Killing the Buddha Read online

  The procession had already begun. A young boy swinging a silver censer led a long line of priests and deacons, a dozen women and men in identical cassocks, equal in all ways but their accessories: glasses, beards, sandals, pearls. Step. Swing. Step. Swing. The altar boy focused on the floor’s hard-wood planks as the toes of his hightops peeked one at a time from under his robe. Careful not to trip and clang into the pews, the boy and his censer masked the stench sneaking in from the street, but incense thick as diesel exhaust doesn’t make it any easier to breathe.

  We slid into the only available seats, a few rows back from a gang of rolypoly leather men fresh from a night of clubbing, their heads shaved and their upper bodies hairy and bare but for their shiny black vests. More conservative, near-identical congregants lined every other pew, handsome men with torsos like V’s wrapped tight in summer-weight cashmere, black, grey, one or two in beige, one hundred heads of close-cropped hair touched with silver. Behind us sat a tall blond woman wearing a designer cowboy hat and a matching white ventilator mask, like the haute couture sheriff of a toxic new frontier.

  St. Luke in the Fields, one of New York’s oldest Episcopalian churches, had once been a refuge from yellow fever, the diseased crowding its sanctuary even as they bled from their mouths and their eyes. A century and a half later the congregation found itself dying of a disease that didn’t even have a name. When we asked a church worker the number of parishioners who had been killed by AIDS, he refused to hazard a guess. Dodging the question the way only a chronic survivor can, he told us, “Oh, I’d rather just pray,” as if God was some kind of silver lining.

  At the front of the church, a small man in white vestments stepped to a mahogany pulpit and gripped it as if he meant to pull it up by its roots. His hair was the color of steel wool, his beard darker but thin. When he spoke, he pursed his lips between phrases, looking at his congregation more than at his sermon notes. “Today is the Feast of All Saints,” he said. “A day for remembering the dead.”

  The priest had just returned from a sabbatical in Rome. He had decided to dedicate his first sermon in months to the memory of the city he’d left and the future of the city to which he’d returned.

  “The Feast of All Saints,” he said, “marks a day long ago when Rome was made holy, like New York now, by ashes and bone.” His voice didn’t so much fill the sanctuary as settle like dry snow, erasing the colors that separate present from past. Like the cloud of incense, like the smoke of burning buildings, it seemed to stop time, opening the morning wide enough to contain an alternate creation myth, another tale of an unlikely beginning.

  “When Romulus defeated his brother Remus for the land that would become the eternal city,” said the priest, “he ordered his men to take up a plow and make a furrow in the shape of a circle. The city that was to grow within its circumference was to be itself a temple, a city devoted to life. Inside the circle would be holy ground, outside profane. Within the city’s borders would walk the living, and beyond them the dead were cast.”

  A charge of recognition rippled through the church. The city. The dead. A circle like a hole in the world.

  The story continued: Soon came the Christians with their resurrection dreams, lingering in the boneyards. They baptized each other by the graves, held feasts and celebrations at the doors of tombs. The tombs of the martyrs.

  “At the tombs of the martyrs,” the priest said, “power”—he paused—“began to emerge.”

  He breathed now into the microphone, scanning the room, letting his congregation catch up. To these battered believers, martyrs were not Christians eaten by lions, nor a generation of men devoured by disease. These days martyrs were men who flew airplanes into skyscrapers. The woman in the cowboy hat adjusted her mask. The leather men shifted uncomfortably, squeaking in their seats. The new martyrs seemed more frightening than the old. None of us needed to be reminded of their power. It was in the air.

  And yet, the priest told the congregation, the ancient martyrs and the modern ones had something in common: They both brought death into the city. The terrorists with their airplanes; the Christians with their bones.

  “Bones. Living Christians dug up the dead and carried their remains within the city walls. From outside the circle drawn by Romulus’s men, into its center.” Land reserved by old gods for the living was resanctified by a new god for the dead.

  Imagine the shock of seeing corpses carried into the city. Something like a 747 screaming past your office window on a Tuesday morning. What the fuck was that? Soldiers run from their barracks, their swords drawn, too late to stop the martyrs. Law-abiding citizens recoil, hold lemons beneath their noses to ward off the stench, leave good seats at sidewalk cafés. At dinner parties and in pubs they say to one another, “Everything has changed,” and they curse the name martyr. Those who claim martyr bring death from the margins to the center of our lives.

  “I am haunted by that knowledge and that image,” the priest said. “Here in a city where the center has become shunned and forbidden.”

  Which city, New York, or Rome? Both. Either. Take your pick. In the dirt of Italy, in the gray mud of Ground Zero, the living dug for the bones of those they had lost, sweating as they turned the earth, their hands pawing as they came closer. They dug until the last layer of dust was carted away, revealing the missing and the missed, wondering with each scrap found, How many times can the world end? How many times can it begin again? In Rome the bodies uncovered would later remake an empire: yellow bones, bits of skin like leather, wispy strands of hair, fingernails curved like claws. These are the ugly, far-back beginnings of all that has come of Christendom, even this elegant West Village church. In New York it will be no different. When the living dug here they found office equipment, smoldering chemicals, gold bricks, still more bones. If that long-ago Roman grave-robbing operation today is given the respectable name the Feast of All Saints, what will this awful new beginning be called?

  The priest braced himself on the pulpit, deepened his voice, dropped his professorial tone.

  “Names,” he said, “are dangerous.”

  He nodded at the silent call-and-response that attends a high church sermon.

  Names.

  Yes.

  Dangerous.

  Amen.

  “Names,” he repeated, “are dangerous.” The nature of the beginning we would make of this tragedy had everything to do with the name we would assign to those who had tried to make it an end.

  “Martyrs?” No. Martyrs, he said, don’t kill, they are killed. Martyrs don’t storm the city, they are carried like kings across its borders. Martyrs don’t desecrate the city, they sanctify it by their faith. And yet still the killers said the word martyr, and meant themselves.

  “How can we reclaim it?” he asked. “How can we find a meaning in the word martyr that again makes it our own?”

  He waited, and the congregation searched. Sunbeams the color of dried sunflowers filtered through the stained glass, drawing lines through the lingering smoke like a scaffold of light. Lines. Buildings. Circles. Yes. We remembered the priest’s reference to the beginning of Rome.

  “We go to the root of things,” he called. We dig.

  “Know that the word martyr means ‘witness,’ ” he said. “Its meaning derives not from the violence that surrounds it but from the vision it requires. Let us reclaim the name martyr, then, as ‘witness.’ ”

  There was that Christian spin again—reclaim—making a sacrament of digging up bones when they fail to rise on their own.

  But he wasn’t speaking of that kind of martyr anymore; not victims or murderers but witnesses to the crime. Those who saw the story; those who tell it. The leather men. The gas-mask cowgirl. Us. You. Believers or not, history determines that we all bear witness. How many times can the world end? How many times can it begin again? As often as you survive. As often as you tell the story. The apocalypse is always now, but so is the creation.

  After the sermon came the baptism of a li
ttle girl named Emma, a bundle of milk and roses in a white jumper. She was attended by two mothers—thin, striking, raven-haired women dressed in matching black pantsuits—and a grandmother just as slender and sharp, the three of them gathered around the baptismal font like Macbeth’s witches at their caldron, won over by the occasion and their giggling baby girl.

  Emma reached out and slapped the brass bowl. It was all a joy to her, even the water dribbled on her head from a silver pitcher. Imagine it through Emma—shiny shiny smooth warm mama man smile sparkle wet cold deep sounds: “Emma, receive the holy light.” Emma squirmed in her mother’s arms and stretched her little hands to grab for the candle. She wanted to get that holy light!

  The pipes of the church’s organ swelled—that weird, spiraling hysteria at the high end of the scale, raising the eyebrows of the music’s bass foundations. Highs and lows wrenching us apart, making us all into Emma, nothing but sensation and reflection—hot and cold, bright and dark, hard metal and soft flesh, smoke rising and a building collapsing—as the pulse and melody of the music collided in the final phrases of the song.

  The congregation stood, stretched, and shook off the hot sun that beamed through the windows. The priest took up his post by the door, patting backs and gripping hands, smiling and laughing. Emma’s mothers received well-wishers, the deacons preened in their vestments. We slipped past and started walking down Hudson Street, into a cool breeze that stank of burning.

  Burning for burning, wound for wound…

  EXODUS 21:25

  Exodus

  BY FRANCINE PROSE

  IREMEMBER, with near perfect clarity. It is one of those sweet spring evenings that, in childhood, seem to last forever. My family has come to celebrate Passover at the home of my great-aunt and -uncle, in Brooklyn. Everything about it thrills me. The warmth of the brightly lit dining room, the long table set with the best dishes and a Seder plate, the exuberance and raucousness of the relatives, so much livelier and louder than my own well-behaved, scrupulously middle-class parents.

  But what I love most—what is, for me, the highlight of the evening, more exciting than giddy conspiracies with my brother and cousins about how we will hide the ceremonial matzoh and ransom it back for money—are the plagues. Their recitation is by far my favorite part of the Passover Seder. As each plague is named aloud, we dip our fingers into our cups and transfer one drop of the delicious, sugary wine to our plates.

  Blood.

  Frogs.

  Vermin.

  Flies.

  Murrain.

  Boils.

  Hail.

  Locusts.

  Darkness.

  The killing of the firstborn.

  It is the only time in my life when playing with my food is not only sanctioned but encouraged, and not just food but wine, which I and my cousins drink until we are fairly hammered. After the dipping is finished, I have to fight the impulse to lick my finger, resisting the temptation out of some cuckoo primitive fear that, if I do so, I might catch one of the plagues we have just so lovingly listed.

  And what a glorious list it was! How mysterious and stirring! Some of the plagues—frogs, locusts, boils—were irresistibly easy to visualize. I was frightened of insects, and so instantly comprehended the horror of an infestation of vermin. Others presented more of a challenge. What was with the blood, exactly? Was it just in the rivers and the water supply? Or did it creep over the banks and run red in the streets of Cairo? “Murrain” made no sense at all. What could a livestock disease have meant to a city kid with basically no idea about the operation of the food chain?

  Such mysteries were at once illuminated and further deepened by the woodcut illustrations in the Passover Haggadah. Each the size of a postage stamp, all ten were crowded onto one page. It was impossible to make out what was going on in the crowded images, though by looking really hard I could discern a few tantalizing clues. Frogs falling from the sky. Bony, moribund cows. Tiny figures covered with hideous splotches that could only have been boils. The indistinctness, the fact that the images seem to be communicating in an indecipherable code—along with the foreign, exotic, and ancient quality of the woodcuts themselves—only added to their creepy mystique. I could have stared at them forever. It was like watching certain horror films: forbidden and disturbing, therefore sexy and alluring.

  Like sex, and like a horror film, the plagues built toward a climax, an orgasm of mayhem and blood. The slaying of the firstborn. In the final woodcut, a figure—was it an avenging angel?—held a scythe (or was it a sword?) poised and ready to do the maximum damage to the hapless, sleeping Egyptian households. The last-ditch special effect, the pulling out all the stops. The technique that worked, when nothing else had.

  Never once, during all those years, during all those Seders, did I think—orwas it pointed out to me—that those plagues had human victims, that the sufferers from boils and blood, the ones whose houses filled with frogs and locusts were human beings like myself. Around the Seder table, my parents and my relatives—deeply kind and compassionate people who would have been appalled to hear that a child was in pain or danger—never seemed to notice that the Egyptian firstborn had once been living human children. And it simply never crossed my mind that the firstborn whom the angel slaughtered could (except for a few particulars of place and time) just as easily have been me.

  There are many reasons, I suppose, to enjoy and admire and be inspired by Exodus. Its themes could hardly be more stirring—or more beautiful, really. Oppression and liberation, courage, self-determination. Nothing less than the human spirit yearning to break free, then breaking free, screwing up, suffering, wandering, and painfully, slowly starting to learn how to live as a new, hopeful nation. It’s the Founding Fathers, the Emancipation Proclamation, with highly cinematic hoodoo: The way that Moses and his brother, Aaron, make people listen to them is by magically changing their walking sticks into snakes. Exodus is also, as many—including, most notably, Cecil B. De-Mille—have realized, action-packed. There’s little in the Bible to equal, chapter for chapter, its roller coaster of incident, suspense, magic, hesitations, missteps, punishments and sufferings, renewals and redemptions.

  And brutality. From the start, Exodus involves a series of bloodbaths—out-breaks of state-sponsored and divinely ordained carnage directed principally at children. It is a story of liberation in which whole populations are oppressed, enslaved, tormented, nearly wiped out. The victims, with the exception of the soldiers drowned in the Red Sea, are almost entirely civilians.

  But what a fabulous spectacle! The burning bush! The parting of the Red Sea! Who would want to spoil the excitement and fun by sitting there and thinking that those Egyptian soldiers, flailing around in the churning waters, may have left behind in Cairo wives and children who would mourn them—minus, of course, the firstborn, who the soldiers themselves must have been mourning even as Pharaoh ordered them after the Hebrews, into the desert and into the sea.

  Even children understand that Exodus is only a movie, that those are actors, not real people, movie deaths, not real ones. And as children, we learn from the movies that the deaths of our enemies are good deaths, to be celebrated and cheered.

  Exodus begins by striking an ominous note of political anxiety that will echo until its last chapters: The Jews are prospering and multiplying, and their presence is a liability that makes the new Pharaoh nervous. He enslaves them, makes them carry impossible weights on their shoulders and break their backs sowing the fields, but still they continue to multiply and grow.

  There is always trouble when one population begins to worry about the birth rate of another.

  And so the book’s first slaughter of children gets under way. Pharaoh directs the midwives to kill every Jewish male baby. But the women resist. Not only do they spare the babies but, when Pharaoh demands an explanation, they play with his head a little, claiming that the Hebrew women are so fertile that the midwives always arrive too late to assist at the births and murder the babi
es. So baby Moses survives, is found in the bulrushes and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter—who hands him back to his mother to nurse and raise him.

  The rest—the burning bush, the staff into the serpent—is pure fairy tale, the sorts of signs and wonders that would separate a Greek hero from the crowd, or reveal a new Dalai Lama, or inspire a prophet. The twist, of course, is God, not just another character but an absolute. The voice that speaks to Moses from the burning bush is powerful and succinct. It’s the voice of God introducing himself: I am that I am.

  Moses speaks, Pharaoh listens. God hardens the Egyptian ruler’s heart. And now comes the long, painful back-and-forth of let-my-people-go, a battle that God warns Moses He himself will make Moses lose. And it happens just as God says. Pharaoh orders the Jews to slave harder.

  Warnings and threats. Promises and failures to keep them. Warnings, promises, threats, and lies. In other words, end-stage diplomacy.

  And before you know it, blood.

  The pools and rivers turn red. The fish die. There is nothing to drink. Recall your horror at drawing a bath and finding the water is dark. And that is only rust. Imagine if it were blood. Then it gets worse. Frogs in the beds and ovens, swarms of flies, locusts stripping the trees and blackening the earth, unprecedented and murderous hail. Darkness.

  And all this is merely prelude to the grand finale, to the plague that succeeds where the others have not, the one that does the trick, that will cause Pharaoh, after all his stubbornness, not merely to let the Hebrews go but to expel them from Egypt. And that, of course, is the killing of the firstborn.