American Savior (35 page)

After that, we went upstairs to the suite (the West Zenith equivalent of a presidential suite; none of us slept there; we’d gotten it for our meetings, for watching returns on the last night) and waited for him to appear. When ten o’clock arrived and Jesus did not, Zelda was left to take the elevator down to the main meeting room, stand at the podium, and tell two hundred and fifty reporters and photographers from all over the world that our candidate was not available. “Why isn’t he available?” they wanted to know, sensibly enough. She was tempted to lie, she told me later, to cite physical exhaustion from all the running. But in the heat of the moment she told the truth: Jesus had disappeared, we were looking for him, the police were looking for him, we hoped to be able to reschedule the conference for three p.m. that afternoon. In the meantime, she said, Anna Songsparrow would be happy to answer questions.

The press was, at that moment, about as interested in what Anna Songsparrow had to say as they were in the final score of that day’s cricket match between the Bombay Buddhas and the Islamabad Ironmen. They had a new hot subject. Fox ran it across their screen more often than their terror alert:
BREAKING STORY. JESUS DISAPPEARS ON EVE OF PRESIDENTIAL VOTE. NOT SEEN OR HEARD FROM IN TWELVE HOURS. STAFF FRANTIC. LOCAL, STATE, AND FBI OFFICERS ON THE CASE. PERSON OF INTEREST SOUGHT
.

There was no person of interest, of course. I was the point man with the law enforcement people, and would have been the first to know. But Jesus was gone.

Depressed, my faith wobbling like a kid on his first two-wheeler, with no security arrangements to take care of because there was no candidate to protect, I listened to Chief Bastatutta tell me about the search he’d organized, listened to the Secret Service honcho, Richard Diamond, lecture me about never allowing a candidate to refuse protection. I gave Angelina Monahan, the FBI agent in charge, a list of everyplace I could
think of that Jesus might have gone in West Zenith and the surrounding area. When that was finished I held Zelda in an embrace for a few seconds and then slipped away to a local bar.

It was a lousy thing to do, I admit that. Cowardly, even. I should have stayed with the rest of the gang, with my mother and dad and Stab and Zelda. As security chief, I should have been there to have face-to-face meetings with the various law enforcement officials who were all fighting with each other about which one had jurisdiction in the case of a disappearing Jesus. But I was absolutely sure there was no foul play involved, and I admit that made me angry at Jesus, I felt we deserved better treatment from him after our months of work. I felt my new, solid house of faith tipping sideways, and I suppose I was ashamed of that and didn’t want anyone to see, so I pretended to be going outside to talk to the police and I sneaked away.

I was tempted to head back to my condo, but instead I grabbed a cab to the Wee Drop Inn, a gloomy pub near the Connecticut River. I knew the patrons might recognize me in the unlikely event they were still sober at that hour (noon), but I also knew them to be the type of people who had enough of their own troubles to have adopted what I thought of as the Code of Nonintrusion. I was right. They left me alone. I sat on a stool, nursed a dark ale, chewed stale peanuts, watching Fox on one TV and CNN on another. I kept my phone on the bar where I could see it. Pundits of every stripe had been rushed before the cameras from their corner offices and penthouse suites, and to a man and a woman they said that this latest bit of unpredictability (assuming it wasn’t foul play) could be devastating to what had seemed, until then, a fairly safe lead, in the popular vote at least.

With thinly disguised triumph bouncing and jumping in her voice, Anne Canter noted that “if there’s one thing the American people don’t like it is a lack of dependability.”

Bulf Spritzer called the turn of events “worrisome in a handful of different ways,” and added, “The drama doesn’t get any higher than this!”

The Alowich and Maplewith campaigns issued statements saying they sent their best wishes to the family and hoped for a happy outcome to
the mystery—while privately spreading the word that it was just this kind of behavior they’d expected from the outset. You had to be in the public eye for years in order to earn the trust of American people. And Jesus hadn’t done that. And now his followers were getting their just deserts.

I kept crunching peanuts and waiting for my cell phone to ring. It did not, unless you count the periodic reports from Dukey, trying to make up for his insubordinate outburst, who informed me, several times, that he and his buddies were “doing shakedowns all over the city, man.” He assumed I was at the hotel, and I said nothing to make him think otherwise. I drank moderately but steadily. I spoke to no one. I tried to keep my faith from leaking out entirely, but the more I thought about what Jesus had done, the angrier I became. The angrier I became, the harder it was to believe he was God, or holy, or even someone worthy of our massive efforts. The more I doubted his worthiness, the guiltier I felt. And the guiltier I felt, the less motivation I had to head back to the hotel. It was, in other words, the classic profile of a sinner.

Finally, at two o’clock, when I couldn’t bear the news reports any longer, I got up off my bar stool and made myself hail a cab. I thought I saw my ex-mother-in-law near the hotel’s front entrance (it might have been what psychologists call a TMM, traumatic memory mirage), so I walked around and used my card key in the back door, and then had to trudge up twelve flights of stairs because work was being done on one of the elevators and the other elevator was very slow. At the suite, with the exception of Anna Songsparrow, the whole gang was sitting around in various postures of devastation. Anna had wandered off somewhere to pray. No one seemed to have noticed I was gone, though after Zelda kissed me she sniffed, squinted her eyes, and said, “Beer?”

Dukey saved me from answering. I flipped open the phone and heard, “Nothin’, man, nothin’. Somebody grabbed him, I’m tellin’ ya.”

“I don’t think so. I think he went off by himself.”

“For what?” Dukey yelled.

“To pray or something. You know how he is.”

“No way. Not today, man. He ain’t
that
crazy.”

“Just keep trying. Look in the places you’d least expect him to be. Check Parsifal’s. Check the Wee Drop Inn.”

“Good idea, Boss,” he said, and I hung up. It was hours before he called again.

The “command center,” as we’d named the suite in better moments, had the feel of a visitation room in a funeral home where someone too young is lying in the casket and friends are standing around in small groups wondering why. When she wasn’t on the phone with press people, Zelda could be found standing at the window with teary eyes. Amelia Simmelton would go up and put an arm around her, and try to convince her, with a nine-year-old’s wise certainty, that everything Jesus did, he did for good reason. Stab kept looking at me as if I had the explanation for all this sorrow and was purposely keeping it from him. My mother had decided the best thing to do was make escarole soup, and she had taken my dad out shopping for ingredients, and they were in the kitchen now, locked in one of their postfight silences, chopping garlic and opening cans of white beans. We paced, we drank bad beer, we nibbled at sandwiches and brownies the hotel management sent up, and some of us cried and some of us swore and some of us did both, but no one could bear to turn on the television.

“Do we go up to the Mahal without him or what?” Wales asked, and the room was split. More arguments, more minor-league recriminations. A phone call from the FBI agent, saying there was a report that Jesus had been seen in a church on the south side. They were checking it out.

At three o’clock, Zelda had to go down and face the press again, and she was still there when the call came in on my cell phone at fifteen minutes before five.

“Russ, Chief Bastatutta. We found him.”

“Alive?”

“Yup.”

“Okay?”

“Yup.”

With the phone still to my ear, I gave the room the thumbs-up. “I have never heard finer words, Chief. Where?”

“Hunter Town.”

“Huh?”

“Been here all day apparently, playing touch football in the mud with some kids. We have him in a car. We’ll get him back to the hotel. Gotta tell you, though, somehow the word leaked out. A few press types were there at the end, just before it got dark. Turn on your TV, you’ll see.”

Someone pushed a button on the remote, and the second the picture came on, there was our candidate, covered from teeth to shoelaces in mud, his arms around four or five black kids dressed in dark hooded sweatshirts. One of them was tossing a football up and down in his hands.

“We’ve been Willie Hortoned,” Wales said, in a tone of voice you might have heard from a guy who’d been told he had to have four root canals on his birthday. I saw Norm Simmelton cringe. “We’ve Willie Hortoned ourselves.”

“Nah, listen,” I told him. “I spent some time in Hunter over the years. I even think I recognize one of those kids. They’re good kids, most of them.”

“Right. You know they’re good kids. I know they’re good kids. Question is, do Suzy and Mitch Hazlegood in Whistlestop, Missouri, know they’re good kids? Don’t think so.”

“Will it ever stop,” Nadine Simmelton moaned.

Hunter Town was a sort of poorer Fultonville, a section of the city that white cabdrivers would not take a fare to. Even the Jamaican and Ethiopian cabdrivers would often refuse to go there. ZIZ reporters asked for police escorts when they were assigned a Hunter Town story.

“I don’t understand,” I said. I was on the couch next to Wales at that point. Zelda had come around behind and put her hands on my shoulders. “I mean, I know he cares about the poor, and wants to make a symbolic statement about that and wants the country to finally get beyond racial problems, but why didn’t he go to Hunter Town and have a rally or something? Why blow off the press? Why not tell any of us where he was going? It’s like he has a death wish or something … You know what I mean.”

Wales was trying to unwrap a cigar, but his hands weren’t working right. He stared at the television screen without saying another word.
We watched ZIZ show the pictures over and over again of Jesus with his football pals. Jesus smiling, waving, and, for the benefit of the TV cameras, tossing one last perfect spiral before climbing into a squad car. Noelle Prendergast, who’d been promoted to roving correspondent when I quit, was on the scene, “Reporting live from Hunter Town, for the Wizard, WZIZ News at five.” She looked frightened and was holding the microphone too far up into her face, but otherwise seemed to be doing a competent job.

When the police escorted Jesus to the suite, Stab hugged him with more gusto than usual. My mother convinced him to have a bowl of soup. He stood at the counter in the kitchen, mud caked on his shirt, running shoes, and sweat pants, looking utterly unconcerned about the fact that he’d stood up two hundred plus reporters, twice, that the pundits were predicting a wholesale abandonment by the fickle swing voters in key states, and that he’d caused us so much worry.

Jesus was polite enough to finish the soup and to compliment my mother on it. He told us plans were still on for the Indian meal in Wells River and that he was going to his room to shower and change. I couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t hold my anger in. I followed him down the corridor and when he turned to close his door he saw me. He smiled, motioned me in, shut the door behind me, and stood there with mud in his hair. “Let me guess,” he said, “you are upset.”

“I would like a momentary exemption,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

“From what?”

“From you being, you know … God or whatever you are. I’d like to be able to say what I want to say without fear of punishment.”

He laughed.

“I’m serious. I want an exemption.”

“You can always tell me what’s on your mind, you know that, Russ.”

“This isn’t always,” I said stupidly. And then it spilled out of me: “You made us all miserable today. It was rude, it was inconsiderate, it was ungrateful, after all the work we’ve done. And most important, it was a completely stupid thing to do from a strategic standpoint—you kept
hundreds of press people waiting not once, but twice, and they don’t like that kind of thing. You might have blown the whole election with one day of touch football.”

He had not moved. The expression on his face was pleasant, attentive, respectful, even friendly. He seemed to be waiting for more.

“That’s all I wanted to say.”

He kept looking at me.

“No offense intended. No disrespect. But I think it was a lousy thing to do, a crazy thing, and I couldn’t just go up to the dinner tonight and pretend everything was hunky-dory. I’m not like that.”

“I know you’re not,” he said. “That is why you’re here, because you’re not like that. That is why I chose you. When it comes time to tell my story, I don’t want someone who is going to prettify it. I am not interested in being the Jesus of someone’s syrupy imagination.”

“All right,” I said, but I was confused.

He held me in his gaze until I was uncomfortable, and then he said, “And I know about your doubts.”

I was suddenly interested in the color of the hotel walls.

“Look at me,” he said.

It was exceedingly difficult to move my eyes back to him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “For the doubts.”

“I am used to it, believe me. If it makes you feel any better, I can tell you this: it is as impossible for you to conceive of the reality of the God realm as it is for you to imagine yourself breathing underwater, or flying with your arms. Later, when you have passed out of this body, the full power of the presence of God will be made manifest to you, and then there will be no possibility of doubt.”

“That scares me, for some reason.”

“For good reason. It is an awesome experience for everyone, and terrifying for a person who has lived a life filled with violence or hatred or greed. For someone who has lived a life of kindness and generosity, however, it is vastly different. In that moment when such people first feel God’s presence they are protected from fear by the understanding that they have God’s goodness in themselves. Clear?”