Killing the Buddha Read online

  As I looked, a great stormy wind came out of the north; a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. In the middle of it was something like four living creatures…and they sparkled like burnished bronze.

  EZEKIEL 1:4–7

  Mortal, eat this scroll.

  EZEKIEL 3:3

  Ezekiel

  BY MELVIN JULES BUKIET

  THERE is no God and the Jews are his chosen people. What a great word that is: chosen. As in choice, prime, grade A meat electro-prodded into marching up a slanted ramp to a mechanical hammer which hums and burps before slamming down onto the ridge atop bovine eyes, which flutter and close as the creature slumps among splinters of bone and brain fluid, after which the floor’s hinged support beam tilts and drops the carcass into the processing room, where steel band saws whine and slice off part after section after part, conveyor belts sending them hither and yon to the fertilizer and dog food divisions and, most profitably, wrapped, packed, and prepriced, $8.99 a pound, bound for the tables of the nation—as a new victim shambles into place.

  I’m no vegetarian, mind you. I run a carousel, not exactly a job I expected, but the one delivered to me.

  “Hot dog,” I shout to the vendor who passes by every day at exactly 4:15.

  He knows his regulars and has already whipped his long fork out of the tin cube of briny fluid in which the sausages steep to spear me one and set it to rest in the center of a soggy, scroll-shaped bun preslathered with mustard and a dab of minced red onion, just the way I like it.

  On the next revolution, I grab the bun and slip the vendor a twenty for the next month. I’m the only person on Manhattan Island who keeps a hot dog salesman on retainer.

  “Mommy!” a kid atop a galloping white stallion calls to a woman in a gray suit by the perimeter, worried that the operator has left the controls. A minute ago, the kid was delirious with glee, hands thrown courageously outward from the reins, but the second I abandoned the cockpit in the island in the center of the carousel, he clutched his steed’s leather straps and started to fret. I could see it as I reached for my lunch. His eyes grew serious and he stopped screaming, his silence more troublesome than his noisy ecstasy. Kid’s a faker. Worse, he’s a young lawyer, already thinking about a possible tort, a claim, a class action suit by the children of America. The hell with him.

  The hell with all of them, the howlers, the whiners, in long pants or knickers, public school kids in torn jeans or private school brats in navy blue blazers, boys or girls in belly-revealing T-shirts or plaid skirts and lace collars. I’m fed up and hungry.

  I slip back between Winky, one of whose marbled eyes is missing, and Silver. They have dumb names, but what can you expect? This thing is designed for five-year-olds circling round and round as they slide up and down bronze poles that give the illusion of flight as the rest of, or at least my little portion of, God’s great universe spins past.

  There’s the quaintly cobbled plaza in front of the carousel, where lines build up on weekends and a wedge of Central Park greenery may be glimpsed as we turn, clockwise, ever clockwise, for a moment eastward, toward Jerusalem, to give out over the roadway that bisects the park at 65th Street onto the macadam path that leads to the zoo.

  At least they call it a zoo. All it consists of is two red-tailed foxes that hide in the underbrush, a slothful polar bear who rolls over and yawns once a season, a family of monkeys who live on an archipelago of rocks in the center of a pond, jerking themselves and each other off to the shock of the tourists, and the insanely popular seals. Pardon me, sea lions, because they have ears, which really are noticeable because they’re the only protuberances from their bodies, which resemble nothing so much as vast, nippleless black breasts. Boring.

  “Don’t worry, kid, I’ll get you in for a safe landing.” I push the shift that starts the carousel to slowing.

  But now he’s louder than ever. “We’re stopping!” He cries out the obvious as the blur of trees gradually resolves itself into individual trunks, limbs, and branches. He feels gypped because the ride has been shortened due to his own obnoxious behavior. His mother is walking clockwise, keeping pace with one of my favorites, Sigmund, a black pony with a playful pince-nez atop his snout. “If you think we are ever coming back here…”

  I can’t tell whether she’s threatening me or her son, who lingers as if he’s expecting a rebate, but I answer anyway. “Only game in town, folks. You don’t like it, go to the zoo.”

  “Hmph.” The mother sweeps the boy under her arm like a shopping bag and whisks him away.

  “No!” he screams plaintively.

  What does he have to complain about? What other kids can pay a buck seventy-five for a two-and-a-half-minute ride? Do the math. That adds up to lawyer’s wages. Now multiply the hourly fee by the forty creatures of my domain and it’s a veritable firm.

  A fairly odd firm, mind you. Of course, most of my partners are horses; that’s traditional, but at some moment the original Coney Island carousel maker—all of the finest carousels were built in Coney Island at the turn of the century—must have felt bored with the equine form and started to experiment with different animals. I’ve heard that he made one carousel that consists entirely of birds, and one of bears for an amusement park in California, but mine is the biblical carousel.

  All the creatures on it are mentioned somewhere in the Five Books of Moses and attendant lore. Besides a dozen horses, one pair of which is attached to a pharaonic chariot, I have Duke the donkey, Robbie the ram, Charlie the camel, and one stationary cow for the tots too young to bob up and down as they turn round and round. Still, the service animal motif was clearly too dull for the creator. Thus he produced Lenny the lion out of Daniel’s den, with his glorious mane, and Sammy the three-seater snake, and Wally from Jonah, the weirdly slim whale—one does need to straddle these beasts.

  Yet unsatisfied, the creator then leapt out of the realm of zoology and began to explore the bizarre world of biblical mythology. He made the ziz, a rooster-like bird with red crop and real feathers that have to be replaced every two years; the behemoth, more or less a supersteroided bull; and the shamir. According to legend, this last creature could gnaw through anything. He was used to cut stone blocks for the Holy Temple because war-adaptable metal tools were enjoined. All we otherwise know about the shamir is that it was as small as a grain of barley, so the carousel maker produced a horse-size grain of barley with google eyes and scary, sharp teeth; it’s the least popular of my attractions.

  Still, moving or still, as fabulous as they are, at heart they’re dry wood. Drill a hole from collar to core and all you’ll find is sawdust to sawdust, ashes to ashes when it’s burnt.

  Can these bones live?

  Never mind. Carved and sanded out of oak and ash, their haunches and chests, wings and scales, press against the wind. Eyes are rounded, nostrils flared, ears glued on, tails of genuine horsehair stapled. Usually testicles are kept off the creatures, but certain kinky manufacturers appended realistic organs—unlike the entirely fake organ on the carousel. My jolly calliope is actually a false front, beautifully ornamental and utterly functionless. The music emerges from hidden speakers attached to a tape recorder behind the pipes.

  These people, they have no shame. I take a chisel to the testes, place it tenderly at the base, where human males are most sensitive, aim my hammer carefully, and lop them off in one swift blow.

  Then I tend the wound, touching up—it sounds pornographic—the bare spot, dabbing on paint to match the streaks and shadows of the first artist before the hydraulic lift starts pumping the brass pole up and down and the revolving platform picks up speed.

  The kid I kicked off the carousel is still on my mind, and his last howling “No!” seems to echo, but I pay it no heed. There’s always a new crop. They’re hovering about by the shingled ticket kiosk that’s designed to look like a miniature cabin. Some have mommies, some nannies, and
some are all by their lonesome, just waiting to fork over seven shiny quarters in return for the strange thrill that I alone offer. Where do they think they’re going on their equine or feline or mythological steeds? And are they disappointed when it turns out that their ride has taken them nowhere?

  A shy little girl in a navy blue jumper cut just above her dimpled knees is first in line. She comes once a week on Wednesday afternoons and always chooses the speckled roan in the middle row. She rubs a hand over its neck, pretending she’s calming the creature before jabbing her saddle shoes into its sides and whispering, “Giddyap.”

  Others scurry for the best mounts, preferably in the outermost of three concentric circles, because only there can they hope to grab the brass ring—good for a free ride—that dangles tantalizing inches out of reach. A tough-looking kid with a cowlick leaps atop the lion, and a pair of identical twins help each other onto Sigmund while the slow kids are paralyzed, at first by choice and then by its lack, as horse after camel after ziz is claimed. A tall boy whose stature alone ought to give him an advantage shuffles worriedly left, right, left again, a pathetic dance step.

  “Room for all,” I say, because the kiosk will sell only as many tickets as there are seats, but that’s no comfort. These kids don’t know that the best tactic is to head immediately for the far side of the carousel, where there will be a moment to make a decision. All they know is that the laggards get the stationary horses, whose hooves never leave the floor and who do not have poles that pierce their bellies to reach the gilded ceiling, or the whale or the snake or, most humiliating of all, the cow. Look at it, waiting for the slaughter.

  “Take your seats.”

  Sadly, the tall boy slumps onto the cow, his knees practically grazing the floorboards.

  Sometimes parents stand beside their children, pretending that they are only there to reassure the young ones but actually cadging a free ride for themselves. I know their games, their tricks. I’ve seen it all before. Kicks are where you find them.

  I’ve seen two giggly teenagers on a mount (both paid in full), the boy invariably behind the girl, rubbing up against each other as if accidentally, and once a couple gave me two hundred dollars to open the carousel for a private ride at midnight. She sat with her back to the horse’s head, he leaned forward, inside her, and her hair splayed out, mixing with the mane. Giddyap.

  I’ve seen a lot, not only cheap sex and cheaper sentiment, but greed and gluttony and sloth and wrath, every one of the seven deadly sins and several more. Worst of all, I’ve seen an utter lack of faith. These people have sated their stomachs and their groins at the expense of their spirits and their souls. They engage in idol worship that is more despicable than that of the ancient world because their idols are sports heroes and movie stars who have taken the place of priests in a corrupt society, and instead of prayer they waste their precious allotment of days in frivolous search of free time, which they call leisure, some of which is used to ride the merry-go-round.

  As for me, I have higher things to think about in my home in the control room behind the calliope facade. It is full of gears and levers, cranks and cams and the tools necessary to repair them when they break. The space is cramped in the summer and freezing in the winter, but I don’t care. I sneak off to relieve myself in the woods when necessary and live off the leavings of my patrons: half-eaten chocolate bars and bags of popcorn and sandwiches brought for alfresco summer lunches and, of course, hot dogs. Physical deprivation doesn’t bother me. What matters to me more than anything, the reason I stay here, is The Voice.

  What voice? Well, I’ve never heard it, but I know that it’s there, somewhere beyond the whistling of the pipes. When my wife died and I abandoned our apartment, I wandered into the wilderness. Month after month, I walked the streets and avenues until one day, standing at the corner of Fifth and 63rd, I detected faint music coming from somewhere inside the park. Obscurely compelled, I followed the music’s trail until it led me here, where I found my destiny. The operator at the time was drunk and slovenly, and the concessionaire was berating him for some prior irresponsibility. “This is the last straw!” he screamed over the music. I inched closer, fascinated by the calliope. Keys and pedals moved up and down as if played by an invisible organist, and cabinet doors flapped open and closed, and every once in a while a dramatic gust of steam jetted out of a hidden aperture atop an array of different-size pipes, but for all the moving parts it was obvious that the contraption had nothing whatsoever to do with music. It was the perfect counterpart to the horses and other beasts that pretended to independent motion, simultaneously ludicrous and delightful. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen or heard in my life. I strode straight past the kiosk and mounted the merry-go-round, mesmerized and ticketless.

  “Hey, you!” the angry boss shouted.

  I put a forefinger to my chest.

  “What do you want?” he raged.

  I don’t know what I was about to say: Music? My wife? The Voice? Instead I said, “A job.”

  He paused for a moment, looked me over, and said, “You’re hired.” And that’s the way it’s been for years now. I strain my ears, but all I hear is whistling.

  Can this God speak?

  For as long as I’ve been listening and waiting, I’ve never heard anything more than the rinky-dink melody of the tape recorder as the horses and other creatures ride and ride and never get anywhere. Surely there is more. I know that it must be there. Yet revelation comes at odd moments. That’s its nature.

  And then I take a bite of the hot dog just as I’m distracted by a pigtailed little girl in a pink frock riding sidesaddle. That’s been a big no-no since five years ago—or was it seven, who knows? time flies like horses—when a kid fell and broke his spine and the insurance settlement nearly put me and the herd out to pasture. I start to shout at the girl, and a chunk of frankfurter wedges in my throat. I gag and wheeze like a teakettle through the reduced valve. Instinctively, I squeeze my fists as hard as I can, and the rest of the offending sausage squirts from between the halves of the bun. And the bun itself opens, unrolls, unfurls like parchment, and mustard lettering appears in the blurry stain of red onions. A message.

  I am choking, perhaps fatally. My face is probably red and my eyes abulge, yet they remain focused on the writing on the yeasty scroll as I stagger into the pole next to a child in a maroon vest. The writing on the bun reads, “Eat me.”

  A command.

  At the risk of further clogging my throat, I obey the divine mandate and stuff the bun into my mouth, and a miracle occurs. Instead of killing me, the soft bread pushes the hot dog down and I breathe free.

  And The Voice of the pipes finally speaks.

  Son of Man, tell them what you know.

  How do I know what I know?

  You know because I tell you.

  So I tell them. I tell them what had been on my mind since I first landed here. All of my complaints burst forth in a torrent of language that I didn’t know I had in me.

  “Harlotry, usury, venery,” I declare. “The Lord gave Himself unto you and you gave yourself unto others. He gave you children and you made them wicked. He gave you a Temple, and you defiled it. He entered into a covenant, and you broke it.”

  The pigtailed girl stares at me.

  I continue. “You pray to false idols and never acknowledge the true God of the carousel that has made you and the eternal go-round. All you need do is open your eyes, but instead you close them and give unto others what is due to your Maker, and you must be punished.”

  Where is this coming from? And to whom am I addressing my screed? To children. The boy in the maroon vest angles away from me, and the twins twist around from their single seat like a double helix unwinding. Still I speak. I am a fountain.

  Thus sayeth the Lord: I will be a scourge. Your skin will blister, your hair fall out, pustules will form and spread. I will whip you and hound you and drive you forth from the Temple you do not deserve, and you will die in ex
ile, and the sun will bleach your bones.

  Can these bones live?

  Sayeth the Lord: You will suffer. Your children will be torn from you and thrown over precipices. Your old people will be set adrift. Your spouses will be presented unto your enemies for their pleasure. You will be pierced, jabbed, and needled. Your skin will be flayed and displayed in the homes of your enemies. Your stomachs will churn, your intestines unwind, your breasts shall be burned and your penises chopped off with chisels.

  Wait, where does that come from?

  Sayeth the Lord: Your homes will be sacked, your bedsheets torn, knotted, tied around your necks, and you will be hung, wrung out to dry.

  Holy cow!

  Sayeth the Lord: You have made your choices, and they will have their consequences. As you sow, so shall you reap. As you write, so shall you read. As you think, so shall you dream. As you are, so shall you be.

  And the visions, they keep on coming. I foresee ruin on a grand scale—individual, social, national, civilizational, universal. I see death and exile.

  But wait again, I want to reply to myself, what does this mean? If exile isn’t home, what is?

  “Jews!” I scream, which is ridiculous because most of the riders aren’t Jewish, though one small boy in a yarmulke winces. Never mind. In a larger sense they are all Jews, because they are all in exile from their personal notions of Zion. Whether that notion is attached to the miserable sliver of land between the Jordan and the Sea makes no difference because every one of us is, whether we know it or not, merely biding time until local weaponry advances from stones to knives to guns to dynamite to the inevitable. The land—Jerusalem or the Upper East Side—is never ours. Nor should it be. Exile is freedom.

  And that’s when I realize that I’m not voicing a warning, or rather it’s not the warning I thought. I’m not warning them for God; I’m warning them of God. Why? Because we haven’t violated the covenant; God has, unilaterally. Because mortality is the first sin against creation. Because all sacrifice is human sacrifice. Because He loves cataclysm, calamity, and catastrophe, performed to the ecstatic tune of the calliope.