Messiah

by Gore Vidal

  "When will you want this piece done?"

  "The sooner the better. Here," he scribbled an address on a pad of paper. "This is Cave's address. He's on a farm outside Spokane. It belongs to one of his undertaker friends."

  "Iris is with him?"

  "Yes. Now you . . ."

  "I wonder if that's wise, Iris seeing so much of him. You know he's going to have a good many enemies before very long and they'll dig around for any scandal they can find."

  "Oh, it's perfectly innocent, I'm sure. Even if it isn't, I can't see how it can do much harm."

  "For a public relations man you don't seem to grasp the possibilities for bad publicity in this situation."

  "All pub . . ."

  "Is good. But Cave, it appears is a genuine ascetic." And the word "genuine" as I spoke it was like a knife-blade in my heart. "And, since he is, you have a tremendous advantage in building him up. There's no use in allowing him, quite innocently, to appear to philander."

  Paul looked at me curiously. "You wouldn't by chance be interested in Iris yourself?"

  And of course that was it. I had become attached to Iris in precisely the same sort of way a complete man might have been but of course for me there was no hope, nothing. The enormity of that nothing shook me, despite the alcohol we had drunk. I was sufficiently collected, though, not to make the mistake of vehemence. "I like her very much but I'm more attached to the idea of Cave than I am to her. I don't want to see the business get out of hand. That's all. I'm surprised you, of all people involved, aren't more concerned."

  "You may have a point. I suppose I've got to adjust my views to this thing . . . it's different from my usual work building up crooners and movie stars. In that line the romance angle is swell, just as long as there're no bigamies or abortions involved. I see your point, though. With Cave we have to think in sort of Legion of Decency terms. No rough stuff. No nightclub pictures or posing with blondes. You're absolutely right. Put that in your piece: doesn't drink, doesn't go out with dames . . ."

  I laughed at this seriousness. "Maybe we won't have to go that far. The negative virtues usually shine through all on their own. The minute you draw attention to them you create suspicion: people are generally pleased to suspect the opposite of every avowal."

  "You talk just like my analyst." And I felt that I had won, briefly, Paul's admiration. "Anyway, you go to Spokane; talk to Iris; tell her to lay off . . . in a tactful way of course. I wouldn't mention it to him: you never can tell how he'll react. She'll be reasonable even though I suspect she's stuck on the man. Try and get your piece done by the first of December. I'd like to have it in print for the first of the New Year, Cave's year."

  "I'll try."

  "By the way, we're getting an office . . . same building as this. The directors okayed it and we'll take over as soon as there's some furniture in it."

  "Cavites, Inc.?"

  "We could hardly call it the Church of the Golden Rule," said Paul with one of the few shows of irritability I was ever to observe in his equable disposition. "Now, on behalf of the directors, I'm authorized to advance you whatever money you might feel you need for this project; that is, within . . ."

  "I won't need anything except, perhaps, a directorship in the company." My own boldness startled me.

  Paul laughed. "That's a good boy. Eye on the main chance. Well, we'll see what we can do about that. There aren't any more shares available right now but that doesn't mean. . . . I'll let you know when you get back from Spokane."

  Our meeting was ended by the appearance of his secretary who called him away to other business. As we parted in the outer office, he said, quite seriously, "I don't think Iris likes him the way you think but if she does be careful. We can't upset Cave now. This is a tricky time for everyone. Don't show that you suspect anything when you're with him. Later, when we're under way, and there's less pressure, I'll handle it. Agreed?"

  I agreed, secretly pleased at being thought in love . . . "in love," to this moment the phrase has a strangely foreign sound to me, like a classical allusion not entirely understood in some decorous, scholarly text. "In love," I whispered to myself in the elevator as I left Paul that evening: in love with Iris.

  3

  We met at the Spokane railroad station and Iris drove me through the wide, clear, characterless streets to a country road which wound east into the hills, in the direction of a town with the lovely name of Coeur d'Alene.

  She was relaxed. Her ordinarily pale face was faintly burned from the sun while her hair, which I recalled as darkly waving, was now streaked with light and worn loosely bound at the nape of her neck. She wore no cosmetics and her dress was simple cotton beneath the sweater she wore against the autumn's chill. She looked young, younger than either of us actually was.

  At first we talked of Spokane. She identified mountains and indicated hidden villages with an emphasis on place which sharply recalled Cave. Not until we had turned off the main highway into a country road, dark with fir and spruce, did she ask me about Paul.

  "He's very busy getting the New Year's debut ready. He's also got a set of offices for the company in Los Angeles and he's engaged me to write an introduction to Cave . . . but I suppose you knew that when he wired you I was coming."

  "It was my idea."

  "My coming? or the introduction?"

  "Both. I talked to him about it just before we came up here."

  "And I thought he picked it out of the air while listening to me majestically place Cave among the philosophers."

  Iris smiled. "Paul's not obvious. He enjoys laying traps and, as long as they're for one's own good, he's very useful."

  "Implying he could be destructive?"

  "Immensely. So be on your guard even though I don't think he'll harm any of us."

  "How is Cave?"

  "I'm worried, Gene. He hasn't got over that accident. He talks about it continually."

  "But the man didn't die."

  "It would be better if he did . . . as it is there's a chance of a lawsuit against Cave for damages."

  "But he has no money."

  "That doesn't prevent them from suing. Worst of all, though, would be the publicity. The whole thing has depressed John terribly. It was all I could do to keep him from announcing to the press that he had almost done the old man a favor."

  "You mean by killing him?"

  Iris nodded, quite seriously. "That's actually what he believes and the reason why he drove on."

  "I'm glad he said nothing like that to the papers."

  "But it's true; his point of view is exactly right."

  "Except that the old man might regard the situation in a different light and, in any case, he was badly hurt and did not receive Cave's gift of death."

  "Now you're making fun of John." She frowned and drove fast on the empty road.

  "I'm doing no such thing. I'm absolutely serious. There's a moral problem involved which is extremely important and if a precedent is set too early, a bad one like this, there's no predicting how things will turn out."

  "You mean the . . . the gift as you call it should only be given voluntarily?"

  "Exactly . . . if then, and only in extreme cases. Think what might happen if those who listened to Cave decided to make all their friends and enemies content by killing them."

  "Well, I wish you'd talk to him." She smiled sadly. "I'm afraid I don't always see things clearly when I'm with him. You know how he is . . . how he convinces."

  "I'll talk to him tactfully. I've also got to get a statement of belief from him."

  "But you have it already. We all have it."

  "Then I'll want some moral application of it. We have so much ground to cover yet."

  "There's the farm, up there on the hill." A white frame building stood shining among elms on a low hill at the foot of blue sharp mountains. She turned up a dirt road and, in silence, we arrived at the house.

  An old woman, the cook, greeted us familiarly and told Iris that he could be found in th
e study.

  In a small warm room, sitting beside a stone fireplace empty of fire, Cave sat, a scrapbook on his knees, his expression vague, unfocused. Our arrival recalled him from some dense reverie. He got to his feet quickly and shook hands; "I'm glad you came," he said.

  "I wanted to see you," I said awkwardly: it was Cave's particular gift to strike a note of penetrating sincerity at all times, even in his greetings which became, as a result, disconcertingly like benedictions. Iris excused herself and I sat beside him in front of the fireplace.

  "Have you seen these?" he asked, pushing the scrapbook toward me.

  I took it and nodded when I saw, neatly pasted and labeled, the various newspaper stories concerning the accident. It had got a surprisingly large amount of space as though, instinctively, the editors had anticipated a coming celebrity for "Hit-and-Run Prophet."

  "Look what they say about me."

  "I've read them all," I said, handing the scrapbook back to him, a little surprised that, considering his unworldliness, he had bothered to keep such careful track of his appearance in the press. It showed a new, rather touching side to him: he was like an actor hoarding his notices, good and bad. "I don't think it's serious: after all you were let off by the court, and the man didn't die."

  "It was an accident of course yet that old man nearly received the greatest gift a man can have, a quick death. I wanted to tell the court that. I could've convinced them, I'm sure, but Paul said no. It was the first time I've ever gone against my own instinct and I don't like it." Emphatically, he shut the book.

  We watched the cook who came into the room and lit the fire. When the first crackling filled the room and the pine had caught, she left, observing that we were to eat in an hour.

  "You want to wash up?" asked Cave mechanically, his eyes on the fire, his hands clasped in his lap like those dingy marble replicas of hands which decorate medieval tombs: that night there was an unhuman look to Cave: pale, withdrawn, inert . . . his lips barely moving when he spoke, as though another's voice spoke through senseless flesh.

  "No thanks," I said, a little chilled by his tone, by his remoteness. I got him off the subject of the accident as quickly as possible and we talked until dinner of the introduction I was to write. It was most enlightening. As I suspected, Cave had read only the Bible and that superficially, just enough to be able, at crucial moments, to affect the seventeenth-century prose of the translators and to confound thereby simple listeners with the familiar authority of his manner. His knowledge of philosophy did not even encompass the names of the principals. Plato and Aristotle rang faint, unrelated bells and with them the meager carillon ended.

  "I don't know why you want to drag in those people," he said, after I had suggested Zoroaster as a possible point of beginning. "Most people have never heard of them either. And what I have to say is all my own. It doesn't tie in with any of them or, if it does, it's a coincidence because I never picked it up anywhere."

  "I think, though, that it would help matters if we did provide a sort of family tree for you, to show . . ."

  "I don't." He gestured with his effigy-hands. "Let them argue about it later. For now, act like this is a new beginning, which it is. I have only one thing to give people and that is the way to die without fear, gladly . . . to accept nothing for what it is, a long and dreamless sleep."

  I had to fight against that voice, those eyes which as always, when he chose, could dominate any listener. Despite my close association with him, despite the thousands of times I heard him speak, I was never, even in moments of lucid disenchantment, quite able to resist his power. He was a magician in the great line of Simon Magus and the Faust of legend. That much, even now, I will acknowledge . . . his divinity, however, was and is the work of others, shaped and directed by the race's recurrent need.

  I surrendered in the name of philosophy with a certain relief, and he spoke in specific terms of what he believed and what I should write in his name.

  It was not until after dinner that we got around, all three of us, to a problem which was soon to absorb us all, with near-disastrous results.

  We had been talking amiably of neutral things and Cave had emerged somewhat from his earlier despondency. He got on to the subject of the farm where we were, of its attractiveness and remoteness, of its owner who lived in Spokane. "I always liked old Smathers. You'd like him too. He's got one of the biggest funeral parlors in the state. I used to work for him and then, when I started on all this, he backed me up to the hilt. Lent me money to get as far as San Francisco. After that of course it was easy. I paid him back every cent."

  "Does he get here often?"

  Cave shook his head. "No, he lets me use the farm but he keeps away. He says he doesn't approve of what I'm doing. You see he's Catholic."

  "But he still likes John," said Iris who had been stroking a particularly ugly yellow cat beside the fire. So it was John now, I thought. Iris was the only person ever to call him by his first name.

  "Yes. He's a good friend."

  "There'll be a lot of trouble, you know," I said.

  "From Smathers?"

  "No, from the Catholics, from the Christians."

  "You really think so?" Cave looked at me curiously. I believe that until that moment he had never realized the inevitable collision of his point of view with that of the established religions.

  "Of course I do. They've constructed an entire ethical system upon a supernatural foundation whose main strength is the promise of a continuation of human personality after death. You are rejecting grace, heaven, hell, the Trinity . . ."

  "I've never said anything about the Trinity or about Christianity."

  "But you'll have to say something about it sooner or later. If—or rather when—the people begin to accept you, the churches will fight back and the greater the impression you make the more fierce their attack."

  "I suspect John is the anti-Christ," said Iris and I saw from her expression that she was perfectly serious. "He's come to undo all the wickedness of the Christians."

  "Though not, I hope, of Christ," I said. "There's some virtue in his legend, even as corrupted at Nicea three centuries after the fact."

  "I'll have to think about it," said Cave. "I don't know that I've ever given it much thought before. I've spoken always what I knew was true and there's never been any opposition, at least that I've been aware of, to my face. It never occurred to me that people who like to think of themselves as Christians couldn't accept both me and Christ at the same time. I know I don't promise the kingdom of heaven but I do promise oblivion and the loss of self, of pain . . ."

  "Gene is right," said Iris. "They'll fight you hard. You must get ready now while you still have time to think it out, before Paul puts you to work and you'll never have a moment's peace again."

  "As bad as that, you think?" Cave sighed wistfully. "But how to get ready? What shall I do? I never think things out, you know. Everything occurs to me on the spot. I can never tell what may occur to me next. It happens only when I speak to people. When I'm alone, I seldom think of the . . . the main things; yet, when I'm in a group talking to them I hear . . . no, not hear, I feel voices telling me what I should say. That's why I never prepare a talk, why I don't really like to have them taken down: they're something which are meant only for the instant they are conceived . . . a child, if you like, made for just a moment's life by the people listening and myself speaking. I don't mean to sound touched," he added, with a sudden smile. "I'm not really hearing things but I do get something from those people, something besides the thing I tell them. I seem to become a part of them, as though what goes on in their minds also goes on in me, at the same time, two lobes to a single brain."

  "We know that, John," said Iris softly. "We've felt it."

  "I suppose, then, that's the key," said Cave. "Though it isn't much to write about; you can't put it across without me to say it."

  "You may be wrong there," I said. "Of course in the beginning you will say the word but I thi
nk in time, properly managed, everyone will accept it on the strength of evidence and statement, responding to the chain of forces you have set in motion." Yet for all the glibness with which I spoke, I did not really believe that Cave would prove to be more than an interesting momentary phenomenon whose "truth" about death might, at best, contribute in a small way to the final abolition of those old warring superstitions which had mystified and troubled men for twenty dark centuries. A doubt which displayed my basic misunderstanding of our race's will to death and, worse, to a death in life made radiant by false dreams, by desperate adjurations.

  But that evening we spoke only of a bright future: "To begin again is the important thing," I said. "Christianity, though strong as an organization in this country, is weak as a force because, finally, the essential doctrine is not accepted by most of the people: the idea of a man-like God dispensing merits and demerits at time's exotic end."

  "We are small," said Cave. "In space, on this tiny planet, we are nothing. Death brings us back to the whole. We lose this instant of awareness, of suffering, like spray in the ocean: there it forms . . . there it goes, back to the sea."

  "I think people will listen to you because they realize now that order, if there is any, has never been revealed, that death is the end of personality even for those passionate, self-important I's who insist upon a universal deity like themselves, carefully presented backwards in order not to give the game away."

  "How dark, how fine the grave must be! only sleep and an end of days, an end of fear: the end of fear in the grave as the I goes back to nothing. . . ."

  "How wonderful life will be when men no longer fear dying! When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity that we have met life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil, demanding, moralizing gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to those maniacs who preach reward in death: grace and eternal bliss . . . or dark revenge . . ."