American Savior (8 page)

The shoe dropped as I drove up to Zelda’s apartment building. She was standing on the sidewalk in her best dress, and Jesus was standing close beside her. It was 7:45 in the morning, and so, naturally, my first thought was that they had spent the night together. I understand that this might seem like a weird first thought to have. We were, after all, dealing with Jesus and not some local Romeo; with my engaged and faithful girlfriend, not some cheap, to use my father’s word,
slattern.
But the unfortunate truth is that Esther Gilbanda, my ex, had engaged in some extracurricular activity after we’d been married for three or four months. Not surprisingly, that activity had led to our divorce. And not surprisingly either, it had left a deep bruise on my psyche. I had been so sure of Esther’s faithfulness, so sure she was happy in the marriage, so stunned when I found out she was cheating, that I wondered sometimes if I would ever really get over it. I mean, how did you trust your judgment after that? How did you know it wouldn’t happen again? You had to go on faith, and do the best you could. In that way, I guess, getting married was like believing in God, or in some Great Spirit, or even just believing the world ultimately revolved around goodness. Unless you came upon your spouse
in
flagrante delicto,
as they say, it was hard to be a hundred percent sure one way or the other. And unless God gave you absolutely undeniable proof of His existence, well, you were always left with a nagging doubt.

Anyway, I’m making excuses for being jealous, but I think they’re good excuses. So when I came driving up West Broadway toward Zel’s condo and saw her standing out on the curb with a handsome miracle worker right next to her, at quarter to eight in the morning, when he hadn’t been part of our day’s plan … it wasn’t a stretch for me to wonder if maybe something not that beautiful was going on.

But I didn’t say anything, naturally. Accusing Jesus of sleeping with your fiancée is not the suavest thing you can do, especially not in front of said fiancée. So I kissed Zelda when she got into the car, and I reached
back between the seats to shake Jesus’s hand as if I’d been expecting all along that he would introduce himself to Zelda early in the morning and then join us for our trip to North Salem.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sit in front, Lord?” Zelda asked, turning around to look at him and moving a lock of hair off her face in a way that I—and I think many other men—found particularly sexy. “Your legs are so much longer than mine.”

I felt a twinge of something bad.

“Enough with the ‘Lord’ stuff,” Jesus said. “And I am fine right here.”

“What should we call you then?” I asked. “You have a nickname or anything? How about Jeez? Or Jeepers Cripes?”

Unfortunately, that is what happens to me when I get upset about something—jealous, nervous, anxious about seeing my family. I get “wise,” as we used to say where I grew up, though
unwise
would probably be a better word. I get fresh-mouthed, as Zelda calls it.

Zelda reached across and punched me on the shoulder. It did not escape my notice that, until Jesus had come into the picture, she had not been the hitting type, and now twice in the last few days I’d gotten a whack.

“What? It’s a reasonable question.”

“It’s disrespectful.”

I noticed, in the rearview, that Jesus was looking out the window as if he was studying the sorry spectacle of West Broadway—its chain doughnut shops and pawn shops and signs saying you could sell your gold and jewelry there, or cash your checks there; its boarded-up storefronts and litter and men wrapped in blankets sitting with their backs against a building in the sun.

“Just Jesus is fine,” he said.

“I thought it was Hay-Zeus.”

“For Spanish speakers, it is.”

I stole another glance, thinking he might be making some kind of joke, but it was hard to tell. His handsome face gave away nothing.

“What about the Italian-American vote?” I asked, since my mother was of that blood. “Shouldn’t we say
Gesu Christo
when we’re in certain neighborhoods?”

There was a patch of uncomfortable silence.

“Is he always so much trouble?” Jesus asked Zelda, after a minute.

By that point, she had turned away from me in disgust. But to her credit she said, “No, not always.” And then, “Only when he’s going to see his family.”

“Some residue of stress there, I take it,” Jesus said. “I will help you with that if you want.”

“Okay. Thanks. And sorry about the wiseass stuff. It’s a little hard for me that you don’t want to be called Lord or God or anything. I don’t think it’s going to help the campaign, either, to tell you the truth. I mean, if you perform miracles and call yourself Jesus, people are going to expect you to be a cut above the ordinary Bob Dole or Mike Dukakis.”

“I am aware of that.”

“All right. Just advising. If you want me to stick to security issues, I will.”

By this point we had gotten our toll ticket and were climbing the ramp that led to the interstate. I knew from hundreds of other trips along this road that there would be a stretch of sorrow before we got out into the countryside: abandoned factories ringed West Zenith like the ruins of old fortifications, their brick walls alive with a garish graffiti of red and blue paint, gang tags, comic book faces, political slogans, or phrases expressing a kind of modern American angst. B
RING MY JOB BACK HOME
! was a typical one. The rooftop water tanks were rusty; the windows had more broken panes than whole ones; the parking lots had become vast tar plains littered with shards of glass and old tires. Once, something good and solid had been made inside; now it was all broken bricks and scraps of crap. I wondered what he thought of it. The Big Man, I mean.

“No,” Jesus said. “I don’t want you to stick to security. And, Zelda, I don’t want you to stick to press relations. You are two of my chief advisors. As a matter of fact, I decided to travel with you today in order to talk strategy. I value your opinions.”

We were silent, both of us warmed by the remark. Jesus could do that,
I was starting to see, could shed his all-business personality in an instant and make you feel like he’d known you all your life. I stole another glance in the mirror, and it seemed to me that his features had softened. The high cheekbones and slightly bent nose, the high forehead beneath the shock of black, swept-back hair, the large crooked mouth—they had taken on, by some otherworldly magic, a glint of mellowness. In full realization that I am driving onto thin ice with a forty-ton tank here, risking the perpetual ire of the
appropriatists,
as Wales calls them, I will suggest that Jesus was able to move from a traditionally masculine roughness to a traditionally feminine kindness, though, of course, those terms are outdated, offensive, and possibly useless. Still, that’s what I thought. He seemed like a man’s man sometimes, the way he talked, carried himself, the things he said. He might have had a hockey helmet on and been sitting in the penalty box, spitting between the gap where his front teeth used to be. And then, in the course of a single sentence, all that changed and he was, well, almost motherly … in the best sense.

“If you like advice, you’ve come to the right couple,” I said, and I could feel Zelda look at me when I used that word. “Because we’re two of the most opinionated people we know.”

“And two of the smartest,” Jesus added.

“Not exactly. Zel here is no bright bulb, as you’ve probably already realized. Yours truly, on the other hand—” I got that far before she whacked me again, harder this time, though in a loving way.

“I want your take on where the campaign stands,” Jesus said.

“But you know all that already, Lor—” Zelda caught herself before pronouncing the whole title. She had swung around in her seat again so she could look at him. “You know everything, don’t you?”

“I let there be gaps,” Jesus said, still gazing out the window, where the scenery had changed now to thick hardwood forest and hills. It’s a beautiful part of the world, western Massachusetts, very different from the eastern part of the state, geologically and politically. Driving from the woodsy west to the energetic east, where I’d been raised, always made me slightly anxious, as if the world around me was moving faster and faster and I had to work harder just to keep up.

“We don’t understand that part,” I said. “The gaps, I mean.”

“On one level, I know everything, yes, of course. On another, while I am here, I limit myself. Purposely. I have detached myself from the Great Spirit, the Father and Mother Spirit, and taken this form, which, I have to tell you, is not my favorite of the physical shapes—”

“But you’re
wonderful-
looking,” Zelda broke in.

Another bad twinge. I tried to tell myself it was because she’d never known her real father.

Jesus went on as if he hadn’t heard. “What you might not understand is that the rules of this planet are fixed. Just as water freezes at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, for example, or earth makes its rotation in approximately twenty-four hours, there are certain spiritual laws here, set in place even before the physical creation of the sphere that houses and nourishes you. To a certain extent, I can bend those laws whenever I want to—perform a miracle, for example. But if I eliminate them altogether for my own purposes, then everything is upended and my taking human form is purposeless. I have to operate within the confines of your understanding, your thought system, even, for the most part, your physical limitations.”

“But why the ‘have to’?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking. “That’s the tough part, for me at least. It seems to me you could do anything you damn well please.”

“My mother has so ordained,” he said.

“Your mother?” Zelda sounded excited. “In the Bible you’re always speaking of the father. ‘My father in heaven,’ and so on.”

“Same thing. Mother, father, me. Same thing.”

“The holy trinity,” I suggested.

“Sure,” Jesus said, “if you like that model. The whole point of the teachings I gave in those days was to try to break you people out of your insistence on identifying with the physical body. All suffering comes from that identification, that should be obvious enough. They have been altered, unfortunately, but the original meaning of my words had to do mostly with that.” He paused for a moment. I saw him staring out the window, and it did seem to me that he was communing in some way with
the trees and stones there.
This is my body. That is my body. I am not my body.
I had a little stretch of wishing I’d paid more attention in Sunday school.

“Listen,” Jesus said. He leaned forward so his head was closer to us. “I do not want to get too far into this right now. Later, if you like, we can take a walk in the desert or something and have a private tutorial. I would be happy to do that. But right now, we have a couple of hours together on the road, and it might be our last quiet time for a while, so I want you to fill me in, to the extent possible, on the situation I am getting into.”

Zelda and I looked at each other. “You first,” we both said at the same moment.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do the Republicans and you do the Democrats, deal?”

She nodded. “You first.”

“Okay. But I want to preface my remarks by saying that these are crude approximations.”

“Fine, it is the big picture I want. And be blunt.”

“That’s never a problem for him,” Zelda noted.

“The big picture,” I said, “is that, at this point, less than five months before the actual election, you are way behind the eight ball. Everyone else has had at least a year’s head start, raised a lot of money, been through a series of tough primaries, contentious debates. You’re going to be seen as a Jesus-Come-Lately, if you want the harsh truth.”

“I do.”

“All right, then. The good news is that the two main people you’ll be up against are not exactly….”

“Divine,” Zel put in when I hesitated.

“Right, divine. On the Republican side, you have Marjorie M. Maplewith, hardass senator from Idaho. Her husband, the Reverend Aldridge Maplewith, is pastor of a megachurch in Boise, famous TV preacher, multimillionaire, proud Christian conservative. Marjorie inherited a fortune from two family-owned businesses—ski resorts and aluminum mining—and when she married Aldridge it was like two empires coming together. She calls herself the ‘Proactive Protector’ of American values
and territory. Wants to double the size of the armed forces. Got a bill passed in Congress that increases penalties for any crime that harms a child, and people admire her for that. Molesters go to jail and never get out. Parents who hurt their kids in any serious way go behind bars for a decade, automatic loss of parental rights, that type of thing. She talks about privatizing government services, the post office, for example, so big business likes her. She picked Adam Clarence, congressman from West Virginia, for her running mate—he’s basically a nobody, and people wonder if there is something behind the scenes, a favor owed or something. She’s raised lots of money from a relatively small number of wealthy donors and conservative PACs, and she flies around the country to these carefully screened rallies that her staff puts together and then films in a way that makes them look larger than they really are. Well-oiled campaign. Ruthless in what she’ll say about her opponent. Abortion is murder, period. Homosexuality is a sin against God and should be outlawed. She would also outlaw X-rated movies, shut down X-rated Internet sites—though nobody has been able to pin her down as to how she’d actually accomplish that. She believes there should be no public money for birth control education in this country or abroad. The government should get out of people’s lives … except if it wants to eavesdrop on them for national security reasons. That enough, or you want more detail?”

“Fine for now,” Jesus said.

“Your turn, Zel.”

“Well,” Zelda touched her new earrings in a contemplative way and then said, “in a nice twist, the Dems have put up a military man this year. Dennis Alowich. His grandfather emigrated from Lithuania, and the name was formerly Alowicious. There might be some Jewish blood there, we’re not sure, but you can bet it’s being looked into. Not the biggest military man, only a colonel, but a war hero who retired, invented a kind of insecticide called GreenBiscuit that kills bugs without harming people, made a fortune selling that, served as governor of Washington State for a term, secretary of veterans affairs for a term, then retired a few years ago to get his campaign together. Chose Senator John-John Maileah from Hawaii, because Maileah has been a party stalwart for
thirty years and they owed him something. Not as much money as Marjorie Maplewith, a more pleasing personality by most estimates, but not as good a campaigner, and not as bright. He tends to hedge on the social issues when he’s speaking to certain audiences, though he’s generally progressive. Talks tough on national defense. His big issue is raising teachers’ salaries, making schools safe, college affordable, etcetera. Plus, his wife is the famous soap opera star Lenda Elliot. She draws some big crowds and people like her.”