American Savior Read online

  “I am not talking about the guys you play golf with, I am talking about you.”

  “All right. Yeah, I feel that way sometimes.”

  “I am here to tell you what the something else is that you should be doing.”

  “You mean Hollywood is finally going to call?”

  He smiled a sad smile, and for an instant I let my guard down and started to think that, God or no, he was kind of a good guy and I was being kind of a jerk.

  “I’m going to do things differently this time,” he said, in that same quiet tone.

  “Really.”

  He nodded, picked up his fork. “Last time I wasn’t entirely happy with the way it worked out. To be frank, it took hundreds of years for what I did to have much impact on the world, and by then things were so muddled.… Well, you people have never really recovered. Look at the Middle East.”

  “So this time you’re going on American Idol.”

  A shake of the head. “This time I am going to run for president of the United States.”

  This knocked me silent, but only for a second. “Smart,” I said. “Good move. A lot of Holy Ones do that.”

  “I came to ask for your help. You, Zelda, a few other good-hearted people who were born in this place and time for this reason. But I can sense that you do not yet feel yourself worthy of being called, and I can see that you’re not going to believe me at first, despite the two events.”

  “Events?”

  “The two miracles.”

  “So-called,” I said.

  “You don’t have faith, then?”

  “A small amount,” I said. “But it’s doing battle right now with a big amount of professional objectivity.”

  “I understand that battle all too well,” he said, finally taking a bite of his food and nodding as if he approved of it. “There is always a war going on between intellect and faith, that’s nothing new.”

  “Which side do you fight on?” I asked him.

  “Neither. Evil has been done by people on both sides of the equation.”

  “Well, okay,” I said. His last remark had softened me up. Plus, I’m usually in a better mood after I have some coffee. “You seem like a decent guy. I’m sure you mean well. But you have to realize that going around calling yourself Jesus Christ will raise eyebrows. So will the claim that you’ll be running for president. And also the tendency you seem to have to ask people to quit their jobs. I’m just offering that as free advice.”

  He gave me the brilliant smile, pushed his plate an inch away from him. “Why don’t we leave it at this,” he said. “I shall try to persuade you in a different way. And if you remain skeptical, then I shall stop pestering you and find a decent replacement.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. I had my wallet out, was paying in cash, anxious to be on my way. “You know, send it to me in a dream or something. That’s the way they did it in the old days.” A pretty good exit line, I thought, but when I stood up and glanced at him one last time he was giving me a look of such profound disappointment that it actually shook me. I worried I had hurt his feelings, and while you don’t want to be taken in by every huckster on every street corner, at the same time, you don’t want to harden your heart to the point where you feel nothing for anyone but yourself, and maybe those closest to you. For a second I worried that I’d stepped over the line.

  But then, after a firm handshake, I was out in the rain again and, may God forgive me, already more or less forgetting about Hay-Zeus heading back to the comfort and relative sanity of my co-workers, my routine, my hopes, my various appetites and assumptions, and so on.

  SEVEN

  And I would have been comfortable in those assumptions for the rest of my life, probably, if I hadn’t awakened, next morning, to the sound of weeping. I’d spent the night alone, in my nice eighth-floor, five-room condo overlooking the city of West Zenith. For a second or two, when I heard the weeping, I thought it must be a dream. I closed my eyes and was trying to sink back into sleep when I felt someone sit on the edge of the mattress. I blinked my eyes open and saw Zelda there, all dressed for work in a sexy green pantsuit, crying to beat the band.

  My first thought, naturally, was that she’d come to tell me she was pregnant. Why else would she let herself into my apartment at nine in the morning and be crying like that? And, even in my sleepy state, I was okay with the idea. I put my hand on her arm, and I said, “It’s okay. It’s fine.” She was shaking her head and weeping, wet black strands of hair caught in one corner of her mouth.

  I pulled her down beside me and we lay there like that for a while, Zelda messing up her work suit and me dreaming of playing catch with Russell Jr. on a weedless lawn in the Boston or New York suburbs.

  But after a few minutes she sat up and said, “Jesus came to me in a dream.”

  “Huh?”

  “He did. You have to believe me, Russ. Please believe me.”

  “Okay, I believe you. What’s not to believe?”

  “He said I’d been chosen for something, to help him with something. It wasn’t like any dream I’ve ever had. It was much much much more real. I’m a psychologist, I deal in dreams all the time. It wasn’t even a dream, really, it was a vision. You have to believe me!”

  “Okay, calm down, I believe you.”

  “No you don’t!”

  “All right, I don’t exactly. I mean, I believe you had the dream, but I’m not sure it was that different than any of the other dreams—”

  She started hitting me, which was a first, banging a soft fist against my shoulder in a way that surprised me but didn’t hurt. I took hold of her hand and said, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  “I knew this would happen,” she said, and there was so much disappointment in her voice that it frightened me. I’d been getting a lot of that kind of thing lately, people telling me I came across as shady or cynical or too ambitious, or one thing or another. At that moment something changed in me, I could feel it. One line of defense broke apart.

  I sat up against the headboard and said, “All right, confession time.”

  “I knew it!” Zelda yelled. “You’ve been cheating. I knew it. I knew it was a mistake to get involved with a celebrity, even a minor league celebrity.”

  “Thanks for the minor league part,” I said. “But I haven’t been cheating. I did have lunch with a guy in Wells River yesterday. He—”

  “A guy? You’re cheating on me with another guy? You never told me this. I mean, it’s not as bad, it doesn’t hurt as much, but it’s the type of thing you are supposed to share.”

  “Zel, listen. You’re upset. Just keep quiet a minute and let me finish. I met with a guy who claims he is the miracle worker. The Good Visitor. Jesus, he said his name is. You know, as in the Bible. He said he wanted me and you to quit our jobs, that he’s going to run for president of the United States. I didn’t believe him, naturally, another state hospital escapee watching too many news reports. But he said he’d send the message to me in a dream.”

  “And he sent it to me instead!” Zelda yelled.

  “All right. Calm down.”

  “But that’s what happened, can’t you see?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Thinking about it? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Wrong with me? What’s wrong with you? You’re a therapist, a scientist of the mind. You don’t think there might be something perfectly explainable going on here?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve never had a dream like that, not once in my entire life. And you’ve never done stories about a stranger healing children, or saving a child who fell three stories. Tell me you have.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then why are you being so resistant?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, why?”

  “Don’t therapize me, Zel.”

  “Answer the question. Just honestly spit it out, no holding back.”

  “Honestly?”

  “No holding back, Russ.”
>
  “Honestly, I think it’s because I want to be God. Deep down inside, I’m another Randy Zillins type, another egotistical, insecure guy who’s jealous of the heroes he reports on. There it is. I want to be the special one, as special as Jesus is supposed to be, to you and to everybody else. Healing kids, having a fuss made. A lot of us want to be top of the heap, king of the food chain. Anchorman on the nightly world news. All right? Now I said it. Your boyfriend is the biggest egotist of all time.”

  I waited, shocked at myself, assessing the damage. There is a downside to one’s defenses falling apart. Zelda was watching me as if I were some kind of orangutan that had escaped from the zoo. I suddenly had the sickening feeling she was going to walk out the door and never come back. So I shocked myself again. I said, “And how about this, as long as we’re being honest: I want you to marry me. I want to get married. Will you marry me?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “I thought you said that, after Esther, you’d never get married again.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “When?”

  “Just now. What’s your answer? Don’t keep me hanging. Don’t pull a Mitchell’s girlfriend on me.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “You won’t. Okay. Fine. That settles that. I don’t blame you, to tell you the truth. This morning I don’t blame you at all. I’m in such a mood I wouldn’t marry me either.”

  “I meant I won’t pull a Mitchell’s girlfriend. The answer is yes, yes I will. I’ll marry you.”

  Her answer made me glad, naturally. Though I have to say I was still shocked at myself and half asleep, and naked. Zelda was unbuttoning and then taking off her nice green work suit, in a frenzied way, and as she climbed in beside me and wrapped her warm arms around me, I could not keep myself, momentarily, from thinking about Mitchell Honorais, a former anchorman at ZIZ. Mitch had proposed to his girlfriend on the air on New Year’s Eve. She’d said no, or at least failed very obviously to say yes, and from that moment Mitch had gone into a slide, personally and professionally, and ended up losing his self-confidence, his job, his house, what was left of his relationship with the girlfriend, and then taking refuge in methamphetamines.

  “We’ll quit our jobs and go to work for Jesus,” I told Zelda, resolutely, and that seemed to please her very much.

  EIGHT

  So we made love, Zelda and I, but something was different about it that morning, as if the marriage proposal had caused some fundamental change between us. Afterward we rested against each other for a while, and then she suddenly sat up straight and looked at the radio. “Oh my God, I have a ten o’clock!” she yelled. It was 9:41. If there weren’t any gas line explosions or shootings along the route, it took her twelve minutes to go from my condo to her office, park her car, and sprint up the stairs, and she was positively obsessive about never keeping a client waiting. “They’ll think I don’t care about them,” she told me, more than once. “It will revive their childhood feelings of abandonment.”

  “Maybe if that happened it would be an opportunity for healing,” I said, because I knew the lingo by then. I’d even done a little therapy myself, after the divorce. I believed in the healing potential of talking to a professional, of course, but that wasn’t the kind of thing top-ten-market news-anchor candidates liked to make public.

  Anyway, Zelda kissed me passionately, ran out the door, buttoning her blouse as she went, and, for some reason, crying.

  I sat in bed for an hour staring at the wall. What had just happened? My brilliant and down-to-earth girlfriend had seen Jesus in a dream. I’d asked her to marry me. It seemed I’d agreed to quit my job, though I couldn’t be sure about that part. The whole thing terrified me. For a while I thought I should go into therapy again. But at that moment I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t think straight. The phone rang.

  “Hello,” I said, in a dazed voice.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Great.”

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “Sitting in bed with a bulging bladder, worrying.”

  “Worry drains the spirit.”

  “Easy for you to say. I didn’t just appear to your girlfriend in a dream.”

  “You have nothing to fear as long as I am with you.”

  “Sure, okay. You going to pay my car insurance, which is due tomorrow? And after that the condo fee? Golf club dues for next year? Pay for the ring, the wedding, the honeymoon, the diapers, the tennis lessons, the braces, the college tuition? And so on?”

  “Yes, I am. Indirectly, perhaps, but your work with me will pay for all those things.”

  I sat there a minute and didn’t say anything.

  “You are cherishing a doubt,” Jesus said.

  “Exactly.”

  “In spite of the dream I sent Zelda.”

  “It seems a bit hocus-pocusy to me, that dream stuff. It’s a few hundred miles outside the realm of ordinary screwiness I deal with every day of my life.”

  “Zelda, on the other hand, has no doubts whatsoever, have you noticed that?”

  “Sure, I—”

  “Are you smarter than she is?”

  “No way.”

  “Wiser?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Is she especially gullible?”

  “Not at all. Gullible’s the last thing she is.”

  “Then how do you explain the difference between your response to me and hers? Have you thought about that?”

  “No, honestly, I haven’t, until just now.”

  Jesus was quiet for a few seconds, and I thought he had hung up. But then he said, “When you make love, Zelda likes you to take hold of her right earlobe between your thumb and second finger and squeeze it gently.”

  I sat there staring at the wall. In the name of full disclosure I should admit at this point that, hearing those words, and traumatized as I was by past marital troubles, it occurred to me that Zelda might have been cheating on me with this Hay-Zeus character, and the rest of it was just an elaborate cover-up. Her way of getting me to finally pop the question, maybe. Her own childhood abandonment trauma being played out.

  But then, in the calmest of voices, Jesus went on: “When you were fifteen you were coming out of a baseball game with some friends in North Salem, all of you happy, raucous. In your boyish joy, you ran out into the street and came very close to being hit and killed by a man driving a red Chevrolet Impala.”

  “You’ve been talking to my mother.”

  “You masturbated for the first time in the bathroom of your parents’ home when you were thirteen.”

  “Okay, you haven’t been talking to my mother,” I said, but he was scaring me.

  “When you shave you always start to the right of your Adam’s apple and take an upward stroke. Esther used to criticize you for preferring to use only a particular kind of spoon when you ate oatmeal. Sometimes, as you are about to take your backswing on the golf course you think about an old girlfriend who dumped you. Her name was—”

  “Stop,” I said, quietly and calmly. “You can stop now.”

  “Or I could go on and on,” he said.

  “You’re not just a particularly talented psychic, are you?

  “You don’t need me to answer that.”

  “Right, okay. Next question then: why me?”

  “Again with the self-hatred.”

  “Nothing to do with self-hatred. You’ll excuse me, I’m just surprised that, of the six billion people on earth, you pick Russell Thomas to come down to.”

  “The fishermen were surprised, too. Mary was surprised. Joseph. Lazarus. Magdalene. The whole gang of them, surprise everywhere. What would it say about somebody if they weren’t surprised?”

  I thought about it. It felt like some kind of compliment. I said, “All right. Okay.” And then I had to force the next words out because I thought I
knew what the answer was going to be. “What do you want me to do next, then. I mean—”

  “Go to the station and give your notice.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes. This morning.”

  “How much notice?”

  “Two days.”

  “Two days? You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve been there almost eight years. I’m supposed to go in and tell them I’m leaving in two days!”

  “You are not that hard to replace,” Jesus said.

  “Thanks. Appreciate it.”

  “Courage is the main thing in this life. And it comes in various forms. Give your notice and we’ll talk,” he said. “You won’t regret it.”

  NINE

  I got up and used the toilet and shaved, starting off, as always, to the right of my Adam’s apple. There were, it seemed to me, two choices: I could write the guy off as a complete crank who happened to have psychic abilities, start screening my calls, and refuse to have lunch meetings ever again with anyone who referred to himself as Jesus Christ. I would keep my job, that was the good part. The bad part was that Zelda would lose all respect for me, probably break up with me, and if it turned out that Jesus was actually who he said he was, I’d be up the creek for eternity.

  The other option was not much more pleasant: I could drive over to WZIZ, walk into Wales’s office and tell him I was leaving in two days. Boom, career gone. I’d never get another job in the industry after a stunt like that because if there is one quality you have to have if you work in TV news it is dependability. I had some savings. I could probably get by for a few months, maybe even half a year, without losing the condo and the car. And then I would be starting from scratch in some other line of work.

  It occurred to me, as I took a shower, got dressed, made my way downstairs into the garage and drove to the station, that it was perfectly easy to go through life saying you believed in God as long as there was no price to pay. You believed in God, you didn’t believe in God—maybe it would make a difference after you died, but saying one thing or saying the other didn’t make much difference in terms of actual, immediate consequences in your ordinary walking-around life. And then something like this happened, and you were forced to put your money where your mouth was, as it were. Walk the walk, so to speak. I’d grown up with stories about people who had to pay a price for their faith. My dad was always telling me about his relatives in Poland (our real name had been Tzomascevic before the people at Ellis Island Americanized it), who’d never tried to hide the fact that they were Jewish and had been tortured and killed for it. And my mom was big on the early Christian martyrs, who could have avoided being burned at the stake or eaten by lions, just by saying, “Nope, not me. I don’t believe in the guy,” but hadn’t done that.