Judas Tree
By Orestes

I used to think that I was an angel. I awoke under a Cercis tree in early spring, and I sat there for a long while, unconcerned about worldly things. It never dawned on me to wonder how long I had been there. Some men take a lifetime to arrive in that place, sitting beneath a tree, with no earthly desires. I only knew that I had started there.
I became a guest of an elderly man who had many animals and many possessions. His name was Hillel. He told me all about his blessings. I didn't understand, and so he taught me his faith.
Later he sent me away, but from what he had taught me, I decided that I might be an angel. I wasn't of the world of men, and if I was from the heaven that Hillel told me about, that made me an angel. It was my first perspective, taken from learning their faith - a collection of stories based on the teachings of Judaism. 
This was the holy land. Holy my ass. 
These days, I hear people debating about whether God was "different" back then, the way the Old Testament says He was angry, and spent His days punishing the wicked. I don't know, but from what I saw, they deserved it. Not just the Jews. Everyone.
Not that I'm so sure about God anymore, or even angels. But wickedness I'm sure of.
You see, I began to feel it. I started with very little desire. I don't even think I ate food for a long while. I was more detached from my own body. My awareness was of the oneness of everything, and the first place I felt hunger was when I saw it in the eyes of others.
It began a fascination that led me to learn about their appetites, not only for food, but for beautiful things made of gold and silk, for excitement, for status and for sex. In trading my ascetic existence for one driven by human desires, I first became aware of perversity. It was my deliberate decision to turn away from that which was good.
Since then, to be perfectly honest, I've been a freeloader. Not like I was at first - a contemplative wanderer who took company with those who offered it, and spoke of simple things. No. I began to take what wasn't mine, and it started to feel as if those appetites were truly my own.
To manipulate those desires was easy for me, and I began to feel it necessary over time.  In this last century, there was a time when I desperately wanted to leave continental Europe. 
There was a girl name Elyse. She was an artist, and I was sharing in her fascination, even fuelling it - with desperate needs borrowed from other artists I had known over time. It was a need to create beauty. That desire was so intense that she could barely manage to keep her hands from shaking with excitement as she painted.
When the most dangerous of times came, I twisted her in another direction. There was a town administrator named Pascal. He was married, but still needed to be loved.
I am normally very careful to avoid that one - the need for love. You see, whatever I touch in others, I've found, I develop an appetite for myself. I can always fill an appetite for fine food and material things. Sex is just as easy. With these desires, people can fill themselves, but shortly the appetite comes again. I'll always be able to find someone just a little bit desirous, and then pull it in any direction I want. But love - is much more troublesome.
This was, as I wrote before, what I felt to be a necessity. I planted in Pascal the idea that he could be truly loved by a woman, but only if he were to show compassion to her and her family. He was already attracted to Elyse. He knew her art, and had always seen her as unobtainable - too virtuous for the likes of him. Now that she was in harm's way it would be different, I convinced him without a word. A moment of eye contact was all it took.
As for Elyse, she didn't need too much adjustment. She loved me, something that I wouldn't allow her to tell me at the time. So she pretended I was her brother. Pascal used his connections, both legitimate and not, to make sure I was safely out of France. She stayed with Pascal, of course, trading her love for my freedom. I'm not sure if either of them believed she would be safe to stay behind, but she did.
I moved on, trying hard not to indulge it - that desire to be loved that I had nurtured in Pascal, and now was present in me.
That was over fifty years ago. Since then, more from habit now than anything, I've been reluctant to call myself a Jew. The question actually doesn't come up that often. The people I trade with - we have just a few things in common. I can spend an entire winter at Whistler, skiing all day, sharing food and drinks in the evening, and each evening find another soul to share sexual desires with, and still, it's rare that anyone *really* wants to know much about me.
" So where are you from?" the young woman asked me. Her parents, who I had been playing with for a couple of weeks, feigned curiosity about the answer.
" Israel," I told her.
" Really, what's it like?" she asked. She was interested, even excited. That was unexpected. People hardly ever genuinely listen.
" I've been gone a long time. It's probably different now."
" I'd love to go there someday, just to see where it all happened."
" Where it all happened?" I asked. I guess I knew what she meant, but I was intrigued by her. I wanted to hear her voice some more.
" You know. Where Jesus was born and died."
" Oh. I wasn't there for that," I stated. She took it as a joke.
Her name was Loela. 
" Short for Delores?" I asked her. 
Her mother answered. " No. Just Loela. I took it from a baby name book. It sounded pretty."
She was only there for the weekends, back from the University. So I knew I wouldn't have much time to work on her before she went back. Fortunately, I thought, it doesn't take much. There was a light touch, to see what she desired. Then, when I found her appetites, I twisted them in my direction. All of this was done in a momentary connection of our eyes.
To my surprise, and I was hardly ever surprised by people anymore, she didn't come to me that night.
I saw her before she left, and I knew I'd had my effect. She was shaken. She'd probably passed the night sleepless. She blushed when she saw me. She stole a kiss on my cheek before she left. I touched her mind again, and it was burning with the desire I had suggested. That's the way it seems to work. Elegant. I find that place where her desires live, and make a suggestion. I seed just an image or two. Then they become her own, spinning away in her head until she can't deny them a chance to become real.
Except that she *had* denied them.
I was living as a guest in their house, Paul and Tina. Tina was the mom. Paul was the stepfather. I found them on craigslist, looking for a threesome. I had shared enough pleasure with them that they invited me to stay, with family and friends accepting me as an interior designer for their ongoing renovations. The house was in Squamish, some distance from design consultants in Vancouver, so it made some manner of sense. It didn't matter. Most people tended to accept what I said as truth in any case.
Loela's self restraint on the weekend left me in an unusual position. I wasn't accustomed to denial and, as mentioned, when I manipulate these things, I can't help but take them into myself.
This one was a simple desire, so far as mine go these days. I liked her voice. I liked the look of her lips when she spoke. I wanted to see those lips pleasuring me. I transferred that desire to her mind.
This line of desire was somewhat reflexive now, given on to me from a gardener I had known in Venice. He had loved the voice of the lady of the house. I met her, and was not immediately moved by her voice. Perhaps it was my unfamiliarity with the language. My fascination with human desire tempted me, however, to understand him. The lady was not difficult. And he was right, in the end, that her lips were wonderful.
So now, when I appreciate a voice, it's not long before I appreciate the lips as well.
Since Loela had denied herself, and it would be a week before she visited again, I took it instead from her mother. I shouldn't have expected that it would satisfy me. She had please me that way before, after all. Only this time, it was without her husband, which signaled a bit of a betrayal. Still, it was not enough.
Loela's little sister Emily was my next attempt at a surrogate. She hadn't much experience at all, which made pushing her seem too simple a challenge. So I transferred in a  fantasy I had found in others. This idea was little more extreme in nature, which would be more difficult for her to ask for overtly.
Emily found her way to my room easily enough, and that she was inviting a sexual encounter was clear. But she flushed with color when it came time to speak.
" I want to try something..." she started. She was almost too nervous. I wondered how aware she was that this indecency was transplanted. It must have seemed very strange to her, this sudden desire. Or, rather, obsession. It must have seemed equally strange to Emily that she would be moved to act on it with so little consideration. 
Its extreme nature came from the minds of those more experienced in the oral arts.
" ... to take it in my throat," she paused, self-conscious, but not for long. " Deep down, I mean. I want you to finish that way. Have you... have you ever done that?"
Of course, I assured her. Perfectly normal. It takes some practice, though. I'll help you through it.
I kept her dressed in her nice pajamas. It suited me well to see her in those fine silk garments. Silk had been quite a prize, reserved for only the wealthiest when I first came to know of it. This fabric, of itself, had been a thing of desire. Now Emily, a girl unblemished by age - a virgin, no less - was positioning herself on her knees at the foot of my bed, dressed in that fine silk. I felt its softness against the flesh of my legs as I stepped into her.
She tried to take me all at once, just as she had imagined it. That was unrealistic, of course. She gagged on me when I swelled in her throat, providing me a truly heavenly sensation. It was intensified by anticipation. She would do it over and over, I knew. She would do so until the muscles in her diaphragm ached from retching, and still be feverishly driven to continue.
" Don't tease me, girl," I commanded, knowing that at this point, Emily would be looking for a firm hand to guide her.
I pressed on the back of her head, and looked in her eyes as they began to water involuntarily from the choking. I allowed her to try it that way for a long while. Eventually, she would be able to tame that reflex of her throat, but not tonight. She wouldn't be able to finish me that way.
The fronts of her silken garments were soaked with the froth of saliva and stomach fluid by the time I finally took her hand, and guided her to the bed. She was gasping, her face red from the exertion. I lay her on her back, and gently propped a pillow behind her head.
Emily was thankful that I wasn't giving up on her. She had wanted my help, and I wasn't going to disappoint her. I knelt over her face, my knees on either side of her chest. 
I gave it back to her, and let her swallow it into her mouth, not quite deep enough to trigger her gagging. I repositioned myself just slightly, and pivoted my hips until the angle was to my liking. Then I pushed in to my fullest.
She never bit down, but I could feel her muscles resisting me despite her desire. It was a wonderfully intimate moment, with the fullness of Emily's mind and body concentrated on this intrusion of her throat. 
Panic would be filling her now. Stopping to take a breath was no longer something that was in her control. It depended on me, and my rhythm. I gave her no measure of mercy, and this would be to her satisfaction, in the end. She craved that freedom from responsibility - knowing that I took my pleasure only from her passage without regard to her comfort or even consent.
When I finally released, I pushed deep and held myself there for a long while. The girl would get no air until I was emptied. 
Then I withdrew from her, resting my spit-covered member on her face until she caught her breath and cleaned me.
Still, it did not satisfy me fully. Her sister Loela would have had a much gentler encounter. This substitution, no matter how entertaining, would not suffice. A couple thousand years of absorbing these sinful desires, and in the end, it was nothing so extreme or complex that I yearned for. 
No matter, I told myself. She was back on Saturday, and I would have her then.
" Let's go for a walk," Loela suggested to me, not long after she came through the door. She pulled her book bag back onto her shoulder, and beckoned me to join her. There was no change in the intensity of her appetite. I had gauged that the moment we made eye contact. I thought that maybe the invitation was  for her to have me alone, so that she could satisfy herself.
Instead, she wanted to talk about photography. She brought out some prints from her portfolio.
" I thought you might have an eye for this sort of thing," Loela told me, but she didn't explain why. My cover story as a designer may have been her reason, but I thought not. 
I looked through them slowly, walking with her. 
" You have talent," I appraised truthfully. "But I find these disappointing."
I caught her eye to see how she took me. Her desire for my approval was not so strong as I would have guessed.
" All art is erotic," I tried to explain. " Gustav Klimt said that to a writer, but never to me. I saw it in his art. Your photography seems too controlled, too passive."
" I studied Klimt last semester. And you expect me to believe you spoke with him?"
" No."
" His art is beautiful," she acknowledged. "But that's not the only definition of art."
" Who is your audience?"
" Pardon me?"
" Klimt's definition is simple, and it is true because he created his art for his audience. The human soul is full of desire. So who is your audience?"
She walked silently, in her own thoughts. I broke the silence, concluding my argument.
" So unless your audience is of saints or angels, his definition is valid."
Loela turned and kissed me. I expected it to lead to surrender, but it didn't.
When she withdrew herself from the kiss, I cocked my head in curiosity.
" I want to know you better," was all she said. She wasn't rejecting, but delaying. We walked home in silence.
I wanted to know her better as well, but I had spent many years practicing my lack of restraint. Over the next two days, whenever our eyes met, I explored her desires further. I intensified them. I twisted them. I transplanted in ideas that she had never imagined. With my experience, I knew which existing desires to tack them onto.
Again, on the morning she left for school, I could see how these extreme desires had worn upon her. It confounded me that she could resist. Over time, I had met people committed to their relationships, or careers, or religions... none of whom took much convincing to throw it all away to satisfy their desires.
Loela had taken it all. Her desires now burned more brightly than I had ever seen, but she still held back.
And she had unwittingly left me to take out my sexual frustration on her family again.
Her mother I disposed of.
That's a harsh way to put it, but true. I found a secret by exploring her mind. A few years earlier, Tina had taken a lover that she never told Paul about. She had broken it off because the man had been dangerous and selfish, pushing her towards the drug scene. I was careful not to touch the desire for drugs, much. It wouldn't do to have that hunger for myself. I gave her a nudge towards him, the lover. The drugs... I just barely addressed, softening her resolve ever so slightly. But to him, I gave her a powerful desire to submit.
Yes, he would have her doing drugs. She would never deny her lover of this. Within a few weeks, Tina would be earning money on her back for this man. I think she already knew that when she called him.
Perversity is a bitch. And we're all full of it. Or at least I am.
I said goodbye with a long kiss before she left. Tina never said goodbye to her husband in person. Maybe she left him a message with some short-term explanation for her absence. I didn't ask.
When I did catch up with Paul, it was on another matter. He liked to take a little whisky in the evening. I poured him a drink, and caught his eye long enough to wake up a suppressed desire. Taboos make fine targets. Paul had been with Tina long enough that he had put any sexual feelings for Loela and Emily out of his mind.
" I've had her to my room," I informed him, after a second drink. I was pouring him a third already, pressing this along quickly because I had already prepared Emily. "She's there right now, if you're interested."
After our encounter the previous week, she had been practicing with a new boyfriend. The boy must have felt quite fortunate to have a girl so eager to please him. I was looking forward to seeing how much she had improved. 
The new boyfriend would soon have something else to be thankful for. Emily was concerned, I knew, about the risk of pregnancy. I had twisted her once around that impulse. Now I pushed her again. This other way would require practice to get accustomed to as well.
I suppose you think I should feel guilty. I won't justify these things or their consequences beyond this: I didn't create these impulses in men. I was connected to everything, without any stake in them at first. Then I learned to take pleasure, and I navigated my way through. But it was all here when I came, and this kind of sin is present in the world with or without me.
Their destruction was set in motion, and if I was to feel guilty, it would not be until after I was done.
I started her off by letting her take me in her throat. I felt every part of her tense when she noticed her stepfather was in the room. I mastered her in that moment, keeping her involved in the act. I worked in her mind to press in the desire to be enjoyed by him.
Emily was on her hands and knees this time. I had asked her to take off her silk pajamas, so she was naked. She folded them neatly on my dresser. I had enjoyed that detail very much. Now she shuddered when Paul approached her, and whimpered when he touched her nakedness. I held her to the task, and I reminded her of her other request.
" He's here to help us, " I told Emily.
That it would be her stepfather to sodomize her was almost too much for the teen to take. She was shaking with desire, intensified I knew by the taboo involved. She reached back and began to rub herself, but I scolded her.
"  Focus on your task," I instructed. I reached down to redirect her hand back to steadying her position for my pleasure.
Paul knew what she wanted, and he was not inexperienced. I had seen him do this to Emily's mother a number of times. He loosened her first, pushing the clear gel into her with his fingers. He took his time, enjoying this access to her. He must have desired her, in fleeting little moments, seeing her walk around their yard in a swimsuit, or when she was dressed for dance practice. 
Emily was lean, with a tight rear, and small breasts, lending her to look younger than her age. That innocent look of hers would have given him another reason to deny the existence of his lust, if I had not tampered with him. As it was, she both whimpered with discomfort, and pressed herself into his exploring fingers with desire.
When he finally mounted her, she cried out, or surely would have if I was not lodged in her throat. It didn't matter how much I made her want it. Those muscles would need to be painfully stretched for her to be used that way.
I let him go at her for a while, enjoying all the little sounds and cries she made around me. Then I told the girl we wanted to switch. Paul and I held our places. I preferred to see her do the switch, to signal her willingness to please. She dislodged herself from each of us, and crawled around to her new position, with her stepfather at her lips and her rear raised in my direction. I could feel her drool running off of me.
She gagged worse than usual when she tasted herself on him. I hadn't warned her to clean herself. This way was more entertaining.
When I pushed in, I didn't take it gently to her like Paul had. I was frustrated, I'll admit. Her sister had left me like this. I had to take my pleasure from petty things, like riding her until I was quite close, and then switching again with Paul.
I must have done it a half dozen times before Paul lost it, and emptied against her lips while withdrawing. Then, I lay her back down and followed suit, releasing over her face before letting her clean us both.
A little bit of guilt came back to me then. I suspected that my tampering would drive Emily to practice her new skills, often and with many partners. I had taken a lot from her, and before I left town, I took only one more; her sister's cell phone number.
" Loela, I want to see you. Could you meet me downtown?"
I called her on Wednesday.
" I'll be at an antique store, east 8th and Main."
There was a little café beside the antique store. It was, like much of this part of town, slightly shabby. It was as if the buildings were just waiting to be knocked down and replaced with something shiny. Loela joined me at a table.
She looked edgy and tired. I had used much more than my customary amount of force in pressing her desires, and it had clearly taken its toll.
" I'm glad you called. I've been thinking of you," Loela told me, as she dropped her book bag onto an empty seat beside us. She'd caught a bus, and come straight from her afternoon classes.
" I've been thinking of you too, but not in the same way."
" You're not falling in love?"
" No. I avoid that when I can."
" Why?"
There was no need to hide it now, since I had already made up my mind. I told her about where I had come from, and what I had done. I would have told her what I am as well, if I had any idea for myself.
Her reaction was hard to read, and I didn't venture inside this time. I wanted to see it as it came naturally. She played it calm, not yet disputing what I had told her.
" So this is what you've become."
" Yes."
" And you're satisfied with it?"
" No. That's the point with human desire. It can never be satisfied permanently. I carry it all with me, everything I have touched in the minds of others. I absorb it, manipulate it, release it in others when it suits me, often to their detriment."
" And you've done this to me?"
" Yes."
" That would explain some things I've been feeling. Let's suppose for a moment that I believe you. For the sake of argument, can you undo it? Does it wear off?"
" I've never tried to undo it. After I set something in motion, it's safer for me to keep my distance from it. The closer I'm exposed, the more it amplifies my own appetites. To engage it fully enough to try to stop it, or to engage the wrong impulse... well, I try to be careful that way. As for wearing off, my impression is that it doesn't. I don't often stay around to see the story ends, but where I've seen these people again, they're still struggling with it."
" I'm so torn apart inside from controlling this. I don't want to stay this way."
" You won't" I answered.
Then I took it from her. I broke all of my own rules, and engaged it. I destroyed it in her, the thing that was holding her back. I attacked it with such force that I hardly even acknowledged it. I simply absorbed it into myself, something to be dealt with later, when my needs subsided.
The change in Loela was immediate. She was no longer conflicted, so my word was kept. Her needs were at the surface now, urgent and uncontrollable. She fairly vibrated with them.
I took her hand gently, and began to walk. I had chosen this antique store, this café, with another destination in mind.
The Fox Cinema was shabby too, but it served my needs. It was an adult theater, playing dated porn flicks on a crackled screen. There were a few other guys in the theater. They watched with interest as we took our seats. The days when a normal couple would come to a mainstream theater to see porn were long gone. Sometimes prostitutes were paid in, but Loela didn't look the part.
Despite their attention, and the distasteful setting, Loela was upon me as soon as she could set down her pack. She pressed hard into me for a kiss.
" No," I denied her. I hadn't brought her here for kissing, or anything that seemed like love. I was desperate for it, in truth, but she was in much worse shape, so I controlled the scene. I was in a vindictive mood, punishing her for denying me so long.
I unbuttoned my jeans, and let her see me. Loela immediately began to nuzzle her face into my lap, ready to satisfy my original suggestion to her.
" No."
I pulled her back again. I kept her ready for that, burning for it. Instead, I showed her how to stroke me, slowly so that I would have time to enjoy it.
Then I ignored her. I pivoted back in my seat a bit and watched the film. 
It would be torture for her, I knew, to hold herself back from me. She wanted to be sodomized. She wanted to be throated. She wanted to forced, and mauled, and used up. But I restrained her. Twice more, I told her no, restraining her from pleasuring herself, and from tempting me into her mouth.
No. I would take it slowly, focusing on the tired old filth from the movie screen, rather than the bright, beautiful girl beside me who wanted my love.
I didn't last as long as I wanted. I closed my eyes for a moment and released on her. She stroked me through it, breathing as heavily herself. I had purposely chosen a seat on the aisle to allow myself this moment. I left her there, feeling used but unsatisfied, with my seed running down the back of her fist. The other men had closed in now, and soon they would be brave enough to try her, and to find her very receptive.
That was the end of Loela.
But not quite.
With my hunger for her finally satisfied to some measure, and the customary let-down upon me, I surveyed what I had destroyed in her. As you'll recall, I suppressed it in her violently, and hadn't given it much thought until now.
It was what she had used to hold off her desires, and now it was present in me. It was simple. She had held off her desires with another desire.
Loela's desire was for forgiveness, this desire born of her faith.
Many have spoken to me about faith over the years, but they had succumbed so willingly to their other desires, I had always assumed they were liars. Not Loela. 
This is a problem for me, as it turns out. She was genuine. She really loved me, and she served her faith truly, with a desire for forgiveness in her heart. I swallowed that desire whole, and it will be the end of me, I think. It's working on me now, as I write this.
Guilt is not the same thing, by the way, as a desire for forgiveness. I've lived with one for a long time, and the other for a very short while.
I'm writing this as I fly back to Isreal, where I began. I don't know what I'll do. Maybe I'll use this new thing in me to repair some of the sins I've partaken in. Maybe not. 
I think that first I'll find a tree somewhere that seems familiar, a Cercis tree if I can, and I think I'll hang there for a while.

