Killing the Buddha Page 24

  The tattoo artist grabbed his customer by the wrist and dabbed his latest artwork with a pad of gauze. “Stay still,” he commanded and the kid obeyed. Pablo seemed pleased by the artist’s power: his needle, his lines. Whether it was a crown of thorns or three gothic letters, what mattered was the fact that flesh could be remade in the image of anything at all.

  We once knew a guy who had a crush on a girl so bad he had her face tattooed on his arm. He was a nice guy, he rode a motorcycle, he liked to bake, but the girl wasn’t interested. She moved away and the guy took a job at a Dunkin’ Donuts. He got so fat, you couldn’t recognize the girl’s face on his arm. A few years later he shot himself.

  Expressions of immutability, so many instants sustained, and yet if you look at tattoos closely all you can see is how they age: how they fade, how they widen as arms swell, how they crack with scabs and battle scars. The guy we knew tattooed a girl on his arm in the hope his devotion could keep her from leaving or not loving him, keep him from getting fat and killing himself. A tattoo on the surface seems so devil-may-care, but underneath, under the skin, it’s the striving for permanence of someone who knows it’s impossible. So the gangsters say, Fuck it, I’ll be dead by the time it starts to sag.

  Pablo turned again to watch the art of it, the writer rather than the written-on. They controlled the streets, but he would control the ink.

  “They tell me first practice on pigskin, or an orange, with letters and numbers,” Pablo said. “Then I will be ready.”

  Still wiping away beads of blood and color from the gangster’s arm, the artist looked at Pablo, then at us. “Who’s next?”

  Pick me up and throw me into the sea.

  JONAH 1:12

  Jonah

  BY RICK MOODY

  NOW the word of the Lord came unto Jonah Feldman, of the Feldman family of Maspeth, Queens, which regional name in the language of the native population connotes place of bad waters, his father being Hyman Feldman, Orthopedist, whose business was at the clinic near the Mount Zion Cemetery. Hyman’s father was also Jonah, whose father was Abraham, and so on, Jonahs and Hymans and Abrahams and Zechariahs helixing into the past. Anyway, the word of the Lord came to this Jonah Feldman, but why this guy, what qualities proved him deserving of such a visitation? What made this young adult, Jonah Feldman, different from, say, Stanley Rabinowitz, just up the block, much smarter, made his parents happier, went to a fancy Ivy League school? Almost caused his mother to have an aneurysm she was so happy. Why Jonah? If you pursue honor it will elude you: The word of the Lord had not come unto Stanley, bypassed him entirely; nor had the word of the Lord come to Louise Luchese, three blocks down, who wanted to take the vows of a nun in spite of her enthusiastic wantonness; nor to anyone else in Maspeth, nor to anyone else in the entire borough of Queens. No, the word of the Lord came unto Jonah Feldman, only young man in his neighborhood to have printed business cards for himself on his twenty-fourth birthday that said Kosher Fag on the back, by which he intended to disseminate through an elegant but unprepossessing font the fact that he both kept kosher and liked boys. Though lately he seemed like he was less often Kosher and more often liking boys. He ate the occasional cheeseburger, which would have infuriated his grandmother, and he felt in these dining experiences a fine disgust and admiration for himself. And he went to the Hispanic butchers in the neighborhood, and he drove on the Sabbath, et cetera. He was putting more energy into the Fag part of his plan. For example, the delirious and profound word cock was his companion, his spur and staff, the word rather than the thing, its Middle English origins, to mete with Cocke they asked how to do, its blunt Anglo-Saxon simplicity, what man are thou, when thy cock is up, its endurance as slang, its flourishing as an image in his image repertoire, Ere his small Cock were yet a fortnight old, how with majestick Vigour it should rise. In boys he saw it, the word, and its syllable rang in his ear, a transgression in want and a transgression in name; it was the name that gave him to wanting, he had come to wanting now, could put it off no longer, and the wanting made the name ring in his ears like the church bells of Maspeth. Jonah Feldman was a Kosher Fag, for his fealty to cock was perfect, his love for cock, his nurturance for cock. A hot cock has no conscience, it is said, yet still he worshiped it, though most of the clubs that he frequented with their thundering breakbeats and handsome but narcissistic regulars did not take kindly to a Kosher Fag from Maspeth, Queens, more Maspeth than queen, alas, with his kinky dark hair already receding, his soft middle, his proofreading job at Price Waterhouse. His eyebrows met in the middle, despite nervous and painful tweezing. He would buy any reasonable clothes at Century 21. He knew nothing about style, he liked sports, even baseball, he couldn’t stand Liza Minnelli. He would have been happy in sackcloth or polyester, eating locusts and cheeseburgers, as long as he could wear his yarmulke. The boys in the clubs did not get the yarmulke, they did not know that in his neighborhood it was a dignified thing to affix this symbol upon the male pattern baldness of his genetic tribe. The yarmulke was strong and noble, and it could make courageous such a one as Jonah Feldman, to whom the word of the Lord came now. And why not, because he loved by the word, the word was with him and in him.

  The particular messenger of the Lord, that night, it should be admitted, was a young blond fellow by the name of Carolina, or this was the name he gave, though it was clearly an assumed name, for the very air of these nightclubs circulated with assumed identities, with calculated anonymities, with the sorrow of cast-off selves, with the shadows of things glimpsed only between songs in the clamp light of the deejay’s booth: the bartender in the black light by the cash register, couples appearing and then vanishing into the men’s room, faces pressed together in the cadences of a strobe. All assumed identities, all assumed masculinities, in leather pants and mesh T-shirts, while afflicted selves like Jonah hovered just out of range. The particular heartache of Jonah Feldman was to come to this place and to see love whirling about him and to know that he would not likely participate in full, as with the gelding who stands off from the herd.

  Nevertheless, one night among the breakbeats at a certain club, West-World, very far west in the city of New York, Jonah Feldman of Maspeth, Queens, managed to find himself dancing with a blond boy from the Bible Belt. It could not be, this cavorting, as many months had transpired since last he had known love. And yet it was. Carolina smoked unfiltered cigarettes, was too thin, was possessed of a large, severe nose and a cruel laugh. Yet behold that one incisor that jutted out in the front part of his lowers, behold that cowlick. Carolina said, Here, take some of this, proffered a certain controlled substance. Frolic with me, Queens boy. It was all too good to be true, dancing to the hurtling of the music, dancing to the cascading of machines, all too good to be true, because it was untrue, in a way, for now no other man was in the room, they had all vanished, there was just the music and the boy called Carolina. When the word of the Lord comes to a room, it is as if none other inhabits it.

  The somewhat soft and somewhat slovenly Jonah Feldman pressed his lips against those of the pseudonymous Carolina. Carolina’s tongue was now in his mouth. It should have been impossible for the blond to talk. The controlled substance was beginning its navigations in Jonah’s bloodstream, the controlled substance whose name started with the letter k, or which had a k in it, though maybe it seemed so just because of Jonah’s preoccupation with the word cock, which also had a k, as did kaon, an unstable meson particle, kaph, the eleventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, katzenjammer, kestrel, kiddush, kaddish, Kislev, kitsch, klutz. They were kissing, and at some point the controlled substance was collapsing them, and that’s when the room began to seem kaleidoscopic. For if you have wondered at the circumstances which are congenial to the word of the Lord, trust that an unearthly light always comes from within, and trust that a voice calls out where none should be. The voice of God should not have come from Carolina, as it should not come from a West Indian woman who cleans people’s apartments in wealthy neighborhoods, as
it should not come from a tottering disabled man lurching from an ambulette to the front doors of his special education school, nor from famine victims of pagan countries, nor from the twittering birds.

  Carolina, in this epiphany, was saying something to Jonah Feldman, the words were becoming clear now, they were becoming audible, they were in the process of revealing themselves in the field of music playing in the room. Here they come now. Empiricists and doubters, take note, the actual word of the Lord, as spoken in a certain nightclub in New York City, in a year of done darkness,

  Arise, arise! Neglected servant, arise!

  Jonah Feldman, of Maspeth, Queens, arise!

  For I have a favor to ask of you, young Jonah, forsaken Jonah, I have a favor!

  Lend to me your ears! For I am not in the habit of talking to you in this way!

  I’m asking for you to lay aside your cares, neglected servant,

  I’m asking for you to draw near to my request.

  I’m asking if you might consider performing the following task as my representative.

  I’m asking if you would prepare for a long journey, to a certain village,

  A village by the name of Lynchburg,

  Where you should search out those with poor reading skills, those who cannot read.

  And there you should instruct them in the matter of reading, young Jonah.

  Because in Lynchburg the standardized test scores are astonishingly low.

  They are not hearing the different ways I spill my name on the page,

  They are not hearing the many poems in which I conceal myself,

  They are not hearing the many soaring melodies in which

  I am so various,

  My melodies of ecstasy and profligacy and enthusiasm and woe,

  They are not hearing that I am in all words,

  That I alike fill the household measuring cup and the mighty ocean,

  That I adorn all empty places, and that I dwarf all mountains and all skyscrapers.

  They do not know the many pronunciations of my unspeakable name, Jonah,

  So I ask if you will go to Lynchburg, when you are finished with the oblivion of this

  Particular kiss, there to deal with the splendid wickedness that I have described.

  I pick you for this task for no reason but that I love you!

  So remember while you are in Lynchburg, in a whole lot of trouble, as it is already written,

  That I love you. Travel safe!

  His hangover the next morning, for it was now the next morning, was an affliction such as Jonah had rarely suffered in his short life. It was as if he were molting his very skull, his jellied eyes were shish’d on flaming skewers, and he was sorely afraid. He was in Maspeth, Queens, trying to reconstruct the night prior, and his mother was banging on the door, wanting to know if he was going to take the morning repast, his favorite, which she had made especially for him. It wasn’t safe that he shouldn’t eat, et cetera. With the scrofulous but pragmatic logic of the hungover, Jonah realized, for he was indeed sorely afraid, that he needed not to be living at this address any longer, he needed not to wake with bite marks on his nipples, pained in certain nether regions the pleasures of which his mother knew nothing about, as she pounded on the door, he needed not to have his favorite breakfast prepared for him each and every morning by a mother who no longer knew him in his entirety. The plan in which he saved for a down payment on a condominium through the largesse of Price Waterhouse was no longer a valid plan. He could not talk about the half of his life of which his parents did not approve, a portion of his life now growing to be more like two-thirds. Indeed when he got up and put on his terry-cloth robe and slippers and went into the kitchen to face his parents—his father with newspaper and bagel, his mother with spatula and coffee—they were looking at him with a noxious disappointment. His mother was going to cry. Why were they looking as if they might cry, when all that he had done was kiss a beautiful, elegant boy called Carolina and take a drug with k somewhere in its name, after which he’d had a tongue in his mouth, followed by some events he could not remember, including bite marks on his nipples—wait!—there was also the strange monologue that Carolina had whispered into his ear.

  The words were unforgettable, notwithstanding the fact that Jonah had forgotten much else of the evening. They came back to him now, and the heart of Jonah Feldman was heavy with dread at this fresh remembrance. These words, perhaps, were the thing that had made him sorely afraid, that made his somewhat occluded arteries skitter as with an SOS. He tried to eat breakfast as usual, but there was a weakness in him whenever the words returned to his ailing consciousness. Of course, this was evident to his beloved mother, who kept intruding. Are you feeling well? Honey, will you examine him? There’s something wrong with him, I can see it. However, his father, the excellent orthopedist, who erred on the side of medical disbelief where his children were concerned, would not examine his son, as even Abraham himself would not give his son a reflex test, nor perform a throat culture, unto the moment when the Lord said that the sacrifice should now be performed. On weak legs, Jonah Feldman, in slippers and robe, walked out of his house in search of the copy of Newsday on the front step, but transmogrified now, pressed into the service of the Lord.

  It would be best if it could be reported that Jonah Feldman of Maspeth, Queens, was such a faithful servant of his recent apparition of the divine that he immediately, in his bathrobe, embarked on the purchase of plane tickets from the airport called LaGuardia, from which a commercial airliner would then take him to our nation’s capital, where he would board a commuter flight to Lynchburg. There, he would descend into the pit of wickedness called Lynchburg, so as to prophesy variously as to the thousands of words hidden in each and every word, the secret languages of the Lord hidden in plain sight, et cetera. Unfortunately, it must be admitted that Jonah Feldman instead walked up the block, halted before Kaplan’s delicatessen, tried to dial Carolina from a scribbled phone number in the pocket of his robe. Number out of service. His intention was to ask Carolina, if indeed this was the name of that blond, to repeat those numinous things Jonah believed he had heard the night before. For if he had not heard them, was it not the case that Jonah had been selected for a great and terrifying burden, namely the burden of hallucination?

  Jonah Feldman, in the convexity of worry, made as to flee from Maspeth, Queens. The fleeing came as naturally as breathing or eating, for he was scarcely observant these days, nor was he old enough to bear the word of the Lord, and he was not a professional success, nor did he have the fire in him which might make him a logical spokesman for the poor or spiritually challenged. So he fled. His destination, on this particular morning, was the township of Port Washington, of the island which stretches easterly into the sea, where a certain high-speed boat, the Ledyard, owned and operated by the natives of this land, served as a ferry service purposed upon their sovereign tribal nation, which in turn featured an emporium of games of chance. Good business for all involved, boat, casino, taxes, jobs. Since it was yet early, and likewise the Sabbath, the Ledyard would be sparsely occupied, except by the most grizzled of habitual gamblers. They’d be making their way to the casino in an attempt to win back large parcels of gold and real estate they’d lost the week before betting on sports events. Yes, this would perhaps be a place that the Lord would not chance to look for Jonah Feldman, formerly of Maspeth, Queens, now a slightly disheveled man wearing terry-cloth bathrobe and slippers, clutching a hundred dollars currency that he had not used the night before to secure the services of a male harlot. So he paid the fare and went down into the boat, in order that he might journey to southeastern Connecticut, far from the presence of the Lord.

  Amazing how quickly that tempest was upon them. The high-speed boat, the Ledyard, designed to be faster than the clotted federal highway grid in transit to the heavily taxed casino, was equipped with all useful conjuring devices, with a global positioning system, with loran, with radar, with depth finders, forward thruster
s, et cetera. It even featured the Weather Channel, on a monitor in the cabin. Yet the spokesmodels broadcasting from the Weather Channel could not explain how this new weather event, soon to collide with a northeasterly storm streaking down the eastern seaboard from Newfoundland, had so quickly cohered into an unpredictable category-four hurricane, name of Katherine, just as the mariners of the craft were steering off of Port Jefferson. The tempest, when it neared the coast, unleashed waves so high that they disappeared into clouds, gales that betimes lifted the boat from the very sea, rain and hail, all manner of precipitation. The tempest was ancient, timeless, and the mariners despaired, for their high-speed boat was disabled and adrift and they no longer could divine their position. They each shouted to individual gods, which gods had as many names are there are words to describe them, they shouted to their money managers and insurers, their polarity therapists, their yoga instructors, their talk radio hosts, their acupuncturists, their chiropractors, their psychopharmacologists.

  And then they began throwing things over the side. They threw overboard the magazine rack from the cabin of the ship, they threw out all the sweet-meats and foodstuffs from the snack bar, they tossed out television monitors, they threw out their expensive overnight bags, they threw out the benches, they threw overboard at least one small dog. For the ship was going down and, if so, would go in a denuded state, that even one life might be thus saved till the last. The dread of the Lord was heavy upon the mariners of the Ledyard, likewise the passengers.

  Jonah Feldman, who knew finally that there was no locale to which he might flee, nonetheless attempted to secret himself in the Ledyard’s men’s room, the comfort station, even if doing so were unlikely to impede the all-seeing omnipotence of the Lord. He drank flat Cherry Coke and muttered that his parents would never forgive him, his neighborhood would never forgive him, his employers would never forgive him, never mind he had done nothing, had never asked, by way of supplication or through any other means, to become a servant of the Lord. In consideration of these requests, he fell fast asleep, because he’d kept late hours the night prior. It was here, asleep on a commode, that he was discovered by the captain of the aforementioned craft. Wake up, buster! One of those taciturn mariners with hands like catchers’ mitts, with a ruddy, striated face, with a knitted cap, with a scar running perpendicular to his jawline and down to his breast. Might as well have had a wooden leg. The captain wore a complete uniform of foul weather gear. Wake up! And get your ass above! We’re going to draw lots to see who gets the life jackets! The ship again listed violently to one side. In a timid voice, Jonah inquired if there were not lifeboats enough for those onboard. But the captain chastised him with popular and offensive terms of derision for the unmanly, and then he additionally remarked, Just get your fat ass up top, if you want to live.