I struggle to withdraw the hand and arm, but it is not up to me anymore — I am growing into it, I am becoming something new.
These adversaries, the Jewbird says — the beak, the head within the beak, and my own mouth, all three of us, all speaking at once.
These adversaries half a world away — to whom the Jew at large now clings, without ever being fully accepted by them — these adversaries are to be despised, that is today’s lesson.
For the Jew, against all, and because of all, I still have pity.
But them, no. They are the despicable ones — not pitiful; not for some time, and never again, we say.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, the Rice woman, Mr. Ashcroft, the dark-skinned one who is coming, the journalists and clergymen and generals, as well as the cowed and thronging civilians, slack-jawed, filled with wonder at these grand personages — they have left it to history: said good-bye, evils; good-bye, wickedness and wretchedness; thus do they evade the pity that would be their due, did they still trade in those heavy coins, were any such coins still in their possession — for all such currency is stamped “pity” on the reverse, if at times in the finest possible type. Their treasury, however, has been emptied, the strongboxes and bursaries laid bare. Somewhere down the line, thieves came. From inside, from outside — who can say? — thieves assembled, then struck without mercy. Treason did its worst, and now all the lovely treasure is gone.
What’s left to these smug, abortive people but to mark our boys and lieutenants as wicked ones, as evildoers? A vanity among vanities: evil and wickedness now beyond the ken of our adversaries, infinitely so — which is why we cannot even pity them, we, who are so often moved to pity. It is precisely this categorical impossibility that often drives us — a people steeped in pity and rage! — half mad.
Omar ibn Al-Khattab humbled himself by entering Jerusalem on foot — today he could offer no such symbol.
Mehmet II presented Gennadius Scholarius with a crozier, which today he would break over his knee.
And there is before all else the lesson of the great mercy shown the Makkan unbelievers.
But how do you address as “brother” those who are not and will not be your brother? Who are mere shells, lost to history, to pity, beyond all healing, shorn of all humanity, against which they have drawn their curtain tight?
Imagine, though, that one among them glimpses the sham — of his people, and his own sham — from behind the curtain. Let us say he comes to understand, if only for a time, that evil has been foreclosed, that he forever belongs to a superficial race, which can at best squeak and twist in its own traps of superficiality, as it lays waste to the whole world — or rather, to the world’s surface, which is all such a people can touch.
In that moment — there might be a difference. They might once again turn to face us, and there would be a recognition, some little exchange — at last, again, pity.
Not an end to our struggles. Not an end to bloodshed.
Just pity. That.
Imagine pity, then imagine someone — a figure, no matter who, any figure — turning away.
Imagine two figures, standing toe to toe, nerves, muscles all tensed — then one turns, is walking — has left now, he’s almost gone, he’s onto something new.
To simply walk away — imagine.
To feel an evil in his heart and the other’s heart, just as he feels a love in his heart and the other’s — and to be saved from that evil, to move toward the love as toward a great light.
Imagine.
Nauseated gagging spills from the beak, from the bird and the Jew at once, and they begin to retch — and I feel a pain I instantly understand. The bird and the Yid are rejecting the arm, are working it out. But my skin is hooked inside. I understand it: that the bird is rejecting the arm, but will keep the skin. And I swoon in agony as the bird vomits my flayed arm from its chest.
The Jewbird picks me from the floor with that huge beak and tosses its head back, swallowing me headfirst, adjusting its grip with quick gulps, and as I’m drawn in I feel a terrible metallic shiver in my bones and teeth, and then a rhythm deeper and slower, accelerating as the wings begin to beat. The throat muscles grip my shoulders, my whole torso, and at last my legs, too, swallowing me back a foot at a time into the dark cavity, thick with scorched oil.
I am face-to-face with the dead Jewboy. His awful grin modulates in the light of the incandescent beetles streaming from his eye sockets.
“Finish me, pig!” I shout. “You scum! Why don’t you kill me?”
You are an old fool.
Finish your thought.
Finish the logic of your thought.
You had a theory about a curtain, but you had not worked it through.
Work your theory through.
How can you not understand it — at all times they see the curtain, and behind the curtain — both at once. At all times! To move toward love — pretty thought! But still there is the curtain. Some see more curtain, some see more of what’s behind, but no matter: they all are forever internalizing this notion: that they are not-evil, that evil as such no longer exists for them. Evil is thus thoroughly lost to their comprehension, and with it all possibility of love. They have no love, and no evil. And yet they think — they think that this not-being-evil is enough.
“Enough to what?”
To save them from Hell — from our world-become-Hell, and the true Hell that follows.
Again the Jewbird is gagging, and I am retched out onto the floor. The monster peers down at my shame — my garments only a few oily scraps I cannot arrange to cover me.
Then I am gripped in talons of rough metal, and the air around us tenses, as in a great intake of breath. And we are launched. The chamber spins us higher and higher, we are borne up on rings of heat and light that tighten and bind until we whirl a hundred revolutions per second, and then there’s no more space, we are drilling solid rock, breaking and beating through at terrible speed, sparking, blasting up out the mountaintop, crashing up and up through all the concentric spheres of the universe and through the plain of the fixed stars.
And there, in the talons of the Jewbird, I am crashing still.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Bill Clegg for his wisdom and magic, and for the Sphinx-like patience with which he received drafts of this going back eight years.
Thanks to Fiona McCrae for her line-by-line editorial brilliance and her larger structural insights. She gave my weird novel a home, and then she made it better. What a gift.
And to the rest of the crew at Graywolf, especially Steve Woodward, Katie Dublinski, Erin Kottke, (the now-freelancing) Michael Taeckens, and Marisa Atkinson — you’re a hell of a team, and it’s an honor to run with you.
For their friendship and all the little lifesaving moments, my gratitude to Jessie Bennett, Stephen Burt, Dennis Cooper, Chad Miller, Kimberly Parsons, Ronnie Parsons, and Gabby Warshawer.
Thanks to the MacDowell Colony (the greatest place on earth), and thanks as well (for many and varied reasons) to John Adams, Janine Agro, Molly Antopol, Matt Bell, John Bernstein, Paula Bomer, Mary Byers, André Carrington, Chris Clemans, Nicholas Cook, Juliet Grames, Justin Hargett, Ted Hearne, Janerick Holmes, Bronwen Hruska, Laura Hruska, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Kiarina Kordela, Bob Kraftson, Sam Lipsyte, Ailen Lujo, Lynn Marasco, Ben Marcus, Rafael Martinez, Rudy Martinez, Belinda McKeon, Sarah Mohn, Kapo Ng, Paul Oliver, Dale Peck, Lou Peralta, Sarah Reidy, David Rylance, Bill Schultz, Virginia Seewaldt, Parul Sehgal, Alex Shakar, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, and Jane Yager.