Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

  "Glaucon and I fell into each other's arms when we met here at one of Petronius's soirees. He was already the toast of the town, as I was, too—this was after the third recital, which you've probably heard about, where the emperor's aunt fainted with excitement. Now, Timmy, be absolutely frank with me. I saw you in the audience tonight. What did you think of Two Keys, really and truly.>"

  When Priscilla wanted your frank opinion about a fiiend's work, an all-out assault was expected. So I said, "I never laughed so hard in my life."

  "Of course you don't really know anything about the theater—or art of any kind," she added pensively. "I'm afraid I thought Two Keys too commercial. Two many concessions to popular taste. A banal plot, tired jokes. Audiences love it, but what do audiences know? Glaucon has the capacity for greatness. I sense it, I always have. I hunger—the world hungers—^for Glaucon's Medea. ..."

  "With you in the tide role.>"

  ^n^iens!^' She clapped her hands at the novelty of my suggestion. ^Tourquoi pas?^^

  The great writer joined us. "Hey there, Tim boy! Great to see you. Just saw Paul in the other room. Like old times, the old gang all together here in Babylon by the Tiber. How docs that grab you as a tide.>"

  "Fun," I said.

  "Surely, we can do better than that," said Priscilla, eyes luminous with artistic envy.

  Then wc were joined by a dark-haired woman, very distinguished if a trifle too long dans U dent, as Priscilla would say. This was the wealthy Christian widow Havia, into whose palatial mansion atop the Aventine I moved the next week, and there I remained for several months as her spiritual adviser and bedmate. Saint was furious but even he had to admit that life on the sixth floor of Eighty-two was intolerable.

  Havia made it very clear, good Christian that she was, that she needed only one spiritual counselor in her bed and home, and that was not Saint, so he moved in with a Christian family at the other end of the hill. Needless to say, he was always hanging around the home, but Havia was a good sport. Of course she never suspeaed that anything was going on between the two of us but then, in actual fact, what with age and the endless lawsuit, Saint was much less active in that

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  department in those days, and I was no longer pawed over as much when we were alone together, which was not often.

  The Christian community in Rome was soon divided between Saint's fans and those of the Rock, with Saint proving to be better box office, as always. Romans are mad for metaphysics and juggling. This gave Saint, a master of each, quite an edge over Rocky, who was terminally boring in the pulpit and was never asked to the better homes even though he and not Saint had been entrusted by Jesus with the Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven; on the other hand, as Saint liked to joke, he and he alone had located the right lock to the gates.

  Aware of the difficulties that I am facing as I try to recollect the now lost or fading testaments, episdes, postcards pertaining to the origin of Christianity and the life of Jesus, I spent a lot of time with Mark, making notes fi-om his original text, which was based pretty much on the Rock's recollections as told to Mark. The Rock himself was practically illiterate.

  Mark was very good about letting me copy direcdy from his text. But he found it hard to believe that in two thousand years the whole thing would start to come undone. I did my best to explain to him what Chet and Dr. Cuder and Marvin had told me about computer viruses, but Mark couldn't begin to grasp the technology. After all, this was almost forty years ago, before the Great Fire.

  "You say you've dreamed all this?" Mark was seated on a pile of rugs just arrived from Persia. I was at his table, copying the begats from his manuscript into mine.

  "No, not exacdy dreamed. It's tough to explain. You see, I'm rememberin0 all this—^you know, life in Rome as of now, 64 A.D., before the Fire. ..."

  "What fire.>"

  "The whole city is going to bum down. This year, I think "

  "Get a grip on yourself, Tim. You don't want to get yourself tagged as a prophet, do you> I mean Rome is absolutely crawling with these freaks, worse than Jerusalem with all those phony messiahs. ..."

  "No. This is for real. At least Fm for real ... I think."

  As I write these lines I am aware of a constant humming that fills my study here in the bungalow. I am being bombarded by radio waves of different frequencies. I suppose I should stop until they let up. But then I'd never get this written.

  Lately, the humming starts whenever I begin to record the sacred story. When I leave my desk, it stops. Dr. Cuder, I presume.^ Anyway, despite interference I must press on because I have finally contacted Mark at the right time and place in my memory where we both had such a discussion, I think, even though the word "hologram" was unknown to us despite the hindsight that I now have, which is more than a match for Mark's total absence of foresight.

  "You see, Mark, I am writing all this down at a much later time than now."

  "But you're copying my text right now in front of me." Mark frowned. "I think you should know that Zenas—a lousy trial lawyer but an expert at copyright—has already registered this book at the Tabularium."

  "I won't publish for two thousand years. That's a solemn promise." Then I told Mark as much as I thought he could absorb of what is happening in fast-forward land.

  To my surprise, he was not surprised. "Demons are everywhere, and we do know that something did happen to Jesus in the Botanical Gardens. So it's possible what you say is true. But if it is, why don't I hide my Gospel out on

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  the Appian Way, in one of the tombs so that your friend Selma . . ."

  "Chet, actuaUy."

  "Right. So Chet can dig it up."

  "Because there is no Mark tape left. No Mark text can survive. This"—I indicated his manuscript—"has vanished, or is vanishing, along vnth all mention of you and all the others' Gospels."

  "But here it is. Right in front of us. As real as ... as this rug." He held up a Bactrian item like the practiced dealer he was.

  "Yes, this is real. So are you. So is that ugly Bactrian door mat. But only because I'm real. You're in my tape, the only surviving nonblocked tape there is."

  Mark dropped the rug. "I exist only in your memory.^"

  "You got it in one. Only in my memory, w^hich isn't what it was now that I'm in my sixties, and there is a humming going on which means that they . . . can you hear it.>" Suddenly, the humming seemed to be coming from the manuscript on the table.

  Mark nodded. He turned pale. He looked like he was-going to be sick. "I don't exist when you leave this room.>"

  "Afraid not. I don't think you'll/^^/anything. Of course the real Mark—^you, that is—is still alive as far as I know, in the year 96 a.d. where I live and where I'm now remembering you just as you were."

  Mark shut his eyes. "I see men as trees, walking."

  I began to take his dictation. By the end of the day I had the whole story written down, without all the begats admittedly, but wdth a lot of vivid new stuff which Mark had been forced by his publisher to cut, including the highly relevant Lesson 254: "Let every voice but God's be still in me because today we let no ego thoughts direct any words or actions." So Jesus spoke directly to Helen Schucman.

  I have now, for those timing in on me, put my version of Mark's testament in a place where no one can tamper with it. Meanwhile I continue wdth my own testament, as it has to do with Saint's last days in Rome, as well as my own eyewitness account of what really happened at Golgotha, which I have yet to visit, presumably on the train from Westport as we have no trustworthy mediums, that I know of, in Macedonia.

  were engrossed in their games, each humming or mumbling to himself a characteristic noise, when not crying out "Oh, partner, what have I done!" like Priscilla, who faked bridge as she did everything else until she realized that if she didn't get a grip on the game she wouldn't be asked to Petronius's Thursdays. So she took lessons from a Syrian slave: For some reason, Levantines are masters of all card games. It is in th
e blood, I suppose, or maybe fingers. Anyway, Priscilla's game improved, and she was invited everywhere, including to Court, thanks to Glaucon's popularity. I never did get to Court but I did meet Nero.

  I placed myself on a stool beside Petronius's marble throne. He ran his fingers through my golden curls. "What a dish," he said in that elegant drawl that everyone in the Palatine set tried to imitate.

  "A lead dish, sir.>"

  "That depends on how much you charge. At the moment"—^he gathered up a handfiil of curls, very painful, too—"I'd say a golden dish." He let go of my hair. "Now tell me about that boring Jew you travel with, the one who looks like a monkey."

  "Paul is a Christian, actually. . . ." Petronius ladled some wine into my goblet. The ladle was made of white gold set with emeralds, and Petronius used its beauty as a standard with which to compare things. Of Flavia, my widow friend and mistress, he observed, holding up the ladle like a measuring stick beside her face, "You are easily one third of my ladle," which was a high compUment indeed. I was "ladlelike," the highest category.

  "There is always some new religion hurtling toward us from the east, and one never knows whether it will last or not. Little did we suspect that when the goddess Cybele arrived in town two hundred and fifty years ago that she would

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  become a major player, god-wise, in our Pantheon. Perhaps your Jesus will catch on, too. Who knows.> And then who cares.> Nothing is real at the end."

  I was shocked, but continued to beam fawningly upon that hawk-nosed face whose mottled skin hung in patches from the gaunt cheeks. He looked like Lazarus, as described to me by Mary Baker Eddy. "Of course your Jesus, if I understood Paul correcdy, is an end-of-the-worlder, and those types always come a cropper when the world does not end as predicted."

  "We say that there is no actual date set but that the end will come ^ and so we must be ready, which is why Christ died for our sins and why, with His Resurrection, God began the final phase."

  I was, even then, adapting to the new line. As I was earnest and boyish and plainly adorable, he grabbed another swatch of my hyacinthines. Then he groped my neck for a moment. Petronius was into necks.

  "As you probably know, for those of us at the heart of the system there is neither God nor gods, only flickering shadows in men's minds, remnants from earlier times and other light, so many confused memories of actual events or, better, entirely imagined ones, as art is always preferable to life, as this ladle so triumphandy demonstrates and certainly, like this ladle, more usefril to the soul. Finally there is no god anywhere except in the imagination, which means that you and your fiiends are imagining a very complicated sort of god while I have never dreamed of one at all. For me there is only flesh and sunlight and the sea off the rocky coast of our Magna Grecia vivid at noon when the port of Croton swarms with life beneath the urgent sun. I still dream of the youths that I knew when I myself was young—I had a yacht, was resdess, needed a constant shift of scene as long as the scene

  included gray limestone and bright painted temples to nonexistent yet cheerful deities, and, always, the blue-green sea into which, years ago, a boy dove from the wharf at Croton so that he could swim to me aboard my ship, but since he broke his head on a rock beneath the blue-green sea, the dive was not into my arms but into all eternity. Smooth skins, sweat like sea water . . . Oh, that was the only deity I ever needed and need no longer since I have now taken the long, long dive into old age. This morning my litde toe dropped off. Were I not a stoic, I might have grown testy. Yet one can still comprehend beauty, see and touch rose-white skin, and gaze upon my glorious ladle. Finally, toeless or not, perfection in art is the only god worthy of worship. Except, of course, for the one who now approaches. ..."

  With surprising agility, Petronius was on his nine-toed feet, as was everyone else in the conversation pit—on their feet and then on their knees to the Divine Augustus, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, known to the world by his family name, Nero.

  Nero was better-looking than his coins might indicate. He had dirty-blond hair, and a very strong body. He might have been really handsome if he hadn't developed what is called in Lystra a beer belly. He looked pregnant. He also had bad skin, like Petronius—^yes, it was from lead poisoning.

  "Rise. Rise. Let the sun of Rome shine frill upon your loyal faces." He spoke perfect if rather theatrical Greek, and Greek was the required language of the Court, which annoyed the old guard patriciate, who were deep into Latin culture. I suppose even without hindsight, one could have figured out that he wasn't going to make it through a long reign, but, at the time, he was very popular in intellectual circles, and a hero in the Greek worid, where he liked to perform in public, boxing and acting and singing songs about

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  how you rack with pain when you keep on picking cotton alongside that old River Nile.

  The only time that Saint ever got close to Nero was thanks to me. I told Petronius what a great tap dancer and juggler Saint was. Petronius auditioned him; then he booked Saint into the Palatine for the Saturday evening smoker. I was not present that night, but Glaucon was and he said that Saint had never been in better form. Apparendy, he kept preaching the Gospel while juggling and tap-dancing, which Nero thought riotously funny. The begats had the emperor rolling on the floor while Saint's account of the Resurrection proved to be a thigh-slapper in the creme dc Id creme set.

  Anyway Saint was furious at being treated as a mere entertainer, but when Nero asked Saint to give him private lessons in tap dancing—^incidentally, Nero was marvelous in modem dance and once partnered Priscilla in Glaucon's version of "The Saints Go Dancing In"—^he was delighted to accept. But then the city burned down and Saint was executed, thanks to Zenas, the lawyer.

  I have often wondered how history might have been altered had Saint been able to give Nero the full twelve lessons in tap and soft-shoe, during which he would certainly have converted him. A Christian Nero—but then there is no use in pondering what might have been. What is is, was was, or will be, won't it.>

  Nero tumbled for my boyish charms. Petronius made the presentation.

  "A lovely young Greek, Petronius. You certainly know how to arbiter them." This was a splendid play on words, in Greek anyway. Nero tugged my hair. "Are you an amateur boxer.^" The usual come-on at Court in those days.

  "No, Divine Caesar. I'm into wrestling—amateur, that is. With girls."

  "He is all boy," said Petronius, waving the glittering ladle over the punch bowl.

  "Some ladle!" Nero sighed.

  "I have left it to Your Divinity in my will. And may I say that at the rate I am losing odds and ends of myself, die ladle will soon find its perfect home with Your Divinity."

  Nero made the sign to ward off the evil eye. "Don't! Bad luck. Death is the great no-no." Nero lowered his voice. "Speaking of no-nos, there is a plot to kill me. . . ."

  "Surely there is always a plot to kill Your Divinity. This is Rome, after all."

  Nero shook his head, rather sadly I thought. "Calpur-nius Piso is behind it. Your friend."

  Petronius was cool. But then sangfroid was his middle name. "Your friend, too. Divinity. At least to your face. As he is to mine. In any case, we are simply bridge partners. Which reminds me, I haven't seen him in many a moon at the bridge table."

  "Too busy plotting, I should think. I suppose I shall have to prepare a blood bath." Nero sighed. "All that work! Those endless lists."

  "Unfortunately, the only thing that your subjects really respond to is a deep, thorough, cUansin£f blood bath."

  "You are always right, Petronius. Meanwhile, let's have some amateur boxing." Nero turned to me. I turned, fearfully, to Petronius, who turned to the buder and said, "Show His Divinity to the boxing room."

  I blushed, for every eye was upon me as Nero led me to my—shame. No other word.

  In the boxing room, he tugged off my tunic and there I stood, trembling like a virgin, bare as a post. "My, my," he said appreciatively as he
scanned the bod. "Let's see some biceps. Now from the side. Good! Tighten those pecs. Good

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  definition. Now mm around. Stretch those lats. Tighten those beautifiil little buns. Ail right. Up on your tippy toes. Let's check out those calves. Good veins. Now turn around. Flex the thighs." His eyes focused on my mutilated whang. "Jew boy?" Nero's eyes narrowed.

  "No, a Christian," I squeaked. "I just had this done because it was too tight. ..."

  "Phimosis!" Nero was now all smiles. "It could happen to anyone. Did you know that there is an epidemic of phimosis, even as we box, in Britain? Don't you love it? Now turn around again. Tighten the buns. Like white marble globes. Too gorgeous. Now spread them wide. ..."

  "But I don't box. Divinity. I'm no nance," I cried. "I'm a top."

  "You were a top," said Nero, arranging me on my back, my legs in the air, one hand on each of my ankles, just the way I handle girls.

  "This is date rape!" I screamed.

  "Correct. Now shut up." He closed his eyes. "I've got to fantasize that you're a beautiful girl to reach the child within."

  Then, with a bellow like a bull, he plunged straight into me. I yelled; he pounded; I bucked; he came. My legs fell to the floor while he lay between them.

  "How I wish you were a girl," Nero whispered in my ear.

  "So do I. I mean, what I mean is, if men are going to do this sort of thing to me, it would be a lot easier being a girl. Like I told you, I don't go that route."

  "But you have gone that route, all the way to the end of the line, Timikins. And I topped you all the way. It's what I call tough love. Now, then, how would you like me to turn you into a girl?"