I, Judas

by James Reich

  In later years, Jesus would still mingle with prostitutes, not because he was tolerant of them or fascinated by them or because he cared about them, but merely because he did not want them to be whores anymore, because he had become an aristocrat. It was not that his love or compassion extended to them. Jesus desired that they extend toward him, by ceasing to be that which later offended him. The street was a bell of ambivalent guttural music, and it was there we learned that the sounds of life, love, and ecstasy are so close to the sounds of death, weeping, and agony. We saw hip bones jut in the lamplight, women mounted like dogs, coins flashing like teeth.

  Mary Magdalene was the youngest prostitute on the street and so the most notorious. Jesus was fascinated by notoriety and complained to me often that when we passed her, slouched in her doorway, she did not look at him. I told him that it was because he carried himself like a rich boy. This made him weep. “I am poorer than she,” he protested. The dogs at the ends of the street shifted in the bloodied dirt.

  I explained to him: “You might have a powerful father, who might have her killed if he knew that she had seduced his son. I don’t know what it is with you, Jesus, but where you—in your vanity—feel the yoke of the world on your shoulders as agony, Mary Magdalene sees it for what it is.”

  “Oh,” he said haughtily, “and what is that?”

  “Adornment.”

  “Is that what you think, also, Judas? Tell me: don’t you ever feel the weight that you accuse me of ‘adorning’ myself with?”

  “Brother, I am more wont to feel it choking me, as though I had swallowed the world like a stone. People are suspicious of those who ostentatiously feel the pain of the world.”

  I dried his eyes with my sleeve. Such aphorisms and ideas I gave him, but he knew not how to deploy them, yet. Neither of us had quite decided who he was, or what he was to become.

  “Then I will seem to ignore it, and become beloved of women. Oh, and of men also, I forgot!” He scooped grit from the floor and tried to cast it into my face as we skipped away. “Come on, Judas,” he sang, “we’ll see her tomorrow!”

  We left the dogs barking and the stars falling from the heavens.

  The following night, we stood in the musky purple of the street, watching lamps extinguished and then lit again, and the men who moved with metallic shimmers, their coins luminous beneath the moonlight. Outside the place where Mary Magdalene worked, a house like a hollowed bone, draped in silk and sequins and cracked open so that the smell of marrow wafted into the night, we waited. We waited for Jesus’ fear to subside. Finally, I grew bored, and I struck him across his flank and shoved him toward her door. He scuffed forward, and dust swelled around him. I watched her straighten her raw back and extend one of her hands to him, before I slumped inside the blackness close to the simple buildings on the other side of the street. He was gone for an hour. For that hour, I felt as though he were dead, and my heart was sick. The street had never seemed so silent and desolate. It dissolved until only a few lamps and candles remained. I felt as though I were hanging between the stars of the night sky, that I was a lightless constellation, asphyxiated by loneliness and knowledge. I was collapsing and sucking the universe in upon myself.

  When Jesus emerged from her house, it was obvious that he had never undressed and that he and the whore had not made love. Without exchanging a word with him, I rose, shoved past him, and forced myself into the whore’s quarters, slamming the door, locking it, and throwing her to the floor. She smiled up at me. I sodomized her until we were both bloodied and tearful. All the while, I could hear Jesus knocking feebly at the door.

  THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEMPLE

  I can remember the first raindrops of the evening falling upon my lips. It was as though the heavens were full of salt and the land was raw, red and wounded. There was so much salt in the rain that when I looked, I saw that the sky was white. Can you imagine a sky as white as salt and the rain hissing out of it? Jesus’ father, who was called Joseph, was shaking me by the shoulders in the middle of the market.

  I had convinced Jesus to slip away from his parents and to visit the Temple with me. He was recalcitrant, of course, and entered like a donkey to its stall. Insects in black robes—the Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, the sects—negotiate the Temple, horrified by light and glass. For God is a boy with a glass, enthralled by transparency and torture. The Temple is a place of exposure, a more fatal lens than any sea, more blasted than any desert. Locusts walk on locusts in scorched wings and spastic limbs, which is to say that guilt is their honey. Beneath their hoods, they are skeletons dreaming of sugary flesh.

  “What are we doing here, Judas?”

  “Don’t you want to see what happens here?”

  “Oh, I know, prayer upon prayer upon—”

  “Ha! You think you’re cynical? Look at this.” I showed him the Court of the Gentiles. His mouth fell open, and I told him: “It’s no better farther in. Those men, on the blankets there, are gambling. And those are moneylenders. That man is a pickpocket. This one is a murderer.” So it went. Soon, Jesus was calm and walked freely.

  “Ah, I see why we are here,” he said. “You want to see if holiness is the same as chaos and violence. You said that once.”

  “A white sheet exhibits more dirt.”

  “I remember that my father once bought a lamb to sacrifice. It looked clean, but beneath the fleece it was diseased.”

  “Your father either knows nothing about sheep or nothing about sacrifice.”

  Jesus hesitated. “Fathers don’t understand sacrifice at all, but mothers do.” At that moment, a Roman soldier pushed between us. “I’m certain that his mother misses him more than his father does.”

  “I have neither, remember.”

  “Then, at least you are free to create what you wish of them.”

  “My father’s house is here,” I said, and hit Jesus on his skull.

  “And mine also, even if my mother is in my breast.”

  Later, we saw the Roman again. He was weeping. The insects in black robes had rejected him.

  Jesus’ parents worshipped me and treated me as their second son. That is a lie. They regarded me as though I were a whore at a wedding, uninvited, filthy, yet too dangerous to eject because of my intimate knowledge of the other guests. Joseph, the carpenter, knew that he was not Jesus’ father and suffered greatly from shame. This shame he fiercely unleashed upon his craft, so that, soon, all he could fashion were the most brutal of joints. He was afraid of me, but he was not so afraid that he would not sometimes seek to beat me. My precociousness infuriated him. It is true that I am a precise and prescient judge of character. One afternoon, as I was drifting through the sawdust of his workshop, I mentioned abstractedly, “We’ll all be making crosses one of these days.” I felt his file slow in the grain, and his brow knot and age.

  Everything went black.

  Mary, whom you will know as Jesus’ mother, was a thin, nervous woman with dove-gray skin. The choking secret that she swallowed concerning Jesus’ conception meant that she spoke little to those beyond her immediate family. She told me, though not directly, not with words, that conversation petrified her, that her terror was that if she began to speak and spoke for too long, then reality would spill from her, flooding like blood from a slit wrist. In her silence, she prayed that truth and reality would be expunged. When she drank wine, she made certain to drink herself to sleep rather than to confessional communion. Sometimes, if I found myself alone with her, I would speak to her, to seek some new advantage over her boy.

  “Do you know about the wine cults of the Romans and the Greeks?” I asked her. She shook her head and nibbled at her fingernails. “Should I tell you, then?” Her gaze flashed around the walls of the room, where candles dripped and some cloths hung. I told her about Dionysus and the miracle of his birth, and I told her about his processions and of his being torn apart by his disciples.

  “Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and a star-fall more lighted than Lucifer. These
luxuries your son claims to remember of the circumstances of his birth. Distortions. Nostalgia. The vine that gives strange memories and dreams that swim in fluid is like an umbilicus.” As I said this, Jesus’ mother moved her head in denial. The candlelight shifted across her features, and I studied the ticks and dilations of her fear. I went on: “It is predictable, a winding thread. With a few more pulls in one direction, I might find out about Jesus’ birth. In the other direction, far ahead of us, are the lessons of the vine.”

  “What is there?” Mary asked.

  I ignored her question but told her: “I know that Jesus has had a mirage burned around his birth. I recognize shame when I witness it. If you had ever really held gold in your hands, then we would never have met. Me, a runt from Kerioth.”

  Jesus’ mother laughed nervously.

  “Don’t be afraid. Jesus is my friend. His interests are mine. If the old mirage wears thin, I will make him another, embracing him like an angel.”

  “You are a good boy, Judas.”

  I explained: “One must teach with the vine and make new life with illustrations and distortions of nostalgia. Perhaps you will find that Jesus is a miracle, after all. That would be no shame, would it? Drink up.”

  Mary drank the wine. I watched her lips shaping to speak in the half-light as though they were animated by pulls from a fishhook. At the same time, her lids began to fall across her reddening eyes. She was like so many mothers who ward against truth with silence and sleep.

  THE FLESH EATERS

  I sat with Jesus in an olive grove, violently spitting stones at shadows. When I had eaten the flesh from each olive, I would roll my tongue around the stone so that I was holding it in a tight tube in my mouth before inhaling deeply through my nose and blasting the air back out through my tongue and parted lips. The kernel thudded from my mouth, shooting into the gravel. Jesus concerned himself with plucking the thin hairs that had begun to push out of his skin, making pinchers with his thumb and fingernails. His eyes were red from the pain and his nose dripped as, hooked around like a crab in his dirty clothes, he ripped tiny black threads from his armpits and groin. I imitated his father’s voice: “You are becoming a man, at last.”

  “I don’t want to,” he hissed, licking spots of blood from his nails.

  “You have no choice.” The sound of my hand across my jaw hissed back at him. “A face for carpentry and crosses, a cock for crowing at whores, and armpits to spread out in the sun.”

  “Do you have anything to drink? I’m thirsty.”

  “Here.” I passed him my gourd. “Only, leave me some.” He unstopped it and raised it to his lips. I watched his cheeks fill and his red eyes widen in shock.

  “Wine! Where did you get this?”

  “Pilate’s decanter.”

  “Liar.”

  “I can’t tell you where I got it because I made it.”

  “You don’t know how!”

  “Well, brother, you start with, um . . .”

  “Yes? Judas?”

  I pretended that Jesus had bettered me. He was getting the hang of it. He drank more wine and handed the flask back to me. We continued to share it until it was empty, and our heads ached in the sun. Jesus felt his feminine shoulders melting into the hard and prickly bark of the tree where he reclined like a prince, long-haired and beautiful. We were in languor. The tree whispered his old trade, his father’s work, back into his flesh. His mother’s voice was in the breeze. Yet, he heard neither as I lay down with him. His lips were wet and insipid; they were like spoiled fruit. He listened to the gently conceited echo of his self as the wood folded like a fleece around his neck and back, and a dutiful sleep descended for him. His robes lapped about him. All was peaceful with him. I could hear him speaking, waking me. “Mastery is not convincing others of what you know, but convincing them of what they do not.”

  THE PSALM OF IOKANAAN

  One summer, we went out to see the Baptist, whose name was John. He was singing as he stood in the flowing water. His voice was crude and nasal. This was before, as Oscar Wilde tells it, his imprisonment in a cistern, before the dance of the seven veils, and before the Baptist’s head was hacked from his body.

  “He holds them beneath the surface of the water for a long time, Judas,” Jesus said.

  “If I were to strangle you for a while, you would see sparks and angels, too,” I explained. “It’s the same thing. Actually, I love the Baptist, because I can sit over here on these stones and feel the ichors screaming in his blood. Do you hear that thin whining sound, above the river? If we met him in a silent street at night, the noise from him would split our ears. That is how I feel God. God is in my intestines, like a knotted rope that sometimes reaches out into my flesh and whips me.”

  We watched as he lifted his face to the sun and pushed another head through the froth of the river. The man came up gasping and full of terror, as though he had fallen from the sky and survived.

  “Shall we move closer?” I asked.

  Distortions of John’s appearance are witnessed in films, paintings, and novels. In fact, he was tall, muscular, and handsome. One cannot stand in the flood of a river forever without powerful legs. His torso was like red marble, the softness burned from his skin by the blazing sun and the motions he made from his waist. He sang mysterious songs as he worked, rocking in a tumult of desperate bodies, pushing the pointless heads beneath the cold mirror of the river.

  John the Baptist was much older than the two of us. When he finally stepped from the water, as the last of the gaping men and women struggled back from the river in their bare feet, across the stones to where they had left their sandals and clothes, the gibbous moon sent silver across his body. His hair was slick and black across his shoulders, and his jaw was as regular and brown as a book. Indeed, it seemed to me that his thighs were full of thick and struggling fish. As the years passed, Jesus and I would often visit him at his time of rest, before his scant sleep, but this was our first encounter with him, and we were much afraid. He walked in pensive circles about his small fire, which lapped between a skirt of stones. He could hear us breathing in the darkness, watching him.

  “Do not be afraid of me,” he said.

  “Don’t you wish to rest?” I asked him, swigging at the wine we had brought with us.

  His laughter was full of patience. “Judas,” he said, and I was astonished that he knew me, “the river is constantly in spate, and I am constantly still within it. I stand against the flow and have stood there, against it, waiting, all my life. When I leave the river, for a few moments before I am able to sleep, my soul cries for anything but stillness. My legs desire movement. In fact, were it not for God’s will, I would run. I would flee the river.”

  “Jesus is much the same, aren’t you, Jesus?” I said, and Jesus muttered something, pulling the gourd out of my grasp and swigging from it. I realized that, of course, the Baptist must know my name since he too had entered into anachronism and ambiguity. John had become stasis, patience, resignation, and death wish. His work was suicidal. He might have walked away, ceased to bring attention to himself, but there he waited, anchored to the stubborn river that flowed as if all things were inevitable. Even as we told our stories and listened to the locusts shifting in the desert, I felt the eyes of Herod’s agents upon John, watching from behind mounds of shale. We were a funny trinity, shuffling around the fire. “Look at us, like brothers.” I watched John’s thighs and thought of Dionysus, the fetal god nourished in the thigh of Zeus, the old sky god. After a while, John ceased pacing, and we all lay down on the clammy earth, staring at the night and becoming drunk.

  “When you sleep, what do you dream of, John?” Jesus asked, passing him the wine.

  “Why, I dream of the river. Do you see those stars that look like the river, or those stars that look like a spine struggling to remain straight in the river? At a certain point, symbols begin to dictate the universe, and we become subservient to them, and sometimes we ourselves become them. A thing bec
omes necessary because it sustains the symbolism that suggested it. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not certain.” Jesus scratched his scalp.

  I explained: “What John is saying is that the universe flows backward from poetry, rather than poetry being made of the universe.”

  “In the beginning was the Word,” said Jesus.

  “Yes,” John told him, “we are intoxicated by symbolic structures. Every time that I baptize someone, there is a moment when they kneel with their shoulders submerged in the bright shining water, and do you know what I see then? I see a head on a plate. I see heads on silver plates, over and over again. It is burned into my brain. I know where I am going. Isn’t that funny? And if . . .” he let the word hang, its feet dangling over the dirt as he put his arm around my shoulder, “if we can make one thing resemble another, one story resemble another, then we can strut the earth with the arrogance of gods.”