orphans, some lone folks you didn’t especially notice on a
regular day; but that night they stood out; the men with the
swords did them first. It took a long time, it’s hard to kill nearly
a thousand people one by one, by hand, and they had to hurry
because it had to be done before dawn, you can do anything in
the dark but dawn comes and it’s hard to look at love in the
light. We loved God and we loved freedom, we were all G o d ’s
girls you might say and freedom, then as now, was in getting
sliced; a perfect penetration, then death; a voluptuous compliance, blood, death. I f yo u ’re G o d ’s girl you do it the w ay He likes it and H e’s got special tastes; the naked throat and the
thing that tears it open, He likes one clean cut, a sharp, clean
blade; you lay yourself down and the blade cuts into you and
there’s blood and pain; and the eyes, there’s a naked terror in
the eyes and death freezes it there, yo u ’ve seen the eyes. The
blood is warm and it spreads down over you and you feel its
heat, you feel the heat spreading. Freedom isn’t abstract, an
idea, it’s concrete, in life, a sliced throat, a clean blade,
freedom now. G o d ’s girl surrenders and finds freedom where
the men always bragged it was; in blood and death; only they
didn’t expect it to be this w ay, them on their backs too, supine,
girlish; G o d ’s the man here. There’s an esthetic to it too, o f
course: the bodies in voluntary repose, waiting; the big knife,
slicing; the rich, textured beauty o f the anguish against the
amorphous simplicity o f the blood; the emotions disciplined
to submission as murder comes nearer, the blood o f someone
covers your arm or your shoulder or your hand and the glint o f
the blade passes in front o f your eyes and you push your head
back to bare your throat, slow ly so that you will live longer
but it looks sensual and lewd and filled with longing, and he
cuts and you feel the heat spreading, your body cools fast,
before you die, and you feel the heat o f your own blood
spreading. Was Sade God? M aybe I was just seventy; I was
born on the rock but the adults who raised me were new to it
and awkward, not native to the rock, still with roots down
below, on softer ground; I died there, a tough one, old, tough
skin from the awful sun, thick and leathery, with deep furrow s
like dried up streams going up my legs and up my arms and
creasing m y face, scarified you might say from the sun eating
up m y skin, cutting into it with white hot light, ritual scars or a
surgeon’s knife, terrible, deep rivers in my skin, dried out
rivers; and maybe I’d had all the men, religion notwithstanding, men are always the same, filled with God and Law but still
sticking it in so long as it’s dark and fast; no place on earth
darker than Massada at night; no boys on earth faster than the
Jew s; nice boys they were, too, scholars with the hearts o f
assassins. Beware o f religious scholars who learn to fight.
T h ey’ve been studying the morals o f a genocidal God. Shrewd
