American Savior (16 page)

TWENTY

I shook Jesus’s hand, which seemed to be his preferred method of greeting. At least with men. Zelda went up and hugged him warmly, and he hugged her warmly in return, pressing his hand against the back of her hair and squeezing her tightly against him. My father was watching. “Pa,” I said, “this is Jesus.” There was more handshaking, though I could see, from the way he’d lowered his head and was looking out from beneath his eyebrows, that my father was uncomfortable. Slightly suspicious. Ill at ease.

“I saw you on TV today,” my father told Jesus. And then he added—and this was classic Arnie Thomas, one of the things that made me admire him so much, despite his quirks—“I have to be honest, okay? I liked what I heard. I agree with you about what America needs. I came up here to say I’ll help you any way I can. Don’t have much money to contribute, but I work hard, have a few minor skills….” He paused and scratched the birthmark on the side of his chin, a sure sign that he was nervous. “But, I have to say this: I’m a Jew. I was born a Jew and raised a Jew, and, well, you’re Jesus,
the
Jesus, I guess, or at least that’s who you say you are. And, well, I can’t just all of a sudden start believing you’re the Messiah or somebody. I want to be straight about it. If that doesn’t work for you, I understand, and I’ll go my own way and not have any hard feelings, and I hope you won’t either.”

My dad finished with a wave of one hand, a wave that encompassed a sort of helpless but confident irony, as if history was what it was, and
would continue to be that way, and all you were left with in the face of that was the ability to laugh and endure. He kept looking Jesus in the eye. Jesus seemed to be studying him the way you would study a museum piece. We heard sirens outside in the street. And then Jesus said, “Agreed.”

“Good,” my father said. He could go back to his friends at the Deli Hillel in North Salem and say that he’d stood his ground. Sure, they’d seen his son Russ up on the stage with the character who claimed to be Jesus, and yes he’d done a little work for the campaign. But he had done it because his family was involved, and he was working for the
campaign,
not the religious figure. There was a crucial difference.

“You are quite a character,” Jesus said. He was still appraising my dad, but now there was a tiny grin at the edges of his mouth. “Like your son.”

My father looked at me and we had a nice moment. “Two crazy bastards,” he said.

Jesus nodded.

“But when we have a friend, we live and die for the guy.”

Jesus nodded again. “Let us hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said, and he said it in a way that made Zelda shiver, and when I looked at her she was frowning and holding each shoulder with the opposite hand.

“Now, Arnie,” Jesus went on, “I am also a Jew, as you may remember. Let’s you and me take a walk and leave the soon-to-be-married couple to finish their licensing process, or whatever it was. Do you follow?”

My dad experienced a moment of confusion, then nodded.

“Two things first, though,” Jesus said. “One.” He turned to me and Zelda. “Tell Wales I want you to rent a commercial jet for the duration of the campaign. Something that seats twenty and comes with a pilot. Get the best deal you can, the money will be in the account.”

“We’ll do it, Lord,” Zelda said. I think she was as traumatized as I was about the licensing remark, and I worried that we’d never make love again, or never make love again without feeling like there was a set of divine eyes upon us the whole time.

“If you call me Lord again, I’m firing you,” Jesus told her. “You’re causing your future father-in-law discomfort, for one thing, and I personally
don’t like it, for another. It’s an outdated term, and it has caused nothing but trouble throughout history.”

“Sorry,” Zelda said.

“And forget the apologies and the guilt. Do what you tell your clients to do: let it go. You know you’re a good person, and so do I and so does Russ and so does Arnie. It shines off you like sunlight off gold.”

“Okay … Jesus.”

“Better. My friends call me the Boss, if you must know. And I have about thirty other nicknames. Big Guy. The Comeback Kid. Etcetera. But ‘Jesus’ is fine for the purposes of the campaign. Hay-Zeus in the Hispanic precincts. And for the record, I never came to be worshipped, not the first time and not this time. I came to be
emulated.
That’s what people didn’t get.
Followed,
as in being an example, as in making your interior world resemble mine. Clear?”

“Not exactly, not yet,” Zelda said, with her typical honesty.

“But that is your work,” he went on, more animated now, with that rustle of impatience in his voice, as if he expected ordinary human beings like us to see the universe the way he saw it. “What do you do all day? You help people straighten out their interior worlds, yes?”

“Yes. I mean, I used to. I—”

“Well then, take that to the next level. You, yourself. Go past the father and mother abandonment stuff and the struggling-to-overcome-your-tough-childhood-professional-woman stuff and to the next level. You people don’t realize what is in there. Your own scientists say you use less than ten percent of your brain. Well, what do you think the other ninety percent is capable of? Think, will you? All three of you.” He was on a roll now. I could see he’d have no trouble sounding passionate on the stump. “I don’t personally care, Arnie, if you think I am God or the Messiah or if you don’t. What possible difference could that make to me? Think about it. Is it going to hurt me? Make me feel insecure? No. What I care about is that you figure out what I am trying to tell you.”

“So you
are
a great teacher then,” my dad said hopefully. “A rabbi. I mean, that’s what you were the first time.”

“Sure, if that makes you feel good. Use whatever word you want. Just
don’t say that’s
all
I was. And forget about me and start focusing on yourself, your potential, your
inner
potential. Okay? If I lose this election, do you really think I am going to be in pain, disappointed in myself, unhappy? I am not doing it for me this time, and I was not doing it for me the last time. Clear?”

“Clear,” we all three said at once, to be polite.

“Now, as far as you two lovebirds go, don’t worry. From this day forth I turn off that part of my celestial vision and give you privacy. Enjoy your intimacy, that’s what it was invented for. Those who are judgmental about sex tend to be judgmental about everything. Hard-hearted. Stingy. Overprotected. I would not choose anyone like that to work with me. Hear me?”

“We hear,” Zelda and I both said, with some enthusiasm.

“Lovemaking is one of the Wonderful Mysteries.”

“Okay.”

“Plus one more thing,” Jesus said, and he went over to my father, put both hands on his gray head, then touched the birthmark on the side of my father’s jaw. The birthmark disappeared. We could see that happen, my dad couldn’t. Zel gasped, my dad looked at her—and then Jesus put his arm around my father’s shoulders, and the two of them walked out the door without saying good-bye.

The package was left lying on the table, unopened. For a few minutes Zelda and I walked around uncomfortably, not saying anything, not making physical contact, avoiding each other’s eyes. She got a towel from the bathroom and finished drying her hair. I had half a mind to turn on the ball game, or flip through the channels to find out what else they were saying about Jesus and the campaign, but instead I went over and checked the address on the cardboard box:
RUSSELL THOMAS AND ZELDA HIRSCH
. It was very light. I used a kitchen knife to cut the tape, and then lifted open the flaps, and by the time I was taking the bubble wrap out, Zelda had walked over to me and was standing at my shoulder. Inside was an envelope, nothing more. And inside the envelope was a note. “Back to what you were doing!” the note said, and there was what appeared to be a smiley face at the bottom, and a bank check for ten thousand dollars.
Inside the card, otherwise blank, was written this mysterious line, “Her name shall be Delahi. This is for the college fund.”

Standing side by side, we shook our heads and puzzled over it for a minute or so. And then there was nothing else to do, really. The day had been tremendously weird, Zel and I were shaken in about three different ways, and we had seven million details to attend to. So, naturally, we took the classic medicine, and sought comfort in each other’s body, and had fun doing it.

As a footnote, I should mention that it would not be until some years later that a child would be born unto us. We would name her Delahi. Which, we have come to learn, means “the licensed one,” in ancient Cyramaisaic, one of the dialects spoken in Bethlehem about the time of Jesus’s birth.

TWENTY-ONE

We rented the plane, as Jesus had told us to, a BizzAire 527, with a small kitchen, two bathrooms, a bar, and comfortable seating for twenty. Jesus informed Wales that our first stop would be Topeka, Kansas. We would fly there in our new jet, then rent two cars and spend a week driving the back roads of Kansas and Nebraska and talking to people. This struck both Wales and me as a terrible idea.

“Kansas is one of the cornerstones of Marjorie Maplewith’s base,” Wales complained, when I went over to discuss security arrangements with him before we left. Ezzie was at the tennis club pursuing fundraising possibilities, so the house was empty. He was sitting at the granite-topped counter in his kitchen and fondling a fishing lure in such a way that I thought he’d put the hook through a fingertip. “There isn’t a chance in ten million that anybody but Maplewith carries the state.”

“Plus it’s dangerous,” I said. “Those fanatical so-called Christians can be nasty, and the plains are crawling with them.”

“Tell me about it,” Wales said.

It seemed to me, from the way he turned his eyes away and gazed out the kitchen windows, that Walesy was still scarred by the repercussions of a story ZIZ had done a year or so earlier about an evangelical church—House of the Holy Loud Voice—in West Zenith. The preacher there, the Reverend Jonathan “Buck” Scythe, had raised the impressive sum of $3.4 million, supposedly for a new building, or, as he put it, “a
grand tribute to the joyful face of Christ.” Then he absconded with the money, accompanied by a dark-haired college sophomore with nice legs. He was apprehended, after a fun month on the island of Eleuthera, and brought back to Massachusetts to face charges, and Wales had put together what I thought was an inventive story on him, interspersing shots of the arrest and arraignment with glowingly positive reports from members of his lunatic cult.

Somehow, this one news story, which lasted all of two minutes on a sleepy weeknight, came to the attention of an online group—headquartered in Kansas, as it happened—called Defenders of the Earliest American Faith, which made it their business to rush to the defense of any “Christian” preachers who ran into unfavorable publicity. DEAF had a membership of a couple hundred thousand, and the ability to stimulate them to fits of e-mail fury at the tapping of a few keys. So for the next week or so the spineless types who own the station had to field all this phone and e-mail traffic. It was unpleasant. All they knew to do with the unpleasantness was to make Wales miserable—memos, staff meetings, empty threats about job cuts.

We recovered, of course. In the end, Preacher Buck went off to jail for three years and six months, the college sophomore got a generous book contract, and the station returned to business as usual, more or less, though the bosses forced us to stay clear of religious stories for a while.

Wales had never forgotten it. As he was looking out the kitchen window I made the small mistake of saying, “What if Topeka is filled with Preacher Buck types? What if DEAF sends hecklers to the rallies?”

He shrugged, maintaining the lack of eye contact for which he was famous. “Let’s cross that river when we get to it. I’m more worried about getting some sense of where our candidate stands on the issues. We’ve been getting requests for position papers. Zelda’s been hit hard with questions. I’ve been trying to get him to speak to that, but he keeps putting me off.”

“Careful you don’t put that hook through your finger,” I said by way of a response, but I was as worried as he was.

A
DAY LATER
, still without knowing where Jesus stood on the major questions of the day, we all climbed onto the plane—Jesus, Wales, Ezzie, me, Zelda, my mom and dad and Stab, Dukey McIntyre with Ada Montpelier and Dukey Junior, and the Simmeltons, just back from Costa Rica.

The flight was smooth—Pa mixed the martinis and Stab dictated a tape-recorded letter to his girlfriend—but once we landed, things went sour pretty much right away. No sooner had our motley crew disembarked at the Topeka airport, Forbes Field, and moved into two white limos (non-Hummers, this time) than we were confronted by the righteous “Christian” anger that was spreading like a virus through parts of the country in those days. On that particular morning, this anger took the shape of a coterie of locals, standing at the gates, blocking our path. There were sixty or seventy of them, ranging in age from kids in strollers to grandparents with canes. There was a predictable assortment of signs saying things like
BLASFIMY
! and
SATAN COMES IN A THIN DISGIZE
! and the holders of these signs were chanting “FAKE! FAKE! FAKE! FAKE! YOU MOCK THE ONE TRUE LORD!” and pushing toward the car in what could be interpreted only as a threatening way.

Zelda and I and Wales and Ezzie were in the seat together, facing Jesus, who liked to sit beside Stab, who liked to ride facing backward. My parents were in the second car with Dukey and Ada and their son and the Simmelton family. Stab was making “pup, pup, pup, pup” sounds with his lips, which is what he does when he’s afraid, and, seeing that, I started to get angry.

“Calm yourself, Russell,” Jesus told me, calmly.

“I’ll calm myself. As head of security I’ll get out and start calmly throwing punches.”

“Pup … pup … pup … Don’t, Russ,” Stab said.