Messiah

by Gore Vidal

  I was alone, awaiting Clarissa for tea. I had actually prepared tea since she never drank alcohol and I myself was a light drinker at best . . . a non-drinker that summer when my liver rested (so powerful is imagination) like a brazen cannonball against the cage of bones.

  I sat on my porch which overlooked the lawn and the water, unlike the other houses on that river, mine had the railroad behind it instead of in front of it, an agreeable state of affairs; I don't mind the sound of trains though the sight of them on their squalid tracks depresses me.

  Beside me, among the careful tray of tea things, the manuscript of my dialogue lay neglected. I had not yet made up my mind whether to read it to Clarissa or not. Such things tended to bore her; yet, if she could be enticed into attention, her opinion would be useful: such a long memory of old customs would be invaluable to me as I composed, with diligence rather than inspiration, an ethical system whose single virtue was that it tended to satisfy the needs of human beings as much as was possible without inviting chaos. I had, that morning over coffee, abolished marriage. During lunch, served me by my genteel but impoverished housekeeper (although servants still existed in those days in a few great houses, people like myself were obliged to engage the casual services of the haughty poor), I decided to leave marriage the way it was but make divorce much simpler. After lunch, suffering from a digestive-inspired headache, I not only abolished marriage again but resolutely handed the children over to the impersonal mercies of the state.

  Now, bemused, relaxed, my eyes upon the pale blue Catskills and the summer green, the noise of motorboats like great waterbugs in my ears, I brooded upon the implications of what I was doing and, though I was secretly amused at my own confidence, I realized, too, that what I felt and did and wrote, though doubtless unorthodox to many, was, finally, not really the work of my own inspiration but a logical result of all that was in the world: a statement of the dreams of others which I could formulate only because I shared them. Cave regarded his own words as revelation when, actually, they only echoed the collective mind, a plausible articulation of what most men felt even though their conscious minds were antipathetic, corseted and constricted by stereotyped ways of thinking, the opposite of what they truly believed. Yet at this step I, for one, hesitated. There was no doubt but that the children and the society would be the better for such an arrangement . . . and there was little doubt that our civilization was moving toward such a resolution. But there were parents who would want to retain their children and children who might be better cared for by their progenitors than by even the best-intentioned functionaries of the state. Would the state allow parents to keep their children if they wanted them? If not, it was tyrannous; if so, difficult in the extreme, for how could even the most enlightened board of analysts determine who should be allowed their children and who not? The answer, of course, was in the retraining of future generations. Let them grow up accepting as inevitable and right the surrender of babies to the state. Other cultures had done it and ours could too. But I was able, vividly, to imagine the numerous cruelties which would be perpetrated in the name of the whole, while the opportunity for tyranny in a civilization where all children were at the disposal of a government brought sharply to mind the image of the anthill society which has haunted the imagination of the thoughtful for at least a century.

  I had got myself into a most gloomy state by the time Clarissa arrived, trailing across the lawn in an exotic ankle-length gown of gray which floated in yards behind her, like the diaphanous flags of some forgotten army.

  "Your lawn is full of moles!" she shouted to me, pausing in her progress and scowling at a patch of turf. "And it needs cutting and more clover. Always more clover, remember that."

  She turned her back on me to stare at the river which was as gray as her gown, but, in its soft tidal motion, spangled with light, like sequins on a vast train.

  She had no criticism of the river when she at last turned and climbed the steps to the porch; she sat down with a gasp.

  "I'm boiling! Tea? Hot tea to combat the heat."

  I poured her a cup. "Not a hot day at all." Actually it was very warm. "If you didn't get yourself up as a Marie Corelli heroine, you'd be much cooler."

  "Not very gallant, are we today?" Clarissa looked at me over her cup. "I've had this gown for five hundred years. There used to be a wimple which went with it but I lost it somewhere."

  "The material seems to be holding up quite well," and now that she had mentioned it, there was an archaic look to the texture of the gown, like those bits of cloth preserved under glass in museums.

  "Silk lasts indefinitely, if one is tidy. I also don't wear this much, as you can see, but with the devalued state of the dollar (an ominous sign, my dear, the beginning of the end!) I've been forced to redo a lot of old odds-and-ends I've kept for sentimental reasons. This is one of them and I'm very fond of it." She spoke this last slowly, to forestall any further ungallantry.

  "I just wondered if it was cool."

  "It is cool. Ah, a letter from Iris." Like a magpie she had seen the letter beside my chair and, without asking permission, had seized it and read it through quickly. "I admire a girl who types," she said, letting fall the letter. "I suppose they all do now though it seems like only yesterday that, next to opening a tearoom, one typed, working for men, all of whom made advances. That was when we had to wear corsets and hatpins. One discouraged while the other quite protected."

  Clarissa chuckled at some obscene memory.

  "I wonder if Paul can keep Cave from wandering off to some impossible place."

  "I shouldn't be surprised." She picked at the tea sandwiches suspiciously, curling back the top slices of bread to see what was underneath: tentatively, she bit into deviled ham; she chewed; she swallowed; she was not disappointed; she wolfed another sandwich, talking all the while. "Poor Cave is a captive now. His disciples are in full command. Even Mohammed, as strong-headed as he was, finally ended up a perfect pawn in the hands of Abu Bekr and the women, especially the women."

  "I'm not so sure about Cave. He . . ."

  "Does what they tell him, especially Iris."

  "Iris? But I should have said she was the only one who never tried to influence him."

  Clarissa laughed unpleasantly. A moth flew into her artificial auburn hair; unerringly, she found it with one capable hand and quickly snuffed out its life in a puff of gray dust from broken wings. She wiped her fingers on a paper napkin. The day was full of moths but, fortunately, none came near us again, preferring lawn and trees to us. "You are naive, Eugene," she said, her little murder done. "It's your nicest quality. In theory you are remarkably aware of human character; yet, when you're confronted with the most implausible appearance, you promptly take it for the reality."

  I was irritated by this and also by the business of the sandwich, not to mention the murder of the moth; I looked at Clarissa with momentary dislike. "I was not aware . . ." I began in a chilled voice but she interrupted me with an airy wave of her hand.

  "I forget no one likes to be called naive . . . . calculating, dishonest, treacherous, people rather revel in those designations, but to be thought trusting. . . ." She clapped her hands as though to punctuate her meaning; then, after a full stop, she went on more soberly. "Iris is the one to look out for. Our own sweet, self-effacing, dedicated Iris. I adore her; I always have, but she's up to no good."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "You will. You would if you weren't entirely blind to what they used to call human nature. Iris is acquiring Cave."

  "Acquiring?"

  "Exactly the word. She loves him for all sorts of reasons but she cannot have him in the usual sense (I found out all about that, by the way). Therefore, the only thing left her to do is acquire him, to take his life in hers. You may think she may think that her slavish adoration is only humble love but actually it's something far more significant, and dangerous."

  "I don't see the danger, even accepting your hypothesis.
"

  "It's no hypothesis and the danger is real. Iris will have him and, through him, she'll have you all."

  I did not begin to understand that day and Clarissa, in her pythoness way, was no help, muttering vague threats and imprecations with her mouth full of bread.

  After my first jealousy at Iris's preference of Cave to me, a jealousy which I knew, even at the time, was unjustified and a little ludicrous, I had come to accept her devotion to Cave as a perfectly natural state of affairs; he was an extraordinary man and though he did not fulfill her in the usual sense, he gave her more than mere lover might: he gave her a whole life and I envied her for having been able to seize so shrewdly upon this unique way out of ordinary life and into something more grand, more strange, more engaging. Though I could not follow her, I was able to appreciate her choice and admire the completeness of her days. That she was obscurely using Cave for her own ends, subverting him, did not seem to me possible and I was annoyed by Clarissa's dark warnings. I directed the conversation into the other waters.

  "The children. I haven't decided what to do with them."

  Clarissa came to a full halt. For a moment she forgot to chew. Then, with a look of pain, she swallowed. "Your children?"

  "Any children, all children," I pointed to the manuscript on the table.

  She began to understand. "I'm quite sure you have abolished marriage."

  "As a matter of fact, yes, this morning."

  "And now you don't know what to do about the children."

  "Precisely. I . . ."

  "Perfectly simple." Clarissa was brisk: this, apparently, was a problem she had already solved. "The next step is controlled breeding. Only those whose blood lines seem promising should be allowed to procreate. Now that oral contraceptives are so popular no one will make babies by accident . . . in fact, it should be a serious crime if someone does."

  "Quite neat, but I wonder whether, psychologically, it's simple. There's the whole business of instinct, of the natural desire of a woman to want her own child after bearing it."

  "All habit . . . not innate. Children have been subordinate woman's ace in the hole for generations. They have had to develop certain traits which, in other circumstances, they would not have entertained. Rats, whom we closely resemble, though they suckle their young will, in moments of mild hunger or even exasperation, think nothing of eating an entire litter. You can condition human beings to accept any state of affairs as being perfectly natural."

  "I don't doubt that. But how to break the habits of several thousand years."

  "I suppose there are ways. Look what Cave is doing. Of course making death popular is not so difficult since, finally, people want it to be nice: they do the real work or, rather, their terror does. In place of superstition, which they've nearly outgrown, he offers them madness."

  "Now really, Clarissa . . ."

  "I don't disapprove. I'm all for him, as you know. To make death preferable to life is of course utter folly though a perfectly logical reaction for these poor bewildered savages who, having lost their old superstitions, are absolutely terrified at the prospect of nothing. They want to perpetuate their little personalities forever into space and time and now they've begun to realize the folly of that (who, after all, are they? are we? in creation?) they will follow desperately the first man who pulls the sting of death and Cave is that man, as I knew he would be."

  "And after Cave?"

  "I will not say what I see. I'm on the side of change, however, which makes me in perfect harmony with life." Clarissa chuckled. A fish leaped grayly in the still river; out in the channel a barge glided by, the muffled noise of its engines like slow heartbeats.

  "But you think it good for people to follow Cave? you think what he says is right?"

  "Nothing is good. Nothing is right. But though Cave is wrong, it is a new wrong and so it is better than the old; in any case, he will keep the people amused and boredom, finally, is the one monster the race will never conquer . . . the monster which will devour us in time. But now we're off the track. Mother love exists because we believe it exists. Believe it does not exist and it won't. That, I fear, is the general condition of 'the unchanging human heart.' Make these young girls feel that having babies is a patriotic duty as well as healthful therapy and they'll go through it blithely enough, without ever giving a second thought to the child they leave behind in the government nursery."

  "But to get them to that state of acceptance . . ."

  "Is the problem. I'm sure it will be solved in a few generations."

  "You think I'm right to propose it?"

  "Of course. It will happen anyway."

  "Yet I'm disturbed at the thought of all that power in the hands of the state: they can make the children believe anything; they can impose the most terrible tyranny; they can blind at birth so that none might ever see anything again but what a few rulers, as ignorant as they, finally, will want them to see. There'll be a time when all people are nearly alike."

  "Which is precisely the ideal society. No mysteries, no romantics, no discussions, no persecutions because there's no one to persecute. When all have received the same conditioning, it will be like . . ."

  "Insects."

  "Who have existed longer than ourselves and will outlast our race by many comfortable millennia."

  "Is existence everything?"

  "There is nothing else."

  "Then likeness is the aim of human society?"

  "Call it harmony. You think of yourself only as you are now dropped into the midst of a society of dull conformists. That's where you make your mistake. You'll not live to see it for, if you did, you would be someone else, a part of it. No one of your disposition could possibly happen in such a society. There would be no rebellion against sameness because difference would not, in any important sense, exist, even as a proposition. You think: how terrible! but think again how wonderful it would be to belong to the pack, to the tribe, to the race, without guilt or anxiety or division."

  "I cannot imagine it."

  "No more can they imagine you."

  "This will happen?"

  "Yes, and you will have been a part of it."

  "Through Cave?"

  "Partly, yes. There will be others after him. His work in the future will be distorted by others, but that's to be expected."

  "I don't like your future, Clarissa."

  "Nor does it like you, my dear. The idea of someone who is gloomy and at odds with society, bitter and angry, separate from others . . . I shouldn't wonder but that you yourself might really be used as a perfect example of the old evil days."

  "Virtue dies?"

  "Virtue becomes the property of the race."

  "Imagination is forbidden?"

  "No, only channeled for the good of all."

  "And this is a desirable world? the future you describe?"

  "Desirable for whom? For you, no. For me, not really. For the people in it? Well, yes and no. They will not question their estate but they will suffer from a collective boredom which . . . but my lips are sealed. Your tea was delicious though the bread was not quite fresh; but then bachelors never keep house properly. I've gone on much too long; do forget everything I've said. I'm indiscreet. I can't help it."

  She rose, a cloud of gray suspended above the porch. I walked her across the lawn to the driveway where her car was parked. The breeze had, for the moment, died and the heat prickled me unpleasantly; my temples itched as the sweat started.

  "Go on with it," she said as she got into her car. "You may as well be on the side of the future as against it. Not that it much matters anyway. When your adorable President Jefferson was in Paris he said . . ." But the noise of the car starting drowned the body of her anecdote. I caught only the end: "That harmony was preferable. We were all amused; I was the only one who realized that he was serious."

  Dust swirled and Clarissa was gone down the drive at a great speed, keeping, I noticed, to the wrong side of the road. I hoped this was an omen.

/>   5

  I got through an unusually sultry July without much interference from either Cave or the world. Paul paid me a quick visit to get the manuscript of the dialogues and I was reminded of those accounts of the progresses made by monarchs in other days, or rather of great ministers, for his party occupied four large cars which gleamed side by side in my driveway like glossy beasts while their contents, Paul and fourteen assistants, all strange to me save Stokharin, wandered disconsolately about the lawn until their departure.

  Paul, though brisk, was cordial. "Trouble all over the map but b-i-g t-r-o-u-b-l-e," he spelled it out with relish, size was important, I knew, to a publicist, even to one turned evangelist.

  "Is Cave disturbed by it?"

  "Doesn't pay any attention. Haven't seen him but Iris keeps me posted. By the way, we're hiring a plane the first week in August to go see him, Stokharin and me. Want to come along?"

  I didn't but I said I would. I had no intention of being left out of anything: there was my work still to do.

  "I'll let you know details. This is hot stuff?" He waved the sheaf of papers I'd given him.

  "Real hot," I said but my irony was too pale, only primary colors caught Paul's eye.