American Savior (36 page)

“Not exactly, no.”

“The eye God sees you with is the eye with which you see God.”

“That’s funny. I remember that from Sunday school. It always confused me.”

He gave me the frown of impatience I’d seen from him so many times. “Feeling the godliness in yourself in God’s presence can be compared to certain moments of unity on earth. The best moments of lovemaking, friendship, family togetherness—those instances when you felt yourself linked to another soul. Ring a bell?”

“A faint bell,” I said.

Jesus smiled at me then. The smile was like warm bathwater being poured over you. “That feeling is an inkling of what you feel in the presence of God if your conscience is relatively clean. Doubt is banished. Self-hatred is banished. You become aware of your true divine identity. To make a crude comparison: the child understands the parent’s love, at the same time that the child understands the parent’s need for him or her, the way the parent’s life has been expanded by the child’s existence. It is the purest form of reciprocation.”

“All right,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Still angry?”

“A little bit, yeah. Only because of all the work we put in. Only because we want so badly for you to actually get elected and start—”

“Only because you think you know better,” he said, calmly.

“All right. Sorry again. I just—”

“Go take a shower. They are preparing a special meal for us at the Taj Mahal. Let’s not keep them waiting.”

So I went back down the hotel hallway with a cold current of confusion running underneath everything.
Only because you think you know better.
Like the scent of an evil spirit, the dregs of my anger and doubt followed me into my room. I could hear the shower running and thought of what I would say to Zelda when she came out, how I would tell her I’d let Jesus have it on behalf of all of us, that he hadn’t apologized, that I was wondering if he even cared about winning.

And then I went and stood at the window and came to my senses.
Darkness had fallen over West Zenith, and I could see the streetlights forming straight lines across the neighborhoods, and offices still lit up in the buildings downtown. Life seemed so massive to me then, so complicated, so many thousands of souls working out an interconnected puzzle. Next to that, even a presidential election was small-time.

Only because you think you know better.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket and then started ringing and when I said hello I was profoundly sorry to hear the voice of Randy Zillins. “Help out an old pal. Give me the inside story on what happened today.”

“Randy Zillins,” I said, “the guy who only calls when he needs something.”

“Yeah, well, listen, I got a story to file. Can you give me something? You know, on today? Inside info? And no more of that Bible crap either. Can you?”

“Sure. What happened today was a lesson in humility.”

“Aw, Christ,” Zillins said.

“Listen,” I said, because I had truly had it with him at that point. Looking back now, I can see that I was experiencing the opposite of what Jesus had told me moments before: instead of being with God and sensing the goodness in myself, I was talking with Randy Zillins and sensing the darkness in myself, the doubt, the pettiness, the insistence on knowing better. “I don’t want you calling me anymore, okay? It’s the night before the election, I have nine million things to do, including protecting the guy you think is a phony, and who is staying in a hotel that anybody can walk into off the street. So please, go find your inside info someplace else, okay?”

I waited a second before hanging up. I could hear R.Z. breathing on the other end of the line, insulted, hurt, shocked—who knows exactly what he was feeling? As I was about to apologize, or at least soften my remarks, he slammed the line closed.

FORTY

The thing I will always remember about our last supper is the feeling of warmth that emanated from Jesus. We’d seen sparks of it during the campaign. With all the travel and the public appearances, though, and the incredible strain of getting up there day after day to say basically the same thing over and over again, he’d been aloof at times. Not cold, but distant.

At the Taj Mahal—as if to make up for his day of absence—he was fully present, and the only word you can use to describe the way he treated us is
love.
Everyone at the table felt it. He smiled radiantly at us, he touched the people sitting closest to him, he cracked jokes with my brother, and generally made everyone feel he had a special place for them in his heart. Near the end of what turned out to be a very good meal, he presented each of us with a twenty karat gold pin with
THE JESUS CAMPAIGN
inscribed on it. Not counting Anna Songsparrow, fourteen people had been invited to the dinner, so there were fourteen of these pins, made by a Manhattan jeweler. (Now, after what happened, and after enough time has passed to give people a perspective on the magnitude of what happened, these pins, I have been told, are worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars each. None of them, to date, has been sold.)

Jesus walked around the table handing them out. He stopped to give each of us a warm embrace and to say words of thanks for our particular contribution. Standing beside my chair with one hand on my shoulder,
he said, “I want to thank Russ for his sass, his reverent irreverence, and for knocking me over in Jocko Padsen’s shed.”

I said, “You’re welcome,” and he laughed and seemed genuinely pleased.

When he was finished with this ceremony, he told us to remain seated. As if on some invisible signal, the door to our private room opened and two waiters came in. One was carrying a silver bowl filled with water; the other was carrying a bar of soap and a towel. Jesus knelt in front of my mother, who happened to be sitting next to me. Before she could do anything to stop him, he was taking off her shoes and washing her feet, tenderly soaping her misshapen toes, then rinsing them and carefully drying them with the towel. She allowed this to go on for one foot before she broke apart. Over the course of almost forty years I had seen my mother cry, of course—at her own mother’s funeral, during times when my father did something to frustrate her, or I did something to disappoint her (the day I told her I was getting divorced leaps to mind as a memorably weepy occasion). But I had never seen anything remotely like the sorrow that began pouring out of her as Jesus moved on to her second foot. My father was sitting on the other side of her, and even though they had not been getting along well for the past few days, he could not bear to see her like that—her cheeks shaking and soaked, her hands fluttering across her thighs like wounded birds, her lips working convulsively. Dad leaned over and put his large hand on both her small ones and kept saying, “Mudgie, what? He doesn’t mean anything bad by it, honey. Mudgie, honey, stop, please.”

I was saying something along the same lines. Stab had started to cry as well. Jesus kept doing what he was doing, with a gentleness you don’t often encounter in a big man.

“Ma, what?” I said, pretty weakly I guess, because I was as puzzled and upset as the rest of us. In the circles in which I traveled, you didn’t often see a man washing a woman’s feet in a public place. “It’s something he wants to do. It’s his way of saying thanks.”

She was shaking her head at me, hard.

“Ma, it’s all right,” I repeated.

“No it isn’t, Russ,” she answered, but the words didn’t come out straight like that; they came out in bursts of sound from underneath the wave of tears and sorrow: “
No … it is … no it isn’t.… No, Russ, it isn’t!
Arnie, it isn’t. It’s from the Bible. This is what he did in the Bible right at the very end. Now he’s going to say he’s going away to a place where we can’t follow!” Her voice lifted and broke on the last syllable.

It was like talking about someone who wasn’t in the room. Jesus was so focused—head down, hands working—that he seemed almost to be
inside
my mother’s feet. But when she spoke those words, I noticed a peculiar twist of the muscles at the corners of his mouth, and when I saw that reaction I felt like the door had been thrown open and a gust of ten-below-zero air had blown onto the back of my neck. I got down on one knee so that my face was at the same level as Jesus’s. I took a risk and put a hand on his shoulder, and I said, “Is she right?”

For a few seconds he ignored me. He concentrated on the second foot, washing between the toes, then rinsing and drying them. With that same exquisite gentleness he squeezed her foot in both hands and set it down on the carpet. Another wave of sobbing spilled out of my mom. “Is she right?” I repeated. “Was what you did today some weird way of preparing us?”

Jesus slowly turned his head toward me, and in his eyes I could see something I had not seen there before. It was as if they opened into a series of deep brown worlds, one standing behind the next, each larger and wider and more complicated than the one before it. The special feeling of friendship I’d had with him in the desert, and in his hotel room that afternoon—it was there all over again, except this time magnified by a factor of ten, as if he was seeing through me and through me and through me, reading the pages of my future and my past, seeing everything and bathing it in understanding, forgiveness, and love. He was the Jesus I’d grown up imagining, except he didn’t care as much about my sins as that Jesus did.

“I am expecting the best of you,” he said quietly, and while this “you” clearly meant all of us, the word just about knocked me over.

I shivered, I couldn’t control it. I needed five or six seconds to recover. I said, “You didn’t come all this way to leave us again, did you?”

His face was as still as the sky on a winter night, full of this massive, sparkling openness. Dark and light at once. He said, “It is not something you can understand.”

“Try me.”

“I have to fulfill the prophecy.”

“To hell with the prophecy. There
is
no prophecy this time. Nothing’s written down, nothing’s set in stone.”

Stab was hugging him from the other side now, also on his knees. My mother seemed like she was going to faint. I was aware of Zelda leaning down toward him, and the others at the table crowding around. Ada Montpelier was bubbling over nearby, and Dukey was trying, in his own way, to comfort her. “It’s nothin’, it’s okay, he’s all right.”

“Everything is fine as it is,” Jesus said. “Everything plays out as it should.”

“But are you going?”

Jesus paused and drew in a slow breath. “Don’t be foolish,” he said.

At that moment I could feel … this sounds weird, but I could feel him coming back into the room. It was as if, after he’d started washing my mom’s feet, he had expanded in three dimensions, turned himself into something larger than his body, something gigantic, something loving and terrifying at the same time. Much later I would remember the part of the Last Supper where he was reported to have said, “This is my body, and this is my blood,” and it gave that passage new meaning for me, as if his disciples were on the slow side, mentally, and full of fear, and he was trying to convey to them the idea that a being as great as the Jesus-spirit could not be encapsulated in a human body. I believe now that he was preparing those disciples, trying to get them to focus on something other than the physical dimension.

“So you’re not going anywhere?”

“Don’t be foolish,” he repeated. “Where could I go?”

“See, he’s all right,” Dukey said with a laugh, as if trying to convince himself.

Stab stood up and started doing an awkward dance around the room. He bounced on one foot and then bounced on the other foot, like some
kind of Native American warrior celebrating peace. They were happy sounds coming out of my brother’s mouth, but underneath the happy sounds I could tell he was afraid his world was going to fall apart.

“All right then,” I said, trying for a lighter tone and half succeeding. “It was nice what you did. I appreciate it. My mom appreciates it. But you scared us.”

“Resist fear,” Jesus said. “Fear is always in the future. Cut through it. Resist it.”

Wales piped up, “Now that we know you’re going to be around, tell us one thing. Are we going to win?”

“Without question,” Jesus said, and we cheered loudly. But there was a false note to that moment. I have gone back over it a hundred times. I remember that Zelda and I let our eyes meet for a second and then had to look away from each other. Norm Simmelton started to speak and abruptly stopped. I believe that, deep down, we all knew something, we sensed something. When Jesus washed my mother’s feet, I don’t think he was expecting the best of us, I think he was expecting too much of us—he was assuming we had learned, by the parable of his presence in a political campaign, that we were supposed to figure things out for ourselves. That we were on our own in a certain way. That we had some power and control over our spiritual fate, a power we did not know we possessed. That we might even have a little godliness in us.

People got up off the floor. My mother put her shoes on. The waiters carried away the water bowl and soap and towel, and came back with tea and rice pudding, and we took our places again and acted like we were an ordinary campaign staff on the eve of an election, nothing more than that.

“Your missing the last press conference hurt us today,” Zelda had the courage to say.

Jesus gave her the look he had been giving me when we were kneeling beside each other on the floor. I saw it register on her beautiful face—the fear, and then something covering over the fear. I wondered if he were preparing each of us in a different way—Zelda and me with this mysterious signal, my mother with the foot washing.

“I know,” he said. “Awkward for you, wasn’t it.”

“Very much.”

I thought Jesus might apologize—something I’d never heard him do. Instead he reached across the corner of the table and took hold of her wrist. She put her hand over his. I was not jealous in the slightest. “You know,” he said, “they don’t let presidents play touch football in the mud. I knew it would be my last chance for anything like that, and if I had told you in advance, what would everyone have said?”