Free Messiah by Gore Vidal Page A

new or old deity, he denies the reality of any power other than the human . . ."
    "A strange sort of messiah."
    "I've been trying to tell you this." She smiled. "He sounds at times not unlike you just now . . . not so glib perhaps."
    "Now you mock me."
    "No more than you deserve for assuming facts without evidence."
    "If he throws over all the mystical baggage what is left? an ethical system?"
    "In time, I suppose, that will come. So far there is no system. You'll see for yourself soon enough."
    "You've yet to answer any direct question I have put to you."
    She laughed. "Perhaps there is a significance in that; perhaps you ask the wrong questions . . ."
    "And perhaps you have no answers."
    "Wait."
    "For how long?"
    She looked at her watch by the candles' uncertain light. "For an hour."
    "You mean we're to see him tonight?"
    "Unless you'd rather not."
    "Oh, I want to see him, very much."
    "He'll want to see you too, I think." She looked at me thoughtfully but I could not guess her intention; it was enough that two lines had crossed, both moving inexorably toward a third, toward a temporary terminus at the progression's heart.
    4

    It is difficult now to recall just what I expected. Iris deliberately chose not to give me any clear idea of either the man or of his teachings or even of the meeting which we were to attend; we talked of other things as we drove in the starlight north along the ocean road, the sound of waves striking sand loud in our ears.
    It was nearly an hour's drive from the restaurant to the place where the meeting was to be held. Iris directed me accurately and we soon turned from the main highway into a neon-lighted street; then off into a suburban area of comfortable-looking middle-class houses with gardens. Trees lined the streets; dogs barked; yellow light gleamed at downstairs windows. Silent families were gathered in after-dinner solemnity before television sets, absorbed by the spectacle of figures singing, dancing and telling jokes.
    As we drove down the empty streets, I saw ruins and dust where houses were and, among the powdery debris of stucco all in mounds, the rusted antennae of television sets like the bones of awful beasts whose vague but terrible proportions will alone survive to attract the unborn stranger's eye. But the loathing of one's own time is a sign of innocence, of faith. I have come since to realize the wholeness of man in time. That year, perhaps that ride down a deserted evening street of a California suburb, was my last conscious moment of particular disgust: television, the Blues and the Greens, the perfidy of Carthage, the efficacy of rites to the moon . . . all were at last the same.
    "That house over there, with the light in front, with the clock."
    The house, to my surprise, was a large neo-Georgian funeral parlor with a lighted clock in front crowned by a legend discreetly fashioned in Gothic gold on black: Whittaker and Dormer, Funeral Directors . A dozen cars had been parked closely together in the street and I was forced to park nearly a block away.
    We walked along the sidewalk, street lamps behind trees cast shadows thick and intricate upon the pavement. "Is there any particular significance?" I asked. "I mean in the choice of meeting place?"
    She shook her head. "Not really, no. We meet wherever it's convenient. Mr Dormer is one of us and has kindly offered his chapel for the meetings."
    "Is there any sort of ritual I should observe?"
    She laughed. "Of course not. This isn't at all what you think."
    "I think nothing."
    "Then you are prepared. I should tell you, though, that until this year when a number of patrons made it possible for him" (already I could identify the "him" whenever it fell from her lips, round with reverence and implication) "to devote all his time to teaching, he was for ten years an undertaker's assistant in Oregon and Washington."
    I said nothing. It was just as well to get past this first obstacle all at once. There was no reason of