He tried to look through shadow to the time before he became a man, and it was a dream filled with light he had lived somewhere, the shards of a madman’s memory delivering him into an abyss of doubt. Why should not the recorded version be any more true than his memory of his home world?
He did not know who he was; he could not prove anything to himself, or anyone else. A proof of his divine origin would deny men the choice of following his example. Only fools would fail to bet on a sure thing. His followers had followed him first, then they had been given their proof; mistaken as it was, it had passed for reality. He thought of how many had followed his name during the last twenty centuries, believing in him even when it had meant their deaths.
The others, the men from the future—they had wanted a living creature to play with, to harm in the way that human wreckage was used and dumped from speeding cars in this evil time around him. They had not had their fill with him, at least. But there was no judgment in his mind, only the awareness of the life he could not lead, the powers he could not enjoy, and the knowledge that he would die eventually, never knowing again the perspective of his own kind.
Slowly the sun came lower into the west and hung swollen over the stone alleys of the city, casting its still warm rays against the face of the building and into the doorway where he was sitting. In front of him the whiskey was dry around the broken glass. An old dog crept by, sniffed at the remains and continued down the street.
His thoughts faded as he tried to remember. It was difficult to remain alert. The sun took an eternity to go down behind the building across the street, but finally it left him in a chill shadow, trying to make sense of the thought of places beyond the world and the bits of conversation floating in his mind.
“Why take the effort? It’s like dozens of worlds. They’re intelligent, but it’s all in the service of the beast.”
“Maybe an example might make all the difference—stimulate their rationality through belief. It’s worked on many worlds. The sight of a man who was also more than one of them, a man who visibly lives the best in them, maybe it would work here too.”
“Whoever took the job would be in for it—the experience would alter him permanently,” the first voice said.
“Karo wants to isolate a new group, work on their genetic structure, maybe supplement it with some teaching.”
“Karo has always underestimated the power of persuasive forces, and any creature’s ability to alter its own choices and tendencies...”
He had come among them, taking the place of an unborn man in a human womb; and the mother had come to the cross to cry for her son.
It was so hard to remember. He still found it deadening to think that these creatures from the future had developed time travel, had taken him from the cross and had made it possible for him to have lived so long in this city. The words in the book—maybe they were truer? No one from his own world had ever thought of making time travel a working reality. They would never find him here.
He started to cough as the darkness filled the stone corners of the deserted street, and he felt the sidewalk grow colder under his feet. The evil ones from the future had taken his life, saving it for their own pleasure; his own kind had forsaken him centuries ago.
His mind clouded; it was more than the alcohol. The shock of appearing in a specific time after he had tumbled out of the shuttle, after he had floated for an eternity in the faintly glowing mists, had left him with sudden discontinuities in his thinking and consciousness, as if his mind were trying to regain the other place, the high ground of his original locus, the place he looked up to now from the bottom of a dark hole.
He heard footsteps in the darkness to his right.
Shapes entered the world, came near him and squatted on the pavement. Suddenly a can of garbage caught fire in the middle of the street and the quick, dancing glow showed three ragged figures warming themselves, their shadows jet black crows on the walls of the deserted brick tenements.
One of the men walked over to him and said, “Hey Hal, there’s an old guy here in the doorway, come see!”
The other two came over and looked at him. He looked up at them with half-closed eyes. He was sure they were not from the future.
“Too bad—he wouldn’t be here if he had anything valuable on him.”
He tried to sit up straighter on the doorstep, to show them he thought more of himself. Their stares were making a mere thing of him, something to be broken. He felt it in them, and the wash of hopelessness in himself.
“We could take his clothes,” one said. They were all unshaven and dirty, their elbows showing through their sleeves.
“Why do you wish to harm me?” he asked.
“Listen, old man, you’re not going to last long when it gets cold. We can use your clothes.”
“Do you have a drink? I dropped mine...”
“Okay, let’s strip him down. Now.”
They came at him, blotting out the light of the fire. Almost gently they began to remove his clothes, moving his arms and legs as if they were the limbs of a mannequin. His body tensed and he became an object in their hands, forgetting where or who he was. Their arms held him like constricting snakes.
He felt a spasm in his right leg and he caught one of them in the crotch with a sudden kick. The man doubled over in pain and fell backward onto the pavement, revealing the fire behind him suddenly.
“Kill him!” he shouted from where he lay. “Kill the bastard!” And he howled from his pain.
The others started to kick him. “Interpose a god to change animals into men, stir a noble ideal in their beast’s brain.” He felt his ribs break, first on one side and then the other, and they hurt as his body rolled on the pavement from their blows. “We’ve been fortunate on our world, we have to help where there is even a chance, even a small chance.” The words of his co-workers on the project whispered to him softly, but he could not remember the individuals who had spoken them.
“Take his clothes off,” the groaning man said from the pavement where he still lay. “Make it hurt good!”
When he was naked one of them kicked him in the neck, exploding all the pain inside his head. For a brief instant he had a vision of the vandals from the future materializing on the street to carry him away; but he knew that they were the same as these who tormented him now.
Two of them rolled him near the fire and he felt its warmth on his bare skin. “Can you spare me?” he whispered. A hot stone from the fire touched his back, settling into his flesh as if it were plastic. His thoughts fled and the pain was a physical desolation. He did not know who he was; he knew only that he was going to die.
A sense of liberation passed through his being as his body shuddered. He closed his eyes and hung on to the darkness. He felt them grab his feet and drag him closer to the fire. Hot sparks settled on his skin...
But he knew now that the lie of his death of long ago would become the truth. He had to die now, violently at their hands to make good all the writings and prophecies—to make worthy the faith which was linked to his name. Only this could release him to return home. Suicide would have been useless, accident would not serve to please the Father.
He knew who he was now. The written words were all true, and his only purpose was to fulfill them. He could trust no other memories. He was the Son of God, and he would have to die to hear his Father’s voice again. “The mission, you’re a teacher, a man of science, a bringer of culture, remember?” Lies! The voices died, the deceiver was beaten.
I am Jesus of Nazareth... I have to be, or my death is for nothing, he said to himself. A great light filled his mind, illuminating all his images of the world’s dark places.
He heard a bottle break somewhere near.
The light destroyed all the false memories which the deceiver had sent to plague him.
He was ready.
They turned him on his back, so the wounds on his back would touch the stone hardness. He did not open his eyes, knowing that in a few seco
nds the mission would be complete. The broken bottle pierced his chest, entering his heart, and spilling blood on to the street and into the cavities of his dying human shell.
The Coming of Christ the Joker
By 2001 A.D. some 44 percent of Americans believed that I would be coming back in the new millennium. That’s better than the ten just men my Father tried to find.
—Jesus Christ
“WELL, YOU KNOW, GOD IS AT BEST AN EXAGGERATION,” said Gore Vidal to his talk show host.
“What do you mean?” Larry King asked.
“You know—omnipotent, omniscient, biggest, best—all extremes. Imaginative exaggerations each.” He crossed his legs and sat back with a sigh.
“Don’t you believe in God, Mr. Vidal?” Larry King asked in a hushed voice.
“Believe? Oh, come now, Mr. King, I shan’t be dragged into that can of worms.”
“It’s certainly more than that,” King said.
Gore Vidal smiled his distant, deep smile. “Now look, Larry. You know what the wars between religions were about, don’t you? About which side had the better imaginary friend.”
King laughed uncomfortably as he got the point. “I’ve heard that joke.”
Vidal grimaced with mock mercy. “Okay, let’s be fair. It was about which side had the one true imaginary friend.”
King shrugged. “Same difference. So you think faith is a sham?”
Gore Vidal said, “I’m sure that I could make a better defense of faith than mere insistence.”
As Larry King hesitated before the poised intellect of his guest, someone who might have been taken for Jesus in a lineup appeared slowly in the chair next to Gore Vidal.
The audience gasped. Larry King stared. Gore Vidal looked over and said wearily, “Magic tricks? I’m going to be part of a magic show? Good God, give me a break.”
Larry King reached over and grabbed Vidal’s wrist. “But you... didn’t you see him just fade in? That’s what he did, that’s what he did! Faded right in next to you!”
Vidal sighed and pulled his wrist free. “Fade in? I had to type that in my scripts for ten years so I could make enough money to live as I please.” Then he glanced over at the smiling man sitting next to him and said, “Good evening, Sir. I don’t know why you’re here, but I hope they’re paying you enough. My name is Gore Vidal.”
“Yes, I know,” the bearded, smiling man said through yellowing teeth.
Just as Larry King began to say, “Look here, buddy, I don’t know how you got in here, but the soup kitchen’s down the street,” the visitor disappeared.
In the twinkling of an eye, before Gore Vidal had a chance to look at him again.
“Faded right out!” King exclaimed. “Right on out there...”
“There’s no soup kitchen down the street,” Gore Vidal said as Christ the Joker came to all parts of the world.
He came to ridicule, not to teach or save, following the principle that a good horselaugh is the best weapon against stupidity.
Heads of state found themselves floating naked above their capital cities, screaming as pigeons alighted on these human dirigibles.
At Grant’s Tomb in New York City, Jesus walked up to a cop on the beat while eating a hot dog and wiped his mustard-covered hand on the back of the policeman’s blue uniform. The Irish cop turned around, and Jesus finished the job on the front of the uniform.
“Now look here, friend,” the cop said. “I’ll be runnin’ you in for that!”
“Oh, come now. If you’ve heard my parable about the mustard seed, you’ll know why I did it.”
“Is that a fact?” the cop said as he reached out to arrest the empty air.
On Wall Street, Jesus appeared on the main floor of the stock exchange and scrambled the big board. Amidst the shouts and moans that followed, he unscrambled the board, then with a hand motion sent it into chaos again, just so there would be no mistaking that he had done the deed.
“Terrorist!” cried the money mob, clearing a circle around the Nazarene.
“Put it back!” a lone voice pleaded from some private hell.
As all eyes looked to the salvation of the big board, the chaos continued.
Simultaneously at the Vatican, Jesus appeared in the Pontiff’s earthly garden.
“Who are you?” the Pope demanded, putting away his Palm Pilot.
“Who do I look like?” Jesus asked.
“I think you had better leave,” said the Pontiff, looking around for his guards.
“Very well,” Jesus said, and dissolved.
When the guards arrived, they found the Pope buck naked, attempting to cover himself with a few fern branches.
At Donald Trump’s third wedding reception, Jesus appeared at the champagne fountain and turned all the waiting bottles into boxed wines.
At the annual conference of American governors, combined in this year with a convention of prison wardens, Jesus replaced the keynote speaker, William Bennett, and said, “The measure of a criminal justice system is whether it commits new crimes against the convicted. Fresh crimes harm those who commit them as much as they harm the punished. Surely you can understand that much?”
Then he did a magic trick—the destruction of all documents, physical and electronic, by which 60 percent of all people incarcerated were imprisoned. “Thus I free the undeserving,” he said to the delegates, “and there will be nothing you can do about it. The lawyers will do their work with a good conscience.”
“Who do you think you are!” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani cried from the middle row.
Jesus raised his right hand and said, “I am who will be.”
“What’s that?” Rudy asked.
“As my father was when the Burning Bush spoke,” Jesus continued. “He was who is, and I am who will be.”
“Ah, shut up, Giuliani!” a voice cried out. “You’d arrest Jesus, Mary, and Joseph if they came to New York.”
Rudy said, “The homeless are not, I repeat, not those holy figures.”
The audience booed.
Jesus raised a hand. “The mayor of New York forgets that what he does to the least of mine he does to me.”
Suddenly silent, the audience shrank back from the intruder. Giuliani rolled his eyes, insisting to himself that no one powerful would show solidarity with the weak and worthless without a political motive. Only legends and myths did that. Tricksters he did not have to worry about.
Silently, Jesus looked at the audience—as he did on Wall Street, and in the Papal Garden of the Vatican where the Pontiff prayed on all fours, and in a thousand other places throughout the world. At Grant’s Tomb he leaped into the cop’s arms and kissed him on the lips. The policeman let him go. Jesus did not fall.
“Lord have mercy!” cried the wardens and governors, still shrinking from the hand that seemed raised to strike.
Jesus popped back in on Larry King Live.
Gore Vidal crossed his legs and said, “You know, you’re quite good. You remind me of a novel I once wrote called Messiah. But there’s one fatal flaw in your act.”
Jesus lowered his hand and turned to the famous author. “Flaw?” Jesus asked. “Act? There can be no flaw.”
Gore Vidal sat back and smiled.
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me?” Jesus asked.
“Don’t you know everything?”
“I don’t pry,” Jesus said.
Vidal leaned forward. “Exactly what I mean. You cannot be Jesus Christ, despite your tricks. But you do have his persona right. At least I’ve always liked to believe that Jesus was an annoying character, even to his friends.”
Jesus sat back and gazed with interest at the man of wit. “So why am I not he?”
“As you said,” Vidal explained, “you don’t pry. Now if theism were true, and God—your Dad, I suppose—made us all, then the first thing he would do is to convince us of his nonexistence. At the very least he would make of his being a thing of doubt. This would then leave room for moral freedom and faith. Aft
er all, everyone bets on a certainty, and you wouldn’t like to be worshiped as a sure thing. There’s no test in that.”
“Go on,” Jesus said.
“Therefore, God’s absence is the best proof we have of his existence.” Vidal yawned. “That is, if you wish to play theological games.”
“So what does all this have to do with me not being myself?” Jesus asked.
Gore Vidal grinned, and there was a twinkle in his eye as he asked, “Now, you’re sure you don’t want to pry into my mind and find out—and prove something to me?”
“No,” Jesus said.
“Well, there you have it. Since you’ve interfered with human affairs, you cannot be God or his Son. An interfering God is inconceivable, so you can’t be Jesus.”
“I interfered once before,” Jesus said.
“So people say. For my part a God of second thoughts cannot be God. Therefore you’re a very clever impostor. For all I know you’re David Coppersteel... or some such magician.”
“Don’t get him angry!” a woman cried from the audience.
Elsewhere throughout the world, Jesus continued his guerrilla raids, playing pranks upon humanity in place of exhortations, teachings, or plagues. These last had always been later explained as natural events anyway, so they had never done any good. Even great theologians had marked them as “physical evils” having nothing to do with God, whose evils would surely have been “intentional.”
This time Jesus had begun with slapstick. But he quickly began to see that perhaps something stronger was needed—irony, even bitter black comedy.
Maybe.
He thought about this as he sat next to Gore Vidal, and in a thousand other locations. Humor, it had been said by these very same creatures who had been set in motion by his father (creation was hardly the word for what he had done), was the highest form of reason. It provoked sudden, unexpected exposures of stupidity. Unfortunately, these insights lasted only long enough to produce very slow net progress in human affairs. These creatures might very well destroy themselves before self-improvement kicked in decisively.
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