American Savior (26 page)

“I know that voice. Give it one more try on the Secret Service stuff,
will you? I’ll call in our secret weapon, Enrica Dominique. We’ll have to watch the crowds better. I’ll tell the others what Stab said and ask them to keep it quiet.”

“Does Zelda know?”

“Not yet.”

“You two okay?”

“The truth? She’s in love with him. It’s a little hard for me. Tough to, you know, compete with God.”

“Tell me about it,” Wales said. “Ezzie adores him, too.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Lucky we’re not egotistical, right?”

“Exactly. What keeps me awake at night, though, is the idea that all the men in America aren’t as enlightened as you and me. I picture some guy out there who can’t bear to see Jesus getting this attention. He’s on the plump side, this guy, thanks to a lifetime of too many beers. His looks are gone, brain cells going. He lives someplace he doesn’t want to live and works someplace he doesn’t like to work, and his daddy made fun of him when he was little for not being able to beat up the kid next door, and he enjoys rifles, this guy, goes out into the woods behind his house and shoots chipmunks on Sunday morning when his wife and kids are at church. One evening, after a lousy day at work, he comes home and finds his wife sitting in front of a TV news story about Jesus coming to town for a campaign stop. She has a certain look on her face. Her cheeks are red, hands sweating, toes curled up. The Spam is going cold in the kitchen. They haven’t had sex since Y2K. Next day the guy skips work, comes to a rally with an AK-47 hidden in the leg of his pants … you get where I’m going.”

“Yeah,” Wales said. We were squishing along in the wet sand near the edge of the water, ruining our good shoes. He put a hand on my arm and turned me a hundred eighty degrees so that we were heading back toward the crowd. “I’m old enough to remember when they took a shot at Gerry Ford … who wasn’t exactly—”

“Richard Sprockett in the charisma department.”

“Not to mention Reagan, King, Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley.”

“Archduke Ferdinand,” I chipped in. The subject was not a light one; in fact, it scared me down to my toenails. But I was doing my best not to let it drag us toward the Paxil bottles at the local CVS.

We went along for a few steps with the sound of surf, seagulls, and screaming fifteen-year-olds. “You know,” Wales said. “We had a chat about this stuff.”

“Who?”

“The Boss and me.”

“About security?” I felt another twinge of hurt that they’d left me out of it.

“Not your kind of security,” Wales said. “Security security.”

“Oh
security
security. I thought you were talking about the other security.”

“Moron.” He spat into the surf, and then turned his head torward me again so I could hear him better. “We took a walk. Palm Springs. Early, you know, before that weird bus ride. I was telling him that, after all those years of struggling—well, I’m a little bit like that guy you described, shooting the chipmunks.”

“Big belly,” I said. “Your looks gone.”

“No, I mean, after years of being single, not finding a woman I wanted to spend more than two nights with, not loving my job, feeling like I was doing nothing more than walking the treadmill and making the paycheck, after all that, you know, I find Ezzie, and it works out the way it has. So great. Then Jesus comes and picks me to be his campaign manager. Guy could have had anybody on earth for the job, right? Now I wake up in the morning and I look at Ezzie asleep next to me and I think about her and me and the job I have, the privilege of it, the thrill, and I worry this will all be taken away from me. Finally I have it, you know? My own little paradise—even your presence doesn’t spoil it for me. And I spend part of every day thinking: what if I lose this? It’s weird.”

Not on the golf course, not on the job, not in Patsanazakis’s over late-night beers, or in an unguarded moment at a birthday party when he’d had four martinis had Wales ever talked to me the way he talked that day on the beach. It was what Zelda had said: as if Jesus had magically shown
us how to take off the armor-plated vest. I was shocked into silence. We were coming close to the screaming fans by then, the surfing safari.

“He said something I’ve been thinking about,” Wales went on. “Can’t wrap my mind around it.”

“Let me figure it out for you.”

“He said you have to say yes to everything. He said Job had trouble when he said no, and then once he said yes, everything worked out; that was the whole point of the story. That kind of trust.”

“Sorry,” I said. “All those sores and everything. Losing the condo, the car. Not for me.”

“Be serious a minute, Russ.” Wales turned and looked at me.

I felt, at that moment, childish and afraid. I did not like the feeling. I tried to swallow my fear, but it stuck in my throat and made my voice come out funny. “So, what then? We’re supposed to let someone shoot Jesus and kill him and say yes to it? We’re supposed to let, I don’t know, let Zelda or Ezzie die, or leave us, and say yes to it? That’s what you’re saying?”

Wales kept looking at me. I could hear the waves breaking and splashing. “All those years you did the news,” he said. “All those stories about kids who died in car crashes on prom night. All those guys who got shot in Fultonville and Hunter Town. Earthquakes. Floods. Cancer. Parents whose kids got kidnapped and were never heard from again. Didn’t we learn anything from that?”

“I interviewed a lot of those people in person,” I said. “I can tell you, ‘Yes’ or ‘Yes, thank you, God,’ was not exactly the first thing that jumped to their lips.”

“Naturally,” Wales said, but he was looking at me like I was missing something.

“When I found out Esther was, you know, doing the mattress tango with the Tai Chi guy, the first words out of my mouth weren’t, ‘Hey, thank you, God.’”

“Good example,” Wales said. “Think about it for a minute.” We were having more eye contact in those few seconds than we’d had in eight years.

I blundered on. “When Stab was born the way he was, my mother and dad didn’t jump for joy about it.”

“Good example number two.”

Wales kept looking at me. I started to have an understanding of what he might be getting at. “Okay, fine,” I said. “But there are things that don’t work out for the best in the end. I can give you ten examples from the news reports you just mentioned. The mother and dad who—”

He held up his hand. “I know that,” he said. “Norm Simmelton and I had a conversation about it. You don’t go up to them and say, “Hey, it’s all right, you’re kid’s going to die in a few weeks but everything happens for a reason.” You don’t say that. You can’t. You shouldn’t.”

“But,” I began.

Wales waited for me to go on, and when I didn’t, he said, “But.” And then. “Maybe.” And then. “You don’t ever really know.”

And then somebody in the crowd was calling us to come over and watch Richard Sprockett, who had decided to get on a surfboard himself, first time, just to see what it felt like.

THIRTY

What Jesus was trying to do, I realized after that conversation with Wales on the beach, was to push us deep into the part of ourselves we habitually ran away from. “There is,” he said, during an ad-lib speech somewhere in the brown stucco sprawl outside San Diego, “a golden alpine field within each of you, a place where you are bathed in approval, not because of anything particular you have done, but simply because of your own sacred nature. If you had a president who could show you the route to that place, what a difference it would make in your lives, and in the culture of the world!”

I imagined intellectuals and anti-intellectuals mocking him in living rooms across the country. “Golden alpine field,” they’d be saying. “My own sacred nature. What kind of bullcrap is that?”

But by then I had started listening more and more closely to what Jesus said. On the one hand, our work with him was very much
exterior
work: the speeches, the logistics, the nitty-gritty of trying to convince large numbers of people to vote for him. On the other hand, in California especially, all of us felt that he had his own global warming thing going: he was trying to change the interior climate we’d been used to our whole lives, the way we thought, the kinds of assumptions we made—assumptions about ourselves, the people close to us, the country. “Enlarge your definition of possible,” was something he liked to say when a member of the staff told him we couldn’t do something he wanted us to do. It
was almost as if he were simultaneously running for national office and conducting a private seminar in spiritual healing.

We spent a large amount of time in California, unreasonably large, both Wales and I thought. But Jesus insisted on it. “The arena of enlightenment” was his nickname for the state, though, as with many of his other remarks, we couldn’t be sure how seriously we should take it.

From San Diego we worked our way northward at a tedious pace, doing sometimes as many as eight rallies a day. Instead of going by a fixed itinerary, Jesus told Wales to accept any reasonable invitation that was offered, and once that word got out, we had requests from every small-town mayor and school committee from Escondido to Santa Cruz. He went out to Twentynine Palms to talk to the U.S. Marines there (telling them that their arduous basic training had been the equivalent of a spiritual apprenticeship, a way of gaining control over their fears). Up to Fresno to address fieldworkers in Spanish (telling them that their sweat fed the nation). Back down through San Bernardino, LA, Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, San Luis Obispo, and every little truck stop and hamlet in between.

The effect of these events was a kind of saturation of the local news media—which loved the fact that they had real stories to report, rather than having to use trickle down from the big news wires and national networks. From the first day of the campaign, Jesus had always shown a preference for doing things differently, partly to get publicity, and partly because that’s just who he was. But in California that tendency was turned up a couple of notches. He seemed to want to talk personally with every citizen of the state.

In San Francisco he arranged a meeting with a bunch of big-money bankers and investors called the Feltonov Group, after Pavel Ivanovich Feltonov, the Russian-émigré, hedge fund billionaire. Strictly a behind-closed-doors event, this meeting was held in the San Francisco Hilton. I’d had a sit-down with the chief of police there, and with a state police captain, passed on word that there had been a specific threat to Jesus’s life (though I said I had no more details than that), and they responded by giving us more protection than the Queen of England would have had.
There were plainclothes sharpshooters on the roof of the hotel, motorcycle cops on all sides of us as we drove in from the airport, bomb-sniffing dogs in the fancy lobby.

Jesus emerged from the meeting saying he’d had “substantive discussions on the future of green investing in all sectors of the American economy.” And that same afternoon Feltonov himself went on record as saying Jesus was the candidate who would best serve the economic interests of the American people. It was a huge endorsement as far as America’s business elite was concerned, and we saw an immediate upward bump in donations.

A few hours later, Jesus earned another big endorsement, this one from the U.S. Association of Public School Teachers. He’d attended a book group at the home of a supporter in Marin County. In advance of this, the press had joked that no teachers could afford to live in Marin County, but this proved to be inaccurate: there was at least one. Andrea Welsh’s husband had made millions selling plastic fireplace inserts that looked like a real fire, but in spite of her wealth she’d kept her job as a sixth-grade teacher at Mill Valley Elementary, while raising three children and hosting a monthly book group with eleven well-connected women friends. That month they were reading
Christ Stopped at Eboli,
and someone in the group had half seriously suggested they inquire as to the possibility of Christ stopping at Marin. Zelda jumped on the idea. Jesus sipped tea, nibbled sandwiches, and spent an hour talking about the book (the first and last chapters of which he read on the ride up from San Jose), and though the title turned out to be misleading (it was an account of southern Italian poverty in the time of Mussolini; Christ made no appearance), they had a lively discussion nevertheless. Jesus suggested that, in place of No Child Left Behind, which teachers universally loathed, they develop a national program in which kids in elementary and middle school were required to spend part of every week reading to the blind, to people in nursing homes, to invalids, and so on, and then to write an essay about their experience at the end of the term. Andrea Welsh had invited the head of the USAPST, who loved this idea. So we got another big endorsement.

Maybe the highlight of the Big State Tour, as Wales named it, was a meeting with its governor, Markus Stradivarius, a moderate Republican whose support Marjorie Maplewith had been courting for a year and a half. Stradivarius, a poet and descendant of the famous violin-making family, had emigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans and come to national prominence when he was chosen out of a comely pack of six young studs on
Bachelorette’s Number One,
a TV show that had been popular in the late nineties. No one understood how he had done it, but Stradivarius had parlayed his date with a Victoria’s Secret model, Zindy Zathro, into a career in politics. He’d had a couple of minor setbacks—a brief groping scandal, the whiff of rumor that the bachelorette show had been rigged—but had proved to be a survivor. He liked Jesus’s abortion conference idea, he said, and was intrigued (he pronounced it “intricked”) by the environmental economy comments, and though he stopped short of offering an endorsement, he did allow photographers to take a picture of him shaking Jesus’s hand, and he did promise to write a poem for the inauguration, should Jesus get that far.

By the time we finished our three-and-a-half-week tour of California and flew to Medford, Oregon (more white limos waiting there), national polls showed Jesus with a double-digit lead in the largest electoral state, and it was clear which campaign had momentum and which did not. I don’t know if it was the “more woman” jab, or the empty challenge from her husband’s pulpit, but Republican hopeful Marjorie Maplewith’s campaign stops had taken on an unfortunately desperate mood. The crowds were small. Her frequent trips to California looked like a tardy attempt to counter Jesus’s flanking move there. It was common knowledge that her closest advisors were making a frenzied search for the right slogan.