One night as Yitzhak Maier awoke from uneasy dreams in Jerusalem he found himself transformed into a searing prophet.
Yitzhak Maier grew up in Tel Rumeida, a disputed Israeli settlement outside Hebron, oldest of all Jewish settlements, eternally disputed, now and forever. "Then Abram came and built his tent in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar to the Lord." Genesis 13:18, and from that verse came 3000 year disputation.
In his dreams Yitzhak was six or seven, playing alone in the public playground 200 feet from his childhood home abbetting a concrete wall against which dozens of nephews and nieces and cousins bounced balls every day.
The earth shook. The wall crashed upward. And there emerged a cave, out from which grew a mouth, and out from the mouth emerged not Palestinians but Patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, all green from decomposition but otherwise perfectly preserved in bearded biblical majesty. Then the matriarchs, beaded and perfumed in bright wears, with their husbands' concubines to carry their earthenware, unbeaded and dirty with torn brown clothes on the verge of slipping. Joseph appeard next in his Egyptian head dress, carried aloft by four servants in his golden tomb, sitting upright and covered by his many colored cloak. Then King David, wearing nothing but a lute, a loincloth, and oil. Then Herod the Great, similarly nude as hundreds of maggots ate at him from every side even as he walked. Behind these two kings, a Sultan. Saladin the Great atop a horse, wearing his five-crowned turban.
Then flew the child Yitzhak Maier among the patriarchs and kings over the concrete wall and they all landed invisibly amid Palestinian Hebron at night where Palestinians slept as peacably in their beds as did Yitzhak Maier. A distant smell of hookah pet the nose and the bassline of Arab disco the ear.
And Abraham did point to a building, and there saw Yitzhak Maier the building, and the building was a tenement highrise. And into the building charged a pack of zealots, lead by Judah of Galilee, and the zealots did barge the doors down, the screams of the murdered in bed unmistakable. No guns, merely Arabic shrieks and the all too distinct timbre of blades piercing flesh.
And suddenly Yitzhak Maier was back in his old playground, watching modern Israeli university students reclined upon sofas ornately draped as naked Persian women fed the grapes by hand. And as the Greek Philosophers asked them questions, Yitzhak Maier's early Yeshiva classmates fed the philosophers grapes. And after every question, another Yeshiva child of Yitzhak Maier's early years would begin to cry inconsolably, thereby catching the attention of a Roman centurion, who one by one would take the child to the other side of the playground, where his legionnaires would impale Yitzhak Maier's classmates on a pike.
Through the mouth of the cave ran the zealots as though driven by chariot. The zealots killed the philosophers, then killed the modern Israelis, then the Roman legionnaires and centurians. Then the zealots killed Yitzhak Maier's remaining classmates, then even the naked Persians.
And even before the zealots killed a second legionnaire there arrived more roman soldiers: 8, 80, 480, eventually 5000 of them watching the massacre in passive formation.
The zealots finished their killing, and frezied but moments ago, they stood as quietly as a Christian awaiting their turn with a lion. Eight legionnaires went about the duty of mounting the Zealots on crosses. The Zealots dutifully screamed as the nails slid through their wrists and ankles and groaned their weight upon the mounted wood.
The legion mounted their own dead atop a pyre of wood and oil, and amid the sticks were all the Greeks, Israelis, Palestinians, Persians of all ages already seen, and many other corpses besides. And with a jar of oil they set the playground alight.
And then, of course, charged a group of ten thousand Muslims through the cave led by a general with no face. They fought every Roman soldier to the ground, then lined them up and beheaded them one by one.
And then charged through the gate Britons, Germans, French, each with chained armor and each of the three with a different colored cross on their shield. The charge each of each army led by a separate king, each with a jeweled crown which never left his head even as every jewel ever more heavily enwrapped splashes by blood. Through the gate marched all the wives and children of the Islamic soldiers. The vanquished Muslims were forced to watch as Christians beheaded every family member, and only then sent the soldiers headless to the devil. When everyone else was dead, the three kings took turns stabbing and slicing the general through every extremity, and as the Christians cheered, the Crusader kings carved a face into his head.
But Mamluks of ever greater ferocity charged next through the mouth, the bejeweled Turkic elegance of their uniforms betokening artistic cruelty. And as the Mamluks fought, their sickles expertly stripped through the chains of crusader uniforms, then through their clothes, and then their skin - not just small appendages but entire bodies, sliced throufh like skin on a sunfish. Many Christians fought the rest of the battle as jellies of meat. Those Christians left artisanally unbutchered before surrender were butchered in the execution, vivisected through the waist, their top halfs then impaled on the remaining Roman spikes unused to impale Yeshiva children. The Christian bottom halves were crucified on the old Roman crosses like zealot soldiers.
But all through these horrors came a new, much more modern sort of Briton, not charging through the gate but ambling at a civilized pace. They did not kill, they merely looked on, striken with horror, whispering affront and scandal as the women fainted. Eventually they stopped the butchery with single gunshot. A well dressed spokesperson with a dandyish goatee made a speech about how senseless this bloodshed and tyranny. The formerly victorious soldiers threw down their swords, won over instantly. Other Britons, more silent ones, collected the surrendered weaponry. The spokesman told them that in exchange for these swords they would have ploughs and prosperity. The spokesman walked back through the gate, saying he would return with all the provisions needed for peace. These drab British soldiers sat amid their colorful and newly peaceful brothers. A few minutes of silent waiting passed, and these newly peaceable brothers in humanity began to shrivel and crumble: their uniforms, their strength, their very bodies turned to rot. They no longer could stand, nor breathe, turned quickly to skin and bones, then bones, then dust.
And onto what was once the playground errupted a giant tank, exploding not through the cave but through the wall, which immediately road over all at once there the bodily remnants, the playground, the cave, the mouth, all ground into something flat, and there was no remnant that anything happened. And through the tank's exploded hole emerged thousands of Palestinians pouring out like water from a blown dam - some exclaiming joy, some exclaiming rage.
And then Yitzhak Maier woke up with a scream, waking up his Yeshiva roommate, Benny."
"Yitzhak, come on, it's five thirty in the morning!"
"I'm sorry Benny, I just had the most incredible dream!"
"So did I."
"What was your dream?"
"That I'd get a new roommate who'd shut the fuck up for another hour. GO BACK TO SLEEP!"
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