Messiah

by Gore Vidal

  At first I paid little attention to what was being said, more interested in observing the audience, the room and the appearance of the speaker. Immediately after his undramatic entrance he had moved to the front of the chapel and sat down on a gilt chair to the right of the coffin; there was a faint whisper of interest at his appearance: newcomers like myself were being given last-minute instruction by the habitués who had brought them there. Cave sat easily on the gilt chair, his eyes upon the floor, his small hands, bony and white, folded in his lap, a smile on his narrow lips: he could not have looked more ineffectual, more ordinary. His opening words by no means altered this first impression.

  The voice, as he spoke, was good, though he tended to mumble at the beginning, his eyes still on the floor, his hands in his lap, motionless. So quietly did he begin that he had spoken for several seconds before many of the audience were aware that he had begun. His accent was the national one, learned doubtless from the radio and the movies: a neutral pronunciation without any strong regional overtone. The popular if short-lived legend of the next decade that he had begun his mission as a backwoods revivalist was certainly untrue. Not until he had talked for several minutes, did I begin to listen to the sense rather than to the tone of his voice. I cannot render precisely what he said but the message that night was not much different from the subsequent ones which are known to all. It was, finally, the manner which created the response, not the words themselves, though the words were interesting enough, especially when heard for the first time. His voice, as I have said, faltered unsurely at the beginning and he left sentences unfinished, a trick which I later discovered was deliberate for he had been born a remarkable actor, an instinctive rhetorician. What most struck me that first evening was the purest artifice of his performance. The voice, especially when he came to his climax, was sharp and clear while his hands stirred like separate living creatures and the eyes, those splendid unique eyes, were abruptly revealed to us in the faint light, displayed at that crucial moment which had been as carefully constructed as any work of architecture or of music: the instant of communication.

  Against my will and judgment and inclination, I found myself absorbed by the man, not able to move or to react. The same magic which was always to affect me, even when later I knew him only too well, held me fixed to my chair as the words, supported by the clear voice, came in a resonant line from him to me alone, to each of us alone, separate from the others . . . and both restless mass and fast-breathing particular were together his.

  The moment itself lasted only a second in actual time; it came suddenly, without warning: one was riven; then it was over and he left the chapel, left us chilled and weak, staring foolishly at the gilt chair where he had been.

  It was some minutes before we were able to take up our usual selves again.

  Iris looked at me. I smiled weakly and cleared my throat: I was conscious that I ached all over. I glanced at my watch and saw that he had spoken to us for an hour and a half during which time I had not moved. I stretched painfully and stood up. Others did the same: we had shared an experience and it was the first time in my life that I knew what it was like to be the same as others, my heart's beat no longer individual, erratic, but held for at least this one interval of time in concert with those of strangers. It was a new, disquieting experience: to be no longer an observer, a remote intelligence . . . for ninety minutes to have been a part of the whole.

  Iris walked with me to the anteroom where we stood for a moment watching the others who had also gathered here to talk in low voices, their expressions bewildered.

  She did not have to ask me what I thought. I told her immediately, in my own way, impressed but less than reverent. "I see what you mean. I see what it is that holds you, fascinates you but I still wonder what it is really all about."

  "You saw. You heard."

  "I saw an ordinary man. I heard a sermon which was interesting, although I might be less impressed if I read it to myself. . . ." Deliberately I tried to throw it all away, that instant of belief, that paralysis of will, that sense of mysteries revealed in a dazzle of light. But as I talked, I realized that I was not really dismissing it, that I could not alter the experience even though I might dismiss the man and mock the text: something had happened and I told her what I thought it was.

  "It is not truth, Iris, but hypnosis."

  She nodded. "I've often thought that. Especially at first when I was conscious of his mannerisms, when I could see, as only a woman can perhaps, that this was just a man; yet something does happen when you listen to him, when you get to know him. You must find that out for yourself; and you will. It may not prove to be anything which has to do with him. There's something in oneself which stirs and comes alive at his touch, through his agency." She spoke quickly, excitedly. I felt the passion with which she was charged. But suddenly it was too much for me. I was bewildered and annoyed; I wanted to get away.

  "Don't you want to meet him?"

  I shook my head. "Another time maybe, but not now. Shall I take you back?"

  "No. I'll get a ride in to Santa Monica. I may even stay over for the night. He'll be here a week."

  I wondered again if she might have a personal interest in Cave: though I doubted it, anything was possible.

  She walked me back to the car, past the lighted chapel, over the summery lawn, down the dark street whose solid prosaicness helped to dispel somewhat the madness of the hour before.

  We made a date to meet later on in the week. She would tell Cave about me and I would meet him. I interrupted her then. "What did he say, Iris? What did he say tonight?"

  Her answer was as direct and as plain as my question.

  "That it is good to die."

  Four

  1

  This morning I reread the last section, trying to see it objectively, to match what I have put down with the memory I still bear of that first encounter with John Cave. I have not, I fear, got it. But this is as close as I can come to recalling long-vanished emotions and events.

  I was impressed by the man and I was shaken by his purpose. My first impression was, I think, correct: he was a born hypnotist and the text of that extraordinary message was, in the early days at least, thin, illogical and depressing if one had not heard it spoken. Later of course I, among others, composed the words which bear his name and we gave them, I fancy, a polish and an authority which, with his limited education and disregard for the works of the past, he could not have accomplished on his own, even had he wanted to.

  I spent the intervening days between my first and second encounters with this strange man in a state of extreme tension and irritability. Clarissa called me several times but I refused to see her, excusing myself from proposed entertainments and hinted tête à têtes, with an abruptness which anyone but the iron-cast Clarissa would have found appallingly rude. She said she understood, however, and she let me off without explaining what it was she understood, or thought she did. I avoided a number of parties and all acquaintances, keeping to my hotel room where I contemplated a quick return to the Hudson and to the darkening autumn.

  Iris telephoned me twice and, when she fixed a day at last for me to meet John Cave, I accepted her invitation, a little to my own surprise.

  We met in the late afternoon at her house. Only the three of us were present on that occasion. In the set of dialogues which I composed and published in later years I took considerable liberties with our actual conversations, especially this first one: in fact, as hostile critics were quick to suggest, the dialogues were created by me with very little of Cave in them and a good deal of Plato, rearranged to fit the occasion. In time, though, my version was accepted implicitly, if only because there were no longer any hostile critics.

  Iris served us tea in the patio. She spoke seldom and, when she did, her voice was low and curiously diffident as she asked Cave some question or instructed me.

  Cave himself was relaxed, quite different from my first view of him. In fact, I might not even have re
cognized his face had I seen him in a group.

  He rose promptly when I came out onto the patio; he shook my hand vigorously but briefly and sat down again, indicating that I sit next to him while Iris went for tea. He was smaller and more compact than I'd thought measuring him against myself as one does, unconsciously, with an interesting stranger. He wore a plain brown suit and a white shirt open at the collar, a modified Lord Byron collar which became him. The eyes, which at first I did not dare look at, were, I soon noticed, sheathed . . . an odd word which was always to occur to me when I saw him at his ease, his eyes half-shut, ordinary, not in the least unusual. Except for a restless folding and unfolding of his hands (suggesting a recently reformed cigarette smoker) he was without physical idiosyncrasy.

  "It's a pleasure to meet you" were the first words, I fear, John Cave ever spoke to me; so unlike the dialogue on the spirit which I later composed to celebrate this initial encounter between master and disciple-to-be. "Iris has told me a lot about you." His voice was light, without resonance now. He sat far back in his deck chair. Inside the house I could hear Iris moving plates. The late afternoon sun had just that moment gone behind trees and the remaining light was warmly gold.

  "And I have followed your . . . career with interest too," I said, knowing that "career" was precisely the word he would not care to hear used but, at that moment, neither of us had got the range of the other. We fired at random.

  "Iris told me you write history."

  I shook my head. "No, I only read it. I think it's all been written anyway." I was allowed to develop this novel conceit for some moments, attended by a respectful silence from my companion who finally dispatched my faintly hysterical proposition with a vague "Maybe so"; and then we got to him.

  "I haven't been East you know," he frowned at the palm trees. "I was born up in Washington state and I've spent all my life in the Northwest, until last year." He paused as though he expected me to ask him about that year. I did not. I waited for him to do it in his own way. He suddenly turned about in his chair and faced me; those disconcerting eyes suddenly trained upon my own. "You were there the other night, weren't you?"

  "Why, yes."

  "Did you feel it too? Am I right?"

  The quick passion with which he said this, exploding all at once the afternoon's serenity, took me off guard. I stammered, "I don't think I know what you mean. I . . ."

  "You know exactly what I mean, what I meant." He leaned closer to me and I wondered insanely if his deck chair might not collapse under him. It teetered dangerously. My mind went blank, absorbed by the image of deck chair and prophet together collapsing at my feet. Then, as suddenly, satisfied perhaps with my confusion, he settled back, resumed his earlier ease, exactly as if I had answered him, as though we had come to a crisis and together fashioned an agreement: it was most alarming.

  "I want to see New York especially. I've always thought it must look like a cemetery with all those tall gray buildings you see in photographs." He sighed conventionally: "So many interesting places in the world. Do you like the West?" Nervously, I said that I did. I still feared a possible repetition of that brief outburst.

  "I like the openness," said Cave, as though he had thought long about this problem. "I don't think I'd like confinement. I couldn't live in Seattle because of those fogs they used to have; San Francisco's the same. I don't like too many walls, too much fog." If he'd intended to speak allegorically he could not have found a better audience for I was, even at this early stage, completely receptive to the most obscure histrionics but, in conversation, Cave was perfectly literal. Except when he spoke before a large group, he was quite simple and prosaic and, though conscious always of his dignity and singular destiny, not in the least portentous.

  I probably did not put him at his ease for I stammered a good deal and made no sense, but he was gracious, supporting me with his own poise and equanimity.

  He talked mostly of places until Iris came back with tea. Then, as the sky became florid with evening and the teacups gradually grew cold, he talked of his work and I listened intently.

  "I can talk to you straight," he said. "This just happened to me. I didn't start out to do this. No sir, I never would have believed ten years ago that I'd be traveling about, talking to people like one of those crackpot fanatics you've got so many in California." I took a sip of the black, fast-cooling tea, hoping he was not sufficiently intuitive to guess that I had originally put him down, provisionally of course, as precisely that.

  "I don't know how much Iris may have told you or how much you might have heard but it's pretty easy to pass the whole thing off as another joke: a guy coming out of the backwoods with a message." He cracked his knuckles hard and I winced at the sound. "Well, I didn't quite come out of the woods. I had a year back at State University and I had a pretty good job in my field with the best firm of funeral directors in Washington state. Then I started on this. I just knew one day and so I began to talk to people and they knew too and I quit my job and started talking to bigger and bigger crowds all along the coast. There wasn't any of this revelation stuff. I just knew one day, that was all; and when I told other people what I knew they seemed to get it. And that's the strange part. Everybody gets ideas about things which he thinks are wonderful but usually nothing happens to the people he tries to tell them to. With me, it's been different from the beginning. People have all listened, and agreed: what I know they know. Isn't that a funny thing? Though most of them probably would never have thought it out until they heard me and it was all clear." His eyes dropped to his hands; he added softly: "So since it's been like this, I've gone on. I've made this my life. This is it. I shall come to the people."

  There was silence. The sentence had been spoken which I was later to construct the first dialogue upon: "I shall come to the people," the six words which were to change our lives were spoken softly over tea.

  Iris looked at me challengingly over Cave's bowed head. I remember little else about that evening. We dined, I think, in the house and Cave was most agreeable, most undemanding. There was no more talk of the mission. He asked me many questions about New York, about Harvard where I had gone to school, about Roman history. He appeared to be interested in paganism and my own somewhat ambiguous approach to Julian. I was to learn later that though he seldom read he had a startling memory for any fact which seemed relevant. I am neither immodest nor inaccurate when I say that he listened to me attentively for some years and many of his later views were a result of our conversations.

  I should mention, though, one significant omission in his conversation during those first crucial years: he never discussed ethical questions; that was to come much later. At the beginning he had but one vision and it was, in its terrible truth, quite inhuman and anarchic: man dies, consciousness dies with him: it is good to die, good not to be. On this the Cavite system was constructed and what came after in the moral and ethical spheres was largely the work of others in his name. Much of this I anticipated in that first conversation with him, so unlike, actually, the dialogue which I composed ending, I still think complacently despite the irony with which time has tarnished all those bright toys for me, with the essential line: "Death is neither hard nor bad; only the dying hurts." With that firmly postulated the rest was inevitable.

  Cave talked that evening about California and Oregon and Washington (geography, places were always to fascinate and engage him while people, especially after the early years, ceased to be remarkable to him; he tended to get confused those myriad faces which passed before him like successive ripples in a huge sea). He talked of the cities he had visited on the seaboard, new cities to him, all of them. He compared their climates and various attractions like a truly devoted tourist, eager to get the best of each place, to encounter the genius loci and possess it.

  "But I don't like staying in any place long." He looked at me then and again I felt that sense of a power being focused on me . . . it was not unlike what one experiences during an X-ray treatment when the hu
mming noise indicates that potent rays are penetrating one's tissue and, though there is actually no sensation, something is experienced, power is felt. And so it invariably was that, right until the end, Cave, whenever he chose, could turn those wide bleak eyes upon me and I would experience his force anew.

  "I want to keep moving, new places, that's what I like. You get a kind of charge traveling. At least I do. I always thought I'd travel but I never figured it would be like this; but then of course I never thought of all this until just awhile ago."

  "Can you remember when it was? how it was exactly you got . . . started?" I wanted a sign obviously: Constantine's labarum occurred to me: in hoc signo vinces. Already ambition was stirring, and the little beast fed ravenously on every scrap that came its way for I was, in that patio, experiencing my own revelation, the compass needle no longer spinning wildly but coming to settle at last, with many hesitancies and demurs, upon a direction, drawn to a far pole's attraction. He smiled for the first time. I suppose, if I wanted, I could recall each occasion over the years when, in my presence at least, John Cave smiled. His usual expression was one of calm resolve, of that authority which feels secure in itself, a fortunate expression which lent dignity even to his casual conversation: the fact that this serene mask hid a nearly total intellectual vacuity, I suspected as early in my dealings with him as this first meeting; yet I did not mind for I had experienced his unique magic and already I saw the possibilities of channeling that power, of using that force, of turning it like a flame here, there, creating and destroying, shaping and shattering . . . so much for the spontaneous nature of my ambition at its least responsible, and at its most exquisite! I could have set the one-half world aflame for the sheer splendor and glory of the deed. For this my expiation has been long and my once exuberant pride is now only an ashen phoenix consumed by flames but not yet tumbled to dust, not yet recreated in the millennial egg . . . only a gray shadow in the heart which the touch of a finger of windy fear will turn to air and dust.