“Then I burn forever, man,” he said, and when I hung up a few sentences later, I felt like I should take a shower, or have a stiff drink to wash the sound of him out of my soul.
The third and last of the Seattle rallies was an outdoor event held in light rain in a park in a particularly liberal suburb called Westonborough. The crowd was friendly and enthusiastic. Jesus finished his speech with a not-very-good Elvis imitation that made people smile, and then he walked around in front of the podium holding the microphone. He was getting ready to take the first question when there was a disturbance in the front of the crowd, the kind of thing we hadn’t seen since Kansas. Someone there was shoving people and shouting—all I could make out was the phrase “the true lord!”—but it would turn out that this was a feint. My attention went to the shouting and shoving, as did that of the police: several officers moved toward the heckler, who slipped away.
In the midst of this planned distraction, shots were fired from the roof of a three-story building to Jesus’s right.
The first bullet missed him and plowed into the wooden stage about six feet to his left. The second grazed the flesh at the back of his neck, below his right ear, missed his spinal column by an eighth of an inch, and cut through the back of his left shoulder before ricocheting off the metal stair rail and breaking the window of a police car parked forty yards away. It was, after about one second of paralysis, as if someone had pushed a pandemonium button. People screamed and stampeded toward the park exits, police pointed toward the rooftop, drawing their weapons, yelling into their radios.
It took me two seconds to react. I’d been distracted by the shouting lunatic in the crowd, and then I hestitated, not wanting to knock Jesus over again for no reason. I heard the second bullet make a strange sound—tink!—when it hit the railing, and I looked up and saw Jesus stagger sideways and then catch his balance and go down on one knee. A patch of blood sprouted on the back of his sport jacket. I was next to him in the time it would take you to say “goddammit.” Wales and two policemen had the same instinct. Two more seconds and we had Jesus on the floor of the stage, covering him with our bodies. Somebody, possibly me, was yelling, “He’s hit! He’s hit!” We pulled his jacket off, which wasn’t easy with the jostling and screaming. In the confusion I was pushed flat onto the stage so that my face was near his, and I saw the strangest other-worldly calm in his eyes. You would have thought he’d just awakened from an afternoon nap and was checking the bedside clock to see how much time there was before he had to be at his friend’s house for cocktails. One officer was ripping open the back of his shirt, the other was pressing a hand against the neck wound—I remember that the fingers looked slippery with blood. But Jesus just gazed at me with those bottomless brown eyes and said, very quietly, “I’m fine, Russ.”
“You don’t look fine. You’re white as a ghost.”
“More votes that way,” he joked, before he lost consciousness.
Six or eight state troopers had formed a sort of wall behind him, standing between his prone body and the place where the shots had come from. It started to rain harder. A doctor rushed up from the crowd. She was an Asian woman of middle age—a pediatrician, but no one cared; a doctor was a doctor at that point. She looked at both wounds and told us not to move his neck, not to press too hard on the spinal cord. And then the ambulance was pushing through the crowd and attendants were up on the stage, and drawn guns were everywhere, amidst the screaming and police radios and sirens. Only one person from the campaign was allowed to get in the ambulance with Jesus; I was that person. I had time enough for one quick look over my shoulder as I trotted beside the stretcher. Zelda and my parents were standing out in the middle of the stage, soaking wet and traumatized, trying to get my brother up off his knees. And then we were racing toward Swedish Hospital with a police escort front and back, and Jesus was either dead, unconscious, or so deep in meditation that no one could reach him. The ambulance attendant had started an IV. “He has a pulse,” she told me after about sixty seconds.
I found myself praying. I could not remember the last time I had said a real prayer, and I did not know exactly who I was praying to, but I was saying, “Please let him live,” under my breath. “Please let him stay alive.”
At the hospital, attendants wheeled him toward the emergency room between rows of photographers, cameras flashing, reporters screaming out questions as if the first priority at that moment was to make sure they got their story. In the examination room, a nurse pulled a curtain around the bed, and two doctors went to work. I wouldn’t let them kick me out, and a few minutes later, when Stab arrived, I wouldn’t let them kick him out either. He was bubbling one prayer after the next, “Hail Mary fulled of God, God loves you. He loves you and among all women and the fruit of your wound.”
Much later on, Jesus would tell Stab it was his prayers that had brought him back down from heaven, and some of us would believe that, and some of us would not.
Fourteen long minutes passed before Jesus opened his eyes. There were all kinds of machines hooked up to him, doctors painstakingly cleaning the wounds, checking monitors, sending things through the IV, taking X-rays of his upper spine. At the sight of Jesus’s lids raising, Stab stopped praying and started jumping up and down. With his big belly, the medicine bottles on the table were shaking so much the doctors finally made us get out. We retreated a short distance to an anteroom off the main waiting area and stood there with Zelda and Mom and Dad, Wales and Dukey and Enrica Dominique. “Why, why, why, why, why?” my mother kept saying.
“He’s going to be okay, Ma. Stab, don’t worry, he’s going to be all right.”
“They shot God!” he said in a furious tone. “Somebody shot a bullet at God!”
The emergency room was crawling with police, the pavement outside the door jammed with reporters, the parking lot beyond them packed with people praying and crying. My cell phone rang. I stepped into a small office to answer. It was the assistant chief of the Seattle Police Department. “We caught the bastard,” he said.
The doctors sewed Jesus back together with twenty-three stitches, started him on an antibiotic to prevent the wounds from becoming infected, pumped blood into him to replace the large amount he’d lost, and made him lie there for hours, while news flashed around the world that someone had tried to kill him.
After a time, Zelda went out and spoke to the assembled press corps. She gave them the facts: Jesus’s condition was good; unless there was an infection or some damage the doctors had not seen, he’d be released the next day and, barring complications, would resume his regular campaign schedule later in the week. The shooter had fled on foot and been caught in a Starbucks men’s room. He called himself a “true, living Christian,” and was a member of a radical church with a few thousand members, spread out mainly across the Northwest. The Temples of the Devoted Angels of Judea it was called, and the shooter had been working in concert with the fellow who created the disturbance in front of the stage—and who had so far eluded arrest.
We stayed in the waiting area a long time, sitting around in hospital chairs drinking coffee and trying to settle ourselves. Experiencing something like that is a strange combination of the familiar and the surreal, as if part of you has already been through it or you have seen it on the screen a thousand times. Another part of you can’t believe it has happened.
My father seemed particularly affected. “Maniacs,” he kept saying. “Idiots.” He hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but I could tell from the fidgety movement of his strong hands that he wanted a cigarette then.
“They don’t like him claiming to be God,” I told him, my own voice jittery. “They have the monopoly on God. They know who he is, what he looks like, how he would act, how he would vote, what he would think about sex, taxes, guns, and hunting.”
“They’re maniacs,” he repeated. “The guy never said he was God in the first place, did he?”
Stab came out to see us. I showed him a big, optimistic smile and told hi
m, “Maybe this is what he was thinking of when he told you that, pal. He said they’d shoot him. Well, they did, and he survived.”
My brother gave me the walleyed stare for which he and his tribe are famous, and then he said, “He told me they’d shoot him two times, not one time.”
“Sure,” I said. “Right. There were two bullets weren’t there? I think we’re okay now.”
And I almost believed it myself.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER Jesus had been moved upstairs and had spoken with his mother by telephone, and after everyone else had gone back to the hotel, Enrica Dominque and I took up positions in the hallway outside his room. Police, plainclothes and uniformed, were posted at both ends of the hall and at the hospital entrances. Dukey and his cohorts were out on the back lawn in the rain, making sure no one got close enough to fire a rocket-propelled grenade through Jesus’s window. But I had the sense that the worst was behind us. The person responsible was in jail, his co-conspirator had been tracked down in the next county, and there just aren’t that many crazies out there. Even the pastor of the Temples of the Devoted Angels of Judea had issued a statement distancing the church from the event and the perpetrator. “While we do not accept this imposter as the One True Christ,” the statement graciously proclaimed, “we never encourage the use of violence to achieve spiritual ends.”
It was three or four o’clock in the morning, Enrica and I propping ourselves up with one cup of hospital coffee after the next, when I told her I thought we’d gotten safely through the roughest part of the ocean crossing and would be okay from there on in.
She looked at me as if I had started reciting the Koran in Russian. Deep down, Enrica was a kind woman, really. Of indeterminate sexuality and age, she had short black hair and a face like a small cement block set on the wider foundation of her body. She favored black pant-suits and giant hoop earrings, and pulled-pork sandwiches for lunch. The skin of her forearms was covered with tattoos of mythical figures wielding swords. As I might have mentioned, she was a practitioner of Thai kickboxing and had something like an eleventh-degree black belt. She had worked at the station about the same length of time I had, and we’d always gotten along. What I liked about her was her unflagging devotion to Walesy and her fondness for vulgar jokes. What I didn’t always like was her tremendous prejudice against anyone she thought had not grown up in as rough an environment as she had. This was the lens through which she saw the world: there were the very rich, and then the “spit-sucking yuppies,” then a small slice of working-class types that included most of her students at the Kickboxing Palace and the guy who fixed her eighteen-year-old Chevy Nova, and then there were the real human beings, like her, who had grown up in abject poverty. Only the real human beings saw the world the way it actually was. Wales told me that, between her salary at the station and the proceeds from her kickboxing empire, most of which she thoughtfully invested, Enrica Dominique could have retired to Gstaad and lived in the lap of luxury for the rest of her days. But that was not the point. The point was that she had found a comfortable identity for herself, based equally on the deprivations of her youth and the mental inflexibility of her adulthood. That was her story and she was sticking with it, like the rest of us.
“For a guy who used to report the news,” she said, fixing me with her dark eyes and pausing for dramatic effect, “you are about as freaking out of touch as a professor.”
“Thanks.”
“You surprise me, Russ, when you say naive things like that. I mean, I thought you grew up in kind of a real family.”
“Real as it gets,” I told her. “My dad is a Vietnam vet, former boxing champ, and retired bricklayer. My mom made beds at the Scabies Motel for seven years.”
“And you think this is the end of it? That nobody else is going to try to hurt him now? What, it’s all dim sum and Bocelli from here on in?”
“Dim sum and Bocelli?”
“Yuppie crap. Nicey nice.”
“I didn’t say that. I just hope we’re done with the target practice for a while.”
She pursed her lips and appraised me. “Don’t you know,” she said at last, “that people get their ideas from what other people do? There’s about six original people in the world. The rest of everybody else are copycats. When it comes to religion and politics, ninety percent of people do what their parents did and think they made up their minds for themselves. They watch the news to see what the latest trends are.”
“Sure,” I said tiredly.
“And in a significant portion of humanity, the latest trend is let’s kill Jesus.”
I made sure I was standing more than a leg-length away and told her I hoped she was wrong.
THIRTY-TWO
While this was going on, Anna Songsparrow Endish was in the middle of her tour of the Deep South and making headlines of her own, though they were overwhelmed, for a time, by news of the assassination attempt. In her quiet way she was an inspiring public speaker. Unlike Jesus, she didn’t make jokes, do Elvis impersonations, or go for a swim in the Suwannee River. She didn’t flatter local tastes by riding bulls or surfboards. She went along quietly on her bus tour, stopping in small towns the other campaigns didn’t know existed and making stump speeches she had not written down and on which she continually improvised. “We are all one tribe,” she’d say, according to what Esmeralda told me, “and we need to begin to act as one tribe, to care for one another, and to contribute to the whole. My grandfather was a great leader, a great wise man in our tradition, and he often said that we should try as hard as we can to understand that we are, in fact, one body. He would tell us that each day we should spend time imagining ourselves as other people in the tribe, especially if we had difficulty with a particular person.”
To some ears these talks were the pinnacle of naïveté. The New York Times ran a sarcastic article entitled “Navajo Platitudes Play Poorly to the Poor,” saying her speeches were like spoon-feeding chocolate to the starving. But, in fact, the poor, the otherwise invisible poor, seemed thrilled that she had come to speak with them, and were madly infatuated with her. Old men and women, many of whom claimed to have Indian blood, came out of the woodwork, in southern Mississippi especially, plying her with gifts of hand-carved war sticks, moccasins, ceramic pots, and pieces of jewelry. She proved to have a flair for the symbolic, too. On the way to New Orleans she purchased a rake—a simple yard rake—in one of the better-off suburbs. When she arrived in the city she got off the bus with her rake, and her small staff, and her hundred or so press followers, and walked, without uttering a word, until she came to a vacant lot that was strewn with broken glass, metal scraps, reams of paper, and other detritus. And she began to rake. She raked without speaking, the press photographers crowding around her, taking pictures from various angles. She just kept raking, not answering any of the questions that were thrown at her, until, finally, someone else had the good sense to get a rake and join in. From what Norm Simmelton (who got hold of a trash barrel himself and went to work) told me, even members of the press bent down to grab a scrap of metal or an advertising insert and toss it in the pile.
When he regained his strength, Jesus called his mother and asked her to turn north. She was to make her way along the mighty Mississippi, staying as close to the river as she could manage, stopping where she thought she should stop and saying what she felt she should say. “I like the rake idea, Mother,” I heard him say. And then, “The main thing is to show people what a fine president you will make if anything should happen to me.”
THIRTY-THREE
The doctors at Swedish Hospital made Jesus spend a second night there, and then a third, to be on the safe side. Being sued was one thing; being the physician who let a not-safely-recovered Jesus go back to work too soon was of larger consequence.
When he did walk out of the hospital—to throngs of cheering supporters in the parking lot—Jesus instructed the limo driver to lose the press and then take him to the local hoosegow so he could have a word with the man who’
d tried to assassinate him. I thought this was a bad idea and told him so.
“A bad idea morally, or a bad idea strategically?” he asked me. We had picked him up in one of the hired limos—just me and Dukey and Enrica; the rest of the gang had stayed at the hotel and were preparing a special meal complete with a show of get-well bouquets and cards that had been sent to him by the score (including attractive arrangements from Maplewith and Alowich).
“I’m beginning to see,” I said, facing him across the space between the limo’s backseats, “that there is no distinction.”
He smiled, but seemed distracted.
“You okay?”
“Physically, fine.”
“And nonphysically?”
He shrugged his big shoulders. “It might not make sense to you, but the goings-on here on earth sometimes fill me with sadness. Everything here happens the way it is supposed to happen, I know that as well as anyone. Not so much as a single hair on your head stands outside the Law and the Great Plan. Not a breath. Not a sniffle. Nothing. But there are moments when the human state of consciousness surprises me—not in its ignorance, but in its persistent ignorance. Compared to the rest of creation, your attraction to violence, for example, is baffling. In certain moods I find myself wondering why that has never changed, never evolved.”
“Welcome to the real world,” Enrica told him.
Dukey was staring alertly out the window.
“There are moments when I lose patience,” Jesus said.
“Don’t do anything rash.”
He smiled. “Do you know that, if, as a race, you could forgo violence for even a few days, a huge karmic weight would be lifted from you?”
“Karmic?”
“The weight of sin. Transgression. The Law. Cause and effect. Use whatever term you’d like, but even a few days and you would see a noticeable drop in what you term ‘natural disasters.’ Floods. Earthquakes. Mudslides.”
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