JUDAS ISCARIOT AND SKULLHEAD

1922. According to the politely folded invoices of the Agence Générale du Suicide of the Boulevard Montparnasse and its principal director, Jacques Rigaut, suicide by hanging, the suicide of the impoverished, could be administered for five francs. Should additional rope be required, it could be purchased at a price of twenty francs for the initial meter, and five francs for each subsequent ten centimeters. Other variations on suicide à la mode could be obtained, from low-end drowning through poison, revolver, and electrocution to the luxurious perfumed death that perhaps Samson and John the Baptist discovered something of. The agency toiled to sustain the dignity of the suicide, to arrange forbidden burials, prevent vandalism, dilute hysteria, and minimize contagion. It was against contagion that Augustine, the Papacy, the Church, and the Apostles set my stolen image. The hypocritical religious councils of sixth-century Europe, at Orleans, Braga, and beyond, denied us funeral rites as the demonizing of my death gathered force with grotesques in illuminated manuscripts, stone relief, tapestry, and deathpaint. The Agence Générale du Suicide agitated and advocated on our behalf. The Dadaists and Surrealists, exhuming the memory of Gérard de Nerval, elevated the discussion of suicide in the newspapers of the Left Bank. Rigaut crossed his scuffed shoes on the surface of his writing desk and ran his nicotined fingers across his brow. Notions formed connections behind his face, which was as handsome as a gleaming snowplow blade. He lowered his feet and began to write.

 

Skullhead, the mawkish savage youth described in Rigaut’s Un Brilliant Sujet (A Brilliant Subject/Individual), experienced dislocated apparitions of himself as a side effect of experimentation with time travel. At first, Skullhead’s intention was to compel as many iterations of himself upon space-time as were necessary to seduce his mistress, who had abandoned him seven years before. Inside the slick and pulsing egg that was his time machine, Skullhead’s audacity ran amok. He ventured deeper into the past, threatening to bring anarchy to the Book of Genesis. Skullhead experienced ancient Judea for months before locating the young Jesus of Nazareth slumbering beneath a tree. Skullhead injected potassium cyanide into Jesus’ skinny arm. In Egypt, he disfigured Cleopatra, attacking her nose with a pair of pliers, leaving her to resemble a disintegrating sphinx until her suicide. His ubiquity caused him to appear as a god, worshipped in South America in bloody sacrificial rites and all across the heathen continents. Eventually, Skullhead declared a universal law mandating suicide for all attaining twenty years of age. At least three science fiction writers unwittingly plagiarized Skullhead in the twentieth century.

 

It was 1929. For five years, Jacques Rigaut had existed—as he says—“on the other side of the mirror,” which is to say that his suicide had become inevitable. Jacques Rigaut had suicide in his blood and set his face into the wind of his destiny with something close to joy, like a mariner enraptured by brilliant chimeras of polar ice. In the drawing room of a house in Oyster Bay, on July 20, 1924, Rigaut rushed headlong at an expensive art deco mirror, his fury growing and mimicking him, until the sleek silver frame passed behind his vision like a noose. The mirror cracked against the wall with the sound of a discharging revolver. But, Rigaut sustained only a slight gash to his forehead and seemed to stagger slightly back into the room, across the clay-colored rugs, while the damaged mirror swung on its hangings, as a guillotine would. In truth, he had transcended the mirror and, like myself, entered into anachronism and ambiguity. From that moment on, he had passed beyond the mirror. Perhaps he was already dead. From that dispassionate vantage, he watched the world until, quite reasonably, he exhausted it.

Rigaut’s most extensive work was called Lord Patchogue, and it concerned that life beyond the mirror. Here, again, we mirrored one another: his Lord Patchogue, like my Lord Jesus, was the lord of an imaginary kingdom. The bourgeois critic prefers art to be mimetic; to present a mirror to life; to mimic its routines, surfaces, and costumes. Artists like Jacques Rigaut or myself—those who have transcended the mirror—care for it only insofar as it may be used to ridicule and offend. Rigaut once said: “Try, if you can, to stop a man who travels with suicide in his buttonhole.” And Rigaut’s mission, his mock passion, was as suicidal as mine or that of Jesus, my brother. Once passion is set in motion, it cannot be apprehended.

Uncertain of meeting God and powerless to modify a past from which he himself was issued, Skullhead concentrates on creating new versions of himself which are just different enough to perplex those of his contemporaries who might subsequently venture back into the past only to find nothing there any longer that corresponded with their historical expectations. Toward the end of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, Skullhead, after roaming the province of Judea for six months, stumbles across a child who is Jesus of Nazareth asleep under an olive tree: he injects potassium cyanide into the child’s veins.

November 6, 1929. The Clinic at Châtenay-Malabry is close to where Chateaubriand, writer, explorer, and lover of flesh, lived and died clutching his wooden crucifix. Jacques Rigaut wandered within the gardens of the clinic, bearing with him a valise containing the necessary tools of his trade. His arm ached from needle punctures at the crease of his elbow. The pain was familiar and as much a part of his experience now as the blinking of his eyes. The grass was wet, and sometimes the earth curled through it like minced meat. The floral beds were without color. A light rain was beginning to fall as he stood beneath one of the chestnut trees. In that moment, he thought of me, and my death, swaying gently and terribly from a bough, and of how Chateaubriand had, at first, experienced Judea with revulsion. Rigaut had not experienced revulsion in half a decade, at least.

 

He shook his valise, and his tools rattled inside. He opened it slightly, but so as not to let the rain inside, and retrieved his metal flask of cognac. His innards leapt magnetically toward it as he flipped the cap with his thumb and poured the contents into his throat. Then, he crossed the swollen lawn to the doors of the clinic where he had a room, idly discarding a pocketful of morphine syrettes from his soft coat pocket onto the grass, like a trail back to the tree where he imagined me—that is to say, Judas—hanging. He was admitted with familiarity. He walked the pale corridors to his room, noting the smell of medical alcohol all around him.

 

Rigaut appraised his room from behind the mirror, which was screwed to the wall above the washbasin. His valise was open on the bed, where he had pulled back the sheets. He had taken the precaution of fitting one of the rubber sheets that the clinic kept to the bed. He lay there, with a draughtsman’s ruler held in his left hand, measuring the precise location of his heart. In his right hand, he held the revolver, which he had declared to be the only literature on his bedside table. The pillow with which he had intended to silence the discharge was obliterated and feathers fell through the room, sticking to the little scorched black vortex in his chest. It was as profound and beautiful a scene as he had ever witnessed. He had cleaned his teeth and nails several times, and his hair was shining and immaculate. The Ruler and the Revolver, the Revolver and the Ruler.

IN TRUTH, we envy the fierce clarity of the death note on the dashboard, the doubtless soliloquy on the leather upholstery, the wedding band in the ashtray, the rejection on the mantel. We are jealous of the end of deliberation; God is in his prison amid the cinders of an immolated bush, dragged back down into the roots and soil of fear and imagination. They are done with vanity and pride. The details are a board game: the Pop Star with the Rope in the Kitchen; the Poet with the Oven in the Kitchen; the Painter with the Razor in the Studio; Ian Curtis in the Tombs of Mancunia; Sylvia Plath sniffing out Lazarus in London; Mark Rothko’s armpits filling with blood on the Painting Floor of New York. The preparations and artifacts, the milk and bread set out; the rubber sheet spread across the bed; the ruler to measure the distance to the heart; I am the shadow that swings out over all of these.