“Is that what they call themselves? The Land People?”
“Uh-huh. I wondered, you know, if you’d like to see what it’s like.”
Somewhere inside him something flared and died, like a star going into nova. If only he could shed these feet of his. If only he could be the person who could take this perfect girl to that perfect society.
But that’s out. No way.
“I wish I could do this,” he said.
“It wouldn’t have to be right away.”
“But your friends are going soon, aren’t they?”
“Tomorrow, as a matter of fact. But we could go, you know, anytime at all. If you wanted.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, deliberately, “I’m going to have to take a small trip. More than a small trip, actually. I expect to be gone for two weeks, perhaps as long as a month.”
“When?”
“I planned to leave the day after tomorrow. I hadn’t told you because I’d been hoping something might come up to make me postpone it, but nothing has.”
“Where do you have to go?”
“Washington.”
“I could come with you. I might even be helpful. I can run errands, do research. And stay out of your way when you’re busy.”
“You tempt me. But it wouldn’t work.”
“Oh.”
He took her hand. “An idea occurs to me. Why don’t you go to the commune with your friends? The Land People? Go with your friends to the Land People.”
“I don’t want to go without you, Miles. I—”
“Let me finish. You go with them. I’ll go to Washington. I’ll take care of my business as quickly as I possibly can. I’ll know you’re at a good place, which will put my mind at ease and thus make the work go faster. Perhaps I’ll be done sooner than I think.
“In any case, I won’t be more than a month. As soon as I’ve finished I’ll find these Land People. If you’ve discovered you loathe it there, we’ll leave. If you like it, we’ll see how it suits us. The two of us, together.”
Her eyes said, Do
you mean it? All of it?
His said,
Yes.
Her face glowed and he kissed her, and his passion surprised him as it had done so often lately. “Oh, let’s make this the best ever,” she said, fitting her body to his. “How can I go a month without you? God.”
She asked the same question afterward, as she was drifting off to sleep.
“Oh, a week with the Land People and you’ll forget me.”
“I’ll always love you, Miles. Always.”
Will you, Jocelyn?
A fragment of dream awakened him. He was at an amusement-park shooting gallery, rifle in hand. Heads passed by, not the usual two-dimensional targets, but genuine heads, disembodied but nonetheless alive. Clyde Farrar, Jr., Burton Weldon, J. Lowell Drury, Emil Karnofsky, Willie Jackson, Royal Carter—an endless parade of the heads of those he had killed.
And, with no will of his own involved, he kept working the trigger, kept sending bullets into those heads. And each head turned into Jocelyn as he killed it, and each dying Jocelyn head fastened tortured eyes upon him, and yet he kept on working the trigger, kept turning head after head into Jocelyn.
He broke himself out of the dream. When his heart rate slowed, he turned to her, irrationally anxious that something had happened to her during his dream. But she slept peacefully on her side, one leg drawn up and bent at the knee. She was clutching her pillow in her sleep.
Karnofsky, too, had clutched his pillow.
She left in the afternoon, in a car with two boys and two girls. Dorn remembered them vaguely from the party. She took very little with her. Some clothing, and she would stop on the way to collect Vertigo. Her other clothing remained in Dorn’s closet, her books on his shelves, her radio on his kitchen table.
After the car was gone, and after he had given himself up to a few minutes of weeping, Dorn reviewed his performance. As far as he could determine, she had not the slightest suspicion that she would never see him again.
In Washington he took a room in a decent but no longer fashionable hotel. His room was on a high floor and he could see quite a bit of Washington from his window. He rarely availed himself of the view.
One of the first places he went in Washington was a chain drugstore, where he purchased a legal-sized pad of ruled yellow paper and several ball-point pens. He returned with his purchases to his room. There was a small writing desk. He seated himself at it, pen in hand, and stared for several minutes at the blank pad of paper.
Then he began to write.
My Jocelyn,
You hold in your hand a letter from a man you now know as the author of a heinous crime. Writing these lines, I ache at the thought of what you must now think of me. You must wonder how you could possibly have loved me. You must recoil at the realization that there was so much about me you could not begin to know.
And yet you knew me, Jocelyn, as no one had ever known me before.
Jocelyn, you know nothing of the man I have been or even of the man I am. Jocelyn, I first killed a man when I was seventeen years old. I killed him because he was a Serb and I was a Croat. At the time this seemed sufficient reason. By the time I was your age, Jocelyn, I literally could not count the men I had killed. I did not know their number.
He filled page after page in his small neat cramped hand. The words flowed of their own accord, and it was all he could do to make the pen move fast enough to get them down. When they stopped he set the pen down on the desk top and closed his eyes. His forearm throbbed all the way to the elbow. He rubbed it idly with his left hand.
After a few moments he got to his feet. He did not read what he had written, nor did he sever the filled pages from the pad. He went to the massive old dresser and, with an effort, pulled it free from the wall. He lifted the carpet where the dresser had been and placed the entire pad of yellow paper beneath it, then carefully pressed the carpet tacks back into place. Finally he returned the dresser to its original position and left the room.
No day passed without this ritual being repeated. Once every day he would shove the dresser aside and take up the pad of paper. Then he would sit at the small desk and write for as long as he had words to put down. The words did not always flow freely. Sometimes he found himself staring at the page before him for ten or twenty or thirty minutes in an effort to sort out a thought and get a sentence in its proper order. One day he wrote three short paragraphs in no time at all, then stopped abruptly, through for the day. But however much he wrote and however long it took, each day the pad of paper went back beneath the carpet, and each day the dresser was replaced over it.
When he was not writing or sleeping he moved around downtown Washington. He took several tours. On a tour of the White House his group unexpectedly encountered the President, who was then emerging from a conference with someone. The President smiled and shook hands with several members of the tour group. He did not shake hands with Dorn.
The Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were key attractions on the tours Dorn took. He visited both of them afterward, by himself. Standing close to the Washington Monument and dizzied by its height, he thought of its particular appropriateness, an absolute phallus raised in tribute to the Father of his Country.
After his visit to the Lincoln Memorial, he wrote these words on the pad of yellow paper:
Once, Jocelyn, I asked you a pair of questions. I asked you, first, whom most Americans regarded as their greatest president. Without hesitation you named Abraham Lincoln. Then I asked you who you thought was the greatest American president. You thought for a moment. “Lincoln,” you said.
There was a man named Henry Clay who never became president, his hopes notwithstanding. For a period of thirty years Henry Clay prevented the Civil War from taking place. Almost single-handedly he drafted one compromise after another. He adhered to no particular principle and made himself roundly despised as a man without principles. But for him, the South would surely have seceded at a time when the North could have done little to prevent secession.
Of course the election of Lincoln made secession inevitable, and war in turn was an inevitable consequence of secession. I often wonder what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had not been elected. Mechanical developments, such as the cotton gin, would have made slavery obsolescent as an institution in not too many years. Other causes of sectionalist rivalry might have smoothed themselves out in much the same fashion.
Perhaps not. But it hardly matters, because Abraham Lincoln was in fact elected, and the South did secede, and war followed. And the North won, and the Union was preserved.
I was at the Lincoln Memorial this morning. I looked into the marble eyes of the most sorrowful face I have ever seen. It struck me, looking into the fact of that deeply troubled man, that Booth’s bullet was an unintentional kindness.
There is no memorial to Henry Clay. I asked you once if you had heard of him. You knew the name.
One night Dorn went to a rally of the New American Patriots. The speaker was James Danton Rhodine. At the entrance to the auditorium Dorn was searched by two well-built and neatly groomed young men. Both wore the now standard royal blue shirts and khaki trousers. They were very well-mannered, and smiled as they apologized for the necessity of searching the men and women who had come to hear Rhodine.
This had become standard practice at NAP rallies ever since an unsuccessful attempt on Rhodine’s life a month earlier in San Francisco. Dorn took it for granted that this attempt had been staged. He found it increasingly difficult to believe that genuine assassination attempts ever ended in failure. It seemed as unlikely as a politically prominent person’s dying a natural death. Possible, to be sure, but not likely.
Dorn found himself paying very little attention to the speech. He amused himself at the onset by anticipating the words before they were uttered. This palled before much time had elapsed. Thereafter, he found himself paying more attention to the crowd and the Blueshirts than to Rhodine. He remained until the address was over and left the hall with I the sound of rhythmic applause ringing in his ears. He went back a to his hotel and went to sleep.
Every night, every single night, dreams woke Dorn. These dreams were rarely confined to a single language. Characters would begin a sentence in Serbo-Croat and end it in English. Then another character would respond in German or Russian. Heretofore Dorn’s dreams had always confined themselves to one language at a time.
He interpreted this new element as another sign of confusion and anxiety. It thus distressed him, as such signs must, but he could not regard it as surprising or as cause for special worry.
He rarely had a dream without Jocelyn in it. In many of the dreams she died, most often at his hands. These dreams were the worst.
He never tried to return to sleep after a dream had awakened him. Each time he would wait until calm returned. Then he would shower and shave and dress. Then he might read from a paperback anthology of English poetry. Or walk through the predawn streets. Or move the dresser and take up the pad of yellow paper and add another passage to his endless letter to Jocelyn.
He never once read over what he had written. Nor did he ever discard a page or cross out a line. There were times when he wanted to do this last, times when he felt he had made a point badly. But he had decided that everything must stand as written.
Today as I was walking back to my hotel a fire engine passed me, siren open. My first thought was of a policeman in Philadelphia who could not understand why people would throw rocks and bottles at firemen fighting a fire.
I thought next of my hotel. It is an old building, and no doubt would burn like a torch. I froze at the thought of this manuscript burning. Not that it might be discovered in the rubble but that it might simply turn into a cinder.
There would not be time to write all of this again, Jocelyn, nor do I think it likely that I would have the heart to try. I stood on the pavement and visualized a lifetime of work going up in smoke. “The work of a lifetime.” Those were the words that came to mind.
And, however grandiose they seem, I would not change them. Jocelyn, I am drowning in Washington. My whole life passes before my eyes, takes its form on these sheets of lined yellow paper.
Of course it was not this building, nor even a building very near to this one. My manuscript was not even warm to the touch.
One afternoon he bought a bag of bread crumbs and went to a park to feed pigeons. He threw out the bread crumbs in huge handfuls so that the birds would not have to fight over them. But no matter how fast he scattered the crumbs, so many more pigeons kept coming that there was not standing room for them all. They shouldered one another aside, pecked at each other, puffed themselves up.
He left the park as soon as the bag was empty, not waiting to watch them finish the crumbs.
It occurred to him from time to time that his letter to Jocelyn was similar to Penelope’s shawl. The letter would never end, and until it ended he would not do the deed which had brought him to Washington. But Penelope had unraveled each night what she had knitted during that day. Dorn did no unraveling.
One day he wrote:
You are the only person whose judgment matters the slightest to me. I have never loved anyone but you. No one else has ever truly known me. No living person but you has ever known me at all. I realize that it is not unusual for a man to care deeply about the opinion that strangers hold of him. I cannot understand why this is true. I know that it is not true of me.
Perhaps I ought to be tempted by the thought that History will vindicate me. But in the first place I doubt that History’s judgment will be kind, and in the second place I do not care in the slightest whether it is. The Judgment of History! The phrase itself is a joke, a contradiction in terms. History has no judgment. History is all blind men and elephants. Not a one of us, Jocelyn, knows much more than a very little about the peripheral facts of our own small lives. Yet History, removed in time and place, presumes to judge. The perspective of History is that special perspective afforded by a glance through the wrong end of a telescope. No man lives in History. Death is absolute.