical sense. It was rumored that even when Samson’s penis was half flaccid, it was strong enough for a woman to perch on like a bird on a branch.
Samson, for his part, spent most of his leisure time just sitting back and pondering all that he could kill. He’d look upon a man or beast and think of how long it would take to rob the creature of its life. Old man— four seconds; bear—three-quarters of an hour. At night he would dream of pushing his foot right through the chests of the Philistines and removing it like he was taking off a leather slipper.
Killing became a kind of therapy for Samson. This one looks like that teacher who called me lunk-headed; this one looks like my father. He lifted that man up to his face by the beard so he could spit in his eye. At such times, Samson felt like he was working things out.
But his murdering only exacerbated his problems, which only made him more murderous. He felt like he was chipping away at one big enemy, but the more he chipped, the bigger it grew.
It was while Samson was in the market of Timnath buying ointments to apply to his massive, battle-wearied muscles that he met up with Delilah. She was on a road trip and was buying bread.
“Samson of the long hair,” she said, sneaking up beside him. “How goes it?”
He felt his great skull-sized knees start to buckle. It was as though something inside him that he’d thought was dead had crawled out to face him. An angel. He stood before her, stammering, until Delilah smiled and told him she had a splinter and would he be so kind as to carry her to her inn.
Samson’s hands floated out from his sides. He placed his thumbs under Delilah’s armpits, which were warm and soft. He lifted her slowly off the ground until she was eye level with him. He walked forward like a somnambulist, staring into her eyes without blinking. She giggled and told him not to be silly, and he placed her on his shoulders. She spread her legs wide around the back of his tree-trunk neck and rode him in silence. After a while, she gritted her teeth, swallowed hard, and ran her hand through his knotted hair.
She knows all that I think, Samson thought. Even now. And even now. And now still.
The first time they made love, Delilah felt like she was being dug away, that when he was finished there would be nothing left of her. Samson smelled like live chickens and saliva. The tips of his greasy hair poked her face.
When he was done, Samson lay beside her, his hands behind his head, exposing his armpits.
“What is the secret of your strength?” asked Delilah. She said it quickly. She was impatient. She wanted revenge for Jason’s death. She wanted revenge for her people—all of this before passing out from the stink of him.
Samson considered telling her the story of his mother and the angel, but he did not want to get all serious so fast. He was aware of how intense he could be, and he decided to keep it in check. He knew that once he got started, he would never be able to shut up, pouring out his heart about everything: how he hates his father, how he can’t stop thinking about Jason, how he’s loved her so long that he feels, at this moment, like he could simply die of happiness. Just thinking about all those things, how true they were, made him feel like he was going to cry. So instead, he tried to be playful.
“I do not know the source of my strength, but I do know that if I were ever made the marshal in a parade, that would be the end of it.”
“Who told you this?” asked Delilah.
“An old weird-looking woman,” said Samson. “She had a limp.”
That evening Delilah met with her cohorts at the tavern. She told them what she had learned.
“It makes sense,” said Delilah. “If we honor him, it will throw a ray of light onto him and the gods will become jealous.”
“Killing a thousand men in battle hasn’t gotten the gods’ attention?” asked Delilah’s brother Potifar.
The Philistines arranged for a parade to honor their mighty enemy. There was to be a marching band and even a banner that would read, “May the gods anoint Samson.” There were to be lyre players, snake charmers, mimics, and women gyrating their hips.
They marched to Samson’s front door, whereupon Samson moved swiftly among their ranks, from musician to juggler to belly dancer, slaughtering indiscriminately using only his feet, fists, and the jawbone from the ass he was in the midst of munching.
“Let the smiting rain down like morning dew,” cried Samson, twirling two old men around by their chin fat.
Delilah turned away from the slaughter and looked up to the heavens. It was a clear, cloudless day. She was wondering if her family had made it away safely when she saw Samson stop dead in his tracks in front of her.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
The next morning, Samson showed up at their love nest, a bullock draped over his shoulder like a shawl.
“I
brought us some grub,” he said.
Delilah watched Samson tear into the animal.
“You know, during your attack you broke my grandfather’s hip.”
“What did he look like? I never forget the face of one I have punished with my fists.”
“He has white hair. He looks like an old man.”
“Does he scream like a girl? There was an old-timer who had screams that tickled my ears.”
Killing people was making Samson more numb by the day. He liked it that way. He wanted to get so numb that he would no longer be able to hear the voices of the people he had killed, which haunted him nightly, or the chastising voice of his father, who had disavowed and disowned him. Even when he thought back to the last time he saw his father, out in the market, and how the old man had slapped him across the lips in front of everyone, he could not get worked up. The only thing that Samson got worked up about was Delilah. He would stay up all night, replaying the significance of certain words she spoke and how she spoke them. If she did not greet him with a smile, he worried that she had grown bored of him and he would babble anxiously about this battle and that—anything to keep her attention. He was greedy for every second he could have of her. For each second was a lifetime of happiness. When she touched his face, he felt like a sparrow’s wing had gotten under his flesh.
Again, Delilah asked her question. She asked it angrily.
“What is the secret of your great strength?”
“It is my hatred of the Philistines that makes me strong. Aside from you, they bring out the worst in me. Just thinking about them makes my bowels watery.”
“Do you mean that if you did not hate the Philistines you would lose your strength?”
“Who knows?” said Samson. “Anything’s possible.”
Delilah set aside her anger, which was great, in order to win Samson over with the splendor of her kinsmen.
“The Philistines are a gentle, scholarly people,” she said. “My brother Potifar weeps when he sees dead birds.”
“He will weep all the more when I bludgeon his skull with the heel of my foot.”
“My cousin Stephan prays each day for peace,” said Delilah.
“He had better pray for a speedy death, for when my sandal enters his kneeling arse he will wish he had never been born.”
“My great-uncle Serge plays a panpipe that would bring tears to your eyes.”
“I will make Jewish his penis with my teeth,” declared Samson.
As the weeks wore on, Delilah continued to bug Samson for his secret. After he told her that carrots were his weakness, the next morning he awoke to find carrots sticking out of every orifice on his body. When he told her that it was the Earth’s sun that fueled him, he awoke the next morning to find himself in a pitch-black catacomb. He had to scrape his way out with his fingernails and toenails.
It was after eleven of these unfortunate events that Samson finally allowed himself to see what was happening. It was his sick love of Delilah that had been keeping him so deluded: Delilah had to be involved in the attempts on his life. All the coincidences that had been happening lately were just too odd to dismiss. And yet he simply could not allow himself to think that one he loved so much could possibly be acting as an agent of his destruction. What kind of unlovable monster would that make him? He pushed the thought from his head, and continued to keep deferring, offering Delilah jokes and lies instead of the truth. But, in the end, he was forced to confront her.
“Delilah, if I tell you the secret of my strength, I fear you will use it against me. I am not the smartest of men, but I do know that something is amiss.”
“Pranks of the gods,” she said. “Everyone—even the spirits—tries to tear us apart.”
“It’s just so weird,” said Samson.
“You do like me?” she asked.
“I would beat myself to death with my own fists for you,” he answered.
“My being a Philistine doesn’t change anything, right?”
“Sometimes it makes me feel like a hypocrite, what with the way I murder you guys, but nothing could ever make me love you less.”
“Would you do anything for me?”
“I would walk through walls of fire for you.”
“Then tell me what makes you so strong. There is an old Philistine saying, ‘The truth will make you grow stronger.’ ”
Samson undid his ponytail and leaned back in bed, his hair fanned out across the pillow like the tail of a peacock.
Because of the drugs, Samson fell into a deep, deep sleep, and when he awoke, and opened his eyes and saw only darkness, his first thought was that he was buried alive again. He reached out his arms to begin scratching away at the dirt, but there was no dirt. He could feel nothing. He stood up. His head hurt. He rubbed it and felt the stubble. He closed and opened his eyes. Carefully, he started to walk. He heard a giggle and swung out his arms. Then he felt the tip of his nose burned by fire. The giggle got louder. The fire was held to his lips, and then to his fingers. In the darkness, he could feel the fire burning his skin; he just could not see it.
He reached his hands up to his eyes, but his eyes were not there. The giggles turned into screams of laughter. It was like his eyes were somewhere in the darkness, laughing at him.
When the impossible idea of his blindness finally sank in, Samson screeched like an eagle. It was like when he was a little kid and his father was beating him unjustly. He would not have ever guessed he could still make sounds like that.
Samson was only blind for a few weeks before he forgot what the world looked like. He could no longer even recall what faces were. When he heard voices, he could only envision swirling rings of gas. He lay on the ground, clutching his forehead and crying. Sometimes he thought he heard laughter. Sometimes he thought he felt a finger on his back. He would flip around and slice his arms through the darkness, touching nothing.
In the gloom, old memories clawed at him. Once when he was twelve, while out walking through the desert with his parents, a lion descended from the mountains hungry for blood. To protect them all, Samson threw himself upon the lion. Even as he risked his life, he could not resist thinking of how stupid he must have appeared in his father’s eyes—rolling about in the sand, grunting through his nose. He showed no dignity. At the end of the long battle, Samson tore open the lion’s stomach and revealed there to be honey inside. It was just like in a dream, how he reached in his hand and offered some to his father from the tips of his fingers. His father told him that it wasn’t honey, that his hands were covered in blood. Samson looked down and saw that his father was right. He couldn’t understand how he could have been so impossibly wrong about something so obvious. Often he would think his father was nearby in the darkness and he would try to keep himself from crying, but it was no use.
Even when he was a kid, Samson hated being alone. Now, in the dark, he was terrified that he would be alone forever. It was after just six imprisoned weeks that Samson pretty much lost the whole of his mind. It turned out that he was just that sort of guy.
In the darkness, he believed he was visited by God.
“You have spent your life making an ass of yourself,” said the Lord, “but you have done so in a most interesting way.”
God kissed Samson’s forehead and threw him into the air, where Samson flapped around and turned into a light that was pure and blinding. The brightness of the light that he was made his teeth hurt. He could not turn himself off! But he was free. The angel inside him had finally escaped.
When two guards showed up and dragged Samson out the door by his feet and into the sun, he thought he was being flown to Heaven by angels. The guards brought him to the king’s court, where a party was in full swing. They dragged him before the king, and they bound his arms to pillars.
“Your short hair makes your face look fat,” said the king.
Samson thought that he was standing at the gates of Heaven, and that the king was God. That God would be so cruel made sense to him. He tried t
o kneel, but his bound arms kept him upright.
Standing there, Samson no longer wanted to think upon his old life. Now he only wanted to get into Heaven. Again he pulled at the pillars, trying to force his knees onto the ground, to supplicate himself, but his attempts were in vain.
Then he heard the sound of lips smacking. The sound came from nearby, but Samson could not match the sound to any particular thing. It sounded like the universe was being sucked up. It sounded like the gates of Heaven were being sealed. The sound came from Delilah’s lips, which were kissing the chest of her lover. She pulled herself away from his arms and stepped up to the bound man.
“I have always hated you,” she told him, her mouth full of grapes.
Delilah then punched Samson directly on the belly button.
“That is for everything,” she said.
Samson’s eye sockets became wide, and you could see right into the blackness in his head. He lunged his chest forth and the pillars shook. They began to give, imperceptibly at first, but then, with each tug, more and more. He felt the ground beneath his feet tremble. Then he heard cracking sounds and the laughing turned to shrieking. Samson continued to thrust himself forward. He wanted to feel Delilah’s touch once more.
King David
Part I: Goliath
Goliath was a Philistine giant who considered himself a laugh riot, and a part of his shtick was coming up with inventive ways to kill Jews. For instance, one time he tied the beards of five Hebrews together, dropped them in a sack, climbed a tree, and threw them from the highest branch. He called it The Fatal Hora. Another time he nailed banana peels to the soles of a half dozen Jews and paid a musician to play rapid harp music as he chased them about with a tent peg.