American Savior (23 page)

“You feel you are not worthy.”

“Lord, I am not worthy,” I said, an old line from the days when I used to go to church. And for once, the “L” word didn’t seem to upset him. “I mean, I appreciate it. I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful. It’s just that, well, Zelda, my mom, even my dad in his own way, Stab, Ezzie, Ada, the Simmeltons—I’m the smartass of the bunch, the doubter, the cynic. And they’re all, well …
good.
”

“Let me worry about whom I give the secrets of the universe to.”

“Right. Sorry. Absolutely.”

“I will keep it simple: There is an energy that runs through all the vastness of creation. On earth, for human beings, this energy takes the form of a stream of consciousness. What you call thought.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“Thought is composed of words.”

“Right. ‘In the beginning was the Word.’”

“Exactly. For some people the force of that stream is overwhelming. These are immature souls, new to the human realm. They are the ones who cause most of the trouble. To make the stream of consciousness, the force of thought, bearable, they feel, mistakenly, that they must narrow it down. They want to take an enormous river and build one small side channel into which they hope to divert it. But, of course, the force of the great river only increases the more you squeeze it into a narrow enclosure. For immature souls, this usually results in terrible violence. Hitler is a superlative example. He came up with his racist and nationalist theories because the complexity of creation was too much for him. That there were good Jews, that there were bad Aryans—too much. Instead of flowing freely through him, the enormous force of the universe was squeezed into his narrow theories. The result was … well, you know what the result was.”

“Okay, but what happens to somebody like that, I mean, punishment-wise.”

“If I were to tell you in a parable, I would say: he lives for six million more lives, suffering in all of them, until he gets the message.”

“Some people would claim you’re going too easy on him.”

Jesus did not seem to hear me. “At the opposite end of the spectrum is love, the complete ability to see the other as the self. I do not mean merely sexual love, infatuation, attraction, loving someone because of what they can do for you. I mean full-scale, selfless, pure love. The love of a good parent, for one of many examples, or of a selfless mentor. Where there is that kind of love, the power of the thought-energy is flowing directly through the person, and the person is unafraid of life’s complexities, does not need every other soul on earth to be exactly like him or her.”

“Nine eleven.”

“Meaning what?”

“The people who attacked us on nine eleven wanted everybody to be like them.”

“Precisely. Of course, there are millions of places on the spectrum between perfect love and pure hatred, between the saint and the serial
killer. Some people manage the thought-energy in partial fashion, in certain compartments and not others. These would be, say, a great composer who is unkind to his or her spouse. A charismatic politician who rises to the heights of power and then misuses it, in a stupid, but not a murderous way.”

“A husband who loves his wife only fairly well.”

“Good. You understand, then. The fact is that you live many lives, you know that, of course. It is in the Bible.”

“No, actually, I don’t believe it is. My mom knows the Bible inside and out and she never once mentioned anything about multiple incarnations.”

“Someone must have edited harshly then,” he said, and I could not tell if he was joking. “In any case, ultimately, after many lives—or many years in purgatory, if you prefer, which is the same idea expressed in different imagery—you learn the full management of this thought-force. You come to master it the way a piano player masters his instrument after decades of arduous practice. At that point, to go back to the water imagery, your life on earth is the equivalent of swimming in a river, or perhaps surfing on a wave. You surf the thought-energy, you are part of the great force of life. The only trustworthy measurement of this is one’s capacity to love—not how often you attend religious services, not how often you smile and say nice things, not your ability to perform miracles or read minds, and certainly not your degree of worldly success. The only measure of that capacity is the ability to inhabit the psychic space of another soul, to fully understand him or her or them—which always results in kindness. A wise, not a foolish kindness.”

“And that’s what you came to earth to teach us? This time, I mean? That’s what you’re going to do as president, make the country more … tolerant, for lack of a better word? Kinder and gentler?”

“The important thing is to push down the barriers at the borders of your thought patterns, to go beyond labels. I have come to help you—all of you—do that.”

“Thank you,” I said, without intending to.

At that point we came over a rise, and where I was sure there would
be nothing but desert, we saw a small town, a paved highway, a water tower. We kept walking toward it without breaking stride. I was hoping for a cold Coke, or something stronger, but I was caught up in thinking about what he’d told me, and I did not want to say anything as ordinary as, “How about a drink?”

“For the time being,” Jesus said kindly, “we have reached the limits of your understanding.”

“And so soon.”

“I want you to remember all this when things play out as they will. Remember this conversation. You might want to make notes about it in your journal, if I can presume to ask you to do that.”

The shiver again. “I don’t like the sound of that,” I said. “The
when things play out as they will
part.”

He squeezed me against him again and said, “One of my chosen people, even if he doesn’t know it; maybe especially because he doesn’t know it.” And then he let me go, and I could tell it would be useless to ask him anything else, and I probably couldn’t have in any case because he’d sent that electric current through me again. I felt like my bones were buzzing.

The other thing I felt during that walk, and this might sound odd, is that I had a true friend. Before I joined the campaign, my work had been sociable work. I had never lacked for people to invite over for a birthday party celebration or to watch the Ryder Cup. I’d always had this dream, though, I think a lot of people do, of finding one person with whom I shared some kind of soul-deep understanding. I don’t mean a girlfriend or wife or family member, I mean a friend. The feeling I had with Jesus on that day was something like what I’d always dreamed of. It must have been what Zelda felt in his company, too—who knows, maybe he made everyone feel that way—and it helped me to understand her better, and helped me let go of my idiotic jealousy.

Without anything else being said, Jesus and I walked to the town, a hamlet really, one gas station, a general store, a dusty bar with wooden railings outside, and places to tie up your horse. Strictly a Wild West movie set. Inside the bar it was cool and dim. They had a decent local ale
on tap called Oasis Amber. Jesus and I each ordered a glass and drank it standing there with our elbows on the bar and one foot on the rail, not talking to or looking at each other, like cowboys after a long trail ride … except that he was dressed in shorts and sandals and had his earring on again. It seemed to me after a time that he was flirting with the waitress, a middle-aged and, to my eye at least, wholly unappealing woman. He was asking about her life, how she liked it here, what her dreams were. Little by little, she opened up to him. She said that all she’d ever dreamed about was being a cosmetologist and starting her own shop, cutting hair, doing nails, makeup, eyebrows. That would be enough of a life for her. Jesus listened to this as if she were telling him she intended to find a cure for cancer. There was no judgment in his face or voice, no snobbery, no mockery, and sentence by sentence you could see the woman’s expression change. Half an hour into the conversation she was almost pretty.

“I have a brother with a pickup truck,” she said, when she heard we’d been stranded out there, reasons unspecified. “Let me give him a call.”

When the brother arrived, it turned out that he worked at the Palm Springs Inn and Club—I don’t know why I should have been surprised—and that he was just heading in for second shift. He’d be happy to give us a ride back if we wanted. We listened to a Willie Nelson tape on the way. Jesus seemed to like the music very much.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Shortly before the start of the two-hour bilingual press-feast in the Palm Springs Inn and Club, Jesus gave Zelda a scrap of notebook paper on which were printed, in his neat hand, the names of those reporters and photographers who had tried to follow us into the desert. They were excluded from the press conference without apology. At first, the sinners complained loudly to Zelda, maintaining their innocence, but in the end they gave up and tried to cut deals with those who had been admitted to the event, asking them to carry a small tape recorder, to show them their notes, and so on. It made me glad I was out of that business. And it made me see again that Jesus had a stern side.

During the press conference, Jesus sat in one of the soft chairs in the oversized suite, hands folded in his lap. The reporters packed in around him, flashbulbs popping, tape recorders whirring, keys on laptops tapping. The second or third question was asked by a woman from the
Wall Street Journal:
“Jesus,” she began, and it sounded like she was making an effort to sound reverent and respectful, “half an hour ago, Marjorie Maplewith’s husband, the Reverend Aldridge Maplewith, who, as you know, presides over a megachurch in Idaho and a TV empire with several million viewers … half an hour ago he demanded, in his weekly TV sermon, that you prove you are who you say you are or drop out of the race.”

Jesus appraised the woman with what I would call a pleasant curiosity, as if admiring her haircut. “Meaning what?”

The reporter hesitated for a moment. You could see the little balloon of confidence that surrounded her start to deflate. But then she pumped it back up again. “He demanded you prove you are God.”

“God?” Jesus said with an amused lifting of his eyebrows. “Have I spoken that word?”

My father was sitting in the corner, and I turned and looked between the bodies of two photographers and saw him scratching the place where his birthmark had been.

“Well, aren’t you?” the reporter had a smile at the corners of her mouth now; she knew she was about to make news.

“You say I am,” Jesus said. “The most I have ever called myself in this campaign is the Son of Man, and even that—”

“But you use the name that most people in this country use to refer to God,” the reporter pressed.

Jesus waited an interminably long time, probably a full twenty seconds, before speaking again. You could hear the
plock … plock
from the tennis courts next door. “Tell the good Reverend Maplewith that if he allows me to use his pulpit for one Sunday sermon between now and the election, I will give him the answer he requires.”

It was another smart chess move, and everyone in the room was scribbling or typing or snapping pictures in a mad frenzy. The Reverend Maplewith would not do it, of course, because it would mean millions of dollars worth of free publicity for one of his wife’s opponents.

Still, there was an impression left that Jesus was not directly answering the question on most people’s minds, and it was to cast a shadow over the campaign as the weeks wore on.

The middle part of the press conference was predictable enough except for the thirty minutes where the candidate answered questions in Spanish. This seemed effortless for him, and allowed the non-Spanish-speaking reporters time to take a bathroom break. Nadine Simmelton sat beside me at the back of the room and translated everything she thought I’d want to know. On immigration, Jesus came down on the side of fairness: legal was fine, illegal was not. On foreign aid, he reiterated his statement that dictators would receive nothing from his administration, and that it
was important to the nation’s well-being that the gap between rich and poor be narrowed. Neither of these stances was particularly original or shocking. The question about the war on drugs put him on thinner ice: Jesus placed most of the blame not on the Colombians, the Afghanis, or the street corner dealers, but on the users here at home. Moral responsibility for any pain associated with the drug trade lay squarely on their shoulders. He did not believe that dealers or users should automatically be sent to jail unless they resorted to violence or thievery. Sometimes punitive measures were appropriate, yes, but he would promote an elaborate system of education, fines, extensive treatment, and community service instead of filling up the prisons with nonviolent addicts. Scribble, scribble went the reporters. (It would be another blip in the campaign, another small target for Maplewith and Alowich: Jesus, they’d say, was soft on crime.)

Jesus had already stated his positions on the key issues of the day—he was vehemently opposed to capital punishment, for instance—and did not seem to like to repeat himself, even when the questions were again asked in English. Four or five times he said, “I have spoken to that already, go back and check your notes,” and, “I have nothing new to say on that subject.” Since announcing his choice of his own mother as running mate, there had been a flurry of investigations into Anna Songsparrow’s past, but all of them had come to the same conclusion: her past was that of a simple Indian woman, raising an unusual child, a single mother who worked in the reservation food market while her son was growing up. Every inhabitant of the reservation who was interviewed said the same thing: that she was a good woman, wise and intelligent, hardworking, very quiet, the daughter of a famous chief, a remarkable though unambitious woman who had chosen to live a life out of the local spotlight. She was known for being generous, for keeping up on world events with a shortwave radio to which she listened every night. With the exception of one fairly brief relationship that had taken her to Kansas, she’d had no other men in her life once Jesus’s father had passed on. She did not drink or smoke, and made periodic trips into the desert for a few days to be alone—a vision quest, some thought, though no one could say for sure.
Often, when there was a conflict on the reservation, the parties came to her and she usually managed to mediate it to a peaceful resolution; other than that, she stayed in the background.