Messiah

by Gore Vidal

  "I hope so. Got any new stunts?"

  I told him, briefly, about my thoughts on marriage or rather Cave's thoughts. The literary device was for me to ask him certain questions and for him to answer them or, at least, to ask pointed questions in his turn. Cheerfully, I had committed Cave to my own point of view and I was somewhat nervous about his reaction, not to mention the others. So far, only Clarissa knew and her approval was pleasant but perhaps frivolous: it carried little weight, I knew, with the rest.

  Paul whistled. "You got us a tall order. I'm not sure we'll be able to handle that problem yet, if ever."

  "I've done it carefully," I began.

  Stokharin, who had been listening with interest, came to my aid. "In the Centers we, how you say, Paul? soft-pedal the family. We advise young boys to make love to the young girls without marrying or having babies. We speak of the family as a social unit, and society changes. I am most eager to study Mr Luther's approach. Perhaps a little aid from those of us in clinical work . . ."

  But then the dark sedans began to purr; nervous attendants whispered to Paul and I was soon left alone with the fragments of our brief conversation to examine and interpret at my leisure. I was surprised and pleased at Stokharin's unexpected alliance. I had thought of him as my chief antagonist. But then, my work finished, I tended roses and read Cassius Dio until the summons in August came.

  6

  The plane landed on a glare of blue water, more blinding even than the vivid sky about the sun itself which made both elements seem to be a quivering blue fire in which was destroyed all of earth save a tiny smear of dusty faded green, the island of our destination.

  The pilot maneuvered the plane against a bone-gray dock where, all alone, Iris stood, her hair tangled from the propellers' wind and her eyes hidden by dark glasses. Like explorers in a new country, Paul, Stokharin and I scrambled onto the dock, the heat closing in about us like blue canvas, stifling, palpable. I gasped and dropped my suitcase. Iris laughed and ran forward to greet us; she came first to me which, even in my dazzled, shocked state, I realized and valued.

  "Gene, you must get out of that suit this minute! and get some dark glasses or you'll go blind. Paul, how are you? It's good to see you, Doctor." And, in the chatter of greetings, she escorted us off the dock and across a narrow white beach to a grove of palm trees where the cottage stood.

  To our delight, the interior was cooled by machinery. I sank into a wicker chair even while Cave was pumping my hand. Iris laughed, "Leave him alone, John. He's smothered by the heat."

  "No hat," said Cave solemnly after the first greeting which, in my relief, I'd not heard. "You'll get sunstroke."

  Paul was now in charge. The heat which had enervated both Stokharin and me filled him with manic energy, like one of those reptiles which absorb vitality from the sun.

  "What a great little place, John! Had no idea there were all the comforts of home down here, none at all. Don't suppose you go out much?"

  Cave, unlike Iris, was not tanned though he had, for him, a good color, a ruddiness of tone unlike his usual sallowness.

  "I don't get too much sun," he admitted. "We go fishing sometimes, early in the morning. Most of the time I just hang around the house and look at the letters, and read some." I noticed on the table beside me an enormous pile of travel magazines, tourist folders and atlases: this had obviously been Cave's reading. I anticipated trouble.

  Paul prowled restlessly about the modern living room with its shuttered sealed windows. Stokharin and I, like fish back in their own element after a brief excursion on land, gasped softly in our chairs while Iris told us of the keys, of their fishing trips. She was at her best here as she had been that other time in Spokane . . . being out of doors, in Cave's exclusive company, brought her to life in a way the exciting busyness of New York did not. In New York she seemed like an object through which an electric current passed; here on this island, in the sun's glare, she had unfolded, petal after petal until the secret interior seemed almost exposed. I was conscious of her as a lovely woman and, without warning, I experienced desire: that sharp rare longing which, in me, can reach no climax. Always before she had been a friend, a companion whose company I had jealously valued: her attention alone had been enough to satisfy me, but on this day I saw her as a man entire might and I plummeted into despair while talking of Plato.

  "The Symposium was the model, yes. There are other ways of casting dialogues such as introducing the celebrated dead brought together for a chat in Limbo. I thought, though, that I should keep the talk to only two. Cave and myself . . . Socrates and Alcibiades." Alcibiades was precisely the wrong parallel but I left it uncorrected, noticing how delicately the hollow at the base of her throat quivered with life's blood and although I attempted, as I often had before with bitter success, to think of her as so much mortal flesh, the body and its beauty only pulp and bone, only beautiful to a human eye . . . hideous, no doubt, to the eye of a geometric progression . . . that afternoon I was lost and I could not become, even for a moment, an abstract intelligence again: I saw the bone; I saw the dust, yet I saw her existing, despite her nature and her fate, triumphant in the present. I cursed the flaw in my own flesh and hated life.

  "We liked it very much," she said, not divining my mood, unaware of my sudden passion and its attendant despair.

  "You don't think it's too strong, do you? All morality, not to mention the churches, will be aligned against us."

  "John was worried at first . . . not that opposition frightens him and it is his idea; I mean you wrote the dialogue but it reflects exactly what he's always thought." Though in love's agony, I looked at her sharply to make certain she was perfectly serious: she was; this helped soothe the pain. She had been hypnotized by Cave. I wondered how Clarissa could ever have thought it was the other way around.

  "In a way we're already on record," Iris looked thoughtfully across the room at Cave who was showing Paul and Stokharin a large map of some strange country. "The Centers have helped a good many couples to adjust to one another without marriage and without guilt."

  "But then there's the problem of what to do with the children when the family breaks up."

  Iris sighed. "I'm afraid that's already a problem. Our Centers are taking care of a good many children already. A number, of course, go out for adoption to bored couples who need something to amuse them. I suppose we'll have to establish nurseries as a part of each Center until, finally, the government assumes the responsibility."

  "If it becomes Cavite."

  "When it becomes Cavite." She was powerful in her casualness.

  "Meanwhile there are laws of adoption which vary from state to state and, if we're not careful, we're apt to come up against the law."

  "Paul looks after us," she smiled. "Did you know that he has nearly a hundred lawyers on our pay roll? All protecting us."

  "From what?" I had not kept track of this.

  "Lawsuits . . . mostly attempts by state legislatures to outlaw the Centers on the grounds of immorality and so on. The lawyers are kept busy all the time."

  "Why haven't I read about any of this in the papers?"

  "We've been able to keep things fairly quiet. Paul is marvelous with the editors . . . several have even joined us, by the way . . . secretly, of course."

  "What's the membership now?"

  Iris gestured. "No one knows. We have thirty Centers in the United States and each day they receive hundreds of new Cavites. I suspect there are at least four million by now."

  I gasped, beginning to recover at last from the heat, from my unexpected crisis of love. "I had no idea things were going so fast."

  "Too fast. We haven't enough trained people to look after the Centers and on top of that we've got to set up new Centers. Paul has broken the country up into districts, all very methodical: so many Centers per district each with a Resident in charge. Stokharin is taking care of the clinical work."

  "Where's the money coming from?"

  "In bushels from h
eaven," Iris smiled. "We leave all that up to Paul. I shouldn't be surprised if he counterfeits it. One thing I know, though, I must get back to New York soon, to the school. I shouldn't really have gone off in the middle of everything but I was tired and John wanted company so I came."

  "How is he?"

  "As you see: calm. I don't believe he ever thinks of any of our problems. He never talks about them; never reads the reports Paul sends him. He seldom reads the attacks from the churches and we get several a day, not to mention threatening mail. It's got so bad that we now have full-time bodyguards."

  "You think people are seriously threatening him?"

  "I don't know how serious they are but we can't take chances. Fortunately, almost no one knows we're here and, so far, no cranks have got through from the mainland. We get our groceries and mail brought in by boat every other day from Key Largo. Otherwise, we're marooned here."

  I looked about me for some sign of the guards but they were elsewhere: a Cuban woman glumly vacuuming in the next room was the only visible stranger.

  Cave abandoned his maps and atlases long enough to tell me how much the dialogues pleased him.

  "I wish I could put it down like you do. I can only say it when people listen."

  "You feel I've been accurate?"

  He nodded solemnly. "Oh, yes . . . it's just as I've always said it, only written down." I realized that he'd already assumed full responsibility (and credit, should there be any) for my composition; I accepted his presumption with amusement. Only Stokharin seemed aware of the humor of the situation. I caught him staring at me with a shrewd expression; he looked quickly away and his mouth was rigid as he tried not to smile. I liked him at that moment: we were the only two, evidently, who had not been possessed by Cave. I felt like a conspirator.

  For several days we talked, or rather Paul talked. He had brought with him charts and statements and statistics and, though Cave did not bother to disguise his boredom, he listened most of the time and his questions, when they did occur, were apposite. The rest of us were fascinated by the extent of what Paul referred to as the "first operational phase."

  Various projects had already been undertaken; others were put up to the directors for discussion. The mood was, due to Paul's emphatic personality, more like that of a meeting of account-executives in an advertising firm than the pious foregathering of a messiah's apostles . . . and already that word had been used in the press by the curious as well as by the devout. Cave was the messiah to several million Americans, one not come with fire to judge the world, nor one armed with the instruction of a supernatural being whose presence was elsewhere but whose secret word had been given this favorite son . . . no, Cave was of another line: that of the prophets, of the instructors like Jesus before he became Christ, like Mohammed before he became Islam. Cave was the one in our age whose single task it was to speak out, to say the words all men waited for yet dared not speak nor even attend without the overpowering authority of another who had, plausibly, assumed the guise of master. I could not help but wonder as I watched Cave in those hectic conferences if the past had been like this.

  Cave certainly had one advantage over his predecessors: modern communications. It took three centuries for Christianity to infest the world. It was to take Cave only three years to conquer Europe and the Americas.

  But I did not have this foreknowledge in Florida. I only knew that Paul was handling an extraordinary business in a remarkable way. There was no plan so vast that he could not contemplate its execution with ease. He was exhausting in his energy and, though he did not possess much imagination, he was a splendid improviser, using whatever themes were at hand to create his own dazzling contrapuntal effects with.

  We decided upon a weekly magazine to be distributed gratis to the Cavites (I was appointed editor though the real work, of which I was entirely ignorant, was to be done by a crew already at work on the first issue); we determined to send abroad certain films to be shown by Cavite lecturers; we approved the itinerary of Cave's national tour in the fall (Cave was most alive during this discussion; suggesting cities he wanted particularly to see, reveling in the euphony of such names as Tallahassee); we planned several dinners to be held in New York with newspaper editors and political figures and we discussed the advisability of Cave's accepting an invitation to be questioned by the Committee on National Morals and Americanism of the House of Representatives, a remarkably powerful Committee which had begun to show an interest in the progress of our Centers. It was decided that Cave delay meeting them until the time was propitious, or until he had received a subpoena. Paul, with his instinctive sense of the theatrical, did not want to have this crucial meeting take place without a most careful build-up. We discussed the various steps taken or about to be taken by certain state legislatures against the Centers. The states involved were those with either a predominantly Catholic or predominantly Baptist population. Since the Centers had been organized to conform with existing state and federal laws (the lawyers were earning their fees), Paul thought they would have a difficult time in closing any of them. The several laws which had been passed were all being appealed and he was confident of our vindication by the higher courts. Though the established churches were now fighting us with every possible weapon of law and propaganda, we were fully protected, Paul felt, by the Bill of Rights even in its currently abrogated state.

  Late in the afternoon after one of the day's conferences had ended, Iris and I swam in the Gulf, the water as warm as blood and the sky soft with evening. We stayed in the water for an hour, not talking, not really swimming, merely a part of the sea and the sky, two lives on a curved horizon, quite alone (for the others never ventured out), only the bored bodyguard on the dock reminded us that the usual world had not slipped away in a sunny dream, leaving us isolated and content in that sea from which our life had come so long ago . . . water to water, I thought comfortably as we crawled up on the beach like new-lunged creatures.

  Iris undid her bathing cap and her hair, streaked blonde by the sun (and a little gray as well), fell about her shoulders.

  She sighed voluptuously. "If it would always be like this."

  "If what?"

  "Everything."

  "Ah," I ran my hand along my legs and crystals of salt glittered and fell; we were both dusted with light. "You have your work," I added . . . with some malice though I was now under control . . . my crisis resolved after one sleepless night. I could now look at her without longing, without pain; regret was another matter but regret was only a distant relative to anguish.

  "I have that, too," she said. "The work uses everything while this . . . is a narcotic. I float without a thought or a desire like . . . like an anemone."

  "You don't know what an anemone is, do you?"

  She laughed like a child. "How do you know I don't?"

  "You said it like somebody reading a Latin inscription."

  "What is it?"

  I laughed, too. "I don't know. Perhaps something like a jellyfish. It has a lovely sound: sea anemone."

  We were interrupted by a motorboat pulling into the dock.

  "It's the mail," said Iris. "We'd better go back to the house now."

  While we collected towels, the guard on the dock helped the boatman carry two large boxes of groceries and mail to the house.

  Between a pair of palm trees, a yard from the door of the house, the bomb went off in a flash of light and gray smoke. A stinging spray of sand blinded Iris and me. The blast knocked me off balance and I fell backward onto the beach. For several minutes, my eyes filled with tears and burning from the coral sand, I was quite blind. When I was finally able to see again, Iris was already at the house trying to force open the door.

  One of the palm trees looked as if it had been struck by lightning, all its fronds gone and its base smoldering. The windows of the house were broken and I recall wondering, foolishly, how the air-conditioning could possibly work if the house was not sealed. The door was splintered and most of its paint
had been burned off: it was also jammed for Iris could not open it. Meanwhile, from a side door, the occupants of the house had begun to appear, pale and shaken.

  I limped toward the house, rubbing my eyes, aware that my left knee had been hurt. I was careful not to look at either the boatman or the guard. Their remains inextricably strewn among tin cans and letters in the bushes.

  Paul was the first to speak: a torrent of rage which jolted us all out of fear and shock. Iris, after one look at the dead men, fled into the house. I stood stupidly beside the door, rolling my eyes to dislodge the sand and listening to Paul. Then the other guards came with blankets and gathered up the pieces of the two men. I turned away, aware for the first time that Cave was standing slightly apart, nearest the house. He was very pale. He spoke only once, half to himself for Paul was still ranting: "Let it begin," said Cave softly. "Now, now."

  Eight

  1

  It began indeed, like the first recorded shot of a war. The day after the explosion, we left the island and Cave was flown to another retreat, this time in the center of New York City where, unique in all the world, there can exist true privacy, even invisibility.

  The Cavite history of the next two years is publicly known and the private aspects of it do not particularly reveal. It was a time of expansion and of battle.

  The opposition closed its ranks. Several attempts were made on all our lives and, six months after our return from Florida, we were all, except the indomitable Clarissa, forced to move into the brand-new Cavite Center, a quickly built but handsome building of yellow glass on Park Avenue. Here on the top floor, in the penthouse which was itself a mansion surrounded by Babylonian gardens and a wall of glass through which the encompassing city rose like stalagmites, Cave and Paul, Stokharin and Iris and I all lived with our bodyguards, never venturing out of the building which resembled, during that time, a military headquarters with guards and adjutants and a maze of officials through whom both strangers and familiars were forced to pass before they could meet even myself, much less Cave.