Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

  Selma has elements of boredom in her personality that have not yet been given, perhaps, their fullest rein. "Did the sky grow dark until the ninth hour?" I asked.

  "No. But it did rain when the Arab horses were doing their stuff for us, and Pontius Pilate had these waiters put this awning up over us but by the time they finally got it up the rain had stopped and Pontius Pilate was coming on to me. How far is Golgotha from the downtown section?"

  "Just outside the East Gate, near the Mount of Olives. You can't miss it. It's a hill that looks like a skull."

  "Well, I missed it, but I did enjoy the horses and Pontius Pilate, too. He asked me to spend the weekend at his beach house in Malibu or Caesarea-on-Sea or somewhere, but I didn't see much point to it as I'm just a hologram."

  I then proposed to Selma that since we had business to transact, the Cuders and I, she might take the opportunity of getting to know Thessalonika better. "Do a litde sight-seeing," I suggested.

  "I'm more into shopping," she said, but she took the

  hint and gave a general "toodle-oo" to the various kibitzers, and wandered out into the Macedonian town. I joined the Cuders in the apse.

  Cutler One was hectoring. "The eye surgery may have been necessary to give you a somewhat fraudulendy youthful appearance, but why did you let them stretch the skin so tight.^ And what did you do to our nose.>" As Cuder One fondly fondled his own prominent hooked nose, I looked carefully at the two Cuders: Cuder One was right. Cuder Two had remodeled their original nose, and the result was an inconsequentially flat insouciant nose, rather lacking in attitude.

  "Perhaps," I said, making what I thought might be a good joke, "you aren't really the same person separated by a decade in twentieth-century time. Maybe you're two different people."

  "He's me all right." Cuder One was glum, eyes on Jesus, who was still talking to his Hacker's lab, where millions—^trillions.^—of tapes were being secredy altered or erased by the master computer at General Electric, counter, needless to say, to company policy, and unknown to the management, much less the shareholders.

  "Vanity!" Cuder Two sighed. "Once I no longer needed a hearing aid and glasses, I thought, why not take the plunge.> A new look, for a new age. The Gulf 4- Eastern look and age."

  Suddenly the door to the cathedral was pushed open, and there was Chet. Marvin waved at him, and Chet visibly winced. I believe, now, diat Chet is a good Christian as well as Mormon and so he was even more shocked than I diat Jesus and Marvin Wasserstein are one and the same.

  Chet joined us in die apse. "We aU meet at last," he said.

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  "High time we took that conference meeting," said Cutler Two.

  "Everything finalized for the big telecast?" Cuder One tried to seem casual.

  "Yes." Chet gave me a huge document. "Your contract, Tim boy. You're anchor."

  "Congratulations!" The two Cutlers for the first and last time spoke in unison. I was, I hope, modest in my response. There is a great deal riding on me, of course, and I am certainly grateftil to everyone at NBC who had sufficient faith in me to see that I got the top assignment, performance-wise, in the history of television news and special programming.

  I signed my name some thirty times without bothering to read the large, much less the small, print. As I did, Chet gave the logistical details. "We will rendezvous tomorrow at Golgotha. At dawn. To set up. The show won't start until . . . Jesus arrives." The small pause was duly noted by the Cuders and me. "That will be about nine in the morning. Middle Eastern Time. We're not going to go live because of the confusion in time zones. We'll tape everything and maybe do some editing, as there are bound to be dull spots. ..."

  "Lon£feurSy^' said Cuder One, all show biz now.

  "Of course, Tim boy will be interviewing the man in the street, but you can only do so much of that. Otherwise there really isn't much action. I mean how long can you keep the viewers staring at someone just hanging there?"

  "But you'll have to have at least one camera always on Jesus's face, ready to pick up whatever he says." Cuder One is up to something, and I am going to try to talk Chet into going live with the program. But then, second thought, suppose Judas on the cross says that all this is a mistake.^ That would be an end to Christianity on prime time Live from

  Golgotha, All in all, I trust Chet's instincts about prerecording and editing.

  "Don't worry about the production values." Chet was curt.

  "How have you prepared the public for this event.>" asked Cutler Two.

  "As fyou don't know." Cutler One is, obscurely, bitter not only at his older self s defection from GE but at his superior knowledge of events due to his being, as he put it, on the cusp of Judgment Day.

  "I do and I don't know." Cuder Two smiled, perfect teeth, each one a plausible gem. What dentistry they have in that far-off century—but for me not so far off, as I shall be speaking directly to hundreds of billions of residents of that era on prerecorded tape.

  "We've started the publicity campaign. Full-page print ads. First, we explain about the technological breakthrough. Then we punch in with some very reverent sort of copy about Jesus and what all of this will mean to believers and unbelievers alike. Needless to say, we will be giving equal time to Mohammed, while AIPAC has insisted on a twelve-part series based on how Moses and God established the Jews in Palestine forever, as well as another year of reruns of the Holocaust."

  "Quite reasonable," said Cuder One, looking very Jewish. "People cannot be told too often about our constant suffering."

  "What about Confucius, and Buddha, and the Hindu gods?" asked Cuder Two, mischievously.

  Chet was ready for that one. "Sony has asked for exclusive rights to all Oriental deities under the special Lew Wass-crman-Universal-Time Warner agreement stating that there is to be no cartel or insider trading in the networks, and that

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  although NBC has the rights to this particular special, because of our technological breakthrough, the other religions will go to the highest bidder in open competition."

  "How is the public taking all this?" I asked, not wanting to hear another row over credits.

  Chet shrugged. "The way they take everything. Actually, they are a lot more interested in 3-D, which we've been promising them for years. The patents are all tied up because Hustler magazine holds most of them, which makes 3-D porno about the hottest item there is in software, particularly since they've started adding smells."

  Marvin sauntered over to us. "Hi, Chet. Dr. Cuder." He turned to Cuder Two. "Are you who I think you arc?"

  Cuder Two smiled. "Yes, I'm who you think I am and you are who I know you are."

  "How did you film my escape from Gethsemane?"

  "I was there with a camera, in another part of the forest, as the bard would say."

  "How could you have known what I did?" Cuder One's curiosity was almost as great as his animosity.

  "How could I not? After all, I am you, later on with a ' more advanced technology, of course— tind a change of heart:'

  "You were able to remember what I had trained myself to forget?"

  "What is on a memory tape is eternal, though a Hacker may find ways of temporarily disordering it." Cuder Two eyed Marvin during this but Marvin was cool as could be.

  "It's a good film," said Marvin. "A bit static, maybe. But a good editor could fix it in a jiffy. It's the property of General Electric, isn't it?"

  Cuder Two smiled. "Well, let's say it is in the hands of Gulf 4- Eastern, and copyright is pending."

  "You'll have to get a signed release from me, you know." Marvin sounded as if he was joking but he wasn't. "I'm a member of AFTRA, so we'll have to have some sort of contract before you can ever show it."

  Cutler Two ignored this. He turned to Chet. "I shall be joining all of you at Golgotha."

  "The more the merrier," said Chet. "We start shooting about noon. But before Jesus arrives on the set Tim will be conducting interviews in the crowd, and so on."
/>
  "I'll want to talk to Pontius Pilate at the horse show," I said. "I want to get his impressions, off the cuff, you might say."

  "You'll be there, too, won't you, Jesus.>" Chet sounded casual but his lips were trembling with nerves. Stage fright. I'm suffering from it, too.

  Marvin laughed. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

  Cutler One started to say something, but his hearing aid began to sputter and we all had a good laugh at his discomfiture. Then everyone went home except Cuder Two.

  "Imagine finding Jesus in a church" was all I could say.

  "The last place that that rabbi would ever want to be found in. He's the enemy."

  "I know. But we don't dare say so."

  Cuder Two switched on the Cuder Effect, a small battery with a viewfinder so precise that the operator can arrive any place at the exact second that he wants.

  The fading away was much more interesting than the arrival of a hologram, say, or someone who has channeled in through a medium. First, you see all the billions of molecules that comprise a human being come apart in a sort of rosy blur. Then they are shifted to another place in time and reassembled. Just before the blur vanished, Cuder Two said, "Don't worry, Tim. Marvin is not the only one with a plan."

  bring it, while a little bit of that documentary on Hirohito goes a long way."

  As we ate our supper in silence, I wondered what to wear as anchor. Should I look like the twentieth-century people, or remain my simple-saindy, first-century self>

  At midnight, after the sheep's head supper, I couldn't sleep, thanks to indigestion. Atalanta was dead to the worid, and snoring beside me. Suddenly Saint was in the room.

  "Is this a dream.>" I asked.

  "Not really, Timmy darling. You're awake. Technically, this time, I'm a vision, like the glorious one that I had on the Damascus freeway. ..."

  "A vision of fat Judas, not Jesus."

  "How was I to know.^ The one I saw was the one who was crucified who was supposed to be Jesus. So I made a mistake. So sue me." He did his Solly number for a moment, as well as a kind of soft-shoe routine that Nero had done his best to imitate but could never master because Saint had been executed before he could teach him all the steps.

  "Tomorrow will be your big breakthrough into the big time. Remember Broadcast News with hot William Hurt.>"

  "How did you get to see that.>" I was mystified. In Saint's lifetime he had never had access to television, much less a VCR.

  Saint answered my question almost before I asked. "I'm an electric impulse now, like television. I get to see everything. It's so busy, thanks to satellite, where I now have my being or, nonbeing, to be precise. ..."

  "So you're not sitting at the right hand of Marvin Wasserstein in Heaven.^"

  Saint frowned. "That's why I'm here in diis tacky vision. We're out of business if the Crucifixion goes through with that lard-ass, Judas."

  "But it does. It did."

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  "It did only because that crazed Zionist Dr. Cuder was able to move Jesus into a much later time slot, more favorable to Israel."

  "But what difference does it make.> Everyone who knew it wasn't Jesus pretended that it was, and then you came along later and invented Christianity, with its logo the cross, so who was actually up there on the cross makes no difference now."

  Saint sighed. "It's not that simple, Timikins. No one ever thought the world would get a chance to see the whole thing and hear the whole thing. Judas won't do at all. . . ."

  "The weight problem?"

  "Weight problem!" Saint hooted. "He weighs more than a Japanese wrestier, more than Orson Welles even. You can't turn that mass of blubber into a part of the Trinity when he is larger than the whole Trinity put together. The image for us of a fat Jesus is simply catastrophic, particularly now that the Polish Pope is making so many converts in the Third World, where people are starving to death, and what do we have to offer them.> The fattest god in the business and that includes the zaftig Buddha."

  "I read you. Saint." A slender, bearded, ladylike Jesus has been universally popular for over a millennium. There would certainly be an image problem. Perhaps, as anchor, I might make some sort of excuse to the viewers. Some mysterious reference suitable for theological discourse. Like Jesus had been undergoing chemotherapy.

  "One picture is more powerful than a thousands words. You don't realize just how awful-looking Judas is. ..."

  "I got a glimpse of him in Cutier's film. Of course it was shot at night—"

  "Timmy." Saint cut me off. "Our only hope is to crucify someone else on prime time."

  "How?" This was far-out even for Saint. But then a Jew who annuls the law of Moses and replaces the Torah with the cross has chutzpah.

  "There is only one way we can undo the Hacker's work and that's to put on a really quality-type Crucifixion that will grab the numbers, ratings-wise. ..."

  "You know who the Hacker is.>"

  Saint nodded. "I also know how to undo the Hacker's work. The Hacker must die tomorrow."

  "We kill Marvin.>"

  "Mercy, no!" Saint batted his eyes roguishly. "HV won't kill him. The Romans will. Timmy, you are going to see to it, with the oldest Dr. Cuder's help, that Marvin Wasserstein is fingered tomorrow, as Dr. Cuder has already suggested, and then crucified according to the Divine Plan, not to mention NBC's scheduling, which has guaranteed that the public will see the authentic Jesus rejoin the Big Fella in the Sky, His Father, high atop picturesque Golgotha. Chet should be helpful once he realizes that if word gets out that Judas, not Jesus, was crucified, NBC will be liable to censure or worse by the FCC under the truth-in-advertising statute, while the Polish Pope's nose will be permanentiy out of joint."

  I was stunned, as Saint intended me to be. No one could say he didn't think big. "But how do I get Marvin crucified?"

  "Why not tell the Romans who he is?" Saint started to fade. "You'll figure it out. I know you will. You will save the church and the simple faith of these millions and millions who have so nobly died over the millennia in blazing autos-da-fe on the fast lane of the Freeway to Glory. ..."

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  Cutler Two materialized, in the flesh, shortly before noon, Macedon Central Time. "I thought I'd get here before my earlier self so that you and I could go back together."

  "I've just seen Saint Paul. In a vision."

  "The old-fashioned ways are still the best, if you will recall Jennifer Jones in The Son£f of Bemadette. That was truly spiritual, and deeply edifying." The perfect smile was now produced with a slight hissing sound and several compulsive nods of the head. "So what did Saint Paul tell you to do>"

  "Kill Jesus."

  "Strange how great minds—and I believe I possess one, at least it says so on my resume at City College—think alike. Yes, it is our mission to see to it that Jesus occupies his rightful place on the cross. Once that happens, there will be no Marvin Wasserstein in 2001 to set off a nuclear holocaust fi-om his headquarters in Tel Aviv."

  "This isn't going to be easy," I said.

  "Tim-san, life is never easy, and history is really tough shit all around. I propose we now use the Cuder Effect and transport ourselves to Jerusalem some hours before the arrival of Chet and me and Marvin. . . ."

  During this, Cutier Two had produced two battery-like multidimensional molecular scramblers. "The principal of tele-time transportation has been well known for several years," he said, adjusting dials, "but the beauty of the Cuder Effect scrambler is the precision with which one can arrive at the exact described moment in the exact desired place. This is done through a simple scanner-monitor."

  Cuder Two dialed place, time and lo! and behold, there on the monitor was Jerusalem as of the morning of Good Friday. Cuder Two then tracked across town to Golgotha, where a small festive crowd had gathered. Vendors were

  selling souvenirs, kosher pizza, confetti. Two crosses had already been set up. "Jesus" would, of course, be obUged to carry his own cross, though how Judas wou
ld manage it, I didn't know.

  "Shall we go.>" Cutler Two turned to me expectandy.

  "Yes." Then I was inspired. "No," I said. "I want to go to the horse show at Fort Antonia. Keep tracking on the scanner until you get Pontius Pilate's box in the courtyard. I'll go put on a toga. I can't wear my bishop's outfit back then but I can inspire confidence among the locals by appearing as a member of the equestrian order, particularly suitable during a display of horse flesh. Try and get us seats just back of Pilate."

  I could see that Cutler Two was puzzled but he was a good sport about it all. Genius he might be in his century but I am a saint in mine, and one whose task it is to save his religion fi-om extinction. I realized, as I put on my toga, that I was dressed somewhat too formally for your average anchor but then this was a solemn occasion. I also wanted to make a solid impression on Pontius Pilate.

  The trip through time and space was so swift that one had no sense that all one's molecules had been disassembled and then reassembled. Cuder Two experdy placed us in two seats behind the governor, on top of two local dignitaries who fled when they saw us arrive out of the blue, as it were, on their laps. The governor turned and smiled benignly at me.

  "Excellency," I said, "it was so good of you to invite me to the horse show. ..."

  "A pleasure, a pleasure . . ." He looked a bit blank, trying to figure out who I was.

  "I am the fiiend of Petronius. I believe he wrote you about me." Needless to say, I had put on the most elegant

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  of Palatine accents, and Pilate, not bom an aristocrat, was deeply impressed.

  "Yes, yes. I recall a letter. Such an elegant man. Wc must have a long chat. I shall want all the news from Court. Fashion notes, too. For the wife. Hair has gone mad this season, or so we hear." Pilate then turned back to the horse show.