Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  “Why don't we quit beating around the bush?” demanded Purcell. “We've been yapping for nine hours if you can believe that crazy clock: it sounds like it learned to tell time in a Cuban whorehouse. I feel like I've had a crash course in Christian history from 40,000 B.C. to twenty minutes ago, you know what I mean? I'm not knocking it, but what I'd really like to learn is what you all think we should do with the Corpse. I'd like to put the question to you. We don't have to reach a final decision until Sunday night if that's how the think-tank game is played, but I'd sure enjoy hearing what you folks feel we should do with . . . it . . . him.” Plucky looked from face to face.

  Ziller obviously was not going to speak. He continued to watch the Corpse as a cat watches a mousehole.

  “Decent burial on the slopes of Bow Wow,” offered Amanda. “Appropriate ritual, then peace at last. The blue sky to keep him company, the winds, the waters, the clouds, butterflies, trees, stones, mushrooms, animals, the wild old ways. Ba Ba leaving no path in the grasses when he brings him flowers on special mornings.” She sat with her hands in her lap, appearing as calm as when we began our session nearly nine hours before.

  “I can't say that I accept Amanda's sentiments, altruistic as they may be,” said your correspondent. “But at the moment, I don't have an alternative. I just haven't settled on any scheme worthy of sharing yet. What about you, Pluck? Apparently you've had your mind set all along. What do you want to do with the Corpse?”

  Purcell sprang upright in his wooden chair. His eyes burned like the snout of his most recent cigar. Yes, he had a plan all right. “Here's what I wanna do with him. Blow him up on page 1! Illuminate his mug on channels 0 through 99! Plaster his wrinkles on the cover of Life! Bounce his kisser off Telstar satellite! Newsmen from all nations here asking questions! Press corps deserts Washington and Cape Kennedy and moves into Skagit County! Movie cameras churning, flash bulbs zapping, microphones crackling, tape recorders spinning their nosy spools; the roadside zoo struck by media lightning! Pundits arriving by private helicopter! Sulzberger rushing out to call the Pope for a personal denial, then using his prestige to get back to the head of the line for another peek in the pantry! Columnists, editors, commentators, prize-winning photographers camping in the parking lot! And don't forget the underground papers—the East Village Other, the Barb, the Rolling Stone—having their turn! Fill every page, every screen with him from here to Katmandu; South Pole melting from the heat of the news wires, drums carrying the story down the Congo and up the Amazon, total World Ear-Eye glued to the final and ultimate death of him!” Pluck paused for the effect that was in it. “That's what I wanna do with the Corpse.”

  “Pardon me, but I get the impression that you don't wish to keep this thing a secret. You want to drop the Corpse on society like a bomb. Why? What would be the purpose of that?” It was my voice that was asking. In the background, my belly had a few questions of its own.

  “The purpose isn't hard to figure out. There's more than one purpose, for that matter, and none of 'em are hard to figure out. The first purpose is to get some honesty back in the game, to restore an element of truth to life. Man has been living a lie since the very beginning of the Judaeo-Christian era. The lie has warped our science and our philosophy and our economy and our social institutions and our simplest day-to-day existence: our sex and our play. Man doesn't stand a chance of discovering—or rediscovering, as Amanda might prefer—who he is or where he fits into the cosmic picture, the natural Ma Nature scheme of things, as long as he's numbed and diverted by the easy Christian escapist superstition. I don't know what the ultimate truth is—hell, I don't even know whether life is sweet or sour” (Plucky grinned at Amanda and, coyly, she smiled back) “but I do know that you can't find truth if you start with a false premise, and Western tradition, the best and the worst of it, has always moved from the false premise of Christian divinity. This Corpse here could destroy the lie and let man begin over again on a note of realism. That's the first purpose.”

  The athlete-turned-outlaw cleared his throat. Or was it his stomach? “Purpose number two,” he said, “is the jolt it'll give the establishment. Man oh man, it'll be a bodacious blow to authority.”

  “You mean the authority of the Church?”

  “No, man, I mean authority, period. Secular authority has made the mistake of tying itself too closely to Christianity. Actually, the whole Judaeo-Christian setup is authoritarian; it's a feudal system with God—the king, the big boss—at the top. It's the ideal religious organization for control freaks, reward-and-punishment perverts and power mongers. No wonder it has succeeded so spectacularly.”

  “In the old religion there were no bosses,” said Amanda. Her little observation was lost on me.

  “No,” agreed Plucky, “and there're no bosses in nature, either. But Christianity isn't based on nature, it's based on a political model. As far back as the Emperor Constantine, the authoritarians spotted Christianity as the perfect front, and they've been using poor old Jesus ever since—using him to bolster their business, to sanction their armies and to generally yoke and manipulate the people. Napoleon had the grace to coldcock the Holy Roman Empire, but look at those so-called Christian-Democratic parties currently in power all over Europe: whenever a Christian-Democrat takes office, you know that the Vatican has recaptured another hunk of territory. Both American government and American business—if there's any difference any more—are rolled in Christian rhetoric like a chicken leg is rolled in flour.”

  The reference to the leg of the hen caused his abdomen to bellow with deprivation. A bit less dramatically, mine followed suit.

  “It's pretty ironic,” Purcell went on, “because as I understand it, Jesus was a freedom-fighting radical who scorned authority—he booted bankers in the ass and made fools of high priests. However—however—he may have the last laugh yet. Because authority has chosen to identify itself with Christ—or rather with the Christian lie about Christ—and now we have the means to explode that myth. All authority, from the Holy See to the White House to the Pentagon to the cop on the beat is gonna suffer as a result. Man, we just might bust things wide open!”

  Plucky was laughing and pounding the table, causing the Corpse to bounce up and down like the Kraft meatball dinner that fell out of love with gravity.

  I shook my head in dismay. “Plucky,” I said solemnly, “I don't want to accuse you of taking this matter too lightly, because I realize that you are quite serious about your reasons for exposing the Corpse. Moreover, they aren't altogether bad reasons. There's a lot of moral idealism in the first purpose that you outlined and a lot of, well, poetic justice in the second. But in the end I have to reject them both, reject the idea of the super press conference, because, Plucky, I think you are overlooking the very grave consequences of such an act.”

  The grin slid off Purcell's face like an ill pigeon slides off the equestrian statue of Ralph Williams in Los Angeles. As he lit another cigar, he motioned for me to proceed.

  “Correct me if I'm wrong: you would use the Corpse to kill off Christianity, a religion which is, at best, a distortion of the teachings of Christ, and, at worst, is an authoritarian system that limits man's liberty and represses the human spirit.”

  “Yeah, man, that's pretty close to the way I feel.”

  “Well, to begin with, Pluck, Christianity is dying of its own accord. Its most vital energies are already dead. We are living in a period of vast philosophical and psychological upheaval, a rare era of evolutionary outburst precipitated by a combination of technological breakthroughs, as I explained it to Amanda. And when we come out of this period of change—providing that the tension and trauma of it doesn't lead us to destroy ourselves—we will find that many of the old mores and attitudes and doctrines will have been unrecognizably altered or eliminated altogether. One of the casualties of our present upheaval will unquestionably be Christianity. It is simply too ineffectual (on a spiritual level) and too contradictory (on an intellectual level) to survive.
So, in forcing the knowledge of the unresurrected Christ on the public you would only succeed in abruptly, crudely hastening a death already taking place by natural processes. It would be like shooting a terminal cancer patient with a bazooka.'”

  “So much the better,” said Purcell. “Why drag it out? Anything we can do to speed up the end of those old authoritarian, antilife ways, why we should feel a duty to do it. Hell, man, that's why I got into dealing drugs. I wasn't just selling a product for a fancy profit, I was selling people a new look at the inside of their heads, laying a lot of powerful energy on them that they could use to open up new dimensions to their existence. I was trying to help change things. For the better. That's part of my trip.”

  “You're a utopianist, that's what you are. A wild-eyed utopianist, aren't you? Well, let me tell you just what kind of utopia you'll bring about by thrusting this mummified Jesus on the world. Thoreau once wrote that most 'men lead lives of quiet desperation.' And that's a damn accurate summation. Most people are lonely and most people are scared. They may not show it, but they are. Their faith in Christ is all that most people have in this civilized Western world. Because even if they aren't practicing Christians—and the majority of them probably aren't any more—they still believe in the Christian God. And in times of stress, such as death or serious illness or self-doubt or frustration, they turn to their faith in God. It's all that gives them the will to persist. The ultimate function of religious belief is the destruction of earth. It helps man to conquer his fear of dying and his dread of what may lie beyond. If he learns that Jesus died—and stayed dead—then what solace is there for him? Most people will conclude, I'm afraid, that if Jesus doesn't live then God doesn't live. And if God doesn't live, what's left for them? See what I mean?

  “We're caught in a time of demoralization as it is, due to the changes we're undergoing. Man is already losing hope. His world is in a mess and he's running out of options for saving it. Think what the mortality of Jesus will do to him. Your plan would shove mankind into a century of the darkest desperation and hopelessness. People would panic. They'd flip out. There'd be waves of suicides. Retired folks would eat their sleeping tablets, dentists would break down at their drills, salesmen would cancel their calls, secretaries would stare blankly at their typewriters, mothers would wander off and desert their children, insane asylums would be standing room only, crime would carry away the countryside, there'd be blood in every gutter, cold gloom on every face. It would shatter the stability of society.”

  “Aw, Marvelous, you're overdramatizing it. Sure, it'd freak out some people. The old and the rigid and the weak. And that wouldn't be pretty, but hell, it's necessary if we're going to get the species to evolving in a sane direction. Evolution always takes casualties. Besides, there'd be loads of people who'd get with it and dig it. The mortality of Christ could mean a fresh start for Western man. All the bullshit cleared off the boards and a spanking new, pure, honest beginning to find out who and what we really are and where we stand as regards the universe and the forces that we've nicknamed 'God.' The young would go for it. They'd eat it up. The young and the creative would welcome such a chance and they'd pitch right in and build a more liberated, joyful, realistic culture. What's this horse crap about a 'stable society'? You've gotta be kidding. Nature isn't stable. Life isn't stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can't have both. Take your choice. As for me, I'll choose a free, organic society over a rigid, artificial society any day. If people are so weak that they have to have the Heaven crutch to keep 'em from fear and death, well, maybe fear and death is what they need. And if they're so unethical that it takes the Jesus lie to keep 'em from going crazy in the streets, robbing each other and doing each other in, well then fuck 'em, man; let 'em go crazy because crime and insanity may be what they deserve.”

  My belly did two rolls and a spin. A ripple of notes twisted and squirted up my digestive tract as if my digestive tract were a horn and that black guy, that Roland Kirk, was on the other end. I squeezed myself around the middle and choked off Roland Kirk in mid-solo. If I don't eat soon there's going to be trouble with the musicians union, I thought.

  “Remember Sister Elizabeth and Sister Hillary?” I asked Purcell. “They said marriage vows to Christ. How do you think this unresurrected Jesus is going to affect them? How's it going to affect the other brave nuns and priests you met during your year with the Church? Is death and fear what they deserve, Plucky? What about your parents and your brother and your sisters, they're good Episcopalians, aren't they? Do they deserve to suddenly have their most vital beliefs kicked in? What about my parents, my momma and daddy? They're fine people, they've always done the best they could for me and everyone else they knew. They're kind and generous, feeling human beings. Religion is all my mother has in this world. Because she has given herself heart and soul to a doctrine that's largely myth, does that mean we have the right to destroy that doctrine for her? After all, that doctrine includes principles of the highest ethical degree. She's lived a better life because of her Christian standards, despite the falseness of their accompanying lore. What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today. My code of ethics—and yours, too, if you'll admit it—grew directly out of Christianity. Don't we owe it anything? Do we have the right to pollute our wellspring of morality? Do we have the right to destroy my mother? A million other mothers?

  Plucky could not answer right away. He was silent and brooding. Even his stomach hushed. Plucky's mood was a boardinghouse the night the cook fixed liver and onions; it was five below outdoors and the TV was on the blink. Eventually, he said, “I've got nothing against Jesus. It wasn't his fault that all this killing and cheating has been done in his name. He was one of the greatest dudes who ever was. You know what I dig about him? He lived what he preached. He taught by example. He went all the way and there was no compromise and no hypocrisy. And he not only was against authority, he was against private property, too. Anybody who opposes authority and property is sweet in my heart. Jesus? Hell, I love the cat.”

  “Yes, Pluck,” I said, “we know that. We realize it isn't Christ or his original teachings that have you riled.”

  “No, it isn't. It's what he's come to stand for that pisses me. It's the perversions and the tyranny and the lies. What I can't understand about you, Marvelous, is how you can defend the lies just because some good has come out of 'em. And you're supposed to be a scientist. I thought scientists insited on facts—regardless of the consequences.”

  It was my turn to brood. Before I could articulate a reply, Purcell spoke again.

  “You said yourself that the world's in a mess and we're running out of options. We have radical problems and radical problems demand radical solutions. Our leaders aren't gonna solve our problems, that's obvious. It was leaders, the good ones right along with the bad, who got us into this mess to begin with. And not one of 'em has vision enough or guts enough to push a program radical enough to get us out of the mess. That's why my plan for exposing the Corpse seems so important. It's radical as all hell, and it's gonna hurt a lot of technically innocent people and all that, but it's the one solution that might work. It could jolt society so hard that it'd be forced to try a whole new approach to life. It could free us from our authorities and free us from our superstitions that keep us in the Dark Ages even though our technology is putting us on the moon. To me, it's the only way out. I honestly don't think it was an accident that I found the Corpse. I'm starting to think that I was supposed to find it, that it's part of a divine plan to rescue the human race. And if some of the species has to be destroyed in order to save the species as a whole, well, that's the way evolution has always worked. But if you all don't want to help me with my plan, if you're afraid to accept the responsibility, if you just wanna stick the Corpse in the ground and forget about it .
. .”

  “I've never intimated that I wanted to stick the Corpse in the ground,” I objected.

  “That's right. You don't know what you want to do with it.”

  “Yes, I do. I do now. You've given me an idea. I have a plan by which we may be able to use the Corpse to improve human conditions without ripping the entire social fabric to shreds in the process.”

  Purcell looked skeptical. “What's that?” he asked.

  “Simply this. We reveal the Corpse only to certain key figures in world government. We let the Pope know we have it, if he doesn't know already. We let the President of the U.S. know, and a few other powerful authorities. And we make sure that they are cognizant of the full consequences of the Corpse becoming public knowledge. Right? Then we make demands. We demand of the Pope, for example, that he rescind the papal encyclical banning artificial contraception. That would go a long way toward solving the population problem. We demand of the President that he withdraw all U.S. troops from foreign soil, and that he scrap provocative defense systems. And we demand of the Pope, again, that he issue an encyclical excommunicating any individual who serves in the armed forces of any nation. That would help to take care of the war and aggression problem. We demand Congress shut down Detroit until it agrees to produce electric automobiles exclusively. Think of how that would help the pollution and ecology problem. Are you getting the picture? We demand that the authorities themselves overhaul society and start making it healthier and happier. Or else. Or else we make public the mortality of Jesus and break up the ball game.”

  Plucky roared. “Blackmail! Marvelous, you sneaky bastard, you're a blackmailer. Aren't you ashamed? I'm surprised at you, I really am. You're suggesting that we blackmail the President and the Pope.” Purcell shook from the laughter the way a rosebush would shake beneath a dodo seduction. The pantry was draped in extinct feathers. “It might work. I don't know. We'd have to devise a foolproof scheme so that they couldn't just kill us and end the threat. We'd have to sit down like we were Leonardo da Vinci inventing the parachute and polish every little detail and make it fool-proof. It'd be one bodacious bitch of a caper to pull off—but it might work. At least we should think about it.” He slapped his thigh. The dodos were at it again.