“Oh, it happened all right.” He is transfixed by the film, stops it, runs it through again. “It is the central fact of our history.”
“But how can we besure? Maybe it’s all a myth. Maybe it’s something that they made up, that they gave films and talks about just as a fantasy. Well,” I say aggressively as he turns on me in the darkness his eyes wide, I know, with astonishment or maybe then again it is rage. “This is possible.”
“That’s ridiculous. Scholars and writers have been back through the converter any number of times; this has all been precisely verified—”
“But how can you be sure? Can you be sure of any of this? Maybe it’s a lie, all of it is a lie; I mean it could be a compact to deceive.” I am floundering and yet I cannot accept the films without protest. Is this not better for all? Should I have let him go on without argument, would it all have been easier if he had not felt that he had to prove something to me as well as to himself? I will never know. Now, I will never know. “Never mind,” I say, “forget it.”
His grasp is harsh on my upper arm. I never knew that those fingers which had brushed me so delicately, a witch’s kiss in the places where the soul lies embalmed could bring such pain. “Then why do you say it? Why do you say something like that?”
“I was only trying—”
“You bitch,” he says against my ear, “you bitch, you won’t ever leave me alone, will you? You won’t ever accept the truth of this, the truth of what is going on, you’ve got to protest—”
“Please,” I say, “please, you’re hurting me,” and this is true, he is hurting me terribly, he is hurting me in a way which cannot be described but his hand is tight and tightening upon me and suddenly he yanks me free of the booth, we are out in the dusty and musty, the nearly lightless but still dimly illuminated area of the museum himself and he is dragging me through the exhibits, dragging me past them while he is saying, “You’ve got to face the truth, you can’t go back, can’t go back into lies, we are what we are because of whatthey have been,” and I can say nothing, the pain is terrific, also the realization that he can do this to me, me who he says that he has loved who, in a sense has been closer (he told me this) to him than anyone he has ever known. We stand before a monstrous diorama, the younger Kennedy in the act of receiving the shot in the pantry that killed him, one hand raised, the other down, the head exploding in the impact, the bodies around him in those strange postures of attention which can be captured only in frieze, trapped movement is grotesque and he puts a hand in my back, pushes, sends me lunging through the serim and I am literally in the pantry, the dead air coursing through my open mouth, the dead forms surrounding me and closer to the plasticine than I am meant to be I can see all of the tiny flaws driven into their faces, the cracked and broken places where the dead spaces of wire and putrefecation begin. These figurines have not been treated for fifteen years, they stink but even though they are more dead in proximity they are more alive as well; the immobilized eyes retain the aspect of recognition, the cardboard appendages seem shaped for caress and as I look at Robert Kennedy, it is as if I am transported to the pantry itself, this is not twenty-forty but the nineteen-seventies which overtake and here I am andthenextshotisforme . The assassin’s gun is levelled, he has killed the Senator andIamnext and I do not want to die, not in this place, not in this fashion, I must be screaming, sunk to my knees, my forehead against the waist of the dummy, curiously resilient and ponderous under the cheap fabrics. I cannot believe that this is happening; I do not want to die and it must be then that my screams begin although there is very little conscious sensation and the screams might come from outside. I am dragged away from there, the scene diminishing as something takes me from the diorama and onto the floor of the museum and when I come back to myself I am on the floor, Scop leaning over me. His face is implacable.
“Do you see?” he says.
I say nothing. There is nothing to say. I cannot control my voice, little broken sounds emerge which may or may not come from me. They may emerge from the diorama. They may even have come from Scop.
“Listen to me,” he says. He puts his hands on my cheeks, cups them, brings my head slightly off the floor so that he is looking at me at close range, the same small spots of ruination around his eyes as I saw in the Kennedy figure. Are they all artificial? “Do you see now what I was trying to tell you?”
“See what?”
“You fool,” he says staring at me, “you fool, try to understand, damn it,” and now he leans in even more closely, the conjunction of our faces is absolute, as absolute as in the motions of intercourse itself but there is something other than desire in his eyes, something even more necessitious. “You thought you were going to be killed,” he said, “the diorama came alive for you, the figures were real, you felt your death in their assemblage, you damned fool,” he says, “you damned fool don’t you see now that that’s exactly the way I feel living in this time? They are killing us? They have already killed us.Wearethevictims .”
And it falls away (so many things fall away but then again there is the lurching sense of recovery also) and I see weeping on the floor the message that he has tried to bring to me: that there is an art to pain.
CHAPTER VIII
I WANDERED LONELY AS A CROWD: On the Knoll after the assassination. Curiosity takes me here; just once it would be interesting to see what it is like afterward, in the part that is unrecollected. Here it is not five minutes after the car has gone away, the sirens pouring through the eaves of the city and still the crowd is here in little broken pieces, wandering over the landscape, looking for a bit of information or if not that some shared memory as to what has occurred. No one seems quite sure exactly what has happened and I would not enlighten them. They do not pay any attention to me nor I to them; it must be understood clearly that I am not part of their time nor they of mine and now that I do not in this new cycle have to be disguised in the garments of their contemporaneity that disjunction is clear; it is impossible that I could be regarded as one of them. But my appearance is not bizarre. It has been carefully modified to avoid undue distraction; the colors are soothing, the cut modest, I look very much as a proper citizen of twenty-forty should look adorned for the Games where the object is to take as little attention away from the field as possible.
There is confusion here but it is of the most modest sort; there is pain but it is well controlled. No one, after all, knows exactly what has happened.I do not know exactly what has happened although at this moment the President, of course, already dead must be in the emergency room at Parkland, the top of his skull being checked for cosmetic changes. There is very little to be done about it. Someone, taking offense at me for no reason which I can understand, casting me for an outsider, suddenly comes against me heavily, a young man in his twenties and begins to push me back against the trees, screaming. I do not know what he is trying to say but it has something to do with the man in the big white hat. The man in the big white hat is out to get him. His motions appear ferocious but have no force in them; he strikes at me with limbs like pins and his efforts to thrust me to the ground are successful only because I cooperate, because I allow myself to fold slowly from the waist and go into the grass. It is always best to cooperate. It is best to make as little of an example of oneself when traveling out of time as possible; dislocations are to be minimized. These lessons I have absorbed well from the temporals if none other. Nevertheless, the sheer accumulation of blows begins to weary me after a time and no one from the crowd seems inclined to help. In fact, they seem quite pleased and interested at the antics of the young man who seems to be acting on behalf of all of them. Have I, after all, managed to make myself that conspicuous? It is a dismaying thought to say nothing of being filled with pain. “Stop it,” I say to him as he begins to kick at me, “now just stop that.”
Oddly, he does, as if the suggestion were something entirely outside of his ken; something so astonishing that it needed fuller consideration. He looks at the sky. “Why?” he says. A little spittle falls from the corner of his mouth. The crowd sighs. “Why should I stop?”
“Because your President is dead.”
“He can’t be dead; he was just here. He just rode by us in a big white car.”
“He was shot and killed,” I say, “didn’t you see that?”
He bends toward me. Like all young psycopaths he is incredibly flexible; his body conforms to laws which only his strange brain can emit. Hands on hips he says, “How did you know that?”
It occurs to me that I am not in an optimum position, sitting on the grass, giving out news of the assassination. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, kicking my legs straight out, “it might not have been that way.”
“What do you mean he was shot and killed?”
“Maybe he wasn’t,” I say. “Everybody has a different point of view on that. I might have been looking at it from a bad perspective. Now—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he says and kicks me. There is no power in his kick either but a weak blow with a foot is more dangerous than one with a hand. I feel little waves of anticipatory pain moving through my upper thigh and draw up my legs, reel over, crouch, haul myself into a standing position. There are forty or fifty of them in a loose circle looking at me with expressions which I cannot deduce but which do not look helpful. I realize that the converter is at a good distance from me, more than a hundred yards, tucked securely behind a bench. This was stupid; Scop always kept his converter at much closer range and now I can see exactly why. It was unwise to take this situation as frivolous. I should not have done it but who was to know what it was like in the Plaza after the assassination? For one thing no one had ever been here before. “You bitch,” the young man says and moves forward to kick me again, “tell me the truth now. Tell me how you knew that he was killed!”
I seem to be in trouble. I seem to be in some kind of trouble but all is very confused and bedazzling; perspectives alter even as I sit and the rising of sound from the circle might only be the own blood’s messages ringing distantly. I never anticipated this kind of difficulty when I came here. Scop would not have anticipated either, that is my only comfort. He would have been in even worse difficulty. “Now just stop it,” I say. I back away from him, three steps that carry me toward the edge of the circle. “Now there’s no reason for this at all; you know that this is ridiculous,” but my voice is carrying toward a shriek the way that it almost always does when I am tired or under pressure. “You’re not being reasonable,” I say, “how would I know that he was killed, it was just something that I was saying.”
Someone, an old man I think grabs me by the elbow, wheels me around. I look into the ravaged face which brings back momentary impressions of the Robert Kennedy diorama but there is intensity as well as corruption to his gaze. “I think you ought to answer some questions,” he says, “we’re not fools here you know,” and swings me to pull me in tighter and at this I break. The situation is clearly more serious than I took it to be until a few moments ago and now I can see the risks. It might not be only the President who is slain in Dallas on this day and the implications, of course, burst upon me: the alteration of history will be grievous. Everything will be changed if my death too becomes a historical fact. I push my way out of his grasp, tearing his hands from me as if they were paper claws, something seeming to tear within him as I do this and then I blunder my way past him pushing hard, falling to the grass, coming erect and just as Scop has so many times so I do it as well: run. I run.
I must make it to the converter and the advantage of my surprise start gives me at least a chance of achieving it but as I begin to work my way in clumsy winding course toward the place where the machine is hidden I can hear them behind me beginning to gather for chase. Some part of me gifted with observation and great acuity paces behind is a part of the crowd, sees them massing, gathering, then coming toward me in a great overpowering rush which gathers up the slowest and weakest and sends them along with the rest, an undifferentiated mass is the phrase that I think that I am seeking, not that I am exactly “seeking” anything in this undifferentiated and terrible chase but the converter itself. Where is it? Where did I put it? Exactly why did I think that it was necessary to come back to Dallas at this time; what did I expect to find here? Well, it would be interesting to say that I was able to deal with such complicated and abstruse questions in flight but of course I did not, fear and self hatred carried me along and helped me to shut out their sounds but I became aware then of footsteps alongside me, someone drawing up to match pace and as I threw a frantic glance over the left shoulder I saw the thin and terrifying youth with which all of this had begun and I tried to run faster but no hope, no way, I was extended to my limits and not used to physical action in any case, breath coming unevenly, coursing through my lungs and burning. “Keep running,” he said to me, the words distinct, “I’ll guard you.”
“What?”
“You’ll get there,” he said, “just trust in me and don’t worry about any of this, just keep on running,” and astonishment disappeared into the reservoir of pain, everything sunk into the pain, all of it falling away from me as if now in the true historical past of the nineteen sixties, none of this happening now, all of it a long time ago and I could see the bulky shape of the convertor jammed against the bench where I had left it, gaping open like a mouth. This gave me heart and I extended my stride, tried with what little strength left to allow the will to enter me freely and the youth was ahead of me now, the crowd slightly behind, he dove for the convertor, flung it open. “Now,” he said and gestured but I did not need the gesture, needed it not at all; instead I plunged within, he followed me; I knew what would happen even before it did, life contained no surprises, all possibilities had contracted, the convertor closed, it lurched, I felt the moments of passage: turned toward him then, the youth in the converter and saw him looking at me in the dim and protected light of course: it had to be that way it could have been no other. No other.
Scop!
CHAPTER IX
GAMES: On the field, in the little shadows cast by motion, they strike at one another. It is difficult to make differentiation between them in the poor light; the teams are nothing but a struggling mass of men, some of them on the ground, others swirling around them. Try as I may I cannot concentrate my attention: my thoughts are elsewhere.
I do not wish to go to the Games. The Games repulse me. Nevertheless it has been insisted that I go there at least once; it has something to do, they assure me, with form. Form requires that I go to all the places that Scop has gone, that I touch the events that touch him. Only in that way can our cycles truly mesh; only in that fashion is it possible that I will be able to make recovery.
I did not want it to be this way. Looking at the men in the distance I understand their predicament in certain ways to be the match of my own; they have been caught by circumstances, plunged into a brutality which is not of their making but which nevertheless are the only gestures that may be theirs in order to survive. So it is for me; I did not want to do this but it was made clear that there was no alternative. If I were not to accept my fate, if I were not somewhere along the way to pursue and dissuade Scop from his terrible mission then civilization as we know it would fall. I could not bear this. I do not want civilization to fall. It is not much that we live in, I believe that Scop is right in saying this, but it is the only reality which we have and to that degree it must be cherished. Must be protected. I think.
I am in an isolated part of the stadium. This at least they have allowed me; to watch the Games by myself and behind glass. No sounds other than those I wish to hear through the controlled speakers assault me, no smells or winds from the field can touch me behind this glass. None of the onlookers will bother me with curses or with his own clumsy response to the Games, no one in an excess of identification will throw up on my lap. Somewhere across the field and if I wished I could throw a beam of light there and find him, somewhere far across the way Scop sits surrounded in the public sections seeing what I see now but I do not have to deal with him. They have given me the most elegant quarters available to one of my rank. That at least they have done for me. They could have done no more.
I know that they are dying on that field. Death is no abstraction to me no matter how reduced it may be for the participants. (There are those who say that they have no sensation whatsoever, that they are bred and trained for the Games and that their nerves have been severed, that the cerebral cortex itself has been reduced. There are others who say that this is a canard and that they are just like us but the Administrators say nothing at all leaving the argument essentially irresolute. I think that this is best for all of us; not to have that final knowledge that is of what it must be like for them. We will never know. It is a mystery.) But the death which they feel is less complex and extended than what is happening to me; what is for us, Scop has warned, is not the simple termination of life but its slow evisceration over the forty or fifty years that we have left to us until, at last, the machines and the temporals have won everything. This is what Scop says; that soon only they will remain; that the rest of us, like the participants in the Games, will be merely their functionaries. I do not know.
I do not know and I take this quiet moment in the sealed booth to at least put all of these thoughts away from me, in some different place. It is not necessary for me to have any awareness of the implications, I have been assured; it is only necessary that I do my job. Far out on the field they are struggling and dying but I have turned off the transistors and none of their cries, none of them at all, penetrate to these spaces.
I am alone; I am sealed in ice. There was a time and it was not so long ago when I was possessed of feeling; when Scop himself could give me feeling over and again but that is not so now. Much has been purged from me and willingly. I do not wish to feel.
