WSR. Burden of the Christ Child.

There are no truths. What we parse as history is fiction, the loopy macrame of our own mythology. “I did this,” we say “but it wasn’t what it appeared to be”. Or “what it seemed I did wasn’t actually my doing, but was done to me. I then only did what needed to be done.” We temper the narrative to make heroism of our hubris, and refuse to mourn the death by fire of everything we contrived to burn.

Few years back there was a guy. Regular dude, bit of this, bit of that, all flecked with the other. Mainly Irish. All of a sudden one day, he’s Jewish. He’s schvitzing and kvetching, and ‘oy vay!’ he groans when there’s no schmear in the fridge at the Chopper. When a friend gets married, he wraps a glass in a tea-towel, stamps on it, booms ‘mazel tov!’ at the room, the baritone pebbles in his gizzard rumbling like Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof . Yubby dibby dibby dum. Sometimes being a white guy is too much to bear. Because there’s nobody to blame. Every opportunity afforded, squandered. It ought to be somebody’s fault. At dinner one night, a friend says, “Y’know a few million actual Jews were forced to wear the badge you appropriated to reinvent yourself as a victim. And then murdered. Doesn’t that seem a bit rude?” He bristles, glowers, and is silent. We won’t see him at this table again. Unaccomplished yet pretentious. The white man’s burden.

Autobiographies cannot be relied upon. Too richly veined with pride or humiliation to be anything other than the liturgies of thin-skinned revisionists, they are tales told by idiots in frayed embroidery, scarred with the holes where it was unpicked. We no longer think we raised the cup, saw the accident, fought in the war: we know we did. Prostrate in puddles of self-regard, we ask that you forgive us our trespasses, as we fail to forgive those that trespass against us. We don’t mean to lie, but we’re so much younger than we used to be, and with infancy frothing towards us like a racehorse, we cannot afford to relinquish vanity, our last redoubt against unending darkness. Know only this: we will love you through the flood and inferno, precisely because you stare back at us with that unwavering gaze. You are the only truths we ever told.

First Born into a fold of childless fornicators, you became, by default, the Christ Child, receiving all acolytes with the same pie-faced dispassion, causing them to squirm like a ball of worms for a glimmer of your approbation. And thus the seed of crypto-fascist Messianism was sewn. Over the years you learned to moderate the blankness of your Magda Goebbels gaze, garnishing it with a practiced smile that fooled each new snake into thinking it would not be crushed. Old Testament in your proclivities, all deadpan Moses stares and cold brimstone, you came three days early so as not to alert suspicion. Twenty-one today, in the frothing spate of your missing years, you’re winking at the world, sucking down skunk beer with mere mortals in Catskills basements; but wait a decade and it’ll be woe the fuck to you, lawyers and Pharisees.

You must have been five or six. We’d been to the coffee shop, and somehow (some measling whimper from a disaffected photographer) we’d become separated by the width of Lincoln Place. You were there, I was here; your eyes devoutly on mine, not seeing the cars charioteering by to beat the light. I gave the urgent sign. Stop. You took it as go. And ran. Now you’re 22, strong, clever, beginning a new life streets from here. But on this corner, and in the midnight corner of my mind, I still sweat at the parallel reality of the crumpling thud of metal on a child’s body. It’s all luck, living. We sleepwalk along the tightrope. Only the hidden lacerations, my thumb along dry lines of blood, speak to its enduring fragility.

Before you, there was just the hole you would fill; but because the hole was in clear air and couldn’t be seen, we didn’t know it was there. When your mother emerged from the bathroom on Water Street, grinning and double-blue-banded, she was already bellying the zygote that would shoulder the world off its axis. Even then I didn’t know. I only thought I’d hauled up the loveliest herring in the ocean. A few months later, sitting in a lamplit corner of St Vincent’s, I gazed into the primordial eyes of a freshly picked sea-cucumber and knew nothing would ever be the same. Sprung untimely from a faun’s belly after refusing (with both feet) to use the usual exit, you had a hole the size of a sixpence in your head, at the crown, as if trepanned in utero; a portal back to the dawn of time, to deep blue air that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. When I pressed my ear to it, I could hear the sea, the thump of blood, and everything it is to be human.

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