A Creed for the Third Millennium (38 page)

'I don't,' he grinned.

She didn't comment for a moment, then she
said, 'No wonder Mama looked stunned! But I must say she handled it very well.
Mama!' she shouted into the front seat, leaning forward. 'What a terrific
actress you are, you villain! Telling that poor squashed girl after we got off
the air all about Hannibal and Dido! A ginger and a stripey, for crying out
loud!'

'Well, I did think of making them
Siamese!' Mama shouted back, twisting her head to laugh at her son. 'But then I
decided that if ever Joshua should decide to keep cats, he would
never
keep a breed! Waifs and strays, that's Joshua!'

'You're bound to be asked a lot more
about Hannibal and Dido, Joshua. What are you going to say?'

'Oh, I'll field the questions to Mama.
I've appointed her the real expert on Hannibal and Dido.'

'Ledger-keeping cats! Where on earth did
you dig that one up?'

'A friend,' he said tranquilly, and would
say no more.

Mobile and St Louis marked the emergence
of what Dr Carriol later catalogued as Personality Three in the changing parade of Dr Joshua Christian.
Personality One was the old original Dr Christian of purely Holloman days.
Personality Two was the happy, fulfilled, intolerably energetic, people-guzzling
Dr Christian of the first month after
God in Cursing
was released. The
new personality was bewildered and slightly numbed, but still capable of flashes
reminiscent of Personality Two; Personality Three was also more enclosed, more
obdurate, more Messianic. But none of her knowledge of those three Dr Christians
prepared Dr Carriol for Personality Four, waiting in the green room for an
appearance still months away in the cold impenetrable future.

He never spoke to her about his feelings
on learning of the closure of the Holloman clinic, the dispersion of his
brothers and sisters-in-law across the face of the globe in his service; all she
had to go on in assessing the importance of this as a cause of the emergent
Personality Three was his initial reaction when Mama had broken the news. He was
shocked, most definitely. Dismayed too. Brokenhearted? That she did not know.
Oh, she could reason shrewdly enough that like most people shot to sudden fame,
he had never thought about its personal consequences, either for himself or for
those around him; he had probably assumed that when the tumult and the shouting
died down he would be at liberty to go quietly back to where he was before it
all started. Besides which, the man had a natural humility and some sound
scepticism about himself. It was possible he thought that despite his
aspirations his success would be modest, or at greatest a flash-in-the-pan
thing, quickly up, quickly down, quickly dead. But to turn overnight not into
the object of a fantasy-based adulation, but into a super-guru, reverenced,
thanked, respected — ah, that was a very different adjustment to
make.

So there were more than enough reasons to
account for the emergence of Personality Three, which Dr Carriol called the super-guru. And, in
retrospect, more than enough for the emergence of Personality Four as
well.

Inside himself Dr Christian had abandoned
any kind of self-analysis. His circumstances had simply turned him into a
sponge, doomed to sop up every scrap of the hugely strong and pervasive emotions
he now encountered on every hand.

During the first few weeks he had indeed
fared best, for his self-image was partially anaesthetized by the shock of sheer
novelty and the remorseless travel, so many different faces and places. Then he
stood outside himself enjoying himself, at a distance from the shabby, ugly,
too-thin, too-dark scarecrow of a man who always seemed to be surrounded by
people. And beneath the fantastic joy, all his revelling in this astonishing
success, beneath the pleasure of knowing his aspirations fulfilled, a pool of
sorrow waited. He so singularly unhandsome was told he was the handsomest man
this or that woman had ever seen, he so unaware of his switched-on dynamo of a
self was told how magnetic he was, what charisma he had, how mesmeric and
hypnotic and electrifying and powerful and and and… The adjectives and the
metaphors tumbled one on top of another into the formidable recesses of his
brain like bits of glitter down a chute in a sequin factory.

So how he felt, and what he thought, and
who he became, and where he went, all were taken care of without his knowing
volition. The tides of the sea of idolatry in which he found himself swimming,
poor seal out of his element again, carried him hither and thither, too strong
to fight against. The best he could do was try to remain afloat.

The second and third engagements of the
day in Kansas City were in close proximity to each other, a radio station four blocks from another
radio station. When Dr Christian emerged from the first of the two, WKCM, his
chauffeur-driven car was drawn up right outside the main entrance. Wherever he
went such a car was laid on for him, not a real limousine, because the days of
the limousine were long over, but a big comfortable government car nonetheless,
all evidence of its legitimate owner removed.

Mama had trained herself to leave
wherever her son was two or three minutes early, so she would be installed
within the car by the time her son came out. It was Dr Carriol's practice to
march Dr Christian briskly and with great determination through the knots of
people who always gathered outside, and thanks to this uncompromising escort
service, all Dr Christian was able to do was smile and wave and call a few
greetings before Dr Carriol had him safely inside the car, and the car moved
immediately away.

But this morning he baulked. The
gathering waiting on the sidewalk outside Station WKCM was large enough to be
called a crowd, thanks to the detailed itinerary the local morning newspaper had
printed along with its front-page article about Dr Christian's visit to Kansas
City. Half a dozen policemen had cleared a wide lane through the middle of the
three or four hundred people who would otherwise have completely blocked Dr
Christian's path from the doors of the radio station to the doors of the waiting
car. It was shockingly cold, between a temperature of 25 degrees Fahrenheit and
a strong wind, yet the crowd waited.

Dr Carriol looked through the glass of
the foyer's outer wall and locked her fingers firmly around Dr Christian's upper
arm. 'Come on, we've got to be quick,' she said, pushed open the doors, and
almost frogmarched him out.

The moment he appeared the crowd sighed;
some of the people in it began to call his name and reach out to him. But he was
no movie star, and they knew it No one rushed forward, no one pushed, no one
commenced a movement which would have ended in his being mobbed.

Halfway across the sidewalk he baulked.
And angrily he wrested himself from Dr Carriol's grasp.

'I must speak to these people,' he said,
turning to his left, where the crowd was thickest.

Dr Carriol got her hand on his arm again,
again was shaken off.

'I will speak to them,' he
said.

'Joshua, you can't!' she cried, not
caring how many heard her. 'You have an appointment in five minutes at
WKCK!'

He laughed, approached a policeman and
touched the padded navy nylon of his parka almost caressingly. 'Officer, you
don't mind if I talk to these good people, do you?' he asked, and in his next
breath called to the crowd, 'Where is WKCK?'

A dozen voices answered him; the
policeman moved aside.

Dr Christian laughed and spread wide his
arms. 'Come on, walk me to WKCK!' he shouted.

The crowd closed around him, but
respectfully, awed and delighted and solicitous for his welfare. Uncertain as to
how they should proceed, the police tagged along behind as Dr Christian and the
crowd walked away.

Dr Judith Carriol found herself
alone.

Mama wound down the car window and stuck
her head out. 'Judith, Judith, what's the matter?'

Dr Carriol swung round and strode to the
car, shook her head at the driver preparing to alight, and climbed into the back
seat unassisted.

'Drive us to WKCK, please,' she said
curtly. Then she turned to Mama. He's decided to walk, if you can believe that.
In this weather! He wants to speak to the people. And he's going to be late.
Shit!'

He was late, half an hour. But such was
his reputation that the radio station happily shuffled its programmes around to accommodate him, and the
newspaper which was next on his schedule scrubbed a formal interview in favour
of attaching a reporter to the swelling crowd which escorted Dr Christian from
the second radio station to the town hall, where he was to give a luncheon
speech. Word was spreading as WKCK ecstatically broadcast Dr Christian's
unorthodox behaviour, with the result that people came from every
direction.

Impotent, Dr Carriol seethed in the
background, only poor Mama available to listen, and since Dr Carriol was not a
pointless talker, Mama listened to her thunderous silence. And shivered, not
merely from the cold.

But it was not until they checked into
their new hotel in Little Rock that Dr Carriol had a chance to voice her
displeasure in the privacy it demanded. Thanks to the continuous addition of new
towns to Dr Christian's tour agenda, so far their progress had been in the
nature of a will-o'-the-wisp; north today, south tomorrow, north the day after,
east of the Mississippi one day, west of it the next. So after she finished
chewing Dr Christian out, Dr Carriol intended to telephone Harold Magnus and ram
a giant flea down
his
ear. To the effect that, while Dr Christian seemed
willing enough to take on the extra load, several of the best people in Section
Four must start plotting a logical route immediately. Places like Kansas City
and St Louis were too far north; from Little Rock the tour must go southward and
westward, thus avoiding the worst of what was promising to be a terrible
winter.

But first things first. And her primary
target was Dr Joshua Christian.

They had been given a suite for him, with
two more rooms alongside it for the women, and Billy, independent of his own
wise choice, on a lower floor.

The moment the door of his sitting room
closed behind the porter and Mama, she prepared for battle.

'Just what did you think you were doing
today, Joshua?' she demanded.

In the act of walking through into his
bedroom, he stopped and turned back, genuinely puzzled. 'What was I
doing?'

'This walking business! Shoving yourself
into the middle of a crowd, for God's sake! You might have been
shot!'

His face cleared. 'Oh, that! I don't know
why I didn't think of it before, Judith.'

'What?'

'Walking among the people. It's so
obvious I could kick myself! It's with flesh-and-blood people that I do my best
work. Oh, radio and television are fine in their place, but I've done the most
useful of them already in Atlanta. These local stations aren't nearly as
important as the local people. Today I did more good walking and talking to the
people who came in person to see me than I could have done on a hundred local
media shows.'

She was flabbergasted, could find
absolutely nothing to say in reply; she just stood staring at him.

He laughed at her expression, came across
to her and took her tight pugnacious chin in his hand. 'Judith, please don't
spoil everything by making a scene! I know, I know, you're a punctuality nut,
and you like every little
i
dotted and every little
t
crossed well
ahead of time. But if you want me to go on with this tour, its nature has got to
change. I saw that the moment I walked out of WKCM to find all those people
waiting for me in the freezing cold. I'm not doing this tour to give media
ratings a boost, I'm doing it to help the people. So why am I insulating myself
from them? Why am I spending my time looking into little glass lenses and
talking into little wire meshes? Why am I travelling in a car? Oh, Judith, don't
you understand? They came to wait for me in the
freezing cold!
Hoping I'd
do just what I did, acknowledge them with more than just a regal smile and wave. When I
walked among them, they blossomed like crocuses after a thaw. Today I — I really
felt as if I accomplished some good. I didn't feel guilty or uncomfortable
climbing into a car when they have none — I walked among them, and I was one of
them. Judith, I loved it!'

Her rage was all gone. No use fulminating
when the reason made so much sense. What a long way up it was to his face! And
what a comforting face it was, not beautiful, not sexy, not synthetic. 'Yes,'
she said, her voice sad. 'I understand, Joshua. And I'm sure you're
right.'

To gain victory so easily rattled him; he
had girded his loins for a real scrap, so now he didn't know what to say.
Instead of saying anything at all, he swung her off her feet and waltzed around
the room carrying her, he laughing uproariously while she squealed and
struggled.

Mama came in while this was going on, and
almost wept with joy. It was all right, they were still on good terms, whatever
resentment Judith had cherished was gone.

The sight of his mother sobered him. He
put Dr Carriol down immediately and brushed his palms together awkwardly. 'I've
just won,' he explained lamely. 'Mama, from now on I am going to walk through
every town I visit'