by Gore Vidal
"But obviously something will."
Chet frowned. "That's why we've got to act fast. We're almost ready to transport a living camera crew to Golgotha."
"With me as anchor?"
"Business affairs is putting the final touches on your contract."
"I shall want a trailer, of course, and my own makeup man." I have learned a lot about stars on location from CNN's Hollywood Minute.
"NBC spares no expense. Well, what did you want to ask me about Marvin Wasserstein?"
"When did you hire him?"
"I didn't. Cuder did. When the Hacker got loose."
"How well do you know him?"
"I don't."
"But you're both at GE "
Chet laughed. "I'm NBC. He's lab. We're mUes apart, in every sense. GE's into weapons mosdy, as well as your average household gadgets. We're entertainment, which means advertising. Oh, there's synergy. Don't get me wrong. Every day we cook up a batch of news so that the couch potatoes will never know what's really going on in what— let's face it—^is the freest consumer society on earth. Naturally, when a GE weapons system gets bogged down in Congress or blows up or something, we really synergize. We
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get the true story out. You know, like how freedom depends on GE know-how."
I raised a bishop's hand to stop Chet's chatter. "Marvin Wasserstein seems eager to get me to tell the good news from the Jewish point of view."
"That's bad news for Christianity. And I speak as a Mormon." Chet frowned. "But why is he interested? He's just a computer analyst, a hired hand." Chet sat down—I suppose he also sat down wherever he is sending his hologram from—on a marble bench. In the dim, steamy comer of the room several youths were indulging in abominable acts of the sort that I must pretend never to notice, since these are the only baths within easy walking distance of cathedral and bungalow.
Chet looked very cool, not to mention peculiar, in his three-piece suit in all that sweating steam. I must say that Chet's hologram is perfect. He is absolutely real looking and totally three-dimensional. It is hard to grasp that the real Chet is two thousand years in the ftiture in the Rockefeller Center headquarters of NBC.
"Marvin Wasserstein." Chet said the name slowly, syllable by syUable. "What does he look like?"
"Short. Thin. Thick glasses. A beanie on the back of his head. Orthodox Jew, I'd say."
"You never know with Cuder's men." Chet was suddenly not at all his usual cheery chatterbox self.
"What—^who—are Cuder's men?"
"They have their own unit inside General Electric. Top secret. Obviously, Cuder has hired Wasserstein to . . ." Chet turned away suddenly. He stared at the entangled panting youths with no interest at all. Plainly, he was thinking hard. Then: "Don't let Dr. Cuder or Wasserstein influence you in your performance."
"How could they do that?"
"So many ways . . . subliminal ways. Dr. Cutler is known to dislike Saint Paul. He believes that Saint Paul in his lifetime deliberately changed the original Message to something else. So he will try to influence you to write an altogether different story from the one that we all know—or knew. We seem to be losing the Gospels pretty fast. You see, in our time frame, everything began to go crazy about six months ago when the Hacker started hacking, last Christmas, which is about the time that General Electric's special computer department discovered that miles of tapes were blank, while the remaining works in print were being altered— altering themselves, that is, because the Hacker had actually gone back to the source, to Saint Mark, say, and got him to write that Jesus was married at twenty and had twins, and was into gambling, and so on. Dr. Cuder was the first to warn the front office what was happening and, I guess, that was when he hired Wasserstein—^too late for all the key tapes except yours, which has been made secure, thank Moroni, so far." Chet looked tired.
"You mean I might still be erased.^"
"Or altered. We're up against the most sophisticated state-of-the-art computer science, and it is in the hands of a genius who knows what he is doing. What are those fags doing.>" Finally, Chet reacted to the orgy by the basin.
"They are defying nature and I pray for them, naturally." Then I took the bull, as it were, by the horns. "You come here today through a medium, as did Dr. Cuder and his later self and Shirley MacLaine. While Mrs. Eddy induces a nightmare to get here. Now—are they holograms, too?"
"Yes. Of course. Most of them are what we call New Age freaks. On the other hand, I'm electronic—except today. Actually, they're only dreaming that they are here, if they are even doing that."
"Then am I dreaming when I see them.^"
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Chet shrugged. "It's not my discipline, Tim boy. Maybe, yes. Maybe, no. But they are getting through to you. Fortunately, they can't touch you or do much of anything except bug you. The real breakthrough was my getting the TV set back here. That was epoch-making, science-wise. They said it couldn't be done, but Saint Paul said if you have faidi . . ."
"Saint was in on it?"
Absendy, Chet walked through the marble basin, and a pederast who saw him fainted, and was removed by a Nubian attendant, preparatory, no doubt, to massage. Chet turned back to me.
"On an earlier tape, now altered. Since we were both suspicious of Cuder, I farmed out the contract to Gulf -I-Eastern's Secret Unit—^you see, before GE, I was at Paramount until Barry Diller left and as you know Paramount is a Gulf + Eastern affiliate which is why I have friends in the lab there so . . ."
"STOP! No business news. CNN is bad enough, with Grant Perry. Gulf + Eastern developed the technology for you, and they sent me a Sony instead of a GE set. But they still can't send a person."
"No. Fast rewind requires such powerful ..."
"The Cutler Effect, I know."
"So the older Dr. Cuder has been bragging to you. Yes, the Cutler Effect is what they call those mega-radio waves that power the transference from one spot in space-time to the other. To date, these waves can project an inanimate object like your Sony. But, until now, they would so scramble the molecules of a human being that he could never be reintegrated."
I now understood what was happening. I was triumphant. "You'll be happy—or unhappy—to know that in the
last few weeks in your time frame there has been a further scientific breakthrough. That's why I made that emergency call to your office. The Cutler Effect has produced a human descrambler. I shook hands with Marvin Wasserstein."
Chet didn't take this in at first. "Well, you met him, yes, like me. . . ."
"No. Not like you. You're a hologram, for which I'm not criticizing you. Live and let live is my motto. He who is without sin and so on. But Mr. Wasserstein is not a hologram. He arrived in my office as unscrambled flesh and blood."
"Jesus Christ!" Chet looked iU.
"It would appear that the Cuder unit at GE is now ahead of Gulf + Eastern. They can send us a complete person. They can also send someone from here back to Golgotha as they plan to do with me, whether I want to go or not. I have seen a Polaroid of myself, taken at the Crucifixion with Mary Baker Eddy."
Chet raced from the steam room. He has now lost control of the situation to Dr. Cuder. This means that my own gospel is now at risk if it is true that Dr. Cuder intends to eliminate Pauline Christianity through me.
I can feel demons all about me, visible and invisible, the quick and the slow. The Prince of this World is more than ever luminous and seductive and I must hold on to my memory of what was true or at least what we said was true, which was the truth. Now it is high time to awake out of sleep. The day is far spent, the night—erasure—is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of light, and let us put on the armor of darkness, as Jesus told His disciples in the house of Carol Levi where she gave the Zionists a dinner party after the fundraiser at Cinecitta.
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Live from Golgotha 119
that once Jesus and Pilate had struck a deal, James would be able to edge the prime rate up, sinc
e Jesus would be too busy arranging for the Day of Judgment and the establishment of the Jewish State as the first in the world in order to make it easier for God to wind up the whole show.
As it turned out, the treasury at Rome ordered Pilate to eliminate Jesus and bring the Temple banking system back into line under the governor's direct control even if that meant occupying the Temple precinct itself, something that could not be done without civil war. So Pontius Pilate, very sadly, crucified the first low-interest-rate monetarist that the Jews had produced since Jesus's ancestor King David, also an easy-money fi-eak.
Naturally, we do not teach the real cause for the Crucifixion but only the cover story. In actual life, Jesus was indeed the Jewish king, who had threatened the rule of Rome as well as that of the Temple rabbinate, whose bank controlled the monetary policy not only of the Middle East but that of Greece and Egypt as well. "If Jerusalem eats a bad oyster, Alexandria vomits" was a financial joke of the period.
Now, of course, the Temple is a ruin, thanks to the Zionist attack on the Roman garrison, an intifada that lasted fi-om 66 to 70 A. D. When it was over, there was no more hope of a Jewish state or even, for most Jews, any sign that one of the two dozen messiahs charging about the countryside might turn out to be the real thing. Only Christian goyim really believed that we had been visited by the real thing, and that He would soon return.
Well, Jesus had not checked in again as of 54 a.d. when I was at Rome with Saint, nor, again, as of now, 96 a.d., nor as of the 1990s in the ftiture, though Dr. Cutier Two said that since there is now a television-age Jewish state, Jesus will return in the year 2001.
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Meanwhile, there have been far too many false alarms. Cutler One wants me to believe that Jesus was simply a politician with a lot of demagogic funny-money schemes. But I shall not fall into his trap. No one, thank Moroni, can guide my stylus.
Thirty years ago Jerusalem was a vibrant city. There was every hope that the Romans would soon see the light and go home. Then Israel would rise again. On the other hand, the city lacked charm, to say the least. Unlike Ephesus or Antioch, there was no fun to be had in the town, not that I would have had the time.
Saint's row with kid-brother James took an ugly turn after Saint was accused of un-Jewish activities. I could never understand why we didn't say to hell with the whole lot of them. Who needs the Jews when, as it turned out, wc were converting the whole world.> But Saint was a Jew first when shove came to knife, as they say in Corinth, and so he agreed to demonstrate his absolute kosherness by undergoing the extra-special Nazirite vow. This meant paying a lot of money into the Temple treasury as well as shaving his head and moaning a lot in public. Four friends also had to undergo this cosdy humiliation.
I said no, thanks. I had given my prepuce to the Jews and that was that. So Paul picked four of the eight who had come with him to Jerusalem, and they put up with all of this unpleasantness for Saint's sake. Even so, as they were Asia Minorite Greeks who despised the Jews, I could see that Saint had dropped a notch or two in their estimation. He did not drop in mine, as I knew him through and through. He would do anything to sell himself—and his Message—to everyone. But for once his anything was not enough.
The governor of Palestine was a pleasant Roman bu-
reaucrat called Felix. Wisely, he spent most of his time at the Roman town of Caesarea-on-Sea. But then, by and large, Roman officials steered clear of Jerusalem, where someone was always being denounced or stoned to death by one faction or another. Every week a new messiah was announced, usually by himself or his mother, and the troops at Fort Antonia would be called out to keep order, and the Sanhedrin would go into session. If there was anything the rabbinate at the Temple did not want, ever, to see it was the real messiah. Of course, they did see ours—^the real one— but they promptly fixed His wagon; or so they thought. Then they convinced James, His possible heir, to go to work in the Temple bank where they could keep an eye on him.
Felix kept out of Jewish religious quarrels as much as possible. He was in place, he said, to administer the province and keep an eye on the Zionists, particularly the ten thousand Dagger-men who kept rushing about stabbing Romans, and generally making trouble. I don't think any of us suspected that by the end of the decade the Roman general—later emperor—^Titus would tear down the Temple and take the Temple treasure back to Rome. But then, all in all, Mossad's intelligence was not what it was cracked up to be. Even so. Saint had worked for them before he saw the light, and it was rumored that James was also on the payroll. Certainly, Judas, who fingered Jesus, was a Mossad man.
On a gray foggy morning, I went to the Temple with Saint and the other four penitents. They looked a sight, with their heads entirely shaved, including eyebrows. James and the other Jerusalem Jesists acted as an escort. James could not stop smirking even though smirking was stricdy forbidden in the truly sacred part of the Temple which is not, according to old tradition, the banking complex but the chamber of cleansing at the heart of the building.
At the center of the chamber there is an oblong pool.
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At the four comers of the pool sandalwood bums in braziers, which adds enormously to the expense of the Nazirite purification ceremonies. I sat in the mezzanine with the rest of Saint's entourage and a number of lucky ticket holders who gazed with pleasure on the elaborate rites, which included a lot of moaning and breast-smiting and, finally, nude immersion to wash away all sin. I noted that two of Saint's fellow penitents—Greeks—had shrewdly drawn their foreskins back to give the impression that a kosher butcher had done his work. I noticed James staring very hard at the potentially offensive members, but the foreskins remained hitched up throughout the purification. Had they not, everyone would have been killed. As it was, we were almost all of us killed after the ceremony.
James gave the penitents lunch at an attractive two-star Pharisee restaurant near the pigeon market. Here Gentiles could mingle with Jews at the edge of the Temple precinct. A number of Roman centurions were having a riotous lunch party in one comer so we sat in the opposite comer—^maybe twenty of us at a tresde table where the menu was, predictably, dairy.
James and Saint sat side by side. I was opposite them. Saint put on his contrition act, and James put on his falling-for-the-contrition act, but it was clear to me if not to Saint that James tmsted him about as far as he could throw him.
Saint gargled wine, an odd habit that, he said, cleared his voice. "I feel the purification already, in the marrow of the bone."
"How about that?" James was cool.
"But then unto the pure all things are pure." Saint took a swig of wine. "A litde wine for the stomach's sake, and what ails you."
"I'm temperance," said James, munching on a cheese blintz.
"Any word from the Rock?" Saint looked like a skinned rabbit without beard and eyebrows.
"You mean Simon called Peter?"
"Has he been sending you remittances, as I have?"
"He is saving souls at Rome, or so he says." James changed the subject. "I don't think this can go on much longer."
"What?" Saint batted his eyes but without the brows the effect was simply comical.
"You are magnifying my brother Jesus into something he wasn't. You are telling the goyim that he was the Son of God, which is blasphemy, and now that you are in a state of unique purity, I want you to cut it out. Desist!"
"I preach that we are all servants of God, all sons of God, as did He, as you well know." Saint loved juggling words as much as he did objects.
"The report that I keep getting is that you said, 'God did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for all of us.' Do you deny this?"
Saint was ready for him. "It's a matter of translation, really. In Greek, the language I use when I speak to the goyim, pais means servant. Pais also means child. When I say that Jesus was the servant of God, as He most definitely was, I am also saying that He is the son of God. Greek-speakers work out my meaning."
&n
bsp; Since James could barely speak Latin and had no Greek at all. Saint easily finessed him. "Anyway, James, it is clear that the One God is the creator of the universe and that His servant is Jesus who is the messiah who will come as the Lord of this world, the King—or Christ—of this Kingdom of God on earth, as it is in Heaven. ..."
James was thoroughly tied in knots. But, of course, he was right. Saint had been changing the whole show. By always using "pais" he was actually telling the Greek-speak-
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ing goyim that Jesus was the Son of God but then, when accused of blasphemy by the Jews, he'd bat his eyes and say that he was only using the word "pais" for servant. Weil, you don't get to be a major saint without street smarts.
The notion of the Trinity—God in three sections—was already being talked about though not formulated until two or three hundred years later. Somehow, with a religion based on a single God-Creator of Jewish extraction, the wild olive shoot had to be grafted on so that One stayed One but had a Son-Servant who was crucified, producing a third section, a Holy Ghost. Frankly, I have never understood any of this, but from what I hear on the Sunday Hour of Power and Prayer, the people in the future don't seem to have any trouble with the Three so I guess I can deal with it, too. Anyway, as a functioning bishop, I am more into fund-raising than theology.
James could not cope with Saint's arguments. All he could say was, "Well, if my brother was the messiah, he came only for us, the Jews, and the restoration of Israel, and our dominion over all. . . ."
"James." Saint's voice was low, pleading. "If He is who we think He is then He is for everyone. I thought we had agreed upon that. I have already got us off the hook by showing how the messiah must be crucified as part of a divine plan to save all men, not just the Jews. ..."