American Savior

by Roland Merullo

  I was tempted to head back to my condo, but instead I grabbed a cab to the Wee Drop Inn, a gloomy pub near the Connecticut River. I knew the patrons might recognize me in the unlikely event they were still sober at that hour (noon), but I also knew them to be the type of people who had enough of their own troubles to have adopted what I thought of as the Code of Nonintrusion. I was right. They left me alone. I sat on a stool, nursed a dark ale, chewed stale peanuts, watching Fox on one TV and CNN on another. I kept my phone on the bar where I could see it. Pundits of every stripe had been rushed before the cameras from their corner offices and penthouse suites, and to a man and a woman they said that this latest bit of unpredictability (assuming it wasn’t foul play) could be devastating to what had seemed, until then, a fairly safe lead, in the popular vote at least.

  With thinly disguised triumph bouncing and jumping in her voice, Anne Canter noted that “if there’s one thing the American people don’t like it is a lack of dependability.”

  Bulf Spritzer called the turn of events “worrisome in a handful of different ways,” and added, “The drama doesn’t get any higher than this!”

  The Alowich and Maplewith campaigns issued statements saying they sent their best wishes to the family and hoped for a happy outcome to the mystery—while privately spreading the word that it was just this kind of behavior they’d expected from the outset. You had to be in the public eye for years in order to earn the trust of American people. And Jesus hadn’t done that. And now his followers were getting their just deserts.

  I kept crunching peanuts and waiting for my cell phone to ring. It did not, unless you count the periodic reports from Dukey, trying to make up for his insubordinate outburst, who informed me, several times, that he and his buddies were “doing shakedowns all over the city, man.” He assumed I was at the hotel, and I said nothing to make him think otherwise. I drank moderately but steadily. I spoke to no one. I tried to keep my faith from leaking out entirely, but the more I thought about what Jesus had done, the angrier I became. The angrier I became, the harder it was to believe he was God, or holy, or even someone worthy of our massive efforts. The more I doubted his worthiness, the guiltier I felt. And the guiltier I felt, the less motivation I had to head back to the hotel. It was, in other words, the classic profile of a sinner.

  Finally, at two o’clock, when I couldn’t bear the news reports any longer, I got up off my bar stool and made myself hail a cab. I thought I saw my ex-mother-in-law near the hotel’s front entrance (it might have been what psychologists call a TMM, traumatic memory mirage), so I walked around and used my card key in the back door, and then had to trudge up twelve flights of stairs because work was being done on one of the elevators and the other elevator was very slow. At the suite, with the exception of Anna Songsparrow, the whole gang was sitting around in various postures of devastation. Anna had wandered off somewhere to pray. No one seemed to have noticed I was gone, though after Zelda kissed me she sniffed, squinted her eyes, and said, “Beer?”

  Dukey saved me from answering. I flipped open the phone and heard, “Nothin’, man, nothin’. Somebody grabbed him, I’m tellin’ ya.”

  “I don’t think so. I think he went off by himself.”

  “For what?” Dukey yelled.

  “To pray or something. You know how he is.”

  “No way. Not today, man. He ain’t that crazy.”

  “Just keep trying. Look in the places you’d least expect him to be. Check Parsifal’s. Check the Wee Drop Inn.”

  “Good idea, Boss,” he said, and I hung up. It was hours before he called again.

  The “command center,” as we’d named the suite in better moments, had the feel of a visitation room in a funeral home where someone too young is lying in the casket and friends are standing around in small groups wondering why. When she wasn’t on the phone with press people, Zelda could be found standing at the window with teary eyes. Amelia Simmelton would go up and put an arm around her, and try to convince her, with a nine-year-old’s wise certainty, that everything Jesus did, he did for good reason. Stab kept looking at me as if I had the explanation for all this sorrow and was purposely keeping it from him. My mother had decided the best thing to do was make escarole soup, and she had taken my dad out shopping for ingredients, and they were in the kitchen now, locked in one of their postfight silences, chopping garlic and opening cans of white beans. We paced, we drank bad beer, we nibbled at sandwiches and brownies the hotel management sent up, and some of us cried and some of us swore and some of us did both, but no one could bear to turn on the television.

  “Do we go up to the Mahal without him or what?” Wales asked, and the room was split. More arguments, more minor-league recriminations. A phone call from the FBI agent, saying there was a report that Jesus had been seen in a church on the south side. They were checking it out.

  At three o’clock, Zelda had to go down and face the press again, and she was still there when the call came in on my cell phone at fifteen minutes before five.

  “Russ, Chief Bastatutta. We found him.”

  “Alive?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yup.”

  With the phone still to my ear, I gave the room the thumbs-up. “I have never heard finer words, Chief. Where?”

  “Hunter Town.”

  “Huh?”

  “Been here all day apparently, playing touch football in the mud with some kids. We have him in a car. We’ll get him back to the hotel. Gotta tell you, though, somehow the word leaked out. A few press types were there at the end, just before it got dark. Turn on your TV, you’ll see.”

  Someone pushed a button on the remote, and the second the picture came on, there was our candidate, covered from teeth to shoelaces in mud, his arms around four or five black kids dressed in dark hooded sweatshirts. One of them was tossing a football up and down in his hands.

  “We’ve been Willie Hortoned,” Wales said, in a tone of voice you might have heard from a guy who’d been told he had to have four root canals on his birthday. I saw Norm Simmelton cringe. “We’ve Willie Hortoned ourselves.”

  “Nah, listen,” I told him. “I spent some time in Hunter over the years. I even think I recognize one of those kids. They’re good kids, most of them.”

  “Right. You know they’re good kids. I know they’re good kids. Question is, do Suzy and Mitch Hazlegood in Whistlestop, Missouri, know they’re good kids? Don’t think so.”

  “Will it ever stop,” Nadine Simmelton moaned.

  Hunter Town was a sort of poorer Fultonville, a section of the city that white cabdrivers would not take a fare to. Even the Jamaican and Ethiopian cabdrivers would often refuse to go there. ZIZ reporters asked for police escorts when they were assigned a Hunter Town story.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I was on the couch next to Wales at that point. Zelda had come around behind and put her hands on my shoulders. “I mean, I know he cares about the poor, and wants to make a symbolic statement about that and wants the country to finally get beyond racial problems, but why didn’t he go to Hunter Town and have a rally or something? Why blow off the press? Why not tell any of us where he was going? It’s like he has a death wish or something … You know what I mean.”

  Wales was trying to unwrap a cigar, but his hands weren’t working right. He stared at the television screen without saying another word. We watched ZIZ show the pictures over and over again of Jesus with his football pals. Jesus smiling, waving, and, for the benefit of the TV cameras, tossing one last perfect spiral before climbing into a squad car. Noelle Prendergast, who’d been promoted to roving correspondent when I quit, was on the scene, “Reporting live from Hunter Town, for the Wizard, WZIZ News at five.” She looked frightened and was holding the microphone too far up into her face, but otherwise seemed to be doing a competent job.

  When the police escorted Jesus to the suite, Stab hugged him with more gusto than usual. My mother convinced him to have a bowl of soup. He stood a
t the counter in the kitchen, mud caked on his shirt, running shoes, and sweat pants, looking utterly unconcerned about the fact that he’d stood up two hundred plus reporters, twice, that the pundits were predicting a wholesale abandonment by the fickle swing voters in key states, and that he’d caused us so much worry.

  Jesus was polite enough to finish the soup and to compliment my mother on it. He told us plans were still on for the Indian meal in Wells River and that he was going to his room to shower and change. I couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t hold my anger in. I followed him down the corridor and when he turned to close his door he saw me. He smiled, motioned me in, shut the door behind me, and stood there with mud in his hair. “Let me guess,” he said, “you are upset.”

  “I would like a momentary exemption,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

  “From what?”

  “From you being, you know … God or whatever you are. I’d like to be able to say what I want to say without fear of punishment.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m serious. I want an exemption.”

  “You can always tell me what’s on your mind, you know that, Russ.”

  “This isn’t always,” I said stupidly. And then it spilled out of me: “You made us all miserable today. It was rude, it was inconsiderate, it was ungrateful, after all the work we’ve done. And most important, it was a completely stupid thing to do from a strategic standpoint—you kept hundreds of press people waiting not once, but twice, and they don’t like that kind of thing. You might have blown the whole election with one day of touch football.”

  He had not moved. The expression on his face was pleasant, attentive, respectful, even friendly. He seemed to be waiting for more.

  “That’s all I wanted to say.”

  He kept looking at me.

  “No offense intended. No disrespect. But I think it was a lousy thing to do, a crazy thing, and I couldn’t just go up to the dinner tonight and pretend everything was hunky-dory. I’m not like that.”

  “I know you’re not,” he said. “That is why you’re here, because you’re not like that. That is why I chose you. When it comes time to tell my story, I don’t want someone who is going to prettify it. I am not interested in being the Jesus of someone’s syrupy imagination.”

  “All right,” I said, but I was confused.

  He held me in his gaze until I was uncomfortable, and then he said, “And I know about your doubts.”

  I was suddenly interested in the color of the hotel walls.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  It was exceedingly difficult to move my eyes back to him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “For the doubts.”

  “I am used to it, believe me. If it makes you feel any better, I can tell you this: it is as impossible for you to conceive of the reality of the God realm as it is for you to imagine yourself breathing underwater, or flying with your arms. Later, when you have passed out of this body, the full power of the presence of God will be made manifest to you, and then there will be no possibility of doubt.”

  “That scares me, for some reason.”

  “For good reason. It is an awesome experience for everyone, and terrifying for a person who has lived a life filled with violence or hatred or greed. For someone who has lived a life of kindness and generosity, however, it is vastly different. In that moment when such people first feel God’s presence they are protected from fear by the understanding that they have God’s goodness in themselves. Clear?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “The eye God sees you with is the eye with which you see God.”

  “That’s funny. I remember that from Sunday school. It always confused me.”

  He gave me the frown of impatience I’d seen from him so many times. “Feeling the godliness in yourself in God’s presence can be compared to certain moments of unity on earth. The best moments of lovemaking, friendship, family togetherness—those instances when you felt yourself linked to another soul. Ring a bell?”

  “A faint bell,” I said.

  Jesus smiled at me then. The smile was like warm bathwater being poured over you. “That feeling is an inkling of what you feel in the presence of God if your conscience is relatively clean. Doubt is banished. Self-hatred is banished. You become aware of your true divine identity. To make a crude comparison: the child understands the parent’s love, at the same time that the child understands the parent’s need for him or her, the way the parent’s life has been expanded by the child’s existence. It is the purest form of reciprocation.”

  “All right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Still angry?”

  “A little bit, yeah. Only because of all the work we put in. Only because we want so badly for you to actually get elected and start—”

  “Only because you think you know better,” he said, calmly.

  “All right. Sorry again. I just—”

  “Go take a shower. They are preparing a special meal for us at the Taj Mahal. Let’s not keep them waiting.”

  So I went back down the hotel hallway with a cold current of confusion running underneath everything. Only because you think you know better. Like the scent of an evil spirit, the dregs of my anger and doubt followed me into my room. I could hear the shower running and thought of what I would say to Zelda when she came out, how I would tell her I’d let Jesus have it on behalf of all of us, that he hadn’t apologized, that I was wondering if he even cared about winning.

  And then I went and stood at the window and came to my senses. Darkness had fallen over West Zenith, and I could see the streetlights forming straight lines across the neighborhoods, and offices still lit up in the buildings downtown. Life seemed so massive to me then, so complicated, so many thousands of souls working out an interconnected puzzle. Next to that, even a presidential election was small-time.

  Only because you think you know better.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket and then started ringing and when I said hello I was profoundly sorry to hear the voice of Randy Zillins. “Help out an old pal. Give me the inside story on what happened today.”

  “Randy Zillins,” I said, “the guy who only calls when he needs something.”

  “Yeah, well, listen, I got a story to file. Can you give me something? You know, on today? Inside info? And no more of that Bible crap either. Can you?”

  “Sure. What happened today was a lesson in humility.”

  “Aw, Christ,” Zillins said.

  “Listen,” I said, because I had truly had it with him at that point. Looking back now, I can see that I was experiencing the opposite of what Jesus had told me moments before: instead of being with God and sensing the goodness in myself, I was talking with Randy Zillins and sensing the darkness in myself, the doubt, the pettiness, the insistence on knowing better. “I don’t want you calling me anymore, okay? It’s the night before the election, I have nine million things to do, including protecting the guy you think is a phony, and who is staying in a hotel that anybody can walk into off the street. So please, go find your inside info someplace else, okay?”

  I waited a second before hanging up. I could hear R.Z. breathing on the other end of the line, insulted, hurt, shocked—who knows exactly what he was feeling? As I was about to apologize, or at least soften my remarks, he slammed the line closed.

  FORTY

  The thing I will always remember about our last supper is the feeling of warmth that emanated from Jesus. We’d seen sparks of it during the campaign. With all the travel and the public appearances, though, and the incredible strain of getting up there day after day to say basically the same thing over and over again, he’d been aloof at times. Not cold, but distant.

  At the Taj Mahal—as if to make up for his day of absence—he was fully present, and the only word you can use to describe the way he treated us is love. Everyone at the table felt it. He smiled radiantly at us, he touched the people sitting closest to him, he cracked jokes with my brother, and generally made everyone feel he had a spe
cial place for them in his heart. Near the end of what turned out to be a very good meal, he presented each of us with a twenty karat gold pin with THE JESUS CAMPAIGN inscribed on it. Not counting Anna Songsparrow, fourteen people had been invited to the dinner, so there were fourteen of these pins, made by a Manhattan jeweler. (Now, after what happened, and after enough time has passed to give people a perspective on the magnitude of what happened, these pins, I have been told, are worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars each. None of them, to date, has been sold.)

  Jesus walked around the table handing them out. He stopped to give each of us a warm embrace and to say words of thanks for our particular contribution. Standing beside my chair with one hand on my shoulder, he said, “I want to thank Russ for his sass, his reverent irreverence, and for knocking me over in Jocko Padsen’s shed.”

  I said, “You’re welcome,” and he laughed and seemed genuinely pleased.

  When he was finished with this ceremony, he told us to remain seated. As if on some invisible signal, the door to our private room opened and two waiters came in. One was carrying a silver bowl filled with water; the other was carrying a bar of soap and a towel. Jesus knelt in front of my mother, who happened to be sitting next to me. Before she could do anything to stop him, he was taking off her shoes and washing her feet, tenderly soaping her misshapen toes, then rinsing them and carefully drying them with the towel. She allowed this to go on for one foot before she broke apart. Over the course of almost forty years I had seen my mother cry, of course—at her own mother’s funeral, during times when my father did something to frustrate her, or I did something to disappoint her (the day I told her I was getting divorced leaps to mind as a memorably weepy occasion). But I had never seen anything remotely like the sorrow that began pouring out of her as Jesus moved on to her second foot. My father was sitting on the other side of her, and even though they had not been getting along well for the past few days, he could not bear to see her like that—her cheeks shaking and soaked, her hands fluttering across her thighs like wounded birds, her lips working convulsively. Dad leaned over and put his large hand on both her small ones and kept saying, “Mudgie, what? He doesn’t mean anything bad by it, honey. Mudgie, honey, stop, please.”