DAVID LEO RICE / JAKOB AS MESSIAH
I.
The basements of the schools he passes through are all the same. Boxes of Jakob as Nazi Hunter comics float in puddles of whatever spews from the pipes that always burst and sputter when he shows himself in, as if they know his mission better than he does and are determined to do what they can either to thwart or to christen it. Jakob steps through a puddle, shakes his heels, and climbs the stairs that lead from the locker rooms to the gyms where the Nuremberg Trials are always underway.
It's always the same folding tables and folding chairs with between five and eight children in clip-on ties or their mothers’ dresses pinned behind their backs, leaning on their elbows and listening to the testimonies of the horrors that have occurred in their own backyards, and have gone on occurring all these many decades while Jakob has roamed from school to school, eavesdropping on exactly the events his mother warned him were afoot in places like this while she kept him home all the days of his youth, learning and relearning the taxonomy of the desert, the forest, and the city Jews, while his father, a heroic amalgam of all three kinds, worked in the garage.
The prosecution rests its case and the defense takes the stand. Jakob lurks by the door that connects the gym to the carpeted area between the main entrance and the front office, where the bulletin boards listing the names of the children in each class always hang. He struggles to remain in his body without knowing why—neither why it’s so hard, nor why, or if, it’s worth the effort. “There are things, far worse than what any of our clients stand accused of doing,” the seven-year-old defense lawyers declare, staring the prosecution down. “Things that, had our clients not done what they’ve done and compelled all of us gathered here today to spend the last eighty years adjudicating them…” The lawyers stare off into space, or into the bleachers where a few standard-issue parents sit. Usually this is enough to get them back in the groove, but if they’ve truly forgotten their lines, sometimes they’ll look to Jakob and, even though he isn’t conscious of knowing what they’re supposed to say next, he can feel himself mouthing it, or his mouth mouthing it, and then the seven-year-olds resume, straightening their ties or worrying at the safety pins bunching the old lace behind their shoulders.
Jakob looks from the area he partially occupies, standing there in the background like an apparition in a painting that’s been imperfectly erased or added later by a different artist, toward the TV and VCR on the caddy in the middle of the gym, but he can’t focus on the atrocity reel flickering across the screen. He knows what he’s supposed to see, the pits of bodies, the drifting piles of ash, the billowing clouds of smoke, but instead all he sees is his father descending deeper into the garage, the back wall warping outward like a fleshy membrane, his weight—which Jakob can now feel as his own—forcing it back, into space that wasn’t there before, deforming the universe with the size of his ego, the crushing need to be worshiped and never again cut short on his path to domination, never again forced into the bunker with the revolver in his hand—
He clears his throat loudly enough that the lawyers stop their chattering and look in his direction, though he can’t tell what, if anything, they see there. Clearing his own throat, one of the lawyers continues, perhaps repeating what he just said. “There are awful things that, had we not spent the last eighty years adjudicating the crimes our clients have indeed committed, would by now have occurred. Worse things. Far, far worse.”
“Like what?” the prosecution bellows. No child needs to be reminded of this line.
A long pause, the same in every gym that Jakob has visited.
Then: “Exactly,” the defense concludes. “The fact that you can’t imagine what could be worse proves the magnitude of the gift our clients have given to society. By doing what they’ve done, perpetrating the so-called holocaust, they have courageously prevented us all from imagining anything worse. They have, let’s not mince words here, nipped our capacity for evil in the bud. In its absolute infancy, preventing the completion of God only knows what trajectories were and still are latent within our species.”
~
When the defense rests, the jurors retire to the girls’ locker room to deliberate. Jakob paces around the front office, twitchy, unable to discern why he’s still here, still attending these trials and, as a larger question branching off from that one, why they’re still going on. The events that now fill his days seem culled from the extremes of possible experience, from the very near or the very far side, the first or the last idea of some guiding intelligence, excluding the wide middle where, he’s still sane enough to understand, life is normally lived.
He knows it isn’t him they’re about to deliver their verdict on, but while the jury deliberates, he fears he’s the guiltiest party in the school. The only guilty party, perhaps, though he never has long enough to work out why before the jury returns and announces, as it always does, that the accused have been sentenced to death by hanging, effective immediately.
Mr. Grotek, the gym teacher, who’d been sitting on the portico with his back to the gym’s steel-reinforced windows, enters as soon as the verdict has been delivered and sets to work on the climbing ropes that have hung from the ceiling all this time, observed by no one until their relevance was revealed.
He works quickly, pulling the balance beam and pommel-horse from the gymnastics closet and setting them up beneath the ropes whose bottoms he’s tied off into adjustable nooses. He nods when he’s finished and the war criminals are marched over. Their accusers glance at Jakob in the doorway, flashing him childish smiles that he can only interpret as, This is what you wanted, right?
Jakob nods. He can’t stand to be here any longer. Hang them now, he thinks. Get it over with.
Mr. Grotek climbs up onto the balance beam, as graceful as a man of his age and size can be on equipment meant for second and third graders, and tests the nooses around his own neck. Then he climbs down and motions for the prosecution to hand him the first Nazi. The prosecution obliges. Two children work together to hand up a third, to whose neck Mr. Grotek affixes the noose, balances his feet on the beam and, when the signal is given, kicks it over.
All watch with their hands behind their backs and their heads slightly inclined until the body at the end of the rope stops struggling, which doesn’t take long, even though, Jakob thinks, they’re never quite dead. It occurs to him that the degree to which the sight of them hanging no longer shocks or sickens him is the same as the degree to which the process no longer results in their death, though he can’t say whether this is due to cause or coincidence.
Mr. Grotek removes the body when the signal is given and a delegation from the prosecutors’ table wraps it in a shower curtain from the supply closet between the two locker rooms and takes it away, down to the basement that Jakob came in through.
Then the next Nazi is hung, and the next after that, until all the parents in the bleachers are fidgeting in their pockets and purses, watching the clock and feigning continued enthusiasm only if their own children haven’t yet done whatever they’ve been called here to do. Jakob lurks in the doorway and drifts as far from his body as the cloistered space will allow, reentering the familiar questions of which Jakob he is, where in the progression, related to these Trials in which way? He leans against the bulletin board to which are glued the foam globes the sixth graders have attempted to label from memory, and he hears a voice say, as if from beneath the veneer of civilized nations whose names are misspelled in purple marker, “How much longer? How many more of these do you need to see?”
He leans deeper into the bulletin board and travels through fog and rain into the Art World alley with his father—or his son; all he knows is that both are there—each holding his newest work wrapped in paper, soaked through and about to peel away. They proceed one at a time through the crowd of humped bodies until they approach the window where their packages will be received by a pair of long, thin hands, unwrapped, inspected, and exchanged for tokens granting entry to the next level, or sent back with nothing to show for their effort, forced to carry out the objects they’d carried in, revealed at the crucial moment to be no more than common rubbish from the garage.
But before Jakob and his son or father make it to the window, a shuddering man in line behind them grabs their shoulders hard enough to spin them around and bellows, “How much longer? How much longer can you make us wait?”
Then he points upward, at the sky over the alley, which now resembles the inside of a wet cardboard box, scored with pen lines crisscrossing and arrows pointing downward. “It gets a little smaller every day. The sky gets a little closer,” the man moans. “You want it should suffocate us? You are the one. Do what you’re here to do.”
At these words, many others in line turn and join in. “Do what you’re here to do!” They chant. “Do it! Do it!”
As the chant grows in volume and agitation, the window slams shut and Jakob is expelled from the alley and planted back in the hallway outside the gym just as the last Nazi crashes to the bottom of the rope and dances there, the tips of his toes brushing the foam mats that Mr. Grotek must have dragged out of the gymnastics closet when word reached him that the Trials had been convened. The lines on the globes by Jakob’s head scramble to regain their earthly bearing after falling into the same confusion as the lines on the cardboard ceiling over the Art World alley.
Everyone present turns to regard Jakob with the same mixture of longing and disdain shown by those in that alley—the question of whether they’re all the same people seems sophomoric, a distraction from what’s truly salient—and he tries to back up further but the bulletin board holds fast. He wants to tell them he’s not the final Jakob, that the one they’re waiting for is still a few generations off, but the word generations, even though he hasn’t said it aloud, sickens him. His eyes settle on Mr. Grotek detaching the rope from the neck of the last hanged child and all Jakob can think is: if only someone could make the generations stop.
~
When it’s finally over and the bodies have been taken downstairs, shuddering and wrapped in shower curtains, Jakob leaves with one of the mothers. There is never any seduction, nor even the exchange of names. Only a short trip in a relatively luxurious sedan and then fast, specious sex in a hastily cleaned bedroom on one of the leafy streets overlooking the river. They each understand their role, though neither would ever ask the other to confirm it.
While they’re busy, he looks out the bedroom window and across the roofs of the neighboring houses and across town to the mountain on the far side where, on the summit, in a circle of broken pillars, figures in robes encircle the statue of a giant. He fixates on this, forcing his gaze high above the roofs so as not to snag on the house with the garage out back in which he perhaps already lives with his wife and son, or, if he doesn’t yet, in which he will soon enough, after he’s completed the task he can see he will be unable to postpone forever—a task that a deeper and more alien part of him knows was first conceived in that garage, seeded into the indifferent world in a time so distant from the present he can’t say whether it came before or is still to come.
When he and she are finished, they dress facing away from one another and go downstairs and she takes something out of the fridge, a bowl of Jell-O, or a tray of brownies off the counter, and they sit at the kitchen table drinking water and snacking and she says, “So this is what you came up with?”
Her hand encompasses the kitchen and the snack and the children’s drawings on the walls and then it keeps spinning, bringing in not just the visible objects but the two of them, herself and the Jakob that Jakob now struggles to wriggle free from, fighting to pry his mouth from the body that’s smothering it, at least enough to gasp, “No, it was my father. He’s the Artist. He’s the bastard. I, like you, am just part of his show.”
But he can’t be sure if he’s gotten this out. She looks at him with a kind of understanding that could mean she heard what he said, or that she knows something he doesn’t. That whatever drew them together, demanding the conception of yet another child to be hung by the neck in the school gym in seven or eight years, has revealed more of its design to her than it ever will to him. He considers fearing her, though decides, as he always does, to act instead as though she ought to fear him.
Me, the father, he thinks. The Great Artist. He pushes his brownie or Jell-O off the table and throws his glass against the wall, though neither he nor she flinches or even looks when it shatters. They’ve both—even if neither has quite taken this form with the other before—been through this enough times already. The moment when that breaking glass might’ve elicited honest shock passed ages ago, just as the first Trials were staffing up after the War. Unless this, the lull, the slack and elongated middle, is the purpose of the artwork, the point it's trying to make, which Jakob allows that it might be. But if so, that point was also lost generations ago. Now, each generation spawns the next only for the sake of escaping the question of what else there is to do. How else to use the life force the scenario has vested them with, or that, unbeknownst to the scenario’s original creator, they’ve generated on their own. Jakob pictures thousands of generations crushed against a translucent membrane, mangled like flies on glue paper, staring at the new world they can just barely see on the other side, unless it’s a smeared reflection of the old world they’ve come this far in their attempt to overcome.
The woman clutches her belly like Jakob’s sperm has made her sick and says, “Okay, get in the car.”
~
Together they drive out of that neighborhood, through the affluent section of town, then across the shaking covered bridge and through the slums and up out of the flatlands, beyond the country cemetery and the unincorporated churches and the fields of sculpted boulders left perhaps by extinct races and then through the thick metal fence around the sheep paddocks and up into the foothills of the mountain, toward the statue of the giant. It must’ve been here forever, or just about, but he still thinks—with his voice fey and theatrical in his head, like he’s having this thought for the sake of some audience in the smoky dark—"I never saw it before.”
Though he knows he could therefore deduce that he hasn’t been here long, that he came from far away and might just be passing through, a man whose business takes him town to town, this story is no more convincing than any other. I lost myself along the way, he thinks. That’s all I can be certain of. He clutches his arms around his sides, as if to hold this conclusion close, and looks out the windows as the woman works the car up the narrow path and into the gravel lot that is already almost full of SUVs and pickups and larger vehicles adorned with official or homemade military insignia.
They park at the base of a restored Spanish lookout tower, get out, and walk up to the giant. Jakob fixes his eyes on the looming feet, made of stone and straw and bark and thick, tarry glue, but he loses his footing when the giant’s hand comes down to scoop him up, helpless to resist landing in the giant’s lap, his backside wedged against the bronze belt buckle just above the protruding phallus. He looks down at the villagers swarming in, more vehicles hauling up the hill and parking at insane angles, and he can tell that those gathered beneath him, and on the turret of the tower behind, expect a speech. Or more than a speech: a speech as prelude to some consecration.
“Messiah!” the villagers shout. “Messiah, messiah! Messiah now!”
Jakob clutches the buckle and gazes up the belly and chest. He considers jumping down the giant’s throat, but the thought makes him sick, like someone or something has jumped down his own throat and died in there. For a moment, he swoons and can no longer say whether he’s Jakob in the giant’s lap or the giant with Jakob in his lap. The answer to this question—even to whether it is a question—seems out of reach, awaiting the decision of some external power.
Then he returns to the body in the lap, though it feels cold and provisional now, like a tent full of rain. He looks down at the women among the villagers, pregnant with his children, all awaiting their turn to commit the crimes for which they will then be hung in the gym where, Jakob can hardly believe it, he’ll have to show up tomorrow once again. Every day the same, he thinks, as he clings to the giant’s lap, though the thought doesn’t feel familiar. Better get some sleep tonight. I have work in the morning. Part of him grasps at an alternate account, a wildly divergent life beyond this one, well outside the suddenly suffocating repetition of school, giant… buffet… garage? He tries to picture his own, or his father’s, work in there, through all the years of his reclusion, approaching some apotheosis that is either still to come or has been so horribly botched that whatever cosmic gateway creaked open has now creaked shut, trapping everyone present in an anaerobic side universe where no one ever truly lives or dies no matter how much violence they commit and condemn and, having been condemned, commit further.
He cowers in the giant’s lap, willing himself back into the abandoned all-you-can-eat buffet on the edge of town, beside the station where he’ll board the bus for his next appointment. “I merely audit the Trials,” he shouts to the villagers. It’s all I’m good for. A lifeline, he thinks, ashamed yet relieved to realize why he isn’t the Messiah and never could be. “I only go town to town!” he screams. “I watch the Trials to make sure they’re conducted in accordance with the Geneva Convention. I make sure the right men get hung, and I wait to be sure they’re dead! But I’m not yet the Judge.” He’s sweating and trembling now, adding as many words as he can push through his mouth. “So I can’t be your Messiah. I can’t… I merely audit the dead, I merely audit the dead!”
The villagers approach, groaning and gnashing their teeth. The women’s bellies swell and though he recalls inseminating only one of them, this afternoon, that recollection clearly means nothing to anyone but himself. He watches them strain toward him, shrieking, “Redeem our children! Do not force them to be born only to hang for the crimes of the past! Give our children a future, give our children a life!”
Jakob turns to look up at the giant’s face, as if expecting reassurance, but sees only a mocking facsimile of his own. His own grimace, his own evasion, his own desire to be swallowed. “Come,” the giant whispers. “If you can’t give them what they want, give me what I want instead.”
Still clinging to the lap, he looks once more at the villagers, at the women clutching their bellies and screaming, “You did this to us! You did this and now you won’t make it right! Be the Messiah, just be the Messiah! Evolve the paradigm!”
Then, more frightened than he’s ever been, even if he feels this way at this time every night, he turns, sinks his fingers into the straw and feathers and fur of the giant’s chest, and climbs arm over arm up its striated front, gripping at the edges of its leather-and-rhinestone tie once he gets above its belly-button, before finally clutching its long moss beard, which, with the help of the clacking jaw, conveys him over the bottom lip, past the teeth, and down the throat.
~
Jakob falls through humid darkness, past glowing knobs of flesh and tangles of weeds and slick vegetal cairns that caress him on the way down, welcoming him back to the bower where he can now recall having spent every night since...
Before he can generate the image of a night spent elsewhere, he comes to a halt at the bottom and slides into his chrysalis. He pulls the steamy membranes up around his head and snuggles all the way down and tries to engender a dream of any place except the Art World alley where he’s already ended up again.
The line has hardly moved at all. Sullen aspirants shuffle behind and in front of him and his father, or son, all grousing about the Messiah who has, once again, skipped his appointment. Some claim that Jakob is still working up to it, gestating a new, stronger self over the course of days or weeks or generations, while others claim the chance passed long ago, before this Jakob was even born, so that his failure to bring the redemption they all seek is his fault only symbolically—it only so happens that he and no one else has been called upon to embody the Messiah’s unwillingness or inability to return. His performance of failure is, in the end, they say, no more than his artwork, the dubious masterpiece he has brought here to present to the window in hopes of earning admission to the Art World whose innermost rooms they all know they will never see.
The Messiah’s Enduring Absence by Jakob with No Last Name. As good a piece of hackwork as any other.
He shuffles along with his son or father—all he knows is that there are two of them and they’re both the same, or nearly the same, differing only in the almost trivial sense of one knowing what has happened and the other knowing what will—toward the window with the gnarled hands, still enacting the hope that this time their measly packages will earn them entrance. “To what?” one of them asks.
“To anyplace new!” the others in line respond, coining a response that will henceforth take on the weight of ancient tradition. “To the Rooms on the Other Side.”
Jakob rattles inside the giant’s belly as it lumbers down from the useless hilltop altar, through the town’s analogue of the alley Jakob is dreaming of, and across open fields and stalled developments to the dumpster where, sickened by the journey, it will in a few hours vomit Jakob into a new day, or even vomit that whole new day out of the guts where it would otherwise have dissolved back into the ooze from which it emerged at the beginning of everything. Anyplace new. Jakob rolls in his chrysalis, already aware that he won’t make it back to the alley, which he now sees peeling off the map, curling around itself like the skin of a potato and leaving behind nothing but a world of white, sopping potato flesh.
But the phrase anyplace new stays with him. The Rooms on the Other Side. The seekers in that alley, he can see now, crave nothing beyond the gate except beyondness itself. He feels sick along with the giant, two sides of the same feeling or not even that, simply a feeling large enough for both of them, and after a couple of heaves he’s flying up the same way he came down, his legs curled up to his chin with his arms around them, burping and bumping upward until he passes the back of the mouth and slides over the tongue and snags on the teeth, slicing his skull and the side of his neck, and then he’s bleeding in a fishy dumpster in the lot behind the buffet, on the access road beside the bus station.
~
Inside the mountain-and-meadow themed steakhouse and buffet, Jakob hurries to the bathroom to blot his wounds with paper towels, then takes a seat in a booth on the window side, across from the food troughs, facing the station where he can see the buses come and go.
He knows he’ll see Mr. Grotek alone at the back table, facing the fish tank behind his trays piled with potatoes and eggs and roast meat and melted cheese. He looks down at his own tray full of chicken-fried steak and macaroni, then back at Mr. Grotek, who probably spent all night hosing down the gym and stacking the stripped bodies in the locker room, preserving their modesty with old copies of Jakob as Nazi Hunter after unrolling them from the shower curtains, which he’d then have to stand on a stepladder to fit back onto the rings in the shower stalls, his thick fingers trembling with the sustained effort.
Now Jakob watches Mr. Grotek reading a back issue he must’ve taken from down there, its edges smeared with blood or bile. Ultimatum in the Bunker reads the subtitle. Death Beneath the Fallen City! Jakob recalls this issue, though the question of whether the memory comes from his mother having read it to him as a child or from his having enacted the events therein, which would only later be canonized in the pages of that comic and disseminated into a hundred million childhoods across the nation, has long since ceased to tantalize him. Or if it does tantalize him still, it does so in an inert way, like a dummy bomb in a war museum.
He watches Mr. Grotek flip through the pages with his steak-stained fingers, working toward the Mastermind’s suicide in his bunker beneath the City where he achieved nearly ultimate power but then, even less fulfilled than when he’d had none—when he’d been nothing but a murderer in a cell scratching away at his Prison Diary—he reached and reached for more until he hit a hard limit. Jakob’s eyes moisten with the memory of finally being admitted out of the alley and through the gates of the Art World, where his quest for power grew unchecked until…
~
He fingers the wound on the back of his skull, suddenly wet as he presses his nail in and out, probing the bullet hole until the pain forces his eyes open and his body back to the buffet hall. He sees that Mr. Grotek has closed the issue and returned to his many trays, more today than on any day prior; more than any one man, no matter what they spent the night doing, could possibly consume. As Mr. Grotek raises his fork and spoon to his mouth, the area around his head trembles and quivers and the food disappears as if through a pocket in the room, a brown seam in the brown backdrop, and for a moment another Grotek peeps through. An ever-so-slightly younger version, Jakob thinks, peering out to see what his tomorrow will look like, and to nibble from the elder’s fork as if otherwise he would starve. A proud father feeding his brood. But then the seam closes and the brown and beige and taupe contours of the buffet hall, empty except for the two of them and the kitchen workers appearing every so often with fresh trays of creamed corn and garlic spinach, return, and it’s as if nothing has happened here and nothing ever will. As if all this food is for the two of them alone, no matter how many thousands of others are waiting just behind the veil with their mouths wide open.
It's as if Jakob was born in this town, and went to school like everyone else and took Phys. Ed with Mr. Grotek and dreaded the rope climb like everyone else, and judged and hung the Nazis at Nuremberg when it was his turn to, a standard part of the fifth grade curriculum no matter how many parents complained that it was morbid and outdated, and then, like anyone, he got on with things, whatever they might have been, it hardly mattered—he sees himself closing his eyes and reaching into a black felt bag to draw out the three or four salient facts about his life—and now here he is, the pupil and the teacher at booths close enough to hear each other chew, and yet there’s nothing to say, no reason to acknowledge the closeness, which perhaps occurs every morning, or just about, and Jakob is so distressed by this possibility, and so willing to do whatever it takes to make anything else be the case, that he piles up his trays, one atop the other, dumps them in the trash beside the self-serv sundae machine, makes a fast sundae that he gulps down with a spoon in each hand, leaning over the grate, and then he pays on the way out and hustles across the street and stands waiting for the bus like a young man who’s finally mustered the courage to leave the town of his youth and stake everything on a one-way trip to the City.
II.
The bus station is dismal: a long, low rectangular space where the bathrooms are always “temporarily closed” and the coffee and donut stand is only open when whoever has the key can think of nowhere else to go. The screens displaying the arrivals and departures are old TV consoles bracketed to the ceiling on wobbly arms that sway when someone heaves open the wide double-doors that lead to the parking bays, which is the only way to enter now that the turnstiles have jammed shut.
Having, for now at least, distanced himself from his memories of going town to town to audit the Trials, Jakob sighs at the familiar sight and smell of the station. He would never say so, but he knows he’s been here before. He knows, on a level just a millimeter beneath the surface, that his innumerable departures from this station have amounted to nothing but an ever-deepening knowledge of its contours, every departure guaranteeing nothing but the next return. He even partly suspects that his attempts to roam have succeeded only in replicating this station wherever he goes, as if he were the carrier of an infection whose primary symptom—he looks at the collapsed rows of wire benches, the magazine store whose taped-over windows display a Jakob as Nazi Hunter issue from 1997—is the very space where he’s sitting and thinking all this now. He leans against a cardboard cutout of a bus cruising past a sign that reads “Lincoln Tunnel: Straight Ahead” and pictures a nation of towns that were once unique but, because of him, have converged into a ring of identical nodes fringing the behemoth of the City like ticks on the body of a dog. He considers whether spreading this disease could in fact be the purpose of all his travel, not a byproduct but the essential goal he’s been striving toward all this time.
Either way, he thinks, cutting short his desire to pose the question of why?, it’s time to do it again. He grins, glad to imagine the possibility of affecting the world even if only to ruin it, as he heeds the “All aboard” notice on the screen for the only bus that ever comes or goes from here, despite the dozen other departure and arrival slots on the screen that constantly blink IN TRANSIT.
He passes into the parking bay and waits with three others, two men and a woman, all looking down with luggage hanging from their shoulders, standing so still they give no sign of being awake. None of them look up when the bus arrives, nor does the driver, who steps out after coming to a stop and takes their tickets while picking his teeth with the keys.
~
When they’ve all taken their seats, as far apart as the space will allow, and opened their respective issues of Jakob as Nazi Hunter, the bus pulls out and maneuvers through the few remaining streets of downtown, then past the dialysis center and onto the state highway.
Noon beats down over ramshackle settlements populated with bands of ten or twenty men and women worshipping idols that, even at a passing glance, stand fully apart from the giant that threw Jakob up this morning. Cults to other deities, he thinks, awaiting other Messiahs or awaiting nothing at all, perhaps simply celebrating what is. Micro-societies saved in ancient times by micro-Messiahs, who gave their lives for the eternal salvation of half a dozen families. Tiny outliers, statistically insignificant, too small to hasten or avert whatever is coming for everyone else, but proof that there’s never only one story. He fears and admires these cults in equal measure, and often imagines that he’d flee the bus and demand a place within them if the driver ever stopped in this region, but of course—and perhaps for this reason—he never does.
The settlements become more elaborate the further the bus goes, tracing a progression of heresy wherein those closer to town display altars and temples still recognizably within the Jakob as Messiah paradigm, if somewhat unorthodox in their interpretation of it, while those further out, in the wide-open prairie that the bus has now entered, worship altogether different deities, their grinning and grimacing faces plainly visible on carved totems and massive effigies built so close to the road that the bus has to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid them.
These people are not waiting to be saved, Jakob thinks. He knows that he’s really thinking these people are not waiting for me to save them, but, aware that his thoughts are not truly his own—that they neither come from nor are they meant for whoever he happens to be, here on this bus—he pretends not to be aware of how intimately involved with the Jakob as Messiah paradigm he really is. This is one of the few forms of solace that the bus journey, now that he knows it won’t take him to New York to begin his art career, still provides. He embraces the possibility that he isn’t Jakob at all and that whoever will or won’t do whatever the Messiah has been created for won’t have to be him.
Soon, the bus heaves through the most desolate territory of the entire journey, beyond the reach even of the least-conquered cults. A no-man’s-land of yawning caves and collapsed brick asylums and shallow, shimmering lakes patrolled by slow reptiles and scavenger birds and dingoes so thin their ribs poke out like shrunken extra arms. Jakob leans against the window and drinks it all in, letting the beginning and the end of the journey fade equally from his mind. Grim as it might be, this wasteland is nevertheless a tonic. Here, no legend, no prophecy, and not even any heresy can survive. Nothing can survive here, it is plain to see, other than what’s here already. A world that has slipped through the Demiurge’s ceaselessly tinkering fingers.
Jakob lets the simplicity of this fact merge as fully with his consciousness as it can, hoping to think nothing else around its edges. “There is nothing here,” he mouths in his seat, “except for what’s here.”
At no other point in the day—and since every day is nearly the same, he knows this means at no other point in his life—will anything be remotely as clear as this. He wishes the wasteland would go on forever, but he can feel its purchase on the map shrinking under the force of his yearning for it to expand. The more the thought of the wasteland intercedes between Jakob and the wasteland itself, the less chance it has of continuing to exist. Signs of civilization are already visible on the horizon, and he can feel the wasteland returning to latency, back into the paradox of a thought that would become real if only he could stop thinking it.
~
Now he’s thinking it so hard that the buildings on the horizon rush toward the bus, as if falling downhill, like models on a mat that has been tipped upward. The bus pulls to a stop, parking amidst the pieces that have landed and taken the shape of an immense travel plaza, full of other buses and gypsy families roasting pigs and lambs over flames and tending giant iron pots of stew and pouring plastic cups full of cloudy liquor from huge plastic drums on wheels.
More sighing comes over the intercom and the four passengers disembark past the driver, who stands once again by the door and looks at no one. Jakob shuffles past them and into the bathhouse, already unbuckling his belt. Once he gets inside, he passes the urinals and toilets and enters the breeding stalls through a screen door in back, the air close and heady with the reek of dozens of backsides. He pities them as he pities himself, everyone roped into a scenario they never would have envisioned alone, just as, alone, none has the strength to end or even to exit it.
Halfway down the line—having no other criteria, he always goes for the exact middle—his pulls his pants down, waits for his erection to form despite his wish, or his desire to seem to wish, that it wouldn’t, and enters the woman whose ass he’s stopped behind. He pumps for a few minutes, feeling his own face slip away. He tries to imagine it materializing on the same Other Side as her face so that, while their bodies do what they must in this world, another part of them accesses the possibility of love in a flowering meadow, gazing into each other’s eyes and committing the other’s being to memory in a realm free of the decay that necessitates the flesh’s ceaseless renewal. A realm where the faces they wear right now need never be peeled off and replaced with new ones.
He finishes, pulls out, zips up, and walks off, beyond the point of feeling any more sullied by the indignity than he had before he came in. He scratches at his face and feels it to be no more than a scrim of wet paper.
Having done his duty for this part of the day, the next hour belongs to him. He orders stewed lamb with prunes and onions from one of the families in the lot, and a cup of raki from another, and carries it to a plastic chair overlooking a brook behind the rows of buses. Though a ditch full of human waste stands between the overlook and the water, this is nevertheless the most peaceful place to enjoy his lunch, as far as he can get from the slow, eerie commerce in the main plaza without running off and being chased down. As he sips his drink, he thinks of his own conception in a stall like the one he just visited. Perhaps the same stall. He pictures his father getting off the same bus, doing the same thing, and eating the same lunch as he’s eating now. Drinking the same raki from the same cup. Jakob looks at the cup, at the lip-prints on its rim, and the superimposition grows too much to bear. He pictures his father likewise growing overwhelmed while sitting here thinking about his own father, and the two of them, Jakob and his father, or the three of them, Jakob and his father and his grandfather, all throw their cups over the railing and into the ditch, where they look down to see many such cups have landed before.
Shuddering from the collapse of generations and once again considering what it would mean to bring an end to their progression, to simply get it over with, and whether any world at all could exist thereafter, he hurries to the souvenir stand behind the buses to buy a braided sweet dough model of the original Jakob dragging his Worm made of arms through the Lincoln Tunnel. He licks at the raspberry jelly where each arm joins the next and stares at the bus until an old woman hits him with her pocketbook. “Stop it!” she shouts, attempting to tear the dough arms from his mouth. “That’s a holy relic. Show some respect. He is coming back!”
He grins, his lips smeared, ghoulish with blasphemy. I am nothing but what this woman thinks I am, he tells himself. Nothing but a man on a bus journey with no destination who stopped in the middle of the day to plug a hole and eat some lamb. He tears another arm, hoping the woman will hit him again, but she’s gone, having given up on him much more easily than he’s so far been able to give up on himself. He finishes his bite, throws the dish in the direction of an overflowing trash can, and gets back on the bus.
~
Leaving the daylong journey’s main stop behind, the bus sets out for the City, its driver and passengers not yet revealing any awareness of how impossible it will prove to arrive there. The interior smells like hot dough, as if the other passengers have brought more arms aboard, but if they have, they make no attempt to eat them.
The landscape between here and the City is denser, marked by the sprawl of lesser cities and their ambiguous suburbs, appended to plazas with many iterations of Wing Hut, Mama’s Pizza, and Giant Chinese all chained together, waiting to be deployed to new towns once Jakob’s circuit activates them. Here and there he sees signs for the Lincoln Tunnel, but whether they’re historical markers commemorating his original exodus into the City to extinguish all the prehistory before that moment and commence the era that humanity has been stuck within ever since, or clues as to how one might, even now, enter that tunnel in good faith once again to activate the Third Age at last, is impossible to determine from the bus. All the signs accomplish is to induce in Jakob the question of whether passing through the Lincoln Tunnel is the concrete form that the Messiah’s birth will take, in his life or that of whichever of his offspring is no longer able to postpone it. If going through the first time made me what I am, he reasons, then going through again is the only way to become anything else.
He closes his eyes and tries to recall, or reconstruct—or even construct for the first time, if that’s the best he can do—what his formative years in the City consisted of. How he transformed from a scared boy running from the altar where his father murdered his mother into the Jakob whose name is known on every continent and in every country and town on earth that knows anything at all about the true pyramid of power, rooted in hell and reaching through the human realm and up into heaven.
The harder he works to construct his years in the City, and with them the City itself, the sketchier the view outside the bus becomes. Soon all he can see are wavering pillars in the dusk, skyscrapers in the extreme distance, across a body of water or a shimmering salt flat, and abandoned construction sites on a dredged seabed. Beyond this he sees nothing corporeal at all, merely the best his mind can do to raise plausible monoliths from the dry plateau. The only destination we’ll arrive at, he understands now, is the one I succeed in conjuring before we get there.
As they pass through a nexus of garden centers selling models of the Art World alley, stocked with an absurd overabundance of lawn-gnome Jakob Nativities surrounded by lumpen sufferers in an assortment of shapes and sizes, time starts to tick faster. He scrunches against the window and tries to bear down and focus, forcing the City—any city, it doesn’t matter how ground-down or denuded of opportunity—to come into being in the near distance, so the bus doesn’t skid to a halt at the end of an invisible line and the driver doesn’t moan, “Everyone out,” and then turn the bus around to leave Jakob standing in the desert with a gaggle of silent strangers.
~
His effort begins to pay off as the sun finishes setting, even if the gathering night gives his projected city the illusion of more solidity than it has. The darkness seems to rise around the edges of the bus, or even to issue from underneath, like smoke from the engine, forming a cloud the bus descends into so that the outskirts of the City appear only near the top of the windows, while below them a subterranean world expands, breaking into tunnels and vaults and bunkers beneath the desert that, just a moment ago, the bus had been speeding across in vivid late afternoon sun.
Sometimes the bus reclaims its purchase aboveground, heaving upward on ramps or rock inclines to cruise again along a stretch of highway until it noses against an invisible membrane and rolls backward, as if what’d looked like an entrance to the City was actually a tall rubber wall with bridges and buildings printed on it. Though these walls are soft, the driver groans every time the bus makes contact.
Eventually, he finds an exit that allows him to descend into a tunnel he does not again try to climb out of. Now the City ripples up by the very top of the windows like the underside of a pavilion’s roof, emitting its own kind of wind, or gas, while the bus continues to descend, burrowing with growing confidence beneath the foundations of the buildings that Jakob has forced to sprout and that, as soon as he stops thinking of them, will collapse in the desert sand and lie on their sides like the wrecked statuary of a conquered kingdom.
Fully underground, the driver turns on the lights and bores onward, through supply and mass housing districts and then into the old center of a buried city conducting its business in the dark. Agents in military uniforms marked with subtle variations on the swastika, some with six sides and some with only two, some rounded and some turned in the opposite direction, as if drawn by reenactors with faulty or ambivalent memories, march to and fro, dragging boxes from trucks into warehouses carved into the walls that keep the tunnels intact.
~
When it gets too dark to see, Jakob closes his eyes and submits to the vision that’s been waiting its turn. He sees that what he became after dragging those arms through the Lincoln Tunnel and into the Whitney has reached the absolute apex of its power, dominating the Art World and then spilling over into whatever remained unconquered beyond, birch woods and alpine streams livid with snowmelt, pacifist villages unvisited for a thousand years and holy cities perched on Himalayan plateaus, temples ruled by undead shamans and the camps of infamous warlords guarded by telepathic wolves, all of it crumbling beneath Jakob’s ego, his immense need for renown rolling over the border of one nation after another until the world could afford to address no concerns but his. He grew to a size that no man had ever reached before, all in order to prove that he wasn’t a man, that he was something greater, something sent here to show men how puny they were, how little all that drove them amounted to, compared with the primacy of his will to power… And he almost did it, he almost took everything there was to take, but then, at the last moment, that power abandoned him, leaving only the will, shrunken and desperate and starving for air. That which had made his rise inevitable guaranteed the same for his fall. It flew from his body and coalesced into a thick hard dome above him, forcing him underground, becoming the ground it’d forced him under, and from there it continued to press downward, insisting he never resurface. Insisting he descend into the earth whose surface he’d almost overtaken, descending now until he came to rest as a charred speck in its core.
Now he was down there, beneath the city he’d built with nothing but the power of his own drive to build it, the city that had to be on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel as Jakob appeared with all those arms behind him, shivering with the killer instinct he’d awakened. The power, the city, the armies he’d commanded, the millions he’d slain to clear space to think and to breathe clean air... But now he was down here alone, in a wrecked wicker desk chair with a revolver in one hand and a pen in the other, sketching on a single sheet of paper. He sketched another Jakob, a miniature, on a bus that was drawing near, approaching what would soon and forever after be known as the site of the Great Man’s last stand. The end of the line for the most powerful force the world had ever known. “Only as real as I can make him with this pen,” he wrote beneath the image he’d drawn, “this Jakob will pass by overhead as many times as it takes for him to become real the rest of the way on his own. And once he has, nothing will again intercede to stop us.”
With this much clarified, the Jakob underground tore the skin from the globe showing the territory that’d fallen to his armies, ripping off one continent after another until nothing but virgin territory remained.
All of that is over now, he thought. Itching his gums with the revolver, he returned his focus to the Jakob he would live on through, if he was to live on at all. The Jakob who was even now, in another iteration of this moment, which could only iterate so many times before it grew unrecognizable, passing overhead in a bus, his eyes closed against the window as his attention dripped down through the seats and the luggage hold and the engine and then down through the earth and into the lair where he sat at his desk, postponing the use he knew his revolver would soon be put to in order to create the best semblance of a replacement his exhausted and defeated hand could still bring to life.
He drew and sculpted and thought and wrote, all as part of the same process, which, he knew, was really the process of gathering together whatever small quantity of genuine power remained inside him and coughing it up onto the desk before the bullet forced its way out of the barrel and into the brain that, this time, like every time before, would prove incapable of envisioning any alternative. “I have no means of traveling onward as I am,” he wrote, in the military blotter whose earlier pages were devoted to what had seemed, amazingly, like a plausible plan to conquer and hold all the territory on earth. “So I will travel on as Jakob instead. It will fall to him to actualize himself or let our saga, and with it perhaps the entire planet we inhabit, or seem to inhabit—all the people whose lives are nothing but a backdrop to our quest for power—fall into nothingness. To allow all the life there’s ever been to perish unredeemed. I will deploy him as destroyer into the world that destroyed me, and he will unmake it from within, and thereby make it livable at last, in an era beyond the one that I inaugurated and that no one but you can bring to a close.”
Then he turned around in his desk chair, upholstered now in plush leather, and watched the walls, floor, and ceiling upholster themselves in the same, the whole room filling with the slick, salty smell of treated flesh, and he thought, Here I am at the absolute center of it all, the deep leather future and the deep leather past, creating the saga from within, the innermost sanctum of the Chapel of Humiliation which, if it doesn’t yet exist, will have to now.
Planting himself there as the sacred seed from which the roots of the Chapel’s power would grow, he closed his eyes deeply and intensely enough to focus his little remaining power in the very back of his skull, hardening it there like a diamond. Then he opened his mouth, as if hoping that, at the very last second, a new idea would fly in.
After licking his teeth to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, he inserted the revolver, placing it a little more precisely than last time, so as to waste less of what he hoped to save. He opened his eyes again, just long enough to look upward, at the underside of the ground atop which Jakob’s bus was now arriving, depositing the mindless and soulless carapace just in time to hurry down into the bunker and retrieve the diamond before it fell into the wrong hands.
After the gunshot, the bunker goes dark and silent for a spell whose length no one is present to measure. Then a shaky, uncertain Jakob enters, incapable of any intention other than scooping up what has landed on the desk and inserting it into the back of his own skull, through the waiting hole, using arms that are weak and withered from a lifetime of inaction. He swallows and inhales the oily leather scent as his mind takes root and, after a spell of consciousness without selfhood, consciousness of nothing but leather and blood and ink, he feels his mind click into place as the saga looms back up from within to consume him. The bus journey, the desperation to bypass the Art World alley and reach the City on his own terms to begin his career in earnest… all this returns to fill the Jakob who, a moment ago, had been merely a vessel for leather.
He stands back to behold the remnants of his creator sinking out of the desk chair and down through the floor as the leather recedes to reveal an iron grate beneath. He watches these remnants sink beneath the foundations of the city and deeper still, out of sight, bound for the center of the earth where they will either vanish in the inferno or power the entirety of whatever is still to come, the battery at the heart of any redemption that might still be at hand.
Accepting that, for the time being, he’s the only Jakob here, he shoulders open a vault door that comes unsealed only once he’s truly accepted this. He hurries through the tunnels beyond, aware that his time down here is limited. He can see that his only chance to return to a life other than one of unconditional surrender is bound to a single bus that only stops once and doesn’t wait for anyone.
He emerges from the tunnels into a subterranean square, the sky lit purple from lights recessed in the cement overhead. A few nondescript characters leaning on lampposts and drinking from small paper cups or leafing through damp newspapers turn his way, their faces flushed as if his presence has startled them, perhaps necessitating duties they’d hoped were complete.
Jakob hurries past, his eyes darting around as the thought enters his mind that this square must be connected, through staircases or escalators or sheer inclines hidden at the edge of the purple glow, to the aboveground city. Perhaps—he blushes, aware that this is an impure thought, and one that, in a moment, he’ll wish he could deny having had—it isn’t too late to resume my ascent to power in the urban milieu where Jakob first became world-historically famous. Perhaps it isn’t too late to experience a tiny bit of my prime, having emerged from the bunker stronger and clearer of will than when I went in.
All those leaning on lampposts lower their cups and newspapers to glare at him, as if he’s spoken this thought aloud, or, more likely, as if the hole in the back of his head has let it out. Another, equally shameful part of him wants to apologize, but he tamps this down as well. No, he thinks. I have as much right as any other Jakob to experience my own damn prime. To inhabit a world that the Messiah has already redeemed, or one that no longer needs him to. He looks past the square toward the shuttered Art World window, installed in a cement wall covered in German and Russian graffiti.
~
He turns from this and moves laterally across the square, drifting and tilting like a dry twig in an autumn gust, which carries him to the newsstand where the agents—he thinks of everyone observing him as agents of the occupying force that swept into the city once his predecessor retreated underground—must have purchased their newspapers. The overhead lighting turns warm and sunny as he enters Horst’s shop, where he and his mother waited happily on so many Saturdays for the truck with the new issue of Jakob as Nazi Hunter to arrive. He has an urge to look behind him for the park where he and she sat on a bench with their coffee and croissants in the warm and breezy noontime, but another urge keeps him from turning around. He shudders, trying to blot out a grim vision of that park entirely erased from the world, not only not behind him, but not anyplace else, either. Not even in memory, a realm that, he understands by now, is no more impervious to invasion than any other. He abstains, as much as he can, from even trying to recall it, hoping to preserve its innocence in a universe capable of defending itself against him.
Instead, he walks deeper inside to rifle through the issues himself. Horst coughs and waves a cigarette in front of his face while Jakob passes by, stirring the dust in the still air. Everything smells so familiar it threatens to annihilate whatever momentum the journey has retained and freeze Jakob right here for as long as his current body can live. But another inkling draws him deeper in, past the familiar racks of Jakob as Nazi Hunter and down a single step into an alcove dedicated to Jakob as Messiah.
Here he pauses, aware of having reached the edge of terminal heresy, of straying so far from his purpose as to flirt with never regaining it. Then he presses on, determined to locate himself in these issues no matter the toll that takes on the world he’s supposedly fated to redeem. Having spent the last of his inherited mind’s will on making this decision, his body takes over. It extends its arms to the shelves, tearing off the foil wrappers and running through one issue after another: Jakob visiting school after school to see crop after crop of children hanging from the climbing ropes, sometimes as witness and sometimes as Judge, while a crudely rendered Mr. Grotek ties the nooses. Jakob turns the pages faster, hurrying without quite knowing why. He passes himself at the rest stop, unbuckling his pants behind the exposed backsides of women whose faces he will never see, then eating sweet baked arms in a paper dish while an old woman hits him with her pocketbook. Then comes the bus ride around the edge of the impenetrable City at night, and then the underground: the bunker, the revolver, the creeping leather, the peeled globes, the ink-and-blood-spattered record of conquest and dominion… He tears through the pages faster and faster, desperate to find himself in this moment, to integrate himself—to inter himself, perhaps—in this cloistered backroom and thus to exit for good whatever remains of the world beyond. To make it so that no Messiah can arrive anyplace except in the pages of the children’s story where he already did, long ago, fixing the world in its final form, with all talk of foundational cataclysm and reinvention quarantined within the stories Jakob read on a bench with his mother when he was young.
So appealing is this notion that now he can’t resist turning to look for the park across the street. If I can see myself over there, he thinks, I’m willing to end up as nothing but a degenerate old man in an occupied city, looking across that street until I or the street or the park cease to be.
Instead he sees a horde of these degenerates closing in. They take the step down to the alcove and regard him with eaten-away mouths and eyes that focus everywhere and nowhere at once, pulsing and dripping in their overlarge sockets. “Leave,” they gasp, trying and failing to speak in unison. “Leave the comics and get on the bus. Go where we refused to go. The park, the town, the whole world outside this one.” Now they whinny, slurping and panting as they struggle to remain upright. “It’s gone for us. We exist nowhere but here. This is what it’s like. If you exit the story, you will not find your way back in.”
Jakob feels himself losing touch, his blood drying and his feet losing purchase on the ground. He tips onto his hands and knees and crawls back toward the entrance, under the legs of the Jakobs who came here to warn him, to force him onto the bus and back to Nuremberg once again.
He makes it through their entwined legs, beneath their long genitals hanging from tattered shorts, and again into the underground square, running from the stationer’s, having renounced the comics, he suddenly believes, forever. He empties his pockets of everything but the bus ticket that someone must’ve placed in there, and he trips across the cobblestones, away from the park in which—he can’t resist a glance—he sees himself and his mother sitting on a bench with all their skin gone, comics they’re unable to read flapping in their laps, coffee cups full of leaves and bird poop beside them.
He forces his gaze away just before it gets stuck and hurries past the agents who nod approvingly, all too glad to see him go, and then he collapses at the feet of the bus driver, who must’ve pulled in while Jakob was browsing the shelves and was—Jakob knows he’s going to say this—“Just about to leave, young man.”
~
This time, the seats are reclining berths, stacked three atop one another on each side of the aisle. The passengers disperse as far as they can, occupying berths at the back, front, and middle of the bus, with Jakob in the middle as well, on the third level, where the ceiling presses against his nose. He stares at the screws and seams in the curved metal and breathes regularly, willing the bus to start moving. But it idles as the driver converses in an indistinct language outside, the automatic door puffing open and closed several times until, minutes later, three agents, as far as Jakob can tell with his head wedged in place, enter the bus, each carrying a bulging bag.
Over the next few minutes, these agents stack bodies into the berths, filling them systematically from the ground level, to the middle, to the top, passing without a word when they reach Jakob and the other passengers, stuffing each berth full of whatever body-like objects they have in their bags, then repeating their route with blankets.
After all the berths are full and everyone has a blanket, they announce something in their language and exit the bus. A moment later, an inspector boards and strolls the aisles with a flashlight, checking each berth. Though Jakob can’t tell whether she’s looking for live or inert bodies, he decides to keep as still as possible, holding his breath and riveting his eyes on the screws overhead when the heat of the flashlight passes across his neck.
~
Then the inspection is over and the bus is pulling out. The driver makes an announcement over the loudspeaker that consists of one or two words and several long sighs, then revs the engine, cruising through the underground in a fog so thick it obscures the point at which they reemerge into the outside world, one that, Jakob understands, he came very, very close to forsaking, and may still end up wishing he had. The last thing he sees before nodding off, in a detail that strikes him as overkill but which he nevertheless can’t help feeling proud of, is one of the roadside cults burning tall stacks of Jakob as Messiah comics and dancing in the smoke, chanting, “The False Testament is purged, the False Testament is purged… Jakob is back on the road again!”
III.
Jakob slumbers in his berth through the blackness of the hinterlands, in which no fires burn, and across an even remoter area beyond, which no passenger can behold while awake. Were anyone on the bus to refuse to sleep, Jakob dreams, the driver would pull over and wait until they disembarked or consented to go under.
Out of this slumber—or into it—at dawn, small bands of pregnant women emerge. They stumble up to the road in the gathering sun and stare at the bus with wide, accusing eyes, hefting their bellies at Jakob. More of them wait by the horizon, snapping into action when the bus crosses their line of vision, and hurry toward it, growing more numerous, their bellies swelling and straining and urging them forward faster than their legs can follow. They call and beckon to one another, seeping out of the background until they swarm the bus from both sides and block the road and force the driver to stop at the edge of the plaza he stopped at before, all perhaps right on schedule.
The driver cuts the engine and gets up to roam the aisle, spreading rosewater on the wrists of each sleeping passenger and caressing their foreheads with a soft towel, waking them gently. Outside, the women pace and grumble like widows left by a great war, almost done waiting for men who will never return. Brushing past them with his head down, Jakob steps out and enters a shop, its metal grate still only halfway open, to find the outfit he will wear at Nuremburg. If it’s true that today’s journey has been repeated many times before, then it’s also true that he lost his outfit somewhere along the way. Otherwise, his memories of having made this journey already are a vestige of something else, a blip or hiccup or coded sign, and in reality, he’s shopping for his trousers and dress shirt and brown plaid trench coat for the first time, asking the muscular young clerk in the tight felt vest and waxed beard and mustache how best to appear dignified and austere, like a man on a mission with no time for fools, without suffering any more discomfort than necessary.
The clerk helps him into the only clothes on the racks—the others look made of little more than dust and hair, hung there only for the effect, half-considered and then abandoned, of making the real outfit appear to have been carefully selected—and then, dressed in this outfit, Jakob stops at the café across the concourse, which has just opened, orders a hot coffee and a dish of sweet arms, and carries them back to the bus, aware—the thoughts enter like smoke pumped into the wound in his skull—that this will be his last meal until Judgment has been rendered.
By the time the bus drops him off at the school, the other passengers are so long gone that there’s no sign they were ever present. The driver salutes him as he climbs down onto the blacktop, and everything about the atmosphere points toward solemnity and formality, a man sent here by great powers to act decisively on their behalf.
Mr. Grotek, panting in the growing heat of the morning, also salutes at the edge of the portico. When Jakob indicates that he can stand down, he opens the door and leads the way past the front office and into the gym, where the folding tables for the subordinate judges are already set up on one side while, on the other side, past the long still ropes, some knotted for junior climbers and others sheer for those expert enough to shimmy unassisted, sit those awaiting their sentence.
Jakob avoids beholding them until he’s taken his seat, spreading his trench coat on the back of his folding chair and smoothing the French cuffs underneath. Mr. Grotek tests the ropes and then wheels in the AC caddy, plugging it into an extension cord connected to the same outlet as the pump for the inflatable trampoline. When the TV and VCR are ready, he looks at Jakob, perhaps awaiting some opening remark, but Jakob simply nods and sits up straight, steeling himself for the atrocity reel that has now begun to play.
~
The reel opens on scenes so familiar that Jakob can hardly see them anymore, and, indeed, he hardly watches. Pits of emaciated bodies; sputtering and coughing chimneys; crushed, looted shoes and spoons and rings and teeth; trains chugging through winter gloom into ashy smog; trim, bespectacled men injecting serums into the testes and wombs of infants. His eyes phase in and out, glancing over the stock trauma and then at the prisoners on the far side of the gym, their faces also smudged and crushed and, even in the relative dark, purple and deep green beneath their eyes and around their mouths and—Jakob looks fully away from the screen now, daring to forsake the very footage he’s been sent here, at considerable expense, through recently conquered enemy territory, to impassively behold—around their necks, where the marks of previous hangings are so pronounced that to hang them again seems beyond grotesque, beyond hilarious, and well into a category of poor taste that Jakob can think of no term for.
He blinks, gags, and tries to look back at the TV set, but finds now that he can’t locate it. He blinks again and pinches his nose and coughs into his fist as quietly as he can. Then, through a wave of sudden fear, he peeks over at Mr. Grotek, who’s staring back at him, a look of thorough menace on his thick, dry lips.
Jakob tries once more to find the TV set and reengage with the footage he’s been sent here to behold, but it remains aloof, everywhere and nowhere, the whole gym flickering with static that might be no more than dust. The accused children sit in their area, some of their heads on backwards, and, though he half-fears that Mr. Grotek will grab him on the way out and tie his neck to the climbing ropes instead of anyone else’s, he pushes up from his seat, clamping his hands over his mouth to hold in the vomit that’s risen from his throat, and dashes past the stage and out the doors that lead to the front office, shoving past his own decaying presence where it used to stand, or stands still in an older version of this same moment, between the front desk and the bulletin board crowded with globes the sixth graders labeled from memory.
~
He hurries through the old schoolhouse, swooning and tilting in and out of the form of a little boy running sickened from the gym, his hands over his face as vomit wells up behind them.
The bathroom doors swing open and he barrels past the low sink and through the low stall doors and leans over the tiny toilet and empties out the dough arms he’s swallowed, one after another after another, each black and blue and burnt from its time inside him. They come and come, more than he can imagine he ever ate, but there they are, smushed and coiled together, and his eyes water and his palms, wedged against the tile wall behind the toilet, sweat so much they slip. He catches himself on the toilet bowl and slides down to a seated position on the floor and pants in a silence that lasts for a single, much-needed minute.
Then the crackle of footsteps interrupts it. He pushes open the stall door with his foot to see the TV and VCR caddy propped beside the sink, the cord running beneath the closed bathroom door. He leans his head against the cold rim of the toilet and watches a nighttime scene of dozens of villagers tramping up a steep mountain path bearing muslin-wrapped bundles on their shoulders. As if in recompense for looking away in the gym, now he finds that whatever space extends between his eyes and the screen is purely notional—in reality, as he experiences it, his retinas sizzle against the hot glass.
The figures move slowly but the footage moves fast, jerky and urgent, the camera skipping around as if filmed by someone who knows they shouldn’t be there. When they arrive on the summit—a moment later, though the climb (Jakob begins to remember this story) must’ve taken many hours—they cross through a moonlit clearing and approach a cabin with glowing orange windows on the far side. When they draw near to the row of vicious metal spiders guarding the point where the open clearing abuts the tree-choked cabin’s property, an old man lurches toward them and says, in a heavy German accent, “Tonight you could do mercy. Tonight you could do nothing. But tonight you do spider.”
“Tonight we do spider!” the penitents shout, dropping their muslin bundles and kneeling to unwrap them. “Tonight we do spider!” they repeat, as they unwrap the bruised, strangled children within. The metal spiders, hearing themselves addressed, shake and twitch and stretch their pincers.
The man—Wieland, Jakob thinks—comes closer, letting his ratty robe hang open to reveal his white chest and swinging grey genitals. The penitents rise with the children in their arms and approach the spiders, who lower their pincers in anticipation. “Tonight the sentencing ends,” they whisper, facing the camera as if to make eye contact with Jakob in the boys’ bathroom, where once so much childhood vomit flowed from his core. “After tonight there will be no more Trials.”
They lift the children in their arms, brandish them above their heads, and, looking now to Wieland for permission to proceed, carry them up to the spiders’ outstretched pincers, which slip effortlessly into their overripe flesh. The spiders then raise their pincers and tip them downward so the children slide into their mouths, and, though Jakob is riveted, the footage cuts out here.
Perhaps there was more, but the screen goes black as the cord under the doorway jerks and shrivels and then a boy, his neck as purple as all the others in the gym upstairs, comes into the bathroom and stares at Jakob where he leans against the toilet.
“Let me go,” the boy says, in Wieland’s voice. “Let me go and I will let you go too. We can do this for each other. It’s not too late to leave the circuit, but it will be if you go back to the gym. Mr. Grotek has seen your kind before. It’s no problem for him to deal with you and call for a replacement.”
He pauses, rasping with the effort of summoning sounds his body is more than half a century too young to produce. Jakob tries to imagine a future other than the only one he can imagine. He tries to glimpse a third way, a narrow passage between leaving here with this boy who will grow into the Wieland he already remembers from his own youth, or returning in disgrace to the gym to be throttled by Mr. Grotek.
The boy ejects the video from the VCR and pulls the tape from the reels, playing with it like a cat with a ball of yarn while Jakob thinks, or uses up the time he feels he ought to use thinking. When this time has passed, he nods and says, “Alright, let’s go.”
Although this is what he’d asked for, the boy looks crestfallen and Jakob wonders what he’s doing here, what’s really happening, how far wrong things have gone and if there’s any parallel or adjacent scheme in which they might still go right. Are we falling back into the morass we both almost crawled out of? Did you too spend these last moments praying I’d think of a third way?
“I need to be pardoned,” the boy says. “You need to pardon me. I will not live in hiding.”
Jakob trembles and wonders how true this is, how much power he could still muster over the situation. He sees himself shrinking and Wieland growing, faster and faster until, ten minutes from now, he’ll be the little boy and Wieland will be the grown man and he’ll be the one begging for clemency, the Black Milk of Ambition sloshing in a cheesy goblet on the old man’s table in the middle of the night.
“No,” Jakob growls, summoning the courage to insist at least on this much. “No. There is no pardon. Leave here, flee, now. Disappear onto your mountaintop and don’t come down again.”
The boy trembles and grimaces while his eyes fill with tears. Behind them, a grudging but unmistakable look of respect shines through. Jakob feels he’s passed a test. He stands up straighter and licks the last of the vomit from his teeth and washes his mouth in the low sink and squirts bright pink soap onto his palms and says, “Show me the way out of here or I take you back upstairs.”
~
Jakob and Wieland exit through the side door that leads to the playground. They walk into the smoke-choked, eerily hot midday, the whole town bathed in the sick light emanating from the atrocity reel whose tape Wieland now carries wound around his knuckles. The light rises from the tape like dust and meets more of the same in the sky, which, Jakob thinks, was perhaps already that color, imprinting itself on the footage back when it was filmed.
Whatever the day has in store feels slack and distant, the air pressure so low that Jakob can’t be sure if time is passing. A pause, he thinks. A reprieve before whatever has to happen next has to happen. He wonders if perhaps he freed Wieland for no reason other than to enjoy this long, slow moment.
Determined to make the most of it, he walks as slowly as he can without standing still. When, nevertheless, they reach the swingset at the top of the playground that slopes down to the street below, he turns to the boy and says, “Okay, you were never here. I was never here. As far as I and the powers I represent are concerned, you were never caught. You vanished in Siberia. Understood?”
But Wieland is already gone, hoofing into the woods beyond the swingset. Jakob wonders how long until Mr. Grotek realizes that the Judge and one of the primary defendants have absconded together. Then he looks back the way he came and sees that it’s already occurred.
Mr. Grotek evidently got so angry he destroyed the schoolhouse, smashing the walls like the sides of a box, opening the closed structure until only the hanging children remain, the ropes extending out of sight, connected to something in the sky, or to the sky itself. They swing more and more wildly as the wind picks up, brushing Jakob’s puckered skin as he hurries down the playground slope, across the basketball and four-square courts, and onto the street along which he now runs like a fugitive, as culpable as Wieland in all that is to come.
IV.
Jakob makes it up the street and into a donut shop at the corner of Laurel and Main. He sits at a window table with a cruller and a cup of black coffee and pictures Wieland dragging the AV caddy out of the gym and down the stairs and into the boys’ bathroom. He knows that something more insidious and complex must also have occurred, something involving the footage itself, but that’s more than he can consider before he catches his breath and acclimates to the new phase he’s moved into. So, for the length of a cruller at least, he resolves to simply marvel at the strange-enough process of a young boy with an old man’s voice dragging his school’s TV and VCR console, with all of its trailing wires, down a steep staircase and into the cinderblock basement where he, Jakob, had holed up in a child’s toilet stall, leaving the entirety of the Nuremberg Trials unobserved in the gym overhead.
When the cruller is gone, Jakob walks back to the bus stop, if only to confirm that no bus is waiting there. That no trip to the City awaits. He passes beneath the children hanging from the sky, drifting like party balloons in a shuttered function hall, and sits on a bench where he feels, for a moment, terribly old, the bulk of his life behind him, the years of his ascent so far gone that they may as well have never happened, or have happened to someone else. “I am,” he takes a grim delight in telling himself, “no more than a lifelong resident of this town who once crossed paths with Jakob, the greatest-ever figure to come from here, and certainly the greatest to ever return.”
Bereft as he feels, and unsettled at the prospect that Mr. Grotek might emerge anytime in all his fury, something in Jakob knows to savor the moment. Something in him knows that, soon enough, this town, this bench, the bus that won’t come, the donut shop he just left, all of it will be part of what he means when he invokes The New Jerusalem, town of his origin, to which he can return only in dreams until the Messiah makes the Third Age a reality. “If not in my lifetime,” he hears himself say, “then maybe in my son’s, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or in his, or—”
~
A firm hand on his shoulder forces him across the glitch. He closes his mouth and looks up into the face of a woman he suddenly feels he’s always known. “It’s time,” she says, cradling her belly beneath her flowing cotton or linen dress. “Take me to the giant.”
Jakob takes her hand and rises to his feet and understands that the time to use up the last of his will has come. After this, perhaps he’ll be done for, his part played, his chips cashed in. Or perhaps he’ll be reborn, at last over the cusp he has for so long approached only to sink back into the froth he’d been swimming in before, the Old World growing only older by washing against the shore of the New.
He walks with this woman through overwhelming late afternoon heat along the bubbling asphalt of the road the bus would’ve taken until they reach the country cemetery a mile out of town and turn right, through the dry underbrush and the viper dens to climb the hill atop which the giant awaits. As they proceed, passing the first and then the second of two iron gates that pen in the cattle of whomever owns this land, townspeople emerge silently from the background, walking at the same pace from every direction, their eyes fixed on the earth in front of their feet with the same intensity they showed in Wieland’s video.
The woman shudders. “Hurry,” she gasps. “He’s coming.” She gives him a look that combines reproach and admiration. You did what needed to be done, even if it was a mistake. He wants to wait and read more in her gaze, some clue as to what’s next, but even he can tell that doing so would be a different kind of mistake, simpler and harder to forgive.
~
They make it to the summit just as the townspeople close in, quickly overflowing the cobbled lookout area and the turrets of the Spanish tower, so that some have to scramble back down, pushing still others further down beneath them. The woman removes her dress and lies atop it while Jakob climbs into the giant’s lap, same as he always does after the Trials, but this time, instead of climbing into its mouth, he climbs around to the back of its head, where the bullet hole gapes. From back here, he takes one last look at the country he will forever after struggle to rediscover. Then he climbs inside, through the dried blood and into what’s left of the giant’s brain.
The blackness blots out everything, so fully that Jakob can’t tell whether he’s moving inside the brain, struggling toward a distant light at its core—its soul, perhaps—or if he’s already been dissolved and merged into it, so that whatever distant light appears is reaching him not through his own eyes but through the giant’s, as it looks down to see the woman giving birth at its feet and understands that, as soon as the baby’s head emerges, the time to act will have come.
It waits along with the townspeople for the first glimpse of that head and then, electrified by their furious chanting—“The Messiah! The Messiah! The Messiah is born!”—the giant bellows so loudly it shreds its vocal cords as it bends over, swallows the mother and child, and then, as it rises, it reaches beneath the rocky summit to tear off the surface of the world. The townspeople run and dive and surf the twisting strips, to which cars, boulders, and the Spanish tower are stuck, while the giant rolls them into bundles, tossing them over its shoulder and into the nothingness in its wake. The town, the school, the bus stop, the donut shop, the children hanging from the sky: all gone, replaced by fresh, bruised skin, a world without dimension or population except for the baby and its mother, safe in the giant’s belly, and Jakob, somewhere in the giant’s brain.
The giant tears up the outskirts and the road to the next town and the rest plaza and the highway that once led to the City, tramping through blood and clumps of virgin flesh underfoot. And there is not only one giant, with only one Jakob and one mother and Messiah inside. All over the world, this scene is playing out, all the babies Jakob sired coming to bear at the same moment, spit out and swallowed up and hoisted in a sour sloshing belly while all the cities and roads and sites of any memory at all are torn from their grounding and rolled up and tossed to the wind, a frenzy of destruction and renewal so complete that, come morning, there will be no one left to appreciate how fully the world has been remade.
The giants rampage undeterred, motivated by nothing but the need for renewal, the need to stomp out of this world and into all that lies beyond it, until, just at the point where the world threatens to cease being for good, one of them shudders and swells, sparking with undigested ego in its core. It belches and tries, with all the strength in its body, to crush what has refused to die within it, but this thing—pure ego, pure will, the certainty that this world is not yet over, or that there is no other world—looms up and roars and forces this giant to turn on the others, ripping the towns and cities from their arms and spreading them haphazardly back atop the denuded earth, forcing the pieces down even though they don’t stick, stomping on their upturned corners, slaying one giant after another, bellowing, “I, I… I alone will triumph in a world that will have to exist long enough to see it happen! The arena of my ultimate becoming spreads forth beneath me alone and it is not through with me until I am through with it!”
When all the other giants are dead and enough of a world to walk upon has been flattened back onto the ground, its landmarks scrambled and shuffled nonsensically, the giant stops beside a dumpster, panting and sick with rage and shame at the thing in its belly that it could not digest. It wavers, aware that, if it vomits now, the night’s work will be for nothing. But the giant can’t hold it in. As if some infinitely powerful idea has implanted in there and demanded a body, the giant peels up the lid of the dumpster, leans over, and vomits the Messiah and his mother onto the pile of wigs and mannequin parts inside. Then it swoons, trips, and falls in the parking lot. When its head hits the concrete, it cracks like a pumpkin and a wiry Jakob, filled with rage, spills out.
He rises to his feet, shaken and alarmed, and hurries to the dumpster to retrieve his wife and nine-year-old son. When he’s gotten them out and onto the pavement, all three embrace and wait for the terror to subside. They wait for a modicum of familiarity, however slight and however fleeting, to find its way into their systems. At least enough to enable them to go into the buffet they’re looking at and order three breakfast specials and sit at a booth in back, near the sundae machine, and then, with any luck, pay with whatever currency the father finds in his pocket.
“The New Jerusalem,” the father says, when he feels steady enough to say it and to assume the role that having said it will cast him into. “It’s still a long way off, but we’re getting closer. I approached it last night, before forces beyond my ken flung me back, into this wasteland. I could see its light shining in the distance. Now,” he turns to his wife, who looks as exhausted as he feels, “let’s find the boy something to eat, and something for ourselves, before we proceed into the new day, whose trials will overshadow even those of the last.”
He shows the family in, ignoring the flapping curtain in the room’s brown depths, behind which Mr. Grotek sits with his chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes, recharging before another long day in the gym. The father takes three trays, allows the family to load them with whatever, given the night they’ve had, they believe they can keep down, and then leads them to an empty booth in the old smoking section on the lefthand side, where, behind the tabletop jukebox and the salt and pepper and ketchup caddy, they can see the bags of garbage they’d once taken for the body of a giant decaying in the summer sun, awaiting the truck that will bring them to Ragtown.
David Leo Rice is the author of the novels Angel House, The New House, The Berlin Wall, and the Dodge City Trilogy, as well as the story collections Drifter and The Squimbop Condition. He's online at www.raviddice.com.