Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

  Aquila paid no attention to his wife, the ultimate tribute of an antlered male. Instead he gazed with joy upon the sunset. Since we gospel writers are not encouraged to describe anything because the taboo against the graving of images also includes telling about how they look, I've decided to decorate this gospel with descriptions lifted from the notebooks of certain future writers that, thanks to Chet, it has been my pleasure to peruse in the here and now to which he brings them on "the train down from Westport," as he describes Z-channeling.

  So exactiy what did Aquila see when he looked toward the Gulf of Corinth.> Here goes. He saw that "over the slate-gray of the western clouds was spread a fiery vapor, a rain of infinitesimal tenuity, a great dust of gold that swept down upon the silent sea like the train of a goddess of fire and, presendy, thrusting through the somber wall of cloud like a titan bursting the walls of her prison, the sun shone forth, a giant ball of copper."

  Of course we Christians were not allowed to use similes or even metaphors—parables, of course, were big—but even if we had been given the green light, style-wise, I would

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  probably have written that the setting sun looked like an egg that was lightly frying in a dirty lead pan, which is exacdy how the sun looked to me that evening if it had occurred to me that the sun didn't look the way it actually did when it had just set, a matter not worth noting in our day. But enough self-consciousness.

  As I left the house with Saint over my shoulder, who should I find in the atrium but Mary Baker Eddy. She glared at Saint, bilious eyes like—let's try another one—^two eggs sunnyside up.> "Tell him that he only thinks he is ill. Tell him to believe. To have faith in Christ Scientist."

  "He's an epileptic."

  "He has Negative Thoughts. I have warned you, Timothy, we will meet again."

  "At Philippi, madam.>"

  "No. Golgotha. I am booked in." \^th a banshee howl, Mrs. Eddy was gone, like a titan (this is really easy) bursting through the time-barrier . . . sic.

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  somehow, in dreams I suppose, to look in on our activities. Since they never stayed for more than an hour at the most, I never paid much attention to them.

  But now, suddenly, a horde of kibitzers are converging on me at a time when there's absolutely nothing historical going on here in Macedonia or anywhere else that I know of The emperor, Domitian, runs a tight ship. The glory days of our act are pretty much over until Jesus returns, which looks less and less likely to those of us in the present time frame. So what's going on?

  No sooner had I put stylus to parchment—^no word processor for me, though Chet says he could get me one complete with battery—^than I was aware of a presence^ of something just back of me as I sit at this trestie table in my study on the cathedral side of the bishop's bungalow. Ata-lanta is downtown, organizing a fund-raiser for the dieting Cretans.

  I turned and there was the man with the eyeglasses and hearing aid that I had met in the tepidarium of the New Star Baths. He was carrying an oblong black leather box with a handle. "I hope I'm not disturbing you at your labors." Was it my imagination or had he been reading over my shoulder? I rolled this scroll up.

  "Well, my son," I was all-bishop, irritated bishop, "as a matter of fact you are disturbing me. Why can't you people from TV-land learn about appointments? I have a fiill-time secretary and a part-time social secretary. Their offices are in the diocesan headquarters, across the street." I indicated the window through which could be seen the square block of offices where the diocese of Macedonia is administered. Actually I am quite proud of my staff, particularly the accounting and investment departments. In fact, only this week the proconsul sent over his entire team of financial advisers to

  study our tithing procedures. But beg as they might, the names on the Holy Rolodex are our Holiest of Holies and never to be revealed to profane eyes, particularly those of tax gatherers.

  "I'm truly sorry. Bishop." He was nervous and his hands shook. "But channeling from where I am to where you are isn't all that exact a science and the niceties just aren't possible considering the state of the art."

  "Then," I said, ready for this one, thanks to Chet, "why not wait until the art's state is further along and then come back here for a visit.^ After all, at this particular moment in time, I'm here forever at this table and on this day, and so forever available to you, like it or not and I don't like it— being stuck here like—^like a cold poached egg in aspic." That was nice, I thought.

  "But I can't wait. None of us can. You see by the time the art is so perfected that I might be able to give you advance warning about setting up a long working weekend Friday through Monday, say, I might be too old or even dead in my period of time. I'm afraid it's all pretty much catch-as-catch-can. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Doctor Francis B. S. Cuder, Ashok Professor of Comparative Religion at Fairleigh Dickinson University."

  "As well as computer genius in residence, at General Electric."

  "Chet told you." Dr. Cuder did not seem too pleased.

  "You wear, as they say in TV parlance, two hats."

  "Exacdy. I channeled in to discuss . . ."

  I was immediately suspicious.

  "If you are the computer wizard at GE why do you use a medium like a tourist, like Mary Baker Eddy.>"

  "I have my spiritual side. Now then . . ." He sat down on a stool, and opened the leather box. "As I told you in the

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  baths, I am editing and collating—^with concordances, naturally—the writings of Saint Paul. You are crucial to my studies." He took from the box a thick manuscript in a dark blue binder.

  I glanced, yearningly I fear, at the TV set in the comer. It was time for the first part of ABC's movie of the week: a powerfiil tale of a young lad who is gang-raped by what I think the announcer said were "account executives," though I could be wrong. I often get confused as to what is said and shown on a machine that keeps hurling words and pictures at you twenty-four hours a day. As Atalanta so wisely said, "We'll end up watching the rube-tube all day und all night." That was when we decided to watch only certain important programs at specified hours. Certainly it woiild never do for me, of all people, to become a couch cucumber in real life. In real life. Yes. That's what all these recent interferences are about. What will I write in my real gospel? Everyone wants to know. So do I.

  Dr. Cuder stared at me through gold-rimmed eyeglasses that magnified his eyes until they resembled sea urchins. "Sa many texts have vanished without a trace. ..."

  "If they have vanished, how do you know that they ever were.>"

  "Secondary sources." Dr. Cuder was prompt. Too prompt.> He was also smooth. "As of now, the end of the second millennium, you yourself are nowhere on record. We still have, barely, what appear to be Saint Paul's letters to you but not a word from you to him. I suppose you did write him from time to time?" I don't know why but I suddenly felt very nervous even though there I was—and still am—in my own bungalow only a stone's throw from my own cathedral.

  "Yes," I said. "Of course," I careftilly added. But Dr. Cuder just stared at me, and I started to gabble, something

  I haven't done since I was a kid in Asia Minor caught in a lie. "I guess he didn't keep my letters. Oh, maybe the odd postcard, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, with the thousand—count them—priestesses, the usual wish-you-were-here sort of card."

  Although Dr. Cuder turned the pages in the blue binder as if he were looking for something, his huge eyes were not on the text but on me. "Perhaps there was a reason why Saint Paul did not keep your correspondence."

  I pulled myself together. "Actually he kept everything. He was a regular packrat. But all of his belongings were destroyed in Rome. Court order."

  "What would you say if I were to tell you that we have retrieved your letters, and that they are all here?"

  "I'd say you must've managed, somehow, to arrive in Rome before the court ordered the destruction of Saint Paul's files, and that you then stol
e—or shall we say borrowed.^— the letters."

  "Yes." said Dr. Cutler. "And it was I, Francis B. S. Cuder, who purloined the files. Before the Hacker destroyed the tape, of course."

  "Well," I tried to make a joke, "you're pretty sure to get one of those many Nobel Prizes for that."

  "I already have the prize of prizes." He was serene. "In physics. For my discovery of the Cuder Effect, which makes it possible to transmit images through time-space, and soon, very soon, persons as well as"—^he looked at the Sony— "television sets. You were supposed to get a GE set. Strange."

  "This works just fine. Any word on whether or not I'll anchor the Golgotha program.^"

  Dr. Cuder shook his head. "That's NBC. The show-biz side of GE. But we've ahnost made the technological breakthrough so that, union rules permitting, we'll be able to

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  transport a live camera crew anywhere we want. Now, as I have said, I have not one but two disciplines, a mandatory requirement at a cream-of-the-cream university like Fairleigh Dickinson, second in stature—and may I say glamour?—only to the University of Florida at Coconut Grove. I alternate between comparative computer software for GE and solid religion. I wear my theologian's hat today." Dr. Cutler looked down at the open binders. "Are you aware that Pris-cilla kept a diary—an erotic diary that was found by one Edmund Wilson, B.A., Princeton, underneath a stack of Dead Sea scrolls and only recendy translated and released by Mossad in order to discredit you. Saint Paul, Christianity and the obscure Mr. Wilson with only the one low academic degree .>"

  I must say I was poleaxed by this revelation. How could Priscilla have had the time to keep a diary, hurrying from lover to lover while consolidating her position as the leader of Ephesus's demimonde.^ Besides, what could she put in it.> Her own conversation.^ I mean she never listened to anybody else. And in what language?

  "Pontusine," said Dr. Cutler, reading my mind. "She wrote these scorching pages at the hairdresser and during those interminable winter concerts at the Aeolian Hall where she was a patroness. She wrote swiftly, as she did everything else. She was alert to the telling detail. She was particularly distressed by your unnatural relationship with Saint Paul. ..."

  "Now. Now." I was getting edgy. "Priscilla is hardly a dependable source. In fact, if there's any false witness in the neighborhood you can count on her to bear it like the trouper and virago she is."

  Dr. Cuder smiled for the first time, a terrible sight. "I have excerpted here all references to you and Saint Paul. . . ."

  " Where is this diary?"

  "Physically it is in a safety-deposit box in a New Jersey bank. And, as you may not know, the New Jersey banks are the safest—security-wise—in all God's country. Naturally, the ones at Passaic, Paterson, and Paramus spring first to mind, but there are other security vaults no less secure. I speak now not of windy Trenton nor sea-girt Ventnor, but of Whitman-samplered Camden and roguish Hoboken, of Morristown which need never hold a candle to Perth Amboy or to the blessed Oranges, place of my origin, whilst it is no secret that the state's capital of Trenton will soon change its name to Mosler in honor of the Mosler Safe. Oh, never, never sell Jersey short security-wise!"

  I said that I would not. Then Dr. Cutler dried the froth from his lips and addressed himself to the blue-bindered text. "Now, my translation from Pontusine is a bit clumsy but, let me tell you, this makes pretty hot reading even for today's audience, jaded as they are with tales of the death styles of the poor and obscure."

  Dr. Cutler handed me the manuscript. "I have other copies," he said, again that smile. "You come out of this very well indeed, Timaximus, with your cornflower- blue eyes and hyacinthine golden curls in need, the authoress assures us, of a more powerful conditioner in the shampoo of your—not her—choice."

  I was turning pretty red during all this, as I pretended to study the book. Then I started actually to read a few lines here, a few lines there, and if the diary wasn't Priscilla's handiwork, whoever had written it had been a fly on a lot of our walls. It was very, very embarrassing as far as I was concerned, and it was catastrophic as far as Saint was concerned, what with all that baby talk he used to babble into my hyacinthine curls while Priscilla, the fly, clung somehow to that wall, writing it all down. "Have you published this?"

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  Dr. Cutler shook his head. "No. Not yet. And perhaps—^who knows?—never."

  "What's the deal.>"

  "Much, much, dear Bishop, depends on your gospel." He pointed at this scroll.

  I rolled it up tight. "Fm just writing a straightforward memoir," I said. "Where we went, who we saw. That kind of thing. And, of course, the Message."

  When Dr. Cutler smiled, the teeth were like the front of one of those cars that gets smashed up every second on the tube. "Why then. Bishop, do you include such detailed— even prurient—data about your circumcision.^"

  "Because"—I was cool—"I wanted to show to what lengths Paul would go to pacify the Jerusalem Christians, who were primarily orthodox Jews."

  "I see." Dr. Cutler's mouth opened to reveal a three-way crash on the freeway. "And what reasons do you give for your numerous descriptions of the sexual act with Priscilla.>"

  I was truly outraged. "There are none." I was firm. "Oh, the prurient may put two and two together with us two. ..." Suddenly the dawn broke like a dish over my head. "How do you know what I've written so far.^ Nobody's read a line of this including my better half."

  Dr. Cuder just looked knowing: Plainly, in ftiture time, my work exists untouched by the computer virus, and Dr. Cuder has read it.

  "May I.>" Like the professional theologian and comparative physicist that he is. Dr. Cuder unrolled this scroll and read aloud a lurid scene of Priscilla giving me head, not one word of which did I ever write although scenes like it happened all the time in real—as opposed to gospel—life.

  "Stop! You're making it up." I grabbed the scroll and held it close to my face—my eyes are going. I read for myself

  an intimate real-life scene between Priscilla and me, graphically rendered.

  Bewildered and angry, I rolled up the scroll. "Somehow, Dr. Cutler, you have transformed—or you are transforming—^my gospel into one of your own devising. I'd be most grateful if you'd return my work to me. Otherwise I'll have to bum this"—I touched these—not those—pages— "and start again. ..."

  Suddenly, out of the door to my locked wardrobe where I keep the diocese's top-secret financial documents stepped Dr. Cutler. In one hand he held a scroll. "I must apologize. Bishop," he said. "But I only this minute found your gospel. I was cleaning out my lab at Gulf -f Eastern and there it was with my discarded DNA unified field theory notes. A thousand apologies."

  "This is intolerable!" Dr. Cuder was on his feet, scowling at himself. The new himself was older than he, and very cheery. My Dr. Cuder was distraught. "What date are you from and where's my hearing aid, and my glasses.^ And what are you doing at Gulf + Eastem.>"

  The second Dr. Cuder smiled, the false teeth flawless. "I'm from a few years later. The last year of the nineties, actually, I left GE. I've also left Fairleigh Dickinson for City College. But why chatter about me?

  "There's been a change of plan on this tape." The new Dr. Cuder was suave. "Your forgery is too crude. Also, preliminary carbon tests have decisively ruled it out. So we're pursuing another tack now." The new but older Dr. Cuder gazed deep into the eyes of the younger Dr. Cuder. "If I may say so, your blood pressure is dangerously high. ..."

  "I've taken my beta-blocker." Cuder One, as I shall call him, was defensive. He was also totally confused, which made two of us.

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  "Yes," said Cutler Two, "but it's the wrong one. Shift to"—^he whispered something into his younger self s ear. "Follow that prescription and you'll avoid the stroke which is supposed to kill you—^in this tape—shordy before the millennium, which means / won't be alive to keep up the good work."

  Then Cuder Two gave me the scroll. "Here's your
original gospel, as far as you've got into it as of this date. May I suggest more local color.> The mutilated whang is fim but a tad special. On the other hand, descriptions of sunsets are right on with contemporary readers since so many of them are blind from Sony-TV radiation and must use Braille. We have audio recordings for them, but there's nothing like an old-fashioned book with pages to turn, like life itself, I always say."

  "Dr. Cutler." I was beginning to rally. "I too find intolerable, sir"—I was courdy but cold—"that you have arrived at the exact moment when you are already here, without invitation, either one of you, with a cock-and-bull story . . ."

  "I had no choice." Cuder Two interrupted me in my own diocese. "Gendemen," he proclaimed, "the Day of Judgment has been penciled in for 2001 a.d."

  "HaUelujah!" I cried.

  "Who told you?" Cuder One probed.

  "I remembered, of course." This was cryptic. But Cuder One was silenced.

  Cuder Two continued. "The messiah will make his arrival in the midst of a spectacular nuclear fireworks display, and then it's Heaven for the good folks and Hell for the bad."

  Cuder One nodded. "Thus spoke Ezckiel."

  I was overcome with emotion. "To think that I ever

  doubted—and I have—^that He would return to us as He promised."

  "Fm afraid," said Cutler Two, "that this messiah will not be the Jesus you and Saint Paul invented. He will be the Jewish messiah, as predicted by Isaiah and Selma Suydam, a Jewdsh Princess from the House of David in Bel Air."

  "Blasphemy!" I could say no more.

  Cutler One was calmer now. "There is still time to alter this tape."