American Savior (41 page)

They managed to get Jesus to the hospital while he was still alive, but he’d lost so much blood that it was impossible to save him. For forty minutes the doctors tried. And for that time we waited in a nearby room, praying and crying. Word came to us quickly that my father’s wounds were not life-threatening; it was the one comfort of that hideous night.

It was strange, the way our vigil ended. This part, of course, was never reported in the press: about a minute before we received word that the doctors could not save Jesus, my brother Stab suddenly stopped sobbing—which he had been doing nonstop—and looked at me. I had looked into Stab’s face several million times in the years I’d known him. There had always been a sort of covering across his close-spaced, droopy eyes and rounded mouth, a dimness—that’s the only way I can describe it—as if his brain were cloaked in fog. But, for that minute or so, a change came across him. He sat there with a look of surprise on his face. I believe that, for better or worse, he was seeing the world around him as the rest of us do. And shortly after that, Dr. Wendy Weston, the head surgeon at Springfield Hospital, came into the waiting room and told us Jesus was gone.

Our grief then was beyond personal, as my guilt had been. It was a universal grieving—for the loss of Jesus, but also for us, our country, humankind. Zelda told me later she thought it was grief that grew out of the fact that we live in a world where evil can triumph so easily over good.

I stayed there a long time. My father had lost a lot of blood and would eventually require two shoulder surgeries, and would never regain full use of his right arm, but his life was not in danger. We were allowed in to see him, though he was still sedated and spoke to us only later in the night.

Before that, dividing us into two groups, the doctors let us into the room where Jesus’s body lay. Zelda and I and Wales and Ezzie and Anna Songsparrow were in the first group. From the shoulders down Jesus was
covered in a sheet. His face was unnaturally pale, the eyes closed, the hair tousled and wet. It was as if no light was in that room, no air.

“Rise,” I said beneath my breath, in a trembling voice that no one could hear. I felt emptied out and bitter, and I could not stop looking at him. “If you’re going to rise, rise now. Don’t wait. Don’t make us wait. Please. Rise.”

He did not stir. Zelda was squeezing my hand and weeping loudly. We moved half a step back so that Anna Songsparrow could go up close and have a private moment. I watched her lean down and press her forehead against her son’s forehead, and I heard her mumbling words—a prayer or incantation in a language I did not understand. She went on for a long time, and after a while her body started to shake, and Zelda and Ezzie went up and held her, and Wales and I moved closer, too, though we did not look at each other and could not speak.

FORTY-THREE

In the small hours of that morning, after Zelda had stood up in front of the press corps and told them everything she knew, and after my mother and Stab had insisted on staying the night in my father’s hospital room (even though he was awake by then and telling them not to), and after Dukey and Enrica and I had accompanied the body down to the morgue, I called Chief Bastatutta and asked him to post a second special detail (in addition to the disgraced Secret Service cadre) to make sure no one tampered with the body, and after Anna Songsparrow and Wales and Ezzie and the Simmeltons had gone back to the hotel to pray or to drink or to field the endless phone calls, I wandered away again. I cannot explain why. When she was done with the press, Zel asked me to take her back to her apartment, which I did. And then she asked me to stay with her, which I did not do, not right away at least. “I’ll come back,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Walking. I just need … I don’t know what I need. I won’t go far. I’ll come back. I need an hour.”

After the trauma of that day, a lot of other women would have made a fuss and insisted I stay. And a lot of other men would not have left. But Zel and I are both different in that respect, and it is a difference that has persisted in our married life, and we both see it as a strength, a way of letting the other person move in his or her own orbit, while holding on to the gravitational attachment we feel for each other.

In any case, I went out walking. It was past three a.m. by that point,
the darkest part of a dark night. I did not set out with any conscious destination in mind, just turned right on the sidewalk in front of the building and kept going, past the row of redone Victorians, and then across the bridge and into Fultonville. Maybe I was subconsciously heading for the scene of the first miracle, I don’t know. I walked in a cold daze. I remember that a few lights were on in the windows of the buildings I passed, a few cars and cabs in the street. Under ordinary circumstances, at that hour of the night, I wouldn’t have been caught dead strolling through Fultonville without a police escort, or at least the accompaniment of a camera crew. But you had the sense that even the muggers and dealers and gang bangers were taking a break (in fact, as statistics would later show, there was a seventy percent drop in violent crime, nationwide, in the twenty-four hours after Jesus’s death).

Still, it was an eerie place, a neighborhood haunted by the memories of awful news stories, and it was almost as if those stories lived on in the brick faces of the buildings, in the littered vacant lots and school playgrounds, in the molecules of the fire hydrants, telephone poles, and rusting chain-link fences.

After a while, tired and cold, I came to a place called Liberty Park, a nasty three or four hundred square yards of urban foliage and trash, a place frequented by street people who could find no safer spot to lay down their cardboard boxes. I had done a dozen stories from Liberty Park, none of them happy. It was only blocks from the place where Dukey Junior had been brought back to life. I was very cold by then. I should have turned around and headed back to Zelda’s apartment, but I was in a peculiar mood, a mood that went beyond sadness. It was more than missing Jesus, more than sorrow that he would never inhabit the White House, more than anger at the violent fool who had shot him. I had sunk into a spiritual depression, you could call it. A feeling that, in this realm at least, good would never triumph, hope was nothing more than a waste of energy, and my own personal demons would always haunt me.

I sat on one of the wooden slat benches in the half darkness, and I looked out across the empty park.

And now I come to another part of the story you won’t find in the history books. I will tell it the way it happened, which is what I was asked to do.

I was sitting on the bench in Liberty Park when I saw a shadowy figure come walking through the same entrance I had used. I felt a stirring of fear, of course—in that neighborhood, at that hour. And yet, I was in such a strange mood that I almost didn’t care, one way or the other, if somebody tried to hurt me. I could see that it was a man. On the tall side, dressed in dark clothes. He was shuffling along in a street person’s gait, moving vaguely in my direction. When he passed beneath the dim streetlight I caught a glimpse of his face. I stood up. He shuffled over to me. I made a move to get down on my knees, but he took hold of my right arm and held me upright. “I do not want that from you,” he said. “Let’s sit.”

We sat side-by-side, but I turned so I could look at him. The clothes were dirty and old and there was mud on his shoes, but it was the same face, eyes shining in the darkness, a hint of impatience around the mouth. There was no evidence of blood anywhere; he did not seem to be in pain; he had a human consistency, if that’s the right word, and was nothing like a walking ghost. I could feel my body trembling, the smallest of vibrations, as if grief were strumming a funeral song in my cells.

“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.”