Messiah

I waited several days before I telephoned Iris. Days of considerable activity, of visiting friends and acquaintances, of attending parties where the guests were precisely the same as the ones I had met at Hastings' house: every one of them bent upon combating boredom with boredom, creating a desert in a dry land. But I was capable of evoking mirages which decorated for me their desert, made unusual (for myself at least) what, with familiarity, might become impossible.

I met Iris at the house where she was staying near the main beach of Santa Monica: a fairly decorous Spanish house, quiet: among palms and close to the sea. The day was vivid; the sea made noise; the wind was gentle, smelling of salt and far countries.

I parked my rented car and walked around to the sea side of the house. Iris came forward to meet me, smiling, hand outstretched, her face which I had remembered as being remarkably pale was flushed with sunlight.

'I hoped you'd come,' she said, and she slipped her arm in mine as though we'd been old friends and led me to a deck chair adjoining the one where she'd been seated, reading. We sat down. 'Friends let me have this place. They went to Mexico for two months and lent me the house.'

'Useful friends.'

'Aren't they? I've already put down roots here in the sand and I'll hate to give it back.'

'Don't.'

'Ah, wouldn't it be wonderful.' She smiled vaguely and looked beyond me at the flash of sea in the flat distance. An automobile horn sounded through the palms; a mother called her child: we were a part of the world, even here.

'Clarissa told me you've been out several months.'

Iris nodded. 'I came back. I think I told you I was going to.'

'To see the man?'

'Would you like something to drink?' She changed the subject with a disconcerting shift of her gaze from the ocean to me, her eyes still dazzled with the brilliance of light on water. I looked away and shook my head.

'Too early in the day. But I want to take you to dinner tonight, if I may. Somewhere along the coast.'

'I'd like it very much.'

'Do you know of a place?'

She suggested several. Then we went inside and she showed me a room where I might change into my bathing suit; we were to swim.

We walked through the trees to the main road on the other side of which the beach glowed white in the sun. It was deserted at this point although, in the distance, other bathers could be seen, tiny figures black against the startling white, moving about like insects on a white cloth.

For a time we swam contentedly, not speaking, not thinking, our various urgencies (or their lack) no longer imposed upon the moment. At such times, in those days, I was able through the body's strenuous use to reduce the miserable demands of the yearning self to a complacent harmony, with all things in proper proportion: a part of the whole and not the whole itself, though, metaphorically speaking, perhaps that which conceives reality is reality itself. But such nice divisions and distinctions were of no concern to me that afternoon in the sun, swimming with Iris, the mechanism which spoils time with questioning switched off by the body's euphoria.

And yet, for all this, no closer to one another, no wiser about one another in any precise sense, we drove that evening in silence to a restaurant of her choosing on the beach to the north: a ramshackle place filled with candlelight, the smell of tar, old nets: 'atmosphere' which was nearly authentic. After wine and fish and coffee, we talked.

'Clarissa is bringing us together.'

I nodded, accepting the plain statement as a fact. 'The matchmaking instinct is, I suppose…'

'Not that at all.' Her face was in a half-light and looked as it had when we first met: pale, withdrawn, all the day's color drained out of it. Above the sea, Orion's belt dipped in the deep sky. The evening star all silver set. We were early and had this place to ourselves.

'Then what? Clarissa's motives are always clear, at least to herself. She never does anything that doesn't contribute to some private design… though what she's up to half the time I don't dare guess.'

Iris smiled. 'Nor I. But she is at least up to something which concerns us both and I'm not sure that she may not be right, about the two of us, I mean… though of course it's too soon to say.'

I was conventional enough at first to assume that Iris was speaking of ourselves, most boldly, in terms of some emotional attachment and I wondered nervously how I might indicate without embarrassment to her that I was effectively withdrawn from all sexuality and that, while my emotions were in no way impaired, I had been forced to accept a physical limitation to any act of affection which I might direct at another; consequently, I avoided as well as I could those situations which might betray me, and distress another. Though I have never been unduly grieved by this incompletion, I had come to realize only too well from several disquieting episodes in my youth that this flaw in me possessed the unanticipated power of shattering others who, unwarily, had moved to join with me in the traditional duet only to find an implacable surface where they had anticipated a creature of flesh like themselves, as eager as they, as governed by the blood's solemn tide: I had caused pain against my will and I did not want Iris hurt.

Fortunately, Iris had begun to move into a different, an unexpected conjunction with me, one which had in it nothing of the familiar or even of the human: it was in that hour beneath Orion's glitter that we were, without warning, together volatilized onto that archetypal plane where we were to play with such ferocity at being gods, a flawed Mercury and a dark queen of heaven, met at the sea's edge, disguised as human beings but conscious of one another's true identity for though our speeches, our arias were all prose, beneath the usual talk recognition had occurred, sounding with the deep resonance of a major chord struck among dissonances. We crossed the first division easily. She was, in her way, as removed as I from the flesh's wild need to repeat itself in pleasure. There was no need for us ever to discuss my first apprehension. We were able to forget ourselves, to ignore the mortal carriage. The ritual began simply enough.

'Clarissa knows what is happening here. That's why she has come West, though she can't bear California. She wants to be in on it the way she's in on everything else, or thinks she is.'

'You mean John Cave, your magus?' It was the first time I had ever said that name: the sword was between us now, both edges sharp.

'You guessed? or did she tell you that was why I came back?'

'I assumed it. I remembered what you said to me last spring.'

'He is more than… magus, Eugene.' And this was the first time she had said my name: closer, closer. I waited. 'You will see him.' I could not tell if this was intended as a question or a prophecy. I nodded. She continued to talk, her eyes on mine, intense and shining. Over her shoulder the night was black and all the stars flared twice, once in the sky and again upon the whispering smooth ocean at our feet, one real and one illusion: both light.

'It is really happening,' she said and then, deliberately, she lightened her voice. 'You'll see when you meet him. I know of course that there have been thousands of these prophets, these saviors in every country and in every time. I also know that this part of America is particularly known for religious maniacs. I started with every prejudice, just like you.'

'Not prejudice… skepticism: perhaps indifference. Even if he should be an effective one, one of the chosen gods and wonder-workers, should I care? I must warn you, Iris, that I'm not a believer. And though I'm sure that the revelations of other men must be a source of infinite satisfaction to them, individually, I shouldn't for one second be so presumptuous as to make a choice among the many thousands of recorded revelations of truth, accepting one at the expense of all the others: I might so easily choose wrong and get into eternal trouble. And you must admit that the selection is wide, and dangerous to the amateur.'

'You're making fun of me,' said Iris, but she seemed to realize that I was approaching the object in my own way. 'He's not like that at all.'

'But obviously if he is to be useful he must be accepted and he can't be accepted without extending his revelation or whatever he calls it and I fail to see how he can communicate, short of hypnotism or drugs, the sense of his vision to someone like myself who, in a sloppy but devoted way, has wandered through history and religion, acquiring with a collector's delight the more colorful and obscure manifestations of divine guidance, revealed to us through the inspired systems of philosophers and divines, not to mention such certified prophets as the custodians of the Sibylline books, 'lllo die hostem Romanorum esse