A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (16 page)

Self practiced his Hebrew, sounding almost happy.
HarMeggidon.

Har Meggidon.

The mountains of Meggido, where the kings of the earth would meet.

Armageddon.

Part Three

Myself Am Hell

Chapter Thirteen

L
ike all wars, this one began with sacrifice.

Here, in a land of grudges and blood, Abraham had set out to murder his child. According to the Jews, the boy's name is Isaac. To the Muslims, it is Ishmael.

Untold thousands have died over such devotion to minor details and metaphor. Explosive devices are hidden under seat cushions because of mispronunciations. Entire families are poisoned for square inches at the back of a shrine or church. The Palestinians and Israelis fought over lines drawn in the dirt. Symbolism leads to suicidal missions inside wired trucks and boats. Women are stabbed for singing praises to a different god on a crooked street in the wrong quarter.

Where there is sanctity, there is Satan.

It's an ancient adage that fits the wide range of awe-inspiring faith and petty madness that is Jerusalem. It was easy to get preachy here.

The pink-haired lady, Betty Verfenstein, put it another way when she saw that I was watching the Muslims spitting on the Jews in the narrow alleys and labyrinthine bazaars of the OldCity. The Jews were throwing rocks and everybody was screaming while the Israeli border guards hung back with their machine guns pointed down at the street.

"I couldn't care less what these fanatics do to each other," she said. "Except when I see children getting involved. They shouldn't have to grow up in this turmoil, all in the name of God. This isn't religion. I don't know what it is. I've never seen anything like it in my life." She planted her meaty fists on her thick hips and looked ready to outwrestle any of the squabbling well-dressed men. "All I'm sure of is that I wouldn't want any of them in my home during Passover."

There were dead children wrapped around her throat, the silver psychic cords twining and whipping about her. Four miscarriages with broad flat heads and trans, lucent, vein-packed skin, and her daughter, Theresa, who'd been murdered thirty-five years ago at the age of twenty.

Theresa had given me all the bitter details, seething in my ear on the plane. She'd been a sophomore at Yardale, cutting across the quad at night with her roommate on their way to a Phi Beta Kappa party, when the pine brush behind them suddenly came alive with arms and gray gloves. She still felt an intense loathing for her roommate, who ran off and left Theresa behind. Right there on one of the nation's safest campuses, in a spot surrounded by the windows to a hundred empty classrooms, she'd had her bowels carefully cut from her while her dead eyes watched each stroke of the fine blade and witnessed the slow and precise removal of her own internal organs. Still, all she saw were arms, and those unstoppable gray gloves.

Theresa wavered close, her teeth champed and white eyes wide now that she had finally come face-to-face with me.

My name had been carved in thin large letters into her chest, years before I was born.

"You all right?" Betty asked. "You look a little sick."

"I'm fine."

She kept her gaze on the fighting. The sorrow etched itself deeper into each heavy line of her face, and the nervous tension kept her talking. "Manny's back at the hotel with heartburn. I wanted to go to Ecuador, but no, he wants to come see where the Bible was born. Except the water here is as bad for him as it was in Mexico. You and Manny, you're both going to be up all night."

Theresa continued to glare. Her open abdominal cavity showed that the butcher had only taken certain organs: the liver, the lower intestine, and part of her lower esophageal tract. The dried tissues could be used for divination. It reminded me of Eddie as everyone in the mount pulled together in order to replace his heart and put him back together again.

I could imagine Theresa's killer back then, with his gray leather gloves still on, surrounded with the burnt embers of her flesh and using a scrying mirror to stare into the future and see me at this exact moment. Why else would he have carved my name, unless he wanted to see my reaction?

I mouthed,
You'll pay for this
. I focused on him as well as I could, turning against the years that led toward Theresa's death. My mind roamed widdershins—counter-clockwise—against the natural order of time. He watched me from the past. I could sense him there, grinning, so slick. He held his scrying mirror and looked deeply within it, staring, watching. He wanted a connection and he got it. I drew forth arcana and hid my glowing fists in my pockets. I recited a thricefold Assyrian hex and hurled a curse, feeling the tide flow against the very current of time. Thirty-five years ago it should've shattered the glass and sent the shards into the bastard's face, leaving him blind in at least one eye.

The miscarriages bobbed in front of us, snapping taut on the silver cords and then sluggishly wafting off. Theresa hissed and came at me with her fingernails poised to scratch my face to shreds. I didn't blame her. My second self unwound from my chest and stuck his chin out at her.
Hey! Who the hell do you think you are making faces like that?

The wheel revolves. After haunting her mother for so long, the girl now realized she'd been tortured and killed only to become the smallest part of a cruel pattern designed to rattle me. And worst of all—it hadn't. Theresa sneered.

Don't look down your nose at me!
Self screamed.

Relax.

She started it! Stuck-up dead bitches are the worst
.

"Did I tell you on the plane?" Betty asked. "With Manny's high blood pressure he's a prime candidate for a stroke. He retired two years ago and instead of making model airplanes or putting ships in a bottle he's been dragging me all over the planet ever since. All truth be told, I liked Japan more. Them Japanese are more respectful of other folks than this. Except during the big one, of course.

She'd told me on the El Al flight over, while Gawain and my father sat one row behind us. I had spent weeks going through a hundred obscure incantations but I still couldn't figure out how to strip the harlequin costume and dye from Dad's body. I called up all manner of majiks until my hands were singed and unfeeling. Self licked at the painted white face and black lips for hours as my father tittered like a schoolgirl on her first date.

Finally, I'd had to use pancake and foundation to cover his clown face just so I could get him on board the plane from JFK to Tel Aviv. I hid his jester's cap under a ten-gallon cowboy hat that made him look like a ludicrous version of Hoss Cartwright. The stewardess tried to get him to put it in the overhead compartment. Eventually she realized her mistake when he started doing a jig in the aisle and instigated a food fight onboard with the kosher deli trays.

I hadn't known how I was going to get them past customs, but I needn't have worried. Gawain and my father simply walked past all the Israeli officials while my luggage was checked and rechecked and I was held in a tiny white room for hours until they finally let me go.

Betty and Manny Verfenstein had taken to my father for some reason, perhaps because they thought he was the victim of a stroke.

I could understand it. Betty was nearing seventy and was boisterous and forthcoming about her life. Theresa filled me in on the rest as she dangled from her mother's throat, my name a wide-open wound. The cord's pressure sometimes made Betty gasp with pain as memories lashed against her.

She was a plump woman with crows' feet stamped into every meaty angle of her features. She had buried her only daughter and the endless ache had worn down her faith but not her convictions. She had a defiant rough laugh that filled me with pleasant warmth. It drove Self bugshit on the plane and made him crawl into the overhead compartments, where he rifled the baggage.

Eventually the fracas ended. A girl limped away crying with two badly skinned knees, comforted by her mother. This kind of scene would be repeated several times a day. Small skirmishes, shoving matches, and screaming arguments were punctuated by other, more savage violence. The leaders of nations from around the world had been vainly trying to get these people to talk peace for years. It had not worked in five millennia, and it never would.

It was Good Friday.

Betty shook her head sadly, and her daughter and the miscarriages twined above, swept aside by the dangling cords and coiling together. "This has nothing to do with the Bible."

She was wrong. It had everything to do with a book that had toppled empires and forged ten thousand wars. The letter and law of its lessons. Contradictions and prophecies held too much consequence, no matter what you believed. That was all they had left of God, and all they could imagine.

"Hope your father is enjoying himself," she told me. Another person might have said it with an air of sympathy, sincere or not, but Betty Verfenstein only spoke what she meant. "I've got to get back to Manny. You take care."

Theresa swung down low one last time, my name shining in her gutted flesh. Her ribs had chips in them from where the blade had sunk deep. She glowered, hissing and despising me, as she deserved to do. Even the miscarriages scowled and gave me the malformed finger.

Self shouted,
And you, you snooty chick, you're lucky I don't come up there and slap you around some.

I left the Old City of Jerusalem and wandered the hills for the rest of the afternoon. Despite the fervor, you could find peace here, alone in the dirt. There was no wind. I stared out over the countryside and felt a welcoming embrace of heat and epochs.

Even with all of time sewn into Self's soul I found that he was hurrying ahead of me.

Self gazed about the rocky spur of the Judaean hills and laughed, listening to the mania of the land. As expected, all of Jerusalem, full of hostility and passion, echoed his wild happiness.

He was home.

Goddamn, it's good to be back.

I stared down at the city knowing that I should have come here a decade earlier with Danielle, back when my studies might have led to something with purpose and significance. Perhaps even discovery and revelation, at a time when I could have reveled in my belief.

Jerusalem, known in Hebrew as Yerushalayim, and in Arabic as Al Quds, was the center of worldwide credence and certainty. The reverend in Perdido, Alabama, owed his yellow pine altar to this far-off expanse of sand.

I spotted tufts of sallow, a willowlike shrub that supposedly has wept since the Jews' captivity in Babylon. Perhaps it was true. Nature not only reflects God, but history. Each moment is rooted in antiquity. The dead past never recedes, and remains as close now as ever. I had warded off Oimelc, the Feast of Lights sabbat, only to face Lent in the place where Christ had been born, preached, died, and altered the rest of humanity.

Stop it
, Self hissed.

What?

Running through it again changes nothing. I'm sick of hearing it
. He held his hands over his ears as if I were shrieking into his face. The more sentimental and pensive I grew, the more he leaped around.
Quit it! Can't we just have some fun for once?

It would be nice
, I said.

Stop it then. Come on, these Israeli army chicks are firm, and they got handcuffs!

He watched the girls walking on the roads and whistled after them. He sighed and dreamed of bruised wrists, lapping at torn veins, and stroking dimpled kneecaps. My stomach tightened and my groin flooded with heat, and I went over sideways in the dust grabbing my guts. He grinned at me, the red sunset washing over his teeth so that it looked as if he had a mouth brimming with blood.

It wasn't his provocation but mine. It had the old familiar feeling. Temptation in the desert was not unknown.

Into this land came a man named Yashua, a stoneworker—not a carpenter—who traveled from a small village to work in the cosmopolitan city of Galilee, during the time of the first zealots. There he learned of the rebellion against the tyranny of Rome, and grew aware of himself within a political tinderbox. He learned at the knee of a man who ate locusts and wild honey and dressed in camel's hair clothes. He returned home to Nazareth and was rejected by his own people, and was forced to start a new and active community with his own disciples.

Just as Jebediah had done.

Is he here yet?
I asked.

You know, the fur-lined leather cuffs are just as nice. Twin straps
.

It got like this on occasion, when he glided among my weaknesses and took advantage.
Is he here?

Yes.

Why hasn't he made his play yet?

Who's to say he hasn't?
His grin grew wider. In the coming darkness his mouth was no longer crimson but now hung open filled with moonlit fangs.
Why haven't you made yours?