“I’m sorry,” was the first thing I said, and even my voice was shaking. “Sorry for me. For the guy who did it. For all of us.”
“I don’t want that from you, my friend,” he said. “You are the high priest of reverent irreverence, don’t go disappointing me now. Where is the sass? Where is the Russ Thomas I knew and loved?”
“Crushed,” I said. “All the wiseass remarks have been squeezed out of me.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I liked having you around. It changed things, inside me and inside all of us. For a while there I thought we’d have a future that was … I don’t know, three cuts above the ordinary human pig trough. I thought I might even turn out to be the Russ Thomas of my imagination or something.”
“You don’t think our campaign made any difference? As far as the country is concerned? And as far as you are concerned, personally?”
“Not as much as it could have if you’d stayed around,” I told him. I was going to say something else then, that I would miss him, miss his presence, that I felt I had a million more things to learn from him. But a spark of anger burst through me and what came out instead was: “And what upsets me the most is I know you did it on purpose. When you disappeared that day and played football in Hunter Town, people thought maybe something bad had happened to you. But I didn’t. I knew it was part of your plan. And this is exactly the same. People are going to say this terrible guy did this terrible thing to you, which is true, but you let it happen and that’s the salt in the wound.”
For a while he didn’t say anything. I turned my face forward, into the park, and pushed my hands deeper into my jacket pockets. I felt like I was risking my soul, talking to him like that, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “The last time I came to earth, did it make any difference?”
“Sure. Of course. Not so many people talked about turning the other cheek and giving to the poor before you showed up. Pretty much the whole world marks the years starting with the time you were born. You have religions named after you. Your face is everywhere. Your name. All those paintings and sculptures and books.… They don’t do that for just anybody.”
“I let them kill me that time, too,” he said. “And not everyone who heard about me believed. And the revolution I started did not really change the balance of power. It did not rid the world of evil. Instead of uniting people, I ended up causing a rift that has persisted until now, a rift that has caused countless deaths. My closest friends, people like you and Zelda and Wales and Stab and Ezzie and the rest of you, they were upset at me for leaving, as you are. They had doubts while I was alive, as you did.”
“And you left a lasting positive impression on the planet anyway,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“Fine, so that could happen again this time. But why not finish what you started? Stay around. Lead the country for eight years. Show the world a new way of doing things—kinder, smarter, more farsighted, more tolerant, more compassionate. What’s wrong with that plan?”
“In the realm of human understanding, nothing.”
“The realm of human understanding is the only realm most of us have access to,” I said.
“Right. And that is the whole problem. I was trying to show you how to go past that.”
“How?” I asked him bitterly. “By giving us a glimpse of a better way of being, a taste of paradise, and then—”
I stopped right there, midsentence. Without turning to look, I had the sense that he was smiling at me. I thought my way back to the beginning, to what would have been if Hay-Zeus had not wandered by when Dukey Junior had taken his three-story fall; to what would have been if Amelia Simmelton had suffocated slowly up there on the third floor of Mercy Hospital. Both sets of parents—rich and poor, couth and uncouth, people who made a great contribution to the well-being of others and people who did a little cocaine on the fire escape to relax—they would have had a glimpse of the purity and innocence of their kids, maybe a glimpse of the love they themselves were capable of giving to those kids; they would have had three years or ten years of that paradise … and then it would have been brutally snatched away from them. I’d reported on so many stories like that I’d lost count—the sweet high school kid killed in a car crash on prom night; the little heroes of the pediatric cancer ward; the nineteen-year-olds shipped home in flag-covered caskets from the Endless War. Way down below the cool journalistic detachment, I’d asked myself why a thousand times. Asked myself why, and asked myself what I’d do if it ever happened to a child of mine. You’d want to die. For days, months, years, you’d want nothing more than to be allowed to die. You’d feel bitterness and anguish like nothing the rest of the world could ever know. And then … you’d either live in that bitterness, in that death-wish, in that pain for the rest of your days … or you’d somehow get past it and keep getting past it and come to some sort of impossible truce with it, as if you had one eye on some other dimension, some other explanation, as if you were stoking a small fire of hope that there was someplace finer than this cauldron of pain.
“I’m sorry to have to say this,” I told Jesus, when I had thought it through, “but it’s a crappy system. Nobody should have pain like that, I don’t care what paradise it points them toward. If I was setting up the world, I’d set it up so nobody dies, nobody suffers. No rape, no cancer, no kids hit by cars, no Alzheimer’s, no war. That would be my idea of loving my created ones. Sorry if that sounds arrogant or something, but that’s what I’d do. And I’d be willing to bet that almost everybody else you ask would feel the same way.”
I turned to look at him then. He was staring out into the park, expression unreadable. I thought for a while that he’d gone into one of his trances, and wasn’t going to say anything else; or that he was about to disappear back into whatever realm it was that he’d slipped out of. But after a stretch of time he put his hand on my shoulder—and it was a real hand, not the hand of a ghost or a spirit. I felt that electric current go through me again, a song of love to push away the dirge my cells had been chanting. He said, “Everything happens the way it is supposed to happen. Everything that happens moves you eventually toward good, toward peace, toward the kind of peace and love you cannot possibly imagine. Everything.”
“That is a very, very, very hard thing to make yourself believe,” I said. “Some of the things that happen are so awful, it’s impossible to say yes to them.”
“I understand that,” Jesus said, and then he went silent for another long time. “You have to somehow cultivate the humility to trust that I understand that, and that your perceptions about what is ultimately best for you are … clouded.”
“How do you uncloud them, is what I want to know.”
“I have given you a hundred lessons in that over the past few months. Go back over everything, your memories, your notes.… You will begin to see the path you can travel to that unclouding.… Begin with the questioning of your assumptions.” As if it were one more lesson, he brought a flask out of his pocket and took a sip. “Which reminds me,” he said, passing the flask to me. “I never told you what job I had in store for you, postelection.”
“Kind of doesn’t matter now, does it?” I took a sip—good red wine that tasted like pure acid in my mouth—and handed it back to him.
“Anna will serve as president for four years, and then she’ll refuse to run for reelection, mostly because she won’t want to endure the vicious attacks the two parties will throw at her. During those years, she will need all of you. Are you interested, or do you want to go back into the news business?”
“I’m interested, of course. After this, the news business would seem like getting paid to roll around in goat dung.”
He almost smiled. “Your job,” he said, “my journalist friend, is to bring the news into people’s lives, to write this down the way it happened. All of it. The good, the bad, the confusing. Do not paint yourself and the rest of your colleagues as so
mething you are not. And do not change my words or my behavior by so much as a single comma. Will you do that?”
“Of course,” I said.
“We are finished then, for the time being.” He kept his hand on my shoulder while he stood, and such a current of love was flowing into me that I could not describe it without resorting to drug or sexual imagery, and even then it would be too weak. I felt loved in a way no human being could possibly love me. I felt that I was about to start weeping. The nice hard crust of protection I’d built up around myself over the years was crumbling into bits of bad jokes and pretend straightforwardness. I managed to put my hand on his for a second or two, and to keep the sobs from pouring out. “Don’t get up,” he said, and I realize now, writing this, that it was the first thing he ever said to me—when we’d met in Pete’s Cafe in Wells River, in what seems like another lifetime. He squeezed my hand warmly. “Wait until I’m out of sight and then go back to Zelda. She is still awake. She’s worried.”
I made myself nod. I thought I saw the tiniest of twitches at the corner of his lips, as if he were sad about something. I thought he might wink, or offer one last word, or even start to cry himself. But he did not. I tried to say something more, but I could not.
When Jesus turned and shuffled off toward the entrance of the park, I felt an actual, physical pain in the middle of my chest, as if someone had shot me there, too. My breath started coming in big heaves, and it was suddenly a lot of work to do what I’d done naturally for almost forty years, just get the air into me and push it out again. I felt a pressure behind the bones of my cheeks and forehead, and then the grief was spilling out of me, unstoppable as the river of thought, and my face was soaked and hot, and there was a drip-drip-drip-drip on the top of my right hand. I wept like a boy. I watched him go, a dark watery figure slowly blending with the blackness beyond the park lights. I could see his legs, the soles of his shoes, one last flash of the bare skin of one hand, and then nothing.
“Come back,” I said in his direction, but I said it quietly, just with my broken-up breath, just once. And then I could no longer see him.
Acknowledgments
So many people had a hand in the making of this book—or have been supportive of me in my writing life—that it is impossible to acknowledge them all. I would like to express my gratitude to my fine editor Chuck Adams, and everyone at Algonquin, especially Ina Stern, Brunson Hoole, Robert Jones, Michael Taeckens, Courtney Wilson, Christina Gates, Anne Winslow, Craig Popelars, and Elisabeth Scharlatt.
Special thanks to everyone at Marly Rusoff & Associates Literary Agency, especially Marly Rusoff, Michael Radulescu, and Julie Mosow.
I’d like to thank Lynn Pleshette for her efforts on my behalf in Hollywood; and, for their generosity of spirit and helpful conversations about the creative life, my gratitude to Peter Grudin, Michael Miller, Craig Nova, Dean Crawford, John Recco, Sterling Watson, and Les Standiford.
My most heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Amanda, and our daughters, Alexandra and Juliana, for their unfailing love and encouragement.
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2008 by Roland Merullo.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-663-3
ALSO BY ROLAND MERULLO
FICTION
Leaving Losapas
A Russian Requiem
Revere Beach Boulevard
In Revere, in Those Days
A Little Love Story
Golfing with God
Breakfast with Buddha
NONFICTION
Passion for Golf:
In Pursuit of the Innermost Game
Revere Beach Elegy:
A Memoir of Home and Beyond
American Savior Page 33