The Apocalypse Reader

by Justin Taylor (Editor)

  WE HAVE REACHED that unfortunate chapter which I assume to be the reason for my being asked to compose this accounting. Might I say, before I begin, that I regret everything, but that, at the time, I felt there to be no better choice? Were my inquest (assuming there is to be an inquest) to take place before a group of starved men, I might at least accrue some sympathy. But to the well fed, necessity must surely appear barbarity. And now, again well fed myself, I regret everything. Would I do it again? Of course not. Unless I was very hungry indeed.

  In the midst of our suffering, I explained to them that one of us must sacrifice himself for the others. I explained how I, as I had not yet finished my work, was unable to serve. To this they nodded sagely. And which of you, I asked, dare sacrifice himself, by so doing to become a type and shadow of your Jesus? There was among them one willing to step forward, and he was instantly shot dead. He smiteth, I could hear the men mumbling. What followed? Reader, we ate him.

  BY WINTER'S END we had consumed two of his fellows, who stepped forward both times unprotesting, each as my apostle honored to become a type and shadow of their Jesus by a sacrifice of his own. Their bones we cracked open to eat the marrow, but the skulls of all three we preserved and enshrined, out of respect for their sacrifice-along with the skull of Finger which I had preserved and continue to carry with me to this day. Early in Spring I urged them further into the hills until we had discovered a small valley whose soil seemed fertile and promising. In a cave we discovered an unrefined salt. I taught them to fish and as well how to smoke their fish to preserve it, and this they described as becoming fishers of men (though to my mind it were more properly described as fishers of fish). We again set snares along game trails and left them undisturbed and this time caught rabbits and birds, and sometimes a squirrel, and this meet we ate or smoked and preserved as well. The hides they learned to strip and tan, and they bound them about their feet. I taught them as well how to cultivate those plants as were available to them, and to make them fruitful. When they realized it was my will that they fend for themselves, they were quick to learn. And thus we were not long into summer when I called them together to inform them of my departure.

  At first they would not hear of this, and could not understand why their Jesus would leave them. Other sheep I have, I told them, that are not of this fold. Having spent the winter in converse with them and reading an old tattered copy of their Bible, I had become conversant in matters of faith, and though I never did feel a temptation to give myself over to it, I did know how to best employ it for my purposes. When even this statement did not seem sufficient for the most stubborn among them, who still threatened to accompany me, I told them, Go and spread my teachings.

  By this I meant what I had taught them of farming and clothing themselves and hunting but, just as with Barton, it would have served me well to be more specific. Indeed, this knowledge did spread, but with it came a ritual of the eating of human flesh throughout the winter months, a ritual I had not encouraged and had only resorted to in direst emergency. This they supported not only with glosses from the Bible, but words from a new Holy Book they had written on birch bark pounded flat, in which I recognized a twisted rendering of my own words.

  It was not until I had been discovered by my former compatriots and imprisoned briefly under suspicion and then returned to my own campsite that I heard any hint of this lamentable practice. It was enquired of me if I had seen any such thing in my travels in the Midwest. Perhaps it was wrong of me to feign ignorance. And I had long returned to my duties, despite the hard questions concerning dog and dogcart and provisions that I had been unable to answer, before there were rumors that the practice had begun, like a contagion, to spread, and had even crossed from the Midwest into our own territories. I had indeed lost nearly all sense of my days as a Midwestern Jesus before the authorities discovered my name circulating in Midwestern mouths, inscribed in their holy books. If when I was again apprehended I was indeed preparing to fleeand I do not admit to such-it is only because of a fear of becoming a scapegoat, a fear which is in the process of being realized.

  If I had intended to create this cult around my own figure, why then would I have ever left the Midwest? What purpose would I have had in abandoning a world in which I could have been a God? The insinuations that I have been spreading my own cult in our own territories are spurious. There is absolutely no proof.

  There is one other thing I shall say in my defense: What takes place beyond the borders of the known world is not to be judged against the standards of this world. Then, you may well inquire, what standard of judgment should be applied? I do not know the answer to this question. Unless the answer be no standard of judgment at all.

  I WAS ORDERED to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus and to the best of my ability I have done so. I regret to say that at the conclusion of my task I now see for the first time my actions in a cold light. I have no faith in the clemency of my judges, nor faith that any regret for those events I unintentionally set in motion will lead to a pardon. I have no illusions: I shall be executed.

  YET I HAVE one last request. After my death, I ask that my body be torn asunder and given in pieces to my followers. Though I remain a heretic, I see no way of bringing my cult to an end otherwise. Let those who want to partake of me partake and then I will at least have rounded the circle, my skull joining a pile of skulls in the Midwest, my bones shattered and sucked free of marrow and left to bleach upon the plain. And then, if I do not arise from the dead, if I do not appear to them in a garment of white, Finger beside, then perhaps it all will end.

  AND IF I do arise, stripping the lineaments of death away to reveal renewed the raiment of the living? Permit me to say, then, that it is already too late for all of you, for I come not with an olive branch but a sword. He smiteth, and when he smiteth, ye shall surely die.

  SQUARE OF THE SUN

  Robert Bradley

  PETRA'S PRESSED FOR time. She has obligations. She's being torn, muscle from bone, in every direction. Pensive angel. I have my hands on her lower back and I'm pressing into her. She has a tattoo of a magic square above her sacrum. Inscribed above it, "Here is Wisdom."

  I tell her, I say, "Lift up a little." Her vocal chords are straining, now. She vocalizes, "One hundred and ninety three. Eleven." They're numbers from the square. I track them with my eyes as she recalls them aloud.

  "Eighty-three. Forty-one."

  "Relax," I say. "It'll come."

  She's spitting out mathematical formulas, trying to prove, I believe, that time doesn't, in fact, exist. That this pleasure never stops beginning and never stops ending. Short, sharp breaths. Elbows on the bed, her head in her fists. "One hundred and three. Fifty-three."

  She's always been a proponent of the power of whole numbers. Extraordinary ability to focus. "Do you feel me?" I say.

  "Thirteen," she says, "One hundred seventy-three."

  I do the math. The sum of each line, column, and diagonal etched into her skin is six hundred and sixty-six. I slow my stroke. So any new arrival would, literally, be born under the sign of the Beast. It starts to snow again. A black dog trots across the salted road, sniffs around a bundle of split wood. I feel my whole body come together like a puzzle. She trembles. Then I'm wiping the spray off her back with a tissue. Like the tomb of the resurrected Christ, revisited, she is empty. A panoply of emotions plays upon the features of her face. She turns and hits me once; a feeble down stroke, then collapses onto her legs and says, "Fuck. It's always the same thing." It's possible she hasn't completed her calculations. But that's the problem with Petra, she's always on the verge.

  I tell her. "All good things flow from ..."

  "Fuck, fuck, fuck," she says, "now, I'm late." She pulls her jeans up and gives me the finger as she walks out the door.

  BEFORE SHE GAVE up on me Petra used to scold me. "You're not wise," she'd say. And, "Where's the rigor? Where's the grit?" And, "You have no inner fortitude." Or, "No resolve, no rig
or: what do you expect? You're a monument to disappointers everywhere."

  Foreplay: you can't take it personally.

  She finally decided that I was doing it on purpose: dashing expectations to the dirt and then wallowing in the chaff.

  "What's chaff?" I said.

  MY WIFE Is at the window looking out at the yard. "Why don't you offer to rake," she says. "It would be a nice gesture."

  "She has people for that," I say.

  "Go ahead. It's supposed to be relaxing, like meditation."

  "Raking isn't meditative, as people say. It's, Look, I have all these problems and now I have to rake."

  PETRA TOOK A different tack. She said once, "Do you understand that Nature is an extension of your being?"

  I looked at my feet.

  "You heard about the Mayans, right? They're a nature-based culture. They created a calendar charting the evolution of consciousness."

  "I heard that, yeah."

  "Yeah? You know about it?"

  I tightened my eyes, worked the muscles in my neck.

  "Listen ..." she said. "Do you feel it? Time: it's speeding up."

  "Give me a minute," I said.

  "Take two," she said. Then, "Have you noticed that more and more is happening in less and less time?"

  "Not me," I said. I felt innocent around her. I don't know why.

  "It's true," she said.

  "What's going to happen?" I was practically gaping.

  "The Truth will be revealed. And all things, all structures, mental, physical and spiritual that have been built on and supported by lies will crumble, because everyone will be able to see it for what it is."

  "Uh-oh."

  "That's right, fuck boy, complete exposure. No more lies."

  "I don't lie."

  "Oh. Does your wife know that you're fucking me?"

  "For all I know she's fucking you, too."

  "Don't be surprised."

  "WHAT ARE YOU doing indoors?" says my wife. "It's such a beautiful day."

  "Spare me your lesbian cliches," I say.

  "What?"

  "Reading."

  "Let's go out." She's holding her coat. "You need the exercise."

  "This is exercise."

  I get my coat. It's unseasonably warm. I stand framed in the doorway, the sun at my back. Petra says that galactic energies are constantly bombarding the earth's surface and that we're all being primed for what she calls The Unveiling.

  "A worldwide apocalypse, you mean," I said.

  She said, "It's not what you think."

  MY WIFE STOPS and smiles at me.

  "I love you," she says.

  I fidget a bit and say, "You're a great lady."

  "You're fucking kidding me."

  "What?"

  "Who am I, Eleanor fucking Roosevelt?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Just ... drop it." She pushes past me out the door.

  I feel like confessing. Not so much about my infidelity as about being privy to the coming Apocalypse. Petra seems to have worked out the mechanics of it. I feel fairly certain that I'll play a significant role in future events; Petra and I.

  "Let's drive into town," I say, "I'll buy you something."

  She glowers, my wife. "I'm mad at you."

  "Sorry, you caught me off guard, that's all."

  "Do you know how lame that sounds?"

  I think about how lame that sounds. Then I think of something else and something else again. Pretty soon I'm thinking of Petra. She said that the goal of consciousness is to discover what isn't.

  I drive.

  My wife stares at me.

  "What?" I say.

  "I'm talking to you. Are you just going to ignore me?"

  "No," I say and look out my driver's side window through the trees at the booming sun. "Is the sun getting bigger, do you think?"

  "What?"

  "Careful. Shrill factor." I hitch up my shoulders.

  She punches me in the chest. "Let me out."

  I pull to the curb. There's a park across the street. As she gets out of the car she bumps her head and curses furiously.

  I leave my coat in the car, but take my hat and gloves, a truly ridiculous figure.

  "Where are you going?" I say, putting on my hat.

  She walks towards the shops.

  "I was only kidding. Come on, baby." I pull on my gloves.

  She stops, turns to face me with her hand stuck to her head, like a teapot. She looks woozy. I feel oddly attracted to her.

  "Honey, come back," I say.

  She sees me, softens just a bit, then says, "You parked like fifty feet from the curb, asshole."

  I ASKED PETRA who'll survive the coming apocalypse.

  "Eye of the needle," she said.

  I HEAD FOR the park. All the benches are empty of people, just as the sky is empty of birds. I ask myself the question: What am I not?

  A plane glides by.

  There's Petra, expanding and projecting her likeness across the skies. I start blurting out numbers in sequence as if they'll protect me. There's a dark spot, in the meat of the sun, where her heart would be. Then I see its shadow spilling, spreading forth, and feel the true weight of it, as a torrent of blood comes crashing through the trees.

  THE END

  Josip Novakovich

  ALTHOUGH DANIEL MARKOVICH got exile status in the States on the grounds of religious persecution in Yugoslavia, after several years of living in Cleveland he no longer went to church, and many years later he quit reading the Bible. This is how it happened, from the beginning to the end.

  He came to the States in 1968 when Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia; he had believed that the next stop on the Soviet world tour would be Yugoslavia. While Czechs were streaming into the States, he couldn't claim the Soviet threat in Yugoslavia as grounds for being a refugee.

  But his claims of religious persecution were not false.

  Daniel had wanted to be a geography teacher in Daruvar, Northern Croatia. In the interview, he answered the question, "Do you believe in God?" affirmatively. The frog-eyed principal, a boar hunter-there were still some boars alive at the time in the Papuk and Psunj Mountains-said, "Of course, you can't teach if you're intoxicated with the opiate of the masses. How can you teach the principles of the dialectical materialism if your head is filled with ghosts?"

  "I understand the principles perfectly well."

  "But you don't believe them."

  "God and dialectical materialism are not at odds with each other."

  "How about evolution?"

  "According to the Bible, God created man last, and according to the theory of evolution, man is one of the last mammals to evolve. The two are in harmony."

  "Where is God? Show him to me. See, you can't. You're superstitious."

  "I can't show you a neutron either, and you take the scientists' word for granted, don't you? I often do. As for the opiate of the masses," Daniel said, "what is the bottle of slivovitz doing on your table?"

  The school principal threw him out, and no matter where Daniel applied for a teaching position, he didn't get it-and he suspected that it had to do with his being a Croat as much as with his never denying his belief in God. For a couple of years before getting to the States, he worked for a living as a house painter and mason. He grew to be big-fisted and muscular; and with his broadchested frame, dark red beard and long red hair, from a distance he looked like a big torch. He got married, to a student of accounting, Mira, a pale freckled blonde with large dark brown eyes.

  They immigrated to the States, in Cleveland, Ohio, and Mira gave birth to a daughter and then to a son. At first Daniel spent a lot of time preaching in Croatian in a Protestant church whose congregation was Croatian and Serbian, and instead of learning English, he studied Greek, because he needed to understand Christ in the original New Testament language more than he needed to understand Walter Cronkite, although he listened to Cronkite too, vaguely understanding him.

  Soon, howev
er, the church in Cleveland had grown large enough to employ a full-time minister, who'd just immigrated from Serbia. Daniel didn't like being the second fiddle to an inexperienced youngster, who was getting overpaid for doing what should be the labor of love. The services were now conducted in Serbian. Daniel went to church no more than once a month.

  Daniel worked as a mason and house painter. Americans, of course, had no use for geography, so his chances of landing a job in that field were even slimmer in Ohio than in Yugoslavia. Daniel was not happy with his physical labor. All nature travails, he quoted, to console himself, and considered it unavoidable to suffer. Even Saint Paul worked-made and repaired fishing equipment-for a living; labor was a genuinely apostolic thing to do. Daniel chiseled stones and fitted them together into garden walls on several estates in Shaker Heights-those were good and well-paying jobs except that little glassy stone shards had hit and damaged his right eye. He stripped old lead paint on many houses and painted with new lead-based paint. The noxious fumes gave him dizzying headaches. He joked that labor was the opiate of the masses. By the time Sunday came, he'd be bleary-eyed, like someone who had been drinking brandy all week long. After a couple of years of working like this, he went to church once every two months. In the evenings he fell asleep with the Greek New Testament in his hands or sliding out of his hands onto the floor, where one day his dalmatian, whom he'd forgotten to feed, ate it-chewed the whole Gospel, and the Book of Revelations and the Psalms to boot. From now on, he called his dog Saint Dalmatian. Daniel got another Greek New Testament, and continued his practice of dozing off with abstruse verses made even more abstruse and sanctimonious by the ancient tongue.