Messiah

by Gore Vidal

I probably did not put him at his ease for I stammered a good deal and made no sense, but he was gracious, supporting me with his own poise and equanimity.

He talked mostly of places until Iris came back with tea. Then, as the sky became florid with evening and the teacups gradually grew cold, he talked of his work and I listened intently.

“I can talk to you straight,” he said. “This just happened to me. I didn’t start out to do this. No sir, I never would have believed ten years ago that I’d be traveling about, talking to people like one of those crackpot fanatics you’ve got so many in California.” I took a sip of the black, fast-cooling tea, hoping he was not sufficiently intuitive to guess that I had originally put him down, provisionally of course, as precisely that.

“I don’t know how much Iris may have told you or how much you might have heard but it’s pretty easy to pass the whole thing off as another joke: a guy coming out of the backwoods with a message.” He cracked his knuckles hard and I winced at the sound. “Well, I didn’t quite come out of the woods. I had a year back at State University and I had a pretty good job in my field with the best firm of funeral directors in Washington state. Then I started on this. I just knew one day and so I began to talk to people and they knew too and I quit my job and started talking to bigger and bigger crowds all along the coast. There wasn’t any of this revelation stuff. I just knew one day, that was all; and when I told other people what I knew they seemed to get it. And that’s the strange part. Everybody gets ideas about things which he thinks are wonderful but usually nothing happens to the people he tries to tell them to. With me, it’s been different from the beginning. People have all listened, and agreed: what I know they know. Isn’t that a funny thing? Though most of them probably would never have thought it out until they heard me and it was all clear.” His eyes dropped to his hands; he added softly: “So since it’s been like this, I’ve gone on. I’ve made this my life. This is it. I shall come to the people.”

There was silence. The sentence had been spoken which I was later to construct the first dialogue upon: “I shall come to the people,” the six words which were to change our lives were spoken softly over tea.

Iris looked at me challengingly over Cave’s bowed head.

I remember little else about that evening. We dined, I think, in the house and Cave was most agreeable, most undemanding. There was no more talk of the mission. He asked me many questions about New York, about Harvard where I had gone to school, about Roman history. He appeared to be interested in paganism and my own somewhat ambiguous approach to Julian. I was to learn later that though he seldom read he had a startling memory for any fact which seemed relevant. I am neither immodest nor inaccurate when I say that he listened to me attentively for some years and many of his later views were a result of our conversations.

I should mention, though, one significant omission in his conversation during those first crucial years: he never discussed ethical questions; that was to come much later. At the beginning he had but one vision and it was, in its terrible truth, quite inhuman and anarchic: man dies, consciousness dies with him: it is good to die, good not to be. On this the Cavite system was constructed and what came after in the moral and ethical spheres was largely the work of others in his name. Much of this I anticipated in that first conversation with him, so unlike, actually, the dialogue which I composed ending, I still think complacently despite the irony with which time has tarnished all those bright toys for me, with the essential line: “Death is neither hard nor bad; only the dying hurts.” With that firmly postulated the rest was inevitable.

Cave talked that evening about California and Oregon and Washington (geography, places were always to fascinate and engage him while people, especially after the early years, ceased to be remarkable to him; he tended to get confused those myriad faces which passed before him like successive ripples in a huge sea). He talked of the cities he had visited on the seaboard, new cities to him, all of them. He compared their climates and various attractions like a truly devoted tourist, eager to get the best of each place, to encounter the genius loci and possess it.

“But I don’t like staying in any place long.” He looked at me then and again I felt that sense of a power being focused on me ... it was not unlike what one experiences during an X-ray treatment when the humming noise indicates that potent rays are penetrating one’s tissue and, though there is actually no sensation, something is experienced, power is felt. And so it invariably was that, right until the end, Cave, whenever he chose, could turn those wide bleak eyes upon me and I would experience his force anew.