Gore Vidal - Messiah

To our delight, the interior was cooled by machinery. I sank into a wicker chair even while Cave was pumping my hand. Iris laughed, "Leave him alone, John. He's smothered by the heat."

"No hat," said Cave solemnly after the first greeting which, in my relief, I'd not heard. "You'll get sunstroke."

Paul was now in charge. The heat which had enervated both Stokharin and me filled him with manic energy, like one of those reptiles which absorb vitality from the sun.

"What a great little place, John! Had no idea there were all the comforts of home down here, none at all. Don't suppose you go out much?"

Cave, unlike Iris, was not tanned though he had, for him, a good color, a ruddiness of tone unlike his usual sallowness.

"I don't get too much sun," he admitted. "We go fishing sometimes, early in the morning. Most of the time I just hang around the house and look at the letters, and read some." I noticed on the table beside me an enormous pile of travel magazines, tourist folders and atlases: this had obviously been Cave's reading. I anticipated trouble.

Paul prowled restlessly about the modern living room with its shuttered sealed windows. Stokharin and I, like fish back in their own element after a brief excursion on land, gasped softly in our chairs while Iris told us of the keys, of their fishing trips. She was at her best here as she had been that other time in Spokane… being out of doors, in Cave's exclusive company, brought her to life in a way the exciting busyness of New York did not. In New York she seemed like an object through which an electric current passed; here on this island, in the sun's glare, she had unfolded, petal after petal until the secret interior seemed almost exposed. I was conscious of her as a lovely woman and, without warning, I experienced desire: that sharp rare longing which, in me, can reach no climax. Always before she had been a friend, a companion whose company I had jealously valued: her attention alone had been enough to satisfy me, but on this day I saw her as a man entire might and I plummeted into despair while talking of Plato.

"The Symposium was the model, yes. There are other ways of casting dialogues such as introducing the celebrated dead brought together for a chat in Limbo. I thought, though, that I should keep the talk to only two. Cave and myself… Socrates and Alcibiades." Alcibiades was precisely the wrong parallel but I left it uncorrected, noticing how delicately the hollow at the base of her throat quivered with life's blood and although I attempted, as I often had before with bitter success, to think of her as so much mortal flesh, the body and its beauty only pulp and bone, only beautiful to a human eye… hideous, no doubt, to the eye of a geometric progression… that afternoon I was lost and I could not become, even for a moment, an abstract intelligence again: I saw the bone; I saw the dust, yet I saw her existing, despite her nature and her fate, triumphant in the present. I cursed the flaw in my own flesh and hated life.

"We liked it very much," she said, not divining my mood, unaware of my sudden passion and its attendant despair.

"You don't think it's too strong, do you? All morality, not to mention the churches, will be aligned against us."

"John was worried at first… not that opposition frightens him and it is his idea; I mean you wrote the dialogue but it reflects exactly what he's always thought." Though in love's agony, I looked at her sharply to make certain she was perfectly serious: she was; this helped soothe the pain. She had been hypnotized by Cave. I wondered how Clarissa could ever have thought it was the other way around.

"In a way we're already on record," Iris looked thoughtfully across the room at Cave who was showing Paul and Stokharin a large map of some strange country. "The Centers have helped a good many couples to adjust to one another without marriage and without guilt."

"But then there's the problem of what to do with the children when the family breaks up."

Iris sighed. "I'm afraid that's already a problem. Our Centers are taking care of a good many children already. A number, of course, go out for adoption to bored couples who need something to amuse them. I suppose we'll have to establish nurseries as a part of each Center until, finally, the government assumes the responsibility."

" If it becomes Cavite."

"When it becomes Cavite." She was powerful in her casualness.

"Meanwhile there are laws of adoption which vary from state to state and, if we're not careful, we're apt to come up against the law."

"Paul looks after us," she smiled. "Did you know that he has nearly a hundred lawyers on our pay roll? All protecting us."

"From what?" I had not kept track of this.

"Lawsuits… mostly attempts by state legislatures to outlaw the Centers on the grounds of immorality and so on. The lawyers are kept busy all the time."

"Why haven't I read about any of this in the papers?"

"We've been able to keep things fairly quiet. Paul is marvelous with the editors… several have even joined us, by the way… secretly, of course."

"What's the membership now?"

Iris gestured. "No one knows. We have thirty Centers in the United States and each day they receive hundreds of new Cavites. I suspect there are at least four million by now."

I gasped, beginning to recover at last from the heat, from my unexpected crisis of love. "I had no idea things were going so fast."

"Too fast. We haven't enough trained people to look after the Centers and on top of that we've got to set up new Centers. Paul has broken the country up into districts, all very methodical: so many Centers per district each with a Resident in charge. Stokharin is taking care of the clinical work."

"Where's the money coming from?"

"In bushels from heaven," Iris smiled. "We leave all that up to Paul. I shouldn't be surprised if he counterfeits it. One thing I know, though, I must get back to New York soon, to the school. I shouldn't really have gone off in the middle of everything but I was tired and John wanted company so I came."

"How is he?"

"As you see: calm. I don't believe he ever thinks of any of our problems. He never talks about them; never reads the reports Paul sends him. He seldom reads the attacks from the churches and we get several a day, not to mention threatening mail. It's got so bad that we now have full-time bodyguards."

"You think people are seriously threatening him?"

"I don't know how serious they are but we can't take chances. Fortunately, almost no one knows we're here and, so far, no cranks have got through from the mainland. We get our groceries and mail brought in by boat every other day from Key Largo. Otherwise, we're marooned here."

I looked about me for some sign of the guards but they were elsewhere: a Cuban woman glumly vacuuming in the next room was the only visible stranger.

Cave abandoned his maps and atlases long enough to tell me how much the dialogues pleased him.

"I wish I could put it down like you do. I can only say it when people listen."

"You feel I've been accurate?"

He nodded solemnly. "Oh, yes… it's just as I've always said it, only written down." I realized that he'd already assumed full responsibility (and credit, should there be any) for my composition; I accepted his presumption with amusement. Only Stokharin seemed aware of the humor of the situation. I caught him staring at me with a shrewd expression; he looked quickly away and his mouth was rigid as he tried not to smile. I liked him at that moment: we were the only two, evidently, who had not been possessed by Cave. I felt like a conspirator.

For several days we talked, or rather Paul talked. He had brought with him charts and statements and statistics and, though Cave did not bother to disguise his boredom, he listened most of the time and his questions, when they did occur, were apposite. The rest of us were fascinated by the extent of what Paul referred to as the "first operational phase."