Scop inhaled deeply, taking in the dazzle of Dallas sunshine, taking in as well the crucial and complicated implications of the choices he was making and then he said, “Don’t take any pictures.”
“Don’t take any pictures—”
“You don’t understand,” Scop said hastily, the words pouring out of him then the way that the disastrous film would rattle through the disastrous camera, the touch of Zapruder’s finger bringing the mindless reel through and over aperture, casting for all time the dread and unbearable images and the very air around them seemed to contract so that he was speaking to the man in density rather than open space, all of the others at some far remove so that only he and Abraham Zapruder were truly at this site which might have been the case in the first place, “You don’t understand what you are doing. The results will be absolutely disastrous. These pictures will be printed in the magazines of your time, they will form the basis, the inaccurate basis, for terrible misjudgements, they will eventually be enshrined as perfect realization of disaster. Fifty years from now people will curse your name for them, a hundred years from now your very name will be unspeakable because of what you have brought to them. Must you take these pictures then?”
Zapruder looks at him blankly and Scop realizes that the old man takes him to be mad, that Scopmust be mad at the Grassy Knoll to have made such statements or there is no objective truth in the Zapruder universe. “Please get away from me,” the old man says. “Please leave me alone. I have done nothing to you, I am a simple man, a retired manufacturer, a grandfather, a lover of children—”
“No!” Scop said and made a sweeping, clumsy gesture toward the camera, “no, you cannot take these pictures, you cannot embalm him on these reels forever!” but even as he leapt forward he lurched, missed footing, pirouetted in the grass and then fell heavily, virtually at Zapruder’s feet or then again it may only have been an illusion of falling so quietly did the old man regard him, so quickly did Scop recover his balance, stand weaving in front of him. “This must not be permitted to go on,” Scop said, “it cannot be, you are dealing with stakes as high as the future of human civilization,” and reached out, struck Zapruder, sent the old man staggering back with a walloping blow and then grabbed at the camera, trying to bring it against him with that one lunge but as he did so he felt himself for the second time beginning to fall in the grass, his shoes flailing clownishly on the frictionless grass, Zapruder’s face congealing with puzzlement as it looked benignly on and then Scop dove, felt himself falling as if from a great height although it could not have been more than his six and a half feet, falling nose first then in the grass, the scene speeding away from him and from the distance then, as he had always known (and would know again, you bet) the sound of thunder, the sound of drums.
CHAPTER V
SODA ON THE SIDE: It has not always been just this way. He seems to recall an earlier, less difficult time when he lived within rather than without the sanctions of his culture and found them acceptable. “It could be that way again,” he says, a little more loudly than he had intended and the bartender in the working class place looks at him curiously over the ridges of the counter, his left hand splayed out at an awkward angle, his right a fist tightly on the cloth which he uses to mop widening circles into the dull finish. “Another one,” he says, “and soda on the side,” and the bartender shrugs, slams the cloth down, walks to the scotch bottle and taking Scop’s glass inverts the bottle, pours clumsily but without haste half-full, puts it down, reaches underneath for a tap glass of soda. The bar is empty at this hour of the day ten-thirty in the morning but later on the workers from the district will come in and stand three deep drinking beer and cursing circumstance. By that time Scop hopes that he will be long gone although he is not sure just where. The bartender gives him the soda, takes some more money over the counter and slams it into the cash register, then walks with a brisk limp down to the rag which has now furled open and continues his slow wiping, looking at Scop now and then with curious, tilted, shy glances as if his manner were mockery and what he really desired was a closer relationship, some perilous intimacy. Scop looks down at his drink, tilts it up, drinks heavily. Alcohol does not agree with him but it is necessary at this time that he keep on drinking for maximum assimilation, the Masters are very strict on this point, and the soda manages to wash away the feeling that he is drowning in the fumes although not the nausea. “Are you all right?” the bartender says for no reason, looking up from his ragging and Scop says that he is all right. “That’s good,” the bartender says, “I thought for a moment that you were going to be sick. You don’t come from around here, do you?”
“Not really.”
“I figured that out right away,” the bartender says, “I know every face that comes in here and furthermore I can tell the outsiders right off too, those who come nowhere from the section. What brings you here?”
“Nothing much.”
“You don’t have to talk,” the bartender says. “I’m not forcing conversation on you.” He considers the counter sullenly, reduces the rag to a knot on his index finger and begins to work in brisk strokes at one limited area. “I just heard you talking to yourself a minute ago I figured you might be better off if you had someone listening to you.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” Scop says, “I don’t mind at all.”
He does mind, of course and if it were not absolutely necessary for him to be at this place at this time he would leave immediately. His one vocal slip was unfortunate; he is under no circumstances to attract attention to himself nor interact with these people. That he intends to break this most stringent rule of the Temporals within the next hour in the case of a man who is about to come into this bar does not give him excuse to flout it: to the contrary it imposes upon him the absolute necessity to follow the rule in all other circumstances . . . at heart and for all of his bravado Scop is a congruent personality, a conformist: he accepts and enacts the codes of his society to a degree which even he would not wish to consider closely and all of the time that he is committing most serious violations of temporality he is in craven fear. For these reasons he dreads involvement of any sort with the bartender. He would leave the place immediately, sacrifice everything, return at once . . . but he cannot, in fifty-two minutes, give or take twelve seconds Leonard Peters will enter this bar and it is vital that this contact be made. Furthermore Scop is almost compulsive about the need to arrive early, the temporal charts have been known to be in error; the coefficient of correlation for fifty-two minutes plus or minus five is no more than point ninety-three and this is not sufficient at least for the high-risk situation in which Scop has placed himself. After all the fate of the universe, nothing more nor less is at stake. So he must stay in the bar, pace out the time, wait for Leonard Peters . . . “What could be that way again I asked you,” the bartender is saying. “Don’t you ever answer questions?”
“I was thinking,” Scop says, “thinking about something.
“All I wanted to know is what you were saying over there. You don’t want to talk about it you could at least say that. I don’t like your goddamned manners,” the bartender says. He seems to be slightly drunk himself which in this working-class district is not unusual even at this hour of the morning. “Maybe I’ll ask you to get the hell out of here.”
“That isn’t necessary. Let me buy you a drink.”
“I don’t get bought off that easy.”
Scop shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says, hoping that he has a correct grasp on the vernacular of the district. “Anything you want to do.”
“The hell with it,” the bartender says. He seems to have reached an obscure but exciting sense of resolution, he begins to make circles with the rag on the surfaces again. “Whatever you do is all right with me. I don’t give a damn.”
The doors slam, someone else walks in. Scop scans him eagerly but the man is not Leonard Peters, that is clear. The life-studies and holographs of the man are exquisite; there is no possibility of mistake. The man gives a long, uncertain stare and then seats himself at the bar, asks the bartender for a beer. The bartender does not seem to know him either. He brings the beer and the newcomer gives him a bill from a sidepocket, then seems confused when the bartender comes back with change. For a moment total dislocation seems to penetrate the crevices of his face, then clumsily he has taken the change from the bartender’s hand and puts it in his pocket. He leans forward in great absorption, holding the glass with both hands, drinking in tentative little sips. The bartender mumbles something and returns to his position. The grating sound of the rag against the boards is very loud now.
Scop begins to shake with apprehension. After his first glance at the new man he has returned to his own self-absorption, but that self-absorption more and more, as he feels awareness beginning to sink into him is a cover for a deep and perverse intimation: the newcomer may well have come from the temporals. It is possible that the man is an agent; that he comes from the Masters, that indeed he has been pursuing Scop for a long time and that now in this remote and empty bar he has found him. Surely if the temporals have tracked matters carefully they know what Scop does: That Leonard Peters is critical to any sense of mission. Everything devolves upon the finding of that man and the temporals would know that too. Although Scop has always been a cautious and internalized man, a creature who does not allow any of his moods (he believes) to surface past the bland and affect less panels of his face he now feels the edges of his control visibly shrinking, tearing back to expose the raw and sodden wound of self. Little scars burst open; little lacunae of woe of which he has been unaware for years are exposed. The bartender looks at him strangely. The stranger does not. Scop’s hands describe little butterfly patterns on the bar not unreminiscent of the wiping motions which the bartender has made. “Get away from me,” he says to the bartender as he imagines the man coming down the railing, enormous, threatening him. “Get away from me now.”
The bartender who has not moved at all continues to stare at him. Now with that cool objective sense which has gotten him as far as he has come to date—although not one step further—Scop realizes that he has had an acute anxiety attack; that the aspect of this stranger has thrust him from that perilous and equivocal perch of balance from which he has made search and that he is now falling free in the crazed breezes of paranoia, descending. Only his absolute control and discipline can be invoked to prevent the scene from disassembling before him becausehedarenotmissLeonardPeters , whatever happens it is imperative that the meeting not lapse. There will not be another such opportunity on this cycle, not for twenty years by which time it will be entirely late and it will have been frozen in Peter’s preconscious that a man he was supposed to see in a bar when he was thirty-one years old was not there. Scop puts both hands on the bar, tries to still their fluttering. The man on his left continues to gulp from the beer glass in short, desperate strokes, his neck moving peculiarly.
Abruptly Scop, staring at that neck, reaches a judgement: the man is indeed from the temporals. He has appeared in disguise and it is cleverly rigged, shows all of that attention to detail and superficial veracity for which the temporals are famous but as is characteristic of their work it lacks conviction, one inch below the surface it is merely that, a costume and if one focuses the tube of one’s attention more deeply it is easy to see, easy to see the lie. “Liar!” Scop shouts and the man turns, looks at him from huge, empty eyes drained of reaction. “Fool! Imposter! Did you think that you could get away with this?”
The man says nothing. He holds his beer glass now like a child might hold a rattle, shaking it slightly, little bubbles of froth steaming and spewing from the rim. Wide, his eyes become wider yet. “You liar!” Scop says. He reaches into his pocket, his hand clings. He feels the weapon hard and smooth within his grasp and tries to remove it but the little lumps and sodden threads of the pocket retain his hand and he finds the weapon half in, half out, its dull gleam visible to the bartender who is suddenly striding toward him rapidly, just as in Scop’s vision. It must have been temporal lag; this is what he had seen. “Give me—” the bartender says and then says no more because Scop has yanked the weapon free in one last surge of effort. He points it at the bartender’s throat, closes his eyes and pulls the trigger.
He does not know whether or not he has made contact with the man until he hears the shatter of bone, the sound of something pulpous hitting board, then he opens his eyes again and watches as the bartender, semi-decapitated, sits slowly behind the bar, first crouching as if seeking a deep knee bend which then comically did not reverse at the end of its arc but instead continued with gravity until at last the bartender sunk out of the line of sight, only vagrant dazzles from his skull giving indication that he had ever been there. Moist sounds from far below. Scop turns then toward the temporal, resolved that he has no alternative, that he will have to kill this man too because the situation has moved past the chance of easy resolution . . . but the temporal has already gone; where he was sitting there is emptiness and the bang of the door gives implication that while Scop was engaged in misdirected fire the real enemy has fled.
It infuriates him. He goes to the door, pulls it open and stares at a dismal street which reminds him of the mockups and model of streets of this era which he has studied in magnification for so many lonely hours in the hall. He cannot take the terrain for real; if anything it reminds him of something on which he will have to take an examination . . . which, of course, at some time in the past he has also done. But beyond the deadening unreality, the sense that he has stumbled into a reconstruction of research materials rather than the consequence he has sought . . . beyond that is the fact that the street is empty. The wide, flat terrain with neither alleys nor parked vehicles is clear. The temporal has escaped.
Scop gives a bellow of rage and looks back into the bar but the bartender is still dead, then he casts desperate glances through the length of the street hoping at least that Leonard Peters has missed the coefficient and has come plus or minus twenty-five minutes early but Peters too is not there . . . and screaming futility, bellowing once again his failure Scop runs toward the machine that will take him out of there knowing that when Peters staggers in, looks behind the counter sees the dead man he will be hurt in a very personal and meaningful fashion which will only have out-come ten years later when he is called in to assist on the Final Plans . . .Scoptryingtoalterhasmerelyreinforcedthefuture . In pain he runs and knows again the wisdom of the Masters: to seek alteration is merely to tighten the threads of causality.
CHAPTER VI
ENCOUNTER AND AT THE END OF IT ILLUMINATION: Thinking of 1995, the convulsion of circumstance, the great hiccup of his father’s being that brought him, that miraculous accident, to life Scop returned to the Grassy Knoll to the side opposite Abraham Zapruder, accosting the two women once again. The sounds of the motorcade were building in the distance; he had lagged through clumsiness to within a two-minute margin: nevertheless he had to go on. There was no time for cancellation. The shorter of the two women was named Elaine Kozciouskos and had been born in 1915. She would die in 1985 hit by an out of control double-decker bus while touring New York City but that was none of Scop’s concern now. Generational lines had already been shifted over, albeit clumsily; the Kozciouskos descendants would ascribe other parentage but would go on. One of them, in a minor way, would even play an important role in the reverals of twenty-twenty two he knows. It was her that Scop seized upon and then dragged into the little clump of trees back from the road, impelling her past the three tramps who having other things to witness said nothing. She looked at him terrified. Throughout all of history, a thousand times she would look at him in this way: there was nothing to be done.
“My name,” he said, “my name is Lyndon Baines Johnson,” picking the name virtually at random, merely trying to reassure her but her face became even more distorted and started to roll away like an enormous vegetable pulled free from the vine, “Now listen here,” Scop said, “you’ve got to get control of yourself,” but she had fainted. Perhaps it was his garb which was somewhat unusual for the day; perhaps it had only been his haste and intensity. She lay at his feet. He could hear the sound of the other woman approaching. Her name was Anne Oble and she played no role in his life or that of history, having died childless within the decade. Scop struck her behind the ear for the second time on that cycle and she toppled three yards from the prone figure of Elaine Kozciouskos. He had no time. The motorcade was only a few hundred yards away. He leaned over, wrenched at Elaine Kozciouskos, pulled her toward the machine.
Halfway there he did not think that he would get there, she was unconscious, heavy, unrespondent weight but it was either that or be frozen into Zapruder’s reels and that could not happen; it had never happened so he continued to struggle, feeling a little better for the assurance that he would prevail and finally, groaning, was able to insert her head-first into the transmission, stuffed her in, made his own perilous connection and hit the switch. Instantly he fell forward fifty years, using 2013 as the bounce-point, landing on the towers of the commemorative museum which had been erected on the site in 1994 he believed although the date was not clear and if there was one thing that Scop was not it was a historian, he had no interest in history, only with causion; he came off the bounce and into twenty-forty screaming, at full throttle, Elaine Kozciouskos full weight rolling on the belts, her feeble cries as the transmission took hold sounding like those of the assassinated President himself and then they were back in Scop’s bedroom in Dallas, none the worse for it except eternally the worse for it as such things always are. He leaned over groaning, took bags of her flesh in his palms, manipulated her from the transmission and pulled her over to the bed. By the time he was done he was crying with fatigue and yet he knew it would soon pass: emotional excesses always passed, all that there was ever left was the grimness of his duty. She opened dull eyes and looked at him. Scop took off his traveling robes and then he took off his underclothing, standing before her naked except for his medallion and his sandals, rubbing his hands together to simulate confidence. “All right my pretty,” he said, “now we fornicate.”
She screamed dimly, without conviction. Scop continued to rub his palms and when he judged the moment to be right, sprang forward and tore away her upper garments. He found the task revolting of course and approached the possibility of sex dryly, without pleasure, but it had to be done. Necessity being foremost, he might as well make it as sensuous as possible. He took off the little strands and ribbons to which her blouse had been converted and looked at her sad breasts trapped in their sad covering. Her handbag which he had not noticed before dangled from one wrist to the side of her. She screamed again without resonance. Scop leaned forward, put his fingers underneath her brassiere and lifted it slowly. There was a hiss as of escaping suction and then slowly, without hope but possessed of craft he removed it, looked upon her.
“All right,” he said, “now we are going to have sex.” Throughout all this she had not said a word, her screams wordless too but now her lips seemed to fuse toward meaning and looking up at him she said, “No.”
“Yes,” Scop said.Gentlyinsistent , this was the quality he was seeking, a sense of communion, slow dance, grasp and enter. Old cliches from the tumultous decade from which he had plucked her mingled and mixed in his mind but he was not quite able to segregate them so that they would emerge into a coherent, seductive whole. “It is quite necessary,” he said. “Observe me. Be patient.” Slowly he settled upon her.
His aim was for quick fusion, burning entrance, random twitches and as rapid a withdrawal as possible but at the first instant of contact he could see that this was not going to be possible. For one thing he had forgotten to remove her undergarments; for another he had neglected to remove his own. Sex without the true meeting of genitals was impossible, at least within the context which Scop wished to occupy (the matter of masturbation was an entirely different matter but he had hoped to operate within the tight situational fix of convention now) and his stupidity made him grunt which Elaine Kozciouskos must have taken for uncontrolled lust because she came back at him with apeep! of anguish and then attempted to wrench herself from under him, a hopeless response of course—among other things where would she have gone?—but just enough to convince Scop of the need for emergency actions before the moment for connection was lost.
Heavily, mastering her with his weight, he stripped her undergarments in a single, clumsy burst; heavily he tore his own garments free to attempt entrance, all of the time mumbling shy but determined insistences into her ear which, he hoped, would convince her of the uselessness of protest and guide her into an acceptance which would permit Scop to complete this difficult part of his journey in jig time. “It’s all right,” he said therefore, “it doesn’t matter, everything is going to be fine, you’re just dreaming this, none of it is happening at all and even if it is happening, well then, it’s of no consequence. You’ll be able to put it out of your mind,” huffing and puffing upon her and she shook her head, her eyes beating like wings, her tongue making frantic gestures against her teeth; in a moment, Scop knew, she would say something absolutely disastrous, something which would yank him from his concentration and cause him to lose the insistence of his rhythm. “Don’t talk,” he said, “it isn’t necessary to talk,” and he wedged himself against and then into her, listening to the racketing sound of her breath, feeling her teeth close to the side of his neck as weakly but with determination she sought to bite him.
Well, she could hardly be blamed for that, with that empathy for which he was already well-known and with which he had conditioned himself for his voyage Scop knew exactly how she must be feeling at this time: abducted from a sunny field in Dallas by a maniac, shoved through a transmission belt in pain to emerge into stinking, reeking quarters in which the lunatic sought to clamb or above and through her, it was something which would unsettle sterner stuff than Elaine Kozciouskos herself and under the circumstances she had done well in not suffering a fatal sympathetic storm. Still, the gnawing and intermittent penetration of her teeth in his tender and vulnerable neck began to irritate Scop to say nothing of retard his orgasm; forcing himself to orgasm was difficult enough under these hasty and mysterious circumstances let alone with the woman biting him . . . absently he reared above her, slapped her open-palmed across the face until her eyes bloomed with tears and then put himself down above her again, closed his eyes, kneaded her sought interior with his organ, placed himself in a smaller and smaller space the way he always did when he was fucking, a feeling of closure and power at last descending upon him as he became closeted in the room of self and effortfully, grunting, feeling pain, little solace in it he began to grind through his orgasm almost incidental to pain and pressure and so in that way he climaxed above her, grunting little pain songs into her ear while her teeth, undiscouraged met once again in his neck with a pressure which outweighed the slender pleasure radiating from his thin organ. Almost immediately he fell off her groaning, rolled to the side. It had not been in any sense a satisfactory sexual experience but then Scop had to remember, cultivating a sense of resignation and larger purpose that pleasure had not been his intention; rather he was seeking an alteration of circumstance, a profundity which pleasure would only have cheapened. He peered cautiously at Elaine Kozciouskos. She seemed to be sleeping but he knew that she had merely fainted from the horror. He began to talk to her slowly in a monolithic, affect less tone, knowing that his words were settling into the pan of her subconscious and that in due course they would have their effect.
“He doesn’t have to die, Elaine,” Scop said, “the next time that he comes through which of course will seem to you like the first time but we won’t weary you with the complexities of that situation, the very next time he comes through if you scream warning, if you cry out you can upset the balance of the conspiracy; you can throw everyone off target. They won’t be looking for a woman to be screaming you see and all of them are in a highly nervous state.”
Elaine Kozciouskos said nothing. Nevertheless the blankness of her expression, the quiet way in which she inhaled were of themselves encouragements; it was really the first time since he had met the woman that she seemed to be placid. “You are very important,” Scop said to her soothingly, “all unwitting you control the balance of history.”
Confidential, inflamed by the significance of the knowledge he was bringing to her even if she was not Scop moved closer, wedged himself hip to hip against her somnolent form. “You can change the course of all history itself Elaine,” he said, “your cry, your commotion can misdirect the assassin’s fire and possibly save the life of the President of the United States to say nothing of future and unborn generations which but for his death would have lived. Nothing less than the fate of all mankind depends upon you; indeed it is the very universe at issue.”
