I, Judas

by James Reich

  No, the iteration that I prefer is the truth: the truth is that Jesus and I emerged together from the bell of a giant pelagia noctiluca jellyfish that was washed ashore on the Gaza Strip, large enough to contain our infant bodies in its luminous form. For a while, the medusa pulsed purple light upon the wet sand, as the waves pulled at its tentacles, pretending to suck it back out, only to force it ashore again. We crawled from the creature’s mouth and lay beside the lantern of slime that was now dying upon the beach. In a flashing of fishing knives, torches, and filmy hands, we were retrieved. It is true that I was then taken south and raised in Kerioth, and Jesus in Nazareth. Later, when my parents moved us to Galilee, we were reunited.

  KERIOTH, OR THE OUTSIDE

  In Kerioth, we lived in caves that were excavated further from natural cavities worn out by the weather of the southern desert region. The caves were extended with stone exterior walls or with tents, as though Kerioth was a town splitting from within the earth. Rain was infrequent, and little grew. We ate grains and inferior olives and milked skeletal goats for cheese and ghee. Kerioth resembled a necropolis, a hive of tombs backing into the rocks from which undead workers would emerge and perform menial, exhausting tasks before returning to their graves. Cockerels picked over the dust, and the shrouds of the homes drummed in the wind.

  It was in Kerioth that I constructed the first versions of the tale of Lazarus and of the resurrection of my brother Jesus, and it was also in Kerioth, with obscure memories of my birth, that I began to doubt my origins and to suspect that the people who called me their son were not my parents. Later, tourists like Mark Twain would pass through the sockets and ruins of Kerioth without even noticing it, en route from Beirut to Alexandria and the sphinx, after the tents had blown away and the goats had been killed. The cave homes were cool by day and were warmed by fires at night; sounds echoed about them, and the ghosts of conversations drifted out into the desert. From these conversations, I learned about the origins of the tribe to which I was supposed to belong.

  The rabbis of Kerioth would dispute the incestuous crime of Reuben late into the hollows of night: did his intercourse with Bilhah, the maidservant of his father Jacob’s second and favored wife Rachel, constitute a primal crime of incest? Mouths gaped and ranted in the fire-lit caves, beards singed or dipped into wine cups as the night wore on. They spoke of Reuben as establishing the archetype of the penitent, of how he might be something less than a traitor, little more than a rebellious son, and they spoke of his part in the conspiracy against Joseph, Rachel’s first and Jacob’s eleventh and penultimate child, and of things that I did not then understand. The tribe of Reuben possessed a labyrinthine genealogy that was prey to semantics and argument; it was tainted by incest and revolt, and as a literary construction, it was whence I had to emerge, the perverse outside, the distorted margins of myth. And all this sex talk was meat to the elderly rabbis, as much as it was to their acolytes; the distended surfaces of interpretation and linguistic discourse were a pungent veil over the vicarious thrill of imagining taking Bilhah, full-lipped and groaning, bent over a table or as she cleaned a floor; the details were lost and had to be recollected. What made the rabbis uneasy was the abstract fusion of the penises of father and son in the vagina of his wife’s maid. They became indivisible in the erotic space and time of the maid; Jacob and Reuben were fucking one another by Bilhah’s proxy. But she was just the maid. The intercourse of father and son with the same woman was merely an aspect of their Oedipal conflict. Such were the echoes that reverberated from the mouths of Kerioth.

  We kept goats, and my childhood involved herding, feeding, milking, breeding, birthing, and slaughtering them. When it was necessary for goats to be slaughtered, I did this out of sight of the others that were to remain. I devised a killing place that was obscure and marked by a cypress tree surrounded by red earth. The goats were suspicious and would resist being led there, for they could smell the death in the soil. One goat I made special. He was charismatic and beautiful, and I set him aside in my mind and would allow him to grow old. His left hind hoof was misshapen. His hair was pale with strokes of copper. In the strips of his eyes, I saw great dignity. I would take him to the killing place with the animals to be slaughtered but always allowed him to return. The others saw him return unharmed, as though he had passed through the trials of death, and they placed a supernatural trust in him, and later they too would follow the strange goat to the outstretched arms of the cypress tree.

  The roots of the cypress tree dripped down into the earth, bloody tendrils that were almost luminous through the soil. They promised to penetrate the inverted belfries of hell, the oceans of the dead.

  Palestine. Judea. Chateaubriand, writer, explorer, and lover of flesh, had at first experienced Judea with revulsion. The dust spoke of the coming neon, truncheons and suicides. Whenever he drank the water or deliberated on a piece of meat, he envisioned flesh and skulls torn apart by dynamite, a whirlwind of milk teeth and nails. The sun was like a tiger. A country is like a bath to die in, inviolate enamel, marble, metal; cartographies of watch hands, radar, lighthouses, cool ruins under floods of birds; rules to fill the bath with petals, to make wedding band and doghouse; wings fold in.

  We left Kerioth beneath thunderclouds of suspicion. A boy was found dead on one of the lower plains where the children of the rabbis struggled to tend the dry crops. The boy’s brow was split and bloodied, and a pair of his teeth shone in the sunlight that fell on the dirt. As soon as I heard the uproar of men and women crying and pronouncing the fatal blow to bear the shape of the runt hoof of my goat, I raced back to find him and to send him out into the desert so that the rabbis would not slaughter him. I walked into the rain, weeping. The man that called himself my father held his palm over my head, and the woman that called herself my mother struggled in the slow mire of our life. We took what few possessions we could carry. I thought of my goat, lost in the landscape of his crime and despair; his head fell lower, and the foothills turned blue. It was as though he was fading on another planet.

  We struggled north until we came to the walls of Jerusalem. An aircraft carrier projected out of the south wall, strung with pulsing neon tubing, stars and stripes, a monstrous engine entrapped in the tendrils and tentacles of the chaotic city; a burlesque show kicked up sand from the vast deck. A jet fighter hung over the precipice, one wing dipping toward the dirt below. The carrier was named the USS Eldritch. I saw children throwing pitiful Molotov cocktails at the blackened hull before careening back through the split in the walls from which they had come like insects. Sanhedrin crouched and shrugged, cloaked in its shadows. The dancing girls stripped off their seamed nylon stockings and threw slingshot shapes, sending them slowly down to the desert floor like scented black angels. Legionnaires snatched at them and wiped them across their lips. In a clamor of black smoke and the sound of a machine vomiting, a Grumman Wildcat lurched from the deck of the carrier and clawed higher into the harpy dark. The metal of the carrier’s hull ground against the city walls built by Herod, father of the tetrarch Herod Antipatros. For a moment, I pulled away from my parents and moved closer to it. Within the surface of the hull, in the bulkheads, conning tower, elevators, and gun turrets, were fused hundreds of contorted bodies, part encased in steel, part decomposing in screaming attitudes and torn uniforms, groping out of the architecture of the ship. Slowly, remaining outside the walls, we made our circuit of Jerusalem, where a bulldozer ploughed skulls into a grotesque hill of discolored bone.

  “Look, Judas, they are preparing for a crucifixion.” My mother licked her lips.

  We climbed with the crowd for an hour, pausing only to buy kosher hot dogs and t-shirts. As we went, I whistled and sang beneath my breath my most beloved hymn, Jerusalem, by William Blake and Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, and my eyes filled with tears as the first evening stars manifested over the city.

  It was there, on Golgotha, where I first encountered the child Jesus of Nazareth. Our parents stood close to eac
h other, but without word nor acknowledgment, so transfixed were they by the spectacle of the preparation and erotic swells of the crucifixions, but we children flirted and smirked as the first crosses of the evening were dragged up the hill. At first, I thought him to be an inauspicious wretch; his unblinking eyes suggested a perverse trust in the world. Regarding Jesus as we were then, as Roman soldiers kicked, spat, and slashed at the criminals nearing the summit, I saw the imprint of my goat, of myself, and of an amazing violence upon his soft skin. It was like the beginning of a love affair. That doe’s unflinching stare and his gentle skin drawn over the imploring planes of his skull like wax are known from Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, on the televisions of 1977, where our script was given to us by Anthony Burgess, a man consumed with regrets over creating disciples of another lethal, servile gang in A Clockwork Orange. I was written according to the evolving template of Judas as a handsome, soulful provocateur, the heartthrob with the anarchic smirk, undone by the politics of the Sanhedrin. That Judas’ last moment is witnessed in a rustling sunrise, the chill boughs of dawn. There, dangling above the disbelieving money. Timpani rolls imitate thunder before the screen fades to black. In another version of myself, in the movie Jesus Christ Superstar, my substitute was a man named Carl Anderson. Carl Anderson has black skin. He was born in a place named Lynchburg, which means “city of lynching.”

  THE APOTHEOSES of crucifixions, the unforgettable ones, always transpire in the rain, when a creature’s arms and shoulders and blood-flashed neck become an aqueduct of agony. It rained during our first crucifixion and our last, when we had pulverized Judea black and blue. The artichoke sellers pushed cursing through the crowd as rain began to fall, and a wave of joy broke over the crowd as the condemned men reached the place of skulls. Their naked, drooling shapes were drawn upward upon the creaking planks of the crosses, wrists and ankles shattered and impaled. They looked like albatrosses harpooned against the dark, men swinging in the masts of torrid ships, pouring sails of blood. Perhaps you have heard of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment? Morris Jessup committed suicide in 1959, in the slash pines of Florida, after years of obsession with the mysterious disappearance of a U.S. Navy vessel.

  AKELDAMA, KINGDOM OF CLAY

  When Jesus and I were seven years old, we would play together in the waste and rubble of Akeldama, which was also called Potters’ Field. Akeldama was like an emptied city of scarabs where hard broken clay stuck out of the earth, where all the tiny buildings of broken earthenware were the mausoleums of birds and bloody weeds splashed across the surface of the dirt. We trod carefully, never ran, skipped, or danced there, for if we did we would gash our feet on broken vases and smashed crockery that the potters had abandoned. Instead, we picked our way over the remnants in the manner of strange compassionate giants.

  “One day, I will visit that magnificent city,” I announced, looking up and pointing into an ambiguous swollen space in the horizon.

  “What city?”

  “That one. The one in the far distance with the sunlight flashing from its roof tiles.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You don’t see it. Of course you don’t. Honestly, Jesus, sometimes I grow so impatient with your weak eyes.”

  “I’m sorry, brother.”

  “I am talking about the city between the rust-colored mountains.” I jabbed my finger further toward it. “The golden minarets and wild buildings that are so beautiful, even from this distance. I wonder how many miles it is? Ah—” I said squinting, “that, that there must be where the King lives.”

  “Wait! I see it now. I was looking just away from it before. You’re right. What a city, so golden.” For a while, we two boys stared down the length of my arm as my sleeve shifted in the wind. The breeze disturbed the dirt of the field.

  “Idiot!” I spat at him.

  “What?”

  “There is no city there! You are like a sponge. You soak everything up, true or false. You never know. I always have to tell you.” I looked disgustedly at the tears dripping down Jesus’ face. “And you are terrified of being wrong.” I clapped my palm upon Jesus’ skinny shoulder, grasping the cloth there.

  Jesus sniffed. “Please, please stop teasing me, Judas.”

  “I’m sorry. You know that I only tease you because I am jealous. People like me cannot be people like you. That’s how it is. I am the black sheep of a family that doesn’t exist. You, you’re the beloved lamb of tender parents.”

  “Maybe we could find your parents.”

  “Ha. That’s funny. They live in that damned city over there, brother, or in this one beneath our feet.”

  “You’re morbid, Judas. You’ll murder yourself.”

  “Not before you do, little lamb.”

  Then I kissed him.

  THE PURCHASE OF ARISTOCRACY AND BROKEN BONES

  In the midst of riches, there is ruin. The potters, who were brothers like us, became rich and, ashamed of their past, trashed the evidence of their former poverty, of their ever having been physical creatures who toiled with slimy hands to make urns. Their death urns were glorious and had borne the chaff of many reputable men, including Pharisees and soldiers. But when, as Zechariah tells, they received thirty silver pieces for their land, they renounced the physical world and became aristocrats. I, Judas, was inspired by this. Many of our childhood dreams took place in their field of broken clay. Later, I would pass this on to the carpenter. The carpenter was of the same grain as the rich brothers, and he too would turn away from his own splintered palms, toward abstraction and the callous righteousness of those who cease to credit the cloth and flesh of the world, and, like the potters, he would become a ghost in the looms and fornications of men.

  Jesus and I spoke often of heroism, of sun-shouldered Ajax falling upon his own sword, of the tepid water around Socrates’ goaty shins as the hemlock kissed his pores and gargled in his throat, and of Dionysus torn apart by his disciples. Later, we would have our own rituals of the vine and of breaking the body. We spoke of the vanity of Samson and of Hercules as we ate olives and spat stones. Seneca bled himself dry in our thoughts. Classicism had reached our shores, washed up in the scrolling waters of the sea, blown over our feet in the dust kicked up by the Occupation. Everywhere we were confused, as though caught in a storm too slow to be visible, one with winds that moved us without our knowledge and with immense irresistible power.

  One day, at that same time when we were still boys, we watched a prostitute being stoned to death. With the first blows, her jaw broke off and hung slack in a pocket of skin. At one point, a Roman soldier drew near to the front of the crowd and moved to pull out his short sword to relieve her of her misery, but the mob held him back and might have killed him also, but for their fear. It seemed to take forever for her to die, and many stones. There was a smell like carrion, and a wheeling of crows that fascinated Jesus to the point that he was watching the sky when the last stone broke the woman’s neck.

  “How would we know the difference between a bird and an angel?” he asked. We played pinch as we went through the streets. “For example, if I heard a voice in my head while a bird was near, what should I assume made the voice?” The slow storm dust rolled about our ankles. “What if it had told me to pick up a stone?”

  “I’d say that you were a hypocrite.”

  “And what if it had told me to stand up and shield the woman from the stones?” Jesus asked.

  “Then you might be an even greater hypocrite.”

  “I wonder if it requires more bravery to save a life or to take one.”

  I told him: “Cowards tend to do both.”

  WE CAME, one night, to a moonlit escarpment, silver glints over the precipice and insects shrugging in the chill black. We took turns running toward the edge, our hearts cracking in the fear that grasped our chests, our bare, scabbed feet slipping in the spaying dust, closer and closer, until we became exhausted. I told Jesus that he was a coward again.

  “Judas, you weren’
t watching me!” Jesus complained like a child performing to an absent father. “I was so close!” His lips trembled as he spoke. “I might have gone over the edge, over the world, spreading my arms out like a bird.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw him hurtling over the precipice, the knotted span of his flesh suddenly frozen in time, suspended in that hanging night, forever. I would think of it again during the night following his crucifixion, his passionate sprint into the paternal embrace of extinction. I would think of his exhilaration as he spread his imaginary wings over the earth. And later, it would seem perverse to me that any of his followers would want to wear the crucifix about their necks, since they do not with any other instrument of capital punishment or suicidal recklessness.

  When we had thirteen years behind us, Jesus and I used to watch the prostitutes. There was a certain street where a sentinel dog was kept at either end, snagged on a short chain. Those who knew the street and the dogs made certain that when they visited, they palmed a chunk of raw meat to the dog as they entered. Otherwise, the howling and whining would make the whores disappear, as if they were sustained only by the leave of the dogs that chewed silence and let motes of bone and stiff blood fall like stars from their mouths into the dirt. We called the dogs Gog and Magog. After we had paid our tithe to the dogs, Jesus would always cup his hands about his nose, sniffing in the smells of the meat and the spittle of the animals. Once, as he skipped along beside me in the darkness, he pushed his damp hands toward my face and said: “Here, Judas, breathe in a whore’s scent!” His eyes shone in the moonlight. I had never seen him so happy.