The Idle Fool
A finch flies through the open window and then rises in a straight line to the ceiling, as though gravity’s been reversed. Jesus watches the creature. They are in the middle of dinner — boiled pigeon and egg, figs for after. Amos, the hosts’ only child — head of hair like a beefsteak mushroom, big drams of whiskey for eyes — gets up and pokes a broom in the bird’s direction.
Leah swats at her son from her cushion, tsking at him until he resettles. A single feather floats down onto the table. Yeshua, the patriarch, picks it up and pulls it opposite of its grain.
Jesus taps the egg gently against his knee and then peels away the shards and the membrane underneath. He eats it in two bites, letting the yolk crumble in his mouth before sending the end down his throat after it. There are pits, shells, and bones on his plate, remnants of everything he’s eaten, as if each carries in it some stubborn will to continue existing.
Yeshua clears his throat and says to Jesus, “Many say they are prophets. How do you distinguish yourself?”
“When you go to the market, Leah,” Jesus says, “how do you remember, for all the noise, why it is you are there?”
“You are a prophet of memory, then?” says Yeshua.
“You must become like an idiot,” Jesus says.
Yeshua exhales loudly and looks at Amos, his only child. The boy is wise, maybe even some kind of prophet himself.
Leah collects the plates and takes them into an adjacent room. She returns with a small ewer and three cups, setting one before Jesus and the others before herself and Yeshua. Jesus drinks his coffee quickly, leaving only a blanket of halved beans at the bottom. They sit in silence. Jesus’s intestines soon begin to move, twitching as though recovering from long exercise. With each movement, his consciousness expands laterally and longitudinally, and to all points in between.
He sees future technologies, the synapses in his host’s brain, the life of the pigeon he has eaten. He feels the wind the walls keep out. He knows the thoughts of all the bones. He sees the place that will one day become Galveston, Texas — nail salons and spray tans, pawnshops selling clay pigeons, jewelry, guns. At the moment it is antelope and bison, Clovis arrowhead. He watches a Karankawa boy net marine catfish. He sees the dinosaurs and mega fauna, the flora deep under the boy’s feet, the fiddleheads of giant fern already unwound and dead, now weaving their star-given carbon into the oil that spurts from the ground millennia later. He watches masons stack bricks atop one another until they form buildings. The sawdust put to bed with water, the ground covered with cubicle carpet and then stripped, concrete exposed. A stubby man rolls a jukebox into the building in 1979. A queue of songs about longing and redemption plays a decade later. He knows how different those inevitable books (Job, Testaments, Song of Songs) would be, should the songs play in different order.
“Have you been to the Middle Sea?” Yeshua says.
“Of course,” Jesus says, yawning.
“And is the Father there?”
“The Father is in Heaven.”
“Where is Heaven?”
“At the bottom of the ocean where you almost forget about light, there are animals who produce it.”
Amos plays with the olive pits on his plate, pulling two away from one another, and then rushing them together as if they are magnets and cannot be kept apart.
Jesus knows the Internet searches of the future, their hunger so palpable it could be bound in leather and blessed, shelved and cataloged, added to the Bible.
Why am I so tired.
Why am I so ugly.
Why is my son crying.
When is mother’s day 2016.
Why are people gay.
Why are people so mean.
Why are my feet always cold.
How to tell if necklace is real gold.
Where the wilderness is.
Where the spirit of the Lord is.
When to use whom.
What to expect.
He is a search engine, a provider of quick answers, as mediocre as people want him to be.
“More?” Amos asks, coffee in his hands.
Jesus lifts his cup in assent. He is a great accepter, above all else.
A dwarf star turns into a supernova, the first few pulses of extinction. He, too, a vessel of mundane gravity. He excuses himself and walks outside to the bathroom.
There is piss in the streets, manure, leering. One woman shows him her breast.
“Do you want to suckle, Jesus? Ohhh, messiah?” she hisses, waggling a pinched brown areola at him, which he at first mistakes for a rat’s nose. The round, pink-brown end; the nipple whiskers.
He looks at her and continues walking. He is barefoot, and each time his foot comes into contact with the ground, a note plays, lighting up the whole planet, audible to everything, even the rocks and water.
When he gets to the bathroom, a small odorous stall, he does not try to hide the sounds of flatulence. He voids his bowels and instinctively turns to see what he’s produced.
“I am asking only that you embrace your life as I have,” he says upon return.
“And how is that?” asks the father. Born in another time Yeshua would have sought divorce from his wife, been profligate with his marriages but not his love.
“He means,” says Leah, “that you must live fully, while careful never to draw a knot. You must consume but not be consumed — let this world pass through you.”
“But what alms to give? Who to worship?”
“You know that after the lions have had their share of a kill, scavengers come — hyenas, jackals, vultures — and take what they want. Flies lay their eggs; maggots eat their way out. While to a passerby the carcass may look picked clean, tiny insects still roam the bones, eating. And after that come smaller creatures. They do this until the bones are completely clean, original enough so that from them might be made another animal entirely.”
He Who Wrote It
His captors take his blood pressure, feed him 1,400 calorie breakfasts topped by greasy American muffins, allow him to garden.
The courtyard is open at its heart, so that if he looks up he might see a pied kingfisher scouting for prey, dots of altocumulus, the long shadow of minaret. But he does not look up. He looks out, at the walkways that surround his enclosure. He looks down, places a circle of white stones around a fig tree.
Dear nation, he writes in his journal, stop counterfeiting currency.
His face is cut with lines deep as his country’s rivers, framed by the beard he’s disallowed from shaving while captive. When he receives visitors, he tames his hair with water before reading to them from his work.
For SSA George Piro, a haiku:
No mistake was made
A motorcade of date palms
Arriving, then gone
Piro taps his knee as He Who Wrote It recites the poem from memory. He shuffles the toe of his boot east and west in the scant sand. The US is a bitch lover, faithless and fidgety.
Early the next morning his son’s spirit appears at the foot of his cot, scowling at him. He Who Wrote It composes some free verse to remind his son of his place:
I am the smoke
Out of which
You cannot reclaim your hands
I use them
To speak to God
Uday talks wistfully of an orchard in the desert, doesn’t say what he thinks of his father’s poem. Because of his continued impertinence, and because his face reminds He Who Wrote It of the grave, he bids him go. Uday stays, staring his father back to sleep.
That afternoon, the Americans taunt him with photos of his sons’ gray corpses. They hold the newspaper clippings up to the windows and drag them down to reveal their own grinning skulls.
He writes in the sand:
At the bottom of the desert
lies a statue of the king
He is in a constant state of rebirth —
Awake and dreaming
He does not like the modern poets, thinks them dull and obvious, like the bodies of his people. If you thank me, he writes, I will give you more.
When his mind runs dry, he turns to gardening, his other love. How he lusts after the act of covering, of something springing forth.
This will come to be all he cares about: the progress of the plants. They emerge even more perfect than his poems, whispering to him at night: You see what you can do with a thing buried? You see, when you drain the marshes, what you might find?
Good Night, Animals
He floats face down; the half-orb of his clouded eyes echoing the sphere of the earth. His beard is soft in the water, tender where in life it bristled. His penis waves back and forth, vessel of life now sweetbread of death, no longer controlled by his brain, which, under the pressure of the ocean, swells. Its folds and creases have shed their electric, sensate properties, and now appear instead as a kind of secret hypoxied coral, visible only to the eye of Allah.
A plastic bag floats by. A passing school of herring flashes this way, that.
The ship that bore his body into the sea, one of an American fleet of thousands, passes overhead. From its passengers, a cross section neither random nor exemplary: a middle-aged man with angina masturbating in the shower; a young female expert in Arabic practicing pronunciation of a Gambian dialect; an aspiring actor doing mediocre impersonations of Muammar Gaddafi; and, finally, in this unrepresentative inventory, two rats who will, in a few weeks time, become parents to seven babies, none of which will live.
A moray eel approaches his body, nibbling his ring finger and then sliding under his arm next to his face.
He once asked his second wife, Fatima — pussy with a sweet powerful scent like mountain kief or mint tea — when she thought he would become a symbol.
“Habibi,” she said, “it’s already happened.”
They were eating tagine, a dish she’d brought back with her from a trip to Morocco, where she taught psychology at the American University. He had just dipped a piece of khubz in the stew when she’d replied to his question, and he looked up at her before taking a bite. A chunk of carrot fell from the bread and onto the floor. He smiled slowly at this wife who he would divorce a month later.
As the skirt of the boat’s shadow lifts, Fatima, worlds away, stirs two sugar cubes into a glass of tea. She has just heard of her former husband’s sea burial, and is thinking not of whether the Americans will come for her, but of how her current movements — the push of the small antique spoon, her desire for the dissipation of the sugar cubes — might be similar to those of the God that now stirs her ex-husband’s body back into the earth.
His body moves languidly under the water as the wake of the ship above crests and lessens. The daughter of one of the men he indirectly pushed from the 104th floor of the South Tower rides her bicycle down a street in Brooklyn, thinking of nothing. The wheels of her bike tread a path through new shoots of grass, and her mind goes with them, free.
Plankton swim around him, entering his mouth and finding their way down his esophagus and into his stomach, full of Pakistani plums at the time of his killing.
After watching Atta, Khalid (Khalid his favorite — Mecca-born, so faithful), Nawaf, and the others fly the planes into the two monoliths, he retrieved his holy book from the edge of a small table. He opened the Quran indiscriminately, seeking divine guidance, closing his eyes and placing his finger on the page. His long index finger pointed:
Then He rendered them as stubble devoured.
A kingfish swims underneath his body, feeling protected there, as if in one of the intricate coral reefs of her youth. She eats from him absentmindedly. His lungs lay just above where the fish nibbles — two still, large sacs, the green of sun-flecked rock kelp, silky and strong.
His skin has begun to peel, beginning with the soles of his feet, where the epidermis curls back as if revealing a present. Sea lice speed the process along, moving their way into the white flesh, hungry.
