Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

  Curiously enough, the published entry for that significant Wednesday evening in Ephesus is quite different fi-om my own recollection. But then, over the years, Priscilla con-standy rewrote the diaries as her views of those recorded changed, usually for the worse—much worse.

  "This morning I had a call ft-om Stephanie." The actor's voice moved fi-ohi ominous alto to thrilling falsetto. Priscilla mimed a meeting wdth Stephanie, cerise scarf double-looped about her neck whose deep lines were now hidden while the recessive chin divided the incensed air like a sinking ship's prow. Why are similes so easy for me now, but metaphors so hard.>

  "Stephanie was deeply agitated, her long expressive legs like . . ." Like what.> I wrote too soon, overconfident. I suppose my just having reread Priscilla's off-the-wall account of that last soiree has blocked me. Afi:er all, her description and my memory don't begin to tally. According to Priscilla, Stephanie came to the house during the dance recital to warn her of danger. All I can say is, if Stephanie had heard the actor's recitation of the diary, deep doo-doo would have been Priscilla's fate.

  "While Stephanie douched, I prepared with my own hands a subtie dish of chicken and rice with just the merest soup^on of saffron. One whiff of my poulet pontusine and Steph knew what an incredibly sensitive cook I was. Flinging her diet to the winds, she shouted, 'Hold the saffron!' Then tucked in. 'And poor Shirley's into tofu.' She laughed, mouth crammed with goodness.

  "Tofij is a secret dish of the high priestesses, denied us mortals, while Shirley is Shirley MacLaine who oft:en channels in from the future to pass the time of day with Stephanie, giving her all sorts of religious and beauty hints based on an altogether too high, for me, fiber diet.

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  ^^Poulet pontusine wolfed down, Stephanie was on her feet, every inch a second high priestess. 'You must prepare for a time that will try your soul, honey bun.' Then Stephanie, belching, did chaine turns around my tastefully appointed breakfast nook adjacent to the purple conversation pit.

  " 'When, pray, will that time come, you sly boots.^' "

  During these very intimate diary revelations, Prisciila was dancing up a storm. She was—even for her—overexcited, agitated. I sat down on a bench next to Saint, who was not well pleased. "She's been hanging out with that pagan set," he growled in my ear.

  "She's a crypto-Sapphic," I said.

  "Not so crypto. She should go back to class." Saint knew a lot about classical dance. "Look at those arms! Call that adagio!" Prisciila was darting about the atrium like a bat in heat.

  "Modern dance," I said, pretending disapproval when actually I was keen on everything modem in those days. Because the old war-horse Temple ballets were so far behind even those far-off times of which I write, Stephanie and some of the other girls had taken to moonlighting every dark of the moon when the Temple was dark. Thqy would put on modem ballets in the Armenian Non-Union Modem Dance Company, where Stephanie's anguished studies of Every-woman astonished all Ephesus. With absolute integrity and perfect boredom, she enacted, over and over again, the life-cycles of ordinary Ephesian women, usually discovered at home, depressed, cooking a goat amongst quotidianal pots and pans and depilatories. Naturally, Prisciila tried to imitate Stephanie. Naturally, she failed, as "all art must," in her phrase, "fail."

  Now Prisciila was circling the atrium, clashing tiny cymbals between thumbs and forefingers, tapping her cleated

  sandals on the marble, flashing luminous eyes at the audience while the words of the diary droned on: "To prepare lamb hotpot Sqthian style, you must grate one lamb very fine, with coriander. Preserve the wool ..."

  At that moment, all hell broke loose. Egged on by temple eunuchs, a gang of Ephesian toughs swept through the house. Aquila tried to stop them but to no avail.

  Apollos fled. Alexander broke at least one eunuchoid neck, while Saint was knocked firom his chair.

  During all this, Priscilla—a trouper to her silver fingertips—^never lost a beat. She continued to dance even when she lost the audience, literally, as Christians fled before the pagan invaders. I scooped up Saint and headed for the street.

  Apparendy the Temple administration had decided that the Ephesus box office was too small to divide three ways. So they dealt us a body blow! They also shut down the Armenian Non-Union Modern Dance Company. Stephanie was reprimanded. Saint had a black eye, and Priscilla had a set of horrendous reviews from the usually pliable Ephesian taste-makers and dance critics. The house itself was wrecked, and the purple conversation pit in tatters.

  "Look at the way they criticize my arms in the adagio." Priscilla held up a tablet which had been nailed to our front door.

  But, for once, no one paid the slightest attention to her. Saint was repairing the Holy Rolodex; his black eye was starting to turn yellow and he was in a foul temper—unlike Apollos, who was soothing. "Just a small setback. Nothing more. Or, as Scripture so finely puts it, they flee before Righteousness."

  "Only it was we who did the fleeing," said Alexander, who was cleaning up the rubble in the living room, aided by a dozen converts.

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  In fact, everyone was busy except the somber Priscilla, who leaned against a column, on point for a change, her face like the mask of tragedy. "Just when I was about to do my great leap, the cosmic one, where I . . ." But Priscilla's leap was not to be completed even in retrospect. The deputy mayor of Ephesus and his guards had joined us.

  With the speed of a practiced juggler. Saint hid the Holy Rolodex behind a large white bust of Priscilla, a gift from Stephanie she said but, actually, a crude bit of work from a mason who wanted the contract to remodel the house. "You've come to apologize." Saint was peremptory.

  "Well, yes, of course." The deputy mayor nodded vaguely at Aquila, who was emerging from the conversation pit, torn purple drapes in hand. "Yes. We're sorry about all the disturbance, but then we live in disturbing times, don't we?" The deputy mayor was known throughout Ephesus as the Grecian bore sans parcil.

  "I am a citizen of Rome." Saint produced his passport. "I demand protection from the governor."

  The deputy mayor was impressed, if not exacdy intimidated. "Naturally, you can fill out the forms, the usual applications for an audience. You will also be obliged to make an application—separately—for a permit to conduct theatrical performances such as this one that caused so much . . . disturbance." He stared at Priscilla, who slipped gracefrilly into fifth position.

  "I shall report everything." Saint was grim. "I have fought with beasts at Ephesus."

  "Come now, sir. Hardly beasts ..."

  Saint thundered, as only he could: "We wresde not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. ..."

  "I hope you arc not referring to the present bipartisan administration of Ephesus, which has been one not only of reform but ..."

  "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God." Saint then, more or less, did exactly that. The eyes rolled up; he went entirely rigid; foamed at the mouth.

  "God is among us!" shouted the ever-quick Pris-cilla. "He has taken the soul of Saul of Tarsus into his bosom ..."

  "For a short conference," said Aquila, always practical. "You know.^ Like a briefing."

  I gathered up the now-rigid Saint. "We shall withdraw for the . . . nonce." I spoke with as much dignity as I could. Although a small man. Saint, at deadweight, was like a block of marble. "We go to . . ."I don't know why I said what I said but I did. "We go to Jerusalem."

  I

  "Now or then? Or should I say then or now?"

  "Ever. A lovely part of the world." He gazed a moment at the cathedral, and the blue hills beyond. Then he said, without changing his casual tone, "Who warned you against me?"

  "Chester Claypoole and—someone in a dream."

  "Someone in a dream." He seemed suddenly weary. "We are all trapped in a dream, like it or not. The seriality of time has col
lapsed and here I am where I should be either dead or unborn or eternal instead of like this, in between."

  "Who are you?"

  "I am a computer analyst detective. I try to keep the tapes clean. I monitor the channels. Ever since Shirley MacLaine popularized channeling, all sorts of idiots have been going back to their earlier lives. Most of it is nonsense, of course. They dream up the whole thing. A sort of mass reverie."

  "Then can you tell me whether you are in my dream or I am in yours?"

  Marvin laughed. "Let's say two dreams are intersecting for the moment. But, in this case, I am the instigator, because I am on a case. Big corporations call me in when things go haywire, like now, when viruses are striking the tapes and the disks and the chips and even the tablets of memory—specifically anything to do with Christianity. I suppose it's because we are so close to the year 5761. . . ."

  This was an odd slip. "Surely, you mean 2000 a.d., which is coming up soon, unless you're fi-om a lot further on in the future."

  "Sorry. I misspoke. Two thousand, of course." He smiled vaguely. He had bad teeth. "There are many people who think the Day of Judgment is at hand, at last."

  "Two thousand years late, if I may say so." I could not keep the bitterness out of my voice. After all, Saint and I and

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  all the other original Christians have dedicated our lives to explaining away the fact that Jesus had left us with no forwarding address, much less an estimated time of arrival. I'm curious as to how later generations are handling his original *'ril be seeing you before you know it, in all the old familiar places."

  "The post-Resurrection phase has been a bit of letdown for the whole team."

  "As a Jew"—^Marvin was flat— "I am of two minds about the Resurrection."

  "We pray for you," I said automatically. By and large, I have none of Saint's tolerance for his onetime co-religionists.

  "I know you do." Marvin smiled. I can't think why he hasn't made use of the marvelous dentistry in the television ftiture, the only aspect of that rather unpleasant world that appeals to Atalanta, whose adult life has been ruined by incessant toothache. I had most of my teeth removed in Rome by a dentist-slave of Petronius.

  "Anyway," said Marvin, idly adjusting the, to me, al--ways mysterious dials at the back of the set. "I think you should know that I am in pursuit of the Hacker. I have been hired by General Electric, which owns the American television network NBC—Nuclear Broadcasting Company—as well as many companies that make the most advanced nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and, of course, household appliances galore."

  I was blunt. "I would say that, so far, you've made a mess of your job."

  "So Chet Claypoole thinks. But I've been on the case only since the 'Joshi' appeared on the Saint John tape."

  "What is a 'Joshi'.>"

  Marvin suddenly became very professorial, but then he

  is in his element, of course—a computer analyst in pursuit of a Hacker, a virologist searching out and destroying a complex series of viruses. In short, a dedicated man of science like Louis Pasteur. "There are ten common viruses that attack computer systems at the weakest point in what we call the software. Many viruses are relatively harmless, even playful, the work of essentially benign if misguided hackers."

  "The hackers, I take it, are a cult, like Mithraists.>"

  Marvin shook his head. Then he pressed the remote control. On the set appeared what he said was an Italian television program—^it looked like any other commercial program except that a white ball kept bouncing across the screen.

  "That is called the Italian hacker. His work is a white Ping-Pong ball that bounces across the screen during a program or, if he has penetrated, let us say, a list of numbered accounts in Geneva, the Ping-Pong ball will bounce over the statements of illicit assets."

  I was getting mildly seasick watching the Ping-Pong ball bounce over a series of artichokes in a Cynar liquor commercial. "A harmless prank," I said.

  Marvin switched off the set. "Men have been known to go mad, watching that ball jump around. Women do not go mad but they are apt to start their menstrual cycle a week to ten days late if they have been exposed to the Italian hacker's Ping-Pong ball, and that naturally causes stress and anxiety at home as well as in the work place."

  "When you say software, what exacdy do you mean?"

  "Program computers with plastic disks where records are kept. Obviously if the disks remain vulnerable, we must shift—^we are, in fact, shifting—to more sophisticated forms of storage such as microchips, but each time we do, in the case of the Gospels specifically, the Hacker—^we think in this case it is one man—or woman—penetrates our defenses and

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  starts to revise or destroy or confuse the text. He is very ingenious. When we transferred from soft to hard disk, he came up with Fish 6. . . ."

  "A holy symbol to us Christians."

  "I daresay, but catastrophic to the hard disk because Fish 6 comes and goes without a trace, erasing the tablets. Gospels, numbered accounts, what have you. Bulgaria is where the most virulent hackers come from, as you might expect of a country once known for prodding enemies of the state to death with poisoned umbrella tips. For reasons of its own, Bulgaria may want to destroy Christianity, no big deal in my view, which is kosher, of course. Then there is the hacker known as Vienna. He may be the man—or woman— or—^who knows? robot—^that we are searching for. Specific files are effectively erased by Vienna while, on the first of April, incredible jokes appear on the screens of a million computers, with such bad-taste jokes as 'the Pope has undergone a second sex change in Bulgaria.' This hacker is known as Jerusalem."

  "Bulgaria, I gather, is a country. Are the Bulgarians-Christian.>"

  Marvin shrugged. "Who knows what anyone is now.>" He switched on the hockey game without the sound, something far too advanced for me to do. "Let me come to the point," he said. "There is no earthly way that the Hacker can ever alter this tape. Dr. Cutler's Super Sam Intercept is a masterpiece. It will take at least a century for anyone, or even any computer, to work out the antivirus combinations guarding the Saint Timothy Tape Two, as we call it."

  "What happened to Tape One.>"

  "There is no One—at least no one One. That is how we confuse the Hacker. So whatever you write will remain unchanged until it is dug up and translated in the first year of

  the Fifth . . . that is, Second Millennium after the birth of your Christ."

  "Ours, not yours?"

  Marvin giggled, not a pleasant sound. "If your New Testament, now being lost except for what you write, is correct, we Jews will all convert when Jesus returns as God. But not till then."

  I grew more rather than less puzzled. "I realize that your . . . science has made it possible for you to tape our lives and our works but even if all the tapes are destroyed by Fish 7 . . ."

  "Fish 6. Fish 7 may prove to be the messiah of the hackers."

  "Whatever. There are still millions of books and inscriptions that tell the Sacred Story, and spread the Good News, and there must be many religious people who remember everything, and are viral resistant."

  Marvin aimed his remote control at the set. The Ponca City, Oklahoma, Jesus Saves Hour was on the air. A minister was reading from the New Testament while a white-robed choir stood in a semicircle behind him, humming softly. "So when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus if He was the King of the Jews, Jesus said, 'I am, and I have come with a sword to drive the pagans from this land so that the Kingdom of God can replace that of the emperor of Rome, and all other pagan dominations and powers.' "

  I stared; listened; sweated. Then I switched off the set. "This is madness."

  "Madness or not, it is the work of the Hacker."

  "How can two thousand years of scripture be erased.^"

  Marvin looked very solemn. "It works like this. If you erase the Saint Mark tape, you also erase the Gospel that he wrote."

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  "Impossible. You erase him
, let us say in 1992 a.d. But his Gospel has been in print for close to two thousand years before the erasure and there is no way you can alter every copy of, let us say, those Gideon Bibles that have been placed in the night tables of every Ramada Inn in freedom's land." I learn a lot from the television simply by absorption.

  "Saint Timothy, you have the right stick but by the wrong end. If Mark's Gospel is erased or seriously altered in 1992 A.D., that will affect what he wrote or did not write. The key word is retroactive. If you enter his tape in Rome at the moment he has completed the Gospel and you tear it up before he can show it to anyone, that's the end of it. Well, when the Hacker goes to work on the Saint Mark tape he either gets Mark to change the text or he suppresses it entirely. . . ."

  My head was spinning. "But there was, once—and there is now—a Mark who is writing the story of Jesus."

  "How do we know.>" Marvin was cool and, somehow, menacing. "We only know what has come down to us. There may or may not have been an actual Mark. ..."

  "Or Timothy.^"

  "Or Saint Paul. Or, indeed, Jesus Christ. All we know is what has been written down and remembered but if, through a control of the tapes, we can determine what was written down as of then, then that is the only reality now. Well, our unknown Hacker has complete control over what we are going to know about Jesus or anything else."

  The enormity of what is—^will be.>—happening is getting to me. "The books—all the books—^the millions and millions of Christian books just change overnight, once a tape is erased.^"

  "No. They don't change because those books, post-Hacker, were either never written or they were not written the way that you think they were."