THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEMPLE

Barry N. Malzberg

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

Preface

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Website

Also by Barry N. Malzberg

Dedication

Author Bio

Copyright

… And God said to Jonah: Art thou greatly angry for the gourd? And he said: I am greatly angry even unto death. And the Lord said: Thou hast had pity on the gourd for which thou hast not labored, neither made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right and their left hand and also much cattle?

I

Oswald shoots Kennedy.

Well, so far so good this time around, but then it all goes wrong again. There is simply nothing to be done with these people. Kennedy, that idiot, has decided to try this standing in the limousine and without actor’s grace he falls heavily across Jacqueline and into the roses which collapse underneath. Explosion of petals. Oswald, unaware of the disaster, thinking as all of them do only of his own performance, throws the rifle cheerfully down ten stories and disappears from the window as I run out frantic.

The rifle is deflected by a third-floor balcony on the Municipal. It slams left off a flagpole, drops to an eave, arcs out beyond the building, and finally misses my ear by only inches, catching me a terrific blow on the shoulder. For a moment I think that I have reached the end right here, right here – to die on the city stones from a blow inflicted by an idiot.

No such luck.

All will go on; my duties will not conclude so abruptly. I come to my feet, flex limbs, everything works. I rub the shoulder convulsively until some of the pain recedes. It goes away quickly. Perhaps I make a little more of the pain than it really is. I will admit this. But they must be taught a lesson. If I die, so will they all in this pigpen: they will learn regard for my person. Precautions will hold. The situation is in flux but it will hold.

And so they gather around me quickly then: Kennedy now bounding from the car. Jacqueline, Johnson, Connally. The security forces. Even though I have finally taught them the necessity of staying within the roles at all times I can see fear hammering at the edges of their characterization. What will they do if I die? Who will speak for them when the incendiaries open? They look frantic. Good. It is necessary that they show me the proper respect. I am their only chance for release from the city and my person priceless.

‘Are you all right?’ Kennedy asks. He runs his hand over his jacket, other hand pumping away in a side pocket. Masturbation under stress is an old habit of the Kennedy clan or am I confusing them with these lumpen? Of course, there are no Kennedys now, all of them are dead; it is the lumpen who have no control. Separate history from situation; cleave memory from instance. These lumpen are insane. Difficult to believe that Kennedy was shot and in extremis only seconds ago. He has worked himself almost totally out of the role, not even a transitional sense. Discipline. I have got to teach them discipline!

‘Get the hell back in the car,’ I say, still rolling the ball of the shoulder under fingers, then stagger toward him threateningly. The sun is uncomfortable; the air binding. Ruined New York makes an inconstant Dallas, the landscape itself is inimical to the sense of the production. Kennedy was killed in open spaces. ‘What are you waiting for?’ I say to those idiot faces clumped around me, docile, but yet threatening. ‘Get back to it. Keep on with the production.’

‘We were worried,’ Jacqueline says. She runs a hand across her wide, blank forehead. Fat stupid bitch! I cannot bear to see them in gestures of appeal. How many times have I told them this? I have only allowed her to play the role because she begged. Records will attest to this; she is no actress. She is no actress, Kennedy is no actor, Connally does not know what he is doing. None of them, possibly excepting Lee Harvey Oswald, have any conception of professionalism or of the peculiar and terrible obligation which all of them have incurred. Have incurred! Nor is there any way in which I can tell them. Certain channels of communication with the lumpen are frozen. They are not human.

Note that it is Oswald who joins us now. At a run from the towers he comes toward me limping from some pointless injury, his eyes dilated. He has seen the flight of the rifle then; now he sees the cast gathered around me, the concern on their faces, the way in which I hold my shoulder (I admit that to some degree I exaggerate the pain to make an impression on them) and he understands what has happened. He has some moderate sensitivity, unlike the others who function on the bestial level of pleasure – pain. I really do not know how he has gotten into this pack but it is unwise in any event to speculate. He is here, he can be used. Were it not for him the reenactment would fail utterly.

‘Are you all right now sir?’ he says, stepping some feet away, backed off from the others. He is still locked into the role – timorous, shaking, but latently aggressive – which is good. None of the others would have had even this elementary understanding. ‘I guess you’re all right,’ he says, turning. ‘So the hell with you then. There’s much work to do. I’m on my way.’

‘So you are,’ I say, facing the others who, anticipating this rage, have begun to scatter. ‘Get on with it damn you!’ I shout. ‘Can’t you do anything right, don’t you have any sense, any discipline, any professionalism?’ – the same pointless rant: set it to music, score it for flute and let it be gone, no hope, no reason, no possibility, no form, no depth, slam the timpani. I am sick of delivering the recitative, sick of hearing it refracted through the damaged consciousness. But it works. They shuffle back to their cars, stake out positions on the ground. Already we are three minutes behind the projected schedule.

Hopelessness overcomes me. Three minutes! I resist an impulse to fling myself upon the ground and weep. Is this my penance then? to extract performances from the lumpen forever on this burning ground, nothing to ever work out? I do not know how I will get through it.

For a moment, I think of cancelling. I actually consider telling them my thoughts in some detail and striking the set. But they have, in their way, worked so hard to this point that it would not be fair to them or to me to let that work dissipate and there are also notes given them from the last run-through which I will have to reinforce in performance. It leads nowhere.

So they are my burden. I will carry them. ‘Let’s go,’ I say, struck by this epiphany (I have had so very many recently), raising my hand, and they see me in the sun, see me standing there, those lumpen, the power oozing from that hand and slowly the cars begin to move. I hear the sirens. Oswald is already gone; it is not impossible that in his haste he will retrieve all of the lost time. I take my pad from the place where it was dropped and taking the pen from my pocket, continue the observations.

Locked within the directorial detachment it is as if none of this is happening now, but has happened a long time ago – in a southwestern city, fifty-three years ago next Thursday it will be, already frozen into artifact, their bones become sealing wax and how much longer, I question, before I lose all patience?

II

Later. With Lara I try to relax and put all of this from me, however momentarily. She is the only one of the players who I will call by her real name even in these notes which as part of the study are supposed to preserve the confidentiality of the principals and to be opened by outsiders only decades after the fact, 2050 or something like that. It is so difficult to keep track of everything and people should understand the problems I am having with my mind. ‘Preserve the confidentiality of the principals!’ Committee actually thinks in this fashion.

Under the terms of the grant, however, I am compelled to keep these notes in order to make a good impression upon future researchers, this being the phrase Committee used – good impression – Committee having no gift for the language at all. But if it were all the same to those future researchers, I would not care to make a good impression or a bad as I find most recollections boring. The past is dismissed, the future is a dream. Only the present is interesting, but how much of a present do I really have now? Well, there are no answers, let alone easy ones. Back to Lara. I swarm in her flesh like insects.

She played the Governor’s wife today. I have shifted her through all of the females, even once to Jacqueline, but none of the available principals suits her qualities, whatever those qualities might be. She becomes frozen at critical times, postures aimlessly, often allows sentiment to overcome her to the point where she cannot function at all. There is that kind of actor, and Lara is a specimen, who can get into roles only through denying themselves. A pity. She has more than moderate sensitivity.

Lara, to be sure, is a bad actress, but she is a good fuck. Even the Director must take his pleasures where he can. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of this?’ she asks, her head now leaning across my legs in a posture of relaxation, her hands rather aimlessly pedalling my thighs, slivers of sensation coming through that way although in the basic sense I am not to be moved by any of them. Even by Lara. Limited people for limited purposes and that is all. Field research. ‘I would think that you’re getting bored.’

‘I am not getting bored. I never get bored. It’s work, that’s all there is but you’re something different. Don’t try to explicate my feelings, Lara; essentially I must be a mystery.’ Directorial detachment.

‘All right, then,’ she says in a mollifying way, increasing the small, deadly rhythm of her strokes as if this could affect me at all. ‘You don’t have to lose your temper. I was only asking.’

‘I did not lose my temper,’ I say. Pomposity extrudes; I wrench it away. ‘I never lose my temper. Do you have the presumption to think that any of you people could affect me at all?’

‘But I don’t understand why you want to do this. I can see everything else, that you were sent here on a study, that you’re working on a project, but why would you choose something like this? Aren’t there topics, areas, possibilities you could take up with me?’

Lara is indeed the most intelligent and the only one with whom I can converse at all, but intelligence is relative. Actually, she is as disastrously stupid as the rest and I perceive, not for the first time, the hopelessness of any relationship with her. ‘Now stop it,’ I say then, ‘I don’t want to discuss this any more. It’s a project, that’s all it is and I should be able to put it behind me. If you want to pursue this you’ll have to leave, Lara, you were the one who initiated this relationship, not me. And I warned you at the very beginning that it would have to be on its own terms. I can do you no favors.’

This is not a pleasant thing to say, particularly to a woman who has indulged my fantasies as industriously as she, but her incessant probing disturbs me more at some times than at others and the run-through today has brought me to embitterment. It is really quite hopeless. I cannot get work out of them. They will simply never get this down right for the damned tapes and as they become overly familiar with the clichéd plotline they are losing even that childish simplicity by which I might have lucked them through and are settling into rigidity. It is possible that on the first run-through after the initial set of notes with no real preparation, they did as well as they ever can and that from here on in matters can only become worse. The rifle will fall tomorrow and I will be decapitated. Kennedy will wave his arms at a signpost and fall out of the car. Three more days and I am out of the field: it will all be over then but what have I learned? Have I learned anything at all?

No. I have learned nothing, will never learn. I am just like them. The anxiety-hysteria overtakes me again; nothing will change. I am what I am, no less than lumpen. ‘Go,’ I say, inflamed by this realization, ‘if you have nothing comforting to say to me, then just go.’

‘All right,’ she says, lolling to my other side, ‘if you want, then I will,’ picking herself up gracefully in a single gesture, and opening ground. ‘If you want me to I really will, if you want me to stay I’ll do that too, it’s always been your choice, you know, on everything. Why won’t you ever talk with us? Why won’t you answer the questions?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Once I thought that you were doing it for our own good because something awful was about to happen, but I’m afraid that it’s only because you have no answers. Is that true?’ Her breasts swing over me, the nipples little blind eyes. ‘Do you really want me to go?’ she asks cunningly. ‘I don’t think you do.’

I do not. I reach for her. My cardiovascular and sympathetic nervous systems have been previously immobilized, this being one of the requirements for entering the city, but the injections have worn off (were they improperly administered?) and I feel again the distant, uncoiling response, hooked to the memories of what I have already done. ‘Stay,’ I say to her and she smiles.

But ah, ah, the nervous cunning! She retreats and holds herself before me with new assurance. ‘Then you must tell me,’ she says, ‘you must tell me the real truth of why you are here and putting us through what you call performance. No one from the outside comes unless they want something from us but I don’t know yet what you want. You must tell …’

‘No,’ I say standing, stalking from her. ‘There is no more. You must go, Lara.’ Too abrupt. I distrust the blocking.

Stricken, yet she holds in place. She might have been an actress if she had had the training. I can see the force of her will protruding in small edges or waves across her face. ‘You must tell me,’ she says, otherwise I tell you, I cannot go on …’

‘You will go on. You will go on as long as necessary and then further yet because you have been ordered to do so and you know that I am your only hope. When it is ended you may have your explanations and welcome, welcome to them, but not until then. I will say no more to you about this.’

There is a certain arrogance in my tone. It is the arrogance I heard in the voice of Committee. I am discomfited by it; nevertheless, I could not have restrained myself. The demands are enormous.

‘You think that you can control us,’ she says quietly, ‘and you think that because you’re from the outside and we lumpen – yes, I know your name for us – you can make us do anything you want because of your authority but you are a fool. You don’t understand …’

‘Don’t I?’ I say, staring at her. She is attractive in the crude, bright way of some of the lumpen females, but amorphous at the edges, filled with her small, restless shadings of darkness and dead in the center as they all must be.

No. She cannot touch me. All of her efforts to reach forward must lead to nothing; there is no interlock with these people. ‘I can do anything I want, you see,’ I say to her quietly, ‘anything I want, all of the time. And you understand that now, don’t you? Don’t you?’

I come forward and touch her breast. It lies quietly within my palm, glittering like a teardrop. She submits. Her head is bowed. She becomes penitential.

Her eyelids tremble as she looks down and yet she says nothing. We are on the eighty-seventh floor of an abandoned housing project near the sea. Vigorous fishlike smells waft through the open window, filling the empty spaces. Once these rooms were lived in, but now they are only for fucking. The support system drones on: it sifts filth from the air, protects our ruined lungs, replaces ash with a scent of incense. In the distance, I hear the clang of an incinerator chute. We, that is to say, the company, have taken over the rooms in this project for the duration of the production. I conceive of them, strung by twos and threes like a necklace throughout this project, coupling mindlessly while waiting for the next run-through. Are they dreaming of me? I know that I would dream of them.

I lead her from the window. Through the pane, eighty-seven stories above the wastes, I can see the miniaturization of disaster, but it looks harmless now, enveloped by gas which gives it the aspect of an old painting. In the spaces below, dangerous animals may whisk invisibly, but they cannot hurt us here. Cannot hurt. I feel suddenly a lurch of hatred from Lara as if it were strung on filaments of wire arced through, filled with explosives and the scent of gasoline.

‘Anything I want,’ I say, ‘anything I want to do ever.’ Then I put my hands upon her, feel her rise against her will toward me, feel the imprint of breasts against my skin and then I move toward the familiar pursuit of myself within her, wondering all the time in some mad corner of the mind if any of this can matter or if I too am already and irrevocably lost.

The city. It must all come from the city.

III

The next day. Final rehearsal, my last chance to pull things into some kind of order, but if possible everything goes worse than before. Oswald levels the rifle nervously, looks down the sight. Even from this distance I imagine that I can see the little lines of involvement working small creases and hatchmarks across his face; he has a bad actor’s habit of working himself into a role only through grief or rage recollected. But even as Kennedy now huddles in the car, moving like a toad toward Jacqueline, burrowing himself into an open angle for the shot, I see that it will not work.

The damned synchronization is off and to compound the disaster the old car leading the motorcade throws a rod or something even worse. Metal vaults through the hood, tearing it, the car comes to a stop with a scream and from that car leap the secret service detail. They curse. They make hand signals that the motorcade is to stop, but the cars behind do not see them or see them too quickly and they pile upon one another in dull thuds, only their extreme crawl at collision point sparing injuries and lending a certain comic intensity to the performance. The crews will be here quite shortly.

Kennedy sways from his car, wiping his forehead. The agents surround him at once, Jacqueline holding an elbow and whispering confidentially. They seem to be telling him that he must go back in there to be properly killed, but Kennedy does not want to be and I can understand this.

From this distance I can see Lara, the only one of them with professional discipline, still at rest quietly in the car, her hands folded, locked into the role. She is waiting for the motorcade to resume. She will wait until it does. The others are gesturing at one another, talking in voices which grow progressively louder and Oswald now disappears from the window (he gathers that Kennedy does not want to be killed) to run clattering again down flights of the Municipal to join them.

The run-through is destroyed. They do not even look at me as I come toward them, gesticulating, ranting, clapping notes now into my hands. In fact, and I am not sure of this, but there seems to be an insinuation of oily laughter as if all the time they have cooperated with me only unwillingly and disaster renews their strength.

It is the end. The repudiation of my project and my last reserve of containment seem emptied as I rush toward them, realizing from long, dangerous knowledge that I am on the verge of a serious loss of control. It is something that I should not risk in this context, but it is too late to talk quietly at myself in the familiar, reasonable tones: small whispers of assurance.

‘God damn you!’ I scream at them. ‘Damn you all, can’t you do anything right? Don’t any of you understand what’s going on here, what the stakes might be, what could be done for all of you? I can’t stand this any more; we only had three days to get this right from the beginning and now you’ve ruined everything you pigs. Pigs!’ I shriek. ‘You deserve to be in the city. Once I took pity on you, but that was before I came to know what you have become. You’re incompetent, there’s nothing you can do in the terms of your lives because you cannot control them!’ It was a fine, scholarly rant with florid gestures intermixed. I am really quite out of control at this moment and it is pointless to abuse the lumpen so because their condition alone is retribution and the abuse means nothing to them. I know this, but the knowledge does me no good.

Nevertheless, it seems that I cannot stop. ‘Three days to get a simple scene staged and taped and now you’ve ruined it all!’ I bellow. ‘Just as you’ve ruined everything for yourselves from the beginning.’

I realize that I am not being entirely fair. The lumpen and, God will face it, have ruined nothing for themselves – their lives being entirely ruined – but only for their director. The scheduling, the reports, the performance, my great plans have been destroyed. Still, I cannot control myself, flinging notes to the ground now where the prompt winds of the Battery whisk in to scatter them on the ruined clumps of earth.

‘How?’ I say more quietly, exhausted. ‘Tell me how I’m going to get anywhere with this.’

‘Don’t blame us,’ Kennedy says earnestly. His eyes are shocked, but persuasive, at least I find them so; he is physically right for this role. ‘Nobody here wanted to do this. We offered our services as a favor and we’ve done the very best that we can.’

‘True,’ says Connally, ‘all true.’ Texan, diffident but scheming, he slides a hand into a pocket, looks at me with tiny, tormented eyes. ‘You made us do this. We had nothing to say about it at all. We’ve done everything that you wanted us to do.’

‘We’re doing the best we can,’ Kennedy points out, looping an arm around Connally’s shoulders. Strange, it garners an insight: how much of a relationship was there between Kennedy and Connally and would anything have happened if they had been in different cars? ‘How do you know what you want, let alone us? You’ve never made yourself clear on this.’

‘That man is right,’ Connally says in the precise, unaccented lumpen English, patting Kennedy affectionately between the shoulders. ‘He is speaking the truth.’ I feel a twitch of genuine feeling. Physically, at least, they are right for these roles and it is affecting to see men fifty-three years past the prime of their portraits, clutching one another. ‘If you don’t like what we’re doing it’s not our fault then but yours because we didn’t even want to do it this way from the start and you know that.’

‘You see,’ John says, striding over to us, winking, grumbling, ‘these men are both right, but then so, both are you.’ Of all my principals, he is the one most poorly cast, being a dwarfish man with stiff hands and no talent for gesture, but I was looking for some inner truth to the role. Out of it, he thinks like Johnson. I thought that by casting against the physical sense of the role I could come to some truly shocking interpretation, but oh my was I wrong! I have been wrong all my life. I have not made a single correct judgement through all of it and now it is too late.

‘I was wrong about all of you then,’ I say with enormous self-disgust. My frustration makes me rash, momentarily at least I must forget where I am, the nature of those with whom I am dealing. ‘All of you are worthless. You pity yourselves for being here and blame everyone because you’re not on the outside but you are lumpen, nothing else and you deserve to be here, every one of you. You’ve made your lives and you’ve no right to complain about anything because it’s all your fault. You repulse me,’ I add excitedly. My delicate, scholarly frame is shaking, sweating, billowing like a sheet in the thin air of the Battery. ‘All of you disgust me, you could not know how much.’

Lara has been out of her car for some time now, touching me on the elbow as I scream and in that touch I feel her own dark quivering. ‘Please,’ she says to the rest of them, ‘he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s not in his right mind, that’s all, he’s very young and there’s so much that he can’t understand. He doesn’t even hear himself. Please leave him alone now.’

‘Leave me alone?’ I say, not understanding. ‘Why should they leave me alone? They’ve ruined everything for the tapes, are they just going to desert me?’

‘You don’t realize,’ Lara says to me quietly, ‘you simply don’t realize what’s going on here, you don’t understand him,’ she says in a different tone to the others, ‘really you don’t, but I think that I do, please let me talk to him, I’m sure that I’ll be able to make him see if you’ll only give me some time, just a little time …’

But it is too late for this. With my heightened awareness now, I can see what is happening. They close around me now the treacherous fools: Johnson, Kennedy, Connally, the secret service agents. Even Oswald. The only one I might have trusted – Oswald with a demented look. But it’s too late going back now. I feel the pressure of bodies, the beginning of enclosure. The scent a high, penetrating odor which can be oozing only from my own glands. I cannot breathe. I always knew that it would end this way.

‘Stop this,’ I say, trying to be calm.

‘Stop what?’ says Kennedy. His hand is within his pocket, wildly flailing, I see his teeth. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ I say, ‘and you’re losing your last chance to escape the city. It’s only a play, a reenactment, a simple run-through for research purposes and if you’re not capable of knowing this, then …’

‘We know,’ Oswald says to me, ‘we know everything that we need.’ And their hands come on me now. I feel the dread contact of bodies, the actual sense of connection filling me with revulsion as pure as I have ever known – the reality of the lumpen who are actors no longer and then I find myself being taken away from there struggling. But beyond the first easy kicks and cries of resistance, there is nothing I can do.

‘Lara,’ I say, ‘Lara, tell them to stop this. It’s impossible, they can’t do this to me and anyway, when the crews come in they’ll destroy all of you. I’m being supervised, don’t you realize … ’

‘Our laws,’ says one of them, ‘are not your laws here in the city.’ Then I am being dragged, carried at accelerating speed over the stones, my feet barely touching the ground. One of them must have whispered the destination; they flank, guide me in without comment. Doors open. I am thrust into a smaller area. A rising stench confronts me; old metal and gates clang and I am taken within abruptly.

I know where I am. The Tombs. ‘I can’t do anything for you,’ Lara says quietly. ‘You see, this whole thing is your own fault.’

My hand strikes a bar then. I stagger and fall. So, then, at least for a while, my researches cease.

When I regain consciousness I lift my head unto the gates to find the dimensions of my entrapment.

IV

In the cell, after those initial, perilous moments, I see that it is quite hopeless to struggle and instead hunch myself against a wall, knees drawn up in a fetal posture, staring listlessly I suppose, already the prisoner-pent although I am unaware, mercifully, of my facial expression, at the small sprays and dots of light which scatter through the single, barred window. This window is too high otherwise to provide me with perspective upon the city. Sitting thus I realize that I have always been in prison.

In a corner opposite are a cup of water, a few slices of bread, food from the city granted to me, spotted only a little by dirt. I suppose that I should make an effort to eat something. God only knows how long it will be until the crews come in and in the meantime I should be sustained, but I do not know if I could bear their food. I have carried my own provisions in a pouch, now taken away. I should keep up my strength; furthermore, the presence of the food surely indicates that they do not wish me to die here and eating would be a life-affirming act.

But it is too much of an effort for me to go to that corner opposite, only some ten to fifteen feet from where I am, yet at another level of existence. If I were to walk toward that corner for the food, it would be an admission that I was in prison, whereas if I stay where I am, I am merely resting. It is easier by far to sprawl and let the impressions overtake me, even with an overlay of panic. What remains of the Tombs is quiet, quiet and isolated and a good place to do some thinking if one were interested in thought. Never a contemplative type, I prefer to subvocalize in a burbling way, largely on a plane of emotional impression.

It was insane for me to come into the city.

Why volunteer to come back when our ancestors’ ambition was flight? Why become involved with the lumpen in a project of this type (and what else could I have expected from them?), but where else, where else oh Lord was I likely to find easily a pool of participants? Professional actors would have been needed to have done this on the outside: actors and space and crews and regulations and levels of approval and right of certification and institutional permission forms and I did not have the means to hire nor did Committee. The lumpen were known to be submissive and eager to cooperate in any project that might win them exit from the city and would not my hastily assembled cast seize upon hope? Nor did I ever mislead them. I made no promises. The record will show this; I said nothing that could have been interpreted as a commitment, but merely suggested that I could, perhaps, help.

Simply enough I did not calculate their strangeness, their simplicity and violence and this makes me a fool as well. In prison all of my life. A fool all of my life: the equation is total.

Lara suddenly appears at the gate. She places her hands on the bars and leans inward, seemingly alone. ‘How are you?’ she asks. She might be checking my condition in a hospital ward.

From this aspect she seems more attractive than I have ever seen her, but I know the lumpen’s irretrievable corruption which cuts even to her level and I will not be tempted by feeling. ‘Leave me alone,’ I say, ‘or get me out of here before the terrible trouble begins. Nothing else. Nothing else but that and leave.’

‘Please,’ she says, ‘you have got to listen to me now. You never listened.’

‘I have nothing to say to you.’

‘Please,’ she says quietly. Is she weeping? It is hard to tell in this difficult aspect of light, this strange angle. ‘They are very angry. They feel that you have used and manipulated them and they want to do terrible things, terrible …’

The crews are coming from outside,’ I say. They should be here within a matter of hours and when they see what has happened there will be retribution for this. I am content to wait a while for my release. Your prisons mean nothing to me.’

‘You are wrong. No one is coming.’

‘Oh yes they are. You are a fool, Lara, and you may tell them what fools they are.’

‘No. You are a fool.’ She wipes her forehead distractedly, blinks at the rubble of the cell. ‘What is your name? You never even gave us something to know you by so I must call you a fool.’

‘That does not matter.’

‘You never told us your name or what you planned or what we were supposed to do and now it’s too late for all of us. You’ve done this, don’t you see that?’ She leans toward me, seems to be trying to put her head against mine, but, of course, the bars stop her. They will stop anyone. Which of us is in jail, which the imprisoned?

‘I think that I can get you out of here,’ she says, ‘but you’ll have to leave the city on your own. I can’t do anything more than get you out of here.’

‘Escape? I don’t want to escape! It is they who are in trouble. Don’t you know who I am? Haven’t I made clear to you the sanctions?’

Always, I note this pomposity. Trying to speak to them in their natural idiom, attempting to establish myself as unexceptional, my voice becomes clipped and vaguely effeminate, I sound like a pedant. Self-revulsion hits me like a clout and I sink to my knees, gripping the bars. I will never escape this cage of self.

‘Oh you fool,’ she says moving away, her hands fluttering like fowl’s wings, ‘you don’t know what’s going’ on here at all now, do you? You understand nothing.’ I hear footsteps upon us. Lumpen who I do not know come into the corridor, their faces bland. They seize Lara, drag her from me without sound, struggles dim and as if in gelatin, soft grunting but no words. She resists for an instant, then collapses upon herself and goes in submission, her head bowed expectantly. Only when they are gone do I hear sounds.

Then, the door opening on the corridor slams and they come forward again. I see Oswald, Kennedy, Connally, other faces which I do not know, peering at me incuriously through the bars. Their faces are like the scabs of wounds partially healed over. Only the eyes are alive in these faces, the hands raised like a network to guide me through and, without the need to hear what they have to say, I stand, brace myself against a wall, feel the stone shift against my shoulder blades or buttocks, but then again perhaps this wall is solid, immutable, and it is I who tremble, pinned upon it like an insect.

‘Come on,’ one of them says to me. I come. Through the corridors of the Tombs, like deep roots from a plant sprawled through the planet and onto the steps where I see others gathered to await me with the aspect of a celebration.

All comes clear. I understand this.

I would fall, I would fall gratefully and let it all run over me like blood but am held by arms in front, arms from behind. ‘Now,’ one of them says again, ‘the time is now for here it all truly begins, here and now.’ I am led in tight custody toward the cars of the motorcade; they gape open for us like mouths.

V

In the dream I clamber (with some lunch in an overcoat pocket) up the flights of the Depository, sit wheezing over my rifle, adjusting the clips until breath has routined again, nibble at odd little slices of meat to pass the time while arrangements are made below. Committee is honoring us today by parading through the streets, but I have never had much use for the old bastard if truth be known and have decided to dispose of him with a single, cleaving shot. Alone in the Depository, I listen to rats whisk through panelling and the groan of elevator cables. My mind is otherwise empty and relaxed. In due course Committee comes through in a large car, waving and smiling, surrounded by motorcyclists.

Quickly I put the last slabs of food into my mouth; chewing, I lift the rifle and with a workmanlike grunt hoist it to my shoulder, feeling the affectionate nibble of the butt against my ear; then I level down the distance and I shoot Committee in the neck. He twitches in the car, shrugs wildly like a man overtaken with lice and in disgust (I had not planned to need more than one shot) I drill him again, this time seeing the satisfying halo of blood and bone encircle him. He falls over toward the front of the car, I lower the rifle joyously and run down the stairs, lunch light within me. Much to do, much to do. In the street I wave to the injured Committee, indicate to him that I would be delighted to go over and pay my respects, but not now; it cannot be done. I have a schedule to keep. Maybe later, I indicate to him, as he rushed off. Right now I have another appointment. With an officer named Tippit, in fact.

VI

Not knowing them at all, I did not like the lumpen. In fact, I hated and feared them, but in how many dreams did they move before me, those forms clotted by darkness, shadows against the sprawl of the abandoned city?

‘We are your history,’ they confided to me in those fantasies, ‘we are what all of you have been and yet could be again if you were to return to the city.’

I do not know if it was tenderness or mockery which drove them, but those faces would break open softly, feeling would run from the planes of those faces like blood and in those dreams, then, I must have answered …

Answered, ‘Yes, it is true, you are our history, but there is more to it than that, something which I can extract from you, some core of meaning which I will find applicable for the means of scholarly research.’ And they laughed then as lumpen often do in their silly, abandoned fashion in and out of dreams and said, ‘There is nothing you can extract. There is nothing you can learn. We have nothing to say to you, no mysteries to impart, we are as mute as the stones of the city, my boy, and you must accept this. What knowledge comes from us will come of what you learn about yourself.’ And so on and so forth, quite endlessly.

What intense dialogues I had with them in these dreams! Why I must have been possessed by the lumpen for years and in terms of that it made sense; it was right when the time came for the project.

Time to go back to the city itself and confront the dreams as they were. If I could use them, could make them actors in the project, they would be wrenched from their history and, out of context, become the principals. Reconstituted. By manipulating them through my devices I could solve the urban sociology problem, it seemed then. I wanted to save them.

‘Let me do this then,’ I said to Committee who listened politely enough to the presentation, ‘let me do it so that I can bring back to you a genuine reconstruction of an important historical event. What we have forgotten, living as we do, is that we are sunk in the trap of forgetfulness. We do not recall the seediness of these tragedies! They did not occur in high places among the cleanly garbed and assembled, but were, in fact, stumbling events which were enacted very much as life is lived in the cities today and I can show you this.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am sure,’ I said to paternal Committee. ‘I can demonstrate what has been avoided.’

‘You are overoptimistic.’

‘Not at all,’ I said and added rather petulantly, ‘anyway, it’s going to be fifty-three years since John F. got it in just a very few months and in terms of the calendar it’s a very significant anniversary. It will be coming right on top of his centennial, remember? The tapes can be franchised, there’s not that much else of interest around and the Institute could do nicely. Very nicely,’ I said and sat back, murmuring with satisfaction. ‘You could take it on a network license, excellent chance of that.’

The cunning of this! The penetration at one shot into the true purposes overlaying the Institute, now hallowed by rhetoric. How Committee, though, mumbled and grumbled, stumbled and bumbled. ‘The dangers,’ he pointed out, ‘and the known instability of the population …’

‘Lumpen.’

‘That is not a name for them we care to use,’ Committee said delicately and wheeled back his chair to look out over the landscape, a pastoral scene to which his office was conveniently adjacent. Cows mowing in the hillocks, fluttering geese taking to wing. The Institute had gone to great expense to reconstitute the grounds and Committee was delighted, sneaking little looks throughout conferences although I, if the truth may be told, was of a harder urban mold and could have well done without it.

‘When we consider that,’ Committee said over the thin honks of geese, ‘how much control can it truly be said that you will exert over them?’

‘Enough. All I need.’

They are a violent, unstable class; it is a condition of their environment and furthermore, furthermore, you would have to sign a full waiver of release as would every member of your party.’

‘I don’t want a party. I want to go in there by myself except for the filming at the end.’

‘Eh? Eh, how’s that?’ Committee said and sat bolt upright. ‘You’d go into that place alone? Are you quite sane, my lad?’

‘It will be the best way,’ I said smoothly, ‘only myself to risk and there will be no problems at all. We can offer amnesty to those who I select to participate.’

‘You mean you’d allow them to leave for cooperation? Now you know …’

‘I said I would offer amnesty,’ I pointed out calmly. ‘It would merely be an oral commitment of course. In truth, there will be no need …’

‘Ah,’ Committee said. ‘Ah, aha, aha!’ He sounded much like the geese himself as he flung open a drawer, seized upon a little file and began to work on his nails with small, frantic gestures. ‘You have a demoniacal cast of mind, son, to go along with your ambition.’

‘I try,’ I said, shrugging off the compliment. ‘One learns this and that patrolling the Institute through a five-year program. Of course, if you’d prefer that the offer in fact be genuine …’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Committee said, ‘I don’t know if that would be at all necessary. Let me think over your proposal.’

‘I hope you will.’

‘It is an interesting project. Quite an interesting conception you have there, a little obsessive of course, perhaps somewhat precious, but still showing a good deal more originality than most of these ideas are prone to do.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It is minor, however, wouldn’t you agree? Essentially minor.’

‘Minor or major, anything original is worth doing,’ I pointed out.

‘Umm. Maybe. Of course, you have made the more sensational aspects clear, but as you know so well it is not mere sensationalism which we seek from a candidate in the violent histories. There has to be a depth, a staying-power and it could be that your idea is lacking in this. Naturally, I’ll have to take the matter to Committee and … ’

‘Why? You are the Committee.’

‘Well, of course,’ Committee said with a laugh, ‘so I am, but there are levels of approval … ’

‘I never thought of you as anything else. If you grant me this, it can be done.’

‘You exaggerate my importance, lad,’ Committee said unhappily and put the file away. ‘You have a tendency to overpersonalize which we have noted. Things tend to be more intricate than you can accept.’

‘Remember,’ I said hoarsely (I am at certain times grimly aware of the tone and tenor of my voice, the sense of my gestures, more aware that might be the case with the normal person, but this is simply due to my extraordinary sensitivity), ‘remember what this could mean.’

‘We will.’

‘It could bring on a whole new insight! The roles will be played by lumpen and the majestic irony, the complexity of the fact that these figures and events are being reconstructed by the filthiest, dirtiest, degraded, least advantaged, malevolent and diseased segments of the …’

I found myself quite unable to go on, choking with excitement as I was. The filthiness of the population is the key to any true understanding of my methods. ‘It will be a fine project,’ I said after rubbing my hands, wiping my brow, blowing noise moistly, shuffling feet, ‘a fine project, quite excellent, and the tapes will be absolutely priceless to the Institute.’

‘They could well be.’

‘And they will become permanent property. I would have no right to them at all.’

‘That is a thoughtful point,’ Committee rumbled and stumbled and grumbled and mumbled and went out of the room winking at the geese in its ponderous and mystifying way (abrupt exits or entrances are a hallmark of our relationship: no candidate is permitted to question these activities, but instead learns through them that necessary resignation to large forces which is the key to any knowledge of history), leaving me with the promise that decision would come shortly and …

In due course the permission came through and I journeyed into that city alone (because out of an excess of fear, I told myself that I had no fear of them at all) to put my little cast together for rehearsals, with the crews to come in three days later for the taping. Everything was to work out splendidly; it was a remarkable project, a great insight, but then the rehearsals began to show difficulties (when would the crews be in?) and the lumpen would not listen when I gave them orders (oh God, where were the crews?) and blocking became unstuck and the line readings broke down (the crews!) and they had to be told what they were because this was the only way to shock them into compliance. But they turned on me – the fools! – and imprisoned me. Then they took me from the cell.

We were now approaching the square.

And …

VII

I find myself thrust then into the third car of the motorcade.

Roses are around me; Lara is on my right. All of it is going too quickly for detached observation for now that damned car begins to move. Lara sits frozen, hands clasped, staring ahead. And looking now into her bland, blind face I can see neither reason nor accessibility. They step away from me; the car moves somewhat more quickly. Sea breezes from the Battery waft the smell of fish into my nostrils and I wonder if Kennedy smelled the roses.

‘What is going on?’ I ask Lara and again, ‘What is going on here?’ and she turns toward me then, her eyes round and open, mouth sagging. ‘Don’t you know?’ she says. She reaches for the roses, clutches them, spills them like drops of blood from her hands and I see in the slackness of features that all along I must have misjudged her. She is no different than the rest. From the beginning there was no access; from the beginning they surrounded me. I thought that I was the director and all the time it was they who …

They who …

The sun comes against my eyes. I squint, raise a hand to block it and feel the increased acceleration of the car, pressing me firmly into the cushions. Amazing that they were somehow able to get this archaic fleet of vehicles running; high marks again to their animal cunning and ingenuity. I feel increasing speed. ‘What is this?’ I say. ‘This is entirely wrong, this is not the way it was supposed to be. I am the director. I do not belong here.’

‘Quiet,’ Lara says, ‘stay quiet now. And keep down. Get down now!’ The rising thread of her voice loops me. I look up at the twinkling sun, at Municipal above. There is someone in the window of Municipal, I can see the glinting rifle barrel moving and retreating through the aperture.

‘Oh my God,’ Lara says, ‘they’re going to get me too, me too, you fool.’

I dive then. I am beginning to understand what is happening, but I do so with lack of precision, knowing that it is already too late and that I should have dived like this three seconds ago or maybe it is three months of which I am thinking.

I feel the impact like a horde of bees across my scalp.

‘Where are your crews?’ Lara says. ‘I want your damned crews!’ And I look up again, wondering if I will sight them. The crews must be here at last. They will gauge the situation in a moment and rush in to save me from these barbarians. But then, as I see the slow-moving vehicles at the rim of my vision, their telescopes fixed and pointed, I understand, goddamnit, that it is not the crews at all, but additional artillery and that this time – well, at this time they are going to finish me off for good.

I dive towards the floorboards of the car again. I hope that they will support me against a mighty crash. Then I feel the second impact, a harsher one, tearing through the side of the neck. I flutter like a fish against the cushions and collapse in Lara’s lap, groaning. This is easier. To groan. To submit. Matters recede and I feel her hands.

‘Oh my God, they’ve shot my husband! Jack, Jack!’ she screams (this woman must be really crazy) and for the moment I hear nothing more. While the explosions are coming over me, I wonder vaguely what I can tell Committee.

How can I make all of this clear to him and thus justify my position? The car, the car is full of roses.

VIII

Deep in a dream, I arise and go to the mosque. The mosque is located on upper Fifth Avenue and I move toward it slowly, like a man underwater, whisking through levels of interference and apperception. I do not want to go there, but on the other hand I know that there is truly no choice; now deep in my troubles, I must take my audiences where they can be found and the mosque, at least, is accessible to traffic. I have many enemies and dare not lean through the windows of the limousine to check the air for possible assassins. If they come, they come. There is nothing to be done about it. I am informed by the sense of my mission.

Outside of the mosque, I check the terrain quickly. Crowds pool like blood in its abcesses; any one of them in there might have a knife or gun to penetrate me, but the faces are quizzical, absent; they have the beaten aspect of uptown and I do not sense murder. I do the best I can. I penetrate the doors quickly and move toward the speaker’s stand.

And am intercepted. Clusters are around me; some want me to make a brief statement, others would like me to issue a quick autograph or brief prayer for stricken relatives. There are people from the press who would like to know my thoughts about this or that. Rumors that potential contributors poised on the edge of decision would like a word or two with me before signing checks. I shake my head. No statements are to be given. No audiences will be granted. Implanted deep within me is a sense of mission.

My wife whispers to me shortly, intensely. She looks, in a vague way like someone I have known, such as Lara, but the accident of feature does not strike me; I have larger concerns. She is merely my wife, therefore a stranger. ‘You must be careful, Malcolm,’ she says, ‘you have many enemies’.

‘I do not care.’

‘Many enemies and some of them may be in this very mosque, this very audience to kill you,’ my wife points out, her hand frozen against my elbow, her face empty, defiant against the winds and I return the pressure hand to hip, looking straight ahead. ‘I do not care,’ I say, ‘it is a question of mission.’

Surely this must be a dream because in the real I would be terrified to speak, let alone deny my fright. I have been haunted by the presence of my assassins for months and months. Soon after the disastrous break with the midwest faction, the assassins came to clamber through my sleep, winking and grinning, making solemn pacts with one another against the screen of night and teaching me as well to regard them in the day. But in this moment, for some reason, I have learned to defy this terror and give no sign of it in my bearing. I will grant them no satisfaction. ‘I don’t care,’ I say, donning my robes which certain elders of the church have seen fit to bring me from an anteroom as they hum around me like birds. ‘One must do the best one can and besides there is no way to change the situation.’ Am I really a fatalist? No, I am not really a fatalist. The fact of the matter is that I am terrified. I ease myself from my wife’s grip like tearing paper and make my way to the podium.

The elders and reporters break before me; I pass through them with superb ease. No one interrupts my path to the podium. As I come onto the stage there is an instant of hesitation, a hanging parapet of doubt where I find my stride collapsing and think of flight toward the curtains, but it is passed through and I seize the lectern like a woman, my fingers gripping, swimming about the panelling. The audience looks up at me numbly. I am aware of quantity, but not personalities. I see the fever in them and something within me rises, singing, to greet that.

‘Consider,’ I say, ‘consider the question of the city. All corruption, all pain I want you to understand has come from the fact that we have become the prisoners of the cities; it is an unnatural, indeed an insane way in which to live. My people, you were not born to live in clusters and pain, but came from great, open, singing spaces, brought like cattle by the white man to be enslaved within the cities for the purposes of working for the continuation of his evil way of life. Our heritage is not the cities nor is our legacy; we have been ill used. We must understand this – that the city is an abomination, vile, ugly in the sight of the Lord for it is not intended that we live in this way, but rather it was intended that we live as did our forebears, in those open spaces, in command of the land which gave us birth and I say to you now that we must repudiate these ways of disease and evil which are not our heritage, but that of the white man, and return to the manner of our tradition. Is that not true? Is it?’

They hum in the temple. It is a familiar text from which I am departing tonight, but one, nonetheless, with the power to move them; which of them has not, looking upon the landscape of his inheritance, not felt the evil, vile sense of abomination which I have? And which of them is capable of coming to terms with that landscape? I feel a nagging operative sense under the skin; it is unfair, perhaps, to taunt them by evoking what they can never have but on the other hand, since I fell into disrepute in Chicago, things have been very difficult, and I have been forced to take my texts where I may. Given my own way about this I would, very likely, not even be here at all, but reformation is difficult and occurs only by degrees. ‘Think of this,’ I admonish them. I observe that my wife is sitting in the fourth or fifth row of the mosque, holding a child against her, and listening to me attentively. How did the children get into this? I did not want to bring the children in the matter; this sermon, more than any of the others, was to establish my credibility within the community and I could have well done without my family having been worked into the situation. Nevertheless, what can I do? It is entirely too late.

‘It is entirely too late,’ I say, picking up the thread of delivery from my frenzied inner thoughts, a habit which has served me in the past and which I hope will serve me tonight because I am very tired and, noting a certain flurry in the rear, suddenly frightened as well, ‘entirely too late to adapt ourselves to the corruption, rather we must spring free of it. The only love, the only liberation we will ever know is through the denial of the temptations, the turning back to the traditions we have known …’ Pounding the podium for emphasis, I see that the flurry in the rear has coalesced into a certain unity of action; the doors spring open, shouting men work their way through, they are absorbed by those in the rear. I see the sudden glint of rifle barrels …

And I know then what I should have always known – that liberation begins at home and that Malcolm is distinctly unliberated. Breaking in mid-line I dive toward the floor, abandoning my grip on the podium. But it is already too late. I feel a bullet tear through the scalp line, unsettling; then another blast catches me full in the chest and I hit the floor, scrambling. ‘Preposterous,’ I try to say, but cough blood. ‘Not preposterous,’ I add and am able to get this out because it is true. I have been waiting for this, I have always expected it. There are the sounds of feet and cries, but they are beyond me; I am locked into a cool, dry place which is mine alone and I fall into my blood. My knees twitch, my wife screams, the child emits a strange, ringing belch and it is this sound and none of the others which seals me and sends me up. Heavenward.

Sinking on the floor, rolling on the floor. Ascending.

IX

Thunder on the ground. I awaken in the cell, coming back to myself in small pulses and rivulets of sound; the stones are trembling. I see that Lara is holding me, cradling me in a maternal position, her eyes lit by concern. ‘Are you all right?’ she says when she sees that I am conscious. ‘We were worried about you. We thought …’

I breathe slowly, deeply, saying nothing, looking at the ceiling. Regular respiration. Profound inhalation. Work against the pulse rate, move the body into acceptance of its condition. I close my eyes and watch the figures darting across the screen of consciousness unhindered by light. After a time I find that I am able to speak. ‘What is going on?’ I ask her. My limbs feel detached, airborne. ‘What do they want of me?’

‘Open your eyes.’

‘No. I don’t want to open my eyes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if I do I’ll see and I can’t stand that,’ I say. ‘Tell me what is going on. First there was the motorcade and then the mosque. But I had never seen the mosque before. I do not understand this …’

‘Are you sure?’ Lara says. ‘Are you really sure that you do not understand this?’

I open my eyes then and see her. In this aspect she is enormous, her face hanging over me like a balloon, her breasts, half-visible through the transparency winking at me through the nipples. We are quite alone. No sounds in the corridors, no haze in the air. But the cell is familiar. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I don’t understand this.’

Something mad, battling against that screen of consciousness, kicks and wedges through a misshapen limb; glancing at it, I realize that I do see and the insight is something more than I can accept. ‘Leave me alone, then,’ I say to her. A breast swings, tempts me vaguely, I think of putting my mouth against it (but would only inhale gauze) and dismiss the scatology. What would it suit me to suckle breasts now? What effect would it have upon the situation? But a whisk of lechery lofting through me incites a stain, a stain which burns and I reach toward her in my somnolence, seize her, drag her against me. ‘Now,’ I say to the gauze, ‘now, now,’ and inhale, bite deeply. I taste cloth and against that something metallic. I gag, expel her. Momentarily it overwhelms me and I sink my head back, overcome.

‘You must listen,’ she says as if nothing at all has happened, ‘If you do not listen nothing can be done for you at all but if you do there is a way …’

‘A way? What way? What are you talking of?’ I struggle to my elbows, look at her. ‘How did I get into a mosque? What did the mosque have to do with it?’

‘There is no time to explain.’

‘I came back here to study the assassination. That was my topic of reference, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the senior, in November of 1963. In fulfillment of the degree for historical referent I intended to restage that event, using local principals, the sites …’

‘No time,’ she says, ‘no time.’ Is she not weary of this? Is she not tired of denying me, of constantly casting aside my queries? I do not know. ‘There is a way,’ she says, ‘a way to save you, but it is very difficult and you must understand …’

‘Why does everyone want me to understand? What is there to understand?’ I say and fight my way bolt upright, but it is too much for me; faintness overtakes me, I lie again, balancing with difficulty against the stones on my elbows, then subsiding. Her breasts swing over me, but now they do not incite. ‘I just can’t face it anymore,’ I say.

‘Of course you can’t. That’s the beginning.’

‘The beginning of what?’

‘Of understanding.’

‘I came to direct a pageant. I wanted a pageant of reenactment, to retrace the past through its reconstitution in the present …’

‘Words, all words.’

‘I’ve lived my life by them.’

‘And that’s been the error,’ she says, ‘that has been the tragedy of it. It is time to penetrate the words. It is time for you to see what has really been going on.’

‘It was all planned, wasn’t it?’ I say, fondled by intuition. ‘Even the crews. The crews were supposed to … ’

‘Enough,’ she says. ‘There is no time for talking now. In time you will understand it all. But there must be a beginning.’

‘I don’t know if I can face beginnings. Origins were never my specialty. It was not a causation but effect which interested me; the effects which would stem …’

‘That is the beginning,’ she says, ‘the beginning of becoming human.’ I feel her hands upon my forehead, cold, distant, remorseless, stroking and twirling my hair. There is a sensation of metal, I feel the biting of wire, deep into my scalp. Calmly, reflexively, her hands absorb this twitch and then pass downward to my cheeks. ‘All right,’ she says, ‘it’s all right.’

I reach a hand toward my hair. ‘What have you done to me? What is in there?’

‘It is merely to accelerate the process.’

‘What process? What are you talking about?’

‘It had to be done electrostatically. To force it through induction would have taken far more time than was available.’

I twirl little strands of hair, feel the imprint of wires in a forefinger. They seem to be faintly warm. Spreading through that finger is a glow which turns slowly into a blister of implication as I withdraw the finger to stare at it. ‘All of the time, I thought that I was the director,’ I say, ‘and all of the time I was being directed …’

‘Not so. But we cannot go into this. Later on you will understand and you will not think so harshly of us. But for the moment … ’

‘Lumpen,’ I say bitterly, ‘all of you are lumpen …’

‘It’s 2116,’ Lara says harshly, straddling me. ‘How much time do you think you have left in your countryside? Reserves are almost exhausted; in just a few years you will have to come back to the cities.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘never …’

‘You say never, but you realize nothing. The cities have been running your world for you all these years now. They have been the source of everything from the start, this lie you call life, but now …’

‘We will never return to the cities,’ I say. I reach out a shaking hand, take a sip of water. ‘That is impossible.’

‘What you say is impossible must happen. It is going to happen when the lines break down and then what will happen to all of you?’ She moves from me. ‘This is the only way,’ she says, ‘the only way in which we could have dealt with the situation. Later, understanding will come.’

I try to get to my feet, find that I am imprisoned by a strange belt of fatigue which loops me, head-to-waist, and leaves me gagging. Underneath, the ground shifts like sliding panels and I feel nausea loft within me, lightly, airily. ‘Please,’ I say, in submission for the first time, ‘please, you’ve got to help me. I cannot go on this way.’

‘But you must.’

‘You were the only one I could trust. I thought you were different than the rest.’

‘I am different than the rest,’ Lara says. She makes a motion through the bars, beckoning release. ‘This is why I have been delegated to talk with you.’

‘But you’re not talking.’

‘You must accept,’ she says, ‘you must not resist what is happening but go along with it. You must believe that what we are doing is necessary and right.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

Hands poke through the doors, there is a grind of key. ‘Understanding is not necessary,’ she says. ‘We do not seek understanding. All that we ask is acceptance. Can you accept? Is that within you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘Try,’ she says quickly and is gone. I try to catch a glimpse of the jailer but the angle is too complex, my position restricted, I can see nothing. ‘You must change your life,’ she says as if from a great distance.

I feel the cool, gray bite of the wires deep within my skull and am then battered by flashes of light as if they were surges of power from the electrodes. I roll on the floor, battering my palms against stone, but there is no way to escape the scenes behind the curtain that is rising in my mind.

X

1963: Driving my way due west from the city, passing first the cluttered, beaten pavement, the buildings enjambed upon one another, the forms staggering in the streets, then onto the dense, clotted highways which loop the city and carry the outsiders around it; finally across the water and into New Jersey, first of the western states. Despite a thick pall of clouds from the refineries, the mutter of trucks, the oil stains on the road, there is nevertheless something peculiarly refreshing and uplifting about the first glimpse of that larger America of the soul on which I have pondered so long. Drive-in movie theaters, Wonder Waffles, Maude’s Cakes and Ale, Disaster Do-nuts. Dodging through the trucks, catching fast glimpses of this landscape. Bargain Blast. Shoot-em-up Alley. The old car beginning to collapse under the pressure of the turns, the very wheel losing resilience in my hands as I thrust my way through America. At Frank’s Wonderama: Late and Early Model Used Cars, I swing right, miss a horse van by inches, spin onto the gravel and, in a controlled skid, bring the car to a halt outside of the offices. I turn the key, letting the ignition cool with the sound of many insects. The beat of America convulses Frank’s Wonderama, the cars, lined in mute rows like idiot children, catch and refract the shapes of the highway. An old man moves through the line, sweeping at them with a rag. Slowly I ease from the car, adjusting my kinesthetic sense to this alien land of New Jersey as Frank himself or perhaps it is only some surrogate of Frank (Frank having leased his name only to the Wonderama) comes from the office, wiping his forehead with a large, damp handkerchief. It is a hot day. It is August of 1963 in the midst of the Harlem riots and the humid weather, strange to say, seems to have permeated all of the coast. Frank has a wheeze, he talks with a light stutter, there is a small glaze of panic behind his eyes which embarrasses me. Business may not be too good at the Wonderama. Then again, I may present a threatening appearance.

‘Hot day,’ he says with a moan and replaces the handkerchief, looking at my car quizzically with the small, mean eyes of people at a zoo. A Plymouth Belvedere convertible, 1957, with power steering and automatic transmission. No other options; the radio is merely a distraction, highway fumes keep me warm and power brakes will put one through the windshield. ‘Can’t give you much in trade on that,’ he says. ‘Of course, we could work out something.’ His eyes scan the highway, flicker back to me. ‘What are you looking for, anyway?’ There is a pleading tone. Business cannot be altogether too good at the Wonderama. Of course Frank and his surrogate have so much with which to compete; across the highway are Bargain Cars, to our right is the Coupe Corner, tucked behind the Route 3 intersection just to the East is Killer’s Cars and Samuel’s Fastbacks. The Wonderama must cleave out its own little circle of influence, but it is difficult and, in truth, Frank’s cars do not look very good. Compared to most of those I have glimpsed hammered into the lots on this westerly route, in fact, they are definitely inferior: bland sedans and rotting convertibles, some of them dropping ominous little pools of oil underneath like menstruating women. ‘I said,’ Frank or his surrogate repeats, somewhat more harshly, ‘what are you looking for?’ His voice is strained, pathetic. In many ways, this man’s life has slipped from his control and I try to take a more relaxed posture, breathing calmly while I watch the stacks of refineries in the distance heave little circles of smoke into the closed air.

‘I’m looking for something in the nature of an open-air limousine,’ I say.

‘Open-air limousine?’ Frank says, and extracts a cigar from an inner pocket, breathes on it cautiously and then places it within a corner of his mouth, making no move to light it. ‘Very rare model, extremely rare. You mean some kind of a convertible limousine, isn’t that right? A four-door convertible?’

‘I think that’s the one.’

‘Um,’ Frank says meditatively, ‘that’s a very rare ticket. What’s the need?’

‘We need it for an assassination.’

‘An assassination?’

‘Government business,’ I say wisely and roll my hands within my pockets. Progress with Frank is slow and painful and I wonder if I would be better trying my luck at Killer’s Cars. But I have been advised that Frank is dependable and cheap and that he has a certain command of exotica in the automobile which passes most of his competitors. Of course the word may be wrong. More often than not information given in the cities is dangerously incorrect.

‘Government business,’ Frank says, taking out the cigar and looking at it. ‘You need an open-air limousine for an assassination on government business.’

‘Optional equipment isn’t important as long as it runs.’

‘Well,’ Frank says, ‘you’re going to get your optionals anytime in that kind of a car. You’re going to get your air-conditioning, your power seats, power windows, power partition separator, rear defroster no matter what.’ He seems to wink. ‘They only make them that one way. A limousine is kind of a standard model.’

‘Sure.’

‘I don’t know,’ Frank says, looking at the ground. ‘On the Cadillac commercial chassis, all of them are closed cars. Except for the flower cars of course. That’s the kind which carry the flowers at funerals, you know. There you have an open rear deck.’

‘That’s no good. It’s for a president; you can’t have a president riding on the rear deck of an open-air car. It wouldn’t be dignified.’

‘Wouldn’t be dignified,’ Frank repeats. The man does not seem entirely bright; also lacking is the aggressiveness and self-confidence which one associates with the stereotype of a used-car dealer. In fact, he seems to have a genuine personality problem – quirks of idiom, vague overtones of guilt, an inability to face the true nature of his problems – which comes through rather clearly in his conversation. ‘There’s the four-door Continental convertible,’ Frank says hopefully. ‘The Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, that is. That might do.’

‘It might well.’

‘But they just started making those in 1961 and here it is 1963 so they haven’t depreciated too much on the used car market. And people who have them tend to hold onto them because it’s probably going to be a discontinued model so it would have some classic value. Get a 1961 Continental four-door convertible, even one in bad shape, it’s got to set you back forty-five hundred, five thousand dollars. Just can’t do much better than that, no matter what kind of condition …’

‘You don’t understand,’ I say, noting a slight loss of control which I instantly stamp down. ‘The question of condition is crucial. It’s got to be in excellent condition. No scratches, dents, body problems of any sort. And it’s got to have a strong transmission and good pickup so that it can withstand the Texas heat and get to the hospital quickly.’

‘Ah.’

‘And the suspension has to be tight, too, the ball joints and so on because it’s going to be cornering at ninety, a hundred miles an hour. There’s going to be a lot of stress on the vehicle.’

‘I see,’ Frank says. He lets the cigar hang down by his side between his fingers, shaking his head. ‘That’s a big order,’ he says. ‘I really don’t know if I can come through, can give you any help on that kind of an order at all. Who did you say was going to be riding in it?’

‘The President.’

‘Well,’ Frank says with a sigh, ‘now I just don’t know. I mean, it’s an honor that you’d come to me for something like this and I’d really like to help, but I just don’t think that I can meet that kind of order at all and it’s not really my fault. I’ve got a really nice 1954 Fleetwood in the back, the only limousine I’ve actually got on the lot right now which is a pretty good car for its age. In fact, for a nine-year-old car it’s really in excellent shape. They just had new brakes put into the thing and the body isn’t bad at all; it could be compounded right up to showroom standards and I’ve used it personally for some of my own business and mechanically it’s in a very good way. I could let you have that one for nine hundred and ninety-five dollars. Well, let’s say nine seventy-five and maybe if we could make a quick deal …’

‘But it’s not open.’

‘You could rip the roof off,’ Frank says desperately. His hands twitch, his battered little cheeks vault toward one another as he gestures frantically, ‘you could roll down all the windows, you could blow out the panels with a couple of charges and lift the roof … ’

‘It wouldn’t work. Sorry.’

‘Why does it have to be an open car? Plenty of presidents, lots of those foreign kings and queens, they ride in a closed vehicle. It’s safer that way …’

‘We don’t want safety,’ I say. ‘I told you, we needed an open car for an assassination.’

This utterly destroys Frank. He mumbles, shudders, opens his palms and looks at them, stares at the ground, looks at the sky, nods, trembles, begins to back off from me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I’m really sorry about this, but I don’t think that I can help you. I don’t think that anyone can help you.’ Panic causes him to billow in the slight wind; the man seems to be having a fit of some kind. ‘Sorry!’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve got to take your business somewhere else. We can’t help you. I don’t do that kind of business here.’ He is at the door of his office. He backs through that door and closes it. Behind glass, he takes on the aspect of a man scrambling through seawater. He spreads his arms, pounds the glass, screams something that the soundproofing conceals. I cannot lip read.

Momentarily I lose control. All of the rage, the hopelessness, the irony of my quest overtakes me and I find myself plunging through the gravel, sliding on the stones, moving rapidly toward the door of the office. ‘You can’t do this!’ I shout. I pound on the glass. ‘You can’t do this to me, you’ve got to cooperate with me, you son of a bitch, you were recommended!’ Frank in panic, opens his mouth, I see teeth like a squirrel’s. I will not be dissuaded. My palms slide over the glass. ‘Come on out and fight like a man,’ I say, ‘come on, face up to the reality of the situation, you can’t be a fool all of your life.’ But Frank will not come out, despite my accusations, no fool he; a bolt clatters, he retreats from the pane and into the darker recesses of the office, leaving me scrambling at the glass.

Pointless. It is quite pointless. Obviously I will not find the vehicle I need here. I return to my Plymouth Belvedere 1957 (actually it is a Savoy, the lowest-priced model, but the model identification was grazed off it in a minor collision and therefore I can obtain the small, prestigious benefits of lying) and turn over the motor with a crash, drop the transmission to low and drive from Frank’s Wonderama, raging. Killer’s Cars. Perhaps I will find what I need there. Certainly I am entitled at this stage of my journey to a little luck and consideration and I roll down the highway allowing myself, once again, to succumb to hope. I really cannot manage the preparations all on my own; somewhere along the way I am entitled to a little help and Killer’s Cars sounds like a happy circumstance.

I allow myself to smile thinly and bring the car off the highway to skid to a halt on the gravel. Emerging from the car, I see the Killer himself striding to greet me and the air is full of light, of the sound of birds, of the movements of a Texas afternoon as I move to close the ground between us, my hand extended for the clasp that might be remission.

‘Help you?’ the Killer asks and takes off his hat respectfully. A white sombrero.

XI

Jaunting through Paradise Alley, my lady and I, on the other side of the Governor and his own wife. Opposing factions, political dispute, much bitterness. Nevertheless, what can one do? One must seal the borders, join the nations together if the sunny Southland is to fall into the right column next year. Never forget the sunny Southland; no less than East, West, North, the best, it is part of the grand scheme which has obsessed me for so many years and now seems so close to fruition. Utter unity. Clamp the nation together like an incision.

Wave to the crowd. They are cheering; there is no reason, really, why they should not be, considering my good looks, my power, my presence and this glorious day which fills all of the spaces with light. Vague sounds of cheering, jostling, children being whisked high for a closer look. I bow to them indulgently. After all, the gesture costs me very little. Gestures have always been my specialty. This is not as much of a fault as it would at first appear.

‘How are you doing?’ I ask my wife beside me. Tiny lines of trouble ease in and out of her impenetrable face; I wish that I really had not asked this question. We have had difficulties, my wife and I, for some time now which I refuse to believe are really my fault. At all costs, however, we must preserve appearances, not only for the crowds, but for myself. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘I despise this state,’ my wife says. She looks something like Lara although this is quite impossible; it is 1963 and Lara will not even be born for a quarter of a century. I put this disturbing image away; among other things I do not even know who Lara is. I despise these people. They’re cruel; I even think they’re a little insane. I want to tell you …’

‘Hush,’ I say, making a presidential gesture and pushing her back into the seat with an extended arm. ‘Those people in the front will hear you.’

‘I don’t care. I don’t care if they hear me or not. I didn’t want to come here.’

‘I know you didn’t want to come here and I didn’t want to come here either, but here we are and we might as well make the best of it.’ The car climbs a slow rise like an animal and squats momentarily at halt in the road; people run down the slopes to get a closer look. ‘See them,’ I say, motioning, smiling, ‘they love us.’

‘I don’t want to be loved,’ my wife says. Lara-like, she twists away from me, her face a mask of repudiation. ‘I want to get out of here before it’s too late.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say, ‘this is a motorcade, we can’t get out of here now. Besides that, it’s just a short trip. We’ll be home tomorrow.’ Distractedly I continue waving, noting that the shoulders of the Governor are hunched as if to ward off a blow and that his wife is talking to him intensely. ‘Don’t bother me with your cheap little neurotic fears,’ I say to my wife, a shade more harshly than I intended. ‘Concentrate on the crowds. It’s a political visit.’

‘That’s you,’ she says, ‘always self-involved, you don’t look beyond your nose.’ This is really too much for me altogether, the woman is absolutely impossible; if we were not in public I would lean across and launch a slap against her cheek – presidential dignity or not, the order in the home must be preserved – but I will myself into compliance, reckoning what I will do with the woman later, what retribution I will seek later, all the time continuing to wave and smile. Let them see nothing, let them know nothing, let the music rise. I feel a slant of weariness. It is really a difficult thing to be a politician and forever at the mercy of public thrust and opinion; surely when my term of office is over in little more than five years I will retire somewhere and write my memoirs. Tell the true stories of the difficulty, explain my position, point out the nature of my many enemies and where the opposition went wrong. I am really quite fatigued. I wish I had never consented to this stupid journey (but at least I had the good sense not to let them put their hat on me this morning) and wish that I were back in quarters, calling a murmurous assembly of my staff men. We could have worked it out at the policy level instead.

‘Well,’ the Governor’s wife says, turning around and looking at me full-face, ‘you really can’t say that the city of Dallas doesn’t love you now, Mr President!’

Is that what she is saying? Is that what the stupid bitch is actually saying! She has had almost nothing at all to say throughout the day and I consoled myself with the fiction that this silence contained great wisdom, delicacies of insight, but the smile on her face is as cruel and broad as any suggested within the crowd. She is their quintessence, not the exception; I lean forward to tell her this – Mrs Connally you are the quintessence, not the exception – arching myself so that there will be no way that she can clear the cutting effect of the lines, the assault upon her nervous system. The hell with the Governor! He is sitting there, static, a strange, bleak resignation in his eyes, small and restless as they look toward the sky. The quintessence, not the exception, I start to say and something hits my neck, tearing open the windpipe it seems and exposing my vitals to the clear, open breezes of the South. I start to gag.

The surprise of it! as I scramble toward the floorboards, quick reflexes already taking me to cover – this is the primary response that surges through. I know instantly what has happened; my senses attuned to disaster for years have never betrayed me, I have walked in and out of the line of death so many times that there is absolutely no doubt but that this is a serious assassination attempt. But even though the logical planes of the mind can contain this like a ball darting through the levels of pinball, it is the surprise, the dismay which sets the lights to flickering, the electricity to set off the bells and it is this perhaps which controls my subsequent and most serious misjudgment. I incline my head to look for the assassin,

Why not? I deserve to see the face of the enemy, but the incline is taking me out of the line of dive, my body will not cooperate, my wife in the frieze is looking at me with complete dismay – how much in bad taste this all is her mouth seems to be saying, that excellent, tasteful mouth – but nothing is to be done with her and instead of falling forward, the arc of the collapse is rather back, my head turned in a slight pivot, the temple exposed, the temple exposed to the line of fire – and I take the shot squarely.

Well, what can I do? I have been killed, that is all there is to it, my own stupidity contributing to my death no less than the treachery of the assailant. No one, in fact, is to be really blamed but myself for being here. But I am already dead it would seem; whistling toward the cushions, little showers of blood surrounding me like pinpoints. Ridiculous. How can all this be happening to me? I should have died years ago.

And then the car accelerates.

XII

In the Institute, months ago, racing through corridors, on my way to see Committee. Poring over the records, the reports, I have had a tremendous slash of knowledge and now I am going to discuss it with Committee. For years it seems as if I have been stumbling through murk, trying to loft understanding through the gelatin of my own mind and nothing has come, nothing ever, but in one instant, just an hour ago, it all came clear and I arranged to see Committee on an emergency basis. Committee granted the request. It is coming time soon enough for my research project and up until now I have had no acceptable ideas. Committee has been becoming restless. What will be done with me in the tutorials if I do not come up with a project? ‘You’d better come right in then, son,’ Committee had said. ‘If it’s important, never delay.’

Never delay. I have no intention of delaying; now, at last, I can explain everything. ‘Look here,’ I want to tell Committee, jabbing with a finger at the empty air, ‘look at what I’ve just seen; every single terrible event which occurred in the historical period under review, every single terrible event occurred in the cities or around them, occurred as a direct result of the pressures and tensions of urban existence. The riots, the assassinations, the griefs and slaughters, poverty, filth, disease, decay, all of these were urban-centered phenomena and therefore we must conclude in any true study of the urban America of that period that the symptoms were indeed the problem, the cure was the disease! Isn’t that marvelous? What do you think of that?’ Skidding on the ramps in the recreation area, nearly bumping into two attendants moving downward, I realize that I am embarrassingly out of synchronization and, force of insight or not, will have to calm down. If I am not calm, I will be babbling soon and how can I make the matter, thus, clear to Committee?

I calm. I walk through the ramps now with a skittering but nevertheless leonine stride, pausing at the walkways, observing all of the traffic rules of the Institute, carefully ordering my intentions against the conference to come. Of course, those few people in the bays at this hour eye me strangely, but I ignore this. Their quizzical looks mean nothing to me. Historically speaking, I have had many enemies and this will have to continue; truly all of them are out to get me and as long as I can keep myself armored with knowledge of their treachery, I know that things will be perfectly all right. No one ever said that my life would be easy; it is extremely difficult to prepare a totally original and unique project for the tutorials, quite difficult enough as it is without being distracted by thoughts of what my enemies will be doing to me. I open the door cautiously and find that Committee has not yet come into his office.

The old bastard is late again. He is almost always late; he runs fifteen to thirty minutes behind on all of his appointments and sometimes even an hour. Surely he should have enough respect for me, at least once, to follow up on his commitment for a conference, but I will myself to dispassion and put down those difficult feelings boiling within me. Committee, after all, has his own problems. I sit restlessly in the chair before the desk, playing with my fingernails and then in small winks and glances begin to appraise the materials on his desk. Committee has a disorganized habit of leaving all of his papers in full view; perhaps I can glean some information through a quick scan. Carefully I check behind me to note that the door is closed; cautiously I edge my way around the desk and begin to read.

The papers yield very little. Committee has at hand a memo from the trustees discussing pilferage in the Institute and a certain lower quality level in some of the tutorials; he is asked to respond. An open folder notes that one Clark Williams who was discharged from the Institute for Cause Sixteen months ago has committed suicide by high-speed impaction in a chute; Committee is writing a closing entry. Underneath the Williams folder is my own and I think with a surge of anticipation that at last I will learn something truly interesting and confidential about myself but the folder is blank. Committee has removed the entry sheets and probably put them in his briefcase to carry around; all that I can see are the biographical details noted on the inside flap denoting the age of birth – 8-2-94; the date of admission to the Institute – 9/14/12, and little else. I have been admitted as a full candidate for the standard degree; my subject major will be the urban history of the 1960s; parents deceased, no siblings, no other close relatives; participating under the terms of the Federal Education Act of 1998, nothing else. It is dismaying. I could have found out more about myself by closing my eyes and rapidly sifting the details of my life before the blankness. Still, what did I expect?

I return to the front of the desk and not a moment too soon for Committee enters, rumbling and bustling, through the door. As always he seems distracted, as if I were an interruption in his path toward self-enlightenment. ‘Well,’ he says, sitting and putting his feet rather abruptly on the desk, ‘I’m here. Tell me what you have to say.’

‘I thought I’d have an opportunity to explain …’

‘I am giving you that opportunity,’ Committee says, ‘but the time is very limited. I arranged to meet you here because of the circumstances but you’ll have to learn to conform to rules and regulations. You cannot be an exceptional instance all your life, young man. Now tell me what you had in mind.’

I tell him. There is little else to do. The edge of hostility, however, jangles me and makes my narrative somewhat less lucid, perhaps, than I had framed it in my mind. Did I want to be an exception all my life? Of course I did not; I wanted to be like any of the others and it is unfair of Committee to make this accusation. My voice sounds lame and bleating within my ears; suddenly I am embarrassed and come to a clanging halt in mid-participle. ‘All right,’ I say, ‘I guess that you have the idea, Committee.’

‘Committee,’ he says and brings his feet off the desk, ‘maybe I can approach this point? Why do you always call me Committee? I have a name just as you do, you’ve never been forbidden to use that name. Do you feel so depersonalized?’

‘Of course not,’ I say, ‘it isn’t that.’ I strangle on the next sentence, put it down, try to frame it in another way. ‘I think of you as Committee,’ I say. ‘You are my Committee. You pass approval …’

‘That is all nonsense,’ Committee says, ‘defensive and possibly psychopathic nonsense. Well, we will pass on that for the time being. There is no point or profit in pursuing your psychic problems at this time. This idea of yours. What strikes you as so original about it?’

Committee’s eyes glint behind his glasses, his palms roll against one another. I resist an impulse to fling myself at him slightly above throat level and beg for mercy. ‘What is original is this,’ I say. ‘The symptoms were the disease. All of it was misinterpreted. It wasn’t that the cities were the syndrome of a corrupt and decaying culture, but that they were the corruption and decay, sending it in waves outward. You could cure the disease by curing the symptoms. The urban sociologists of that time misunderstood completely, you see. The problem wasn’t to remake the cities in terms of an older, pastoral idealization, but to get rid of them. The problem wasn’t to make the lives bearable or to attack root causes but rather to lop them off.’

‘And you really think that this is an original insight?’

‘It struck me as such.’

‘It struck you as an original insight to say that the symptoms were the disease and the cure then was to get rid of the cities entirely.’

‘Of course,’ I say hesitantly, wishing that I had not looked at the papers on Committee’s desk. Has he somehow sensed this? Has some stain of implication ground its way into my fingertips, now revealing itself on tracers with small beeps resounding in his head? Why is he looking at me in this way?

‘Oh, you fool,’ Committee says, ‘that’s no insight, that is exactly what happened. You have merely stated the conclusions and policies as they were implemented in the 1980s.’

‘Oh you fool,’ Committee says, ‘that’s no insight, that is that Committee is not going to speak. ‘Well, it’s not really my fault,’ I add rather sullenly, ‘I mean my specialty, my referent is the 1960s and I’m not really much of an expert out of that area …’

‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with you,’ Committee says. Quickly he becomes active, stands, paces, returns to the desk, sifts papers, feeds them into a case which he produces from a drawer of the desk, makes flexing motions, goes to the window, comes back again. ‘I simply don’t know what we’re going to do with you, we’ve tried and tried, but it’s becoming plain to me that all of our efforts were for naught. If you’ve been able after all these years only to reproduce common policy …’

‘Well that makes me valuable, doesn’t it!’ I shriek. ‘That makes me important, that’s nothing for you to sneer at, if you say that the government came around to doing exactly what I discovered on my own, an entire government, an enormous bureaucracy, then I can’t be so damned stupid. I wish that you would stop thinking of me as stupid! I am not stupid and I’m entitled to respect and before I’m done, before I’m finished I’ll come up with something so important that you’ll regret having talked to me in this way. I’ll show you! I’ll show all of you here!’ I seem to be rather out of control. My clothing feels too tight, my limbs mal-proportioned, my voice a squawk. ‘You’ve got to take me seriously!’ I shout. ‘No one takes me seriously!’

‘I take you seriously,’ Committee says definitively. He walks to the door. ‘I have taken you very seriously from the start of all this.’ He is right, he is not merely a Committee. He is a man, an old embittered man.

Now, as if for the first time I see him: the shaking hands, palsied skin of his body, hawk in his voice, intermittent cough that causes his body to heave, the high, dense odor of palliatives which drifts from him when he exhales rapidly. He is nothing but a ruined, evil old man; all of the time that I thought I was putting my faith, my life, my research into the hands of Committee it was merely this wreckage with which I was dealing and I find myself suppressing a frantic impulse to laugh. ‘I don’t have to listen to you anymore,’ I say, ‘I don’t have to listen to any of you. But before I’m done …’

‘I’m sorry,’ the old man says, ‘I’m really sorry, but I’m not going to stand here and become involved in this now. Sometime later when you’re calm perhaps we can discuss this, right now you’re acting like a lumpen!’ And out the door he goes, not even urging me from his office, leaving me standing there in the foul little cubicle that I had thought of as being the crucial unit of the great Institute. Nothing to do, nothing to do. I stand there in this place for a moment and then I lunge through the door in search of anything, I do not care: a bed to take me, an opticon to convert me, a lumpen to comfort, no matter, no matter, and in the haze of that flight I see the first lumbering shapes of my plan.

XIII

No cell this time – they have released me or do not think of me as a potential escapee; I am lying in the withered grass by the Battery, looking out over the sea, Lara kneeling over. ‘What is going on now?’ I say. Too weak to lift my head, I look into her gaze, then cast my eyes beyond, see birds, a whiff of clouds, inhale smoke. ‘Or don’t you want to tell me.’

‘Nothing is going on now. You’re supposed to rest.’

‘What are you doing to me?’

She comes closer; her face half-wedge of moon as she looks at the sky. ‘You know what we’re doing,’ she says, ‘don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I say and of course I do. ‘But why? I don’t understand …’

‘You don’t have to understand. There is no need for you to do anything. Just rest now.’

‘I can’t rest,’ I say. I struggle against elbows, half-rise, look at her. Implacable, sun-splashed, she looks like no one I have ever known. Impossible to believe that I have fucked this woman, but in the abcess of recall I know that I have, fucked her two or three times during the time I was the Director. Now she is as far from me as Committee. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ I say.

‘No one can help you.’

‘That isn’t true. You can.’

‘No, I can’t,’ she says. She poises above me, brings her palms flat to the earth, hovers over me now like a male dog slavering at a bitch. ‘It’s too late. It’s 2116 and you’re in the city and the city has been abandoned. What you have lived by is not lived by here.’

‘The tapes. The reels. The cannisters … ’

‘Don’t you realize? They mean nothing. Your tapes mean absolutely nothing now.’

‘Why are you here?’ I ask. ‘Why are you talking to me then if it means nothing?’

‘Because there is nothing else to do,’ she says. Her face comes closer. ‘Nothing at all to do. You can kiss me if you want,’ she says. ‘I don’t care.’

‘Why should I kiss you? I’ve never kissed you; we huddled in the dark …’

‘I said you can if you want. You don’t have to. There is still love in the cities,’ she says flatly, ‘although of a kind you might never comprehend.’

‘It looked so simple,’ I say. I talk at cross-purposes to her; it is impossible to reach her at any plane of access. Always, I realize, the lumpen were abstractions. I never had any sense of them at all. ‘It was going to be easy and it would have worked for you as well; what I offered you …’

‘Nothing is simple.’

‘It would have worked out. It would have worked so well. All that I needed was for you to learn the lines and not get in each other’s way. Editing could have done the rest. It would have been a brilliant project. There hasn’t been anything on the assassinations in years.’

‘Impossible,’ Lara says. ‘What you wanted, we could never have delivered.’ She sways, stands, moves against the sky. ‘But it doesn’t matter now. I was just supposed to see if you were all right. There’s really nothing to talk about at all, is there?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘there isn’t.’ I reach a hand toward my skull. The metal is still there, small jolts of power seem to slide from the wires as I fondle them. Conversion hysteria or am I socketed? I will never know. ‘You’ll suffer for this you know,’ I say flatly, ‘you’re going to pay a terrible penalty. You’ll never get away …’

‘You don’t see,’ she says sadly, ‘you still don’t see anything at all, do you?’ She nudges me with a toe; I feel the prod in my armpit, vaguely erotic, slivers of intention knifing through me, but I cannot act upon them. I do not have the inclination. ‘But it isn’t your fault.’

‘Nothing is my fault.’

‘Not to blame us, however,’ she says vaguely, ‘not to blame us.’

She leaves. That is to say she dwindles from the line of sight and is gone; there is no clear sense of exit as in a play, the passage of an actor from the stage. She becomes part of the landscape or then again it is the landscape which simply absorbs her.

Lying there on the cool, dead grass of the Battery I find myself suddenly oddly at peace. There is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be done, I have already been through the changes. Then the music overtakes me again and I am gone from there so quickly that before I have even been able to span the realization I am at a different place in another world and everything, as it was ordered, proceeds.

XIV

All that I know is the fear, but at its center is something dreadfully, intolerably reasonable, beckoning me to keep my attention focused on the situation because all that is happening here is very interesting and very complex and will be important to be told when I get back home: people must understand what is going on down here. But I’m never going to get home! Something squeals and for a moment I think it is me, but it is not, it is the one standing beside me, dissolving into the furnace of his terror. ‘Take him,’ the boy says, pointing to me, ‘go on, take him, it was all his idea, I didn’t have a thing to do with it except to come along. I’m not in any organization, I never wanted any part of it at all!’ He babbles on and on in this mode while the police against the walls listen and smile and the one nearest us, the fat one in civilian clothing, takes the boy by the collar and shoves him back against a wall. ‘Fuck you, you son of a bitch,’ he says. It could be a prayer. ‘We don’t have to put up with this at all, you bastard,’ the chief says and I understand this suddenly – there is too much pain in his voice, the chief is not so much taunting as suffering along with us. What we have done to him is so painful that he must inflict the pain back and force is the only means he knows whereas more intellectualized, effete Eastern types such as myself who have learned to kill with gestures and recover with smiles, refused to realize this. ‘Stay against the wall, you son of a bitch,’ the chief says to my now-quivering friend and then closes the ground quickly, facing me down. I try to meet his eyes in a resolute manner, but the police are laughing again, laughing like small boys examining themselves at recess and it is this laughter, the realization that I am going to be killed in the midst of giggling and not even shouts which breaks my control and I bring my hands to my face. I whimper. No use in this, however; the chief seizes my wrists in hands like manacles and brings them down.

‘You come down out of your cities,’ the chief says and strangles on his rhetoric, starts again, ‘you think that you can tell us the way to live, control our lives, but you can’t do it, these are our lives goddammit.’

‘Leave me alone,’ I say. My friend is gasping. ‘I didn’t come here to do anything to your lives, I just wanted to help … ’ The chief hits me. It is a dull punch against the side of the head with fist half-open, more of a cuff than a blow and it sends waves and waves of nausea through me, but this merely overlays a denser feeling. ‘We’ll show you people,’ the chief says, ‘you people are going to learn, whether you like it or not, you’re going to learn that these are our lives and you are going to respect them. This is our territory.’ He hits me again. Like the second jolt of medicine, this one goes down more easily, I brace myself against the wall.

The police are still laughing. Nothing will ever stop that laughter; it is a sound which will go on and on; past the time of the wars, plagues, devastation and riots the laughter will continue. I have heard it not only in this life, but in all of my lives. ‘I want to go home,’ my friend says. He is weeping. ‘All that I want to do is to go home, my God, we were just driving home, don’t you know that? All we wanted to do was to get out of here.’ The weeping blends with the laughter; indeed it is a refraction, an extension of that sound. No difference.

I realize that I am going to die. The knowledge is exceptional; I am only twenty-three years old and death has been a lamentable abstraction. People I know have died and people who knew people I know have died, but it has never been direct. Like oppression or for that matter profound sex, death has always been something that happened to other people, a characterological flaw as it were. Nevertheless, I am definitely going to die somewhere in the swamps of this miserable state for what amounts to the crime of coming into town to talk to Negroes. The chief cuffs me again.

‘This is really ridiculous,’ I hear myself saying, ‘it’s impossible, you just can’t go ahead and do this kind of thing to people. Who do you think we are? There are people who know our whereabouts, people who are concerned … ’ I stop. It really seems quite pointless. Besides, I feel that I understand the chief very well; the curse of empathy is that it is indiscriminate and I can switch myself psychically to his position without difficulty. If I were where he was I would probably kill myself too. Certainly I know that I could kill him.

‘Take them out of here,’ the chief says with a sudden delicacy of gesture, a raising of his index finger as if he were a woman declining another round of fashionable cocktails. ‘I can’t stand the sight of them anymore. Or the smell.’ The police, a gangling, awkward chorus, encircle us. There are three of them and the surprising thing (or perhaps there should be no surprise in this at all because it is so predictable) is that they are probably younger than I am, hulking boys just barely out of their teens who a few years ago were slashing up car tires with knives for recreation. Now they are the force of the law, their role has made them incomparably distant and it is at a high, gray remove that I feel their hands seize me and we are taken from the basement. ‘I don’t ever want to see them again,’ the chief says. ‘Is that understood? I don’t want to see them again in this life or the next.’ And the police groan agreement with this, impelling us through.

Cool, dense southern night, insects in the bushes. My friend is praying now which is nothing to derogate; prayer is an excellent palliative and if I knew the words I might join him, but at best as I can make out certain disjointed phrases and appeals coming from him in a series of shrieks, the prayer is personal rather than general, he is praying for his own safety, his own preservation, I seem to be left out of the pleas and this hurts me. He was supposed to be liberal and unselfish; around the offices up North people had talked about his saintliness. Well, death does not bring out the best in people, I must face this.

‘Dirty sons of bitches,’ one of the police says as we are wedged into the back of a sedan, four of us hip to hip, my friend and I in the center, only the driver in the front. The car starts with a snarl and rockets out of the mud with slippage of the transmission between neutral and low. ‘Dirty sons of bitches, first you send a nigger down here to go to school and after that they send fuckers like you to open up everything. You won’t leave us alone, will you? We’ll send them a message in the capital.’

This is unreasonable. ‘You’ve got this all wrong,’ I say over my friend’s shrieks, thinking that reason may, even at this last extremity, win out; we are, after all, heading away from the chief and this is something. ‘You think it’s some kind of a plot coming out of the capital then, don’t you? But it’s nothing like that at all, we’re here on our own.’

‘Sons of bitches,’ the cop repeats, ‘going to make our lives like your lives except that you’re not. We’re up to it now, we know what you’re doing. This is our country and we’re going to hold onto it.’

‘All right,’ I say, ‘it’s your country. It’s my country, too. Shut up,’ I say to my friend. It is the first thing I have said to him directly since we were dragged into the police station. ‘I can’t stand your whimpering.’

‘It’s all your fault, it’s all his fault, he did it to me. It was his idea … ’

‘Listen to that,’ the driver says, ‘they turn on each other. Where are your liberal instincts now, you Jew sons of bitches?’

But I am still interested in the policeman to my left. He is my contact; somehow I have convinced myself that if I can only break through with him to some level of understanding the situation might be saved. The chief, after all, did not order us killed. Not exactly. He said he never wanted to see us again and that gives the car at least, a small chance of being headed toward the state line. I made a pact with myself; if I can convince this policeman that I am not part of a plot, then the car is definitely heading toward the state line and my friend and I will be kicked out on the roadside and beaten of course, left quivering, but nevertheless left alive. ‘It’s unconnected,’ I say to my left, ‘the one has nothing to do with the other.’

‘Every thing has to do with everything else,’ the policeman says with relaxed certainty. He prods me in the rib cage with a gun butt. ‘All of it ties together. How far are we going?’ he says to the front. ‘Haven’t we gone far enough?’

‘A little farther out.’

‘Maybe we should just drop them,’ the policeman to the far right says quietly. ‘Beat the shit out of them and then drop them.’

‘Yes,’ my friend says, ‘oh yes do that, I deserve to be beaten, I really want to be, him too, just don’t … ’

‘Don’t be a fucking asshole,’ my policeman says, ‘we can’t leave them alive, then we’ll all be in the soup.’

‘It’s not a plot,’ I say, ‘not a plot, just individual strands … ’

‘Oh shut the fuck up,’ my policeman says. The car jolts to a stop, spilling insects and little slashes of light into the darkness. ‘Far enough?’ he says to the front. ‘I thought you were going farther.’

‘Enough,’ the driver says, ‘I’m getting nervous. I don’t like this. Who knows who’s following us?’

‘Out,’ my policeman says, ‘get out of the car.’

‘I don’t like it,’ the one on the far right says, ‘I think we should just beat the shit out of them and leave them here. Who’ll know the difference? No one’s going to listen to them down here anyway.’

‘You chicken-hearted asshole,’ my policeman says, opening the door, ‘we do something like that and we’re all finished. They’ll be on our tail so fast …’

‘We won’t say a thing,’ my friend says eagerly, ‘not to anyone, we’ll just go straight out …’

‘Yeah,’ the driver says wearily, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, sure,’ and ponderously extracts himself from the car. I hear the thick sounds of his boots hitting mud. My policeman yanks me through; on the other side the door opens and the others spill out. I stand clamped by mist in dark mud that pools to my ankles. The driver takes out his pistol and looks at it incuriously.

‘I can’t stand this,’ my friend says, ‘I can’t stand it,’ and turns to run. I try to warn him – too late – the driver raises his pistol and there is a single explosion which sends both of them kicking into the mud. After a time the driver stands, shaking his head, twirling his finger in the open barrel. ‘I warned him,’ he says. ‘The silly bastard should have stayed in New York.’

The three of them turn on me. Even the one guarding my friend has closed off his expression. Confronting them this way, seeing their dark, blunt faces, it occurs to me that the entire confrontation has somehow been self-imposed; it has nothing to do with the terrain, nothing with the night, nothing with the events that brought all of us here, individually. If there were a way for me to show them this – that the world is what we make it; that the hell is self-imposed – there might be a way out of this even now, but no way, no way. They dreamed of killing someone like me before they were born; bile squeezed them out into the world. I wonder what it will be like to die. I do not want to die. ‘I wanted to come to the country,’ I say pointlessly, ‘get out of the city, see the country, move around a bit, understand America,’ and that is when they shoot me. One of them shoots me. I do not know which. A single smash in the temple, nothing else, I fall.

Hitting the mud which sprouts arms and reaches upward to hold me like a lover, I decide that death is not so bad at all and it, at least, is not a mystery. Everything makes sense. Everything comes together. Nothing is confusing when evaluated backward from the point of death.

I think that I hear approving murmurs in the distance.

XV

In the car I think that I sense the presence of the assassin some instants before the bullets hit. Living on the edge of death for so long has increased my apperception; now some blaze of light in the Depository, the sense of a form shifting alerts me and against the cushions I begin to scream. ‘Watch out!’ I say. ‘Something’s up there, someone’s out to get us!’ I will myself into a dive, but before I can move am restrained by the strong, able brown hand of the Governor, looping back an arm from the front. He turns and looks at me, his face stolid, dependable, radiating trust against the Texas afternoon. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he says. ‘Who would shoot you?’

‘Who would shoot me?’ I say. ‘Anyone would shoot me, I’m the President!’ and I struggle against him as if impacted on a pin. My wife gives me strange, quick glances of fear and as the sweat comes out on my forehead I can see that she thinks me to be insane. ‘I tell you,’ I say, ‘they’re all out to get me, every single one of them! I have many enemies! My enemies are everywhere! For God’s sake, duck, he’s going to get you, too!’

‘You know, Jack,’ the Governor says with enormous calm, holding me in his level glance, ‘I think that the international troubles have just made you entirely too tense. You need a long rest.’

‘That’s right,’ his wife says, inclining her head rearwards, chattily, ‘that’s quite right, a nice rest in Texas, some Texas hospitality. You can’t say that the city of Dallas doesn’t love you now, Mr President.’ She smiles deep within herself and returns to her position. I hear the shots.

Nothing, nothing, nothing to be done about it. ‘You stupid bitch!’ I cry. ‘That’s the cue line!’ Here they come, one in the neck and the other in the temple, one if by land and two if by sea, fifty-four, forty or fight, don’t tread on me, the union forever, Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, duty, honor and country, I feel myself collapsing yet again. How much juice is there in me? How much longer can I go on this way? Eventually all of this, I am sure, will have a fatal effect, but they keep on running this as if the resources were infinite. What kind of Director is running this show?

XVI

In the abcess a dreaming-space of America: taking the nightroads out of the city, opening up the car to eighty-five on the straightaways, doging the curves at a cutback to fifty-five, other cars approaching and disappearing like the half-hunks of image skewered in dreams. Nothing else. If we and the other cars meet – explosion, impaction, terrific wrenching and then nothing else, ever; but the cars seem to have no more existence than the speed which I push out of the vehicle, lunging it finally into a straight careening dive from the rise on which we have momentarily looked at America.

Looked at America and now fall to merge with it: Wonder Waffles and Sam’s Superbar, Dick’s Drive-in and Killer’s Cars hitting out their great spokes of light toward the land, the spokes of that great wheel called the land, knifing out the plains and the darkness in their colors, the wheel like a knife in the hands, the old car failing in thrusts of power on those turns, but giving all that it has left: three cylinders, forty-five horsepowers on the open roads. Beside me the girl sits quietly, her hands in her lap, looking from the dashboard to the floormats and then incuriously out of a side window, silent for the moment. (She has no understanding of nor appreciation for speed. I could put the car off the road before she would understand what had happened to her.)

I think momentarily of taking her to the back of Wonder Waffles and quickly lifting her buttocks off the seat, pulling down her pants, accomplishing an insertion and emission which would be little more than a twitch of restlessness in this night, then discard the idea. I could do it. I could do anything with this girl which I wanted for she is slack and stupid, made only for dry accompaniment on trips such as this, and a fuck would have little more meaning to her than a kiss, less, perhaps; I will leave it go. Wonder Waffles, as many of the franchises, has a big parking area in the back, unlighted, suitable for matings of this sort and surely no one would note the difference or even come by to take our order, understanding being the key to the highway life. But I will not do it. I will not take this girl into Wonder Waffles for a fuck or even into Sam’s Superbar for a drink; tonight is the night for speed and I will keep my attention upon the highway, not the rubble aligning it. Perhaps this will be chalked up to my credit. Someone, some notetaker in a franchise system of his own will observe that I have passed up the chance for easy sex and will enter it as a plus against my name; when I become exposed to some disaster later on (like piling this car into a tree) it will be held in my behalf that when I was given the opportunity to use another human being cheaply I did not and from that will spring all salvation. I really do not believe this. I would like to, but it will not hold; it is not credible.

The girl’s face shimmers in the murk, she turns into someone or something else. Surely I did not think that this scene would hold in all stolidity, I should have known that in America all faces change, the actors don different masks; in the repertory theater that is America nothing is quite as it seems but then again everything is exactly as it seems if we can bear the comprehension. The girl becomes Lara, someone who I have known at another time, possibly the future, perhaps the past, a gentle girl the crudity of whose background cannot quite erase all of the sensitivity and light in those eyes. I hold the wheel two-handed, feeling it begin to slip with the sweat from my palms, carefully draw my knees together to protect the groin as I aim it down the highway night. ‘This is really quite foolish you know,’ the girl named Lara says, ‘nothing will come of this.’

‘I know that.’

‘You’re going to be killed, you know. You’re going to be killed in Dallas at 12.30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, and nothing you can or ever will do will change that. It is immutable, frozen.’

‘I won’t discuss that.’

‘And no matter what you do, what your life becomes, you will have to make that moment.’

‘Don’t be fatalistic,’ I say, arching the car into a side lane, suddenly decisive. ‘Nothing has happened until it’s happened.’

‘This has. It always will. Again and again.’

‘Nevertheless,’ I say, pumping the brakes, the car skittering onto an exit path as I bring it to a halt on the outskirts of the huge parking field surrounding Heavenly Hamburgers, ‘that isn’t for some time to come.’

‘Ah, but you must be prepared for it. You must resign yourself now.’

‘I am resigned,’ I say, turning off the lights, ‘I am totally resigned,’ I say, killing the engine. ‘I accept everything that will happen to me,’ I point out, sliding the gearshift lever into P. ‘An event has not occurred until it has occurred,’ I finish confidently and slide across the seat toward her. I extend an arm, feel the cool damp of her shoulder, bring her against me. ‘Meanwhile, we can have a lot of fun.’

She lies against me submissive. ‘Fun has nothing to do with it.’

‘Why not? It has everything to do with it.’

‘If you think this will make any difference,’ she says putting her hands behind her to open the zipper of her dress (and it falls from her easily), ‘you’re quite wrong. Someone is going to come over and take our orders here, you know. You can’t just park.’

‘I’ll take the chance,’ I say, rolling up the window on the driver’s side all the way, checking that otherwise the car is secure, pressing down locks, arranging myself over her on the seat. ‘Actually if we keep ourselves below the level of the windshield they’ll think that we went inside. They won’t know anyone’s in the car at all.’

‘Optimistic,’ she says, putting a finger against my lifts, then raising her arms to lever me down in position, ‘that’s your trouble, you always see the best in situations. It doesn’t work out that way.’

‘What works out?’ I say. ‘What ever works out?’ My genitals seem to be exposed, I feel pressure against her, easily, slickly, there is a union of sorts. She takes me in.

‘You understand,’ she says, ‘that I’m just trying to help you in the best way I can.’

‘Of course you are,’ I say, jiggling against her, ‘and I really appreciate that.’

‘I’m the only one who understands or cares at all because I’m the only one who has freedom of action. The others are just playing their roles.’

‘Of course,’ I say, not understanding exactly what she is talking about though this is perfectly all right with me; she can wander on and babble as much as she wants as long as she continues to let me fuck her in the parking lot of Heavenly Hamburgers. ‘And I appreciate everything you’re doing.’

‘It isn’t easy you know,’ she says, exposing her neck so that I can sink my teeth in gently. I seek her breasts with my hands. ‘After all, it wasn’t my choice.’

‘Yes,’ I say pumping easily, ‘yes, yes.’

‘I wasn’t the one who decided that you were going to be killed on November 22, 1963. The decision was entirely out of my hands. As a matter of fact I don’t even know why you’re going to be killed. It sounds terribly unfair to me.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I am wedged in deeply and despite her distracting conversation, I feel the imminence of orgasm. I am going to come much more quickly than I had thought. I incline my head toward her breasts, begin to suck at them. She looks down at me in an attitude of regality, her eyes distant as if it were someone else’s mouth, someone else’s breasts. ‘Of course it’s unfair, life is unfair.’ Orgasm is close. I am going to come in an instant.

‘If it were up to me,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t have you killed at all; I don’t want to see anyone hurt, I think that people should just be gentle with one another and get along as best as they can. Isn’t there enough death in the world as it is without inventing more?’

‘True,’ I groan, ‘true, but if we invent death then we feel that we can control it,’ and I kick over, orgasm seizing me like a jungle beast attacking, all teeth and claws and I groan, vaulting over her at some enormous height, seeing her dwindle to insignificance below, her body only extraneous now to the feelings that seize and shake me, and as I come, as the heat of orgasm comes upon me like blasts from a furnace I have a sudden appreciation – I see myself, I am in the car, it is November 22, 1963, I am shot, the shots take me in neck and temple, I am hurt, I am dying, I am burning, and for the first time then, coming into her I see my own death, that beast, scrambling away at me, hurting. Hurting. Whimpers like blood ooze from me, I feel my eyes widening, my brain becoming a sore which obsorbs the pain as it plunges deeper, pain overtakes me like a cunt, I see my death, I see the shots, I see the blood and I tumble through levels against her, falling, falling, death bright against me, beating like a bird.

XVII

Some inherit the city through ancestry and others through exile, a few madmen have inhabited the city by choice, but in the end there is no discrimination: all of them are lumpen, all will die. On an October day in 2016 I take myself to the city, passing the checkpoints by conveyor, then making the last five hundred yards the hard way by foot, loaded down with gear. The escorts in the conveyor turn it back rapidly toward the land.

On an October day in 2016 I make my way into the city, stumbling with the weight of scripts, notations, recording devices, directorial tools; all of them are supposed to be portable, but in agglomeration they make a nasty weight, fifty pounds or more, and when I come into the first of the streets I am already panting with the effort. I sink kneeling to take the straps from me and then look upwards, upwards to the slant of sky through the ruined buildings as slowly the lumpen filter from their spaces to greet me.

They are at bay in the city, move freely among its buildings, From what we have been able to ascertain of the lumpen from tentative researches (it is not an area which incites great interest, there are very few experts on their lifestyle, no one returning from exile is permitted to talk about it) they do not have discreet dwelling places, have mapped out no sense of community, but instead tend to take indiscriminately from the city as they move, pause where they are to rest, continue in circles throughout the next day and so on. There is no sense of purpose to their lives; their lives (even those hounded into the city by choice) are only a holding action against the next day and communication between them seems to have broken down since there is so little to say. Every day for the lumpen then is like every other except when the fires rage, the illness abound or a Sweep is conducted from the outer sectors – then they move in terror, but the terror, soon enough, collapses to boredom. No one needs to comprehend their inner lives; those inner lives are merely a refraction of the terrain.

On an October day in 2016 I looked at the lumpen as they emerged from their posts and they looked at me: gentle, beaten creatures we are led to understand, creatures whose every instinct toward malice and destruction has been burned out of them by the Sweeps. I assessed them as they came cautiously to close ground, the nearest of them stopping a full ten yards away, and then took from an inner pocket the electronic megaphone, small as a jewel, and held it against my lips. I explained to them the purposes of my mission.

There are always missionaries in the city; they are permitted through the checkpoints routinely if they have the proper documents and at least a hundred on any given day must be circulating through these areas: some to study the architecture, others to look for the artifacts of the Great Burning of 1988 still in place with their placques, a few to observe such things as social dynamics, a couple of the misguided, inevitably, to try to convert the lumpen. They come from the minor sects although now and then a mystic in apprenticeship will come through to work on the leavings.

I knew then that my appearance was not exceptional and they had seen outsiders before, that outsiders no less than the burnt-out sites were a part of their condition. But there is always – I had been told this by specialists in the Institute, preparing me for the journey after it had been approved – there is always that first moment of hesitancy, that submission to primeval fears that the lumpen are beasts who will swarm over one to devour; it is a fear which must be understood, accepted, worked through, but it lent quaver to my voice as I introduced myself and explained my purposes.

‘And there is remission,’ I said finally, ‘remission for those of you who cooperate, an exit permit from the city and into the projects to the west where a place has been prepared for as many of you as are prepared to return to the living. The Institute will aid in your adjustment, there are counselors to welcome you, but you must be prepared to understand that this remission is for only the very few of you who are willing to assume the risks and to help me with this reenactment. Which of you want to join me? Which of you will come?’

And one of them stepped forward: a woman, Lara, to close the gap to fifty yards and to stand near one of the hulks of metal that had once been cars. This seemed to give impetus to the others and slowly, slowly, some of them came: a small, hopping lumpen who I knew at once would be my Oswald, another older, shaking male who could only be my Kennedy, still another male, this one with curiously penetrating eyes which seemed to look upon what he saw with hatred, this an intelligent one then with great evaluative tendencies who could be my Connally and yes, here from the abcess came many others, first hesitantly, but then in a stream until my volunteer corps, fifty or sixty in number stood in shambling file, looking at me with their curiously restless eyes and grimacing with apology as I surveyed them. Attendants, police, secret service operatives, all of them assembled before me. No less than God, oh indeed, no less than God, I knew that it was good and I was pleased. Pleasure bestirred itself like a small animal in my chest and chewed with little teeth like knives through all the corridors, emerging at last in a burbling and happy grin, a barely controlled outpouring of laughter which I allowed to resound, the first laughter, possibly, that these streets had known in many years. Since the Great Sweep came in to suck them dry over two decades ago, no one had laughed as I did that morning.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am pleased, if all of you will cooperate with me I will see that remission is granted. We are going to restage the assassination, ladies and gentlemen,’ restoring to them not only gender but identity. I could see the pride in their faces as they remembered that they could be men and women again. ‘We are going to restage it right here and it will be like nothing else has ever been for you. I intend to make you famous; right here on these streets I am going to make all of you not only acceptable but celebrated.’ And they smiled and began talking to one another. What a thing to see! What a thing to know! Committee would have been proud of me; I only wished at that moment that Committee had been with me to see how easily, with what joy and tenderness I had restored lives and hope to the lumpen. I felt redeemed, I had a unique sense of importance, awe almost at what I could do, but the power was dusted with humility as well because I knew what abiding trust they, childlike, put in me and I knew that I would be worthy of this trust.

‘Now,’ I said to them, in ringing, declamative tones, with the voice of the Director, one in control and command of his work, ‘now let’s get started.’

And we got started.

But is there anyone who could or would take that morning from me? I have known heat, I have known redemption, I have known what could have been and this was no small accomplishment, no small accomplishment I will say, whatever is done to me by these wolves now.

XVIII

‘Don’t die, Malcolm,’ she said leaning over me in the mosque. I could feel the floor move like water underneath me, could feel the spillage of the blood in pulses. Lights above me reeled, I heard the sirens. ‘You can’t die, Malcolm.’

‘Yes I can,’ I said quietly, not so much to comfort her now as to bring her understanding. ‘I can die and I will. And I must.’

‘You mustn’t die,’ she said, reaching toward me. I felt her hands against my chest and with a last gathering of strength pushed them away. One must, at the end, exit alone. ‘You cannot … ’

‘I want to,’ I said to her quietly, her face near. ‘Don’t you understand that? I want to die, it is the next part of the mission. Unless I die like this none of it makes any sense at all, but now everything comes together …’

‘It’s your life, Malcolm, it’s my life, too, you can’t just throw away lives … ’

‘I want to die. Death is the meaning of life. Death gives life structure and purpose and the manner of a man’s death defines everything he has been.’ It is too close and hot in here for rhetoric; my speech stifles, I cough and emit a thread of blood bright as a scream. ‘Get away from me,’ I said to her, ‘get away and let me die now, I want to die alone.’ And she raised her head, weeping; I saw her move away from me. I did not want to hurt her, but there was no other way in which I could have made my purposes clear. There was no time now for any of that. I felt hands working at me and knew that it was definitely over.

A momentary image of the prison passed by me – I could see the cell clearly, see the gates, see the corridors as they opened before me and then all was gone; with a grunt I was free and speeding toward Saturn or Alpha Centauri at a hundred billion miles a second thinking was this death? If this is death it certainly beats the shit out of all life. And found that it was not and that this was but the first of many unpleasant surprises awaiting me in my own, personal New World Symphony. Prophet in the prison, Daniel of the mosque, what did it ever gain me?

XIX

‘No more victims,’ I am saying, ‘no more victims, enough of this suffering; the history of the cities was not known through the victims but the assailant. Enough of this sentiment, I can take the pain! But this is a lie, I tell you, I can take the pain, but there is far more to this than can be understood through disinterring the victims over and over again.

‘The purpose of my method,’ I continue, not knowing whom I am addressing, but the point seems desperately important to make, I will somehow do the best that I can even if there is no one at all listening, ‘the purpose of my method was not to disclose blood and pain – they meant nothing – we have had blood and pain through the history of the world and in the cities of the 1960s which America gave to us we only had more, but that was not the point. I wanted to make a comment upon the unique quality of those conditions which had nothing at all to do with pain. Isn’t anybody listening to me? If you’re going to seize me and pervert my work, destroy my purposes and take away everything I’ve done, then at least be true to the meaning of what I wanted to say. You’ve got it all wrong, you’ve missed the point … ’

‘We have missed nothing,’ a voice which might be Lara’s says with certainty. I cannot see, whether from the dark, unconsciousness or tapes over the eyes I do not know, but the voice does sound like hers, ‘absolutely nothing at all. You think the victims suffered, do you?’

‘Of course they suffered but …’

‘Then you ought to take a look at the perpetrators,’ the voice says calmly and in various colors the screen of the mind is lit again and I …

XX

Pull the car slowly from the Wonder Waffles lot, admiring the iridescence of the dashboard against the sign flicking through the windshield while the soft, bearlike heave of the air conditioners pumps cool through the compressor at twenty-three pounds per square inch. I ease back on the accelerator of the powerful car as it squeezes off the gravel and begins to fly. ‘On schedule?’ I ask the one beside me although there is no need to ask. Our communication, our sense of timing is that precise.

‘We’ll make it.’

‘Wouldn’t want to be late for this date,’ I say and laugh, dropping a hand to feel the pistol jammed in under my belt, making sure the safety is on: uncock that one, have a little accident and blow your balls off baby! What a mess for Cadillac servicing, they would never get it clean. I burp a wonder waffle, taste syrup. ‘Good,’ I say and reach forward, turn on the radio, hit the signal-seek. Sounds of the South fill the car and I absorb these sounds gratefully; they smooth out the excitement and enable me to merge with them with a sense of purpose. I have always wanted to live a life set to music. In the movies I have most admired and remembered the longest, the characters perform everything against a musical background which gives them definition and dignity; surely I would have no less. I think of myself as a mean, rock guitar, unfurling a thread of sound through the night. Not much traffic on these roads now, a prowl car passes us at ninety, flasher working and I hesitate, slow to fifty, then begin to work up again. ‘Wonder where he’s heading?’ my friend says.

‘Wouldn’t know. Someone spat on the counter maybe in Wonder Waffles. That’ll bring them out.’

‘What if she got wind of it?’ my friend says, tapping the dashboard, ‘and went for a police escort?’

‘She couldn’t get a police escort to jail in this state,’ I say.

‘I don’t know. Just a little nervous.’

‘Don’t be nervous,’ I say, patting the pistol. ‘Nothing to be nervous about. Just a little night-wandering around.’

‘You like this, don’t you?’ he says. His face is oval, featureless in the moonlight; it might be a soundbox asking the questions. ‘You don’t sweat it a bit.’

‘Not much.’

‘I think you like it.’

‘Liking has nothing to do with it,’ I say belching again, a little rancidity now. I must remember for the next time that it is best to be an assassin on an empty stomach. ‘This is just something has to be done.’

‘Don’t quarrel with that. But it’s more than a job for you, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t know about that,’ I say, suddenly irritated with this line of conversation, placing it then at some distance and putting my mind into clear, geometrical patterns of calculation. ‘She’s supposed to be heading south down this road in about fifteen minutes so the thing we’ve got to do now is to find a nice clump of trees to tuck this thing out of sight.’

‘Beats me,’ my friend says, ‘how they can have it down so precise that they know she’ll be passing anywhere in fifteen minutes. What if she doesn’t? What if she goes the other way? What if three other guys decided to get her and put her over into a ditch?’

‘No chance,’ I say, but the last question has discomfited me; indeed what if the mission has been appropriated by others who in their earnest clumsiness and haste might botch it? Everything had been calculated except this – that some interlopers might decide to try the job themselves. The woman had certainly made herself conspicuous enough, the bitch. It would have taken very little for the idea to have been planted in other, less qualified heads. ‘Let’s not talk about that,’ I say hurriedly, finding in the headlights exactly what we need – an abcess tucked between two large trees, exposing a full view of the road but yet hidden from it on the approach; a large car with two men could hardly be seen there. And using the wheel and brake delicately, I bring the car to ground. Gnats and fireflies swim merrily in the headlights, bombarding us with the little, deadly pellets of their bodies. I shut off the motor, knock off the headlights and roll down a window, look alertly back toward the empty highway, then extract the pistol and uncock it gradually, enjoying the weight in my hand. ‘Now we just wait,’ I say.

‘How much longer?’

‘About fifteen,’ I said. ‘Can’t be more than twenty. They’re leading her to the town line at eight o’clock and letting her go.’

‘Thought you said she couldn’t get a police escort to jail around here.’

‘Don’t get smart with me,’ I say. In truth this man is beginning to irritate me; it was necessary that we work as a team, of course: one to handle the car, the other to level off a shot and it is important as well that we make conversation all during and through the act. Conversation is important; without it where would any of us be? Nevertheless I resent his presence, his prodding, the slight, nauseating whisk of his fear which now and then pokes me like a broom and in addition, he has raised a question now with which I am not fully prepared to deal: why are the police into this at all? The whole plan of the exercise was that the authorities would have nothing to do with it. Of course, they are merely collaborating with us, but nevertheless I do not like it, I do not like it at all. Is it possible that we are being set up, the two of us, for apprehension after the act has been committed?

No, this is ridiculous. I turn the ignition to accessory to get the radio again and with the return of the music I am comforted; it surges into me as if planted by hypodermic and I feel the easy, loose, detachment return again. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. I wish I had a bottle; one drink would hardly hurt me and would bring everything into focus. No bottle, however. ‘Everything’s fine.’

‘Everything’s always fine with you. Don’t you understand that this could go wrong? Maybe the whole thing is botched.’

‘Nothing’s botched. Everything’s under control.’

‘That’s easy for you to say. Maybe we don’t really know what’s going on here.’

‘We know,’ I say, ‘we know.’ I turn the volume up higher; it is important to shut off the sound of his panic which is easily communicable. I realize that this situation, most situations, have always been somewhat beyond me and I have managed to deal with them only through faith and luck, but in the quiver of my friend’s voice I can sense some foreshadowing of the collapse which has always awaited me.

‘Shut up,’ I say and play with the pistol, suggestively. He cannot possibly believe that I would shoot him in this car, but the suggestion can be implanted at a subliminal level. ‘Keep quiet, all of this will be over soon.’

‘You think that it’ll really be over? It doesn’t end with the bitch. They’ll swarm all over here.’

‘So what?’

‘So what?’ my friend says. ‘So what? so what’s going to happen to us if the pressure really picks up? They’ll throw us onto them.’

‘Enough,’ I say, taking rapid, shallow breaths in rhythm with the pulse to restore balance. ‘I’ve heard enough now.’ I ease down a power window, crane my head, look down the expanse of highway. Insects battle for possession of the line of sight; I reach out a hand to sweep them through the air, feel matter encrust around me. Damn Alabama. There is a faint sound beyond the hills like a rustle of sheets. ‘I think she’s coming,’ I say.

My friend bunches himself on the seat. ‘How can we be sure?’

‘We can’t be sure,’ I say, ‘we know the car, that’s enough. Here,’ I say and pass him the pistol across the seat, putting it into his hand like a dreadful little secret, clamping down the safety. ‘I’ve got to watch the road.’

‘I’m supposed to shoot her?’

‘Of course,’ I say, ‘I’m the driver, right? How did you think this was going to work, you fool? I can’t drive the car and shoot her.’

‘I don’t want to. You are supposed to.’

‘I wasn’t supposed to,’ I say, starting the engine quietly, still looking out the window, insects nattering into my eyes.

‘I won’t do it.’

‘Yes, you will do it,’ I say as headlights suddenly sweep across the line of sight, momentarily blinding. She is using her brights. I blink my eyes rapidly, turn, drop the car into drive. ‘I’ll pull out when she passes and then come alongside her.’

‘I tell you, I don’t want to do it.’

‘Too late,’ I say, ‘we can’t switch positions now. Besides, I’m a better driver.’ I know that this at least is true. A car storms by us at seventy, tires screaming ahead as a slight curve is taken without deceleration. She must be very frightened. ‘All right,’ I say and move the accelerator gently, ‘this is it.’

‘I don’t like it,’ my friend says, ‘I just don’t like it.’ But I have no time to listen to him now with full concentration upon driving. I must be doing seventy myself before I slow for the curve, then open up to ninety on the straightaway. I see her taillights bobbing. They must be her taillights; we will be in serious difficulty if I have gone after the wrong car. But faith will provide, I have the certainty that this is her car because I was born to kill her. Acceptance floods me, immersing me in a sticky ooze of anticipation which blankets me from my friend; all that exists now are the taillights, the steering wheel, the long tube of roadway leading south to the interstate system. I overtake her. At one hundred miles an hour I pull into the opposing lane of the two-lane road, close the gap to twenty yards, begin to hit the horn to make her scuttle to the side. She does not yield ground but instead increases speed. Momentarily the gap opens. I floor the accelerator and the gap closes. Nothing can beat the Cadillac on a straightaway. After four years, repair and maintenance costs exceed the value of the car, but up until that time they are the best. Simply the best. They make Cadillacs in her home city of Detroit. Detroit has given not only bitches but magnificence to the world. Remember that. Both the best and the worst can come from the great cities, but there is nothing mediocre. If a car should choose to be in this opposing lane, hightailing it for Montgomery we will be dead before I know it, crushed into powder at a combined speed of one hundred and sixty miles an hour, but I have faith. Faith, faith. There will be no car. The roads have been cleared. Nothing left to chance. I am alongside the other car now. It it the make and model described. It is her car. Dimly through the closed window I can see something shaped like a giant beetle, all tentacles and cilia holding the steering wheel, staring blindly through the windshield. Excellent. I have not only run her to ground, but she is not even human. That will move things along nicely. Delicately I use the master switch to roll down the right front window all the way, then return the hand to the wheel, both hands on the wheel now aiming the car down the line with complete concentration and a sense of removal. ‘All right,’ I say to my friend, ‘do it now.’

I think that there will be protests, refusal, am already girded for curses at a hundred miles an hour, but to my surprise he says nothing. A single shaft of light bounces as the pistol, being levelled, gets caught in the convolutions of light and reflects them; then there is a dull sound almost not heard against the noise of the wind through the open window. The beetle quivers in the seat, falls against the windshield and then the car drops from alongside.

I storm away from there, back into the safe lane, seeing headlights weave in the rear-view mirror. I decelerate to see if the car behind will go off the road. But it does not, the beetle must be struggling with the wheel, exerting every force of dying will and discipline and the car holds to course. I slow to forty miles an hour to maintain vision; the car swerves off the road, dives past trees and vanishes. She may be found, then, later. All right. All right. This has nothing to do with us; our responsibilities are ended. Turning the radio to full I allow electric guitars to propel me through the night. Five miles to the interstate cutoff and then I will take the highway home.

At a comfortable fifty miles an hour I turn to see how my friend is taking it. He has done well, I do admit this, given me less trouble than I would have feared and I mean to congratulate, and if necessary even console him, but as I look toward his place on the seat I find that he is not there. The pistol lies in his place hulking crosswise on the vinyl. He is not there. I am alone.

I am alone, my friend is not in the car, the pistol lies spent on the seat. What I meant to say lodges in my throat and I must expectorate it like vomit, heaving and spitting on the floor, strangling with nausea that forces me to cut the car down further yet to twenty-five miles an hour, reeling across the highway in spasms of illness, the radio digging knives of sound into the vitals.

Understanding floors me and I realize who was in the car all of the time. It was not my friend. I have no friend. Alone, always alone.

Blinking my eyes I see the beetle coming up fast and then the car hits gravel. It spins.

XXI

‘Now you see’, Frank says, taking out a handkerchief to wipe his streaming forehead, ‘if you want a real good car for an assassination I’d like to recommend that 1953 Packard Capri down the line there, that’s right, the second car in on that row. That’s a magnificent car and I can give you a very good price on it because that’s a discontinued line and parts aren’t too easy to come by.’ His eyes bulge, he wipes his forehead yet again, balls the handkerchief and stuffs it into a side pocket. Our negotiations seem to have taken somewhat more out of Frank emotionally than he is ready to give, but with the salesman’s willingness he is still in there, still trying to please. We must have been at this for several hours now; my time sense is completely disjointed. I do not know if there has been one continuous negotiation with Frank or whether, after being equally unsuccessful at the Coupe Corner and Killer’s Cars, I returned to Frank with whom, at least, I have established some sort of relationship. Chronology is not vital; it is only results that count, the meaning that can be wrenched from the agglomeration of incidents. Frank licks his lips, looks across the two poles from which merry streamers and ribbons have been hung and up into the iridescence of neon where several bulbs are out. FRANK WO D AMA. ‘I can give you that car over there for three hundred dollars with a thirty-day one hundred percent guarantee on the driveline and engine block. Usually it’s a fifty-fifty guarantee but that’s how much confidence I have in that Capri. It’s a good car and I knew the owner pretty well, a retired guy who used it maybe two, three times a week.’ His eyes become poignant, contemplative. ‘Two hundred and fifty for a quick cash deal,’ he says, ‘just to send you off the lot happy. Recommend me around, that’s the only thing I ask for doing something like this.’

‘I tell you it’s no good,’ I say somewhat petulantly, kicking gravel. ‘It can’t be a Packard. It’s got to be a Continental or a Cadillac, a big luxury car, not necessarily a limousine but at least something high-priced …’

‘Packard’s a high-priced car. That was the biggest luxury car of its time, man owned a Packard, he was a cut above any fool in a Lincoln. General Motors, Ford, they took up almost all the ideas they had for their luxury cars from the original Packard.’ Frank’s voice stumbles, edges into a whine. He seems to be losing his confidence and I cannot say that I blame him, I have lost mine a good long while ago as would any owner-driver of a 1957 Savoy convertible with a stick shift. Also I am beginning to despair of my mission; it was stupid, perhaps, to think that I could pick up a good car for an assassination on Route 46 in New Jersey. Maybe I should have stayed within New York City, visited the Cadillac and Lincoln dealers where it is possible to pick up a late-model, previously owned luxury car in good condition, but their prices are far beyond my budget. Unfortunately the assassination is on a limited scale and any override will be ruthlessly excised when the time comes for final preparations. I thought, at least, that I would have saved money on the car; it would have been rank foolishness to have tried and saved it on the rifle. Only the best rifle with telescopic sight would do, but these run high, quite high. I know almost nothing about rifles, but it seems that such a piece of equipment must cost at least five hundred dollars and I have only two thousand altogether which must also cover the gasoline, the driver, the assassin’s fee and his lunch. Disgraceful of Committee to give me so little margin, but Committee, of course, has his own problems and two thousand dollars was probably the limit of his own scale.

‘Come on,’ Frank says, pointing at the sky, ‘it’s getting – almost dark, got to close up the place and get some dinner. I used to have some help,’ he adds confidentially, ‘so that I could keep the place open twelve hours a day, but it just ‘didn’t pay. There’s too much competition, almost nothing’s the way it used to be. Frankly, the only way I can even carry expenses now is to do all the work myself. I even have to wash these things off myself, do my own maintenance and even then I’m just barely getting along. Come on, son, what’s your decision?’

‘I can’t take a Packard.’

‘It’s a good car.’

‘I know it is. But I can’t take it.’

‘So how about that 1954 Fleetwood?’

‘It’s too old. It’s almost ten years old. No president would be caught riding around in a ten-year-old Fleetwood, even in South America. This kind of thing just isn’t done. It’s a question of national prestige.’

‘For what you’re asking to spend I can’t help you, son,’ Frank says and extracts his handkerchief again. He blows into it at length, moistly, folds it over and crushes it into a hand, putting his hands on hips, staring up at the neon. ‘Son of a bitch bulbs are always blowing on me but what can I do? They cost ten dollars apiece and then they don’t last. I just can’t help you, friend. If it’s a president you say you’re buying this thing for you’re just going to have to spend more money or maybe shop around privately. Maybe you can pick up something out of the newspaper, find a guy who’s in a cash bind.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I say, stricken with an idea. ‘Maybe it doesn’t have to be a Cadillac or a Continental as long as it’s clean and has an open top. After all, who’s going to notice anyway? If you’re having a two-thousand-dollar assassination, you are going to have to cut corners, shouldn’t you think?’

‘I’d think so.’

‘I mean, what do they expect for two thousand dollars?’ I say eagerly. ‘It’s not my fault if things have to be a little shoddy. It’s their fault for giving me such a limited budget and they should understand.’

‘I suppose so,’ Frank says vaguely. ‘You say that the President is going to get shot in this thing?’

‘Something like that,’ I say in a preoccupied way. ‘Listen, do you have a decent Ford or Chevrolet convertible in the place? Clean, with not too much mileage?’

‘Nothing right now. If you’d come in earlier today I might have been able to help you. We switch around you know, if one dealer doesn’t have something maybe another would. But it’s just too late to start calling around now. Son,’ Frank says, ‘I’m very tired. I don’t want to rush you …’

‘You have any convertibles?’

‘Have that ’62 Buick in the back row but that’s going for thirty-five hundred dollars and frankly the brakes aren’t any too damned good. I wouldn’t drive it myself.’

‘So what good are you?’ I ask furiously, control at last breaking. ‘I thought you were supposed to help me …’

‘Tried to help you,’ Frank says, ‘but can’t do anything because you won’t help yourself. It’s not my assassination I’m planning or whatever you call it, it’s yours and you’ve got to take some responsibility.’

‘It’s not fair. I can’t do this all on my own. I’ve had no help all the way along.’

‘Listen,’ Frank says reasonably, going for his cigar again. Having exhausted all variations of the handkerchief, he seizes the butt affectionately, looks at it with wonder before he jams it into his mouth. The man is obviously orally obsessed. ‘I got one idea – take it or leave it – which might help you out of your situation. Now you don’t got to listen if you don’t want to.’ His eyes ooze hope, they become moist and lustrous, he leans closer to me, giving me an intense aroma of cigar-and-handkerchief which causes me to reel. ‘But this might solve your problem. What you should do, I think, is to use the Plymouth convertible for this job you’re working on. It’s an open car just like you’ve been saying you need and the condition could be corrected.’ He looks at my rotting car with careful, stunned used-car dealer’s eyes and says, ‘I could probably get the thing in shape for you for two hundred dollars. Give it a repaint, touch up the chrome, do a little body and fender work. It runs good, don’t it?’

The idea of using the Plymouth has never before occurred to me, but I find it oddly intriguing. ‘No,’ I say after a pause, ‘I just don’t think that it would work out.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s a Plymouth. I told you, we can’t have a president riding in something like that. And the shock absorbers are really gone and the brakes aren’t too hot. No, I don’t think it would work at all.’

‘Then the hell with it,’ Frank says and extracts his cigar butt, flings it into the imminent darkness with an air of finality. ‘I’ve given as much time and help to you as I can. You’ve taken up most of my day, I haven’t made a cent off you, there’s nothing I can offer you that you like and I’ve just about run out of patience. I don’t have any more time, son. In fact,’ Frank says with a sudden change of expression, his face going slack and moist, a hand flung to chest-level as in a Prussian salute, seeming to dissolve so that he appears almost watery in the disappearing sun, ‘in fact, I’m beginning to feel terribly ill. I think I’m having a heart attack. I was warned … ’

‘Don’t have a heart attack,’ I say, backing away from him. Really, I cannot stand illness or death; the grim mission on which I have been launched has increased my morbid horror of all human frailty. ‘Really, you’ve got to snap out of this.’

‘Pills,’ Frank gasps, ‘pills in my office, son, under the checkbook, I keep a vial there.’ His face pulses, blue snakes seem to twist through it. ‘You’ve got to hurry,’ he says, ‘oh my God, you’ve got to hurry.’

I bolt toward the office. Simple mercy, regardless of position after all, would seem to dictate that I assist Frank in this moment of terrible need. But as I sprint up the three concrete steps heading inside I hear a dreadful little flutter behind me, a flutter which has the soft finality of the strangulation rope and as I hesitate, then turn, I see that Frank is lying full-length on the stones, one arm extended like a semaphore, holding his handkerchief, his limbs launched into an awkward posture of flight which can only mean that he is dead. It must be, from his point of view, a fitting end to a disastrous and futile day, but there really is nothing that I could do to change his position. Or could have done.

I walk back to the corpse, nudge it experimentally with a toe, check for visible signs of life, find none, turn away meditating. Neon continues to crackle above on the WO D AMA sign, cars hiss by on the highway. I should go into the office and phone the police of course, failing that I should get into the Plymouth Savoy and get out of there quickly before there are inquiries, but I do neither. Instead, coincidental with the ring of a phone inside the office – the first time I have heard this phone (Frank was not lying, business must have been very bad) – I find myself struck by an idea. The idea makes no apparent sense and should, on the face of it, be instantly dismissed but it extrudes high tension wires which lead me along a path, past the corpse, around the lines of cars and slowly into an area concealed from view behind the shack of Frank’s office.

It is a shallow area, just large enough to conceal a car, not gravelled like the rest of the lot but instead laid out in flat, wide, smooth stones. Arcing upward a hundred feet or more from the stones is a single lamp supported by a huge pole, the light glowing like a jewel and shedding brilliance on what lies underneath it.

What lies underneath, with top rolled down, power windows shining with all force under the light, steering wheel sparkling, gleaming dashboard softly beckoning is a 1963 Lincoln Town Sedan with sliding panel. Inside the keys dangle welcomingly from the ignition.

‘Why the lying son of a bitch,’ I say and get into the beautiful car, take the wheel like a lover, start the engine and glide out of there like a god, ‘I should have known it all the time.’

Never trust a used-car dealer.

XXII

On the Battery. Or in the Battery. Have I really been away from there? The grass is heavy under my head. Lying in the grass, looking upwards, I see for the first time the un-obscured sky through the buildings. The weather has cleared. I have been unconscious of the weather in the city all of the time, being occupied with the climate of lumpen, but even here, it seems, the sun will shine. Little empty clouds which to my damaged consciousness seem to shape themselves into likenesses of various slain presidents drift across the sky and I examine them, squinting. Lincoln, Kennedy, Kennedy. McKinley and Williams. I know the faces from the kinescopes; they would be old friends. In fact they are old friends. I raise one arm weakly in indolent greetings, the presidents roll on like the ship of state itself leaving the unobscured blue.

No one seems to be around me. This is odd; I have been surrounded since I came here; if I was not being surrounded I was standing examination. At no time was I alone (whereas I was always alone in the Institute) but now there is no one around. It is possible that they have all forgotten me? Is it possible that whatever was planned to be done has been accomplished? I do not know. Weakly I test myself for the power of movement and then haul myself, shambling, erect.

Now I can see that through the expanse of the Battery there is no one at all. I seem to occupy the area alone. The building parapets from which my actors were strung have been taken down, all of the cars of the motorcade have vanished, the litter and rubble remains in the shapes which I appointed it, but there is no sense of use. The show, it would seem, has been struck and only I, the Director, am left, Nevertheless, where are they all? Have they forgotten or finished with me already after all those plans which they were supposed to have?

I begin to walk. Considering the strains to which I have been subjected, my gait is surprisingly agile, my body peculiarly unmarred. Tentative fingers poking at the crown fail to disclose any hint of the wires which I felt before. Only the shrivels of scars remain. The body feels liquid, weightless from the period of disuse, but otherwise there appears to be no ill effects. I am what I was before. There has been no change at all. If there is any change (and this is specious to consider) it must be on the inside. But the inside also feels the same. Weariness, an extended revulsion, but the basic attitudes remain.

I come to the edge of the grass and cross a street, move near the building line caught by an image which must have registered at the preconscious and then, flicked away, must register all over again as I see the shape lying crumpled against a wall: it is a man’s body fallen in upon itself like a smashed balloon. I do not know if it is curiosity or a sense of shared predicament which drives me to that body, but I go there quickly, extend an arm, touch the cool, dead shoulder and turn the body slowly so that I can identify it.

I find that it is my Kennedy.

My first impulse comes from revulsion – it is, of course, to flee, but it is instantly subsumed by a deeper, calmer feeling which cloaks me and causes me to crouch by the side of the corpse, carefully inspecting it for signs of external damage. I cannot be afraid of death; no man such as myself who has made death his field of major study, who has worked within its limitations, tried to understand it, tried to use it toward some deeper understanding, no man as this can run from a body simply because it is dead. This would be the rankest hypocrisy, and foolish as well. If my Kennedy is dead it is certainly for a reason; perhaps by ascertaining it I can come closer to some comprehension of my own fate.

I look at the corpse.

I note the death mask of the face, the eyes sunken and turned inward, the faint loft of the cheekbones, the way in which the hairs, untouched by the Battery breezes, lie damply against the forehead. Never so much as in death did this actor look more like Kennedy: my instincts were right, he was the only proper choice for this role. Physically he is correct. The pity was that he could not do line readings.

There are no signs of external damage. Certainly with no blood streaks or entrance marks on the face, no sign of damage below, no indication of assault, cause of death is impossible to ascertain. It might have been a heart attack or stroke I think and this thought launches a wave of illness which makes me momentarily weave on the stones: why if this lumpen can die so inconsequentially then so can I and to what purpose? It was not for this that I planted him in the motorcade. Nausea overcomes me and I think that I may retch, scramble for balance against a building ledge, extract a tissue from my pocket and begin to wipe my face in slow, even strokes like the wiping clean of a blackboard. I turn from the body. It was not supposed to be this way. I did not want them to die. The entire thing was supposed to work as a series of simulations. Is it possible that they took me too seriously? That in their urban simplicity they could have interpreted the project too literally and arranged for the death of Kennedy? Could they possibly be so stupid? Or was death always lurking within this city beast and its approach as casual as the scatter of shot from a rifle?

I will never know. From the buildings, from the shadows, from the empty places on the Battery my actors begin to appear. Like the first time they come from the darkness, here and there emerging in patches of light to stand before me, still wearing the masks of the ritual. Lara emerges last of all and moves in front of them, raises a hand, points a finger. Behind her the others point as well. She looks upon me from a spread of only five yards or so but it could be a terrific distance. I feel small in this confrontation, impaled in position as she opens her mouth and speaks.

‘You did it,’ she says, looking at the dead Kennedy, ‘you did it.’

And the others nod.

XXIII

I know that I am going to die, have known it for a long time; since yesterday the apprehension was taken over quietly and completely, but regardless of one’s metaphysical view of the matter, please remember this gentlemen when the final testimonies are taken – death is always a surprise. Looking at death, dreaming of death, rising to meet it in dreams and speech is one thing, but taking it as a muddy scatter of blood and bone is another. I do not like it. I do not see any future in a movement founded upon the acceptance of death. Please quote this if you will and take the word around because I am no longer in a position to do this.

Coming onto the motel balcony, downtown Memphis, five o’clock, sniffing in the breeze, I must have known that I was going to die. Why else would I have gone out there at that time, gentlemen? I have many enemies, Memphis was filled with enemies; they had crawled and jostled, all part of the committee to follow me from town to town in those years and in Memphis the signs had been clear: the threatening notes, the editorials, a certain clamping meanness in the very air which indicated that here might be the final confrontation. And I gathered strength from my enemies and went on.

What, after all, to do? Flight would have set a poor example, so would hiding: enemies or not, there was a whole movement to sustain, appropriations to be made, financing to be obtained and the movement could only go forward in limps and surges to the degree that I was able to impel it; pull out the socket, someone once said to me, pull out the socket and the electricity starts and you, Martin, are the socket and the wire, the sheer conductor. I am sure he was right; people who address me are always right, this is what I have tried to teach them. That if you believe, it is so. What else to do? There was no way to get out of Memphis and after Chicago I had learned to drag around the little tin can of fears like a dog, banging and clattering, the sound of disgrace always behind me. But Chicago was so bad that it could make anything else seem like a festival; I came into Memphis resigned. When it would happen, it would happen. Take me to the mountaintop. I have nothing against old age; long life is a blessing, but there are more important things. Take me to the mountaintop. I have seen the mountaintop. Believe this or not. They listened. What was the alternative? What else could I have shown them? It was the mountaintop or nothing, the rubble all around or the mountain; I believed that if I could keep them looking up they would not look down or around. How much this may have cost them I do not know.

Out on the balcony I am breathing the Memphis breezes, the city is low around me, there is a murmur from inside the room. Just a moment, just a moment on the balcony and then back again to more conferences, to give more instructions (inspiration is only the grease to keep the movement staggering ahead.) And then there is no apprehension, only a flicker across the way, a confusion of angles and before I have even fallen, I am falling; it is as if death catches me twice, first by intimation and then at the root, the bullet colliding into the temple, turning, flowering inside there, but I have at this last instant betrayed the assassin, am yet again the stronger because I am dead before the bullet hits me; it was not Martin, but the empty body which was hit. And falling then on that balcony into flames and darkness I think I hear the shouting of children, I think that I hear murmurs from the sacristy, the music of those sounds overtaking me and I slide into the unconsciousness I have always sought, free at last. Free at last. Great God Almighty, to be free at last.

They are out there quickly and they huddle around me with dispatch; my staff has always been efficient – this is so much part of the secret, almost anything can be supportable if it is done through the chain of command – and they look down at me with terror, some of them surely seeing their own death in my face. You fools, I want to shout to them, get off the balcony, he may still be at work! But no more, no more, I have come then to that mountaintop and there is much work to be done.

I am pleased. If I had staged this myself (and didn’t I?) I could not have found a more satisfactory way in which to end it and to prove that the work could continue to be done. But the pleasure is momentary; around the edges lurks fear and it is that fear which takes me down, down to the eventual understanding that anyway you take it, death is still death and whatever is made of it, it is always an ending.

XXIV

On the evening of my journey into the city, Committee came to my quarters for the first time in the years of our relationship to give me encouragement and warning. ‘You must not take this too lightly,’ the old man said, sitting quivering in a chair by the window and looking out through the bars to the silent abcess of grounds, ‘you must be aware of the dangers.’

‘I am,’ I said, ‘I am aware,’ pulling out chairs, arranging my room, frantically picking up and dusting, assembling and ordering, shocked by the visit and filled with dread that the disheveled state of my quarters would give Committee the idea that it was a projection or prediction of the disorganized state of my consciousness, that the interior of the mind was as cluttered as the terrain of the room. This would have been utterly false because as everyone should know by this time I am a highly organized person: punctilious and meeting all the requirements needed to be a Director. It is hardly my fault that the lumpen turned upon me in the way they did. I had nothing to do with it at all. They would have done it to anyone. They are savage and mindless, ‘I am certainly aware and will be very careful,’ I concluded, whisking the last dust specks off my desk, seating myself in a chair, facing Committee head on and noting how benevolent and indeed fatherly the old man looked. I was much touched by this because I have never had a father in any true sense. Nor relatives of any sort. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

‘The city is largely unexplored territory,’ Committee said. ‘We have no idea of what has evolved there in the last twenty-five years.’

‘Twenty-three years,’ I said, nodding encouragingly, trying to show Committee that I was alert and interested, no fool I, I knew all of the material, ‘since the Sweep.’

‘Ah yes, of course, since the Sweep,’ Committee said blinking, ‘but let’s not talk about this if we may. There is no point in discussing it. What must be noted is that since the Sweep and the conversion of the city to a closed zone, the implantation of the barricades that is to say, we neither know nor have control of what is going on there.’

‘We had no choice.’

‘Of course we had no choice!’ Committee said, sitting bolt upright and fondling a finger with a spare hand, bringing the finger to his mouth and chewing absently, very childlike in an old man’s adorable way. I had never felt so close to him as at this moment. ‘Whoever said that we had a choice? It was quite inevitable and, platitudes to the contrary, it was either Sweep and seal or see the ruin of the countryside.’

‘Of course.’

‘If it had not been for the Sweep there wouldn’t even be an Institute today let alone a young fool like you or a man like me to direct him. Your project would not exist. Just remember that!’

‘I never criticized the Sweep, sir.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ Committee said, subsiding to vagueness, ‘that’s very good. I’m glad that you didn’t because that would be indefensible. Quite seriously indefensible.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, somewhat appalled by his agitation. I took a quick nervous look at the desk, but all of my secret materials were neatly tucked away in the third and fourth drawers to the bottom, the locks turned discreetly. I had had the fear that his old eyes might have intercepted the materials lying across my desk and even though he would not know exactly what they were – how could he possibly know what they were – some scatological insight would draw him over there; he would begin to prowl through, look at the pictures, note the secret writings, and then, rules of privacy or not, I would be quite done for. But the materials were locked away. I had always been cautious. I had always been supercautious. No one at the Institute, judging from my external behavior, could have any idea of the secret life contained within that desk. No one can tell. I am completely insulated. I betray no hint whatsoever of the inner condition and even if I did, what difference would it make? I am entitled to my habits, even now, and no one will take them from me. ‘Yes, that would be indefensible,’ I went on to say; all of these thoughts passed through in a series of pulse beats, just stabs across the screen of consciousness for I have an extremely quick mind, much quicker than Committee’s or for that matter anyone else’s, ‘but I agree with the principles of the Sweep and anyway, how could I know? I wasn’t even born then.’

‘Yes, of course, you weren’t even born then. But I have one more warning to give besides the fact that we know very little about these lives and you must proceed cautiously from your deductions. You are not to have any of them murdered.’

This gave me an unpleasant jolt, I sprung from the seat and moved quite rapidly to the window. ‘Now why did you think that?’ I said, summoning calm, making the affect bland and soothing as it could be, ‘I never considered it.’

‘We’re aware of what you have in mind, young man, in your project of restaging the assassination. Inevitably it would occur to you to reload the rifles and have at least one of your principals killed.’

‘Well, no. I just wouldn’t. That would be quite dangerous for me,’ I said calmly. I went to the desk, seated myself on it facing Committee, folded my arms and just managed to feel with the calves the drawers holding the secret materials. I drew some warmth from them, some control and conviction. ‘Don’t you think I’d be aware of the dangers?’

‘Not possibly. Not very possibly. You place very little value on the lives of these lumpen and you might think a murder would increase spectacle.’

‘Oh no. It wouldn’t.’

‘It would not indeed. It would be extraordinarily dangerous. Whatever we have achieved, it is a tenuous balance. The lumpen must not, cannot be abused, however. This balance must hold.’

‘I wouldn’t think of a murder,’ I said casually enough, my calves becoming warm from the contact, ‘I wouldn’t even know where you’d get such an idea.’

‘A tenuous balance,’ Committee repeated and shifted in his position on the chair, ‘the essential rigidity of the pact sits upon the understanding that we will not hurt them, that they will not devour us. That was the essential purpose of the Sweep, you know. It was purely defensive in origin; we simply wished to demonstrate to them that they would have to pay a penalty for the invasion of the countryside. The Sweep might have been excessive, there are still debates going on about this I understand, but they need not concern us. These concerns are totally extrinsic. You are a very impulsive young man who does not perhaps investigate things as deeply as you should and this warning is quite necessary.’

‘I wouldn’t think of it,’ I repeated and moved away from the desk, having derived as much comfort as I could from the contact and returned to my chair. I kept my features impassive, implacable, sullen. I have been marked in the Institute, I know, as an impassive, sullen youth; this balance too will hold. ‘The purposes were purely simulative,’ I countered and sat, looking down at the floor, ‘didn’t I make that clear in the prospectus?’

‘We’ve made it clear that we think you have an interesting idea here,’ Committee said, ‘a little bit unbalanced, perhaps, a little bit florid and over-dramatic in its audacity, but then many good ideas are audacious and we can accept this. The tapes could be quite interesting, truly quite interesting. But they must be simultaneous throughout. You are not to have any of these people killed.’

‘I told you I wouldn’t.’

‘Because if there were a little accident,’ Committee said, ‘or perhaps in the hotheaded impetuousness of youth you decided to lend the scheme some, well, veracity by loading the rifles, deciding in your unauthorized way that one or two lumpen more or less would not matter, the consequences could be quite serious. There would be little that the Institute could do to protect you. I could do nothing to protect you. We will not discuss this matter any more.’

‘Very well,’ I said, wondering then how the interview would end. It would hardly be apt to ask Committee to leave my quarters. Beyond that I had lived for, dreamed of the moment when Committee by coming to these quarters would actually honor my existence, move toward the closer relationship I had always felt might flower between us. But then again this discussion was extremely uncomfortable, my own dull fears about going into the city had not been held in check by the interview, the proximity of Committee to the secret materials in my desk (even though they were well-guarded and held permanently from his sight) gave me a bubbling feeling of anxiety so intense that I decided that before I went into the city, I would definitely get rid of them, throw them down a hatchway if I must, mail them to a nonexistent address if possible, but whatever I would not leave them behind in quarters when I left in the morning. ‘Is there anything else?’ I asked, holding my ankles together as if wired by invisible thread, locking them against the barely perceptible shake of my delicate limbs. ‘Can I do anything more for you?’

‘Well,’ Committee said, suddenly an old man again, a useless, querulous old man who had failed at almost everything that he had ever attempted but had been protected by the Institute, the benevolent, kindly Institute that had found work for him as counsel to one such as me – and what a strange, yet comforting way, finally, to see him – ‘well, I guess not, then. Except that you should be very careful. But I said that already, didn’t I? To be careful.’

‘Yes I think you did. You did that already.’

‘So there’s nothing more to be said then, is there?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, almost cheerful, knowing now that the wheel at last had turned and that I was beyond Committee’s protectorate, I had moved into a new series of power relationships because of the simple and irrevocable approval that he had given to my project, ‘nothing that I can think of.’

‘I’ll just go then,’ said Committee and went from my room, shambling out in an old man’s impatient gait to be gone, flicking ashes throughout the disorder with such lack of concern that I could see that there had never been anything to worry about; Committee’s dishevelment was my own, mine was Committee’s. We were more similar than I had ever realized, so intertwined, in fact, that I might look back upon this someday to realize that there had never been a superior/subordinate relationship at all, but instead all the time Committee and I had been equals, virtually the same person at different stages of life. It was an amazing way, really, to look at the old bastard, but things were changing rapidly; there was so much to consider, so much to be done on my last day before the city that there was no time to ponder this now. I speeded Committee on his way, locked the door behind him, double-bolted it and checked the drapes on the viewplates (I have many enemies and there is no telling when they might not decide to sneak yet another look although the viewplates are supposed never to be monitored, existing only for emergencies), dimmed the lights, went to the desk, using the secret grip on the special handles to open the hidden place. Then I seized the materials, went to the bed, lay on the bed in the familiar anvil position, scurried through the materials until I had found exactly what I wanted …

And then took hold of myself and …

Thought of something that might have been an apprehension of Lara who I had yet to meet and so …

Gentlemen, I carried myself through the night. Have any of you done any more?

XXV

Something which Committee had said evokes thoughts of the Sweep; I must have dreamed it repeatedly then or later. I lie in the gravel, looking up at the sky, the incendiaries taking off like birds to the right and left of me, half of the city going up in walls of flame, shrieking forms blackened by these flames, then disappearing in them. Somewhere at the bottom of all this I lie, miraculously or at least accidentally preserved, hearing the roar, alive at least on the night that the city is dying.

From the sky, sounds of the planes, some of them are carrying huge megaphones blaring recorded messages. How they expected us to listen or what difference they might have thought listening would make I do not know, but that is the mind of the countryside for you, take it or leave it (how I wish now I had taken it!) and alone in the city I attend to the messages. YOU MAY EXIT AT THE NORTHWEST BOUNDARIES, the megaphones are saying, AMNESTY AND TREATMENT ARE AVAILABLE TO THOSE WHO WILL GET TO THE BRIDGE; RELIEF STATIONS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED, YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED OF THIS PREVIOUSLY UNDER THE ACT OF 1992; THOSE WHO WISH TO LEAVE MAY DO SO AT THE NORTHWEST. How can they say that notification of this has been given when the incendiaries are in flight? There has been no notification whatsoever, the attack has hit without warning. Now while I lie in the rubble everything comes clear at last – they are out to kill us. They were out to kill us from the beginning. If we had seen, known, comprehended the depths of their passion to kill we would have fled the city a long time ago, but we did not know and it is too late. Tracers hit, their fire surging like banners. The entire area is under attack; if I stay here I am surely going to die. I scramble to my feet. I bow my head. I move my legs and I run.

Running is hopeless too, the entire city is under seige, but at least there is the illusion of activity now to sustain me; in flight there is the momentary feeling that if I were to only continue moving I would at last land at the northwest where there would be safety. Surely the bridge station must be manned by reasonable people, people at least as reasonable as myself. Listen here, I would tell them, this is ridiculous, you can’t destroy a city. You’ve got to save it. Don’t you see this? You’ve got to save the cities. No bridge station, no people. I feel the tracers around me, they imprison me as securely as if I were in a cage. Nothing to be done. I fall on my knees in an enclosed space and come in upon myself like a swaddling child.

There is a woman beside me. Her clothing has turned to rag, her face is blotched with age and pain, she is no more a woman than I a man, simply a creature and to stumble against her means no more than to stumble against a plank of wood on the street. Nevertheless I feel some absent surge of pity which hangs me against her and she falls against me, her mouth open, screaming without sound, great gulps of breath being the only use to which her larynx is put. Her fingers rest on my arm, tighten, she summons will, begins to mount me as if I were a tree. ‘They’re killing us,’ she whispers, her fingernails digging, digging into ruined flesh, ‘they’re going to kill us all.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I know that,’ trying to get away from her, feeling the poison and corruption of this woman working below her surfaces, knowing that the two of us will present twice as engaging a target as either alone, but how can I pull away from her? ‘You must move,’ I say, ‘we must run.’

‘We can’t run. There’s nowhere to run.’

‘Then be quiet.’

‘They’ve turned the war around,’ she says with hysterical solemnity, ‘they can’t fight the war over there anymore so they’ve brought it back here. This is the war, don’t you know that? They’ve brought the war home.’

‘Stop it. Don’t talk.’

‘The war, the war, it’s all around us, they had to bring the machinery somewhere else when they couldn’t fight the war anymore out there so they’ve brought it back and don’t you see, we are the enemy.’ The woman is hysterical. I feel blood surge through openings made by her fingertips. ‘I want to die,’ she says, ‘everybody wants to die, me too, but not like this. Let me die in the free air.’

I fight to get free of her, feel instead waves of thick submission beckoning me under the flesh. Idiot lust like a clown’s nose bobs and prods underneath. We are all going to die in the fire: what is the difference? I might as well die fucking. At the heart of the Sweep in this dream I find myself tearing at the woman’s clothes, they fall away easily, like the buildings which have toppled to expose the streets and it is her breasts which are in my hands. I look upon them, those breasts powdered with a fine, gray dust and before I quite know what I am doing, have bent to work upon them. I suck furiously, trying to draw out the blood and milk of her but instead there is only the taste of gravel and I sob, frustrated, leaning, reaching. I feel her hands like talons on the back of my neck, drawing me in.

‘What’s the difference?’ she is saying, muttering really, talking in a fast, subliminal croak in the small network of silences between the bursts of the tracers. ‘Go on, fuck me, chew me, spit me out and beat me, I don’t give a damn, let it be this way, it’s as good as any other.’ I cannot seem to get inside her. Part of it has to do with the position she is in, crouched, leaning against the wall, her legs spread tailor-fashion so that the only proper entrance would be downward rather than across and she will not fall upon the ground to let me mount her. This has something to do with unyielding matter within her, a gelatinous, stony mass strung like a net across her cunt which I cannot penetrate despite my frightened, battering strokes. ‘What are you doing?’ she says as buildings in the distance begin to weave and totter across the line of sight. They are trying to level the entire city. ‘What are you doing to me?’

‘I’m trying to fuck you.’

‘You can’t do it that way, you fool,’ she says and reels against the wall, puts her palms against the stones and then points her buttocks at me so that they hover like two bleak moons beneath. ‘If you want to get in you’ve got to do it that way. Go on, go on, do it!’

Desire has vanished, her buttocks are thin and marked with fine, small scars, between them I can see lurking the red heart of her emptiness and it is this, perhaps, which I want less than anything; to make an entrance into that ruined sphere as the city collapses around us is more, perhaps, than I can bear but I am committed, it is entirely too late for contemplation of this sort and so I wedge myself into her, beginning slowly to force the motions of generation. Already detumescent, my prick sends a deep whinny of fright which causes me to recoil. I rear above her, but cunningly she has trapped me; deep within her I can neither emerge nor penetrate farther, but only hang in that single gloomy instant of joining. Then with the motions of wreckage bouncing on the jaws of the ocean she at last begins to move, first slowly, then quickly, then slowly again, no rhythm in her jouncing, no sustenance in the drawing in. Against myself I feel the slick engorgement, the ancient fakery of sex and the slow tightening beneath that portends orgasm. Rubble from the buildings falls around us. A hysterical plane swoops too low and splits the sky with a scream, staggers like a bird hit by gunshot, then moves away to plummet to ash in grace and stillness a quarter of a mile away. And still I fuck. Still I fuck her. ‘Go on,’ she is screaming, ‘do it fast, do it slow, do it for the last time!’ And in the midst of the great Sweep I feel at last the gathering, every pore opening, sighing, spilling forth and that is how I spurt within her, not a moving outward but instead a series of implosions, collapsing inward, panels of my own flesh exploding against me as the heavy weaponry begins to move in now. What we have been seeing is, it appears, merely a dusting and preparation for the ground rolls with a series of explosions so fierce that they merge with my declining orgasm until I can no longer tell which is which, explosion or come, devastation or extension and I fall across her whimpering, helpless, still not knowing her name or even her touch as we are now consumed by the center of the fire.

‘We are the enemy,’ she is saying, ‘don’t you understand that? We are the enemy now.’ Who is to tell? who will know the difference? For the first time I reach to hold her, she collapses against me, I hold her and we hover on the ground like a grenade tossed from a lower level; someone removes the pin, the grenade explodes, we are the grenade, we reach out in threads of exploded nerve toward the northwest …

XXVI

Before the breakfast, leaving the room, I say to my wife, ‘I don’t want to go through with this. I have a bad feeling about it. At least if I’ve got to go through with it you ought to come along with me.’

‘No,’ she says, touching her hair, looking in the mirror, making a miniscule adjustment of an eyebrow, ‘I told you I’d meet you later. For the motorcade. I’m tired now and I don’t want to see them for breakfast. Good Lord, how much of them can I stand to see? I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to, but enough is enough.’

‘I tell you,’ I say, pacing at the door, ‘I don’t like it, there’s just something about this I don’t like.’ Unable to fashion rhetoric, I am aware that I sound like a fool. ‘I never liked these people anyway.’

‘That’s your problem,’ my wife says. It is an unhappy thing to admit, but she is very cold in certain ways right to the center of the marriage and things have not been as they should be for many years. Usually I do not think about this at all but sometimes the woman irritates me beyond reason. I am too important and good-looking – I note the latter quickly in the mirror – clearly too good-looking a man to have to put up with this kind of behavior. ‘Anyway,’ she says, pushing back the chair, running hands over her thighs, ‘I’m not coming along and that’s my final statement.’

‘It isn’t fair. Why should I have to go through with this alone?’

‘You were the one who said life wasn’t fair, my friend,’ she says, standing. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ve got a few personal things to do. Why don’t you just run ahead and let me attend to them?’

‘Personal things? What the hell kind of personal things could you have in Dallas, Texas.’

‘Phone calls,’ she says vaguely. ‘People I haven’t spoken to in years live around here. And I want to find out about the children. You never show any interest, you know.’

Another unfair thing to say. It hits me like a dart in the stomach, I feel a wave of sickness. ‘Is this all there is?’ I find myself saying. ‘Is it?’

‘Is what all it is?’

‘This,’ I say, motioning vaguely, hating myself, but nonetheless catching an admiring glimpse of the grace of my taut gesture in the mirror. There is simply no disputing that I am a good-looking, dominating, powerful man. If I had not become president I would have found something equally stimulating to do with myself – become a publisher perhaps or corporation lawyer or even a novelist, something which for a time had interested me. ‘Phone calls to the children. Telling me that you won’t be at the breakfast because you have other things to do. I would think the least … ’

‘I won’t discuss this any more,’ she says and goes to the door. ‘I’m going to take a walk.’

‘You can’t take a walk. The secret service will be on you ten-deep before you’ve gone five feet.’

‘So we’ll all go for a walk. The secret service and myself. What’s the difference? I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me.’

‘You don’t like anything about this,’ I say, ‘do you? You hate it. You can’t stand the idea of being married to the President of the United States. It takes all your little secrets away from you.’

‘You’re ridiculous. You’re a ridiculous, foolish man.’

‘That’s what you think.’

‘I don’t want to argue,’ she says and lifts her head; in that gesture I see a little bit of the girl I might have married years ago, the little interviewer who had come into my office that Tuesday to stun me. ‘If you want to argue you can do it with yourself. Don’t you have to get to that breakfast?’

‘I’m frightened,’ I say, ‘can’t you understand that? Don’t you see it?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘It may be ridiculous, but that doesn’t change things. I’m afraid of this town. I’m afraid of anything here.’

She pauses at the door, places her hands precisely on hips. ‘So what am I supposed to do about it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Just tell me what I’m supposed to do because you’re frightened. You tell that to anyone and they’re going to laugh you know.’

‘I know.’

‘Just get hold of yourself. We’ll be home tomorrow and it will all be behind us.’

‘I want you to come with me,’ I say, ‘I want you to sit next to me. I don’t want to be alone today, don’t you see that?’ I say harshly. ‘I can’t stand to be alone.’

‘You’re not alone. Everybody’s going to be with you. You haven’t been alone since the hospital. That’s one of your problems, you don’t know what it’s like to be alone.’

‘I’m alone without you,’ I say.

‘That’s the most ridiculous, childish, adolescent, romantic, stupid babble I’ve ever heard in my entire life,’ she says and adjusts her clothing abruptly, smooths herself, opens the door and steps through. Only when she has crossed the line does she look back, secure with the knowledge that the hall is open to her. I see a secret serviceman’s head bob into view, looking at me incuriously. ‘You just go on your way and have a good time now,’ she says in her public voice, ‘and don’t worry about anything and I’ll be seeing you soon. I’ll be with you at the motorcade.’

‘You should be with me now.’

‘At the motorcade,’ she says, her voice flat, having taken on the tones of positive righteousness. She is gone, leaving me alone in that room. Slowly I work my breathing and concentration levels to normal and then I walk out of there to attend the breakfast.

Maybe I can get through it quickly and with minimum loss of dignity. After that it will be only the motorcade and lunch and I will be able to get out of there. In the motorcade, at least. I will have a chance to be with myself for a while and pull all the pieces of this menacing and confusing city together in my mind.

XXVII

‘Come on,’ I say to Oswald when I give the notes to the actors, more worried about him than any of the others, aware that because of his relative sensitivity he is having trouble in coming to terms with the role, ‘it’s not that bad. You don’t have to let it upset you so.’ It is the end of the second run-through; blocking assignments have been established and now I am beginning to look for interpretive nuances, but they cannot inflect. Only a day into the preparations it is already becoming apparent that the project may be a disaster; Oswald’s resistance is only one of many possible points of attack. ‘Look here,’ I say, ‘it’s barely a speaking role. You don’t have to worry about lines at all, all you’ve got to do is stay in position and not get in anyone’s way.’

‘I know that,’ Oswald says, wiping his nose with the back of a cuff, ‘but I can’t seem to do it. I don’t understand this. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do and I don’t even know if I like it. I want to cooperate and I want to get out of the city as much as anyone else but if I don’t understand … ’

Seated on the ground the others murmur. Oswald has somehow managed to phrase what disturbs all of them: they have no conception whatsoever of what is going on. In fact, it is possible that none of them know anything about the assassination; most of the lumpen can read and write of course, but their access to texts is nil, their concept of the past amorphous. The ‘past’ to the lumpen, some theories hold, stretches from one minute to ten years ago; they have no real conception of chronology, living as they must in the present.

That means that I may have made a mistake in my notes in trying to explain to them the inner motivations and back-ground of the reenactment and I would curse myself for my stupidity if I could get away with it in such public circumstances. ‘Never mind,’ I say to Oswald, ‘it’s nothing that you have to understand. All that you have to do is do it, go through the assignments I’ve given.’

‘Why am I supposed to kill him?’

‘Because it is necessary. It happened that way.’

‘But we do not kill here,’ Oswald says, his eyes luminous, ‘we have never killed.’

‘It’s a play. You’re not really killing him.’

‘I feel like you want me to kill him,’ Oswald says bleakly and looks to the ground. The others murmur again. ‘I just don’t know what you want me to do,’ Oswald says.

Hopeless. Only the second run-through and I can see that it is quite hopeless; nevertheless I must continue and if I cannot extract the promised tapes from this, well, then, where will I be? There is no question about what I suddenly realize – neurotic impulsion has driven me to this project, neurotic impulsion has taken me thus far. Without dread, anxiety, nervous energy I would never have come here. But these qualities are hardly those which would lend Directorial credence; the lumpen have enough dread and anxiety of their own. More than enough. ‘Maybe it would help,’ Oswald says ponderously, fondling his rifle stock, ‘help a little anyway if you could explain to us. Why is he supposed to be killed?’ He points to Kennedy, then sweeps his hand to Connally who beams as if delighted to be recognized. ‘And he not. And she not?’ He points to Lara. ‘I just don’t understand this.’

‘It’s not necessary to explain motivations,’ I say quickly. ‘It would only become highly confusing. We don’t have enough time to penetrate the material.’

‘If I can’t understand then I can’t do it,’ Oswald says petulantly and looks to the ground. The others begin to talk to one another. ‘I think,’ Lara says, ‘that you should explain more to us than you have. He’s right, how can we do this if we don’t know what’s going on?’

‘He’s right, he’s right,’ they murmur and wearily I unfurl myself, wearily I stand. ‘It happened a long time ago,’ I say. ‘Kennedy was the President of the United States in 1963. He went on a political trip to Dallas, Texas and was assassinated there,’

‘Which Kennedy was that?’ Oswald says ingenuously.

‘The one that was President,’ I say. ‘See, I told you, there’s no time to get into details. Later on, if you’re really interested in this we’ll be in the countryside, you can do some independent reading, you can study …’

‘I don’t want to study,’ Oswald says, ‘I want to know about this now. Did he go to this Dallas knowing that he was going to be killed?’ He risks a smile, the first Oswald smile, how strange and perilous it sits on his face! ‘Just to help me in the role,’ he says.

‘There are theories about that,’ I say, ‘many conflicting theories; it is suggested by some that he did know that Dallas was dangerous and was aware of the risks in going there, but assumed those risks willingly because he felt that the only way in which the country of his time would be saved from civil war would be to undertake the role of tragic martyr. This theory is contraindicated by most scholars, but there is a fringe which holds onto it as a means of demonstrating that Kennedy functioned from altruistic purposes and saw himself as deliberately sacrificial. There is another branch of thinking in this field which holds that he knew he was going to die in Dallas and went there because he wanted to die. This was no altruism at all you understand, having nothing to do with saving the country, but meant simply that he was of an apersonality-set which had always sought death and indeed of a type which only feels itself alive if constantly menaced. And then there is another more accepted and even agreed-upon theory that he knew little of the political climate in Dallas at this time and did not care, that he felt himself so insulated and protected by the powers of his office that he could go anywhere safely. American presidents of this time tended to think of themselves as kings. It is very hard to say,’ I say, sweating lightly, wiping the moist forehead with the most delicate and perilous of fingers. ‘There are so many conflicts, so little agreed-upon opinion. The standards of scholarship, in fact, have become so relatively relaxed since the time of the Sweep … ’ and then stop myself, hesitant, embarrassed. I should not have mentioned the Sweep in this company. My cast looks at one another, then returns their solemn gaze to me. ‘I don’t think that he wanted to die,’ Oswald says after a pause, looking at his shoes. ‘If he wanted to die, you would have him looking up at me from the car, he would anticipate the rifle shot. Isn’t that so? But instead you want him to be looking down. You’ve been very specific on that point.’

‘Well, yes,’ I say, blinking, ‘that’s true, but I want to make clear that this is one interpretation, my interpretation, it doesn’t have to be the final assessment.’ Panic dances within me like an athlete on wire. Is it possible that I have come into this reenactment with prejudice, that all along I was going to use them merely to demonstrate my own ideas? If so this would be inexcusable, it had never occurred to me that I would be that way: I am a scholar, detached. I wanted to let the truth emerge, not work from a presupposition of truth. ‘Let’s not talk about this any more,’ I say abruptly, ‘get back to your places. No more notes. We’ll try another run-through.’

‘But this is interesting,’ Connally says, standing, his amiable face dwindling, cold. ‘Are you using us then to prove some kind of theory?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Then why won’t you answer the question?’

‘What question? What are you talking about?’

‘The question of why he doesn’t look at the rifle,’ Lara says.

‘It isn’t important. It doesn’t matter …’

‘You’re using us,’ Lara says, ‘you’re using us to prove some kind of theory. You don’t think that he came there to be killed and you’re trying to make everyone feel the same way.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I say. I feel weightless, floating on high ground. ‘That’s absolutely preposterous. You have no right to say that at all.’

‘Yes we do.’

‘Yes we do,’ Connally says. ‘We have a right to say anything we want to say.’

‘Absolutely,’ agrees Oswald. He becomes interested in his rifle. ‘You know,’ he says quietly, ‘we’ve put up with just about as much of this as we’re going to take. We’re tired of being used.’

‘And abused,’ says Kennedy.

‘You should consider our position,’ says Mrs Connally.

‘Our position is very important,’ Connally points out. ‘This is our territory. We’re entitled to be treated with respect.’

‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about!’

‘Don’t you?’ says Oswald, pointing the rifle at me. ‘Don’t you now?’

‘Stop it! Stop it!’

‘Why should we stop?’ Lara says. ‘You wouldn’t.’

‘This is ridiculous …’

‘Is it?’ says Kennedy. All of them are standing now in frieze behind him. ‘Is anything ridiculous unless you make it so?’

‘That’s an important point,’ says Kennedy. ‘You should take it into account.’

They move toward me. Panicked, I slip trying to run, fall to my knees. ‘Stop it!’ I say again. ‘This is ridiculous! You are fools! Don’t you know who I am?’

‘All too well,’ says Lara as they close in upon me. ‘All too well,’ she adds sadly. And then they conceal the sky. The scene ends or at least I see no more, sense no more, am driven inside once again.

Was that the way it happened? That is another way, certainly, of looking at the problem.

XXVIII

Opening up the Lincoln Town Sedan all the way, I am able finally to break the car free, first on 46 in New Jersey, sullen and cold in the evening hour, clumps of trucks buffeting even this huge car like a puppy, then on the access lanes to the Jersey Turnpike, where only one car can pass at a time, I cut to twenty. A severe shake in the steering on the bumps can only indicate loose tie rods. Finally at the toll booth there is an agonizing wait to pick up the ticket and be fed into the mouth of the highway, but now at last on the Turnpike itself, driving clear South, I open the car to the top of its range.

Ninety, ninety-five, ninety-eight. At a hundred even the needle rocks, spins, collapses to the bottom and from then I must do it on speed and instinct alone, forcing the car past the top of its range until even the wind noise through the open spaces is overcome by the stuttering of the motor. Some intricate failure occurs at the heart of the machine, trucks are beginning to come up again and in panic I come off the accelerator, duck the car into the slow lane, finding recovery in heart and needle at sixty-five, the Town Sedan sounding true again at its effective top range. I will have to drive all night and through the next day as well in order to make Dallas by the appointed hour and even then there is no saying if the car will be acceptable, if everything will be in order there, if the President will approve of the faded upholstery, the small incisions against the leather through which the stomach of the car gapes, the streaks on the dashboard and war on the brake pedal which can only be the sign of brief but frantic abuse. Nevertheless, I must try. I must try to make Dallas, it is the only hope; no saying that success awaits me at the end of this, but America is journey, America is struggle, and I will give it everything that I have, Already I am tired. I reach inside a jacket pocket, take out a vial containing caffeine capsules and put two into my mouth, chew vigorously, absorbing a short, smooth burst of energy. The heart will pay for this, the ruination of the blood, but I am young yet and it will be many years until the penalty will have to be faced and who knows if the nation itself can endure those years? Who knows if there will be a nation left?

Rocking the car through the turnpike at sixty-five, one hand on the radio to tune in and out, America flooding the dial as I turn it east to west, listening for some voice that will pin me in the seat. Wonder Waffles, Smart Cars, news and blues comes from the rear speaker, a pure, fine dismal tenor singing cowboy songs, a panel discussion on the true objectives of the moon flight, but there is nothing to absorb. News and views and blues collide against one another like racketing cars in a speedway; at 1535 kilocycles I find a sound which converts itself momentarily into assurance, the voice of an announcer describing how the entrance of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi in 1962 was brilliantly, skillfully stage-managed by the administration to be accomplished with the least amount of bloodshed and violence. The entrance was stage-managed. The police were stage-managed. The rifle shots and grenades and riots were stage-managed. Meredith’s first class was managed. The Attorney General and the head of the Federal Bureau of investigation were in constant contact with one another and all moves were planned before they were executed. Then analyzed. Then the analysis was fed back for further activity. James Meredith is now alive and doing well at the University of Mississippi, thanks to the activities of the administration. Management is the key to achievement, public relations the gateway to success. The announcer sings a little song or perhaps it is not the announcer but someone who sounds much like him, the segue is quick, someone is pinging about Wonder Waffles baked three ways for goodness and I am looking for some goodness myself in the Lincoln Town Sedan so it is heartening to realize that my quest is not individual but universal; after Wonder Waffles the announcer – apparently this is some kind of panel on the social sciences – interviews various people for their opinions on the University of Mississippi and more or less they concur, with one another and then with the announcer. I listen attentively, hoping that if I stay with the radio throughout the night I may learn something useful such as how the Attorney General and the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation might get together on remote units to manage my own life, keep in continued consultation with one another, that is, to solve the Lincoln Town Sedan problem, but disappointingly the announcer brings the program to a conclusion and says that sports will follow. All of this time I have been driving through the night, but now the pressure on the bladder becomes intense and I realize that I will have to find a rest-stop or stain the Town Sedan.

This would depreciate it further.

At Exit 7, Camden, there is a sign denoting that the next service area is fifteen miles up, fourteen minutes and twelve seconds that is by my calculations. The Charms and the Grenades are going at it head and head, toe by toe, at 1535 kilocycles in a battle for undisputed semipossession of third and fourth places in the northwestern deep central division. The Charms pull off to a quick lead aided by stirring efforts in the net and hoop by Reese and Stellar, but the Grenades, showing that grit and dedication which has characterized them in their drive from the cellar to undisputed fourth challenger’s position come right back on two buckets and a hit by Jerome Christmas, their bonus rookie. Christmas is all over the floor in this battle; before we have quite known what has happened he has brought the Grenades to a near-tie, but just as the Charms are back on the slash counterattack, 1535 kilocycles fades out and I am left holding a damp steering wheel. Service area. I dive the car crosswise to the windows and stagger out clutching myself like a priest carrying some enormous and sacred burden to the altar. I go through the clouded entrance and into a cavernous room in which one by one or in pairs men stand behind or between urinals, meditating. I join the confessional line, unleash myself, pour my body and blood with a splatter into the urinal and then stroll away casually without washing into the dining area, looking for a name brand. I settle for Wonder Waffles, coffee on the side. This country is going to blow up. The waffles go down quickly massing agglutonously somewhere in the left-center of the stomach. And twelve precious minutes already behind schedule, nearer curfew time, I return to the car, fling open the door and insert myself. The bladder jiggles merrily against the anal sphincter inciting a spasm of colitis. Should I have gone the other way, too? Now I will never know, just clamp the buttocks together and keep on driving. I will need a full tank of premium before we hit the Turnpike, however. Forty-two and nine-tenths of a cent per gallon.

This country is going to blow up. Back on the highway again, to seventy-five to make up the lost time, hoping that the car will hold it. 1535 kilocycles wavers in and out of range. The Charms have held back the charge of the Grenades and are now absolutely killing them nine point two to seven-tenths with only seconds remaining in the middle percentile. Two quick buckets for Christmas however, revive hope; now the Grenades are storming again, but the percentile ends and so does 1535 kilocycles, fading out of the car and my life forever, never to be recovered. What happened to the Charms? What happened to Jerome Christmas? An image of brains exploding rosily is suddenly framed in the halo of consciousness; I see the moist, pulped spatter as someone’s skull explodes and wonder if this is a happy premonition of the fact that I will make Dallas on time and the president will accept the car after all. Rain begins. I turn on the wipers, they move reluctantly, turn the road ahead to foam; panels of whiteness lurching against the windshield. But I do not cease neither do I desist: I drive on. The dismembered brains surge and chatter against the gleaming upholstery as I bring the radio through and around the fullness of its range, seeking something else in the darkness that will yank me through the night. The Delaware Memorial Bridge thirty miles ahead. Twenty miles ahead. Fifteen miles ahead. This country is going to blow up.

Paying the toll at exit one, four dollars and thirty-five cents, I resist an impulse to leap from the car and seize the attendant, begin to talk earnestly. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ I want to say to the attendant, ‘you’re the only human presence I’ve seen in two hundred miles not counting the service area which really doesn’t exist, you’ve got to give me some assistance, some contact, some sense of reality, it is impossible to drive these roads alone.’ But what would the attendant say? How could I make this clear to the gray old man without seeming insane? No, better to roll up the window and drive on, teeth chattering against the cold. The heater of the Town Sedan does not work properly, another strike against Frank’s Wonderama, home of fine used cars, American and foreign. At the price I obtained it from the deceased Frank, however, I should not complain. Wipers on high as the air of the new South blows vagrant snow-flakes against the windshield; the flakes become drizzle, diminish, go away. Straight south now on the Shirley Highway, the Baltimore-Chesapeake Bridge, the interstate coming up fast. Cut southwest out of Washington. I will be in the South by daybreak. If I stay hard on the accelerator now and keep clamp on the bowels and kidneys I may be in Dallas by the close of business tomorrow. Time. Time enough. Surely I cannot fail if I remain at the wheel unsleeping, the last alert presence left in the heartland. The radio, squealing away for miles, collapses with a moan. Good enough. I need no voices now, locked deep into my mission. I am purely of myself, myself and the Town Sedan, cleaving our way down the empty turnpikes. After ten on a Tuesday night, no traffic, no presences. Not even a toll booth attendant. At last, at last I am on my own. This country is going to blow up.

This country is going to blow up. Something opens in my mind like curtains parting, I see the fires, hear the sounds of shooting, the still, doomed sense of panic rising and in this vision I see not only the death of my country but my own as well, the two intermingled; it must have always been this way because driving the interstate I am the country, the country is me, linked together forever. The country is going to die, for too long things have been too close together: misdirected energy, waste, ambiguity, loss, rage. Now at last a knife is going to be drawn limb by limb, north through south, east by west through the corpus and in the bed the patient is going to erupt in clouds of blood and steam. Thrashing, clutching, groaning on the bed this patient, the country is going to die; it has been willed for a long time, now at last it is going to happen. I am going to help it die. I could not be more culpable if I had willed the destruction myself. I am bringing the Lincoln Town Sedan to Dallas.

Bringing the sedan to Dallas; in this car the President (if he approves) will sit to receive the bullets; the bullets will impact, neck and temple, and in that hit the country will begin to die. From those entrance wounds will boil the blood of the nation and it will run free and ragged through the corpus and then through the room, all the rooms, the buildings, streets, cities and at last the country will sink underneath these rivers of blood. I see it clearly; this will all be accomplished, spreading like fires from the impact of the assassination and there is no way that it can be prevented, this country is going to blow up, no way that it could be saved then, no way that it should be saved and if I can only accomplish the assassination everything will follow easily and naturally. But that one obligation hovers over me. I must get the car to Dallas. I must get the President into it and the shots must be fired. For if I do not, if I fail in this all-important task, then what is meant to happen will not and the failure of the country to die will be my responsibility. It needs dying, it has needed it for a long time, now the pact is written clear, but everything (as I always knew it would) depends upon me and I hope that I am equal to the great obligation that has been invested upon me.

The radio comes back on me suddenly, like a shotgun. The Charms have, after all, held on to defeat the Grenades, but three of the starting set have been eliminated from future competition because of injuries or disqualification. James Meredith’s social activity at the University of Mississippi is treated as a sidebar story in the late-night wrap-up. Conditions in Germany remain tight. At last the voices fade and all that is left is the music, the ringing and banging of the music flooding the car through the speakers fore and aft and it is the music, only the music and my great premonition then which holds to carry me through the night. And straight through the morning, straight as a knife, toward the clean and open streets of Dallas.

XXIX

I feel Lara’s arms around me, her body comes tight, the smooth, open surfaces of her body roll against me and I effectuate entrance. Orgasm is instantaneous followed by a sensation of falling and still I am gripped within her embrace. Her lips go against my ear. ‘Do you understand now?’ she says, gripping her thighs. ‘Do you at last?’

‘I understand nothing.’

‘It was all your own fault. That is all we want you to understand.’

‘Put me back in the cell,’ I say, ‘put me back there and leave me until I become a skeleton, but don’t talk to me of fault. You know nothing of fault.’

‘It was you all along.’

‘It is 2016,’ I say to her. We are in darkness, I cannot see her face, it is, in fact, unclear where we are although I suspect that we are huddled on the floor of one of the ruined, blasted cars of the motorcade. ‘It is fifty-three years later. I cannot be blamed for anything. I was not even born then.’

‘You were always there.’

‘I could have been,’ I say. Her teeth meet in my earlobe, I jerk. ‘I was born in 1993, the year of the Sweep.’

‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘the year of the Sweep.’ I feel myself being drawn in again and unwillingly I respond. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

‘It means nothing to me.’

‘Then you’re not thinking,’ she murmurs, ‘not thinking.’ The pressure mounts, it is intense: the woman is trying to draw me through. The body cheated again, feels the murky fluids of orgasm pooling somewhere within. I rock upon her tumescent again, after a while I come and to come this time is like an awakening. I am poised above her on palms, looking at streaks of the sky and it is as if I vault to a new level of understanding. Probably not, however. I no longer reckon on understanding. ‘This has got to stop you know,’ she says, gathering herself underneath to toss me off, ‘it can’t go on.’

‘I didn’t start it.’

‘Yes you did,’ she says, ‘everything was all right until you came here. We had our lives and they had meaning. But you destroyed everything.’

‘How can there be meaning in the city?’

‘How can there be meaning without?’ she says and adds, ‘you know the countryside is going to die.’

‘You said that.’

‘You came here and ruined everything for us,’ she says without passion, smoothing her hair, ‘can’t you see that?’

‘I see nothing,’ I say and it is true. I glance down from the sky; whatever understanding I had fades. ‘Nothing at all.’

She gathers herself, bunches away, huddles in close. Yes, we are in one of the old cars, I can see the glint of faded leather, the heart of the car oozing forth. ‘And now it’s too late,’ she says, ‘entirely too late. It could have gone on this way for a long time but now it’s over because you wrecked it.’

‘Take it up with Committee.’

‘Committee?’ she says and laughs. ‘What do you mean, Committee, are you such a fool, are you still so ignorant? There’s no Committee. It never had anything to do with Committee. It’s only been you all along.’

I put a hand to my temple and feel the rising scar, half-healed to the touch, the edges opening slightly like a fly’s wings against my fingers.

XXX

At Dealey Plaza everything opens to me like a flood and there is suddenly no mystery. ‘Stop the car!’ I say to the driver, screaming through the panels. ‘Stop the car now! Turn around!’

My wife takes my hand and forces it back to the seat. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ she says.

‘I’m going to be killed. I’m going to be killed less than a mile up ahead. It’s all been planned, don’t you know that? I’m dead if the car moves on!’

‘Don’t worry,’ my wife says to the shaken Connallys, leaning forward imperceptibly, ‘there’s nothing wrong.’

‘Everything’s wrong!’ I say. I can feel a moistening in the skull, a flowering, an anticipation of impact. ‘I said stop the car!’

‘You’re having an attack of nerves,’ my wife says soothingly. ‘Just keep driving,’ she says to the front, ‘keep this car moving. A simple attack of nerves,’ she says, ‘tension, worry. Everything will be fine. We’ll go back to the hotel and everything will be fine.’ She licks her lips, her eyes brighten. ‘You can’t have the car stopped now, what will people say?’

The Connallys have subsided to their seats, I look at my wife entranced. ‘You too,’ I say, ‘you’re part of the whole thing. The whole thing, the whole thing, it’s all a plot and you’re in it.’

‘You’re crazy, Jack.’

‘You’ve been part of it from the beginning. I should have seen it. Listen here,’ I say, ‘I tell you, I’m not going to be a sitting duck in this operation. I’m going to save myself whether you like it or not.’ But I find myself peculiarly unable to move from the seat. Something seems to be holding me in place, something no more complex perhaps than a basic disinclination to move. Why bother? What is the difference, what can I do? If they have engineered me so deeply into their cunning plot, I would hardly be able to unseat myself by this time. Not only the air but the car would be full of assassins. ‘All right,’ I say, bemused by this, ‘let it be then. But you’ll pay for it.’

‘You’ve got to get some help, Jack. You can’t go on this way.’

‘You think if you shoot me you’ll get rid of your problems, but you mark my words, the troubles are just beginning. The whole country will fall apart.’

‘No it won’t,’ Connally says genially, giving me a wink as he half-turns to posture over the seat, ‘the country will get along just fine. Don’t you think so?’ he says to his wife. She shrugs in an abstracted way. ‘Never mind her,’ Connally says, ‘you know the way women are. This country is going to get along just fine. It’s going to let a lot of poisons out into the open Texas air, that’s what it’s going to do, son, and make no mistake about it.’ He rubs my knee reassuringly. ‘Now you just don’t worry about a thing,’ he says, ‘just recollect that whatever is going to happen is all for the best and fifty-three years from now, no one will know the difference anyway. What’s fifty-three years in the lifetime of a civilization? Just a twinkling, lad, just a twinkling.’ He hunches his shoulders expectantly, turns around, bends over to rub his own kneecap. ‘Still,’ I think I hear him mumbling, ‘still I wish to hell that it could be done without getting me involved in it.’

The car continues to roll and I settle back against the seat. Nothing to be done about it. My wife caresses the roses on the seat between us, then leans into her own corner of the car. Her eyes are lusterless, vague, she seems to be listening for something in the distance. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘have it your way. But it won’t do you any good at all.’

‘Quiet Jack,’ she says as if to a child. ‘Don’t talk any more. Just wave.’

‘It won’t change a thing.’

‘Wave to the crowds. Don’t you see the crowds? You’re down here to make friends, Jack, you really ought to wave.’

‘As a matter of fact, I think things are going to get much worse.’

‘Oh do you now, really?’ she says plucking at the roses. ‘Well, that’s very interesting. Come on, Jack, look at people. Smile. I am. I’m just doing this for you, you know. You could at least take an interest.’

‘Much worse,’ I say, ‘much worse.’ I look at the roses. I had never noticed before that they seem to have been painted over; speckles of white and black protrude where the brushes seem to have missed. Interesting. Of course this is a very synthetic environment altogether. ‘You’ve just taken the wrong line on this.’

‘There’s the Depository, Jack. You could at least look up now. Look, there are a lot of people out on the grass there. They’d like to see your face.’

‘No they wouldn’t.’

‘Of course they would. Look, they’re jumping up and down. Mothers are holding children. And there’s a man with a camera taking pictures.’

‘I don’t care,’ I say, ‘I just don’t care.’ Unquestionably I am becoming sullen. Outrage should possess me, but I am unable to generate much emotion. ‘I don’t have to look up if I don’t want to.’

‘They love you, Jack.’

‘No they don’t.’

‘Of course they do,’ Mrs Connally says brightly from the front as her husband seems to dive below seat-level. ‘What a thing to say! You can’t say that the city of Dallas doesn’t love you now, Mr President.’

First impact. Scattering of skin. Truly I am becoming bored with this but the pain is always the same. Like knives working to the bone and then comes the second hit. Oh boy. At least this time I am out of it quickly and do not feel the speed.

XXXI

At the Institute that last night I must have sat up until the dawn meditating, considering, planning, adjusting, working out the essential rightness of my decision and the truth of the quest and as the dawn came up there must have been one moment when everything fell away and I saw the Institute as it was.

I am not sure of this, recollection is burned out of the brain by the impact and the repeated jolts; nevertheless it seemed that as I looked out through the window surveying the Institute, I saw the truth of it for the first time. The Institute was not as I had conceived it but was instead something else. The buildings were not tall, it did not sit on a high place, the rooms were not aseptic, the quarters were not clean: instead the Institute seemed to be sunk into a pit of the countryside and the countryside itself was not beautiful, I believed that it had been beautiful but all that I could see was the blackened shapes where foliage had been and the deep pits left by the trees that were no more.

And then I snapped my eyes against the vision and when I opened them again the Institute was as it had been and all faded away, a dream, an inconstancy. It must have been a hallucination for the countryside in which the Institute sat was beautiful, its desolation had been sprinkled through with gardens and delicate, pinwheeling roads and from it the Institute rose in its armory of buildings, thirty stories high or more, the Institute from which all control radiated.

I was more content then, easeful, almost at peace for the first time since I had taken the request to Committee. Everything made sense, everything was ordered and beautiful and I on the verge of the completion of studies was prepared to embark to the city that morning for the last and most significant of all the studies I would make, not only for the benefit of myself but for the Institute.

I stood. Weariness made me lightheaded but made the retrieval of possibility unlimited as well. I carefully, neatly folded over the secret materials and opening the desk with the special grip, stowed them away once again in their hiding place, the purposes for which they had been saved accomplished once again. I closed the drawer and secured it, got my belongings together and went through the door toward the conveyors. Halfway there I had another impulse, I would bid good-bye to Committee; whatever his faults he was a dedicated old man who had made so much possible for me and I owed him a great deal, owed him in fact almost everything. So I went to his office which I found ajar and went inside there to see him sitting quietly at his desk, rubbing his hands together, looking down at graphs and documents on the desk. He did not look up with expectation nor did he greet me in any way, but in his wonderful old way he instantly grasped my presence as well as the reasons why I had come there. ‘I suppose you’ve come to say good-bye,’ he said, still not looking up. ‘Well, good-bye then, and be done with it.’

‘Good-bye,’ I said.

‘I suppose that you want to hear something from me which you will remember and which you can apply to your tasks ahead but I can tell you very little. I am completely out of aphorisms, lad.’

‘That’s perfectly all right,’ I said, standing, ‘you don’t have to tell me anything.’

‘You can consider yourself properly spoken to last night. I have nothing to add to that.’

‘I know,’ I said, not moving at all. ‘I didn’t expect to hear anything from you at all this morning.’

‘So why are you here?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I just wanted to say good-bye to you, I think.’

‘You’ve said good-bye. I’ve said good-bye. Good-bye, then.’

‘It’s as if,’ I said and realized only then that this was what had driven me to the dear, frenzied old man that morning, ‘I may never see you or the Institute again.’

‘Ridiculous for you to feel that way. You’ll be back in three days rain or shine and with some good tapes for us, I should hope.’

‘Of course I will. But it was just a feeling.’

‘Well, it’s a totally ridiculous feeling and we’ll pay no credence to it. What else is on your mind, son?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So why don’t you go?’ Committee said, putting his palms flatly over the documents on his desk and drawing them in tight to his chest. ‘Nothing is being accomplished by any of this and you have to make the convoy.’

‘Conveyor.’

‘Conveyor, convoy, what’s the difference?’ For the first time he looked up at me and his eyes, I saw, were glazed over with fright. ‘What do you want of me?’ he said quietly.

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

‘Because there’s very little that I can do for you or anyone any more.’

‘I knew no one here,’ I said, ‘no one at all. In all the years I’ve been here, you’ve been the only contact I’ve really had. I knew none of the others, I never had any relationship with anybody. You were all that I had.’

‘I can’t treat social disorders, son.’

‘No one,’ I said, ‘there was never anyone at all. It was as if I was attending the Institute alone, I was the only student. I never saw any of the others. In fact,’ I said, ‘I don’t even know what the Institute is like. The only times I went outside were field studies under your supervision. Otherwise I’ve been in here alone except for you.’

‘There’s a recreational program.’

‘I don’t know anything at all about the Institute,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where it is or what it is or even who you are. In fact I don’t even know how I got here. You said that you would get around to explaining all of that to me someday but you never have.’

‘You’ll have to go now,’ Committee said harshly. ‘The time for this is passed and you’re already behind schedule.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked wonderingly. ‘What is the Institute? And why am I here?’

‘Those are not the real questions, son.’

‘No? They aren’t?’

‘Of course not. Haven’t you learned anything by now? The real question is who you are and until you answer that you can know nothing else. I thought that you had gone at least that far; I’m dismayed to see that you haven’t. But that’s neither here nor there,’ Committee said and finally stood, looked at me across three feet of space with perilous exactitude and said, ‘because you’re to get out of here. Right this moment. Go on, get out.’

‘Before you’ve even told me who I am?’

‘You’ll find out. If you haven’t found out by now you will in the city. I’m ordering you out,’ Committee said and reached into a pocket, extracted an antique small-bore pistol which I recognized instantly due to the fact that I have somewhat of an obsessive interest in weaponry, and pointed it at my small, fluttering heart. ‘Now get out now.’

‘I’ll go,’ I said, ‘I’ll go.’

‘If you don’t go I’ll shoot you.’

‘I understand that,’ I said and went out of that room, down the hall, through the corridors, toward the conveyor. With my mind blanked, my eyes expressionless, I showed no affect whatsoever while I tried to conceal from myself the realization that Committee had indeed been willing to kill me. And if this were true of Committee then what could be said of the others? What would the others do? And what would become of me in the city?

XXXII

Walking from Safeway, jiggling a bag of groceries. Safe at Safeway, everything looking safe indeed, but I must watch the parking lot for cars making sudden turns, watch spaces between the cars where assassins might dart out, watch the area around the market which has a lot of places of concealment. Never can be too sure. One hand in the pocket, clasping the pistol. They may think that I’m incapacitated, the mockies, because I’m holding this bag against my chest, but watch it sheenies, watch it kikes, this thing I’m gripping in my hand ain’t no prick, and I’ll blow your teeth right up your yarmulka or the name ain’t George Lincoln. Fuck you.

Fuck you, you sons of bitches, kike bastards, Pitchfork Tilden in South Carolina, he was the only one who had the right idea, what was it he patented? – the ‘kike killer’, that was it, the ‘kike killer’, shaped like a pitchfork, looks like a pitchfork, moves and cuts like a pitchfork too but with a Star of David on the top, that’s it, the ‘kike killer’. Only way to deal with them, where is Pitchfork now? For that matter where are all of them now? Things are not what they used to be. Watch that son of a bitch in the Pontiac cutting through the lines there. He’s got a hat shoved over his eyes, I can see the dense, Semitic features. Aiming right toward me. Okay. No he’s not. Taking a parking space across the way, stealing it out from under another car, that’s all. Lying, dirty, conniving son of a bitch. Filthy bastards having the nerve to form an anti-defamation league.

Watch that loaf of bread on top. All right buster, that’s better now, shove it down against the teabags like a huge prick. A huge uncircumcised prick. Streicher was right. Julius Streicher was definitely right. There is a definite difference in the Jewish physique and it manifests itself mainly in the buttocks. Prod them and they scream. Small balls too.

Why do I keep on thinking this way? There’s the car, it’s a longer walk than I thought. All of the walks are longer these days, you’re getting out of shape, getting near forty, George Lincoln, have to work out with the troops as well as push them along, but the troops are dwindling too, not what they used to be. What the fuck are they going to do? take everything away? Streicher was right. A Jewish ass in a line of Christian asses will stick out. I must stop thinking this way. Why can’t I fucking cut it out?

Why? Why do I think of Jews all the time? The idea was to think of them less, Judenrein, that was it, but instead as I get older more and more I think of them; now my brain is full of tumbling thoughts of Jews: old Jews, middle-aged Jews, baby Jews, girls and men, fathers and sons. Wall Street mockies and the ones in the candystores plotting out their schemes together in the International and the more I try not to think of it the more it overcomes me. I should take a long rest I think. There’s the car anyway. Son of a bitch, the mufflers are near the ground. In another day or two I’m going to lose the mufflers, dangling like a kike’s balls, almost hitting the gravel. Another fifteen bucks, even if I do the job myself. Get under a car and struggle with mufflers. Fine doing, George Lincoln. And oh how the Hebes would laugh.

Got to get to the car. In there at least, a little safety, a little isolation, however temporary, from the kikes before I have to come out into the world again and face them. Have to face them all the time, Jews are the world and I understand that. But oh Jesus Christ I’ve been shot in the head!

Right in the head, oh my God, the groceries scattering around me, eggs and lettuce and teabags and epsom salts (showing a weak streak there, George Lincoln) and they’re shooting at me again now. The fucking Jews have got the parking lot covered and they’re shooting me to death in Arlington fucking Virginia. Oh God, they’re still firing. They will not stop, they are crazy, it is not enough that they are going to kill me, they want to tear me open! Well, that’s what you get for trying to tell the truth about them, isn’t it? Get into the heart of the Jews and they’ll shoot you in the fucking head! My God, I’m dying I really am this isn’t funny this is serious the groceries are rolling where the fuck are the groceries I’m really going to die they are serious this time rolling on the ground wedge of sky opening up in front of me in the shape of one of their scrolls, I am being overtaken by Jews and their rituals wet all around they are investigating my ground George Lincoln you have gone a long way old friend and you were right, right from start to finish but this is no way to go I tell you this is no way to go but too late now I think of the Depository, the sun comes toward me at a very high speed I am on top of the Depository, it is the Depository that is falling upon me and I do not know I simply do not know now whether I am the shooter or the one getting shot it all amounts to the same thing doesn’t it?

XXXIII

Finally I come into Dallas, driving down the boulevards into the parking lot, where instantly the secret service or people who look like they are in the secret service swarm all over the car, ordering me out, shouting to one another in high bleating tones, poking and prodding at transistors in their hands with which they seem to be in communication not only with one another but with some higher sources. ‘Where did you get this car?’ they are shouting. ‘Do you have the papers for this car?’ ‘For what purposes was this car intended?’ I answer all of their questions with nods and murmurs, stiff and frantic from twenty-three hours behind the wheel with no sleep and only four rest stops. I motion to the glove compartment to indicate that all of the Frank’s Wonderama papers must be in there, answer everything else with little burbles and groans and move off trembling to a side area of the parking lot where I decide that I will try to be sick in privacy. The servicemen, checking out the vehicle, swarm over it like roaches giving little eager cries of assent and discovery as one by one all of the many exciting features of the car are revealed. It looks, from this distance, as if they have found the car acceptable and my journey has not been in vain, but it is not easy to be sure of this. I am so tired that I do not know how much pleasure I can take in the knowledge that I have satisfied the requirements. Dallas bounces and shimmers in the air around me like a gigantic fruit and I fall, hitting the cinders of the lot with fatigue until two secret servicemen detaching themselves from the group around the car run over and pull me blinking to my feet. ‘Where did you get this car?’ one of them asks. He is a heavy man in his mid-forties bearing, as a matter of fact, a shocking resemblance to the President whereas the other somewhat taller and thinner, looks vaguely like the Vice-President. In my exhaustion I wonder if this is the key to getting ahead in the Secret Service: to look, that is, very much like the men you are guarding. ‘Tell me where you got this car!’ Kennedy says.

‘I got it at Frank’s Wonderama on Route 46 in Lodi, New Jersey,’ I say. ‘It’s a Lincoln Town Sedan 1962 with sliding roof panels …’

‘We know what it is,’ Johnson says. ‘Did you buy this car? Did you pay cash money for this vehicle? Where is the proper title transfer and the certificate of ownership?’

‘Maybe in the glove compartment.’

‘There’s nothing in the glove compartment,’ Johnson says grimly. ‘We think that you stole this car. Can you produce documentation that you did not?’

‘Well of course not,’ I say. ‘How can I produce proof that I didn’t do something? I must have left the papers at the Wonderama in my excitement; there was a great need for the car you remember, it had to be down here by this afternoon … ’

‘Don’t be so rough on the lad,’ Kennedy says. ‘You can see how tired he is and how panicky.’ He puts a comforting hand on Johnson’s shoulder. ‘I’m sure that he can explain everything to our satisfaction if we only give him a little bit of time and anyway the car checks out …’

‘It does check out?’ I say. ‘Then you find it satisfactory? You’re going to use it for the assassination after all?’

‘Just let’s take it easy,’ Johnson says slowly, putting a hand into his pocket, squinting down at me, ‘let’s take everything nice and loose and not be so sure what use to which this car is going to be put. What is the address of this Wonderama, did you say? We’ll have to make a checking call.’

‘I don’t think you’ll find the dealer there now.’

‘Ah,’ Johnson says, ‘ah, aha. You don’t think that we’ll find the dealer there.’ He removes his hand from the pocket, holding a pistol. ‘I think we’re going to want to have a long talk with you about this, son.’

‘Oh come now,’ Kennedy says with a deprecating gesture. ‘I really do think you’re being a bit harsh …’

‘Am I now? Am I?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I think you are; you’re acting like I’m somehow planning an assassination when I’m only supposed to provide a car for it … ’ Then I stop dead, hit by an appalling ray from the Dallas sun, suddenly quivering amidst beetles and the heat. ‘You think I’m responsible for this?’ I ask furiously. ‘I was just assigned to get a car, that’s all, I had orders. This is ridiculous …’

‘We’re not saying, son,’ Johnson says quietly, ‘but we do think that you’d better come along in custody so that we can work this matter out. Come on,’ he says, putting a hand on his shoulder in an appropriative way, ‘let’s move it. Let’s move out.’

‘You don’t have a thing to worry about,’ Kennedy says to me almost confidentially. ‘It’s just a routine check. But you have to understand …’

‘Leave me alone,’ I say wrenching free, ‘leave me alone, now! I’ve driven this car almost two thousand miles, up all night to get it delivered and I don’t have to put up with this. It was just an assignment, I have nothing to do with it at all …’

‘Yes you do,’ Johnson says bleakly. He reclaims his grip and this time I know that I will not be able to move away. ‘You have everything to do with it.’

‘They said you were planning …’

‘I know what they said they were planning,’ Johnson says almost contentedly, ‘and we’ll check it out. We’ll check every single detail of this out and you don’t have to have any doubts about that at all.’

I am in motion, my feet hitting the alien Dallas terrain in an off-rhythm. Behind me Kennedy follows murmuring apologies, murmuring explanations, advising that surely this is a routine investigation and that when it is over I will be able to go about my business, perhaps even get to the Plaze by noon but I do not believe him. Now in the heart of the land I feel its massive treachery beating around me, a feeling of enclosure like trees collapsing to ground level in a forest.

XXXIV

Jiving on 124th Street, nothing serious man, just getting a whiff of the noises and the sounds, digging all the stores and the activity, cats coming out of those stores with television sets, liquor bottles, one cat with a baby carriage, someone else, taking leavings, a handful of bath towels, four in the a.m. on a loose, easy morning, fun all around and then whap! the whole fucking street goes up in lights and there is the sound of shooting. Sirens, screams: the cops are moving in, no question about it. There I am on West 124th Street feeling naked to the ass, brothers and sisters streaming around and yes sir, I can see by the dawn’s early light the Tactical Police Force themselves pouring out of a big mother truck down the street waving their clubs. I was only there to mess around, I wasn’t going to take a fucking thing out of those shops. How could I? Man, they was cleaned out before I could have gotten two-deep.

The TPF waving their clubs and closing in are faceless. Hard to see how many of them there are or who they are, but what they got in mind is not so hard to figure out, I see the clubs splitting the air and then the blood begins to move, springs out of the brothers and sisters who are also moving and it is my time to run too. I am just an observer, just came down to catch the breeze and take the fun, but try to tell that to the TPF when they are on the prowl. I haul my ass out of there, I tell you the truth I am nearly pissing with fright and down Madison Avenue I go with a six-pack moving southward trying to get out of the way of the cats in blue and their clubs. Oh my God, the clubs.

Heavy activity in the neighborhood now; the first spurt carries me to the front and I see that if I am not exactly getting away I am putting some distance between me and what I have to think of as the opposition. August of 1964 in New York City and the TPF are the opposition, but what is so strange about this? I should not take it personally. Then moving south I see that we are down in chains for sure this night because while we are being moved south by one group of the opposition there is another group of them at 121st in stake-out position, trucks and cars, blazers all around. We are being driven right up against them. Right up against them.

All that we are trying to do is to move out of the way, I want to explain to them, feeling myself being appointed as the spokesman of the group because I am in the forefront of it anyway, and the last man cannot speak. But as I spread my palms and begin to try to make the point to these new TPF’s, gesturing behind me, they raise their clubs and right away even before the hit I have a full and real understanding of the situation.

We are heading south, that is the message, heading south to the good districts. They have got it into their heads that we are going to move down south and trash the brownstones of the gentry, not knowing that this is not in any cat’s mind at all. But what we are trying to do only is to get out of the way, get away from the chase from behind but the TPF do not think that way, they do not see it, they think that we are heading south toward destruction. Oh my, I can see in the lights and the glow of the flashers how we are going to get our heads busted this time and for real.

They must have been waiting for it for a long time, for us to take the fun downtown that is, must have waited thinking that sooner or later we were going to do it and now they are putting the barricades up. ‘For shit’s sake!’ I scream or want to scream though it is very hard to make much of an impression against all of this noise. ‘We don’t want your property, we just want to get the fuck out!’ This is not the way to put it exactly, I can see, for I am getting blasted.

One minute I am running and the next I am on the ground with what feels like ropes around the ankles although it seems impossible that TPF could truss me up like a duck in such short order, they are just not that smart nor that effective. But there I am on the ground in the lights, brothers and sisters piling up on top of me, swarming and diving into the stinking flesh. I feel the hard edges of bottles and packages going into me and as I dive under for what is very probably the last time it all comes entirely clear and I see the way it will be and what will be happening in the next thirty years – they are going to clean us out altogether. Thinking we want downtown they are going to come uptown and oh baby is there going to be noise when the clubs and guns hit! But there is nothing to be done about it, nothing to be done about it; we are in the midst of a Sweep …

They are going to Sweep us out.

Oh Lordie, yes, it is bad and shit, President Kennedy has not even been dead a year, that fine wonderful man, now that is to cry. But at least Martin Luther King, he is going to take over Chicago.

XXXV

I am on the ground and Committee is looking at me. Committee has come into the city and has found me here on the ground and now as he stares at me, compassion in his deep, brown old man’s eyes I know that he has come to save me. There would be no other explanation; he would not have come into the city unless it were to rescue me, but as I raise my head and try to croak thanks I find that I have a little difficulty. I can barely speak. Perspectives blur; the city seems to rotate and I stretch myself full-length on the ground again. I must be in the Battery.

Committee looks at me for a long time, moistens his lips. Delicately he adjusts his clothing, then leans closer, perilously, almost unbalancing and sprawling across.

‘Fool,’ he says to me.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I whisper, ‘I did the best that I could. It was them …’

‘Fool,’ he says again. His eyes half-close. He seems to be done with saying whatever he had in mind; he stands, recedes from the line of sight. ‘Now you’ve left us the whole problem of how to deal with this.’

‘Deal with what?’

‘Never mind,’ the voice of Committee says. That is all the old man is: a voice. All of them were voices. For so much of the time I thought they were people when it was merely the voices which were doing me in. Voices and the music. ‘Get off the ground,’ Committee says, ‘you’re making a disgusting spectacle of yourself.’

‘I can’t move.’

‘I know you can’t move but nevertheless get off the ground. We can’t have you lying around like this. The first thing to do is to get you out of here.’

I stand. It is much easier than I thought. So much easier. Practically everything is a state of mind. If you think you can do something then you can do it. If you think you can’t then you can’t. Everything in the mind. The mind is a wondrous creation. The most wondrous creation of all God’s work. I am standing. Grass flutters loosely on the Battery; before me lies the discarded scene of the assassination. Empty cars, rubble, litter, cigarettes discarded, a rifle, Oswald’s rifle lying on the grass. Woven in amidst the rubble as if in a pattern of stitching are the bodies of lumpen. Some of them are on their backs, others on their stomachs, a few on their sides. The eyes are blank, lusterless. They are dead.

‘Do you see what you’ve done?’ Committee says, motioning. ‘Do you now?’

‘I didn’t do this.’

‘You did everything,’ Committee said. He begins to pace while slowly I test limbs, deduce reflexes, find that I am, after all, able to function. I should have expected nothing else. After all of it I am able to function. Basically, and this may be the central tragedy, I am a healthy individual. I bear and comprehend everything and then go on.

‘I guess we can just leave them,’ Committee says. ‘They run in packs but when one drops they all do. They’ll stay away from the area. After a while they seem to have some kind of pickup detail. We won’t have to be bothered by that.’

I stumble to the discarded rifle, pick it up. Wet, it still exudes heat in the barrel. ‘Drop it,’ Committee says, ‘just leave it here.’

‘I thought I’d take it back with us. There aren’t many of these …’

‘Drop it,’ Committee says harshly. ‘If you want to go back at all, leave that here.’

I drop the rifle. Now, after all has been done I have become childlike, dependent. What Committee says oozes quickly through layers of resistance and deposits itself in the heart, a warm, wet spot of compliance. ‘Come along,’ Committee says, let’s go.’

He strides out briskly, quite briskly for an old man. I would hardly have judged there to be so much energy in him. But the city, it seems, has revivified. ‘Come along,’ he says behind him, ‘we have very little time now, very little time at all. Move quickly.’

‘I’m doing the best I can,’ I gasp. Not five minutes before I was lying, fainted on the ground and now I am ambulatory and urged to greater speed. There seems no limit to the indignities to which the body subjects itself, can be subjected. The body is a reservoir, a tool. I stumble on an object, hit the ground palms flat, feel pain, force myself to continue. Something in the knee feels like crumpled bone. No matter. It does not matter.

‘Here,’ Committee says. He gestures to a car wedged in a space between two buildings revealed by a sudden turn we have taken, ‘that will be our transportation out of here.’

‘Where are the conveyors?’

‘Never mind about the conveyors, you fool!’ Committee screams. He hobbles forward, opens a door of the car, gets into the driver’s seat. I follow, wedge myself at his indication into the back. The upholstery as I sit breathes out a gaseous odor of the swamp, of sea beasts. A 1963 Cadillac convertible ruined but still serviceable. Committee starts the engine, the car rolls forward. Rotted mufflers make the sound of sewage exploding. Committee turns the car around and heads back towards the Battery.

‘Where are we going?’ I cry but of course in the overwhelming sound of the engine which sounds like grenades around us I cannot be heard. Committee stolidly drives on. From a pocket he takes a hat, places it precariously atop his head. He disks one sweeping glance backward to see that I am in place. His old man’s face is in shadow, his features seem to roll and disappear in the accidents of light. He turns back toward the wheel. The car accelerates.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask again but under the sound of acceleration even I cannot hear my voice now. The corpses lying on the Battery when we passed before have vanished. In their place are little indentations which have vaguely human form. I look upon this with astonishment. Where have they all gone?

‘This isn’t the way out of the city!’ I shout to Committee as he makes a shrieking half-left and puts the car to forty or fifty miles an hour. The noise is now simply overwhelming. I burrow into the seat and clasp my hands over ears. ‘You don’t get out of the city this way, this is going to take us into the sea!’

No matter. I am burning and jouncing on the seat, Committee has floored the accelerator, the car must be doing sixty or seventy miles an hour now and still there is no respite, no understanding. And then understanding does break over me and I roll on the seat, dive toward the floor, trying to protect myself against the shattering impact that will tear blood from bone, holding my fingers spread like a web over neck and temple so that I will at least know that I am dead before I die. But here is the biggest surprise of all (and proof positive that the project has, after all, come to happy conclusion) – the bullet does not hit, the bullet does not hit, no one is firing at me from above. After a time the car decelerates, skids, comes to a stop and Committee launches himself over the wheel to weep in an agony of frustration while slowly, slowly I unfurl myself from the car, alive and healthy, forty-six after all and ready to continue the great tasks entrusted to me by God and the nation, that is to say that I know I will (because no one else ever could) manage after a fashion to hold things together.

The light breaks and at last I hear the applause.

1972: New Jersey

If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you’ll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …

For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …

Visit the SF Gateway.

www.sfgateway.com

Also by Barry N. Malzberg

Chorale

Conversations

Dwellers of the Deep

Galaxies

Gather in the Hall of the Planets

Guernica Night

Herovit’s World

In the Enclosure

On a Planet Alien

Overlay

Revelations

Scop

Tactics of Conquest

The Cross of Fire

The Day of the Burning

The Destruction of the Temple

The Empty People

The Falling Astronauts

The Gamesman

The Last Transaction

The Men Inside

The Remaking of Sigmund Freud

The Sodom and Gomorrah Business

Universe Day

Dedication

This novel is for Bob Mills, Bob Gleason,

Bernard Shir-Cliff and Roger Elwood.

Barry N. Malzberg (1939–)

Barry N. Malzberg is an American writer, editor and agent, whose prolific career has spanned numerous genres – most notably crime and science fiction. Malzberg was particularly active in the science fiction scene of the early seventies, although he became disillusioned with the market forces defining the field, and has rarely published SF works since. His most recent activity in the field has been in the form of advice columns for writers in the quarterly magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Barry N. Malzberg has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick.

The opening section of this novel, in far different form, appeared in Future City, edited by Roger Elwood, copyright, ©, 1973, by Roger Elwood.

Copyright

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Barry N. Malzberg 1974

All rights reserved.

The right of Barry N. Malzberg to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 10240 8

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

Preface

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Website

Also by Barry N. Malzberg

Dedication

Author Bio

Copyright