Gore Vidal - Messiah

I went to see him that evening with Paul. When we arrived at the jail, we were not allowed near him though Paul's lawyers had been permitted to go inside a few minutes before our arrival.

Iris was sitting in the outer office, pale and shaken. A bored policeman in uniform sat fatly at a desk at the other end of the office, ignoring us.

"They're the best lawyers in L.A.," said Paul quickly.

"They'll get him out in no time."

Iris looked at him bleakly.

"What happened?" I asked, sitting down beside her on the bench. "How did it happen?"

"I wasn't with him." She shook her head several times as though to dispel a profound daydream. "He called me and I called you. They are the best, Paul?"

"I can vouch that…"

"Did he kill anybody?"

"We… we don't know yet. He hit an old man and went on driving. I don't know why; I mean why he didn't stop. He just went on and the police car caught him. The man's in the hospital now. They say it's bad; he's unconscious, an old man…"

"Any reporters here?" asked Paul. "Anybody else know besides us?"

"Nobody. You're the only person I called."

"This could wreck everything." Paul was frightened. But Cave was rescued, at considerable expense to the company. The old man chose not to die immediately while the police and the courts of Los Angeles, at that time well known for their accessibility to free-spending reason, proved more than obliging. After a day and a night in prison, Cave was released on bail and when the case came to court, it was handled discreetly by the magistrate.

The newspapers, however, had discovered John Cave at last and there were photographs of "Present-Day Messiah in Court." As ill luck would have it, the undertakers of Laguna had come to the aid of their prophet with banners which proclaimed his message. This picketing of the court was photographed and exhibited in the tabloids. Paul was in a frenzy. Publicist though he was, in his first rage he expressed to me the novel sentiment that not all publicity was good.

"But we'll get back at those bastards," he said grimly, not identifying which ones he meant but waving toward the city hidden by the Venetian blinds of his office window.

I asked for instructions. Cave had, the day before, gone back to Washington to lie low until the time was right for a triumphant reappearance. Iris had gone with him; on a separate plane, however, to avoid scandal. Clarissa had sent various heartening if confused messages from New York while Paul and I were left alone to gather up the pieces and begin again. Our close association during those difficult days impressed me with his talents and though, fundamentally, I still found him appalling, I couldn't help but admire his superb operativeness.

"I'm going ahead with the original plan… just like none of this happened. The stockholders are willing and we've got enough money, though not as much as I'd like, for the publicity build-up. I expect Cave'll pick up some more cash in Seattle. He always does, wherever he goes."

"Millionaires just flock to him?"

"Strange to tell, yes. But then nearly everybody does."

"It's funny since the truth he offers is all there is to it. Once experienced, there's no longer much need for Cave or for an organization." This of course was the paradox which time and the unscrupulous were bloodily to resolve.

Paul's answer was reasonable. "That's true but there's the problem of sharing it. If millions felt the same way about death the whole world would be happier and, if it's happier, why, it'll be a better place to live in."

"Do you really believe this?"

"Still think of me as a hundred percent phony?" Paul chuckled good-naturedly. "Well, it so happens, I do believe that. It also so happens that if this thing clicks we'll have a world organization and if we have that there'll be a big place for number one in it. It's all mixed up, Gene. I'd like to hear your motives, straight from the shoulder."

I was not prepared to answer him, or myself. In fact, to this day, my own motives are a puzzle to which there is no single key, no easy definition. One is not, after all, like those classic or neo-classic figures who wore with such splendid monomaniacal consistency the scarlet of lust or the purple of dominion, or the bright yellow of madness, existing not at all beneath their identifying robes. Power appealed to me in my youth but only as a minor pleasure and not as an end in itself or even as a means to any private or public end. I enjoyed the idea of guiding and dominating others, preferably in the mass; yet, at the same time, I did not like the boredom of power achieved, or the silly publicness of a great life. But there was something which, often against my will and judgment, precipitated me into deeds and attitudes where the logic of the moment controlled me to such an extent that I could not lessen, if I chose, the momentum of my own wild passage, or chart its course.

I would not have confided this to Paul even had I in those days thought any of it out, which I had not. Though I was conscious of some fundamental ambivalence in myself, I always felt that should I pause for a few moments and question myself, I could easily find answers to these problems.

But I did not pause. I never asked myself a single question concerning motive. I acted like a man sleeping who was only barely made conscious by certain odd incongruities that he dreams. The secret which later I was to discover was still unrevealed to me as I faced the efficient vulgarity of Paul Himmell across the portable bar which reflected so brightly in its crystal his competence.

"My motives are perfectly simple," I said, half-believing what I said. In those days the more sweeping the statement the more apt I was to give it my fickle allegiance: motives are simple, splendid! simple they are. "I want something to do. I'm fascinated by Cave and I believe what he says… not that it is so supremely earthshaking. It's been advanced as a theory off and on for two thousand years. Kant wrote that he anticipated with delight the luxurious sleep of the grave and the Gnostics came close to saying the same thing when they promised a glad liberation from life. The Eastern religions, about which I know very little, maintain…"

"That's it!" Paul interrupted me eagerly. "That's what we want. You just keep on like that. We'll call it 'An Introduction to John Cave.' Make a small book out of it. Get it published in New York; then the company will buy up copies and we'll pass it out free."

"I'm not so sure that I know enough formal philosophy to…"

"To hell with that stuff. You just root around and show how the old writers were really Cavites at heart and then you come to him and put down what he says. Why we'll be half-there even before he's on TV!" Paul lapsed for a moment into a reverie of promotion. I had another drink and felt quite good myself although I had serious doubts about my competence to compose philosophy in the popular key. But Paul's faith was infectious and I felt that, all in all, with a bit of judicious hedging and recourse to various explicit summaries and definitions, I might put together a respectable ancestry for Cave whose message, essentially, ignored all philosophy, empiric and Orphic, moving with hypnotic effectiveness to the main proposition: death and man's acceptance of it. The problems of life were always quite secondary to Cave, if not to the rest of us.

"When will you want this piece done?"

"The sooner the better. Here," he scribbled an address on a pad of paper. "This is Cave's address. He's on a farm outside Spokane. It belongs to one of his undertaker friends."

"Iris is with him?"

"Yes. Now you…"

"I wonder if that's wise, Iris seeing so much of him. You know he's going to have a good many enemies before very long and they'll dig around for any scandal they can find."