The first known miracle enacted by a Jesi, with the possible exception of the resurrection of the South Korean birth mother (see above), is the impregnation of Valeria Paz (see propagation of the Jesi, above). After this event, the four Jesi became celebrity figures in their own countries and worldwide, performing miracles in public.
The first instance of healing the sick (the Munich Miracle) occurred at a long-term care facility in Munich, Germany. No media representatives were present at the event, but later accounts from witnesses confirm that on June 3 of 2009, no less than seven Jesi converged at the facility at 3:00 AM, arriving on foot (it was later speculated that the Jesi teleported to Germany, a power they have since demonstrated on countless occasions).
The Jesi restored mobility, speech, and muscle mass to three men: Hermann Gottleib, Paolo Abbaggio, and Henri Dauphin. All three men were quadriplegics with reduced brain function, the result of having ingested an unidentified toxin in 1964 while students at the International Academy for the Advancement of Science. The fact that the three injured men had attended the Academy concurrently with Dr. Wawrzyniec did not go unnoticed. Internet discussion boards were filled with speculation: about the role of the Academy in the invention of the cloning process and the procurement of the base genetic sample; about whether or not Dr. Wawrzyniec may have been exposed to the toxin but been genetically immune (see: survivor’s guilt), as well as whether he may have created the toxin, or whether he had any extraordinary knowledge of the toxin at all; and about the three men themselves, their personal histories, nationalities, and fields of research before paralysis.
The possible reasons for the miracle were not explored in depth outside of the blogosphere, however, as most mainstream media chose to focus on the fact that seven Jesi had been sighted in Munich, when only four were known to have been created. Privately funded investigations and media pressure for the responsible parties to come forward, as well as questioning of the Jesi themselves, led to the admission that Jesi had been created clandestinely by the Coca-Cola company in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and, with the assistance of unsanctioned government funds, at the Harvard University Stem Cell Institute in the United States and the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran.
In 2010, the seven Jesi walked across the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, Canada, carrying torches and inaugurating the 21st Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.
The first case of Jesi resurrection occurred in 2011, after a suicide bomber detonated explosives strapped to her chest while hugging the Microsoft Jesus in Israel. His final words were “And so it is done.” The world went into mourning.
The other Jesi refused to make any comment on the death of their brother. Three days later, the Microsoft Jesus showed up for his scheduled function at a hospital in Palestine. When questioned he simply said, with one of the few genuine looks of surprise ever recorded on a Jesus, “And on the third day, I rise again.” Faith in the Jesi increased, including a dramatic rise in the number of ordained religious, and the total number of Jesi-bearing pregnancies (both miraculous and biological) more than doubled.
LETHARGY OF THE JESI
An unexpected phenomenon associated with the Jesi is the utter lethargy and unresponsiveness that sets in approximately 10–12 years after birth. The term “zombie-god” has been used by more than one commentator, though “lethargized Jesi” is now considered the proper designation. The lethargized Jesi follow simple instructions if asked, but they do not speak, eat, or drink; nor do they respond to requests for miracles.
The lethargy of the Jesi is what led to their eventual enslavement. The first widespread use of the Jesi was in minefields. After the assassination attempt in Israel (and several others that followed) it became clear that the Jesi could not be killed. A full-blooded Jesus in the state of lethargy will respond only to simple commands (a half-blood or demi-Jesus tends to experience severe depression in later life, which can be treated with conventional anti-depressants). When asked to walk through a known minefield, a lethargic Jesus will comply. When the land-mines detonate, the Jesi are generally destroyed, but will return to the field three days later.
Once the Jesi began their de-mining work in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Serbia, and along the Thai-Burmese border, the civil rights controversy concerning the humanity of the lethargic Jesi became a high-profile international issue. The debate is ongoing: the UN legal unit works tirelessly in the defence of the lethargized Jesi, but because of the sheer number of them there is little that can be done. The lethargic Jesi are most often used for dangerous work such as de-mining, demolition, and working on offshore oil rigs. In the early phases of lethargy, the Jesi are often used in hospital emergency rooms to heal fatal traumas. Other contested commercial uses for lethar-gized Jesi include medical testing, pharmaceutical research, and military development. It is also believed that organized crime rings have abducted lethargized Jesi, and sold them into prostitution, used them to create counterfeit currency, and forced them to perpetrate torture and commit murder.
GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS AND RELIGIOSIT Y OF THE JESI
A long-standing theological question in various Christian sects has been the original Christ’s possession of God-consciousness, the total and complete knowledge of his divine personality. The Jesi have never commented on this issue or any other aspect of religious doctrine, despite requests from literally every leader of a world religion. To date they have refused to engage in any kind of formal religious teaching at all, including the telling of parables, for which the original Christ is renowned. They will not make any absolute statements about faith or the specifics of the afterlife. When questioned, they tend to simply say, “All that has been said before.” Their patience is indefatigable and they are never caught in any kind of rhetorical trick. Another characteristic possibly related to God-consciousness is that all the Jesi have been (and continue to be) perfectly multilingual in every known language living or dead, including sign languages, pidgins, creoles, and regional dialects, regardless of lack of exposure in their early childhoods.
At various points in the past twenty-three years, religious groups have responded to the Jesi with denial, outrage, acceptance, paranoia, obsession, and devotion. The sheer range of reactions exceeds the parameters of this article, from proclaiming certain Jesi as godheads to denouncing all Jesi as idols (see the Papacy, Protestant Christian reactions, Judaic reactions, Islamic reactions, Hindu reactions, other religious influences of the Jesi, etc.).
IMPLICATIONS AND AFTER-EFFECTS OF THE JESI
The implications of the Jesi in terms of sustainable human population growth and gender equality in the species are largely unknown. However, given the seemingly limitless power the Jesi have in early life, there seems to be a consensus that no single problem will prove insurmountable.
In May 2020, in Poland, the remains of Dr. Maciej Wawrzyniec were discovered by a tourist who had become lost during an “extreme hiking” tour in the mountains. Autopsy confirmed that he died of exposure to the cold. On his person was a handwritten note dated December 2009, part of which read, “You have desecrated the one true thing that ever existed, and made my life’s work profane.” The death was ruled a suicide, as the note went on to give instructions for the disposal of his body should it ever be found. In accordance with his wishes, he has not been resurrected.
[last updated June 18, 2029]
2.
Last year was a good year for me—I made it into People’s 100 Sexiest Men Alive for the third time, became the world’s seventeenth-youngest billionaire, and was interviewed by Barbara Walters as one of 2006’s most fascinating people. You might have seen the interview: Barbara said, “Convince me that you awe not as despicable as evwyone thinks,” and I said, “Barbara, I’m much more despicable than most people can even imagine, and that doesn’t bother me at all.” That line got quoted a lot. And then of course there was my profile in The New Yorker: “Jordan Shaw and his Cabinet of Human Atrocities.”
This year, things are taking a
drastic turn for the worse. It’s the dreams I’ve been having. Real horrifying shit. Angels on meat hooks getting their guts torn out and ground up into sausages. Packs of black dogs ripping old people apart in the hospital while the nurses watch and laugh. I wake up with my heart pounding like I’ve just done an eight-ball of coke, and if there’s one thing I’m still scared of in this world it’s dying alone in my bed.
It’s destroying my life. I can’t hold erections, I can’t keep down any solid food, let alone the rich stuff I normally eat, and I haven’t taken a photograph in months. It’s guilt, plain and simple. And that’s the fucking kicker. I’m as Catholic as the day I was confirmed. No matter how much blow I snort, no matter how many Sundays I sit home with my thumb up my ass, no matter how many dumb-ass blondes I stick my dick into, I’m still an altar boy at heart.
And dumb as a box of hair. Shit.
I don’t believe in god. I don’t. My mother started me off Catholic, kneeling all the time, worrying rosary beads like rubbing them would make her life any better than it was, constantly muttering prayers to her magic man in the sky. She kept a strict home, so we weren’t supposed to even think about touching meat on Fridays. Not even fish—she didn’t want to take chances. Every Friday we had mashed potatoes, boiled turnips, and baked beets. You can imagine what a treat that was for a kid.
So one Friday when I was nine years old, I took all the quarters I’d been saving for a couple of months, and after dinner I pretended I was going to a friend’s place and headed straight to Burger King. I bought the most gorgeous, juicy Whopper you’ve ever seen and bit into all that beef, clear grease and ketchup all over my face. On the way home I had to pass by Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I was scared shitless, thinking god was going to strike me down for transgressing his laws and walking right past his doorstep. And nothing happened. I licked my lips and I knew then that my mother was an idiot and that god didn’t exist. I don’t remember anything else that went through my head, but I got my first hard-on, a real stiffy in my jeans. Just the little-kid kind, but it was my own little miracle.
Barbara Walters asked me when I first became fascinated with human evil. Was it when I worked developing crime scene photos for the NYPD? When I started taking my own photos in less-developed countries? I fed her some bull about studying the Holocaust in high school, and having a friend who’d been the victim of abuse from a stepfather.
And when, she wanted to know, did I decide that physical pleasure was a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself? When I made my first million at the age of twenty-six? When my stocks in anti-depressant medications tripled? I told her my body is the only thing I know for sure is real, the only thing I trust, and physical pleasure is the only happiness I really understand. Did I identify as a hedonist? Not exactly. Just someone who likes to have monthly caviar hot tub parties, spleen massages, orgies. Don’t I need some kind of higher gratification, for my mind or, dare she say it, soul? I don’t believe in the soul, nothing eternal about me. And for my mind, I have my photography. Although I see it as a kind of visual pleasure, not so distinct from my purely physical delights. Isn’t it contradictory, then, that I’m most well known for photographing holy religious relics? No, Barbara, not at all. They’re very beautiful, and in some ways are exactly the same as the things I collect myself. “Ah,” said Barbara, off camera, “I promised my producers not to mention your abominable collection.”
The New Yorker guy didn’t even pretend to like me. I could see the look of disgust on his face the whole time, and I kind of got off on it. When he went to shake my hand at the end of the interview, which we had in my apartment so he could see all my pieces, I shot my hand forward and grabbed his wrist, hard. His eyes widened a bit and he looked scared, and I leaned forward and kissed him. I could tell he was a fag. I told him if he gave me fifty bucks he could blow me. He said no, acted offended, but I could tell he was thinking about it. That’s the shit I love. That’s humanity. I don’t really like sex with guys, but I don’t mind it, either. The closest I’ve ever come to transcendence is when I’m blowing my load, preferably in someone’s face. And if that someone is a preppy-looking Ivy League journalist fag who hates himself for paying to blow someone he finds morally repulsive but physically attractive—well that’s just pure gold. I wish I had a picture of him licking my spunk off his lips.
He didn’t mention it in the article, of course. He omitted a lot of things. “The Cabinet of Human Atrocities”—that was his name for my collection, but he left most of the good things out. Things he mentioned: the elephant footstool with the zebra-skin seat cover; all the ivory; the gorilla-hand ashtray; two of the illegal meals I’ve eaten and photographed (manatee steak and panda veal); some of the serial-killer stuff I’ve collected; the Aztec human sacrifice artifacts; and, surprisingly, the blanched skull of a Tutsi man, which I smuggled out of Rwanda in ’94. Things he didn’t mention in the article: all the Nazi memorabilia (that surprised me); my copies of the Bernardo tapes; the pickled body parts from Ground Zero and my piece of shrapnel from the second plane; and my prize possession—the one from Poland. He didn’t ask me any of the questions I usually get when people see that: how does it work, what happens if I unplug it, am I ever going to try to wake the kid up. This guy didn’t even ask me how I got it, and given what I’ve learned since, I wouldn’t have told him.
My photographs of holy relics are just the public face of what I do. I photograph lots of things: concentration camps (my favourite is a piece of graffiti in Kaunas Fort IX reading If God exists, he’s going to have to beg ME for forgiveness), that theatre in Russia where the government gassed the entire audience just to take out the Chechen terrorists inside, mass graves, all that kind of stuff. And porn you need to see to believe. And lots of people know about what I do, the kind of things I like to collect. I’m not a good candidate for religious photography.
But back in 1991 I was travelling around South America, chewing coca leaves, looking for torture devices on the black market, trying to bang as much Latin pussy as I could. In Chile I ate a traditional indigenous dish similar to cabrito guisado: they slit the throat of a live goat and let the blood pour into a pan loaded with garlic and herbs. When the blood congeals, it’s sliced and served, like Jell-O. It had been technically illegal since the eighties, thanks to a law the city-bred animal-rights activists pushed through, but in the mountains no one cares. When I got to Venezuela I wound up in a little town called Betania, in the arms of a television journalist named Sonia Mañana, with long straight hair and perky tits. I wanted to spend the Christmas holidays in bed with her, so on December 8 I let her drag me to church for some feast day. I wouldn’t have gone for anyone else in the world, but she had the best ass I’ve ever had the pleasure to be inside. I was only twenty-three years old, and couldn’t help myself.
The cathedral was Gothic and stunning as shit, and I spent my hour walking around at the back, tuning out what was going on up front, studying the architecture and the stained glass, taking pictures. It had been a long time since I’d been inside a church, and I realized I’d been missing out on some very pleasing, gory, artwork. In one of the side altars, they had a bloodied piece of gauze that supposedly came from the side of Archbishop Romero when he was assassinated in El Salvador in 1980. How it ended up in Venezuela I’m not sure, but I was fascinated by it because it looked exactly like something I had in my collection at home: a T-shirt sprayed with blood that I’d bought off a kid who’d been beaten up at school by his brother and his friends. Next thing I knew, there was a scream from behind me, and I turned to see a nun yelling that the host was bleeding.
I snapped a photo. If you were to look at this picture now, you would see a rosy glow like aurora borealis all around the host. Sure, it’s weird, but it’s not a miracle. I can show you any number of pictures I’ve taken in my kitchen or my backyard with similar wonky lighting effects. It could have been bad film. It could have been a reflection. It could have been anything.
The priest quieted ev
eryone down and went back to mass, but when he finished no one would leave. They all just sat there, praying. I saw Sonia give me the look of death, so I just kept lurking on the sidelines waiting for something to happen. A few hours later the priest brought out the host, and I had my Nikon 570 at the ready. This part is true: that host dripped blood into the chalice like the priest was squeezing an orange. And I got it all on Kodak 35-millimetre ISO 800 film.
Since then, people keep asking me: Jordan, you saw the miracle, how can you not believe? It’s such a profoundly stupid question. I don’t know what happened in that church, but I don’t think it was divine. I’ve seen monks in Asia do weirder things than make bread bleed. And I haven’t joined any of their honky-tonk religions.
This is what happens next: Sonia never touches me again— she becomes this totally hardcore devoted Catholic. The priest takes the host to Bishop Pio Bello Ricardo of Los Teques. The Bishop sends it to “experts” at the Medical Institute at Caracas for analysis. The experts come back with the following information: the red substance on the host is blood of human origin, containing red and white corpuscles, and doesn’t match the blood of the priest. The blood stays fluid for three days, then begins to dry up, leaving a small red spot at the centre of the host. The host stays totally dry on one side—the blood doesn’t go through it. I sell my photos to Time for $75,000, which makes my name as a photographer of relics and miraculous phenomena. This leads, eventually, to Petr Grabowicz.
In 1995 I was in Italy. I was there for my own reasons—Nero, gladiatorial relics, Pompeii—but also photographing the supposed Eucharistic miracle at Lanciano. Catholics believe that during the mass the bread and wine change, not in form but in “essence,” into the body and blood of Christ, and that when they eat and drink of these they receive the whole Christ— body, blood, soul, and divinity. “Miracles” like the one I saw in Betania and the one in Lanciano prove and reaffirm this doctrine for them. And pictures of it sell like smut.
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