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 each 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.