Again, Dangerous Visions

by edited by Harlan Ellison

  "It's you who have damned me!" I exclaimed, then fell back on my pillow. As if from very far away I heard the Bishop going on with the ceremony, but now I was powerless to stop him, or even to speak.

  "I'm damned," I whispered to myself. "Damned. Damned. Damned."

  "Hey, don't take it so hard just because you can't get a hard-on," said Marie, lifting her head from where she was uselessly sucking on my dick, my flabby, hopeless, impotent dick.

  Outside, in Montmartre, it was raining, but the night people still walked the streets, shouting and laughing and pretending to have fun, and the accordion in the Lapin Agile cabaret down the street played a heavy-footed waltz. I reached over to the bedtable and poured myself a drink.

  "That won't help you fuck," said Marie. "That's what's damning you, in fact, if you ask me."

  I ignored her and drank deep.

  "Hey, my friend," she said. "Were you ever a monk?"

  "Hell no," I snapped. "Do I look like one?"

  "You drink a lot and can't make love. That's the way it is with a monk, eh?"

  "I was born a second-rate piano player," I growled. "That's all I ever was and that's all I ever will be."

  "You aren't much of a lover, my friend," she said, sitting up on the edge of the bed and reaching for her bloomers, "but I like the way you play piano, and the songs you sing. They tell the truth about what a shithouse we live in, and besides, people pay good money to hear them. That's the important thing, if you ask me."

  "I'm damned," I said again. "I wish I was dead."

  "Are you going to get into that? Listen, you promised me you wouldn't try to kill yourself again, right?"

  "That's right."

  "Well, promise me again."

  "I won't try to kill myself," I said, gloomily. "Now how much do I owe you?"

  "Listen, my friend. Forget it. Nothing for nothing, right? We've been friends so long we're like brother and sister, eh? It's all in the family."

  "Brother and sister? Shit. If you were my sister I wouldn't let you sell your ass for a living."

  "How do you know, my friend? Brothers don't always treat their sisters so very well. Now help me into my corset like a good brother. Then you can walk me down to the Gare St. Lazare. I have to catch a train."

  "Walk all that way? In the rain? Shit!"

  "It'll be good for you, my drunken brother. It'll sober you up."

  "Oh, what the hell. All right. I don't give a fuck!"

  She stood in front of the mirror, putting on her little silver crucifix.

  "What do you wear that thing for?" I asked her as I searched for my pants.

  "I know what's good for me," she answered with a shrug.

  When we were finally dressed and stumbling down the steep streets trying not to get run over by the passing horses and carriages, I asked Marie, "Where are you going, anyway, on that train?"

  "I am going to make my visits," she answered simply, clutching my arm to steady herself, though lord knows I could have used a little steadying myself.

  "Visits?"

  "To my family. Everyone makes visits, you know."

  "I don't," I told her.

  "Poor man," she said sadly. "A veritable orphan!"

  "I have parents . . .right here in Paris. They have no more wish to see me than I have to see them."

  "Poor man," she repeated.

  After a while we were in the station. It was crowded as hell.

  We stood together on the platform for a while, not speaking, and then she said, "Listen, my friend. I have nothing to read on the train. Can you run down to the stand and buy me a newspaper or something?"

  "All right."

  "But hurry. The train is due any minute."

  I started off through the crowd, but it was slow going.

  I saw an old woman sitting on a bench, and I thought she was dead because her skin was so blue, but then she moved. Old age is always horrible. Only fools see anything good in it.

  "You won't be old," said the dark angel in my ear.

  I was used to hearing strange voices when I drank too much, so I paid no attention. I just bought a few newspapers at random and started back through the milling mob.

  Then I heard the train coming in, puffing and chugging and hissing like a winded dragon. And I saw it . . .or anyway the clouds of smoke it was belching out, so I tried to run, but the crowd was so thick it was like swimming in molasses. At the edge of the platform there seemed to be some clear space, so I tried to get through there.

  The locomotive was coming now, drivers pumping with a slow easy roll.

  Then someone pushed me.

  I went off balance for an instant, then fell onto the tracks, landing on my side with a painful thud. There were two thoughts in my head, before the train hit me. The first was of Marie, that she would think I had done it on purpose. The second was of my songs. "Oh, why didn't I ever write anything down?"

  Miriam apo Magdalla, when I spoke of writing down her account of the Master's life and sayings, answered mockingly, "If Jesus had wanted a book written he would have written it himself. It was to free us from a book that He took on flesh! What need have we of a book when God speaks through us directly? Did Jesus not say, 'The letter brings death; the spirit, life'? He who lives by a book is unfaithful to the Holy Spirit within himself, as if God, having spoken once, could never speak again. I say, on the day that men open the book of ink and papyrus, they will close the book of the Spirit, and men will no longer do good, but only devote their lives to catching each other in errors, pointing to the papyrus and saying, 'See! I am right and you are wrong!' Is this faith, to say that God's words may be lost? I say, if all record of God's words be lost, He need but say them again, and those who have ears to hear will hear. And I say further that those who love a book more than God will become murderers and torturers and liars and tyrants and be able to justify every sort of monstrous cruelty by quoting their book. God is within me, or there is no God! And if He is within me, He will tell me Himself, directly, all that I should know."

  So I left the old woman, Mad Miriam of Magdalla, without the words I had come to record on my scroll, and walked the streets of the Jewish quarter in Alexandria. A grim-faced Roman soldier passed in a chariot, red cape twisting in the hot, sand-laced wind. The wheels of the chariot were bright-painted wood rimmed with iron, and the sound of the iron clattering on the stones of the street lingered in the air long after the chariot had passed. I, an Egyptian by birth but a Greek by education, had no love for the Roman conquerors, but on these streets the sight of a servant of law and order was a welcome sight indeed, what with the riots and violence that filled our streets every night. And now night was almost upon me!

  I was dressed as a Jew, and so was fairly safe from the knives of the Jews, but what if I should meet a Greek? Would I have time to tear the Jewish deep blue tassels from the hem of my tunic? What indignity! That the life of a gentleman, a scribe of the Great Library of Serapis, should hang upon a blue tassel!

  And yet, would you believe it, I ventured into that lawless, bloodstained quarter again and again, drawn as if by a wizard's spell to that strange old woman who claimed to have kissed the lips of the God-King of the Jews. There were those who said she was a witch. And more who said she was possessed by seven demons.

  For my superiors, religion was but an instrument of politics, and a new gospel from this old woman would serve no other purpose than to be another means of holding down the fanatical rebelliousness of the Jews. If they must have a Messiah, let it be a Messiah of Peace, not like the others who spring from every stone in the streets of Jerusalem to raise a sword against Rome.

  At first, I felt the same.

  And then, who knows? Perhaps she bewitched me.

  Why else would I listen to tirades like this one?

  "You should have seen how grudgingly the Twelve allowed my presence by the Master's side. Those idiots! How many times did their slow wits try the patience of my Rabbi, my Lord, my King? I, only I, really un
derstood Him, for only the mad can know the mad. His kingdom had three ranks . . .those who know, those who only believe, and those who neither know nor believe, but only wander in ignorance. Only He and I dwelt in the highest rank, for only to us did the voices speak and the visions appear. Because of our visions, this lower world cast us out, and we lived in another, but the Twelve remained in this lower world. They chose which world they'd follow. When my Rabbi went to the stake, they ran and hid themselves while I stayed with Him to the end. In their shame they could not bear to see me or hear my scorn for their cowardice, and they quickly did what they dared not do while the Master was alive. They sent me away, saying that because I was a woman I was not worthy to be one of them. Now we hear talk that they, too, see visions, hear voices and even speak in tongues, yet I know that whoever it is that speaks through them, it is not my Rabbi! My Rabbi, in the flesh, never preached the Jewish virtues of law, work, family and ritual. When He said He had come to fulfil the Law, He meant He'd come to end it! The Law called for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but Jesus freed us to become kind."

  Or fantastic claims like this?

  "The Great Beast, Nero, is not dead forever, but will return, as shall we all, in a new body, when the time is ripe. We all come, the good, the evil, the indifferent, again and again into the world. John, the Baptist, was, before this, Elijah, the prophet, and I was before this the sister of Moses."

  No, it was a certain ring, a certain feeling that hooks the mind, in stories she told about Jesus. Like this one:

  A certain Zealot asked Jesus, "If the Romans threaten our religion, should we not defend our God with the sword?"

  Jesus answered, "Who is stronger, you or God?"

  The Zealot said, "God, of course!"

  And Jesus said, "Then God has no need of your defense. It is you who need His."

  Or another like it, about a Roman Centurion who was questioned by Jesus in the marketplace:

  Jesus said to the Centurion, "Why do you need armies?"

  The Centurion answered, "To defend the borders of our Empire."

  Then Jesus said, "If your Empire had no borders, what, then, would you have to defend?"

  Or this one:

  Jesus said, "Some build temples by laying one dead stone on another, but how can dead things ever give life? I have made my temple as a living tree is made, growing outward from the seed, and in the fruits of that tree are the seeds of new life."

  When she told a story she would then explain it, like this:

  Miriam said, "The Master's thought is like a great tree. It has many leaves and branches and bears rich fruit, but it all grew from one little seed, and that seed is that Man was created in the image of God. Everything else grows outward from that."

  I managed to write down a few of her stories from memory, but what I really needed was a full story, with a beginning, middle and end, like the scroll the Jew, Mark, had made a few years ago for the followers of Jesus in Alexandria, but more complete and bringing out more the radical pacifism of this particular Messiah. Such a document, with the authority given it by an eyewitness like Miriam, could do more to tame the blood-thirsty Jews than seven legions of Caesar's finest.

  All the news was of endless bloodshed in the war between the Romans, led by General Vespasian and his son Titus, and the Jewish fanatics in Judaea, so that at times I wondered if my mission of peace would have any effect, even if I were to produce the manuscript I felt the occasion demanded. And now, with the death of Nero, civil war broke out in Rome itself, where first one emperor, then another, laid claim to the throne of the world.

  It was useless to appeal to Miriam on humanitarian grounds. She felt those Jews who put their faith in Herod's defiled temple deserved whatever they got. It was only by chance that I finally hit upon a way to secure her co-operation.

  I happened to mention Mark's gospel to her.

  "What? Mark wrote a gospel? But he never knew the Master! He was no more than Peter's scribe! How can he write of that which he knows nothing?" she shouted, smashing her withered old fist on the table.

  Jealousy! How could I have guessed that saints could be jealous? Yet it had been obvious all along.

  "If you were to dictate another," I said carefully, "perhaps Mark's foolish impulsiveness could be corrected."

  "You're a sly one," she said to me. "But yes, I'll do it. I'll do it after all!"

  I knelt at my writing table, took a reed brush from behind my ear, wet my writing ink, and waited. Miriam's Greek was crude and ungrammatical, but I could polish it as I wrote. Together we might well produce a work of lasting value.

  "But first," she said, "you must promise me something."

  "Of course," I said, my eagerness overcoming my caution.

  "You must promise to defend the truth I give you from all those who would change or corrupt it."

  "Of course," I easily agreed.

  "Until the end of time," she added.

  "Until the end of time? How can I promise that?" I demanded.

  "You will remember, from one life to the next, what you have promised to me here, even if you forget me, even if you forget everything else. Is it agreed?"

  In my heart I did not believe a man has more lives than one, so why not humor the old woman? "Agreed," I said. And so she began:

  "When he was a child, Jesus was brought here to Alexandria to escape Herod, who called himself King of the Jews, though he was neither King nor Jew. Herod slaughtered all who had rightful claim on the Jewish throne, and Jesus was of royal blood, of the House of David. Like Buddha, Jesus was born an earthly ruler, but renounced earthly rule for the other kingdom, that is not of this world. He was a student, not of one religion, but of them all, for that is what it means to be raised in Alexandria, where every god in the universe has at least one follower. From the Buddhist Theraputae by the lake He learned monasticism and meditation, from the Rabbi the whole of Jewish law and tradition, and from the shaven-headed priests of Osirus He learned how a man can save his soul by identification with a sacrificial god, and it was from them, too, that He learned baptism and the wearing of the Cross of Life. Yet He never forgot his people, the Jews, never forgot that He and His brothers and sisters were the true royal family of Judaea, and many were the times, while He was still only a boy, that He spent the whole of the night talking of the sad plight of the Jews with His cousin, John, who was later called 'The Baptist.' He saw, clearer than anyone else, that the Jews could never throw off the Roman rule by force of arms, and that by trying to, they would only bring down upon themselves destruction. He saw, clearer than anyone else, that the Jews had been led away from the religion of their fathers and of the prophets by the false king, Herod, and the false priests Herod appointed, and the false temple Herod built in Jerusalem.

  "I knew Him then, but I did not learn holy things from Alexandria. For a young girl who has no money and cannot speak Greek like a lady, Alexander's city of marble has other lessons to teach. I learned that there was something between my legs that I could sell again and again, yet never lose. Jesus said my cunt was like knowledge in that way, or like truth, for though all my family and friends turned away from me because of what I did, Jesus never turned away. You know that a woman is counted lower than a horse or cow in this world, but though I was a woman, and the lowest of women, Jesus spoke to me as if I were a man, and His equal, and defended me from His friends, who were forced to put up with me, at least until Jesus was dead.

  "When I returned to my home in Magdalla, on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus and John returned also, and John went south to preach the things he and Jesus had learned in Alexandria, and he soon had a great following, because the people of Judaea were simple and unlearned, except in the Torah, and John had sharpened his wit in debate with the school-trained philosophers from the Alexandrian library. Even on the subject of the Torah and the Jewish traditions, there was not one Rabbi who could best him in a fair argument, and you should know that the Jews decide all things by learned argument
, whether it be the origin of the universe, or the proper preparation of food, or the number of days in a year.

  "But the people of that day were not content with a prophet. They called out for a Messiah, and many were the false Messiahs who stepped forward to lead them to destruction against the Romans. In all Judaea, in all the world, there was only one who, by right of blood, could be a true Messiah, and that was Jesus, the eldest prince in the House of David. So Jesus went to join John in Judaea, and I believe it was in His mind to look for some sign from Heaven that would tell Him whether or not He was truly the savior His people longed for and cried out for night and day.

  "When it came, the sign was a simple thing. At other times it would have passed without notice, but it came at the exact moment that John was baptizing Him. A bird, I think it was a dove, came down and lighted on Jesus' arm, and He ran from the water into the wilderness like a man possessed by demons."