by Gore Vidal
"You've never met Mary Baker Eddy."
"I suppose she was bad-mouthing poor Marianne Williamson again."
I nodded. "More and more freaks want some input. . . ."
"Don't let them." In the ftiture, Chet lit a cigarette. "I've been checking out Marvin Wasserstein."
"You still haven't met him.>"
"General Electric's a pretty big outfit. Besides, he's on the road a lot. He's some kind of computer genius, which means that even the Japanese call him in on difficult cases. He's in Tokyo right now. I've left word on his answering machine that I'd like to take a meeting when he gets back."
A group of lepers stopped for my blessing, which I gave. "Do you know exacdy when this"—I indicated the cathedral—"discovery of my manuscript is going to take place?"
"Not a clue. Gulf + Eastern claim they'll have a fast-forward human-projection perfected any day now, but I personally don't think it's possible. I mean how do you visit some place that isn't there yet?"
"You can come back in time. ..."
"Because you were—and you are—there. Since you've already taken place, this is a snap. But to go to a time that hasn't happened yet . . ."
I asked the big question. "Has no one channeled in to you from the friture.> Or arrived on that train from a Iciter Westport?"
Chet turned very red for a hologram. "I'd hoped you wouldn't ask me that."
"That means that no one has come to you from your fixture."
"That's right. And it's weird. At GE they think there's some sort of blockage on the line. . . ."
"The Hacker?"
"No. He can't affect channeling, only the tapes of
Hght."
"And he's blocked all those other tapes of light."
"Pertaining to Jesus, yes. But he can't affect all of them,
since they are infinite in number. No, there's some sort of
interference going on. The only visitor from a time later than
ours—I mean my time and Marvin's and Selma's and Dr.
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Cutler's—is the second, the older Dr. Cuder. Have you seen him lately?"
I shook my head. Then I had to get out of the way of a flock of goats, who simply walked through Chet's hologram, which showed how distracted he was. Usually, he's careful to pretend he's real and fakes things like drinking beer or sitting down.
"I'd question him pretty closely if I were you," said Chet. "He knows more than any of us. From what you told me he's plainly 2000 a.d. or even a bit later."
"But he must be living before my gospel is discovered, otherwise he wouldn't keep dropping in."
"Good thinking, Tim boy." Chet glanced at his watch. "I better be off." He frowned. "One thing bothers me, particularly now that Selma's on your case. Substitution."
"Substitution of what for what.^"
"There's nothing to stop one of these obsessive types from writing some sort of fanatic gospel and then whisking back here and putting it in the mop room and everyone will think that you wrote it."
The thought had already occurred to me from the first time I met Chet. "Carbon dating would show it was a hoax."
"Not if they got their hands on some local papyrus. . . . Tim boy, if I were you I'd keep a full-time guard on duty "
"For the next four hundred years.^ Until the Goths, or whoever it is, wreck the town.^" Atalanta and I have watched a number of movies about the fall of the Roman empire, and very funny they are, too. They seem to think that there was some sort of military catastrophe when actually it was a combination of deficit spending and a misguided attempt to increase the tax base by raising personal income taxes to a theoretic ninety percent, at which point the Goths took over
the Ravenna stock market and, in a perfectly straightforward leveraged buy-out, they folded the empire, not a moment too soon for what is now called, in Chet's time, the European Community.
I got all this information from a sixth-century bishop who paid me a call while he was dying. I was his patron saint and he was having a nightmare; in fact, he was delirious, but even so we had an interesting chat—about Jesus and the stock market, and I truly believe he died a happy man.
"This is bothersome," said Chet. "I mean they will have a long time after you're dead to get in there and make a substitution."
"I'll hide it so no one can find it until the whole place is excavated next year, your next year."
"You do that, Tim boy." Then we went back to the bishop's bungalow and Chet took the train home. Of course it's Chet who'll try to plant his version of the gospel in the mop room, unless I tell the story his way, which I will, of course, if he and Saint in the dream are on the level. Oh, what a tangled web they weave! Now I must move on—or rather back—^to Rome on this tape—^text.
Am I possessed? Or—^who am 7? I must keep a firm grip on myself, assuming that it is mine that I now try firmly to grip. Memory is all that we are. Alter the tapes, and one is not one but another. I am besieged.
"2:cnas lives just back of the Senate house in Sorcerer's Street, number eighty-two South Side, Island Nine." Saint had memorized the address. Just as he had already learned the speech that he intended to deliver to the judge, about Caesar and God and all the rest. He had had plenty of time to prepare his case during our visit to Malta. "I'll have them eating out of my hand, Timmy. Wait and see. Poor Peter thinks he's got Rome locked up but wait till yours truly hits the pulpit."
As it was, yours truly was hit by a bullock cart at the start of Sorcerer's Street and would have ended his mission on earth right then and there had I not dragged him out from under the wheels, since the driver had no intention of stopping.
The house of Zenas was actually an apartment building seven stories high, the top two being illegal, but if you paid the right building inspector you could put up anything you wanted in Rome and everyone did and so just about everything either caught fire or collapsed. By and large, you couldn't get insurance in downtown Rome unless you paid an impossibly high premium.
The ground-floor comer of number eighty-two was a pizza parlor with a powerful fish sauce. On the first floor there were a number of lawyers' offices. Zenas was in his office, a large room with a view of another apartment house across the alley. He had a cheap bust of the new emperor, Nero, on a stand behind his desk, to swear on.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome." Aside from his small-ness, he did not seem dangerous. He looked Greek; certainly he spoke good Greek to us—and a lot of it.
Saint harangued him about the case while I took a nap on a bench. I dreamed of Selma, of her pearlike breasts. She was stripping. Slowly, lasciviously. I could not control myself.
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I flung myself upon her. "Watch out for Marianne," she whispered in my ear.
The next thing I knew Saint was pulling on my hard-on. "Wake up, Timmy darling," he whispered. "We have a visitor."
I sat up and loosened my tunic to hide my youthful tumescence. Before me stood a stout man with a gray beard: the Rock, himself, also known as Simple Simon Peter. "Hi there, Tim!" He had a deep voice and a powerful handclasp. "Looks fi-om here like you was dreaming of Marianne Williamson." Of course he could not have said the name any more than I could have been dreaming of Selma, whose hologram I was not to see for another thirty years. What is happening is that these invaders are not only barging into my dreams—fair enough, if you're into religion—but also into my waking life as a gospel recorder.
"I don't know Marianne Williamson and neither," I said, "do you." Then the awful question: "Or do you.>"
"The lad is speaking in tongues." The Rock was himself again. I had probably misheard him. Even so. Saint looked nervous. "Well, anyway, you guys can both bed down here. This is a Christian apartment house, you know."
The Rock helped himself to some beer from a stone crock in the comer. "Owned by a rich widow named Flavia. She don't charge Christians no rent. We pay maintenance of course." Peter sat in Zenas's chair. "Well, Brother Zenas, how does Solly's case lo
ok.^"
Saint ground his teeth. He hated being called Sol or Solly. The Rock knew this and never called him anything else. I give away no theological secret when I say that Peter and Paul were like a dog and a cat in each other's company.
"The case," said Zenas, opening a folder, "is pretty cut and dried. The charge of blasphemy will be thrown out.
Causing a riot is a bit heavier, but even if we can't get it throw^n out, the penalty will be nothing more than what we call, in Roman law, a slap on the wrist."
"The trial isn't until next year." Saint was staring out the window at the usual traffic jam. "I hope you have a room on the inside courtyard for me. I can't take this noise."
The Rock chuckled. "You'll get used to it, Solly. That's a promise. Mortify the flesh, and all that."
2^nas turned to Saint. "You'll have to report to the judge that you're here. I've prepared a bail order. Shouldn't be any problem."
"I shall also want to be presented at Court."
The Rock really laughed at that one. "No way, Solly."
"I am a citizen of Rome, Rocky."
Peter frowned at this use of his nickname, usually said behind his back. "Nero's an anti-Semite. I know. I'm one of the few Jews he's ever booked into the Palatine. But I'm the exception that proves the rule, which is restrictive, although Petronius supports the quota system while there is already affirmative action on the books for Semites and Scythians both in textiles and the building trades."
"Well, I'm a Christian ^rrt, and a littie bird tells me that Nero's ripe for conversion. ..."
"No way, Solly." The Rock was rocklike. But I knew that if Saint wanted to get in with Nero and the Palatine crowd, he would, sooner or later.
At that time, Christianity was making a lot of headway in Roman society, particularly among the ladies who had nothing better to do with their time. Naturally, the slaves always found our message comforting: If you're having a lousy time here, you'll have a wonderful time after you're dead—^/you've been a good Christian, and paid your dues. Since Nero, who was about my age then, was having such a
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wonderful time during his own life, I doubted very much if we could sell him on the idea that he'd have an even better one after he'd cooled it.
Saint and I were assigned a room right on the street, on the sixth floor, which had recendy been tacked on with termite-ridden lumber. Luckily, it did not fall down while we were living there, but it did cave in a few months after I'd moved in with the widow Flavia on the Aventine, as her spiritual adviser and stud. Saint stayed nearby in a gracious Christian home.
Despite the squalor of Rome pre-Fire, there was always a lot to do if you were game and full of curiosity. There was also a lot to do if you had got yourself involved in the Roman judicial process with a lawyer as bad as Zenas. I am sure that Rocky picked him deliberately. At the end Saint was charged with having started a rebellion against Rome and, thanks to the sudden appearance of Alexander the bronze-maker from Ephesus, he was found guilty. Alex told a lot of lies at the judge's request—and so Saint was duly martyred, the name of the game for us saints.
But before Zenas had a chance to display the full range of his incompetence. Saint was at liberty and preaching up a storm all over the city. He was really in orbit there; he also kept in close contact with the rest of his Asia Minor church. By now the whole thing was not only pretty much his invention but it was kept together by his energy and mastery of cross-filing and, of course, the Follow-up Letter. James and the Jerusalem crowd were, gradually, cut out of the action. No other way of putting it. They just faded away. Later, after the Romans destroyed the Temple, they had no influence outside Jerusalem, while the center of the church shifted to Antioch, with Rome as a sort of western capital, despite the so-called persecution of Nero, something of a bum rap since
he was just trying to shift suspicion from himself to the Christians for having started the Great Fire, another bum rap.
The talk of the town when we first got there was Giau-con's play Two Keys for One Lock. I had to see it. So Saint and I got free tickets from a Christian who worked in the box office. The theater was a small one—^what the Pontusines in their faux ^allique call bijou —in a wing of the palace of Petronius, the most elegant man in the Roman empire, as he was always billed. He was the emperor's best friend, and he also wrote dirty books that have been banned, despite my protest, in our diocese where no one reads anything anyway, including Atalanta and me since we got the Sony.
The theater was sold out and the play was very ftmny though the second act dragged a bit. We saw all sorts of celebrities in the audience, and Saint vowed he would convert every last one before his mission on earth expired. To give him credit, he did convert a few rich ladies, and he reorganized the church in Rome, a most lackadaisical affair, since the Rock had no organizational sense. There was a lot of tension between these two at the end.
As we were leaving the theater, who should we see in the fashionable throng thronging about but the author himself, Glaucon, grown a bit paunchy but still frill of ftm. "Hi there. Saint . . . Stud." He always pretended that I was some sort of bull in bed with the ladies, which, I suppose, was true up to a point back then. I pray for my soul every day.
"Superb theater," said Saint. "A gripping yam, well told. With a laugh riot in the second act. No viewer will leave the theater unmoved not only by your wit but by the wisdom that underlies it and makes it so much more than a tinkling cymbal, or mere sounding brass."
"Boy, will that look good on the marquee! Come on, kids! Petronius is giving a party."
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This was my first Roman party and, in many ways, the best. Although it has been Christian policy to depict every Roman party of that era as an orgy, there was very little sex other than the usual exhibitions put on by slave boys and girls, the sort of thing you see in any hick town in the world every night.
Most of Petronius's circle was into bridge. There was one vast hall with a couple of hundred bridge tables where the cream of Roman society played by the hour while an orchestra could be heard in the background. Then there was a conversation hall where people who liked to talk would go and practice their epigrams and mots on each other. Saint headed for that room where Petronius, a dried-up litde man wearing heavy makeup, was being talked at by the wittiest conversationalists in Rome.
I headed into the banquet hall, where a buffet had been set up. I was always hungry during the time we were staying at Eighty-two because the communal Christian kitchen was the pits. Instead of bejeweled yentas like the ones who cooked and served in Jerusalem, we had lowly shicksas giving us boiled wheat.
I was just about to start in on an entire roast boar when I felt two arms embrace me fi-om behind. I turned and gazed into the bright eyes of Priscilla. "Welcome to Rome, Timi-kins."
"My God, what are you doing here.>" Fm afraid that I wasn't very affectionate, but Priscilla seldom noted such things. She was too busy reinventing me for her diary. In the Alexandrian edition of the diary, she wrote that I had been thrilled to see her again when we met at the emperor Nero's palace on the Palatine. Thus, she improved the occasion and made me fictional, her aim in art if not life.
"I've married Glaucon, at last. I had to. He would have killed himself without me at his side. I give him that inner
Strength that he lacks because of his cold withdrawn mother, whose catering business in Crete always came before her son. I have tried to compensate for her indifference by devoting myself entirely to his career, which is now so triumphant that I have been tempted to return to the stage with my own dance troupe. ..."
"Where's Aquila.>"
"In Ephesus. Such a good man."
"Did you divorce him?"
Priscilla's laugh was tinkling. "How old-fashioned you are! This is Roman high society, the fast lane . . . only litde people bother to get divorced. I simply married Glaucon, too."
"You're a bigamist."
^^Cheri, you will keep my secret,
I'm sure."
"I will. But don't tell Saint."
"Are you and he still committing acts against nature together.>"
"Certainly not. What do you think I am, some sort of a nance.>" A nance is what Romans called a guy who takes it in the rear, and also goes in for amateur boxing, a nance specialty, as everyone knows. In olden times a nance would be called a bottom and his penetrator a top. I believe it was Plato who wrote that for every bottom there's a top, somewhere, waiting to be screwed on.
Fortunately, Priscilla's publisher had a good lawyer go over her diaries prepublication. Egyptian libel laws are particularly strict—and all her allegations about Saint and me were either cut out or toned down. She still got in a few digs, including the one about how greatly I had aged when she saw me again in Rome when actually she was the one who looked beat up and I was at the height of my youthful beauty, at twenty-seven.
While we munched on boar, Priscilla boasted. "I found
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that I was already a legend when I arrived here. Everyone knew of the dance and reading recitals in Ephesus, and our host, Petronius, a man with perfect £fouty says that I am greater than Sappho in my recitations," she added quickly, fearing my put-down.
"Where's Glaucon's wife, now that we're talking about les girls.^" With Priscilla I always drift into faux £falltque.
"Ephesus. With Stephanie. Or so they say. I couldn't care less. I warned Shirley MacLaine about what was going on and you can be sure that she won't be channeling in anytime soon to Ephesus. We're well rid of both of them, Glaucon and I. You see, we were made for success, and I don't mean commercial success in the theater. I mean in history. We are two vast legends already. ..."
"Then I reckon a couple of myths are just around the comer."
"Don't mock!" Priscilla's eyes gleamed beneath the heavy black eyeliner and the purple mascara that she had used on her upper lids. The lips were a gorgeous red, and the black gum seldom in evidence since she no longer opened her mouth when she smiled. The body was still good but the neck was really gone. Even so, she still acted as if she was the most beautiful woman on earth.