The Six Messiahs

by Mark Frost

  "Why, this is very much like the meditative states attained by the yogis in the Far East," said Presto.

  "Is that a fact?" said Edison, who had not paid much attention to the other men beyond an occasional friendly glance. "I'm very interested to know this; are you a Hindu yourself?"

  "I am the Episcopalian son of an Irish-Catholic mother and a Muslim father who fled a Hindu culture to live in England," said Presto with a bow.

  "Well, America certainly sounds like the right place for you."

  With a glance at his pocket watch, Jack suggested they not take up too much of Mr. Edison's valuable time but should proceed with their reason for the visit. Edison, who seemed more grateful for the interruption than annoyed, marched them through the massive laboratories they'd glimpsed through the windows. Sixty full-time employees did the lab work, as teams assigned to various projects. Most of Edison's time was now taken up with administrative details, he explained grumpily; his investors insisted on it. Money drove everything now, not like the good old days in Menlo Park when energy was boundless and trust of one's fellows came unquestioned.

  They left the main building, walked to a far corner of the quad, and entered a low oblong wooden shack fifty feet long, topped by a strange sloping hinged roof. Black tar paper covered the interior walls; black curtains draped a small raised platform at the far end. Doyle decided the hinging at the tops of the wall allowed the roof to slide open, for what reason he could not imagine. The men took seats on folding chairs before a square white screen hanging straight down from the ceiling, while Edison disappeared behind a black box of curtains at the back.

  The room went dark and Doyle took advantage of the pause to lean over to Jack and ask, "How did you come to know him?"

  "Came to his door unannounced. Three years ago when I reenlisted," said Jack. "Identified myself, showed my credentials: agent to the Crown."

  "Why?"

  "Mysteries I'd come across. Ideas. Questions I wanted to ask. He was surprisingly cooperative; he found me quite exotic. I lived on the grounds for two months. He told his people I was a visiting engineer. We shared a few ideas for applications of his new technologies...."

  A rhythmic humming issuing from behind the curtain cut him off; moments later a narrow beam of light shot out of a peephole cut in its center, flooding the screen with a square of brightness painful to the eye.

  Edison reappeared and stood beside them. Writhing black squiggles danced across the screen.

  "Dust on the lens," he explained. "There is some extraneous footage attached to the front of the reel, Jack, but be patient; this does lead to the material you asked me to show you."

  The screen went dark again, and then suddenly two prizefighters appeared before them, circling around a roped-off ring, slapping punches at each other; there was no sound, the image leeched of color to a flat black and white and the figures moved with an almost comical jumpiness, but the spooky, larger-than-life spectacle appearing out of thin air astonished them.

  "That's Gentleman Jim Corbett, world heavyweight champion," said Edison, pointing to the larger of the men. "Filmed in this same room a few months ago. His opponent's a local fellow we recruited from an obscurity—"

  On the screen, Corbett floored the man with a single punch.

  "—to which he quickly returned."

  The image changed to an exterior landscape; a train tunnel cut in the side of a mountain, tracks running from it directly at the screen. Moments later, a steaming locomotive charged out of the tunnel and hurtled toward them; the men yelled involuntarily. Innes dove out of his seat.

  Edison guffawed and slapped his thigh. "No matter how many times I see people react to that it still gives me a chuckle."

  The screen changed again to an intimate boudoir draped with tasseled gauzes and Silks, lush pillows crowding a leopard-skin rug. A shapely larm encircled with silver bracelets slithered out from behind the curtains, followed by a barefooted leg; then their owner revealed herself, a sinuous, dark-haired dancing girl in diaphanous harem pants and a filmy halter; flowers adorned her hair, pearls ringed her neck, a hefty dew-drop jewel ornamented her navel. She flirted with them from the screen, flashing her kohl-rimmed eyes, and began to shake and shimmy in a way that could only be described as extraordinarily professional.

  "Good night!" said Innes. "Who is that?"

  "Her name is Little Egypt," said Edison. "Actually her name is Mildred Hockingheimer from Brooklyn. Our nation's foremost practitioner of the hootchy-kootchy. And she is going to be very, very famous."

  They watched her for a while and could find no basis for disagreement.

  "Very talented girl," said Stern.

  "From Brooklyn?" said Presto. "It hardly seems possible."

  "She found the inspiration for her act in a Syrian woman— not so coincidentally also named Little Egypt—who scandalized last year's World's Fair: There are currently twenty-five Little Egypts plying their trade around the country. We've got the jump on them, though: Our Little Egypt is already the biggest attraction in every Kinetoscope parlor we've put her into; we could charge a quarter a peep and men would still be standing in line."

  "Worth every penny," said Innes.

  "And all a trick, her sense of motion, that is. Retention of vision; a trick the eye plays on us. Separate still photographs shown so quickly in succession the mind perceives the movements as continuous."

  "The possibilities," said Doyle, thinking well beyond the scope of her current performance, "are limitless."

  "Do you think so? I'm afraid it may not have much application beyond the prurient or purely sensational. Eye-catching, of course, but something kind of shameful about it finally, isn't there?"

  "For two hundred years, the most popular attractions in England were public executions, followed closely by bear-baiting and cockfights," said Presto. "If your marvelous invention moves the masses toward voyeurism, they shan't have much distance to travel."

  "Hope you're right. People are usually suspicious of new inventions," said Edison. "For the longest time, they were afraid diseases could be transmitted over the telephone. But not moving pictures; I've never seen anything like it; people take to it like camels to water."

  "How ever did you find her?" asked Innes, untroubled by Edison's concerns, his mind doing handsprings around some pretext—a convention; a class reunion of sorts—that would unite all twenty-five of the Little Egypts.

  "Dancing at Coney Island, although this performance was recorded right here in our Black Maria. Quite a gal, Mildred; she likes to tell you her dance is patterned after the secret ceremonies of the ancient Egyptian temple. How they happened to fall into her hands in the middle of Flatbush remains a mystery she will carry to her rest."

  Little Egypt vanished without revealing any of the secrets she seemed to have been leading up to: A stunning vista of white Grecian and Italianate pavilions took her place on the screen, immense crowds scurrying in and out of the buildings like insects.

  "This is the World's Fair now," said Edison. "Ran for six months last year—any of you gentlemen have the good fortune to attend?"

  No, none of them had, they said.

  "Sorry to say you missed one of the great spectacles in creation. Originally the town fathers wanted to show the world how Chicago had recovered from the great fire in '71, but it quickly became clear that the unseen forces which occasionally conspire to push forward the progress of man had something more significant in mind. In the middle of our worst economic crisis in forty years, the Fair was visited by twenty-seven million people; nearly half our country's population. And between my company's efforts and those of our competitors, it was the most widely photographed event in human history."

  A dazzling flood of images cascaded over the screen: exhibition halls filled with gargantuan manufacturing displays; dynamos, hydroelectric power, models of machines from the new Golden Age of Science. An entire building full of turbines and generators, seemingly the work of a race of giants. Steam-powered f
ire engines. Horseless carriages. The latest advances in luxurious rail travel; gloriously appointed sleeping cars with silk curtains and silver washbasins. In its central chamber, a tower of electricity reached to the roof of the vast steel hall, the words "Edison Light" flashing around its pinnacle—as he stood beside them, Doyle watched the flickering shadows play off Edison's face, marveling at the riches of inspiration that must animate his mind; godfather to the march of progress they were witnessing.

  A separate pavilion displayed Edison's Inventions of Tomorrow, machines predicted to better the lives of every man, woman, and child; vacuum cleaners, laundry machines, refrigerated ice boxes. And most astonishing: the Telectroscope, a viewing tube, like a telescope, that when perfected would allow a man in New York to see the face of a friend in Chicago as if they were standing side by side.

  Rising from an amusement area called the Midway, a gigantic wheel of light carried passengers in swinging baskets, up, down, and around in a fiery circle—invented by a local man named George Washington Ferris, Edison told them—as if a wonder from Mount Olympus had fallen among the mortals. One dizzying shot demonstrated the point of view of someone sitting in the revolving chairs; from its apex the fairgrounds spread out beneath the wheel like the dawning of a new civilization.

  "Two hundred and fifty feet in the air: Our cameraman nearly fainted and fell to his death," said Edison.

  Now pictures documented groups of men and women gathered on stairs in front of various Fair pavilions; in wide-angle shots, a banner in their center announced the group's identity—Pan American Association of Horse Breeders; the Chicago Club; United Women's Congress—followed in each instance by closer shots of the camera slowly panning across each stationary membership, most of them, used to posing for still photographers, standing as rigidly as statues with unwavering smiles on their faces.

  This is all very interesting, thought Doyle, on the verge of asking: What was the point?

  Then came the Parliament of International Religions: one of the largest groupings, a swell of clergy populating the steps around their banner and a second sign that read: Not Men, but Ideas. Not Matter, but Mind.

  Lionel Stern leaned forward in his seat. The closer examining shots began: bishops, cardinals, deacons, vicars, Protestant and Catholic in their clerical collars standing shoulder to shoulder with rabbis, both Orthodox and the more contemporarily outfitted Reform....

  "There, there he is, there's my father," said Lionel Stern, leaping forward to the screen and pointing at a briefly glimpsed angular figure in the center of the group. "Is there any way to stop the picture?"

  "I'm afraid not," said Edison.

  The camera continued to slip to the right across the congregation; Lionel watched anxiously as Jacob's grainy image drifted to the edge of the screen and disappeared. Now the many races and religions of the East made their appearance, eyeing the camera with more variety of expression—from quiet humor to outright suspicion—all wearing their distinctive traditional vestments: clusters of draped and turbaned Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists in dark saffron robes, ascetic Confucianists, Coptic Christians, Tibetans, elegant Shinto priests, forbidding Eastern Orthodox patriarchs.

  As the camera reached the far margin of the group, it stopped moving and held the frame. A lone figure in the back row captured their eye: a tall, arresting man, thin as a scarecrow, wearing a high stovepipe hat and a severe black frock coat, cut like an undertaker's. Long, scraggly hair flowed to his shoulders; out of his back on the left side rose a spiny deformed hump. The features of the face remained blurry; alone among the entire membership, this man was moving his head from side to side....

  Jack stood straight up, jolted from his seat. He moved quickly to the screen and studied the faint image; moments later the film ended, the screen trailed off in a congestion of lines, sprockets, motes of dust. Edison turned off the projector and the room went silent. Jack turned to Doyle, eyes wide with alarm, caught for a moment in the stark white light on the screen.

  "I must see it again," said Jack.

  "I'll have to rewind the reel first," said Edison.

  "No; let me see the film plain, in my hands, one picture at a time."

  "Of course," said Edison.

  "What is it, Jack?" said Doyle, watching him closely.

  Jack didn't reply.

  Minutes later, in Edison's lab, the length of film spread out across a glass panel lit from below, Jack pored over its individual frames with a magnifying glass as the others stood quietly by.

  In one of the frames, between his constant movements, Jack found an image of the humpbacked preacher that caught the outline of the man's features nearly distinct.

  Jack went instantly pale: Doyle noticed his hands shaking.

  "We know this man, Arthur," said Jack gravely.

  "Do we?"

  "We know him all too well," he said, handing the glass to Doyle.

  BOOK THREE

  CHICAGO

  chapter 9

  Eilleen tried to steal a glimpse of the sketch pad in Jacob's hand, but he shooed her away with mock annoyance. She sighed and continued to stare wistfully out the window as he instructed, only too accustomed to following a man's directions, watching his pencil working furiously out of the corner of her eye but unable to see the results. Oppressive heat shimmered the horizon line as the train pulled its way through a winding arroyo and began to climb from the flat, sandy landscape into broken promontories of rock.

  What went haywire inside a man's head when exposed to a woman's physical charms? Eileen had been bedeviled by the question for years: Put an otherwise sensible man in the company of an uncommonly attractive female—she had enough perspective untainted by wishful vanity to include herself in that category—and the poor fellow was either rendered speechless or consumed by an impulse to possess and dominate her.

  She rolled the issue around in her mind: Is this madness a reaction to something I'm doing or the work of invisible biological mechanisms? Either way, short of entering a convent there didn't seem to be a thing she could do about it; nature did not yield to logic. Sex itself wasn't the problem, anyway; it was these damn mating rituals. Better to be born a cat or dog and confine all the torment over who sleeps with whom to quick seasonal frenzies. Part of her sentiments looked forward to getting past the breeding years so she could be treated like any other human being.

  On the other hand, old girl, she corrected herself—remembering her worn face in the mirror that morning and how welcome were the full thrusts of a man's attentions when she felt receptive—let's not be too hasty.

  "Let me see if I understood you," she said, resurrecting a recent conversation. "You're a certified member of your clergy, doesn't that give you the authority to communicate directly with God?"

  "Oh, thank heavens, no; only Moses and a few other Old Testament Jews were saddled with that responsibility, and even their conversations were usually filtered through some sort of intermediary; an angel or a burning bush," said Jacob, bent over his drawing.

  "But there must be hundreds of Christian ministers in this country who believe they receive the word of God straight from the horse's mouth."

  "Yes," said Jacob, with a sad smile, "I know."

  "But if you have no contact with whoever He is, how can you claim to perform God's will?"

  "A rabbi makes no such claim, my dear; that is far too important a job to be entrusted to professionals. If God speaks to anyone it is only through the voice of the human heart and everyone you meet has one of those."

  "Theatrical producers aside."

  "Not to mention certain neighborhoods in New York," said Jacob. "My people have a belief that the existence of the world is sustained by the righteousness of a small number of perfectly ordinary people who attract no attention to themselves and very quietly go about their business."

  "Like saints, then."

  "Hidden saints, you might call them, seeking no reward or recognition for what they do. Pass them in the street, you'd h
ardly notice them; not even they have the slightest idea they are performing such essential service. But they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders."

  "Sounds more like a job for the Messiah," she said.

  "This whole Messiah business is so terribly overemphasized. ..."

  "You don't believe in the Messiah?"

  "There is a tradition in Judaism that if someone tells you the Messiah has come and you are planting a tree, first finish planting the tree and then go see about this Messiah."

  "Hmm. I guess if a fellow actually was the Messiah, the last thing he'd do is run around announcing it to people."

  "Not if he wants to live until suppertime. If you look at the subject historically, this idea began because the Jews in Israel wanted a man with supernatural powers to fly down from heaven and rescue them; quite a natural response to a thousand years of slavery, wouldn't you agree?"

  "I'd wish for a squadron of them."

  "Then Jesus came along and, regardless of who you believe he was, the rest is history. But ever since in Western culture when we approach the end of a century, as we are now, a terror that the Judgment Day is at hand awakens in us this hunger for a savior to appear and set things right. And with it the strange notion that there can only be one of these persons."

  "More than one Messiah?" asked Eileen. "But he's one of a kind, isn't he, by definition?"

  "In Kabbalah there is an alternative idea that has always struck me as infinitely more reasonable: Within each generation that passes through this life there are a few people alive at all times—without any self-awareness that they possess such a quality—who, if events called upon them to do so, could assume the role of the Messiah."

  "The 'role' of the Messiah?"

  "In the same way we are all playing a part in our own lives: strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage, full of sound and fury, signifying God knows what. If you look at it from this perspective, in the great pageant of life the Messiah is simply one of the more interesting characters."