the Arrival took place.
This last one to arrive was a man so pale that his skin seemed to glow with an inner light. He was tall, six feet three I would imagine, and his hair was long and his beard dressed and shaped, and his eyes of such startling clarity that you felt he saw your bones through your flesh and your soul inside your bones. As he passed each table, the knives and forks hesitated on their way to half-open mouths. After he passed, leaving a wake of silence, the business of life began again. He strode with a measured tread as if he wore robes instead of a tattered coat and some soiled trousers. He gave a blessing gesture on the air as he moved by each table, but his eyes were straight ahead, as if seeing some world beyond, not ours. He was looking at me, and I shrank, for I couldn’t imagine why he would seek me out, among all these accepted and established talents. And at last he stood above me, the gravity of his demeanor being such it pulled me to my feet.
There was a long silence as this man with the beautiful face stretched out a thin arm with a thin wrist, and at the end of it a hand with the most exquisitely long fingers I had ever seen.
I put my hand out to take his. His hand turned, and I saw the mark of the driven spike in the middle of the wrist. He turned his other hand over, so I could see the similar scar in the middle of his left wrist. He smiled, reading my mind, and quietly explained, “Most people think the nails were driven through the palms. No. The palms could not hold a body’s weight. The wrists, nailed, can. The wrists.” Then he turned both hands over so I could see where the nails had come through on the other side.
“J. C.,” said Fritz Wong, “this is our visitor from another world, our young science-fiction writer—”
“I know.” The beautiful stranger nodded and gestured toward himself.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
I stepped aside so he could sit, then fell back in my own chair.
Fritz Wong passed down a small basket full of bread. “Please,” he called, “change these into fish!”
I gasped.
But J. C., with the merest flick of his fingers, produced one silvery fish from amidst the bread and tossed it high. Fritz, delighted, caught it to laughter and applause.
The waitress arrived with several bottles of cheap booze to more shouts and applause.
“This wine,” said J. C., “was water ten seconds ago. Please!”
The wine was poured and savored.
“Surely—” I stammered.
The entire table looked up.
“He wants to know,” called Fritz, “if your name is really what you say it is.”
With somber grace, the tall man drew forth and displayed his driver’s license. It read:
“Jesus Christ. 911 Beachwood Avenue. Hollywood.”
He slipped it back into his pocket, waited for the table to be silent, and said:
“I came to this studio in 1927 when they made Jesus the King. I was a woodworker out back in those sheds. I cut and polished the three crosses on Calvary, still standing. There was a contest in every Baptist basement and Catholic backwash in the land. Find Christ! He was found here. The director asked where I worked? The carpenter’s shop. My God, he cried, let me see that face! Go put on a beard! ‘Make me look like holy Jesus,’ I advised the makeup man. I went back, dressed in robes and thorns, the whole holy commotion. The director danced on the Mount and washed my feet. Next thing you know the Baptists were lining up at Iowa pie festivals when I dusted through in my tin flivver with banners “THE KING IS COMING,” “GOING ON BEFORE.”
“Across country in auto bungalow courts, I had a great ten-year Messiah run, until vino and venality tattered my smock. Nobody wants a womanizing Saviour. It wasn’t so much I kicked cats and wound up other men’s wives like dime-store clocks, no, it was just that I was Him, you see?”
“I think I see,” I said gently.
J. C. put his long wrists and long hands and long fingers out before him, as cats often sit, waiting for the world to come worship.
“Women felt it was blasphemy if they so much as breathed my air. Touching was terrible. Kissing a mortal sin. The act itself ? Might as well leap in the burning pit with an eternity of slime up to your ears. Catholics, no, Holy Rollers were worst. I managed to bed and breakfast one or two before they knew me, when I traveled the country incognito. After a month of starving for feminine acrobats, I’d run amok. I just shaved and lit out across country, pounding fenceposts into native soil, duck-pressing ladies left and right. I flattened more broads than a steamroller at a Baptist skinny dip. I ran fast, hoping shotgun preachers wouldn’t count hymens and hymnals and wallop me with buckshot. I prayed ladies would never guess they had enjoyed a laying on of hands by the main Guest at the Last Supper. When I wore it down to a nubbin and drank myself into a stupor, the studio’d pick up my bones, pay off the sheriffs, placate the priests in North Sty, Nebraska, with new baptismal fonts for the birth of my latterday kids, and tote me home to a cell on the backlot, where I was kept like John the Baptist, threatened with losing both my heads until they finished one last fish fry at Galilee and one more mystery tour up Calvary. Only old age and a dilapidated pecker stopped me. I was sent out to the bush leagues. Which was great for I ravened for leagues of bush. There was never a more woman-oriented man than this lost soul you see here. I was undeserving to play J. C. when, in thousands of theatres across country, I saved souls and lusted for dessert. For many years I have solaced myself not with bodies but with bottles. I’m lucky Fritz renovated me for this new film, in long shots, with tons of makeup. That’s it. Chapter and verse. Fade out.”
Applause. The whole table clapped hands and called praise.
Eyes shut, J. C. bowed his head, left and right.
“That’s quite some story,” I murmured.
“Don’t believe a word of it,” said J. C.
The applause stopped. Someone else had arrived.
Doc Phillips stood at the far end of the table.
“My God,” said J. C. in a strong, clear voice. “Here’s Judas now!”
But if the studio doctor heard, it was not evident.
He lingered, studying the room with distaste, fearful of encounters. He resembled one of those lizards you see on the edge of a primeval forest, glinting his eyes around, terribly apprehensive, sniffing the air, touching the wind with probing claws, lashing his tail in little twitches, doom in all directions, no hope, only nervous response, ready to spin, rustle, run. His gaze found Roy and for some reason fixed on him. Roy sat up, stiffened, and smiled a weak smile at the doc.
My God, I thought, someone saw Roy stealing off with his box. Someone—
“Will you say grace?” called Fritz. “The Surgeon’s Prayer— O Lord, deliver us from doctors!”
Doc Phillips glanced away as if only a fly had touched his skin. Roy collapsed back in his chair.
The doc had come, out of habit. Beyond the commissary, out there in the bright high-noon sun, Manny and a few other fleas were doing backflips of anger and frustration. And the doc had come here to get away from it or search for suspects, I could not tell which.
But there he was, Doc Phillips, the fabulous physician to all the studios from the early handcranked cameras to the advent of shrieks and screams in sound to this very noon when the earth shook. If Groc was the eternal jolly Punch, then Doc Phillips was the glum curer of incurable egos, a shadow on the wall, a terrible scowl at the back of theatre previews, diagnosing sick films. He was like those football coaches on the sidelines of victorious teams, refusing to flash their teeth just once in approval. He spoke not in paragraphs or sentences, but clips and chops of shorthand prescription words. Between his ayes and nays lay silence.