“And by damnation you mean nothing more than our continued, fragile existence?”
“Of course,” Jesus said. “As one of your great ones said, ‘First you dream, then you die.’ “
“Did it ever occur to you,” King began, “that we might wish to continue as we are?”
“Everything occurs to me,” Jesus said. “Evil always wishes to perpetuate itself. Have some faith in me when I tell you that you’ll be much happier as nothing.”
“That’s sheer sophistry,” Gore Vidal said. “We won’t be around to appreciate a state of nothing.”
“Trust me,” Jesus said. “I’ll know you’re better off. Appreciate the thought now, while you can. You won’t be able to later. You know, bright as you are, for a man, you really should listen more closely. Worlds teeter on a Word.”
King took a deep breath. “Are you flesh and blood, now?”
“If you doubt it,” Jesus said as he took a Smith & Wesson revolver from under his armpit and slid it across the table to Larry King, “you can shoot me through the head.” King caught the weapon before it landed in his lap. “Feel free,” Jesus said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, act freely, even if it looks to me like repetitive motion.”
King put the black gun gently on the table. “Let me ask you if there’s any point to the universe, I mean from your perspective... uh, in the scale... of things.” He stared at the gun.
“Oh, I don’t think there are things really. It’s all nearly nothing to begin with, with no beginning or end, needing no explanation of anything except local origins. The only thing that really seems to matter is being the right size.”
“Right size?” King asked, his eyes still worrying the gun before him.
“Morally and physically, we’re bigger than you, since we know how things have gone in the scale below us, at least down to several
trillion levels.”
“And above?” asked Gore Vidal.
“We do not inquire upward,” Jesus said impatiently.
“Ah—so you fear something after all, or someone?”
“No, we just don’t care to know more of what’s there. What good would it do us?”
“But you do know?” Gore Vidal said.
“Hierarchies,” Jesus answered, “—endless, petrified hierarchies from endless duration. I prefer the humilities of below.”
“And you ignore the true God who rules above it all!” Larry King added belligerently.
“No,” Jesus said. “An eternal being would be an absurd mystery to itself. I am that I am. An all-powerful, eternal, and even all-knowing being would still be unable to answer the question, why am I like this? Such a being would be an enigma to itself.”
“But that doesn’t rule it out, does it?” King asked, delighted by his own cleverness.
Gore Vidal smiled and said, “Well, I suppose that would all depend on what the meaning of the word is... is, wouldn’t it?”
“We already have eternal existence,” Jesus said. “It’s the unique, infinite superspace—the mysterium tremendum. You’ve heard the story—the roof of the world... is supported by seven pillars, and the seven pillars are set on the shoulders of a genie whose strength is beyond thought. And the genie stands on an eagle, and the eagle on a bull, and the bull on a fish, and the fish swims in the sea of eternity!”
“Mysterium tremendum!” King exclaimed ecstatically.
“Latin,” Vidal added, “for a right smart piece of time, as Lionel Barrymore once said about eternity.”
Jesus said, “The most important part of that story is the infinite sea, in which the fish swims. Without that infinity, nothing would be possible.”
“I see,” Gore Vidal said. “The buck stops there, since the infinity simply is, and needs no further explanation. It always was.”
Jesus said, “That is what the word is truly means.”
“I think I see what you mean,” Larry King added.
“Wait a minute,” Gore Vidal said. “I know that story. It’s from The Thief of Bagdad, a 1940 movie!”
“Yes,” Jesus replied. “I’ve seen quite a few. They’re so much better than the shapeless dramas that are your lives. I’ve even seen some of the movies you wrote.”
Gore Vidal waited to hear what Jesus might say about his movies, but after a few moments of silence asked, “And my novels? Read any?”
“No,” Jesus said, “no novels. I do envy the best moviemakers their godlike eye.”
Gore Vidal grimaced. “Who do you fear?” he asked, pressing the question as if he had discovered something.
“Unpleasant, unkind people, if you must know,” Christ said. “One of us got like that and fled upward into the scales a long time ago. We don’t know what he’s doing there, and we don’t care as long as he stays away.”
“One of you?” King asked. “Could that by any chance be Satan?”
“We don’t know his name anymore,” Jesus said with a wave of his hand.
“I don’t quite understand this fleeing upward,” Gore Vidal said, “despite your pilfered fish story. Who inhabits the upward?”
“It’s all pretty mysterious,” Jesus said. “The same infinity, the infinity! It’s a kind of endless horror of unknowing for us who know so much, a cloud without edges. It’s the one thing all our knowledge can’t encompass. Not even our deep travelers will ever dive to the top or bottom of physical infinity.”
“Deep travelers?” asked Gore Vidal.
Jesus smiled and pointed to himself.
“Then why do any of you bother... to travel?” King asked.
“It might still not be an infinity,” Jesus said. “The idea haunts many of us, that infinity might only seem to be one, and that at any moment the end may not be far off.”
“And if you came to the end of it,” King asked, “what would you learn? That there’s more beyond?” He laughed, proud of himself for getting it.
“Alas, yes. No matter how far we travel, the end may be an infinite way off. And if we found it suddenly nearby, there would likely be more beyond it.”
“You’ve said we rather often,” Gore Vidal said. “Who is this we?”
“The Trinity,” Jesus said. “And each of us is also made up of quite a few lessers. We’ve been massing for a long time now.”
“Massing?” Gore Vidal asked.
“We share each other,” Jesus said. “You’ve had some imitative experience of that in your worship of cultural idols.”
“Another caller!” King cried. “Go ahead, you’re on.”
A deep voice said over the loud crackle. “Hi, I’m from North Carolina...”
“Let me fix that for you,” Jesus said, and the interference died.
“Thanks! Lookee here, I’ve been dead for donkey’s years now, and suddenly here I am in my fallin’ down old house with my dead girlfriend, who just said to me, ‘Jesse Helms, how did we get back here?’ “
“How do you think?” Jesus asked.
“My question is this. How can you be Jesus Christ? From what I’ve experienced firsthand you’re just some kind of powerful alien... or some hogwash like that.”
“So what’s your question?” King asked.
“Who does he think he is, coming here and doing all these crazy things? Shoot him through the head and see what he does!”
“Go right ahead,” Jesus said, pointing at the gun on the table.
“Don’t get him mad, Jesse!” a woman’s voice cried out. “He’ll send us to hell!”
There was a long silence.
“Call his bluff, King!” Helms cried. “Do it and settle this crap once and for all.”
“Lordy, lordy,” chuckled Gore Vidal.
“Jesus! Jesus!” cried the crowd in Central Park. “What can we do?”
“First,” Jesus said, “you get a big needle. As big as you can find, so you’ll have a chance, at least. Then you get a very small camel— I’m trying to be helpful—then pass the beast through the eye of the needle—and you’re home
free.”
Gore Vidal said, “Jesus, that’s a really bad one.”
“But Lord, Lord!” cried the mob, “We can’t do that. No one can.”
“It’s a parable,” Jesus said.
“Easy for you to say, Lord!” the mob cried.
“But remember,” Jesus said, “I am who will be. And you can do the same.”
“Mercy, Lord!” cried the crowd. “Save us!”
Larry King asked, “What about eternal life?”
“Aren’t you going to shoot me?” Christ asked.
“Read his mind,” Gore Vidal said.
“Can’t tell which possible world this might be,” Jesus countered in what seemed a moment of confusion. “But to answer your question. Eternal life? A nice ambition—a prerequisite to any kind of civilized life—but no one will give it to you. Certainly I won’t. You’ll have to accomplish all that on your own—or you won’t know what to do with it.”
“Providing you let us live,” Gore Vidal said, using the word that might or might not be related to providence.
“Shoot him!” cried Jesse Helms over the crackle-free phone line.
“How can we achieve eternal life on our own?” King asked.
“You’ll have to learn how.”
“You’ve done it, then?” King asked.
“A long time now. It’s a basic of truly intelligent life. But don’t rush things. There are virtues to having a beginning and an end— certain qualities of dynamism. True, they must be paid for by being brief. Short lives in intelligent species are a way of shuffling the genes until something worth permanence emerges.”
“Hmmm,” said Gore Vidal wonderingly. “But not always...”
“And you can raise the dead?” King asked.
“That’s part of it,” Jesus said.
“No use in shooting you, is there?”
“Shoot him!” Helms cried. “So we’ll know he’s a goddamn liar!”
“It’s worse if he’s telling the truth,” said Gore Vidal.
“You’re forgetting the Trinity,” Jesus said, shaking his finger at the camera.
“He’s got backup,” Gore Vidal said with a smile.
“Eternal life is a matter of bending time,” Jesus said.
“Please demonstrate?” King asked, picking up the gun and pointing it at him. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the feeling you want me to use this. You will get up from the dead, won’t you?”
“I’ll show you once more before I leave. Try not to get it all wrong.” He stood up and faced the host’s desk.
King hesitated, and his hand trembled.
“Here, give me that,” Jesus said, grabbing the gun by the barrel and pulling it up to his chest.
“Wait a minute!” King cried as he let go and crashed back into his chair.
The gun fired, opening up Jesus’ chest. The bullet came out through his back, whizzed over Gore Vidal’s head, and shattered a studio light. A sudden shadow covered the scene. Jesus fell forward across the veneer wood desk and lay there for a moment.
Then he stood up and smiled.
And in the next twinkling of an eye, Jesus Christ rose into the air and vanished with a whoosh, abandoning Jesse Helms to the prison of this life and leaving Larry King with an open and locked jaw.
Trembling uncontrollably, Gore Vidal leaped up from his chair and shouted, “My Lord! My Lord! Take me with you!” ***
After three days of solemnity, during which the world sought to explain away the Millennial Coming of Christ the Joker, the man buried in Grant’s Tomb arose, walked marveling to the public library on Fifth Avenue, and asked a pedestrian, “What happened?”
No one had noticed his blue Union general’s attire.
Jesus appeared at his side, presented Ulysses S. Grant with his favorite cigar, and lit it for him with a flutter of flame from nowhere.
“Thank you,” Grant said, taking a puff. “How do you do that? Who are you?” There was another man beside Jesus, heavyset, gray-haired, and pale, looking a bit shaken but relieved.
“Deep travelers, like yourself now,” Jesus said. “You’d better come with us.”
Grant looked at him inquiringly, and then at his companion. “You think that would be best?” he asked as he flicked the ash from his cigar.
Jesus nodded. “You and Mr. Vidal are about the best to be had from... here.”
The two men looked at each other, and the shadows fled from their faces.
Then Jesus took them by the hand and together the threesome slipped downward through worlds-within-worlds, searching the lower infinities, where swimmers from above would always be gods.
Nappy
“The story of Napoleon produces on me an impression like that produced by the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. We all feel there must be something more in it, but we do not know what.”
—Goethe
WHEN WE LOOK BACK TO THE VIRTUAL DARK AGE, before we emerged from ourselves and the chaotic variety of infinite existence once again reclaimed our human devotions, bringing a new age of outward explorations and a new age of space travel, it is easy to see the virtual centuries as only the most recent structuring of duration, one in which all of recorded human experience became, for a time, a new way of life—following in importance the first ordering of social life with timepieces. This was not an unusual consequence, from a historian’s view. The realist understanding of history had led to an epochal disillusionment, and to the end of sovereign national states. Along with economic emancipation from the tyranny of scarcity and the repetitive, sterile temptations of power bought by wealth, true histories destroyed the human weakness of looking at their localities in the sentimental, myth-ridden ways. But even as political and economic gangs perished in the blinding glare of revelation, the old longings persisted and gradually reemerged in the form of the Virtual Reality States, designed to give everyone his heart’s desire. These new conditions of life took the form of individual solipsisms, interlocking solipsisms, and genuine social groupings colonizing the various backdrop creations. Everyone thought he could do better than the given reality, whose pressures could now be suspended by willful acts of analogous creation.
Of course, inner realities emerged that could only be understood and valued by experiencing them; fundamental differences between inside and outside states had to be learned before new steps could be taken toward deeper understandings.
Among these realizations was the central, inescapable fact that a virtual reality could never be the equal of external existence. By the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, well known for centuries, if two things are exactly alike, they still differ through their location in space: there are two things and that is how they differ. An exact match would exclude all differences, including the difference in spatial coordinates. The two objects would be one and the same thing, in the same place. What this meant was that a perfect match with external cosmic infinity was impossible, short of creating a second, identical cosmos. Difference would always be felt, and there would be other artifacts, quite unpredictable and inescapable giveaways to spoil the illusion, however perfect-seeming for a time. A sudden return to the non-virtual universe was always a shock, a collision with a universe free of obvious perceptual flaws, with an infinite richness that could never be duplicated, only suggested.
The mystery of the singular, non-made cosmos remained.
But as with an earlier Dark Age, we find in the Virtual Reality States many worthy reconstructions of the past—much as ancient Greek and Roman cultures were reinterpreted by the Middle Ages and became a platform for the first human attempt at modernity (1500–2500 A.D.)—reconsiderations that brought great insight and beauty to countless human episodes that might otherwise have been forever lost, as many were lost.
The historical experience with virtual continua itself became a valuable lesson. These worlds were the remnants of a great social error, lost worlds containing whole human societies. Many were never found, and merely faded away as
their structural supports in the primary world deteriorated or were destroyed. Some may still exist, and may be the only surviving examples of such groups. A search has been underway for some time, without success, for the Jesuit Order of scholars and scientists, which translated itself into virtual realms because its members had lost faith in the afterlife’s promise of immortality. The virtualities, of course, offered immortality from the purely subjective view, for as long as the frame was fed power. There is a legend that a serviceable simulacra of Franz Liszt dwells among the Jesuits.
It has been argued that the entities contained in the virtuals only appear to be sentient and have no conscious subjectivity other than an apparent one; but of course this cannot be settled any more than we can prove the subjective self-awareness of minds outside the frame. Only behavior is visible to us inside the frame and outside. Besides, inside there were no bodies. There had been bodies during the dark age, and they had been awakened from their worlds; but a large number remained who had long since given up the flesh.
One of these still accessible fates is that of Nappy, once known as Napoleon Bonaparte, whose many-faceted personality, often held up to both ridicule and praise, refused to be erased from history’s modalities.
Despite his death in what we must call, however vainly, the primary world, there were still the initial printed, painted, and sculpted survivals of his persona (he just missed the photographic), the theatrical and filmic survivals, and then the great wave of virtual reincarnations. Nappy was not to be denied. He persisted—because he lived in the minds of others, as prior conquerors had infected his imagination.
His specific survival is one that illustrates the first steps in our discovery of “framing strategies,” studies which later became the basis of our current understanding of the universe—itself a unique system which inherently resists any ultimate framing, but which can be stepped back from endlessly, by pieces, and thus reveals ever proliferating details but not a final grasp of a universe known only from the inside, since it cannot be exited.
It had all started innocently, as W.W.W., the great historian, descending from an earlier age, examined a Nappy reincarnation, little expecting its viral charm—and was caught by the corporal’s thoughts:
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