“I did not. I couldn’t—”
“But you did,” she says, “I wouldn’t have been here otherwise. Come on. Let’s have sex.”
“What?”
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? That’s what you called me here for. I don’t care. It’s all the same to me whether you do it or not so you might as well take advantage. You lecherous fool,” she adds with a little wink. “You can’t change the way in which we live so at least you should be able to change the level of sperm in your vesicles. Don’t you agree?” she says. He has never seen her so devilish. Indeed, she is a woman in her late forties, early fifties, hardly sensual, at least as he recalls her from the circumstances of meeting on the Grassy Knoll yet she seems to be absolutely inflamed now with passion. “What the hell,” she says, “come on and do it. Don’t you think that the symbolism of the gardens is just a little bit transparent? That’s what has been on your mind from the first you know.”
“Get away from me,” he says as she seems to advance upon him, her palms extended, “get away from me right now. I mean it.”
“Ah,” she says and hooks her arms around him, draws him in, places her lips against his forehead to give him a long if not sensual kiss in that spot, “don’t run away from it. It’s hopeless and besides you know it’s always what you wanted.”
“It isn’t what I wanted.”
“It isn’t?” she says. She draws back. “Then why are you here?”
It is too complicated and wearying for him to explain why he is here. He is not even sure that the explanation would hold together. “No,” he says. He considers possibilities of flight staring in the distance which dazzles over her left shoulder. Swift calculations almost musical in their regularity, their order, the way in which they blend together assault him. “No,” he says again. He crouches in a sprinter’s stance. He thrusts himself forward on perilous feet. He flees.
Brushed away by the force of his spring Elaine Kozciouskos stands on the path wiping at her skirt, shouting now with humiliation. He cannot see her but since this is a dream he can see her very well. She waves at him and screams through the flowers. She curses him. He has never heard a woman curse like this before even at the Games. He is immersed in spangles of daffodils.
CHAPTER XIV
TOWARD A HIGHER AND MORE LASTING JUSTICE: Bitter, he is taken before the Temporal Court. Eight solemn old men in the special robes of their office sit above him and confer with one another by passing notes as Scop stands far below in the dock, looking down after that first swift glance at their faces. He cannot deal with them. He knows his failure. It is burnt within him. Later on he knows he will have to deal with the auditors but for the moment they have left him alone and he needs this isolation; quietly, bitterly, he reviews all the events in the long chain of his failure coming to the present time and his humiliation. “I wanted to change worlds,” he mutters but this does not give him satisfaction. “I wanted to make this all different, shift the way in which people regarded their lives,” but this as well does not matter. There is no efficacy in his voice, no power in his monologue, it is as if the very authority of self has drained from him at some point: maybe at the Games, maybe during one of the rapes, maybe even when little Abraham Zapruder confronted Scop and told him that he was wrong. Who is to say? It does not matter. You go into the machine, you do the best that you can and if at the end of it it has come to this . . . well then, at least one has made an effort. He made an effort to change. This does not comfort him either. In just a moment, Scop knows, he will disappear into this self-pity in which he is wallowing and never be heard of again, hear nothing himself. He does not want this. For one thing he has an enormous curiosity about the verdict. What will they say? What do they really think of him as measured through their judgement? He can hardly wait to find out.
The head of the temporals rises. He is not head by virtue of seniority but by election; nevertheless he sits at the extreme left being the junior member of the court and otherwise exposed to small indignities imposed by the hierarchical framework. Twenty-forty is full of little inconsistencies and mysteries like this; they do not concern Scop. They are not worthy of his rage. He always felt that his rage had to be saved for the higher, deeper, finer, more important things such as being on the Grassy Knoll. The head of the court clears his throat, shakes his head, allows his little fingers to play with papers on his desk. At length, in a mild, almost apologetic tone he pronounces Scop guilty. Scop is guilty of all counts of unauthorized realteration of circumstance. He is sentenced to obliteration to be conducted in due course.
Immediately Scop is on his feet. He is not really surprised by the verdict he finds; he must have anticipated it as this a long time ago. It could have been in no other way. “May I address the court,” he says. “I would like to make a statement.”
“You have tampered with the very fabric of our contemporaneity,” the head of the court says. His hands are little blotches against the paper, his voice a mild, reedy mumble against the sound of the huge generators which power the autonomous environment of the court. His eyes however are huge and round, it must be the compelling aspect of those eyes, beckoning and deep which made the other members feel that here indeed would be a proper chairman. “By attempting to juggle with the constants you have menaced the lives of everyman, woman and child of the planet, not only that but you have ransomed the unborn to your monstrous, megalomaniacal—” He trails off into vagueness, shaking his head, brings his palms together. “It is a terrible calamity,” he says and sits down.
“I would like to address the court,” Scop says. “I have some prepared remarks.”
“I am quite afraid,” the senior member, a huge old man at the center says, “that statements are not permitted at this time and in this fashion. You will have an opportunity later.”
“I want it now. Each of us, everyone of us are being held hostage not to the future but to a brutal mindless past, a past which if the truth itself but be known is the outcome of a criminal conspiracy—”
“No,” the senior member says, “no, I’m afraid that we cannot tolerate this at this time and you must be evicted.” Scop feels attendants, unseen, but enormous, seize his elbows. “Everything in its place,” the senior member points out, “and you will have ample opportunity to make your final statement after you are disposed of. After you are disposed of,” he says again and laughs although whether it is from his own humor or merely a random spasm Scop cannot tell. It probably does not matter. “You cannot change the past,” the senior member says. “You cannot change the past,” the others agree. Their unison is ragged but effective. Scop is speeded out.
His last thought as they take him to freeze him in stasis for a hundred thousand years while they decide what is to be done with him forever or leave that decision to future generations, his last thought is that although they are unreasonable they are not unkind. Perhaps that was what he should have understood from the beginning. They are not unkind. They may have wanted it to be this way but they too have had no choice. He is vaulted through doors. Wood collides with his features. He is taken to a different place. For a while there is immersion and sorrow but after a time there is the immersion only.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
ELAINE KOZCIOUSKOS: Disguise is not easy. The old features will show up no matter how cunning the plasticine; I know this and know too that to live in mask is to live as a child, convinced that the motions of flight are in themselves concealment. They are not. One learns this and many other things as one grows older.
One must always be the same and those who would know you in one way will know you another. Nevertheless when I am called in and ordered to the Grassy Knoll where I will impersonate a tourist I do not have the will to resist. They promise me that the disguise will be strong, that Scop himself will be mesmerized by the cunning alteration. How am I to tell them that a long time ago Scop and I were lovers and that even if the face conceals the body will, bit by bit, yield its familiar messages? I cannot of course. Our relationship was illicit; confession would be utterly destructive. Beyond that, I have no choice. My gradient does not allow me refusal; a fact of which they are all too aware.
So I tell them I will go and they say that they are satisfied. They are always satisfied in agreement; that is all they have ever sought from the beginning. Not submission, not unending power, not total control . . . merely the agreement of those they consider their subjects to a direct proposal. This is little enough; I would hardly oppose them even if Scop and I had been lovers. I did not care for him a great deal. Our relationship was one which came out of pain and which ended in perceived hopelessness. Listening to them talk to me it is possible to feel that he may have forgotten my body. Only the administrators in themselves matter, I think. Only they are imperishable.
We are not. Certainly the flesh is mortal; a discovery which must be made when one has reached my stage of life. I do not deny it. Nevertheless, willing to go on for all of my mortality, I take myself to the Grassy Knoll in the most intricate plasticene and given the superficial characteristics of a tourist of this time I blend among the rest of them so easily that it is hard for me to be aware, so deep do I find myself in the role, that the man talking to me in an impassioned way is Scop until suddenly I am hurtled behind the bushes and he begins to shout at me in his strange cracked voice. “Now,” he is saying, “you must return with me now.”
I shrug, trying to preserve my composure. This is what was urged from the first, that I do not betray emotional distress of a primary nature. Most of my panic can be masked as the understandable terror which a tourist of this time would feel being dragged off by an individual such as Scop. Have I said that he is extremely unstable and presents a bizarre appearance? I do not think that I have made this clear but it is so and the temporal garb of course makes him appear even less rational. Scop is not an unattractive person in some of his moods and given real understanding and patience can respond in a convincing imitation of sanity but there is little question but that to most of us, let alone tourists of the nineteen-sixties he is a preposterous and menacing figure. “Please leave me alone,” I say. I think that I have also neglected to mention that another woman standing next to me who Scop has misidentified as being my companion has been knocked unconscious and left in place by one stirring and lunatically energetic blow. Haste, Scop had once confided to me in bed-conversation, makes waste but one would hardly know that he believes this from his conduct at the Knoll. “Away with me,” he says, wrapping an arm around me in a close, trembling embrace and I feel the little ridges of his body trembling. People are not looking at us but instead are fixated upon the approaching motorcade which by all calculations is no more than five minutes distant. They must be forgiven for they know not what they do, etc., I think, and let out a low, piercing shriek, not because I am in terror because things are going exactly as I was advised, but simply to encourage Scop into believing that he has control of the situation. I am acting as Elaine Kozciouskos would in this situation. He does not, in embrace, recognize my body. “Now,” he says, and hurtles me into the machine.
“No,” I say, “no,” but of course he has joined me and we are already plunging out of time, toward what I take to be the objective present. Jammed against one another in the enclosure, barely able to fend buttocks from one another there is a horrid intimacy underlying the mutual antagonism; I am seized with the urge to reach out, touch him by the elbow and confide my true identity to say nothing of the plans of the Temporals. It would make us collaborators. But their choice was sound; I could no more establish communion with Scop than I could sincerely beg for release on the Knoll; what happened between us happened a long time ago and now we must be enemies. We are spat out of the enclosure and I find myself in his detestable cubicle. He stumbles out behind me, pulls the door closed, urges me toward the bed. “Now,” he says, “we are going to do it now.” His eyes are glazed with familiar urgency. His hands began to slash at me, little hammers undoing my clothing. “Now,” he says. He is overcome by the urge to copulate. I am told that this would be so, that this is exactly the effect that his plans would have upon him, still it is surprising. I have never seen him this way. Scop was not a passionate man. Our relationship was not characterized by physical passion. It interlocked on other levels. “Come here, you bitch,” he says when I am naked. “Get under me now.” His face is alight with necessity; truly he is transfigured. It is curiosity as much as duty that causes me to slide rapidly beneath him. I cannot wait to see if there is any change in his performance.
There is not any change in his performance but I do not wish to engage in graphic description. There is no need to dwell upon aspects of the sexual act; they are boring and monolithic the Temporals assure me and the functions of generation have nothing to do with the personality. They offer no insight. They are merely impressed in a kind of universality upon all of us. If purposes were to be served by description of what it is like to copulate under adverse circumstances I would put them down because I am unswerving in my verbal honesty (this is another reason I was chosen) but it is not. In addition, the temporals are embarrassed as well they should be by explicit description of sexual congress. They yearn for it themselves yet it is all behind them. I would not wish to give them pain and will in fact strike these passages when the report is handed on.
After we are done he rolls from me, stares at the ceiling mumbling.Tristesse . He sighs heavily as if about to speak, then grumbles quietly and says nothing, waits, starts to sigh again, actually turns toward me with his mouth open and then turns away, shaking his head as if in disgust.
Has he deduced my identity? In the penetration of my body has he learned who I am? Impossible and yet it might be. There is little to be done about this of course. If he knows, he knows; it cannot be changed. I simulate a terrified patience and wait him out. Eventually he will speak. The ways of the Temporals are devious I think: how is my smuggled relationship with him going to misdirect Scop from what seems to be a very careful and well thought out scheme to put the Temporals out of business? What do they have in mind? Or then again do they have nothing in mind and are the reports about the Temporals true at the core, that is that they do not know anything that is going on, that circumstances are utterly out of their control? “I bet you’re frightened,” Scop says.
I do not think that this requires an answer. Haste to verify would implicate on a different level. So I say nothing.
“Are you frightened?”
I shrug, not an easy gesture while lying on one’s back. My breasts bobble. They are the plasticene breasts of a fifty-year-old woman; do I dare to say that he has found them attractive? I inspect them without interest in the work of technicians. “Of course I’m frightened.”
“Do you know where you are?”
He will not catch me that way. “Of course not,” I say.
“Or what has happened?”
“No again.”
He groans, moves on the bed, then abandons that slight collision of thighs which had lent warmth to our conversation. “Your President was killed not ten minutes after you were abducted.”
“Really?” I say keeping my voice level. Absence of affect, I have been advised, will work every time. Denial is a stress-reaction; it need never be questioned. “That’s hard to believe.”
