Messiah

by Gore Vidal

  "I hoped you'd come," she said, and she slipped her arm in mine as though we'd been old friends and led me to a deck chair adjoining the one where she'd been seated, reading. We sat down. "Friends let me have this place. They went to Mexico for two months and lent me the house."

  "Useful friends."

  "Aren't they? I've already put down roots here in the sand and I'll hate to give it back."

  "Don't."

  "Ah, wouldn't it be wonderful." She smiled vaguely and looked beyond me at the flash of sea in the flat distance. An automobile horn sounded through the palms; a mother called her child: we were a part of the world, even here.

  "Clarissa told me you've been out several months."

  Iris nodded. "I came back. I think I told you I was going to."

  "To see the man?"

  "Would you like something to drink?" She changed the subject with a disconcerting shift of her gaze from the ocean to me, her eyes still dazzled with the brilliance of light on water. I looked away and shook my head.

  "Too early in the day. But I want to take you to dinner tonight, if I may. Somewhere along the coast."

  "I'd like it very much."

  "Do you know of a place?"

  She suggested several. Then we went inside and she showed me a room where I might change into my bathing suit; we were to swim.

  We walked through the trees to the main road on the other side of which the beach glowed white in the sun. It was deserted at this point although, in the distance, other bathers could be seen, tiny figures black against the startling white, moving about like insects on a white cloth.

  For a time we swam contentedly, not speaking, not thinking, our various urgencies (or their lack) no longer imposed upon the moment. At such times, in those days, I was able through the body's strenuous use to reduce the miserable demands of the yearning self to a complacent harmony, with all things in proper proportion: a part of the whole and not the whole itself, though, metaphorically speaking, perhaps that which conceives reality is reality itself. But such nice divisions and distinctions were of no concern to me that afternoon in the sun, swimming with Iris, the mechanism which spoils time with questioning switched off by the body's euphoria.

  And yet, for all this, no closer to one another, no wiser about one another in any precise sense, we drove that evening in silence to a restaurant of her choosing on the beach to the north: a ramshackle place filled with candlelight, the smell of tar, old nets: "atmosphere" which was nearly authentic. After wine and fish and coffee, we talked.

  "Clarissa is bringing us together."

  I nodded, accepting the plain statement as a fact. "The matchmaking instinct is, I suppose . . ."

  "Not that at all." Her face was in a half-light and looked as it had when we first met: pale, withdrawn, all the day's color drained out of it. Above the sea, Orion's belt dipped in the deep sky. The evening star all silver set. We were early and had this place to ourselves.

  "Then what? Clarissa's motives are always clear, at least to herself. She never does anything that doesn't contribute to some private design . . . though what she's up to half the time I don't dare guess."

  Iris smiled. "Nor I. But she is at least up to something which concerns us both and I'm not sure that she may not be right, about the two of us, I mean . . . though of course it's too soon to say."

  I was conventional enough at first to assume that Iris was speaking of ourselves, most boldly, in terms of some emotional attachment and I wondered nervously how I might indicate without embarrassment to her that I was effectively withdrawn from all sexuality and that, while my emotions were in no way impaired, I had been forced to accept a physical limitation to any act of affection which I might direct at another; consequently, I avoided as well as I could those situations which might betray me, and distress another. Though I have never been unduly grieved by this incompletion, I had come to realize only too well from several disquieting episodes in my youth that this flaw in me possessed the unanticipated power of shattering others who, unwarily, had moved to join with me in the traditional duet only to find an implacable surface where they had anticipated a creature of flesh like themselves, as eager as they, as governed by the blood's solemn tide: I had caused pain against my will and I did not want Iris hurt.

  Fortunately, Iris had begun to move into a different, an unexpected conjunction with me, one which had in it nothing of the familiar or even of the human: it was in that hour beneath Orion's glitter that we were, without warning, together volatilized onto that archetypal plane where we were to play with such ferocity at being gods, a flawed Mercury and a dark queen of heaven, met at the sea's edge, disguised as human beings but conscious of one another's true identity for though our speeches, our arias were all prose, beneath the usual talk recognition had occurred, sounding with the deep resonance of a major chord struck among dissonances. We crossed the first division easily. She was, in her way, as removed as I from the flesh's wild need to repeat itself in pleasure. There was no need for us ever to discuss my first apprehension. We were able to forget ourselves, to ignore the mortal carriage. The ritual began simply enough.

  "Clarissa knows what is happening here. That's why she has come West, though she can't bear California. She wants to be in on it the way she's in on everything else, or thinks she is."

  "You mean John Cave, your magus?" It was the first time I had ever said that name: the sword was between us now, both edges sharp.

  "You guessed? or did she tell you that was why I came back?"

  "I assumed it. I remembered what you said to me last spring."

  "He is more than . . . magus, Eugene." And this was the first time she had said my name: closer, closer. I waited. "You will see him." I could not tell if this was intended as a question or a prophecy. I nodded. She continued to talk, her eyes on mine, intense and shining. Over her shoulder the night was black and all the stars flared twice, once in the sky and again upon the whispering smooth ocean at our feet, one real and one illusion: both light.

  "It is really happening," she said and then, deliberately, she lightened her voice. "You'll see when you meet him. I know of course that there have been thousands of these prophets, these saviors in every country and in every time. I also know that this part of America is particularly known for religious maniacs. I started with every prejudice, just like you."

  "Not prejudice . . . skepticism: perhaps indifference. Even if he should be an effective one, one of the chosen gods and wonder-workers, should I care? I must warn you, Iris, that I'm not a believer. And though I'm sure that the revelations of other men must be a source of infinite satisfaction to them, individually, I shouldn't for one second be so presumptuous as to make a choice among the many thousands of recorded revelations of truth, accepting one at the expense of all the others: I might so easily choose wrong and get into eternal trouble. And you must admit that the selection is wide, and dangerous to the amateur."

  "You're making fun of me," said Iris, but she seemed to realize that I was approaching the object in my own way. "He's not like that at all."

  "But obviously if he is to be useful he must be accepted and he can't be accepted without extending his revelation or whatever he calls it and I fail to see how he can communicate, short of hypnotism or drugs, the sense of his vision to someone like myself who, in a sloppy but devoted way, has wandered through history and religion, acquiring with a collector's delight the more colorful and obscure manifestations of divine guidance, revealed to us through the inspired systems of philosophers and divines, not to mention such certified prophets as the custodians of the Sibylline books, 'lllo die hostem Romanorum esse periturum' was the instruction given poor Maxentius when he marched against Constantine: needless to say he perished and consequently fulfilled the prophecy by himself becoming the enemy of Rome, to his surprise I suspect. My point, though, in honoring you with the only complete Latin sentence which I can ever recall is that at no time can we escape the relativity of our judgments. Truth for us, whether i
nspired by messianic frenzy or merely illuminated by reason, is, after all, inconstant and subject to change with the hour. You believe now whatever it is this man says. Splendid. But will the belief be true to you at another hour of your life? I wonder. For even if you wish to remain consistent and choose to ignore inconvenient evidence in the style of the truly devoted, the truly pious, will not your prophet himself have changed with time's passage? for no human being can remain the same, despite the repetition of . . ."

  "Enough, enough!" she laughed aloud and put her hand between us as though to stop the words in air. "You're talking such nonsense."

  "Perhaps. It's not at all easy to say what one thinks when it comes to these problems or, for that matter, to any problem which demands articulation. Sometimes one is undone by the flow of words assuming its own direction, carrying one, protesting, away from the anticipated shore to terra incognita. Other times, at the climax of a particularly telling analogy, one is aware that in the success of words the meaning has got lost. Put it this way, finally, accurately: I accept no man's authority in that realm where we are all equally ignorant. The beginning and the end of creation are not our concern. The eventual disposition of the human personality which we treasure in our conceit as being among the more poignant ornaments of an envious universe is unknown to us and shall so remain until we learn the trick of raising the dead. God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased and conceived. We are prisoners in our flesh, dullards in divinity as the Greeks would say. No man can alter this though of course human beings can be made to believe anything. You can teach that fire is cold and ice is hot but nothing changes except the words. So what can your magus do? What can he celebrate except that which is visible and apparent to all eyes? What can he offer me that I should accept his authority, and its source?"

  She sighed, "I'm not sure he wants anything for himself; acceptance, authority . . . one doesn't think of such things, at least not now. As for his speaking with the voice of some new or old deity, he denies the reality of any power other than the human . . ."

  "A strange sort of messiah."

  "I've been trying to tell you this." She smiled. "He sounds at times not unlike you just now . . . not so glib perhaps."

  "Now you mock me."

  "No more than you deserve for assuming facts without evidence."

  "If he throws over all the mystical baggage what is left? an ethical system?"

  "In time, I suppose, that will come. So far there is no system. You'll see for yourself soon enough."

  "You've yet to answer any direct question I have put to you."

  She laughed. "Perhaps there is a significance in that; perhaps you ask the wrong questions . . ."

  "And perhaps you have no answers."

  "Wait."

  "For how long?"

  She looked at her watch by the candles' uncertain light. "For an hour."

  "You mean we're to see him tonight?"

  "Unless you'd rather not."

  "Oh, I want to see him, very much."

  "He'll want to see you too, I think." She looked at me thoughtfully but I could not guess her intention; it was enough that two lines had crossed, both moving inexorably toward a third, toward a temporary terminus at the progression's heart.

  4

  It is difficult now to recall just what I expected. Iris deliberately chose not to give me any clear idea of either the man or of his teachings or even of the meeting which we were to attend; we talked of other things as we drove in the starlight north along the ocean road, the sound of waves striking sand loud in our ears.

  It was nearly an hour's drive from the restaurant to the place where the meeting was to be held. Iris directed me accurately and we soon turned from the main highway into a neon-lighted street; then off into a suburban area of comfortable-looking middle-class houses with gardens. Trees lined the streets; dogs barked; yellow light gleamed at downstairs windows. Silent families were gathered in after-dinner solemnity before television sets, absorbed by the spectacle of figures singing, dancing and telling jokes.

  As we drove down the empty streets, I saw ruins and dust where houses were and, among the powdery debris of stucco all in mounds, the rusted antennae of television sets like the bones of awful beasts whose vague but terrible proportions will alone survive to attract the unborn stranger's eye. But the loathing of one's own time is a sign of innocence, of faith. I have come since to realize the wholeness of man in time. That year, perhaps that ride down a deserted evening street of a California suburb, was my last conscious moment of particular disgust: television, the Blues and the Greens, the perfidy of Carthage, the efficacy of rites to the moon . . . all were at last the same.

  "That house over there, with the light in front, with the clock."

  The house, to my surprise, was a large neo-Georgian funeral parlor with a lighted clock in front crowned by a legend discreetly fashioned in Gothic gold on black: Whittaker and Dormer, Funeral Directors. A dozen cars had been parked closely together in the street and I was forced to park nearly a block away.

  We walked along the sidewalk, street lamps behind trees cast shadows thick and intricate upon the pavement. "Is there any particular significance?" I asked. "I mean in the choice of meeting place?"

  She shook her head. "Not really, no. We meet wherever it's convenient. Mr Dormer is one of us and has kindly offered his chapel for the meetings."

  "Is there any sort of ritual I should observe?"

  She laughed. "Of course not. This isn't at all what you think."

  "I think nothing."

  "Then you are prepared. I should tell you, though, that until this year when a number of patrons made it possible for him" (already I could identify the "him" whenever it fell from her lips, round with reverence and implication) "to devote all his time to teaching, he was for ten years an undertaker's assistant in Oregon and Washington."

  I said nothing. It was just as well to get past this first obstacle all at once. There was no reason of course to scorn that necessary if overwrought profession; yet somehow the thought of a savior emerging from those unctuous formaldehyde-smelling ranks seemed ludicrous. I reminded myself that one of the more successful messiahs had been a carpenter and that another had been a politician . . . but an embalmer! My anticipation of great news was chilled; I prepared myself for grim comedy.

  Iris would tell me nothing more about the meeting or about him as we crossed the lawn. She opened the door to the house and we stepped into a softly lighted anteroom. A policeman and a civilian, the one gloomy and the other cheerful, greeted us.

  "Ah, Miss Mortimer!" said the civilian, a gray, plump pigeon of a man. "And a friend, how good to see you both." No this was not he. I was introduced to Mr Dormer who chirped on until he was interrupted by the policeman.

  "Come on, you two, in here. Got to get the prints and the oath."

  Iris motioned me to follow the policeman into a side-room, an office. I'd heard of this national precaution but until now I had had no direct experience of it. Since the attempt of the communists to control our society had, with the collapse of Russian foreign policy, quite failed, our government in its collective wisdom had decided that never again would any sect or party, other than the traditional ones, be allowed to interrupt the rich flow of the nation's life. As a result, all deviationist societies were carefully watched by the police who fingerprinted and photographed those who attended meetings, simultaneously exacting an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Flag which ended with that powerful invocation which a recent president's speech writer had, in a moment of inspiration, struck off to the delight of his employer and nation: "In a true democracy there is no place for any disagreement on truly great issues." It is a comment on those years, now happily become history, that only a few ever considered the meaning of this resolution, proving of course that words are never a familiar province to the great mass which prefers recognizable pictures to even the most apposite prose. Ir
is and I repeated dutifully in the presence of the policeman and an American flag, the various national sentiments. We were then allowed to go back to the anteroom and to Mr. Dormer who himself led us into the chapel.

  Several dozen people were already there, perfectly ordinary-looking men and women, better dressed perhaps than the average. The chapel was a nonsectarian one which managed to combine a number of decorative influences with a blandness quite remarkable in its success at not really representing anything while suggesting, at the same time, everything. The presence of a dead body, a man carefully painted and wearing a blue serge suit, gently smiling in an ebony casket behind a bank of flowers at the chapel's end, did not detract as much as one might have supposed from the occasion's importance. After the first uneasiness, it was quite possible to accept the anonymous dead man as a part of the decor. There was even, in later years, an attempt made by a group of Cavite enthusiasts to insist upon the presence of an embalmed corpse at every service but fortunately the more practical elements among the Cavites prevailed, though not without an ugly quarrel and harsh words.

  John Cave's entrance followed our own by a few minutes and it is with difficulty that I recall what it was that I felt on seeing him for the first time. Though my recollections are well-known to all (at least they were well-known, although now I am less certain, having seen Butler's Testament so strangely altered), I must record here that I cannot, after so many years, so much history, recall in any emotional detail my first reaction to this man who was to be the world's, as well as my own, peculiar nemesis.

  But, concentrating fiercely, emptying my mind of later knowledge, I can still see him as he walked down the aisle of the chapel, a small man who moved with some grace. He was younger than I'd expected or, rather, younger-looking, with short straight hair, light brown in color, a lean regular face which would not have been noticed in a crowd unless one had got close enough to see the expression of the eyes: the large silver eyes with black lashes like a thick line drawn on the pale skin, focusing attention to them, to the congenitally small pupils which glittered like the points of black needles, betraying the will and the ambition which the impassive, gentle face belied . . . but I am speaking with future knowledge now: I did not that evening think of ambition or will in terms of John Cave. I was merely curious, intrigued by the situation, by the intensity of Iris, by the serene corpse behind the banks of hothouse flowers, by the thirty or forty men and women who sat close to the front of the chapel, listening intently to Cave as he talked.