“His face falls open exposing little blotches and pearls of sweat. “You do not know what you are doing. You have no idea what you are saying.”
“Get out now.”
“You are being as subversive as he. The consequences will be terrible.”
“I don’t care about the consequences,” I say. The interview is stimulating; for the first time since I was beamed to Grassy Knoll I feel alive, utterly engaged with myself. The risks are great but Scop has taught me something about the levels to which one can be pitched. “Ifyou want me to help you will leave at once,” I say. His face rounds. “At once,” I say and he backs in a confused way toward the door. “At once,” I say yet again and he lurches from the room, I am filled with triumph, he is gone from the room and all unbidden a laugh of sheer relief boils from me and I think how easy it is, I should have known it a long time ago, all that it takes is simple defiance and they are defeated, they are not at all conditioned for the mechanisms of defiance, nothing in their training or position has accustomed them to the fact of refusal and I feel better and leap to my feet, whirl around the confined space in a free and laughing way trying little pirouettes and gestures of release but then as I should have known it would—in fact I am not at all surprised—the depression hits me in overwhelming measure and I collapse to the floor where for a long time I sit pondering, my chin in my hand pondering, sit pondering to consider what has happened to me and whether it is possible that there is any way out. I do not think that there is. I am as confined within the measure of my circumstance as Scop. The Temporals to the contrary. Everything to the contrary.
CHAPTER III
CONSPIRING: The texts are not clear as to the true sequence of events at Dealey Plaza. As preparation for my enlistment it seemed sensible to engage in research, to become familiar with what had happened so that I could play my role on assassination day without bringing undue attention to myself, but although I spent hours rolling and unrolling the Zapruders, although I studied the still photographs and did not neglect the efforts of our very best historians to trace through the motives and culpability I emerged with very little. It is difficult to judge exactly what happened there. There are some who say that there was a conspiracy operative while others feel that the sole assassin was Livy Osborn who was of course killed by Jack Diamonds before he could go to trial. There are some who say that the conspiracy went up to the highest levels of the government at that time and others who say that Osborn was a lonely madman with a good streak of luck. Some say this and some say that but most say nothing at all; it is hardly a topic of consuming interest to most. Scop is an exception; he became obsessed by the assassination long before I knew him but how many are there like this? I think that he fastened upon it, became familiar with the details precisely because it was arcane, an area of dull and private scholarship. He would have gotten no satisfaction from dealing with something where he would have been competing with many others in an area of wide interest.
He was always fascinated with the assassination, however; I cannot deny the sincerity of his interest which appeared to be quite real and which was not based upon self-aggrandizement. “That’s when everything went wrong,” he said to me once or then again he might have said it several times, all our conversations seem to muddle together in the bowl of happenstance, the cup of memory, “that is when the entire social fabric seemed to come askew, don’t you see? If a figure of this importance, the paternalistic leader of the nation, the psychic underlay of the common consciousness could be murdered inexplicably—”
“Others had been murdered.”
“Yes,” he said, “yes I know what you’re saying but not in the era of modern technology. The techniques of diffusion, the communications which had been developed by that time made the tragedy personal and accessible and besides that there was the enormous power which the President yielded before the dispersion—”
“Oh Scop,” I said and turned from him, “this is so boring, can’t we talk about something else? Is this the only thing that you can talk about?” I was rather dull and frivolous in those days; it must be admitted that our relationship, such as it was, was based upon a mutual sexual attraction and my own boredom, little else. It took the temporals to tell me that there were areas of far greater significance between us than I might have grasped. “I just can’t bear to hear any more of this,” I said, my back toward him, my little haunches drawn up, pointing toward him my resilient but capacious rectum in which occasionally he would bury himself with small moans and confessions beyond words, “so let’s talk about something else,” and felt his hands come around to encircle my breasts, “that’s better,” I said, “that’s better now,” I was a wanton little slut in those days, interested in immediate satisfactions, unaware as I was for a long time of how deep was his obsession, how serious his intent, “Oh, I like that so much better than all this dull talk about society,” and allowed myself to be swaddled in his embrace, taken to his center (or so I thought at the time, lecherous little bitch that I was) but eventually he released me and without turning away, his chin still clamped into my shoulder said, “There’s got to be something done about this.” I am impacting many discussions of course. He talked about it all the time during the course of our relationship but I am taking highlights, so to speak, from each of the discussions and stringing them together to give the impression of a coherent, rising point of action and view. This is under the advice of the temporals who were good enough to suggest that if I wanted to keep a diary as a tension-outlet I approach my memories in precisely this way. They have had more experience with this than I have. They have had more experience than I have but they do not know what is going on either. “I’m going to have to straighten it out,” he said.
“Straighten what out?”
“Everything went crazy then. We’re the stillborn product of assassination out of despair. We’re a monster, a grotesque; the child that is our age is blind and horribly misshapen.”
“Can’t you stop talking about this Scop and just have fun?”
“No one can have fun. The Temporals will not permit it. They control everything; they have locked off alternatives not as they say for our protection but merely for our perpetuation. It’s got to be changed.”
“And how are you going to change it?”
“Well,” he said and paused, a long, thick pause which might have lasted some moments or days; there may have been yet another fuck dropped into it (on a level of superficiality we had a passionate relationship, it took the Masters to show me how false it was and how divorced from true feeling) or merely the desire for one but he finally said, “Obviously I’ll have to get back to the point of origin.”
“How?”
“How?” he said, “by using the convertor of course.”
“Unauthorized time travel is illegal. You will be subject to severe penalty.”
“You really are a stupid little bitch you know,” he said, “if it weren’t for the fact that there was a raw, crude sexual attraction here I wouldn’t even have gotten involved with you.” He shifted on the bed, moved away from me. “Even so, I believe that I am going to get away from you. Right now.”
“Be sensible, Scop. You cannot change the past.”
“I don’t want to change the past. I want to change the present.”
“Even so. Even so—”
“I believe that I am going to get away from you,” he said, getting from the bed, turning away from me, striding toward his clothing which he began to put on in a rough, absentminded fashion, the glowing insignia of his rank intimidating me as I lay naked on the bed, filled with the desire to get into my own clothing yet not willing to concede weakness. “I don’t have to put up with this nonsense. I really don’t have to put up with it any more.”
“All right,” I said. I must have realized then that our relationship was over. He was truly obsessed and when Scop fastens upon an idea he will not let it go, not for anything. “Do what you will.”
“I intend exactly that. Get dressed,” he said. “Get out of here, get out of my room. You disgust me.”
“You did not say that before.”
“I did not say a lot of things before. Get out now,” he said and lunged to pull me roughly from the sheets but I was too clever for him and had already gained my footing, stood beside the bed then and with real anger went for my own clothing, contorting my emotions into a loathing which I felt would help me survive the humiliation he had imposed upon me. There was no reason for this. There was no reason for him to have done this I thought and while he stood over me raging I drew on my clothes one by one and stood before him for an instant before leaving, I did not know what that look in his eyes meant, was unable to place it for some time but later on it came to me: it was the look that Osborn must have had before he set off the safety and looked down the long distance to the white car in the motorcade.
CHAPTER IV
DESOLATION ROW: His hands are enormous on me as he yanks me away toward the little hidden spot behind. “Come with me now,” he says, “don’t fight, I’ll kill you if you fight,” and even though I have been prepared for this it is terrifying to see what he is doing. Even though I have been warned that he will act in exactly this fashion and that I am in no danger whatsoever as long as I cooperate and stay within the role the thought brushes my mind that he is capable of anything, even killing me. We stumble through the grass, his hands seeming to touch me in a hundred hidden places, obscene and yet certain in their persuasiveness and I wonder if he will kill me. If he will kill me right here I will have in one sense succeeded because he will have directed all of his passion onto me but in another way I have lost because I do not want to die. Nothing in or out of this world is worthy my death, my life pivots around the certainty of my continued life; perhaps this sudden insight is worth something. Most likely it is not. I can hear the shouting now, dim applause in the distance as the motorcade approaches and I want to turn, to see, I have never been within distance of this President before and the least I should be able to take out of this experience is to see him but Scop is pushing me toward the machine and I cannot adjust myself within the parameters of this body which they have given me; I cannot adjust and stagger in front of him, the touch of him like insects on my being and we are jammed together in the convertor, heel to heel, the fumes of his breath pattering on my cheeks. “Now,” he says, “now,” and hits the controls. It seems that we have been through this before but I cannot tell. The sense of chronology has been shattered, all molds as well as the sequential value and it could have been the first or the tenth time that we have been together in the spaces of this machine. I was warned about this too; the faltering and then the breakage of causation so that I might go through one act fifty times and another directly antecedent not at all but the important thing was to maintain courage and perspective. Not to panic. “You damned bitch,” he says, “you damned bitch, Elaine,” and I say nothing, biting my little lips, clenching my little hands, nothing that I say can possibly affect him. The machine stops and we lurch out together onto the bright pavement of a city, scattered with refuse, facing the large doors of a shuttered building. He grabs me by the elbow. “In there,” he says, wrenching me around, “in there,” and pushes me toward the doors.
I stagger on the filthy and putrescent stones, fighting for balance, then losing it, going to my knees but being yanked upright by him immediately and he impels me toward the door now in front, dragging me. “Hurry,” he says, “oh hurry, hurry, it’s going to be too late, you bitch, oh you bitch Elaine,” and the pain is terrible. I would not have known that there was so much force in him, would never have measured his brutality even as our worst moments together, even in the clanging and interruption of orgasm as he groaned over me, screaming with astonishment at his discharge he never hurt me so much and I want to tell him then, I can no longer maintain the focus of the lie, I want to tell him who I am and what I am to do to him. “Scop,” I say, “Scop,” and his face, birdlike, wheels around, he seems at the verge of recognition and as I look at him, as we stand poised, locked on the top step of the building I find that I cannot go through with this; I cannot say to him what I want to and the instant passes. My conditioning has been true; I have been bound in. “No,” I say, “no, forget it. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“How did you know my name?”
“You told that to me.”
“No,” he says, “no I did not, Inever told you my name, who are you, who are you?” and there is an instant or maybe several at which time I could reveal everything to him, could indeed break through just as I had fantasized but then it is me to back away from this possibility and I say, “Yes you did, you’re so upset, you don’t remember anything, don’t remember anything at all,” and his face blinks like a bulb, astonished at my control and then it is me, me not him who seizes the doors and tugs them open, stumbles into the dense and intolerable spaces of what seems to be a small temple, now in the process of a service: heat, light, dust, crowds, noise, blazing fluorescence from the podium, a tall man shouting and gesturing, cries from the onlookers, perhaps forty or fifty of them in here and a moment with Scop a long time ago comes to me, a promise he made me on the bed, “No,” I say, “you’re not taking me here, you can’t be doing this to me,” and he saysstop ! with terrible energy, hurtling himself at me, I tumble over him, hit the floor, feel his own weight cave against me and then overhead I hear the crack of rifle fire from behind, from the door through which I had entered. There is the sound of collision ahead, a gasp, a thin scream, the sound of a body toppling and then the voices, discordant and desperate have broken over us, “No,” they are saying, “no, Malcolm, no, no,” and another spate of fire, shorter and less purposeful than the last, then the banging of the doors and there is a sudden lush moment in which there is no sound at all, the silence inevitably more provocative than the screams . . . but the screams begin again, jangled and intermixed this time, as fervent as chant but more ragged and lying on the floor I incline myself toward Scop lying on his stomach, his arms crossed, eyes closed, a strange look of satisfaction carved on his face as if put in there by a clumsy but demonic miniatrust, little pleasure-wrinkles at the side of his eyes which I had seen sometimes while he was coming and underneath the screams, the cries mounting, tumult of movement in the chapel I say to him, “You bastard, why did you take me here, why am I in Harlem now?” and then I remember that the assassination of Malcolm according to what Scop had told me did not occur until a year, almost two years after the assassination of Kennedy and that therefore in my guise as a tourist of this period I am not supposed to know of this. I cannot concede the knowledge of event; instead it is as if I had come to it afresh. Ihave come to it afresh, of course; I can allow my reactions unhindered. My thoughts are confused, disordered, as if little pellets embedded in glassine. “Now,” Scop says moving on the boards, “now,” and comes to his feet, it is very confused in the terrain surrounding; it is hard to perceive exactly what he is doing, perhaps he is doing nothing, this thought occurs to me, that the events are meaningless, his witness is meaningless . . . I try to get to my feet in the astonishment but my limbs seem to revolve upon the floor rather than grasping, bodies come in more tightly, it is then that I feel myself lifted, vaulted to a standing position, blocked in by heads, bodies, some of them whimpering, others laying their hands upon me in a way as abrupt and ferocious as had Scop and I see him then through a sudden break in the foliage of witness, at the podium, leaning over the dead body of Malcolm, an aspect of panorama imparted by this, the frieze of his attention as kneeling he stretches out a hand, touches the forehead of the dead man and then the crowd closes in again. I can see nothing.
He has equated the death of Malcolm with Osborn’s slaughter of Kennedy; I know that now, knew it before, but I cannot understand why he has taken me to this temple, what he can hope to gain by making witness to further slaughter. Does he feel somehow that I am energized by death just as he is, that all of us can be brought alive only by dead, moody speculations, they are broken, he comes through the crowd toward me, his face blotched and broken into damp and although he is examined no one touches him. He reaches out toward me. “We must leave,” he says. Our hands touch. “He is dead.”
“No,” I say, “I can’t go with you, not like that, this has got to stop, sometime it has got to stop.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I say which is almost the truth, “I don’t know what I am talking about,” and forms collide; we seem to be at the center of a mass of struggling, weeping people some of whom resemble us but others of whom do not. “Why did you do this?” I say pointlessly, “there had to be another way,” and there is the sound of hands beating at the doors, the wood buckling, they must have locked it behind us when we came in although then again it might have been the assassin: who knows? Who knows about anything? “You fool,” I say to him, reaching forward, grasping his wrists, impelling him toward me, “You dumb fool, this surely is not the way. This is not the answer, you can’t change things by retracing the past over and over again, we are living in a future which will be the product of the past no matter what we do; the future is immutable you see, you have it the wrong way,” and he looks at me, looks at me intensely, seems to be trembling on the verge of real understanding, certainly an insight which I cannot bear and then as he is about to break into the speech that will destroy everything, ruin all of the frail plans of the temporals it is too much to bear: “No,” I say, “no, don’t do it, don’t say it, don’t do anything at all,” and lunge away from him toward the doors which are open, they part, I plunge through them, I run heedless through the wild and the darkening streets.
CHAPTER V
THREE FORTY-FIVE ET SEQ: “Excuse me,” I say to the small man who has been pointed out to me over and over again in the scans as Abraham Zapruder, “May I have a word with you?” It is ten minutes before Scop’s materialization, twelve and a half before the motorcade comes into sight. All of this has been carefully, carefully calculated but efficiency or not all confidence seems drained as I face the man. Calculate as you may, work the machines onto the finest point of calibration, the acts will still have to be carried out by humans, the acts will still have to be lived from the inside. The machines can never, never grant us the ethos through which we must regard our condition. “It is very important,” I say. He is a shabby old man, frayed but pleasant. He is not bitter like Scop. Scop’s bitterness destroyed our relationship; even without the other factors I would have surely left him. One cannot live this way. “I must talk to you.” Rolls of film are revealed in the open pouch which dangles from his shoulder. His hands are gathered around his camera like a breast. “Please,” I say.
