Messiah

by Gore Vidal

  "What date?" This was unexpected.

  "The year? I don't recall. About thirty years old, I should say."

  There was a silence. "Of course yours is a special case, being marooned like this. There's a ruling about it which I think will protect you fully since you've had no contact with the outside; anyway, as a Communicator, I must ask you for your old copy."

  "Why certainly but . . ."

  "I'll give you a new one, of course. You see it is against the law to have any Testament which predates the second Cavite Council."

  I was beginning to understand: after the schism a second Council had been inevitable even though no reference to it has ever appeared in the Egyptian press. "The censorship here is thorough," I said. "I had no idea there had been a new Council."

  "What a bunch of savages!" Butler groaned with disgust. "That's going to be one of our main jobs, you know, education, freeing the press. There has been almost no communication between the two spheres of influence . . ."

  "Spheres of influence." How easily the phrase came to his lips! All the jargon of the journalists of fifty years ago has, I gather, gone into the language, providing the inarticulate with a number of made-up phrases calculated to blur even their none too clear meanings. I assume of course that Butler is as inarticulate as he seems, that he is typical of the first post-Cavite generation.

  "You must give me a clear picture of what has been happening in America since my retirement." But I rose to prevent him from giving me, at that moment at least, any further observations on "spheres of influence."

  I stood for a moment, resting on my cane: I had stood up too quickly and as usual suffered a spell of dizziness; I was also ravenously hungry. Butler stamped out a cigarette on the tile.

  "Be glad to tell you anything you want to know. That's my business." He laughed shortly. "Well, time for chow. I've got some anti-bacteria tablets they gave us before we came out, supposed to keep the food from poisoning us."

  "I'm sure you won't need them here."

  He kept pace with my slow shuffle. "Well, it increases eating pleasure, too." Inadvertently, I shuddered as I recognized yet another glib phrase from the past; it had seemed such a good idea to exploit the vulgar language of the advertisers. I suffered a brief spasm of guilt.

  3

  We dined together in the airy salon which was nearly empty at this season except for a handful of government officials and businessmen who eyed us without much interest even though Americans are not a common sight in Egypt. They were of course used to me although, as a rule, I keep out of sight, taking my meals in my own room and frequenting those walks along the river bank which avoid altogether the town of Luxor.

  I found, after I had dined, that physically I was somewhat restored, better able to cope with Butler. In fact, inadvertently, I actually found myself, in the madness of my great age, enjoying his company, a sure proof of loneliness if not of senility. He too, after taking pills calculated to fill him "chock full of vim and vigor" (that is indeed the phrase he used), relaxed considerably and spoke of his life in the United States. He had no talent for evoking what he would doubtlessly call "the large picture" but in a casual, disordered way he was able to give me a number of details about his own life and work which did suggest the proportions of the world from which he had so recently come and which I had, in my folly, helped create. On religious matters he was unimaginative and doctrinaire, concerned with the letter of the commands and revelations rather than with the spirit such as it was, or is. I could not resist the dangerous maneuver of asking him, at the correct moment of course (we were speaking of the time of the schisms), what had become of Eugene Luther.

  "Who?"

  The coffee cup trembled in my hand. I set it carefully on the table. I wondered if his hearing was sound. I repeated my own name, long lost to me, but mine still in the secret dimness of memory.

  "I don't place the name. Was he a friend of the Liberator?"

  "Why, yes. I even used to know him slightly but that was many years ago before your time. I'm curious to know what might have become of him. I suppose he's dead."

  "I'm sorry but I don't place the name." He looked at me with some interest. "I guess you must be almost old enough to have seen him."

  I nodded, lowering my lids with a studied reverence, as though dazzled at the recollection of great light. "I saw him several times."

  "Boy, I envy you! There aren't many left who have seen him with their own eyes. What was he like?"

  "Just like his photographs," I said, shifting the line of inquiry: there is always the danger that a trap is being prepared for me. I was noncommittal, preferring to hear Butler talk of himself. Fortunately, he preferred this too and for nearly an hour I learned as much as I shall ever need to know about the life of at least one Communicator of Cavesword. While he talked, I watched him furtively for some sign of intention but there was none that I could detect; yet I was suspicious. He had not known my name and I could not understand what obscure motive might cause him to pretend ignorance unless of course he does know who I am and wishes to confuse me, preparatory to some trap.

  I excused myself soon afterwards and went to my room, after first accepting a copy of the newest Testament handsomely bound in Plasticon (it looks like leather) and promising to give him my old proscribed copy the next day.

  The first thing that I did, after locking the door to my room, was to take the book over to my desk and open it to the index. My eye traveled down that column of familiar names until it came to the L's.

  At first I thought that my eyes were playing a trick upon me. I held the page close to the light, wondering if I might not have begun to suffer delusions, the not unfamiliar concomitant of solitude and old age. But my eyes were adequate and the hallucination, if real, was vastly convincing: my name was no longer there. Eugene Luther no longer existed in that Testament which was largely his own composition.

  I let the book shut of itself, as new books will. I sat down at the desk, understanding at last the extraordinary ignorance of Butler: I had been obliterated from history; my place in time erased. It was as if I had never lived.

  Three

  1

  I have had in the last few days some difficulty in avoiding the company of Mr Butler. Fortunately, he is now very much involved with the local functionaries and I am again able to return to my narrative. I don't think Butler has been sent here to assassinate me but, on the other hand, from certain things he has said and not said, I am by no means secure in his ignorance; however, one must go on. At best, it will be a race between him and those hardened arteries which span the lobes of my brain. My only curiosity concerns the arrival next week of his colleague who is, I gather, of the second generation and of a somewhat bookish turn according to Butler who would not, I fear, be much of a judge. Certain things, though, which I have learned during the last few days about Iris Mortimer make me more than ever wish to recall our common years as precisely as possible for what I feared might happen has indeed, if Butler is to be believed, come to pass, and it is now with a full burden of hindsight that I revisit the scenes of a half century ago.

  2

  I had got almost nowhere with my life of Julian. I had become discouraged with his personality though his actual writings continued to delight me. As it so often happens in history I had found it difficult really to get at him: the human attractive part of Julian was undone for me by those bleak errors in deed and in judgment which depressed me even though they derived most logically from the man and his time: that fatal wedding which finally walls off figures of earlier ages from the present, keeping them strange despite the most intense and imaginative recreation. They are not we. We are not they. And I refused to resort to the low trick of fashioning Julian in my own image of him. I respected his integrity in time and deplored the division of centuries. My work at last came to a halt and, somewhat relieved, I closed my house in the autumn of the year and traveled west to California.

  I had a small income which made
modest living and careful travel easy for me . . . a fortunate state of affairs since, in my youth, I was of an intense disposition, capable of the passions and violence of a Rimbaud without, fortunately, the will to translate them into reality; had I had more money, or none, I might have died young, leaving behind the brief memory of a minor romanticist. As it was, I had a different role to play in the comedy; one for which I was, after some years of reading beside my natal river, peculiarly fitted to play.

  I journeyed to southern California where I had not been since my service in one of the wars. I had never really explored that exotic land and I was curious about it, more curious than I have ever been before or since about any single part of the world. Egypt one knows without visiting it, and China the same; but that one area of sandy beaches and orange groves which circles the city of Los Angeles, an artificial place created from desert and sure to lapse back again into dust the moment some national disaster breaks its line of life and the waters no longer flow, has always fascinated me. I was of course interested in the movies, though they no longer had the same hold over the public imagination that they had had in earlier decades when a process of film before light could project, larger than life, not only on vast screens but also upon the impressionable minds of an enormous audience made homogeneous by a common passion, shadowy figures which, like the filmy envelopes of the stoic deities, floated to earth in public dreams, suggesting a braver more perfect world where love reigned and only the wicked died. But then time passed and the new deities lost their worshipers: there were too many gods and the devotees got too used to them, realizing finally that they were only mortals, involved not in magical rites but in a sordid business. Television (the home altar) succeeded the movies and their once populous and ornate temples, modeled tastefully on baroque and Byzantine themes, fell empty, the old gods moving to join the new hierarchies, becoming the domesticated godlings of television which, although it held the attention of the majority of the population, did not enrapture, did not possess dreams or shape days with longing and with secret imaginings the way the classic figures of an earlier time had. Though I was of an age to recall the gallant days of the movies, the nearly mythical power which they had held for millions of people, not all simple, I was not really interested in that aspect of California. I was more intrigued by the manners, by the cults, by the works of this coastal people so unlike the older world of the East and so antipathetic to our race's first home in Europe. Needless to say, I found them much like everyone else, except for minor differences of no real consequence.

  I stayed at a large hotel not too happily balanced in design between the marble-and-potted-palm decor of the Continental Hotel in Paris and the chrome and glass of an observation car on a newer train.

  I unpacked, telephoned friends most of whom were not home. The one whom at last I found in was the one I knew the least, a minor film writer who had married money with great success and had, most altruistically, given up the composition of films for which the remaining movie-goers were no doubt thankful. He devoted his time to assisting his wife in becoming the first hostess of Beverly Hills. She had, I recalled from one earlier meeting, the mind of a child of twelve, but an extremely active child and a good one.

  Hastings, such was the writer's name (her name was either Ethel or Valerie, two names which I always confuse due to a particularly revolutionary course I once took in mnemonics), invited me immediately to a party. I went.

  It seemed like spring though it was autumn, and it seemed like an assortment of guests brought together in a ship's dining room to celebrate New Year's Eve though, in fact, the gathering was largely made up of close acquaintances. Since I knew almost no one, I had a splendid time.

  My hostess, beyond a brilliant greeting, a gold figure all in green with gold dust in her hair, left me alone. Hastings was more solicitous, a nervous gray man with a speech impediment which took the form of a rather charming sigh before any word which began with an aspirate.

  "We, ah, have a better place coming up. Farther up the mountains with a marvelous view of the, ah, whole city. You will love it, Gene. Ah, haven't signed a lease yet, but soon." While we talked he steered me through the crowds of handsome and bizarre people (none of them was from California I discovered: most were Central Europeans or British; those who were not pretended to be one or the other; some sounded like both). I was introduced to magnificent girls exactly like their movie selves but since they all tended to look a great deal alike, the effect was somehow spoiled. But I was a tourist and not critical. I told a striking blonde that she would indeed be excellent in a musical extravaganza based upon The Sea Gull. She thought so too and my host and I moved on to the patio.

  Beside a jade-green pool illuminated from beneath (and a little dirty, I noticed, with leaves floating upon the water: the décor was becoming tarnished, the sets had been used too long and needed striking. Hollywood was becoming old without distinction), a few of the quieter guests sat in white iron chairs while paper lanterns glowed prettily on the palms and everywhere, untidily, grew roses, jasmine and lilac: it was a fantastic garden, all out of season and out of place. The guests beside the pool were much the same; except for one: Clarissa.

  "You know each other?" Hastings' voice, faintly pleased, was drowned by our greetings and I was pulled into a chair by Clarissa who had elected to dress herself like an odalisque which made her look, consequently, more indigenous than any of the other guests; this was perhaps her genius: her marvelous adaptiveness.

  "We'll be quite happy here," said Clarissa, waving our host away. "Go and abuse your other guests."

  Hastings trotted off; those who had been talking to Clarissa talked to themselves and beneath a flickering lantern the lights of Los Angeles, revealed in a wedge between two hills, added the proper note of lunacy, for at the angle from which I viewed those lights they seemed to form a monster Christmas tree, poised crazily in the darkness.

  Clarissa and I exchanged notes on the months that had intervened since our luncheon.

  "And you gave up Julian, too?"

  "Yes . . . but why 'too'?" I was irritated by the implication that I gave up all things before they were properly done.

  "I feel you don't finish things, Eugene. Not that you should; but I do worry about you."

  "It's good of you," I said, discovering that at a certain angle the Christmas tree could be made to resemble a rocket's flare arrested in space.

  "Now don't take that tone with me. I have your interest at heart." She expressed herself with every sign of sincerity in that curious flat language which she spoke so fluently yet which struck upon the ear untruly, as though it were, in its homeliness, the highest artifice.

  "But I've taken care of everything, you know. Wait and see. If you hadn't come out here on your own I should have sent for you . . ."

  "And I would have come?"

  "Naturally." She smiled.

  "But for what?"

  "For . . . she's here. In Los Angeles."

  "You mean that girl who came to lunch?" I disguised my interest, but Clarissa, ignoring me, went on talking as energetically and as obliquely as ever.

  "She's asked for you several times, which is a good sign. I told her I suspected you'd be along but that one never could tell, especially if you were still tied up with Julian, unlikely as that prospect was."

  "But I do finish some things."

  "I'm sure you do. In any case, the girl has been here over a month and you must see her as soon as possible."

  "I'd like to."

  "Of course you would. I still have my plot, you know. Oh, you may think I forget things but I don't: my mind is a perfect filing system."

  "Could you tell me just what you are talking about?"

  She chuckled and wagged a finger at me. "Soon you'll know. I know I meddle a good deal, more than I should, but after all this time it would be simply impossible for me not to interfere. I see it coming, one of those really exciting moments and I want just to give it a tickle here, a push t
here to set it rolling. Oh, what fun it will be!"

  Hastings crept back among us, diffidently pushing a star and a producer in our direction. "I think you all ought to know each other, Clarissa . . . and, ah, Gene too. This is Miss . . . and Mr . . . and here in Hollywood . . . when you get to New York . . . house on the river, wonderful, old . . . new film to cost five million . . . runner-up for the Academy Award." He did it all very well, I thought. Smiles gleamed in the patio's half-light. The star's paste jewels, borrowed from her studio, glimmered like an airliner's lighted windows. I moved toward the house, but Clarissa's high voice restrained me at the door: "You'll call Iris tomorrow, won't you?" and she shouted an exchange and a number. I waved to show that I'd heard her then, vowing I would never telephone Iris, I rejoined the party and watched with fascination as the various performers performed in the living room to the accompaniment of a grand piano just barely out of tune.

  3

  I waited several days before I telephoned Iris. Days of considerable activity, of visiting friends and acquaintances, of attending parties where the guests were precisely the same as the ones I had met at Hastings' house: every one of them bent upon combating boredom with boredom, creating a desert in a dry land. But I was capable of evoking mirages which decorated for me their desert, made unusual (for myself at least) what, with familiarity, might become impossible.

  I met Iris at the house where she was staying near the main beach of Santa Monica: a fairly decorous Spanish house, quiet: among palms and close to the sea. The day was vivid; the sea made noise; the wind was gentle, smelling of salt and far countries.

  I parked my rented car and walked around to the sea side of the house. Iris came forward to meet me, smiling, hand outstretched, her face which I had remembered as being remarkably pale was flushed with sunlight.