Gore Vidal - Messiah

"What date?" This was unexpected.

"The year? I don't recall. About thirty years old, I should say."

There was a silence. "Of course yours is a special case, being marooned like this. There's a ruling about it which I think will protect you fully since you've had no contact with the outside; anyway, as a Communicator, I must ask you for your old copy."

"Why certainly but…"

"I'll give you a new one, of course. You see it is against the law to have any Testament which predates the second Cavite Council."

I was beginning to understand: after the schism a second Council had been inevitable even though no reference to it has ever appeared in the Egyptian press. "The censorship here is thorough," I said. "I had no idea there had been a new Council."

"What a bunch of savages!" Butler groaned with disgust. "That's going to be one of our main jobs, you know, education, freeing the press. There has been almost no communication between the two spheres of influence…"

"Spheres of influence." How easily the phrase came to his lips! All the jargon of the journalists of fifty years ago has, I gather, gone into the language, providing the inarticulate with a number of made-up phrases calculated to blur even their none too clear meanings. I assume of course that Butler is as inarticulate as he seems, that he is typical of the first post-Cavite generation.

"You must give me a clear picture of what has been happening in America since my retirement." But I rose to prevent him from giving me, at that moment at least, any further observations on "spheres of influence."

I stood for a moment, resting on my cane: I had stood up too quickly and as usual suffered a spell of dizziness; I was also ravenously hungry. Butler stamped out a cigarette on the tile.

"Be glad to tell you anything you want to know. That's my business." He laughed shortly. "Well, time for chow. I've got some anti-bacteria tablets they gave us before we came out, supposed to keep the food from poisoning us."

"I'm sure you won't need them here."

He kept pace with my slow shuffle. "Well, it increases eating pleasure, too." Inadvertently, I shuddered as I recognized yet another glib phrase from the past; it had seemed such a good idea to exploit the vulgar language of the advertisers. I suffered a brief spasm of guilt.

We dined together in the airy salon which was nearly empty at this season except for a handful of government officials and businessmen who eyed us without much interest even though Americans are not a common sight in Egypt. They were of course used to me although, as a rule, I keep out of sight, taking my meals in my own room and frequenting those walks along the river bank which avoid altogether the town of Luxor.

I found, after I had dined, that physically I was somewhat restored, better able to cope with Butler. In fact, inadvertently, I actually found myself, in the madness of my great age, enjoying his company, a sure proof of loneliness if not of senility. He too, after taking pills calculated to fill him "chock full of vim and vigor" (that is indeed the phrase he used), relaxed considerably and spoke of his life in the United States. He had no talent for evoking what he would doubtlessly call "the large picture" but in a casual, disordered way he was able to give me a number of details about his own life and work which did suggest the proportions of the world from which he had so recently come and which I had, in my folly, helped create. On religious matters he was unimaginative and doctrinaire, concerned with the letter of the commands and revelations rather than with the spirit such as it was, or is. I could not resist the dangerous maneuver of asking him, at the correct moment of course (we were speaking of the time of the schisms), what had become of Eugene Luther.

"Who?"

The coffee cup trembled in my hand. I set it carefully on the table. I wondered if his hearing was sound. I repeated my own name, long lost to me, but mine still in the secret dimness of memory.

"I don't place the name. Was he a friend of the Liberator?"

"Why, yes. I even used to know him slightly but that was many years ago before your time. I'm curious to know what might have become of him. I suppose he's dead."

"I'm sorry but I don't place the name." He looked at me with some interest. "I guess you must be almost old enough to have seen him ."

I nodded, lowering my lids with a studied reverence, as though dazzled at the recollection of great light. "I saw him several times."

"Boy, I envy you! There aren't many left who have seen him with their own eyes. What was he like?"

"Just like his photographs," I said, shifting the line of inquiry: there is always the danger that a trap is being prepared for me. I was noncommittal, preferring to hear Butler talk of himself. Fortunately, he preferred this too and for nearly an hour I learned as much as I shall ever need to know about the life of at least one Communicator of Cavesword. While he talked, I watched him furtively for some sign of intention but there was none that I could detect; yet I was suspicious. He had not known my name and I could not understand what obscure motive might cause him to pretend ignorance unless of course he does know who I am and wishes to confuse me, preparatory to some trap.

I excused myself soon afterwards and went to my room, after first accepting a copy of the newest Testament handsomely bound in Plasticon (it looks like leather) and promising to give him my old proscribed copy the next day.

The first thing that I did, after locking the door to my room, was to take the book over to my desk and open it to the index. My eye traveled down that column of familiar names until it came to the L's.

At first I thought that my eyes were playing a trick upon me. I held the page close to the light, wondering if I might not have begun to suffer delusions, the not unfamiliar concomitant of solitude and old age. But my eyes were adequate and the hallucination, if real, was vastly convincing: my name was no longer there. Eugene Luther no longer existed in that Testament which was largely his own composition.

I let the book shut of itself, as new books will. I sat down at the desk, understanding at last the extraordinary ignorance of Butler: I had been obliterated from history; my place in time erased. It was as if I had never lived.

I have had in the last few days some difficulty in avoiding the company of Mr Butler. Fortunately, he is now very much involved with the local functionaries and I am again able to return to my narrative. I don't think Butler has been sent here to assassinate me but, on the other hand, from certain things he has said and not said, I am by no means secure in his ignorance; however, one must go on. At best, it will be a race between him and those hardened arteries which span the lobes of my brain. My only curiosity concerns the arrival next week of his colleague who is, I gather, of the second generation and of a somewhat bookish turn according to Butler who would not, I fear, be much of a judge. Certain things, though, which I have learned during the last few days about Iris Mortimer make me more than ever wish to recall our common years as precisely as possible for what I feared might happen has indeed, if Butler is to be believed, come to pass, and it is now with a full burden of hindsight that I revisit the scenes of a half century ago.

I had got almost nowhere with my life of Julian. I had become discouraged with his personality though his actual writings continued to delight me. As it so often happens in history I had found it difficult really to get at him: the human attractive part of Julian was undone for me by those bleak errors in deed and in judgment which depressed me even though they derived most logically from the man and his time: that fatal wedding which finally walls off figures of earlier ages from the present, keeping them strange despite the most intense and imaginative recreation. They are not we. We are not they. And I refused to resort to the low trick of fashioning Julian in my own image of him. I respected his integrity in time and deplored the division of centuries. My work at last came to a halt and, somewhat relieved, I closed my house in the autumn of the year and traveled west to California.