Killing the Buddha Page 17

  “There is no difference,” the imam said, “between the Christian God and the Muslim God. I am here today to tell you we love Jesus. We know he is a prophet.”

  The day we attended had been announced as one of “outreach” and “introducing ourselves,” but it seemed as much a defensive strategy as an educational endeavor. Sharing wavelength with John Walker and Waylon Jennings, Muslims were on every TV and radio station in Nashville: Muslims harassed, Muslims arrested, Muslims assaulted, murdered, thrown from trains. “We love Jesus,” the imam kept saying, because he had seen them on the news each night, he’d watched them as if he was a witness to the crimes: Three Muslim medical students are pulled off the highway in Florida, accused of “plotting an attack” at a Shoney’s restaurant. In Houston, a Muslim-owned Goodyear store is set on fire. In Cleveland a man attacks an Islamic center by driving his car through its wall. There are shootings, there are shouts: Raghead. Towelhead. Sandnigger. “Arabs out” scrawled on Muslim houses. “Nuke them all” scratched on Muslim cars. There are hard drives confiscated; there are killers claiming “post-9/11 rage.”

  “We love Jesus,” the imam said, because around the country there were so many racists threatening so many mosques you’d think that all the synagogues had already been graffitied, all the black churches already burned.

  “We love Jesus,” because as close as LaVergne, Tennessee, managers at the Whirlpool plant were stalking the bathrooms, listening at the doors, preventing prayers to Allah from being said in the stalls.

  “Jesus,” the imam said emphatically. “Muslims love Jesus, okay?”

  Half the people in the mosque were like us, lukewarm Christians or secular Jews or born-again Buddhists: “spiritual but not religious”: infidels. Nobody said it, but it was true; not an accusation, a statement of fact. There were two kinds of people there: faithful, unfaithful; believers, unbelievers; insiders who lived Islam, and outsiders who’d come to learn. The imam moved his hands as he spoke, gesturing out with open palms, then drawing them toward his chest, not dividing the crowd but trying to blur lines he knew existed. Those outside of the faith fidgeted on the floor, trying to take pressure off pinched tailbones, raising hands occasionally to ask questions that would show them to be sensitive to the complexity of the situation. The other half watched the unfaithful watching, hoping none of the visitors were violent kooks in just-curious clothing. The imam droned on about American Islam, about how real Muslims were not like John Walker or the Taliban, repeating again and again that real Muslims did not respect Osama bin Laden. “No, no. Not at all. Jesus. We respect Jesus.”

  After the service, we got back in the car and turned on the radio. Waylon again, his slow voice still warning: “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…”

  Back in the city, deep below it, we met two archivists from the Tennessee State Museum and followed them farther down winding metal stairs into the depths of the permanent collection, so vast it spread out from under the museum like catacombs. The archivists were the kinds of guys whose ages were hard to discern because their grins were so quick and expansive, changing their faces from old to new in the duration of a greeting. They were unshak-ably jolly despite the permanent dark of their basement bunker, in which the totems of the American South had been gathering for decades. We’d come to see depression-era pulpits carved from tree trunks, ivy-vine snake-handling baskets from high up in the Smokys, ritual objects of people too poor not to improvise.

  In their spare time, the archivists told us, they were reenactors of the conflict they called, with a wink, the “War of Northern Aggression.” “Used to be we had trouble finding enough guys to be the other side,” the more burly and bearded of the two said. “Got so you had to bring a pair of uniforms with you if you wanted to participate: a gray and a blue. Last guys to show up had to be Yankees.”

  He smiled; he knew where we came from.

  “Somebody had to do it, even if it wasn’t as much fun. You mind dying less if you’re Union, but then you’re out of the action.”

  We walked by a grove of twenty-foot-tall concrete crosses, each designed to be dropped in the sea, hauled into the jungle, or shipped to the moon, to be seen a thousand years from now, reminders for the future of the faith of the past, just as the skyscraping Buddha statues of Afghanistan had been, before they joined the dust of the Bamiyan valley. Etched on the face of each was a warning: GET RIGHT WITH GOD. PREPARE TO MEET HIM.

  “The battles are better lately, though,” the second archivist said. “Lots of European reenactors are coming over these days. Irish. German. They don’t care what side they’re on.”

  “Just look at the Tenth Legion,” the bigger one added. “All English. Back home a lot of them are Roman reenactors; they come and do the Civil War in the off-season. Gray, blue, whatever the heck centurions wear, it’s all the same to them. Just another uniform.”

  We turned a corner and stopped in front of a mannequin dressed in an ancient-looking coarse-cloth robe with a veiled hood. It looked like it had once been scarlet and sturdy, but now it was closer to pink, its fabric linen-thin. On the face of the hood were painted crude features: a backward L for a nose, a mustacheless beard, and two comically arched brows smudged above two ragged eyeholes.

  “That’s something, ain’t it?” the burly archivist said. “Oldest Ku Klux Klan robe in existence.”

  They couldn’t be sure, but they thought it dated back to the days right after the war, the new fashion of the aftermath that never really ended. “Confederate veterans got home and couldn’t wear the gray anymore, so some of them switched to red. Later they all changed to white, and those pointy hats, you know.”

  We stared at the robe like it glowed, trying to imagine the man who’d worn it. Small, by the measure of his shoulders, slight, maybe just a boy. With skirt and sleeves drooping toward the ground, it could have been a clown costume for a low-budget circus. Yet it hung on the mannequin like a tattered shroud, rags on the bones of a past not buried deep enough, naked in the archive’s overhead light.

  The archivists wanted to move on, to bring us deeper into the archive, farther below the churches and bars up on the surface. Spotting a bicycle that had once belonged to a great evangelist, they tried to coax us away from the robe. “But you all were looking for religious stuff, right?”

  Fallen, fallen is Babylon…

  ISAIAH 21:9

  Isaiah

  BY CHARLES BOWDEN

  WE’VE been dry too long and the thirst rasps our throats. The air here is wet, heavy with the taste of rain, and all the avenidas are lined with jacaranda trees lush with leaf. Our shirts hang limp off our backs and we suck down the air like nectar. We have come from the deserts to the land of milk and honey and endless spring.

  The politician refuses to move fast as we cross the clogged street in front of the old cathedral in Guadalajara. We’ve got appointments with government officials, talking points to hone, clothes to press. But still there is no hurry in him. The traffic stalls in angry lines with the grilles like hungry mouths as he slowly moves, his eyes on the ancient temple. He is new here and this is his homecoming. The air is flowers and blue sky, the buildings ancient and stone.

  The cathedral seems to be his target but my mind is elsewhere. I want to see the frescoes and paintings of José Clemente Orozco. I want the anger, the black fury, and especially the fire. When Orozco lived, nobody here could handle him and he had to leave and go to Babylon for eight years of brooding after his early ideas were denounced. He did not like it there and made a painting he called The Dead. He later wrote, “Something grave was happening in New York. People were rushing more than usual…. You could hearthe sirens of the fireman and the Red Cross sounding furiously…. Wall Street and its surrounding area was an infernal sea…. The crash…. This was the crash, the disaster.” He was seeing the economic collapse of 1929.

  But I bow to the hunger of the politician as he ambles across the street. Exhaust fumes cotton on our tongues, and
he looks here and there with deliberation. His skin glows a rich, dark brown, the hair a mat of black and the body solid and not to be hurried. Now he falls into one of those labyrinths of silence where he likes to wander. He’ll be all words, a smile on the face, and then silence will descend like a curtain and he is gone, the pain is in his dark eyes and I wonder what hell he has suddenly discovered. He’s around fifty, got some flesh on him, that gait of a solid citizen, the burgher safe in his city ways, but when this silence crosses his face and his eyes get narrow, well, then he is in another country and blazing with the kind of fire that blazes in the night thoughts of adolescents. He has always kept his wounds close at hand.

  He suddenly asks, “Are you Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I am deeply Catholic.”

  We’ve come from Babylon, but this name we never use.

  Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge: And their honourable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst.

  ISAIAH 5:13

  I remember the first night our paths crossed. He’d just won the big election, the one he was not supposed to have a prayer of winning, the one where all the big money was aimed against him like artillery. He came from the wrong people on the wrong side of all the tracks. Yet, he won. I walked into the campaign headquarters with the money guy, the one who brings the envelopes election night so that they are not recorded before the vote. The money guy had explained to me that he gathered the fistful of checks with one simple argument: “If this asshole wins, do you want him not to know who you are?” And so, we walked in with all that money, all the checks written by the very rich boys who had tried to kill him in the campaign. He was sitting in this back room, a throng of brown people circulating around him. A mariachi band played, there were tacos and beer, and yet he did not smile. He seemed to glower, but when I looked closer, I realized that he was simply somewhere else, someplace beyond my geography.

  Years before, I began a book with a Bible verse snatched from one of those bedside Gideons. I habitually prowl the Bible in lonely motel rooms as the wine bottle slowly flows down my gullet in the midnight hours. I’d cracked the book open to Isaiah 1:7, where he picked the scab of the loss of Jerusalem and the Temple, tasting the pain of the captivity in Babylon. And the voice said, “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.”

  The book I was writing then was about speed and going over edges and living the fast life with no brakes, not a single thought of slowing down, and no purpose. I’d decided to capture the empty flesh pressing against me at all hours. But I could never put my real finger on my anger until half drunk I cracked Isaiah open and the wound drained right across my face. We have all lost our land to strangers and come to Babylon. We’ve grown fat here, but the pang of the loss remains. We are incomplete, especially around midnight. And we are angry, I know I am, because I’ll be damned if I can understand why this has happened and what I ever did to deserve this fate. And though I want an answer, I do not pray for one. I never pray. I fucking refuse to pray.

  In Isaiah, it’s all pretty damn simple: The Jews go down, the Temple is torched, they’re hauled off to bondage, they wail to God about the loss, and then the promise comes that they will be allowed, in the sweet by-and-by, to return home, that a stranger will come and bring them salvation, that God will square everything and create a new righteous kingdom. Done deal. Trust me. Made in the shade. Hot buttered soul.

  I believe in the wound, the land taken, the temples burned, the bondage—that I believe with all my heart. But not the restoration, the righteous new kingdom. Not for the Jews, not for the gentiles.

  The cathedral casts a cool shadow over vendors peddling rosaries, small pictures of saints, crosses, images of the Virgin. Indian women sit on their haunches on the steps, a child in one arm, the other hand out begging. The politician drops a coin in each and every hand. He knows the language. But he has never been this far before, never more than about 150 miles into the country. As a boy he would go to a provincial capital in the north and spend his summers there with relatives. The local kids would make fun of the way he talked, how he did not have the language down quite right. That is what he remembers. And that the north is dry, a place of sun and heat, and this place, this city with the cathedral, rests on a high bench a ways inland from the sea and is green, lush with green. He did not imagine home would be like this.

  When he asked his father once why he came north, the old man said, “Toilet paper. They have better toilet paper over here.”

  Inside the cathedral is the usual high, vaulting ceiling, the naves like little caves off to each side, the various saints resting in glass cases, giant dolls with old robes and their faces always shiny from the paint dictated by custom. The faithful pray, leave offerings, sometimes light a candle, but mainly ask and ask and ask for that favor, for that caress of grace. The light is not bright, simply cool. Fifteen or twenty souls sit on the pews in silence. The scuffle of footsteps is the loudest sound. In back on a balcony, a huge pipe organ of rich woods and tarnished metal is still.

  I wait in back for about twenty minutes as he wanders. Finally, he is done. As we come down the steps and back into the day, he says, “I’ve decided.”

  “Just now? In there?”

  “Yes.”

  During the hard time of revolution, one in ten or one in eight died, probably at least a million. Then came the influenza, killing 300,000 more. Then came the revolt called Cristero, in which the righteous rose up and protected their faith and tens of thousands more died. And then came more hard times, and the pain kept increasing and so the people left, went north, and entered Babylon. And in Babylon they made the best of where they were. And yet, a part of them never forgot where they had come from, no one forgot, not those who had come, not those who had been born in Babylon. Especially those who had never been there. No one forgot right down to this present day. It is a wound, this leave-taking, one still fresh yet hardly mentioned. One always felt and yet never understood. Why were they forsaken, why did they have to leave? Where is the justice and mercy in this? And why did they have to come to a place where they were despised?

  But it is promised in Isaiah that all of these lordly souls who despise others will suffer, all the empires will go to dust in the blazing light of the true faith. Comeuppance, that is the repeated message of Isaiah. As for Babylon, well, listen:

  But wild beasts shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

  ISAIAH 13:21, 22

  Still, I reject the idea of special people with special truths. Babylon may be bad, but Jerusalem is fatal.

  Over drinks, I say the Bible asks some good questions but I fall away when it gives answers. But this is a ruse. The Bible is embedded in my culture, the dreamsong of the zombies that we are, and so I know I must look at it if I am to understand the deeper rhythms of the talk in the churches and the back alleys. There is a single story: the faith, falling away from the faith, the punishment, the chance at redemption, and then someday the end time, when all is made right.

  As a child I stopped believing this single story. Now, I fight it.

  But this is the story I know in my bones from my life. The faith does not protect, the falling away is really the experience of being taken away, the punishment comes. And there is no redemption. And there will be no restoration.

  Orozco once wrote that the revolutionary believes in “Justice whatever the cost.” He made this statement to explain his painting of a revolutionary who stares out in defiance as a general stabs him in the back.

  In Isaiah it is written, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the
government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace” (9:6).

  That early whisper of the Messiah, the righter of wrongs. Orozco paints something he calls American Civilization: Modern Migration of the Spirit. The background is tanks, cannons, Greek columns pushed off pedestals and fallen to rubble, fires of war on the horizon, Buddha akimbo in the ruin, the headless statue of a woman with full breasts saying milk and succor, all this in the gray tones that grace the flesh of a corpse when we mourn our loss. In the foreground is a man in a loincloth. His flesh is yellow and orange and red, his cheeks dark blue, singing out about loss of blood. Huge holes are in his palms and feet. His eyes are somewhere between rage and catatonia, and these eyes say they have seen enough and will look no longer, so stop your praying. The man holds an ax, and behind him lies his cross, severed at the base by his hand.

  Orozco, unlike Isaiah, never tells us what his work means. He sees, he paints, and then he leaves us to our fate. Much like the man in the painting who has returned in what looks to be a rage and cut down his own cross, announcing his renunciation of his suffering and of what has ensued from his message. The man has had enough of us and our ways and seems angry at what we have made of his life.

  He does not bleed, but then corpses notoriously do not bleed.

  Last night, the scheduled three-hour flight became twelve hours.

  At the first stop in the north, we had hours between planes and so took a cab into the state capital. The restaurant was beer, food, and a mariachi band. The politician kept sending up requests for songs his father sang, and then he would sing along with them as we drank. After that, everything went strange. The next leg of the flight was late, and in some city farther south a woman got on and sat by me and told me as she drained double martinis that she was flying down to a coastal town, there was a deal in the offing that she might finance involving fish, special fish, and the special fish would be caught by brown guys in small boats and then air-freighted to Japan, where they’ll pay a lot for this flesh. She wore a couple of rings on each finger and her thumbs also. Her boozed eyes peered from beneath a crown of blond hair and she explained how Buddhism had turned her around, as had this guy she’d met down here who’d steered her into this good fish deal. The plane broke down at the next stop, and after an hour or two, we were herded onto another aircraft, somehow she got lost in this shuffle, and we got to our destination about 2:00 A.M.