Messiah

by Gore Vidal

3

We met at the Spokane railroad station and Iris drove me through the wide, clear, characterless streets to a country road which wound east into the hills, in the direction of a town with the lovely name of Coeur d’Alene.

She was relaxed. Her ordinarily pale face was faintly burned from the sun while her hair, which I recalled as darkly waving, was now streaked with light and worn loosely bound at the nape of her neck. She wore no cosmetics and her dress was simple cotton beneath the sweater she wore against the autumn’s chill. She looked young, younger than either of us actually was.

At first we talked of Spokane. She identified mountains and indicated hidden villages with an emphasis on places which sharply recalled Cave. Not until we had turned off the main highway into a country road, dark with fir and spruce, did she ask me about Paul.

“He’s very busy getting the New Year’s debut ready. He’s also got a set of offices for the company in Los Angeles and he’s engaged me to write an introduction to Cave ... but I suppose you knew that when he wired you I was coming.”

“It was my idea.”

“My coming? or the introduction?”

“Both. I talked to him about it just before we came up here.”

“And I thought he picked it out of the air while listening to me majestically place Cave among the philosophers.”

Iris smiled. “Paul’s not obvious. He enjoys laying traps and, as long as they’re for one’s own good, he’s very useful.”

“Implying he could be destructive?”

“Immensely. So be on your guard even though I don’t think he’ll harm any of us.”

“How is Cave?”

“I’m worried, Gene. He hasn’t got over that accident. He talks about it continually.”

“But the man didn’t die.”

“It would be better if he did ... as it is there’s a chance of a lawsuit against Cave for damages.”

“But he has no money.”

“That doesn’t prevent them from suing. Worst of all, though, would be the publicity. The whole thing has depressed John terribly. It was all I could do to keep him from announcing to the press that he had almost done the old man a favor.”

“You mean by killing him?”

Iris nodded, quite seriously. “That’s actually what he believes and the reason why he drove on.”

“I’m glad he said nothing like that to the papers.”

“But it’s true; his point of view is exactly right.”

“Except that the old man might regard the situation in a different light and, in any case, he was badly hurt and did not receive Cave’s gift of death.”

“Now you’re making fun of John.” She frowned and drove fast on the empty road.

“I’m doing no such thing. I’m absolutely serious. There’s a moral problem involved which is extremely important and if a precedent is set too early, a bad one like this, there’s no predicting how things will turn out.”

“You mean the ... the gift as you call it should only be given voluntarily?”

“Exactly ... if then, and only in extreme cases. Think what might happen if those who listened to Cave decided to make all their friends and enemies content by killing them.”

“Well, I wish you’d talk to him.” She smiled sadly. “I’m afraid I don’t always see things clearly when I’m with him. You know how he is ... how he convinces.”

“I’ll talk to him tactfully. I’ve also got to get a statement of belief from him.”

“But you have it already. We all have it.”

“Then I’ll want some moral application of it. We have so much ground to cover yet.”

“There’s the farm, up there on the hill.” A white frame building stood shining among elms on a low hill at the foot of blue sharp mountains. She turned up a dirt road and, in silence, we arrived at the house.

An old woman, the cook, greeted us familiarly and told Iris that he could be found in the study.

In a small warm room, sitting beside a stone fireplace empty of fire, Cave sat, a scrapbook on his knees, his expression vague, unfocused. Our arrival recalled him from some dense reverie. He got to his feet quickly and shook hands; “I’m glad you came,” he said.

“I wanted to see you,” I said awkwardly: it was Cave’s particular gift to strike a note of penetrating sincerity at all times, even in his greetings which became, as a result, disconcertingly like benedictions. Iris excused herself and I sat beside him in front of the fireplace.

“Have you seen these?” he asked, pushing the scrapbook toward me.

I took it and nodded when I saw, neatly pasted and labeled, the various newspaper stories concerning the accident. It had got a surprisingly large amount of space as though, instinctively, the editors had anticipated a coming celebrity for “Hit-and-Run Prophet.”

“Look what they say about me.”

“I’ve read them all,” I said, handing the scrapbook back to him, a little surprised that, considering his unworldliness, he had bothered to keep such careful track of his appearance in the press. It showed a new, rather touching side to him: he was like an actor hoarding his notices, good and bad. “I don’t think it’s serious: after all you were let off by the court, and the man didn’t die.”

“It was an accident of course yet that old man nearly received the greatest gift a man can have, a quick death. I wanted to tell the court that. I could’ve convinced them, I’m sure, but Paul said no. It was the first time I’ve ever gone against my own instinct and I don’t like it.” Emphatically, he shut the book.

We watched the cook who came into the room and lit the fire. When the first crackling filled the room and the pine had caught, she left, observing that we were to eat in an hour.

“You want to wash up?” asked Cave mechanically, his eyes on the fire, his hands clasped in his lap like those dingy marble replicas of hands which decorate medieval tombs: that night there was an unhuman look to Cave: pale, withdrawn, inert ... his lips barely moving when he spoke, as though another’s voice spoke through senseless flesh.

“No thanks,” I said, a little chilled by his tone, by his remoteness. I got him off the subject of the accident as quickly as possible and we talked until dinner of the introduction I was to write. It was most enlightening. As I suspected, Cave had read only the Bible and that superficially, just enough to be able, at crucial moments, to affect the seventeenth-century prose of the translators and to confound thereby simple listeners with the familiar authority of his manner. His knowledge of philosophy did not even encompass the names of the principals. Plato and Aristotle rang faint, unrelated bells and with them the meager carillon ended.

“I don’t know why you want to drag in those people,” he said, after I had suggested Zoroaster as a possible point of beginning. “Most people have never heard of them either. And what I have to say is all my own. It doesn’t tie in with any of them or, if it does, it’s a coincidence because I never picked it up anywhere.”

“I think, though, that it would help matters if we did provide a sort of family tree for you, to show....”

“I don’t.” He gestured with his effigy-hands. “Let them argue about it later. For now, act like this is a new beginning, which it is. I have only one thing to give people and that is the way to die without fear, gladly ... to accept nothing for what it is, a long and dreamless sleep.”

I had to fight against that voice, those eyes which as always, when he chose, could dominate any listener. Despite my close association with him, despite the thousands of times I heard him speak, I was never, even in moments of lucid disenchantment, quite able to resist his power. He was a magician in the great line of Simon Magus and the Faust of legend. That much, even now, I will acknowledge ... his divinity, however, was and is the work of others, shaped and directed by the race’s recurrent need.

I surrendered in the name of philosophy with a certain relief, and he spoke in specific terms of what he believed and what I should write in his name.

It was not until after dinner that we got around, all three of us, to a problem which was soon to absorb us all, with near-disastrous results.

We had been talking amiably of neutral things and Cave had emerged somewhat from his earlier despondency. He got on to the subject of the farm where we were, of its attractiveness and remoteness, of its owner who lived in Spokane.

“I always liked old Smathers. You’d like him too. He’s got one of the biggest funeral parlors in the state. I used to work for him and then, when I started on all this, he backed me up to the hilt. Lent me money to get as far as San Francisco. After that of course it was easy. I paid him back every cent.”

“Does he get here often?”

Cave shook his head. “No, he lets me use the farm but he keeps away. He says he doesn’t approve of what I’m doing. You see he’s Catholic.”

“But he still likes John,” said Iris who had been stroking a particularly ugly yellow cat beside the fire. So it was John now, I thought. Iris was the only person ever to call him by his first name.

“Yes. He’s a good friend.”

“There’ll be a lot of trouble, you know,” I said.

“From Smathers?”

“No, from the Catholics, from the Christians.”

“You really think so?” Cave looked at me curiously. I believe that until that moment he had never realized the inevitable collision of his point of view with that of the established religions.

“Of course I do. They’ve constructed an entire ethical system upon a supernatural foundation whose main strength is the promise of a continuation of human personality after death. You are rejecting grace, heaven, hell, the Trinity ...”

“I’ve never said anything about the Trinity or about Christianity.”

“But you’ll have to say something about it sooner or later. If—or rather when—the people begin to accept you, the churches will fight back and the greater the impression you make the more fierce their attack.”

“I suspect John is the anti-Christ,” said Iris and I saw from her expression that she was perfectly serious. “He’s come to undo all the wickedness of the Christians.”

“Though not, I hope, of Christ,” I said. “There’s some virtue in his legend, even as corrupted at Nicea three centuries after the fact.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” said Cave. “I don’t know that I’ve ever given it much thought before. I’ve spoken always what I knew was true and there’s never been any opposition, at least that I’ve been aware of, to my face. It never occurred to me that people who like to think of themselves as Christians couldn’t accept both me and Christ at the same time. I know I don’t promise the kingdom of heaven but I do promise oblivion and the loss of self, of pain....”

“Gene is right,” said Iris. “They’ll fight you hard. You must get ready now while you still have time to think it out, before Paul puts you to work and you’ll never have a moment’s peace again.”

“As bad as that, you think?” Cave sighed wistfully. “But how to get ready? What shall I do? I never think things out, you know. Everything occurs to me on the spot. I can never tell what may occur to me next. It happens only when I speak to people. When I’m alone, I seldom think of the ... the main things; yet, when I’m in a group talking to them I hear ... no, not hear, I feel voices telling me what I should say. That’s why I never prepare a talk, why I don’t really like to have them taken down: they’re something which are meant only for the instant they are conceived ... a child, if you like, made for just a moment’s life by the people listening and myself speaking. I don’t mean to sound touched,” he added, with a sudden smile. “I’m not really hearing things but I do get something from those people, something besides the thing I tell them. I seem to become a part of them, as though what goes on in their minds also goes on in me, at the same time, two lobes to a single brain.”

“We know that, John,” said Iris softly. “We’ve felt it.”

“I suppose, then, that’s the key,” said Cave. “Though it isn’t much to write about; you can’t put it across without me to say it.”

“You may be wrong there,” I said. “Of course in the beginning you will say the word but I think in time, properly managed, everyone will accept it on the strength of evidence and statement, responding to the chain of forces you have set in motion.” Yet for all the glibness with which I spoke, I did not really believe that Cave would prove to be more than an interesting momentary phenomenon whose “truth” about death might, at best, contribute in a small way to the final abolition of those old warring superstitions which had mystified and troubled men for twenty dark centuries. A doubt which displayed my basic misunderstanding of our race’s will to death and, worse, to a death in life made radiant by false dreams, by desperate adjurations.

But that evening we spoke only of a bright future: “To begin again is the important thing,” I said. “Christianity, though strong as an organization in this country, is weak as a force because, finally, the essential doctrine is not accepted by most of the people: the idea of a man-like God dispensing merits and demerits at time’s exotic end.”

“We are small,” said Cave. “In space, on this tiny planet, we are nothing. Death brings us back to the whole. We lose this instant of awareness, of suffering, like spray in the ocean: there it forms ... there it goes, back to the sea.”

“I think people will listen to you because they realize now that order, if there is any, has never been revealed, that death is the end of personality even for those passionate, self-important 'I’s’ who insist upon a universal deity like themselves, carefully presented backwards in order not to give the game away.”

“How dark, how fine the grave must be! only sleep and an end of days, an end of fear: the end of fear in the grave as the 'I’ goes back to nothing....”

“How wonderful life will be when men no longer fear dying! When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity that we have met life. No longer will children’s minds be twisted by evil, demanding, moralizing gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That’s it: life is the villain to those maniacs who preach reward in death: grace and eternal bliss ... or dark revenge....”

“Neither revenge nor reward, only the not-knowing in the grave which is the same for all....”

“And without those inhuman laws, what societies we might build! Take the morality of Christ. Begin there, or even earlier with Plato or earlier yet with Zoroaster ... take the best ideas of the best men and should there be any disagreement as to what is best, use life as the definition, life as the measure: what contributes most to the living is the best.”

“But the living is soon done and the sooner done the better. I envy those who have already gone....”

“If they listen to you, Cave, it will be like the unlocking of a prison. At first they may go wild but then, on their own, they will find ways to life. Fear and punishment in death has seldom stopped the murderer’s hand. The only two things which hold him from his purpose are, at the worst, fear of reprisal from society and, at the best, a feeling for life, a love for all that lives ... and not the wide-smiling idiot’s love but a sense of the community of the living, of life’s marvelous regency ... even the most ignorant has felt this. Life is all while death is only the irrelevant shadow at the end, the counterpart to that instant before the seed lives.”

Yes, I believed all that, all that and more too, and I felt Cave was the same as I; by removing fear with that magic of his, he would fulfill certain hopes of my own and (I flatter myself perhaps) of the long line of others, nobler than I, who had been equally engaged in attempting to use life more fully. And so that evening it welled up suddenly: the hidden conviction behind a desultory life broke through that chill hard surface of disappointment and disgust which had formed a brittle carapace about my heart. I had, after all, my truth too, and Cave had got to it, broken the shell ... and for that I shall remain grateful ... until we are at last the same, both taken by dust.

Excitedly, we talked ... I talked mostly, I think. Cave was the theme and I the counterpoint or so I thought. He had stated it and I built on it, built outward from what I conceived to be the luminosity of his vision. Our dialogue was one of communion, I believed and he believed too. Only Iris guessed, even then, that it was not. She saw the difference; she was conscious of the division which that moment had, unknown to either of us, separated me from Cave. Each time I said “life,” he said “death.” In true amity but false concord war began.

Iris, more practical than we, deflated our visions by pulling the dialogue gently back to reality, to ways and dull means.

It was agreed that we had agreed on fundamentals, that the end of fear was desirable; that superstition should be exorcised from human affairs; that the ethical systems expressed by the major religious figures from Zoroaster to Mohammed all contained useful and applicable ideas of societal behavior which need not be entirely discarded.

At Iris’s suggestion, we left the problem of Christianity itself completely alone. Cave’s truth was sufficient cause for battle. There was no reason, she felt, for antagonizing the ultimate enemy at the very beginning.

“Let them attack you, John. You must be above quarreling; you must act as if they are too much in error even to notice.”

“I reckon I am above it,” said Cave and he sounded almost cheerful for the first time since my arrival. “I want no trouble, but if trouble comes I don’t intend to back down. I’ll just go on saying what I know.”

At midnight, Cave excused himself and went to bed.

Iris and I sat silently before the last red embers on the hearth. I sensed that something had gone wrong but I could not tell then what it was.

When she spoke, her manner was abrupt: “Do you really want to go on with this?”

“What an odd time to ask me that. Of course I do. Tonight’s the first time I really saw what it was Cave meant, what it was I’d always felt but never before known, consciously, that is. I couldn’t be more enthusiastic.”

“I hope you don’t change.”

“Why so glum? What are you trying to say? After all you got me into this.”

“I know I did and I think I was right. It’s only that this evening I felt ... well, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m getting a bit on edge.” She smiled and, through all the youth and health, I saw that she was anxious and ill-at-ease.

“That business about the accident?”

“Mainly, yes. The lawyers say that now that the old man’s all right he’ll try to collect damages. He’ll sue Cave.”

“Nasty publicity.”

“The worst. It’s upset John terribly ... he almost feels it’s an omen.”

“I thought we were dispensing with all that, with miracles and omens.” I smiled but she did not.

“Speak for yourself.” She got up and pushed at the coals with the fire shovel. “Paul says he’ll handle everything but I don’t see how. There’s no way he can stop a lawsuit.”

But I was tired of this one problem which was, all things considered, out of our hands in any case. I asked her about herself and Cave.

“Is it wise my being up here with John, alone? No, I’m afraid not but that’s the way it is.” Her voice was hard and her back which was turned to me grew stiff, her movements with the fire shovel angry and abrupt.

“People will use it against both of you. It may hurt him, and all of us.”

She turned suddenly, her face flushed. “I can’t help it, Gene. I swear I can’t. I’ve tried to keep away. I almost flew East with Clarissa but when he asked me to join him here, I did. I couldn’t leave him.”

“Will marriage be a part of the new order?”

“Don’t joke.” She sat down angrily in a noise of skirts crumpling. “Cave must never marry. Besides it’s ... it isn’t like that.”

“Really? I must confess I ...”

“Thought we were having an affair? Well, it’s not true.” The rigidity left her as suddenly as it had possessed her. She grew visibly passive, even helpless, in the worn upholstered chair, her eyes on me, the anger gone and only weakness left. “What can I do?” It was a cry from the heart ... all the more touching because, obviously, she had not intended to tell me this. She’d turned to me because there was no one else to whom she could talk.

“You ... love him?” That word which whenever I spoke it in those days always stuck in my throat like a diminutive sob.

“More, more,” she said distractedly. “But I can’t do anything or be anything. He’s complete. He doesn’t need anyone. He doesn’t want me except as ... a companion, and advisor like you or Paul ... it’s all the same to him.”

“I don’t see that it’s hopeless.”

“Hopeless!” The word snot from her like a desperate deed. She buried her face in her hands but she did not weep. I sat awkwardly, inadequately watching her. The noise of a clock alone separated us: its dry ticking kept the silence from falling in about our heads.

Finally, she dropped her hands and turned toward me with her usual grace, “You mustn’t take me too seriously,” she said. “Or I mustn’t take myself too seriously which is more to the point. Cave doesn’t really need me or anyone and we ... I, perhaps you, certainly others, need him. It’s best no one try to claim him all as a woman would do, as I might, given the chance.” She rose. “It’s late and you must be tired. Don’t ever mention to anyone what I’ve told you tonight ... especially to John. If he knew the way I felt....” She left it at that. I gave my promise and we went to our rooms.

I stayed two days at the farm, listening to Cave who continually referred to the accident: he was almost petulant, as though the whole business were an irrelevant, gratuitous trick played on him by a malicious old man.

His days were spent reading his mail (there was quite a bit of it even then), composing answers which Iris typed out for him, and walking in the wooded hills which surrounded the farm on two sides.

The weather was sharp and bright and the wind, when it blew, tasted of ice from the glaciers in the vivid mountains: winter was nearly with us and red leaves decorated the wind, so many ribbons for so much summer color. Only the firs remained unchanged, warm and dark in the bright chill days.

Cave and I would walk together while Iris remained indoors, working. He was a good walker, calm, unhurried, sure-footed, and he knew all the trails beneath the yellow and red leaves fallen.

Cave agreed with me on most of my ideas concerning the introduction; and I promised to send him my first draft as soon as I’d got it done. He was genuinely indifferent to the philosophic aspect of what he preached. He acted almost as if he did not want to hear of those others who had approached the great matter in a similar way. When I talked to him of the fourth-century Donatists who detested life and loved heaven so much that they would request strangers to kill them, magistrates to execute them for no crime, he stopped me: “I don’t want to hear all that. That’s finished. All that’s over. We want new things now.”

Iris, too, seemed uninterested in any formalizing of Cave’s thought though she saw its necessity and wished me well, suggesting that I not ever intimate derivation since, in fact, there had been none: what he was, he had become on his own, uninstructed.

During our walks, I got to know Cave as well as I was ever to know him. He was indifferent, I think, to everyone. He gave one his private time in precise ratio to one’s belief in him and importance to his work. With groups, with the masses, he was another creature: warm, intoxicating, human, yet transcendent ... a part of each human being who beheld him at such times, the longed-for complement to the common soul.

Yet though I found him, as a human being, without much warmth or intellectual interest I nevertheless identified him with the release I’d known in his presence and, for this new certainty of life’s value and of death’s irrelevance, I loved him.

On the third day I made up my mind to go back East and do the necessary writing in New York, away from Paul’s hectic influence and Cave’s advice. Cave asked me to stay with him for the rest of the week but I could see that Iris regarded me now as a potential danger, a keeper of secrets who might, despite promises, prove to be disloyal; and so, to set her mind at ease as well as to suit my own new plans, I told her after lunch on the third day, when we were for a moment alone in the study, that I had said nothing to Cave, that I was ready to go back that evening if she would drive me to Spokane.

“You’re a good friend,” she said. “I made a fool of myself the other night. I wish you’d forget it ... forget everything I said.”

“I’ll never mention it. Now, the problem is how I can leave here gracefully. Cave just asked me this morning to stay on and ...”

But I was given a perfect means of escape. Cave came running into the room, his eyes shining. “Paul! I’ve just talked to Paul in L.A. It’s all over! No heirs, nothing, no lawsuit. No damages to pay.”

“What’s happened?” Iris stopped him in his excitement.

“The old man’s dead!”

“Oh Lord!” Iris went gray. “That means a manslaughter charge!”

“No, no ... not because of the accident. He was in another accident. A truck hit him the day after he left the hospital. Yesterday. He was killed instantly ... lucky devil: and of course we’re in luck too.”

“Did they find who hit him?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. Iris looked at me fiercely. She had got it too.

“No. Paul said it was a hit-and-run. He said this time the police didn’t find who did it. Paul said his analyst calls it 'a will to disaster’ ... he wanted to be run over. Of course that’s hardly a disaster but the analyst thinks the old way.”

I left that afternoon for New York, leaving Cave jubilantly making plans for the New Year: everything was again possible. Neither Iris nor I mentioned what we both knew ... each of us, in our different way, accommodating the first of many crimes, as we drove across the smoky hills to Spokane.