American Savior

by Roland Merullo

  “We’re half Jewish,” Stab explained to Zelda.

  “You’re not even a Jew,” my mother said. “You’re an atheist. An agnostic.”

  “Thanks for the ‘not even,’” Pa said, still not looking at her. He seemed sad now. The spirit of celebration had drained out of him in the course of a few minutes.

  “The first time, I could see,” my mother went on, still burning him up with the eyes. “You people had your traditions. You interpreted it a different way. He was just a rabbi, a great teacher, nothing else. The first time, forgivable.… But now, if you do it again, Arnie….”

  “What, I’ll go to hell?”

  “Don’t be so sure you won’t.”

  “And what about you? You married a Jew, where does that leave you as far as your Jesus is concerned? He’s going to make you the next pope? Oh, I forgot, sorry, no women allowed, right?”

  My mother made the sign of the cross. It was the word pope that had done it. There were pictures of several popes in her bedroom, a fact that drove my father absolutely crazy. He had confided to me once that the papal pictures sometimes affected his ability to “perform,” as he put it, and early on in their marriage he’d convinced my mother to turn them to the wall before the lovemaking got started.

  “I raised my children Catholic,” she said.

  “Mistake number two.”

  Zelda cleared her throat. I could feel what I thought of as her therapist’s personality rising into her face. It was a kind of calm detachment, almost as if she were stepping out of herself. Most of the time I liked it. But it could drive you nuts if you were fighting with her and she went into this detached zone. “Mr. Thomas,” she said, “Arnie. May I say something?”

  “Of course, dear,” my mother said.

  “Does Jesus have a big penis?” Stab inquired innocently. The thought had simply occurred to him, and he had spoken it; that was what he did.

  My mother shushed him. My father almost smiled.

  “I know you think Russ is a little weird,” Zelda began. “I think so, too, sometimes.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “But this time, if anything, he’s being too cautious. I’ve met this man we call Jesus, and I am not in the least a religious type of person. I don’t pray. I don’t go to church, or synagogue. I try to be a good person, but I’m not much on the idea of a God who runs the universe. But when I had that dream it completely changed me. Completely. And it was the last thing I expected or wanted.”

  “I’m not buying,” my dad said. He wasn’t looking at her, which is what he tended to do when he got angry at people, or lost respect for them.

  “I’m not asking you to buy, really,” Zel went on calmly. “What I’m asking you to do, and I realize that you’ve just met me and don’t know me, and I’m not even officially part of the family yet—”

  “Yes you are,” Stab insisted.

  “Thanks, Stab. I want to be.”

  “Then you’re nuts just for that,” Pa said, but he was looking at her again, and there was a small note of affection in the words. Zelda had turned so that she was facing him full on, and the top of her low-cut dress had somehow traveled another half inch down her chest, and she was pushing the hair out of her eyes in a certain way, and I could see that she had my father’s full attention.

  “I want to be,” Zelda repeated. “I love your son. And I admire him for having the courage to put his beliefs above financial security. All I’m asking is that you come and meet Jesus and decide for yourself. If you believe he’s a charlatan, I’ll understand that, but I’d ask you, with all respect, you and Mrs. Thomas—”

  “Call me Mudgie.”

  “You and Mudgie, to come and meet him in person. He’s giving a public talk next Wednesday in West Zenith, and we’d like to invite all three of you to come and listen.”

  “Never happen,” my father said, but in his voice I heard what I’m sure Zelda didn’t, which was the slightest weakening of his position, the smallest note of surrender. This was my dad all over: He’d put up this big bluster, he’d yell and say things that hurt, and he’d storm out of the house and say he was never coming back, he wasn’t buying, didn’t want to be part of this crazy family anymore.… And then he’d come home an hour later with flowers and ice cream.

  “Because he’s an atheist,” my mother said. “He wouldn’t know God if God came down and ironed his underwear.”

  We had reached that point where the flames had burned hot for a while, and then Zelda had come in with the hose and started to put them out. But little fires were still burning all over the room, giving off smoke she couldn’t know about. Poisonous gases. I was embarrassed, too, who wouldn’t have been? I wanted only to do what I had done as a boy, go into my room, shut the door, curl up on the bed and pretend I was from outer space and had ended up at 98 Shirley Street by accident, and soon my funny-looking friends from the planet Quelaty would come and take me away. But I had nothing to lose at that point, and I was frustrated, and disgusted, and maybe even ashamed because my father’s reaction had awakened the doubt inside me. So to make up for that I finally blurted out, “Jesus is not just running for public office, he’s running for president of the United States.”

  My father looked up and met my eyes. He thought maybe I was making a joke. That the whole thing had been some kind of grand prank TV newscasters played on their parents when they announced their engagements.

  “No joke,” I said, and it was as if I had punched him. “And he wants you and Mom and Stab to work on his campaign with me and Zelda.”

  A long silence, and then, “You’re kidding, right?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “No. Not kidding. Not fooling around. Not a joke.”

  “Only an atheist would ask,” Mom said.

  “Then you’re a nut. And your pretty girlfriend—excuse me, I like you, but I’m a man who tells the truth—is a nut, too. First of all, goddammit, too much fuss was made about Jesus the first time, if you ask me.”

  My mother was strangling a dishtowel. She mouthed, “No one asked you.”

  “I’m not saying he was bad, all right? And for me, coming from the people I come from—people who were chased into a corner or burned alive or shot by people who loved Jesus—you ever hear the stories of the Jewish shuttle?”

  “Shtetl, Pa,” I said, but he was in fourth gear by then, roaring along, and wouldn’t have heard me if I’d had a megaphone. It was a point of pride for him to mispronounce certain words. No matter how many times we showed him the dictionary, he insisted that his pronunciation was correct, or also correct: asprim, Lou Gehrigs, shuttle, Vaddicun, Madeline Monroe, etcetera.

  “Coming from those people even, I can say he was a good man. Did good things, helped people, meant well.”

  “God forgive him,” my mother mouthed.

  “But too much fuss was made, I’m telling you. Too much! Look at these so-called Christians now, what they’re doing! Would you look? They’re starting all over again. Every other word out of their mouth is Jesus. It makes you sick. He wins football games for them now, they really believe that! Next thing, another few years, they’re going to be coming to the door with a gun and asking if you believe in Jesus, if you have a personal relationship with Jesus, if you’ve accepted Jesus into your heart. You say no, they’ll slice your tongue out before they shoot you. I’ve lived with this crap my whole life, okay? So how am I supposed to feel when my oldest son comes home and tells me he met Jesus and quit his job? Tell me, really, I’m asking you: how am I supposed to feel?”

  “Give it a chance,” I said. “Half a chance. You’re a good judge of people. Come meet the guy. Come listen to him talk. If he’s a phony, you’ll know in a second. He’s announcing his candidacy next Wednesday. Come up, you can stay with me or I’ll put you up in a nice hotel. Listen to him talk, and then let me know how you feel.”

  “Never,” my dad said. “Never happen. And I’m, for the record
, worried about you, and I think it’s lousy that a happy event like getting married, a happy thing like telling us you’re getting married, had to get spoiled with this, with this—”

  There was a knock on the front door, and a second later we heard the squeaking hinges. After our argument over who should pay for the champagne, we must have left the door ajar, which was a mistake, because the second-floor tenant, one Mrs. Wu, had been born in a part of China where, we had always suspected, a neighbor’s open door was an invitation. She was tremendously lonely, Mrs. Wu, and her loneliness expressed itself in her habit of inviting herself into other people’s homes, often at mealtime, and her ability to talk for an hour or more without pausing for breath. You said hi to Mrs. Wu on the front porch and you’d be there for sixty minutes listening to stories about her childhood in the Ying Yang Valley. You could pass high school geography without ever opening the book. You could go all the way through puberty standing there on the front porch between that first, “Hi, Mrs. Wu,” and the time your mother started calling you in for supper.

  She shuffled in, but before she could get beyond her opening line, before she could really get deeply into the rhythm of her nonstop talking, before we could go from the fact that it was my fiancée Zelda sitting at the table, not Esther, and from there to the taste of fish caught in the Ying Yang River and grilled over an open fire whenever there was a wedding, and how the little girls were taught to cook the rice that went with it, and how even the eyeballs of the fish were eaten in those days, and how awful the river smelled at certain times of the year because of the factory upstream, and how she and Mr. Wu had sneaked across the border into Nepal … my father stood up. “Too much,” he said. “Mudgie, if you and Stab want to go, you go. Go ahead. But this is too much for me. I’m going up to Lincoln Park to hit golf balls. You hit the ball, it goes in the woods or it doesn’t, it makes sense, it’s simple. Mrs. Wu, here, sit here. Zelda, Russ, I’m sorry, it’s too much for me today. I’m happy for you.”

  And he was gone. And, after Zelda had been forced, along with the rest of us, to listen to Mrs. Wu for an hour and fifteen minutes, we said we had to get to the hotel and check in, and we kissed my mother, who looked like all the plants in her garden had died, and we hugged Stab, who looked confused, and we said that, if they wanted, we could pick them up the next morning and take them to West Zenith, so they could listen to Jesus give his big speech.

  “WELCOME,” I SAID QUIETLY to Zelda as we walked down the creaking steps, “to the Thomas family.”

  SIXTEEN

  The next morning there were no takers for the ride west. Zelda and I made the drive back home more or less in peace.

  My mother had told us she and Stab would wait two days and come up on the train—I think Ma wanted to have that time to see if my father would change his mind—and during those two days Zelda and I worked overtime, trying to get things in place for the big announcement at Banfield Plaza. What troubled us, troubled me at least, was the fact that Jesus had gone incommunicado. At some point on Friday, we realized that we had no way of reaching him. No one—not me, Zel, Wales, Ezzie, no one—had been given a phone number. Zelda did receive a letter with a substantial money order in it and a handwritten note saying the funds were to be used to rent one of the vacant storefronts on Main Street and turn it into campaign headquarters, to hire a car and driver for the Wednesday event, to cover incidental expenses (nothing about my rent was mentioned). But there was no return address on the envelope and no way to trace the money order. While waiting for the headquarters lease to be signed, the rented furniture to be brought in, the placards and posters to be printed up, we did our work out of the house that Wales and Ezzie owned, in Shetland Village, a development of oversized new homes in the rolling countryside fifteen miles west of Zenith proper.

  We sat in their living room with boxes of pizza and trays of sushi (Ezzie’s idea), and we talked and planned and made phone calls, expecting Jesus to show. But he did not show. I started to get nervous. I started to feel, though I was afraid to mention it to Zelda, that my father might have been correct: we were victims of some elaborately staged dupery. We were going to show up at Banfield Plaza on Wednesday at noon, and thousands of other people were going to show up, and there would be no sign of the man who called himself Jesus.

  To make things more nerve-wracking, on Monday, two days before the big event, the press seeds that Zelda had planted started to sprout. In a major way. Whether or not they believed this guy was the actual item, the fact that someone was going around calling himself Jesus Christ was interesting enough to attract the attention of at least the regional media. And the idea that he was running for president, in a climate where the newspapers and TV were already heavily geared up to cover the race, had the potential to be a giant story. National and international. Those of us who’ve been on the inside know that the media has a herd mentality. After the first two or three cautious days, when the big outlets were trying to make sure we weren’t just a bunch of crazies led by a lunatic, they all seemed to decide, simultaneously, that the story had appeal. And then they swarmed.

  The trouble was, they didn’t know where to swarm to. There was no headquarters as of yet. The candidate wasn’t there for them to interview. Zelda had given them the Waleses’ home number, but there was only one phone line, and so they swarmed around the Simmeltons, already public figures despite their reclusive nature (wisely, the Simmeltons decided it was a good time to take that long-planned trip to Costa Rica) and around Ada Montpelier, who, while not the most eloquent spokesperson, seemed to be enjoying the attention; and around her boyfriend, Dukey McIntyre, who’d taken to wearing combat fatigues and boots, even though he had never served in the military, and to telling reporters that he was CEO of Scorched Earth Protective Services, a company that specialized in security arrangements, bodyguards for hire, armored limousines, and transportation of large sums of money. (Against great odds, Dukey would go on, after the campaign was over, to make a small fortune running this business.)

  My mother and Stab were supposed to arrive via Amtrak on Tuesday afternoon, but at the last minute Ma called and said there had been a delay—she’d explain when she saw me—and that they’d be arriving on Wednesday morning, on the 8:30 train. She hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.

  By Wednesday morning, Zelda and I were already exhausted and the campaign hadn’t even officially begun. We’d been at Wales and Ezzie’s until three a.m. for four straight nights, answering calls from everywhere: How did people get press credentials? Would there be face time with the candidate? Did we have empirical proof that this man was actually the Jesus? Were there any more details on the miracles? How could one obtain a press release? Position papers?

  And we’d been driving all over the city, from Banfield Plaza to police headquarters, to the printer, the balloon supplier, the outfit that handled the PA system, the company (called Poop Safe) that provided portable toilets. Some local clergyman had organized a protest and arranged for members of his church to stand on street corners with signs that said, THOU SHALT NOT HAVE FALSE GODS BEFORE YOU! And we’d had word that hotels, motels, and campgrounds within a fifty-mile radius were filled up. The streets of downtown West Zenith, usually half deserted, were crowded with the curious, the faithful, the skeptical, the legitimate and illegitimate press. Restaurants were doing the kind of business they usually did only in the week before Christmas, when a few hundred brave souls came for the traditional lighting of the lanterns at the West Zenith Public Library—a happy event at which two people had been stabbed a few years earlier.

  Zel and I had not eaten a decent meal, not made love, and not had a conversation of any substance in almost a week. A volcano of doubt was shaking and bubbling inside me, and, though I knew she could sense it, I did not say one doubting word to her until we were on the way to the train station, in atypically heavy traffic, to meet my mom and brother. “What if he doesn’t show?” I asked, innocently, through the haze of exhaustion that hung in
the front seat of my car.

  “He’ll show.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?”

  I could feel her turn to look at me. “If he doesn’t, that would mean he was lying to us. He doesn’t lie.”

  “You say that like you know him,” I said. “Intimately.”

  There was no response.

  “What if he’s been assassinated? Or kidnapped by some evangelical mental patient who doesn’t want him moving in on lucrative preaching territory?”

  No response to that either.

  “You’re going to say I don’t have much faith.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I have plenty of faith. I just need the tiniest bit of evidence now and then to support it. It’s like you know a woman loves you, you believe it, you have faith in it, but a kiss on the cheek every couple of days sort of helps fortify your confidence. The occasional ‘I love you,’ or ‘honey,’ or ‘sweetheart,’ the occasional card with ‘To the Sexiest Man Alive’ on the front. Something along those lines.”

  Nothing. She seemed to be off in another dimension, which was not like her. To use a term I dislike, Zelda was one of the most present people I know. She looked at you when she talked. She really listened, despite the fact that her entire workday was composed of listening. “Where are you?” I asked, after another few bad quiet seconds.

  “I’m worried.”

  “Yeah, me, too. I was saying—”

  “Not about that. I’m worried we aren’t prepared. I don’t mean for the campaign, I mean for today.”

  “We ordered ten potties from Poop Safe.”

  “I’m starting to think we should have ordered a hundred.”

  “Nah. A hundred. That’s crazy.”

  “I just have a feeling. The traffic is so heavy. I’ve never seen traffic like this in West Zenith.”

  We were at the train station by that point. I found a parking spot without too much broken glass in it, and we locked the car and climbed the old stone steps that led to the platform. We were talking at least, Zel and I.