I, Judas

by James Reich

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  | PROLOGUE |

  THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE

  THE BIRTH OF JUDAS

  KERIOTH, OR THE OUTSIDE

  AKELDAMA, KINGDOM OF CLAY

  THE PURCHASE OF ARISTOCRACY AND BROKEN BONES

  THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEMPLE

  THE FLESH EATERS

  THE PSALM OF IOKANAAN

  JUDAS ISCARIOT, DELILAH, AND THE SUICIDE OF SAMSON

  THE FIRST DEATH OF JESUS OF NAZARETH

  THE PIGS

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE SUICIDES OF VINCENT VAN GOGH AND GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND GÉRARD DE NERVAL AS ILLUSTRATED BY GUSTAVE DORÉ

  THE KISS OF JUDAS

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND SKULLHEAD

  LADY LAZARUS, A SELF-PORTRAIT

  LIVE AT THE WITCH TRIALS

  JUDAS ISCARIOT, SALOME, AND THE DECLINE AND BETRAYAL OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

  THE TERMINAL RACETRACK: JUDAS FINDS PILATE IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

  THE DMZ

  THE ACTORS PREPARE

  STELLAR DEATHS IN MOTION

  DOUBT AT CANA

  JUDAS ISCARIOT, THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK, AND THE SUICIDES OF MONROE AND HEMINGWAY

  THE GLITTERING SNAKE

  THE BATHS OF BETHZATHA

  THE BIRTH OF JESUS

  THE ENDLESS FEAST

  THE MOTORCADE

  THE BROTHEL IN BETHESDA

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE SUICIDES OF SAUL AND HIS ARMOR BEARER

  THE OCCUPATION OF GERASENES

  THE ASSASSINS AT BABYLON

  THE ETEMENANKI HOTEL

  THE EMPTY HOUSE

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE DANGLING WOMEN

  THE CONNING TOWER

  THE LAST SUPPER

  THE PASSION OF JUDAS

  THE TRIAL OF JESUS

  JUDAS ISCARIOT AND THE SCAPEGOAT

  | EPILOGUE |

  | ABOUT THE AUTHOR |

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  | PROLOGUE |

  THE RIVER COCYTUS

  He moved between morbid articulations of rock and dull signatures of slime, following the quartz-lined way of Virgil, the lantern-lit coils of Dante, down through the splay of fossilized vegetation, shoals of crystallized fish, a vertiginous landfill of microchips, pterodactyls, and religious billboards, compressed jungles, sedimentary cities, rotting wings of cinema screens, diving boards, neon, crushed statuary, ashen corpses like nameless buildings, upright or split or flattened, until he reached Cocytus, the lethal river of lamentation. Beyond this river lay another, Acheron, and beyond that Judecca, the plain of ice. The end of his journey.

  The river Cocytus rolled slowly, each wave a frozen iron bell. His reflection beckoned from the luminous black water. He crouched and looked closer. Bruises bloomed through the skin of his throat, imprinted with rope, the blunt blue-black line of it gouged like a prison tattoo. He fingered the raised welts and scorched nebulae pulsing over his larynx. Crystals of frost sparkled on his goatskin jacket. He studied the frostbitten fingers that had counted the money, the hollows of the neck from which betrayal had sounded, the voice that had spoken seductions, the spiteful pout that had driven in nails, and the eyes that had now apprehended so many versions of himself that he could no longer account for the many apparitions he was blamed for. His shadow swung across the fractured surfaces of the glacier as he stood upright.

  From within the water, voices rose, enraptured in grief, millions of souls bound to the eros of disappointment and the crude arousal of grief. An abandoned bark drifted toward him, as though strung on a wire. The river screamed and the bones of a thousand flying fish spattered against the ceiling of the cave. The small boat was crusted with ice. He stepped into it, and it began to float toward the point where Cocytus and Acheron merged, toward the dreadful plateau of Judecca, his home.

  He watched as a dorsal fin split the cold film of the river, protruding slowly, frozen shards falling from it. The blue-black fin pitched in the aching torrent. It was metal, part of a machine pulled into the dark. Then he saw the taillights of the car surfacing and the rear section of the familiar Lincoln Continental. Drenched in frozen weeds, a woman in a pink Chanel suit once again crawled upon the smooth metal. The limousine and its castaway surfaced for only a few moments, long enough for the woman’s screaming to fill the vault.

  Then, it was gone, back to the slow drag of death, a diffuse red froth in its wake. Judas paddled through it, recalling the day that he and his brother Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem for the last time. From that journey he had known there could be no return. This was the same. He saw Sylvia Plath slumped against a block of ice that resembled a frozen transparency of her death-oven, posed on her knees, her pale cheek pressed against its wall, gorgon hair all about her cardigan shoulders. She maintained the attitude of a housewife eavesdropping through the walls. He saw George Armstrong Custer marooned on a blood-glazed escarpment, a gaping wound smoking like an ashtray where his heart had been, a whiff of powder drifting from his gun’s last chamber. He saw eyeless Samson nursing his erection in the gray slush of the far bank. Judas appraised the suicides without judgment, for in the rootless coils of eternity he had been elected their reluctant monarch.

  Frosted coffins shunted against one another in the timeless currents. At last, the skiff ran aground upon the huge sheets of ice that extended about Judecca.

  He stood on the plain, in the shadow of the fuselage of a Boeing 767 that stood wingless and upright, part submerged like an image of a sinking ship; a giant spike from the frozen sea. Judas pulled his fleece tight against the Plutonian cold, the wind across the landscape of Judecca a glacial paean to the possibilities of suicidal death and betrayal. He looked at the numerals on the suspended aircraft: N334AA. One of the two planes from New York. Judas reached inside his clothes and tore a piece from the greasy pastry parcel he had made and filled with flowers from the trees that also bore his name, red petals spilling from the crust. He discovered that he could no longer ingest food. Wet clots of the oily pastry fell from his chapped lips and were rejected by his tongue as he coughed and gagged. The flowers of the Judas trees drifted like snowflakes as he wiped the grease from his trembling fingers.

  Judas had lost track of time. How long had he been descending into the grievous earth? Time had ceased to function. One moment was decoupled from the next. He moved through its broken translucent sheaths as he did through morality, sometimes with nonchalance and at other times with a streetwise diffidence, a distant contempt at the corner of his mouth. Time was as transparent and measureless as the ice that surrounded him. It lent scenery to the stages of his rage, yet it was confused, conjoined, one moment projecting into another, with objects surfacing through the perverse film between them. It might have been hours; more likely it had been days. It did not matter. The effects were the same. He spat into the permafrost. There is the speed of life, he thought. He remembered the rotting rope breaking and how the mud beneath the tree had absorbed him, sucking him down like quicksand into a wet crack in the earth. The contractions had borne him to an opening, where he fell into a slick and jagged hollow. He had followed the slanting floor, blindly perceiving an impression of descending steps beneath his hands as he crawled, imagining the flow and progress of water and seeking after it. The raw steps grew more defined, and even the dense black thinned as he went lower.

  Somewhere behind him, the agitated corpse of the dog Cerberus twitched and mouthed in what passed for moonlight. The three-headed hound had confronted him first in discordant overlapping howls and barking that caused small pellets of sedimentary stone to fall from the cave ceiling. Then it charged at him in an unraveling of ancient chains at its three collars and a fury of claws on rock. The six e
yes of the beast—mastiff, pit bull, and jackal—glowed brightly and lit the flesh-sprayed walls. Its breath was a boiling, nauseating fog, and its carrion-wet fur stood erect along a deformed but powerful spine. Its tail whipped against the crude stone hall with the sound of breaking bones. Judas pulled his revolver from inside his goatskin jacket and fired on the horrific dog as it lunged toward him. His first shot missed, the bullet ricocheting into the catacombs beyond, as did the second. Suddenly, Cerberus reached the limit of its chain and the timeless shackles choked the dog heads and caused it to fall back. Here, Judas strode forward and shot each of them in a shattering of canines and palettes. The chambers of his futuristic gun had gasped and smoked in the chill as he ejected the cartridges. The dog whimpered from three wounded muzzles.

  Some time after that, as Judas descended, a man with a mutilated ear stepped from the weeping shadows, waving a small, sharp trowel at him. At first, he took the shade to be the slave Malchus, whose ear had been severed that night in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus was finally apprehended. As the weird light shifted about the walls of the funnel where they met one another once more, Judas saw that the man’s thin skull was slicked over with linseed and soft red hair, like the peeling orange of lost Dutch royalty. His face was shadowed with paint and the worming palsies of infinite sorrow and madness. Crows pulled the skin at his eyes. Judas handed the gun to Vincent van Gogh and continued his descent.

  At times he had exerted control, directing actors with electric shocks of his contempt or indifference, and at other times he felt that he was nothing more than a flickering ghost, a frigid shudder in the conscience where he might arise, summoned, dragged. He might be a whisper over a coroner’s desk. Now, it did not matter that he desired otherwise or how bitterly he fought against it: his condition was one of simultaneity; he had entered into ambiguity and anachronism, existing in distortions, refractions, echoes, and caricature. There were millions of claims on his being. He was pulled apart and remade. His was the most exquisite corpse, the paragon of suicides. His name Iscariot meant “man of Kerioth” and that he was an outsider from the beginning, the sole non-Galilean among the disciples. This otherness also proved that from the beginning he was not a historical figure but a literary figure. He had been hijacked, pirated, fashioned, and abused. He no longer possessed any control over his image, his presence, recurrence, and attribution in space and time. Now, the rhythms and repetitions of his life were beyond his power to influence. Judas discovered death to be an endlessly transfiguring and distorting night.

  The ice creaked beneath his crampons. He experienced himself as a fly on a museum case, beneath him a vast dredge and glassy cataracts of extinct megafauna, mutilated beings like homunculi, shreds of Atlantic cable, chrome hubcaps, ovens, the children of poets beating on windows, a suspended blizzard of smashed windshields, objects beyond his comprehension frozen and floating, structures of desiccated meat, lice, peacock feathers, and fur. He was walking on dead water, a sea of abstract desolation. Fissures allowed jets of burning gas to storm out of the surface.

  His mind flickered with the infinite landscapes he had seen: a mosaic of presidential skull blowing in red fragments over Dealey Plaza, a babushka lady in the Dallas sunlight through a telescopic sight and cine camera on a mound of grass, bodies smashed in Pisa like a horror movie in the slabs of a de Cherico painting, fetuses in Roswell and the stench of Artesia’s rotting cattle, flaming tanks in the tar pits of Los Angeles, barricades of dead horses and a cinnamon-haired general pushing his trembling revolver against his breast, the British Telecom Tower shearing in two like a broken horn, sex parties in Babel like a pyre of engorged flesh, the libraries of Babylon machinegunned, Grumman Wildcats pouring like locusts into the Bermuda Triangle, bleach evaporating in the clinical halls of Glenside Hospital, women electrocuted in colleges of poetry, soft riots at rock concerts, Parisian hashish dens beneath the falling gargoyles of Notre Dame, tumescent rain forests with hanging monkeys, the star-worn care of nights on the flat rooftops of Nazareth.

  This was before the escalation of love, dares, secrecy, and promises had made a straw prince of his friend, Jesus, and before the omens of rose moons and crows over the wheat field.

  And somewhere in the distance, at the epicenter of Hell, Lucifer, the rebel angel, now monstrous, degenerate, and terrible, was also trapped in the ice, his massive torso yearning from it, pinned at the elephant tusks of his ribs, his bloodied wings ceaselessly beating to break free. As Lucifer’s tears fell, the freezing wind from his wings transformed them to ice and held him faster. Gorgeous Lucifer, like Prometheus the thief of fire with his liver endlessly punctured and devoured by savage birds, suffered the fate of those accused of treason against the highest. Monumental, despairing, Lucifer waited for Judas at the center of the earth as though he were awaiting his Son. Judas moved slowly toward that confrontation, as he had done all his life.

  THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE

  One million cockroaches fell from the sun like bloody crusts of paper. The moon spread her uterine frost across the black and hollow heaven. We watched the slant of the stars as we had watched cold bright spittle spooling from the mouth of Lazarus, brothers of the tomb if not the womb, intoxicated in the vertigo of the crucifix, the swing of a bough inside a flash of lightning. Men were approaching.

  My mouth moved inside the needles of his beard, not to identify him—because by this time, everyone knew Jesus of Nazareth by his somnambulant walk and dreaming words—but to inspire him for the last time, to breathe the remnants of my passion into him, and to finish what we had begun when we were children, to give him the strength to finish it. His brown eyes, as whorled and abandoned as snail shells, were closed; his pungent mouth disbelieving as the serpent of my breath hissed through his aching teeth, then passed over his tongue, into the shining purses of his flesh. I brought him here, constructed him from fleece, bone, blood, dust, wine, seed, straw, my occluded desires, my orphanage, the endless art of my fury. His disciples, his ineffectual mirrors, shivered between the soldiers and the knotted trees of Gethsemane. By this time, he could not resist anything that I suggested to him. It had been that way for so long that I did not have to witness him being led away.

  THE BIRTH OF JUDAS

  I might furnish you with opulent versions of my childhood. I might gift you the thirteenth-century iteration, as told by Jacobus de Voragine, the pulp hagiographer and archbishop of Genoa who in The Golden Legend merely superimposed me over the Egyptian myth cycle of Osiris and the Oedipal horrors of Sophocles; forgivable, for such is the chimera of my existence. My mother was named Cyborea and my father Simon, of the tribe of Reuben. Cyborea lay swollen on her pallet, sweating in her dirge of dreams. The time of my birth was near. The stars wheeled over the crude yellow home of Simon and Cyborea in Kerioth, and the earth was dry from drought. My mother, who also believed in witches, the power of lambs’ blood, necromancy, gyromancy, and sinister agencies, was in the throes of a nightmare: I came from her womb, precocious and halfgrown. With our umbilicus, I strangled my father, whose eyes bulged from his skull. Later, I would torment my mother, exposing myself, masturbating, and pulling the clothes from her breasts, until finally, she would relent and I would fuck her on the same pallet where I had been born, whose planks of bloodstained timber were the last images that my father had seen. Then, I would abandon her and her corrupted womb and prostitute myself to anything but God and become a golden young man, terrible, erotic, and cruel.

  Such was her dream, and she took it to be prophecy, so that when I was born and the gruel of her body was still upon me, she locked me in a casket and cast me into the sea. This was like the assassination of Osiris in the iron maiden by his brother Seth, who abandoned him to the ocean in that sarcophagus, or like the setting adrift of Moses in his basket of reeds. Inside the floating coffin, for floating coffins are the vessels of parables like Ishmael and Jonah, be they of wood or whale meat, I was washed ashore on the island of Korkyra, which is also known as Corcyra
, and Corfu.

  Soon, aristocrats delivered me from the splintered box. They took pains to educate me at court and to train me, so that in Ionia I learned theatre and practiced the tensions involved in both hanging on to myself and occupying other beings across broken historical plateaus with borrowed masks and gestures. So, I could move within their rich absurd society. The island, the same shape as a lamb’s amputated leg, was a place of olives, pomegranates, and narcotic vines; and there was myrtle, the sex scent of the Jews, its starry white petals and dark berries, and red-fruited arbutus, also with starry white blossoms, as eaten by bears in Madrid. It was a place of nymphs and intoxications of all senses. A pubescent girl from the extended family of the aristocrats snapped off a length of myrtle and showed me how it was like a penis, letting it loll between her lips, and rubbing it in the gauzy cleft of her behind, and sex began to possess me like drunkenness. We climbed into a tree and discovered ourselves engorged, swollen, and slick; silver petals and blossoms dripped beneath us as I entered her above the grove. Suddenly, she fell.

  At first, I thought she had caught herself. Instead, her head had passed between two vines and her neck had snapped, the black fabric of her hair spooling over her face. I began screaming and was too panicked to climb down before the aristocrats discovered us, the body swaying in the boughs as though I had murdered her. I fled toward the sea and stole a skiff that was still loaded with salty fish. The winds from the Illyrian channel bore me away, fast into exile. After weeks at sea, near-starved and half-dead, I came back to Judea. Supposedly, I took a job as a page to Pontius Pilate. Some of that is how Jacobus de Voragine tells it. And there were other versions written and rumored across the empires before Voragine’s Latin edition was translated and published in Bohemian and French editions.