“Let us pass now, if you would,” Jesus went on quietly. “We have a rally today in Veterans’ Park, and we’d like to get to the hotel and prepare. I invite all of you to come to the rally and hear what I have to say about rescuing America.”
One of the elderly women at the edge of the crowd suddenly threw her cane across the metal barrier and shouted, “I’m cured!” Someone else pushed one of the sections of fence aside, and for a moment I thought there was going to be a wholesale stampede. They were pressing forward, or about three-quarters of them were. There was still a fair-sized minority of nonbelievers hanging back. They had not knelt. They’d lowered their signs and stopped chanting, but the expressions on their faces were thick with disdain. Dukey and I circled around in front of Jesus and held out our arms, hoping he’d hurry back into the limo. Instead, he came forward between us, waded right into the crowd, and started touching people on the shoulder or the top of the head. Some were shivering. At least one of them started speaking in tongues. Jesus crouched down and put his hands on the shoulders of a boy who could not have been more than three, and instead of crying at the sudden attention of this dark-haired stranger, the boy flashed a toothy smile. Naturally, at that point, the reporter pushed his way through, with the cameraman right behind him, thrust the microphone in Jesus’s face and said, “What is your stance on the question of abortion?”
“I have no stance on it,” Jesus said after a moment, looking up from his crouch.
“But is it right or wrong?”
“Right and wrong,” Jesus said calmly.
“But would you appoint justices who’d outlaw the taking of human life in the womb or wouldn’t you?” the reporter pressed.
I could feel myself cringing. I could feel the mood of the crowd swinging back toward where it had been before Jesus had first approached them. The answer to this question, it seemed to me, was going to send the campaign careening in one direction or another, toward the red states or toward the blue, or, possibly, toward a premature end. On this issue, more than any other in American politics, there was no compromise.
“There is God’s law, and the law of the nation,” Jesus said.
I cringed again. I moved toward him, looking for a way to get him safely back into the limo and get us out of there.
“What you’re saying is ‘render unto Caesar,’” a man in the crowd called, taking up the questioning before the reporter could get his next word out. “But what if Caesar allows people to slaughter the unborn?”
“I have come to bring the two laws together,” Jesus said.
“To make murder illegal then,” a woman said hopefully.
“To make unkindness unacceptable,” Jesus said to her. “Anger and hatred and unkindness and greed and selfish behavior of all kinds.” And then, patting the boy’s head a final time, he stood up and turned, and in another minute we were back in the limo with the doors locked and an awful silence floating in the air among us. The driver took us slowly forward through the crowd, which was neatly divided now into those who were waving and smiling and those who were standing still with scowls on their faces. I turned my head as we went through the gates, and I could see the reporter speaking animatedly into the camera, and small arguments already beginning to break out. What did he mean? What kind of political doublespeak was this? He wasn’t a liberal, was he?
After we’d been cruising toward the hotel for a few minutes, Wales, God bless him, had the courage to break apart the terrible quiet that had settled over us. “It’s a question that’s going to haunt you all through the campaign, you know,” he said carefully.
“What is?” Jesus asked him. “The inclination toward universal compassion?”
“You know what I mean. The abortion question. Pro-choice. Pro-life. It’s not a fence you can sit on. Not here especially. But not anywhere really.”
“I’ve been wondering what you wanted me to say to the press about it,” Zelda said. “We’ve all been talking about it.”
“Tell them I will answer any question they ask.”
“But this is the American media,” Wales said. “They don’t want parables, and they don’t want cryptic sayings. They’re going to try to pin you down.”
It was not the finest choice of words. For a second or two, Jesus almost seemed to grin, and then he turned to my brother and said, “Stab, we’re glad you’re here, do you know that?”
My brother smiled his tremendous smile, a smile without any defense in it, any sophistication, any cynicism, any armor. “I’m happy I’m here, too, God,” he said.
“But if you hadn’t been born when you were, to your mom and dad, with this joker here as your brother, your spirit would have found another way to come to us. Do you understand?”
“Sure I do,” Stab said. “But nobody else would love me like this mom and dad, right? And this brother?”
“Nobody.”
“I knew that was right,” Stab said. “And I know how they made me, too.”
Jesus patted him kindly on the knee. I could feel myself almost leaning toward him, could feel the words climbing up my throat toward my lips. “But say it plain,” I wanted to yell out. “Let us know what you think about it!”
Jesus turned to Zelda. “Let me take care of that answer for now,” he told her, and she was nodding her head in rapid beats.
“But we want to know,” I blurted out. “Is it murder, or is it okay? Or are we going to get into situational ethics? As president, what would you do?”
Wales and Ezzie were murmuring their agreement, so at least I wasn’t left out there hanging.
“I shall teach,” Jesus said. “I shall teach kindness and compassion. That’s what I’ve always done. And it has always made certain people angry and violent.”
“But you’re avoiding the question,” I said. Zelda was nudging me with her leg. I knew I was pushing things, but I could not stop myself.
Jesus looked across the space at me until I became uncomfortable, but I kept my eyes on his eyes.
“You have ultimate freedom in how you behave,” he said at last. “You were given an unlimited freedom to determine your fate. None of you seems to understand that yet.”
“Even so—” I started.
“I understand it,” Stab said, which was the kind of thing he always did, picking up a few words of a complicated conversation and responding with some kind of semi non sequitur.
“Your brother here understands it,” Jesus said, boring his eyes into mine. It wasn’t a look of coldness; it was the definition of direct, though his words had a soft lining to them. “You, on the other hand, are a bit slow.”
“I’ve been telling him that for years,” Wales said, and everyone laughed.
I joined in the laughter, content to let the subject fade away for the time being, but it felt false to me. I had been cast back into the zone of uncertainty again, and I knew Jesus could feel it, and Zelda, too, and I was glad my parents hadn’t been in the car to hear the conversation.
As we were checking into the Topeka Sheraton, Wales waited until no one was near us and said, “That’s going to kill us, that kind of answer. You know that, don’t you?”
I said that I knew it, and then I went upstairs with my good wife-to-be, and we showered and changed clothes and got ready for the rally without saying a word to each other.
TWENTY-TWO
Among the crowd in Veterans’ Park, a number of people were holding up placards with photos of dead fetuses on them, and I was worried that Jesus was going to try to smooth over the abortion issue by talking about something else, or that he would give the kind of evasive answers he’d more or less gotten away with at the airport. I introduced him again. It was easier this time, though I felt the crowd was less sympathetic. It wasn’t only the people with the fetus pictures, and the fruit-heads yelling, “Thank God for the war!” (meaning, we found out later, that they believed God had put America in what was looking more and more like a thirty-year war, as punishment for our tolerance of homose
xuals). It wasn’t only the EVOLUTION IS THE DEVILS DOCTRINE! ADAM AND EVE WERE MADE IN THE FIRST DAY! crowd (grammatically challenged, as so many of the loudest mouths seemed to be) either, although, as my mother noted, even if you read the Bible literally, Adam and Eve weren’t made until later than that. It wasn’t that the people were unfriendly. In fact, everyone we’d met, from the hotel bellhops to the limo driver to the police officials with whom I’d arranged for security, was friendly and nice. It was just a general sense I had—my own prejudices maybe—standing up in front of the microphones and five or six thousand souls, that this new flat world we were in was less than welcoming to the Jesus candidacy.
So I kept the introduction short and to the point, and then yielded the stage to Jesus. He began more or less the same way he’d begun in West Zenith, saying America was in grave danger of losing its soul, and that he’d come to spread love and good will again, and so on. But then—perhaps sensing a growing restlessness in the crowd—he surprised me, surprised us all.
“Now I know that the campaign is new,” he said in the same gentle, even-toned way he said almost everything, “and that there are many unanswered questions. As I have said before, I am going to answer every question I am asked, although the answer will not always make everyone comfortable. At the airport today—and I want to thank the good people who were there for making us feel excited about being in Topeka—at the airport today I was asked about abortion.”
He paused and even the fruit-heads fell silent. You could hear crows flying overhead, making their harsh laughing sounds. You could hear skateboard wheels on the nearby sidewalk. Jesus drew the silence out, stood there not saying anything else for ten or fifteen seconds, just looking at the crowd. I was aware, naturally, of all the cameras focused on him, all the dead air time.
He took a breath and started up again. “I understand that it is an issue that divides this great nation, divides brother from sister, father from son, mother from daughter, friend from friend. I understand that. I am aware of that and deeply saddened by it. What is at the heart of this issue? What can we say is the truth at its center?”
“That abortion kills!” someone yelled out.
Jesus ignored him. “The truth is that some people, good people, believe human life begins at conception, and anything that interferes with the growth of the fertilized egg to maturity is the equivalent of murder.”
“It is murder,” the same guy yelled. “It’s not the equivalent of murder. It is! It is!”
I saw Dukey moving through the crowd toward this loudmouth, pushing people aside roughly as he went.
“And other people, good people also, believe that life begins at birth. Or at some point between conception and birth. Or that certain circumstances make abortion the lesser of two difficulties. Or that it is a quintessentially private matter. I understand this. I see all this.… What I see even more clearly is the hatred that has grown around this important issue. People have actually been killed in the name of not killing!”
“So what are you going to do about it?” the same guy yelled. Just as he got the last word out, Dukey reached him. There was a scuffle, a little knot of people blocking my view of what happened next, and I was wondering, not for the first time, if Dukey McIntyre would prove to be a net gain or a net loss for the campaign.
Jesus did not seem to notice. Or, if he did notice, he went on without reacting. “And so, with full respect for the complexity of this matter, as president, within the first two months of my first term, I will convene a national conference on the issue of abortion. Held here in Kansas, the heart of the nation, televised nationally. It will not be a debate. Hate speeches will not be allowed. It will be a conference, with speakers representing each position given equal time. This will not satisfy everyone, I realize that. I think of it as a first step only, a small but important first step. The reality is, if abortion is made illegal, people will continue to have abortions by the millions—there is ample proof of that from this and other societies. And the reality is, if abortion remains legal, people will continue to have abortions by the millions, and the hatred and anger surrounding this issue will not cease. So let us come together as a nation, with good people on either side of this question, and see if we cannot find one small foothold of national reconciliation, an intelligent and compassionate way of reducing the number of abortions, at least. Surely we can all agree on that.”
As soon as Jesus had delivered himself of this mild, sensible idea, people started throwing things. Someone about twenty feet from the stage was the first: he or she sent a tomato flying toward the podium. The tomato splattered against the floor and onto my mother’s shoes, looking like a splotch of blood. For a second or two I thought she had been hurt. Taking this as an example of proper behavior, someone farther back threw a stone. He had, thankfully, not been quarterback for the KU Jayhawks: the stone did not reach the stage but fell into the front of the crowd. More objects were thrown—hot dogs, corn dogs, cans of soda, sticks, stones, small briefcases; I even thought I saw a Bible go flying through the air. Then there was a backlash against the throwers, and soon a dozen skirmishes had broken out in the crowd, and the police were wading in, and what we had there in the heartland, instead of peace and national reconciliation, was a melee. My mother and Zelda and Ezzie and the three Simmeltons huddled around Jesus as if he needed protection. And my father and Wales and Stab and I huddled around them, moving like some bottom-of-the-sea, twenty-two-legged organism toward the relative safety of the limousines.
“THAT WENT WELL,” Wales remarked dryly, when we were all seated, straightening our clothes and hair, checking for injuries, and looking worriedly out the windows, where the police seemed to be gaining the upper hand.
“Actually, it did,” Jesus told him.
And in a way he was right. As we started our five-hundred-mile tour of the plains states, he repeated his call, at every stop, for a national conference on abortion. Listening to him, I wondered if he was crazy, or naive. But, if nothing else, it garnered lots of attention. Within two days some in the media had started calling us the Divinity Party, and though I think they meant it ironically, it caught on, and then, as the video clips were replayed on the Internet and the TV talk shows, it was the fruit-heads throwing briefcases and tomatoes who looked foolish.
The biggest news of all—and this reached us four days later in Kearney, Nebraska, a pretty college town where we had a rally that attracted some thirty thousand folks, and where the reception had been quite a bit warmer—was that two of the loudest voices from opposite sides of the abortion question, Milly Osterville of the National Confederation of Women, and Edie Vin of Americans for Life and Liberty, said they would be willing to take part in such a conference. That, as you might guess, was front-page news in every newspaper in America, top-of-the-hour story on every big news show, liberal and conservative. Zelda came running into the dining room of the hotel where we were having a late lunch and she was waving three newspapers and smiling exuberantly.
The two major-party candidates did not fail to notice this shift in tectonic plates, of course. Even after the wild rally in West Zenith, they had been more or less able to ignore Jesus and hope he’d go away. But with his mostly successful foray into the heartland, and all the publicity his abortion conference idea generated, they went into panic mode. And faith in our candidate’s divine savvy—if not in the goodness of humanity—was restored.
TWENTY-THREE
A few polls had been taken immediately after Jesus’s announcement in West Zenith, but no one put much faith in them. He was still a novelty item at that point, amusing news. For the real polls, we had to wait a couple of weeks. By then, we had completed our tour of Kansas and Nebraska, spending time mainly in small and medium sized towns there, and had flown to Denver and made another limo loop: Greeley, Aspen, Salida, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. One thing that surprised me was the variety of individual responses Jesus received, everything from the well-dressed couple in Aspen who walked up
without saying a word and handed Wales a large check, to the diner waitress in Salida who refused to serve us. Some people looked Jesus up and down very carefully, as if they were purchasing an expensive golf bag; some people just wanted to touch him, or have him lay a hand on their child; some people seemed not to care very much about his divinity or lack of it, and they took the opportunity to engage him in a thoughtful give-and-take about the war, immigration, terrorism, taxes, or health care.
By and large, though, we had the feeling that he was seen as a welcome breeze in a campaign that, for months, had been full of bitterness and stale rhetoric. On route to New Mexico and another busy day of appearances and interviews, we stopped over in a rustic roadside motel in Trinidad—the Wagon Wheel Inn, it was called; I’ll never forget it—and were watching the news there when CNN flashed the prestigious Yansman-Carver poll up on the screen. It looked like this:
MARJORIE MAPLEWITH (R)
36%
DENNIS ALOWICH (D)
26%
JESUS CHRIST (I)
32%
UNDECIDED/OTHER
6%
We were having what passed for one of our strategy meetings at the time—thirteen of us sitting around in a motel room with take-out food (decent Mexican, in this case). There were four or five seconds of stunned silence, and then, well … all hell broke loose. Everyone but Jesus was standing and yelling at top volume. It was, for me at least, the moment when our campaign went from being a David vs. Goliath enterprise, a quaint road trip with nice people for a good cause—to an actual run for the White House.
Only Jesus stayed seated. He was sitting there with a paper plate on his lap and a glass of cheap red wine in one hand. I turned to look at him, in midcelebration, and saw the sharp-cut, handsome face wrinkle from the smallest wash of pleasure and then fall back again into the expression of preternatural calm he seemed to wear at all times. Stab did what I wanted to do but was afraid to—he went over and clapped Jesus on both shoulders and hugged him. Wine sloshed onto the already ratty rug (next morning, as we were checking out, Jesus quietly instructed me to leave the motel owners money enough for a new one). Jesus laughed quietly at the spilled wine, looked up at my brother, and said, “Good news, isn’t it, my friend?”
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