“Don’t be ridiculous,” Robert Kennedy said and closed his eyes again. “None of this is happening. You’re not really here.”
“Nevertheless,” he said and found a more comfortable position against a wall, crossing his legs, leaning into the bare, burnt surfaces of the wall, “whether I’m here or not there is an obligation upon you to accept the found reality. Isn’t that one of the subjects of your many fine campaign speeches: the need to deal with reality, to live in the real world? Anyway,” Scop added, “no one will ever know whether I’m here or not, the room isn’t tapped, you’re in complete privacy. Indulge yourself. Act as if I was here. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is within me,” Robert Kennedy said, “within my sanity I mean to say,” but his face seemed quizzical and interested, the famous political candidate and historical personage seemed barely able to restrain his curiosity and ironic involvement in all around him, try as he might. This encouraged Scop. “What are you doing here anyway?” Robert Kennedy said.
“I’m waiting for you to quote Aeschleyus. It’s a very profound and inspiring quotation.”
“See Sorenson.”
“I don’t want to see Sorenson, I want to see you. You’re the one who speaks these things, it’s a matter of complete indifference to me who may look it up. Come on,” Scop said, “think of me as a time traveler from the future. Imagine a future in which time travel has been developed by private technology at enormous expense so that certain privileged scholars and members of the aristocracy can bear direct witness to fabulous people and events. Think of what it might have cost me to come here and indulge me.”
“Is that true? You do come from the future? Are you a time traveler?”
“That’s neither here nor there. I said, imagine that this is the case.”
“Did I win this election?”
“Come now,” Scop said, moved by the cleverness of Robert Kennedy; none of that cunning indicated by the historical texts appeared to have been manufactured. “If I were what I represented to be, you can imagine that divulging information of the kind you ask for would be the most serious crime we would commit. The future is the product of the past; we change the past at our peril for no matter how unsatisfactory it may have been without it we would not have been here at all. I can give you absolutely no information at all which would risk changing the past.”
Kennedy stretched on the bed, looked away from Scop, looked at the ceiling again. “I’ll keep it to myself,” he said. “It’s just a matter of curiosity. What harm could it do to tell me?”
“If I told you you did not succeed you might abandon the campaign now which would lead to changes of a different sort. If I told you that youdid your attitude might change which in turn would change that of others.”
“But either way the future would not change.”
“I will not,” Scop said, “I will not under any circumstances get into the laws of temporal paradox. We simply will not discuss that.” He looked at Robert Kennedy, admiring him. Unquestionably much of what had survived about him to Scop’s time was true; the man simply had an unusual shrewdness, an acuity and sense of self-definition which was lacking in Scop’s rather miserable and self-indulgent era. It would have all been different, he thought, all would have been different indeed if people of this quality were existing in twenty-forty; different conditions would have fully applied . . . whya Scop himself might not have been necessary. Of course that is not the case now: he realized that such thoughts must be put out of his mind. “You want to give me that quote?” he said, “I really would like to hear it.”
Kennedy shook his head. “No,” he said. “Definitelynot. I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here or exactly what the sense of all of this is supposed to be but one thing is for sure, I’m not going to be an exhibition for you. I would suggest that you leave.”
“I agree with you. Still, I’ve come here at such enormous risk and inconvenience that I’d hate to just give it up without staying as long as possible.”
“Suit yourself,” Kennedy said. He flexed on the bed, closed his eyes. “Just don’t bother me if you would. I’d like to get a little rest.”
This seemed to complete the issue. Kennedy seemed to fall into a deep and even slumber, the sound of his breathing large and rhythmic in the room, paying no further regard to Scop at all. It was obvious that whether or not Kennedy paid credence to his presence there would certainly be no further discussion with him: the man was sealed into his subjectivity, a subjectivity whose rational dimensions (Scop suspected) would not admit any province of the imagination which this interview would signify. Scop wandered around the hotel room for a little while, trying to pick up from it, from the sleeping form on the bed some indications of the temper of the man, some sense of the personna which would grant him connection but there was none. It was always very difficult for him to establish a relationship with one who was sleeping or otherwise unconscious or dead; all three applied in the case of Robert Kennedy. Moving over to the bed, standing poised, then, above the man Scop had a vision and in that vision he descended upon Robert Kennedy with hands grown ferocious and enormous through need and tore his throat, beat him severely around the temples until he was dead and the need to do it was momentarily palpable, Scop could feel it stalking within him. He could kill the man. He could do this. No one would believe that he was he and when it was over it would all have been for the best anyway because Kennedy was going to die. Kennedy was doomed; whether he died by bullet or by slaughter in his bed his death would be just as absolute as would the world which pivoted from that circumstance.
He could have done it. In fact, Scop leaned forward, thrust out his hands in a rigid, militaristic gesture to do just that, to begin the slaughter and evisceration of Robert Kennedy. But as his hands moved down, as he felt the rhythms of attack falling upon him something stronger than desire came up against him and he stopped in mid-gesture paralyzed, at attention, searching the walls of the room as if for indication of some exterior force that had restrained him, nothing to be seen within the walls but he could perceive it within him nevertheless. He could not murder. He could not do this. There were seemingly limits even to his voyage, his condition: he could not perpetrate. All that he could seek was the obliteration of circumstance, not its renewal. Rape was different, to be sure.
Scop moved away from the bed. Pain like tears moves within the skull of memory. He crouches. He does not want to weep. He waits for the machine to take him out of here. The process is not instantaneous. He weeps.
CHAPTER XII
SLAUGHTERHOUSE: To reassure him of the rightness of his mission—he has stinging doubts, he is not entirely obsessed, every so often Scop thinks that he may be mad and his evaluation of society based upon idiosyncratic perception, not some absolute truth—Scop goes to the Slaughter Games, taking a rear bench high in the stadium in the unreserved section, a place where hopefully he may sink amidst the crowd and be unnoticed. It would not be worthwhile for him to be discovered at this juncture. The unreserved section in which he sits is filled with the Mob: the lowest and crudest elements of the society are here, creatures so brutalized and broken by the poverty of their lives that they do little more than growl at one another while they stare at the Games and then occasionally in a fit of transferred lust turn upon one another and regardless of sexual identity begin to mime the gruesome motions of copulation on the hard planks. The state guards look at all of this without interest, only there to make sure that the disorder does not spill over the gates and into the upper class sections where the responses if no less savage are at least somewhat controlled. No one pays any attention to Scop as he finds a small space on the long, crowded bench, everyone’s attention is fixated upon the arena itself where several Reds and Whites are attacking one another with iron implements, the sounds of impact picked up by the on-field microphones, reverberating hugely from the speakers lined around the stadium. Fifteen or twenty Reds are down to only five of the Whites and the Reds are beginning to lose formation; there is little strategic interest in what will happen now but of course the battle, which is merely a preliminary, must go on to the conclusion. The crowd is not discomfited, only slightly bored by the failure of the Reds to make a better showing and now and then someone in the section faints or succumbs to a quiet, subterranean blow which caves him or her across the bench: only then do the guards become active and take out the struggling form. Scop takes a small bag of candy from his pocket and begins to chew on it absently while he stares at the field.
It is a terrible spectacle, of course. The Slaughter Games are only thirty years old and the formal league arrangements trace back barely a decade but the way in which they have seized upon the imagination to say nothing of the social structure of the populace is to Scop the clearest indication of how dreadfully far the society has run down, how feeling has become obliterated: now only mass murder within the superficial framework of the game format can be said to serve mass emotion. But there is no time for speculations of this sort; rather he finds himself riveted to the field where the advantage of the Whites is now being pressed to the point where the formation of the Reds has completely broken; they scatter on the grass, some of them in open flight, a few others making a last dismal effort to hold ground and to at least die bravely . . . but there is nothing to be done about it, the ground cannot be held nor is there any possibility of bravery when the Whites overflow and from the speakers comes the full resonating sound of heavy blows. A Red is decapitated, another is beaten to death by a gang of five Whites and as the last, stricken Reds now in full retreat try desperately to reach the safe area circumscribed outside of the grass the Whites set upon them . . . and Scop can take no more. He looks down at his feet. There are limits to his capacity to absorb this; he does not think that he is as cruel as most of the spectators at the games and has always felt that it is a certain sensitivity to this kind of brutality which marks him as finer and better than most of them; that it is in fact this loathing of the sadism of the games which has sent him upon his desperate attempt, the Masters to be damned, to change the past so that the present may live again.
Thatthepresentmayliveagain. It is a good phrase, it is indeed one which could become the slogan of his quest itself and he meditates upon it as he stares at his feet. In just a little while he will bring himself to a standing position, lurch out of the stadium. He has seen all that he needs to; has verified his relative humanity in relation to the barbarism of his times and now he may leave but he will just stay for a few moments if he might; standing is such an effort, fighting his way through the throngs who are now screaming for the next round to begin is such a difficult thing to do. Indeed, his companions in these stands are gone mad now with the excitement of the games, they seem to have lost all rationality, any measure of responsibility has been drained from them and looking at them with pity and disgust Scop feels again his distance from the madness and the crowds, the obsession and desires of the culture in which he is trapped. He must be an artifact. He must be some remnant from an earlier, gentler age, that is all he can say because he is totally revolted by the spectacle he is glimpsing and cannot bear to examine the true nature of a culture which could give rise to such spectacle.
Still, he cannot move. Sense tells him to move, also desire and yet he cannot urge himself from the seat. The point is that the games are kind of fascinating, the attitudes of the crowd compelling. The way in which the spectators and various lowlife surrounding him refuse to respond to one another, how their only relationships seem to be identificatory ones with the gladiators is distressing and yet to Scop enriching as well: they may have discovered the secret. The secret is to deny relationships other than abstract, externalized focus. The last Reds have now stumbled from the field and a new troupe comes out, Blacks and Greys this time Scop notices, taller, stronger, more richly attired contestants than those they have succeeded. The Blacks and Greys are, of course, the concluding event on the first part of the program and it would be senseless for him to leave at this point. The program is close enough to intermission; he can leave quietly at that time in the throngs without making an issue of himself as he would, of course, if he were to leave now. It is a strange manner of spectator who would leave the Games just before the concluding event and the Blacks and Greys come very highly recommended; Scop knows from third-hand information if not from direct access (he never reads about the Games or attends them ordinarily) that these teams are among the leaders of the First Division and their contest will decide the standings for the mid-season. Why should he leave now?
Of course he finds the Games repulsive; that is not the point. He does not have to leave to establish his distance from the spectacle, he thinks; he is hardly so uncertain, hardly has such a tenuous grip on his revulsion that he must flee the area. He can test his resolve by witnessing them and not being moved, he thinks. He does not have any ambivalence about his revulsion; he can expose it to the utter fury of the contest and have it remain as it was. But as the teams meet on the field for brief conference, their heads bowing then in the mandatory prayer and exercises of reemission, as he feels an uncharacteristic excitement begin to spread through him, working its way from thighs which seem to blend into his loins with a kind of mutual, aqueous excitement Scop wonders if this is quite the truth. Perhaps the Games are more important to him than he has ever admitted. He is not a creature who can stand apart from his culture; everyone, even the calmest and most dispassionate researcher is the creation of his cultural ambience and essentially falls within that culture. Can he comment upon it? Can he really stand aside? Damned if Scop knows, he thinks; the Blacks and Greys, deep in conference now, settling the preliminary exclusions do not seem to know either. It occurs to Scop that he really can make no more of an objective judgement on his culture than can these participants themselves; all of them are trapped within the eddying cycles and consequence and so for that matter are these spectators, his fellows for all his disgust: all of them are bound by the spectacle of the Games.
Something lurches within Scop. He is not as strong as he thought after all. He is not as capable as he might have suspected of using these games in the way that they should, as an object of proof. Quite to the contrary. He stands, discombobulated by small breezes, feeling nauseous in the dry air of the stadium. Spectators begin to shout at him. Scop turns, stumbles toward the end of the planking, the shouts rising. He is obstructing view. The formation breaks and the Blacks and Greys return to their separate sides of the playing area. Someone is going to get killed out there. They all are going to get killed out there; in a contest between teams as skilled as these at this stage of the season, as evenly matched as they are some ninety percent of the participants in a given game do not survive. Nor is it important that they survive; all of the continuity of the teams is in their programming and administrative personnel. Scop knows that he should not be concerned about this: the participants are willing, well paid, heavily insured, facing short, brutish lives anyway; to be a Black or Grey, even to be a Red or White is to incur more nobility than they would ever otherwise find. Someone kicks him heavily in the calves and Scop falls to his knees across the next row of spectators, his arms flailing. People curse at him but not in a language which he understands. He wants to explain to them that this is not his fault, that the accident was precipitated by others, that he would never on his own have done anything like this but he cannot seem to frame the words. He is falling. On the field the Blacks and the Greys approach one another, the speakers amplifying and nicely transmit the sound of their threats. He hears them full like birds in the air. He is falling. Falling.
CHAPTER XIII
REALITY AS THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NEED: He dreams that he was able, somehow, on the Grassy Knoll to deflect the bullet, the angle, the windage factor of the riflist, the aim of Zapruder’s camera; he dreams that he was able somehow to call off murder and now he is back in the arena where the slaughter games would be conducted . . . but there are no slaughter games, never were, the field took an entirely different plan and is now filled with flowers. He strolls among them, aisles and sculpturings of plants, admiring the huge constructions which loom at him at the end of corridors: enormous flowers shaped like bells, their stems like handles on precious artifacts. He is overwhelmed by the beauty of these gardens, particularly since there has been nothing like them in the twenty-forty he knows. He reaches out, takes a large purple flower shaped like a bowl, grasps it by its curiously pendant stalk and twists it off roughly to sniff at it. Thick vapors curl back at his senses, their odor curiously penetrating and grasping him with smells that seem to carry him into the vault of memory: other times other connections. Perhaps he is overreacting to the aspect of these gardens but then again there is no question as to the reality of his sentiment: never has he seen anything quite so beautiful as this or then again he is peculiarly conscious—how could he not be conscious—that he is undoubtedly dreaming.
Nevertheless, Scop continues to wander through the gardens, following a single, circuitous path that takes him through sprigs of displays to a deeper, shadowed portion where behind gates he can see large blooming roses, beyond the roses he can see the trunks of dwarf trees, perfectly formed from the ground to the branches, then strangely misshapen. Leaning against the gate, taking the hard iron into his palms as he might caress a woman’s breasts he tries to look into the trees, tries to reach through the gates and merge with their stately, unmoving corporeality in the strange windlessness but the gate does not shift under his hands, his aspect does not quicken or change; he can get no closer, then, to the trees then he is now. After a very long time he allows his hands, one by one, to slide from the gate and turns on the path to wander back the way he came.
He tires now of his isolation, of the strange peace of these gardens. As the demonstration of a world unmade they are moving but sheer symbol has never been able to affect Scop deeply; what he needs is activity, some sense of dramatic heightening which will bring the gardens into closer alignment with his own thoughts, murky as they maybe . . . but there is no one. He feels the surfaces of the dream then beginning to clamp upon him, annoyingly tight and confining in what is, after all, merely an impression of reality and he would like to awaken; he does in fact struggle through the motions of waking, turning in place on the path, waiting for the giant hand of consciousness to reach through the dim bowl of sky and take him out of this, the lesson of the gardens already known, on then to other things . . . but nothing happens. No hand descends to yank him away. Indeed, he feels more deeply within the dream than ever, the gardens shimmer, reassemble in colors even brighter. A little breeze begins to churn against his face and with it comes the first odors of putrefecation as if the flowers were blooming not petals but little excrudescence of dead flesh. The air tickles his lungs. He feels as if he is about to vomit.
Further down the path, trudging back from its winding departure into a little abscess of magnolias comes Elaine Kozciouskos. What she is doing in these gardens; exactly what the symbolism of her appearance in his dream might be Scop does not know but as she raises her head, sees him, begins to react he finds himself seized with a dread that has nothing to do with the putrefying odors, ever stronger in his nostrils. He is not sure exactly what he fears but it has something to do with her turning upon him, with her running away. Here, more than ever before, he wants her good opinion. This is the world which, in part, he has created for her; he cannot deal with the possibility that even in these places she would turn from him in disgust. “Hello,” he says, weakly raising a hand. “Hello, Elaine.” He has never used her name before. It must signal a new relationship between the two of them. Maybe not. “Hello Elaine,” he says again. “How are you? Where have you been?”
“You fool,” she says to him. She lifts her face. Her eyes are luminescent; absolutely excited in a way which he has only associated before this with sexual passion. “You stupid damned fool.”
“Me?”
“Of course,” she says. “You thought that you could change the future and you can’t even change the past.”
“I don’t want to discuss that Elaine,” he says. Somehow he had not imagined himself in dialogue with her; at the corner of his consciousness, in some pocket of the mind when he first saw her, he admits that there might have been a thought of sex, some hint of coupling beneath a sprig of tulips he can just see at the left peripheral vision, a bow of them strung between two bushes . . . but thoughts of fornication have certainly dwindled; it is hard for him to think of such things when she is being accused of stupidity. He does not think that this is an abnormal reaction. Still, her features are so dusted with light that it might be need which informs them. “Oh you fool,” she says again, “do you think that life is a garden?”
“It could have been. It could be yet.”
“Nothing,” she says, “it could have been nothing,” and stretches out her arms toward him, in the very heavy symbolic overcast of the dream it is as if clouds gather around her fingertips although this would be climatologically impossible even in the very advanced technology of twenty-forty. “The past is immutable, you see,” she says, “all that you can do by going back and meddling with it is to make it occur over and again in different guises. But of course,” she says, her face changing expression, a strange wink spreading a cast over one eye as her hands sink to the level of her waist now cupped gracefully, “if you want to do it you may. No one can stop you. It’s your life. All that you’ll do is discover and rediscover this on your own and no one ever can make you see that until you see it yourself. You didn’t have to take me from Grassy Knoll,” she says, “that wasn’t necessary at all. I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have done it to you.”
But Scop has now lost interest in her. He has lost interest in the dream as well, it has been superseded only by an urge to get out of it but the dream is as thick and heavy and clinging as the memory of the shots levelled one and two into the dead form of the President, the body already taking evasive action in the limousine, swinging off-angle at cross-purposes to itself as it hit the purposeless cushion, the head rolling, limbs lolling, the face already kneaded into that high parody of itself which is always known by the dead, the sound of the sirens as they went through Dealey Plaza with the thrill that the ruined blood must have crept into the assassin’s Joins. “Get away from me,” he says to her, “I don’t believe in you, I don’t believe in anything. I just want you to leave me alone.”
“Why should I leave you alone? You summoned me.”
