I went up to the podium. The crowd filled the huge square completely; all the side streets leading into it were full of people as well. Men, women, and children were leaning out of open windows everywhere, some even standing on the rooftops. A noisy helicopter circled overhead. Police lights flashed on all sides. The press were corralled in their roped-off section, pointing cameras at us. The Poop Safe truck was trying to work its way from the outskirts into the center, a supply of new potties wobbling precariously on the back. Oscar was sitting on the roof of the Hummer with his arms crossed over the top of his knees, and here and there one of Dukey’s biker pals was shoving somebody away from the stage. Zelda had an enormous smile on her face. For the first time in what seemed like a year, she put her arm through mine and squeezed. “I know you’ll be great,” she shouted into my ear … at which point I remembered that I was doing the introduction. And then I was at the podium, holding up my hands to try and bring some measure of quiet to the throng. In front of me stood twenty or thirty microphones.
“Hi,” I said. “Good morning.” The rumble and roar quieted a decibel or two. I held up my hands trying to quiet it further. No luck. People were yelling out things, cheering, weeping. Finally, I just pointed to Jesus with both hands and the crowd went berserk. Here and there I could see skeptics standing alone or in small groups. They were watching, not cheering, not applauding, not standing up on their tiptoes to get a better glimpse, not wearing crowns of thorns or waving crosses or carrying placards with biblical quotations on them. For a moment I felt a guilty kinship with them.
In response to this new wave of cheering, Jesus did an odd thing. He took a step forward and held up one finger, like an athlete making the claim that his team was at the top of the national rankings. When I turned to look, I thought I could see a glow around him, a subtle shimmering in the air. After letting the cheers and screams go on for a minute or so, he raised both hands, palms forward, and the place quieted immediately.
“We are tired,” I heard myself saying, without having prepared to say it. The words went echoing around the plaza. “We are tired of politics as usual!”
There was a huge roar. I held up my hands, waited, leaned into the mikes, absolutely winging it. “We are tired of war and greed and lies and unfairness, of our great country being divided up into competing factions. As some of you know, I’ve spent eight years reporting the news here, and in those years I’ve met with thousands of ordinary people, and the message I’ve gotten from those people has always been the same: what happened?”
This was true, actually, and I thought it was a decent line, but the crowd didn’t go wild for it the way I’d hoped they would—a few tentative cheers, that was all. For a moment I did not know what else to say, an unusual situation for me in front of a microphone. I closed my eyes, opened them, looked out at the ocean of faces.
“What happened to my city?” I went on. “What happened to my country? What happened to the sense of decency and compassion we used to know? … Well, the Great Spirit I’m about to introduce”—huge cheer here, and it went on and on until Jesus finally held up his hands and silenced them. “The Great Being who is about to speak to you and make what is probably the most important announcement in American political history, … he has come to give us our city back, our country back, our way of life back!” More of the tremendously loud cheering, and a sense of excited impatience rippled through the crowd and across the stage. “So without making you wait any longer, I give you the next president of these united United States, Jesus Christ!”
I stepped reverently away from the podium, and I can tell you that never before or since have I ever heard anything like the sound that greeted Jesus as he took my place. Utterly deafening. A weird symphony of screams, thousands of voices, whistles, chants, all of it echoing around shabby old Banfield Plaza with its crappy metal-grated storefronts and weedy, now trampled, patches of grass. Stab ran over and hugged me. Zelda gave me a big wet kiss. My mother, tears again running down her cheeks, could not stop nodding, at me, at Jesus, at the crowd. I noticed that Wales and Esmeralda had come up onto the stage. She gave me a lovely smile, and he nodded twice in my direction—about as big a compliment as you’d ever get from the guy.
“Thank you. Thank you all for coming,” Jesus was trying to say, but the thousands of people in Banfield Plaza would not let him speak. For several more minutes they went crazy, and there was a mad pushing and shoving down below us as a few idiots tried to rush the stage. One of the Harleys got knocked over. I saw at least one punch being thrown, and I hoped the ambulances could get through. I worried that Chief Bastatutta would be having a heart attack somewhere on the edges of Wilson Street, trying to keep an open corridor. In fact, I noticed that some of the most attentive listeners and enthusiastic applauders were in police uniform.
“Thank you. Thank you all.” Jesus held up his hands and the crowd soon quieted. “I am going to keep this short. As my good friend Russ Thomas just told you, we are doing something here today that has never been done. I have come to you, come back to you”—another prolonged cheer—“because you are a nation in grave spiritual danger. You are in the process, well into the process, of losing your moral leadership in the world, losing your way in the modern frenzy. What I am offering is not a campaign based on gain, personal or political. There are some of you here who will not necessarily be better off under my leadership, not materially better off, at least. I cannot say I will cut your taxes and raise your salaries. What I can say is that you will have a nation based on kindness and goodness, not some mere slogan that includes those things, but actual kindness and goodness. You will have a sane, sensible foreign policy based on moral rather than strategic imperatives and founded upon the principle of considering the other as yourself; you will have a country in which children are no longer hungry, and you will live on a planet that is not being ravaged by our greed and stupidity. In the name of my father and mother, the greatest of great spirits, the ones you know in the secret depths of your souls but have been blinded to by the concerns of ordinary life; in the name of the Creator’s Creator, the inventor of time, the great pulse of love that spins the universes, I have come into this humble body, in this humble place, on this troubled planet, to become its most powerful citizen. Here, today, in the city of West Zenith, I, the Son of Man, announce my candidacy for the presidency of the United States of America. And I ask you for your support.”
Forget support. At that moment, the people in that square—Bastatutta later estimated the crowd at sixty thousand—would have given Jesus their lives. It was pure pandemonium. Jesus stepped back from the podium, took my brother’s hand in his left hand, and Zelda’s in his right, and raised them, and you couldn’t have heard a cannon if it had been discharged ten feet away. Wild, it was. Near chaos. We’d arranged for a thousand balloons to be set free, and they were released at that moment, making about as big an impression as one kid blowing bubbles in the stands at Fenway Park. My brother Stab started jumping up and down, holding Jesus’s hand and yelling “Jee-zus! Jee-zus! Jee-zus!” The chant caught on, and it seemed to me that the stage and the sides of the buildings were all shaking, trembling, about to crash to the ground. “Jee-zus! Jee-zus! JEE-ZUS!”
After it had gone on for I don’t know how long, ten minutes I’d guess, Jesus let go of Zelda’s hand and motioned me over. He put his mouth against my ear, and he said these words: “Call your dad.”
SEVENTEEN
So, as Jesus walked from one side of the stage to the other, pointing at people in the cheering crowd as if he knew them, raising an index finger above his head like a quarterback after a touchdown throw, mouthing, “Thank you! Thank you!” I crouched at the back of the stage, and dialed my dad’s number. He picked up on the first ring. “Pa!” I yelled, and he yelled something back. I could hear his voice but I couldn’t make out the words. “Pa, you there?”
“—tching the TV!” I thought he yelled.
“Do you see us?”
&nb
sp; “Bltng di font if sel!” it sounded like.
“He’s something, isn’t he?”
“Lie shoe. Shoe aw!”
“Okay. I can’t hear you too good. It’s crazy here. We miss you. Come up, okay? You don’t have to believe or anything. Just come and be with us. All right? Pa?”
The line had gone dead. I couldn’t tell if he’d hung up or if the thunderous noise of the crowd had knocked over a cell phone tower on a nearby hillside. We had a group hug then, me and Zel and my mother and Stab, as Jesus went back and forth across the stage, now lifting Wales’s hand into the air, now Ezzie’s, now flashing his phenomenal smile, now pushing up two fists in time to the JEE-ZUS! JEE-ZUS!” chant.
Eventually, he decided it was time to go, and looked over his shoulder at me the way the lead singer in a rock band looks at the drummer and bass player to signal the end of a song. I relayed the signal to Oscar, who crawled back into the Hummer and set himself up behind the wheel, and then to Dukey, who got his beefy leg breakers lined up in such a way that we had about a yard-wide corridor from stage to car. Even with the bikers pushing and shoving, people were reaching out to touch Jesus on the shoulder or the arm, or falling on their knees, or yelling things. As we climbed into the Hummer, two police cars backed in through the crowd, sirens going, lights flashing. With the cruisers running interference we made it out of Banfield Plaza and onto what was now a slightly less crowded, litter-paved Wilson Street.
“That went well,” Jesus said, as we were running red lights behind the police cars, on our way back to Padsen’s.
“A blast!” Stab said.
“What now?” I asked excitedly. “What’s next? Give us our marching orders, Boss.”
He looked at me and I noticed that, behind the chocolate brown eyes, there seemed to be a deep well of absolute calm. On the surface he seemed, if not excited, than at least pleased with how things had gone. Gratified. Optimistic. Those were the types of emotions you would have expected; there was something human about them, for lack of a better term. A few hairs had been knocked out of place. There was a thin coating of sweat on his neck and forehead—all normal. But the bright stillness in his eyes was something not of this world. My mother noticed, I was sure. In her adoration, she was almost shrinking back into the corner of the seat. The picture of the pope was gone, and she was working the rosary beads a mile a minute, and staring.
“What now?” the object of her adoration answered. “Now I am going to wander around alone for a few hours and you should all go back and get something to eat, get some rest. Tomorrow we will talk about strategy.”
“Wander around?” I said, perhaps too forcefully, because Zelda swung her knee sideways against my leg. “As your security guy, I don’t want you wandering around. People know you now. They’ll recognize you. They’ll crush you to death trying to get close. Plus, this neighborhood is not exactly known for—”
“Let me worry about that,” he said. Calmly.
“It’s nuts. We have to get you off someplace, some safe house or something. It’s all different now. That scene we just came from, that was broadcast around the country, probably around the world.”
“Let me worry about it, Russ,” he said, and at the sound of my name on his lips a chill ran across the skin of my arms, a thousand tiny eight-legged creatures scurrying.
“You sure?”
He nodded. A little smile. “Maybe tomorrow Stab and I will find a bar where we can play pool.”
“He knows about Stab and pool,” my mother whispered.
Jesus looked at her and said, “In these two sons you should be most proud. And in your future daughter-in-law as well.”
My mother, naturally, started to cry. Stab reached across to comfort her. I watched.
In a little while we were passing through the gates of Padsen’s. The irony of police cars leading Jesus into such a place was not lost on me. I have to admit that another spark of doubt flew up in my mind: as Bastatutta said, why was Jesus doing business with an underworld guy?
Standing in the lot, we thanked Oscar for his good driving. Oscar asked Jesus for his autograph and held out a parking ticket, which he’d pulled from his back pocket, and which he appeared to have no intention of ever paying. Jesus obliged, scrawling his name in blue marker across the orange paper. And then all of us—my mother and Stab, Zelda and I and Jesus—crowded into Jocko’s shed (Wales and Ezzie had gone to see about the headquarters rental; Ada Montpelier and her son had stayed behind at Banfield Plaza with Dukey Senior), where the calendars had been taken down and the shrink-wrapped stacks of porno mags hidden away, and where Jocko was standing next to the coffeemaker pouring an evil-smelling black brew into Styrofoam cups and setting them on the desk in a crooked line. Zelda wrote him a check for eight hundred dollars, which made him blush—probably the most shocking of all the shocking sights I’d seen that day. But his embarrassment did not keep him from folding the check in half and pushing it into the pocket of his tailored pants.
“Would you give us a moment alone?” Jesus asked him, and blushing and dipping his head in small pseudo-reverent movements, Jocko stepped out into the sunlight and closed the door.
Jesus held out the one chair, and motioned for my mother to sit in it. She hesitated, shook her head, worked her beads.
“Ma, sit,” Stab told her. “He wants you to, Ma.”
Jesus kept his hands on the back of the chair until she was seated, and then he stepped away and stood with his back to the door. He took off his tie, folded it neatly, and slipped it into the side pocket of his jacket. “You did well,” he told us. “This is a proper beginning. I shall leave you now for a short while, but,” he looked at me, “do not lose faith.”
“What do we do next, Lord?” Zelda asked.
Jesus made the smallest of frowns. For some reason, he seemed not to mind when Stab and my mother called him God or Lord, but with Zelda it did not please him.
“You work it out,” he said. The tone was not unkind, but it was tinged with impatience, as if we should have known, by then, everything he wanted us to know; as if we should have been experts on running a campaign, at the center of which was the most famous man in Western history. And then, more gently, he added, “I have spoken to Wales about our schedule. I understand he is going to get you all together tomorrow.”
“Will you be there?” Zelda asked.
Jesus looked at her more tenderly. “Perhaps. Stab and I are playing pool later in the day. After that we should begin our travels.”
At that moment, I heard what sounded like a gunshot outside in the lot. I dove across the room and knocked Jesus down, covering him with my body the way I’d seen Secret Service men do on television.
“Russell!” my mother yelled.
Jesus was not happy. “Off me, get off,” he said. We stood up—I made a point of keeping my body between him and the window, thinking it might have been Padsen taking a pot shot. Zelda and Stab were glaring at me as if I were a lunatic. Jesus was brushing the dust from the pant legs and sleeves of his excellent suit.
“I heard a shot,” I explained. “I thought someone was shooting at you.”
Jesus straightened his sleeves. “A car backfiring, Russell.”
“You could have hurt him,” Zelda said.
I started to explain to him in more detail, to say that I’d heard what sounded like gunfire—not exactly a rare sound in West Zenith in those days—but he put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt the usual zip of current. Our faces were not more than a foot apart. I could see then that he had very little facial hair, and I wondered if he had Indian blood. The strong nose was slightly bent, the skin remarkably unlined. It occurred to me that we had no idea how old he was. “We have a problem,” I said. “You have to be born in America to be president.”
“Not an issue.”
“You have to be thirty-five.”
“Also not a problem.”
“Where were you born? The press is going to ask. They’re going to start aski
ng a million questions now, about where you stand on various issues. There have already been some blog postings that wondered about your past—and we don’t have so much as a paragraph of biographical material.”
“Make something up,” Jesus said.
“We can’t lie.”
“You won’t be lying.”
“But you just said to make something up. What do you mean it won’t be a lie? Of course—”
“Russell,” Zelda said. “Stop.”
“Fine,” I said. “You do it.” Maybe it was a sort of decompression after the morning’s tension, but I felt a bubble of anger at Zelda working its way up into my mouth. I loved her, I admired her, but I’d pretty much had it by then with the idea that her adoration of Jesus—which I did not object to in principle—seemed to go hand in hand with her ignoring me. God knows I had been trying my best, and it wasn’t easy, what with the family dynamics to think about and the introduction and everything. And all I had been getting from her were these nudges, these turned-down lips, the rare hug. I felt that I deserved better.
“She will,” Jesus said. “That is part of her responsibility. You are the security man, and, for the record, I appreciate your knocking me down. It reminded me of my football-playing days in Kansas. So there, you have a bit of biographical information. Football. Kansas. I also studied ballet at a school outside of New York City, but dropped out when I pulled my oblique muscle, right side. Build on that. Do your research. We will discuss my positions on the issues once the campaign gets on the road. I love you all and shall see all of you very soon.”
And with that, he went past me and out the door, closing it quietly, and leaving the air of the room filled with what I can only call an affectionate awkwardness. We were not yet used to being in his presence. None of us had ever felt that kind of straightforward, no-nonsense, divine, and immeasurably deep affection. And we were, I think, afraid, because on that morning we had realized that we were at the center of some kind of sandstorm, something massively powerful and unpredictable. I was used to the spotlight, so in that way, possibly, it was five percent easier for me than for the others. But the spotlight I was used to had been like one of those penlights people read with on a train. This was like the sun.
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