CHAPTER V

TAKING LEAVE: So it is time then; it is time to say farewell. Farewell before embarkation and his quest which can have only one result whatever its outcome; his death. He knows that he will die. He sacrifices himself willingly. Farewell to Elaine Kozciouskos and just one last time he appears on the Knoll to touch her, a clanging touch, her skin like brass as he comes against her and then is gone. Farewell to Dealey Plaza itself, to Abraham Zapruder and the motorcade; farewell to JFK and Lee Harvey Osborn who was only trying to stay out of the Bijou: he soars way, way above them, three hundred feet or more through the stasis device of the convertor and here they seem absolutely reduced, insignificant, roiling in their convulsions on the dead brown and green below although their pain too must matter. Farewell to the Games and he appears five hundred feet above the stadium, suspended, oddly at peace in the lift and thinks of giving a speech except that he has no amplifying devices and no one would hear him; they are too interested in what is going on below; farewell to the Masters also who were only trying to do their job, doing what they could to preserve the order that had been given them, not their fault, no one’s fault at all really that that which they occupied was unspeakable; farewell to all of them and then finally taking the convertor back for the last time to the hotel room in which he made his various preparations, drawing on his gloves, setting up and sighting the rifle, reading newspapers, eating sandwiches while waiting for the proper time, here in that hotel room past the formal goodbyes it is time for him to take leave of himself because no less than the others he must cut off his own personna. The leavetaking must be final, he realizes. In order for it to work he must divest himself of everything and that means his own identity as well. Fair is fair. Certain things are absolute. “Goodbye,” he says to himself in the hotel room, “goodbye now.”

His personna barely looks up, being otherwise occupied. “Goodbye then,” he says.

“Had to be done,” Scop says, “there was no other way; you must see that now.”

“I can’t be bothered,” his personna says, inspecting the rifle, the gleaming surfaces, shaping his hands around it, shaking it for solidity. “As you see I’ve got other things to do.”

“I just wanted to make it clear. I wanted to make it clear to you as well,”

“You’ve made everything clear. You’ve done everything that you could. Now leave.”

Scop sees that he is right. There can be no search for justi­fication; the only answers must be within himself. “All right then,” he says, “all right if that’s the way you want it,” and before his personna can look up he has whisked himself out of the room, has detached himself utterly, moved elsewhere. Perhaps taking formal leave was a mistake; perhaps he should have left the sit­uation as he found it but he has always been inclined toward sentimental gestures of this type. It may be for the best in the long run; no one can say that he did not make it clear at exactly what point he had given up. For he has given up. He has gone as far as he can within the present context, even further if he may say so (he will allow himself to say so) and now there is nothing else to do. There comes a time when history must be permitted to work out its own terrible equations, when a rational man out of a decent sense of awe will remove himself and allow that to be done. He has thrown himself into the machinery and done what he can; now it is out of his hands.

“Live,” Scop says in Dealey Plaza, “live,” he says hovering over the Games, “live,” he says to Malcolm and to Robert Kennedy and to Jack Kennedy, “live,” he says to Lee Harvey Osborn in the corridors and to King on the ledge in Memphis, “live and live,” he says and then he pushes himself to the fullest exertion, the fullest and most terrible exertion he has ever known and falls with the convertor wraps around him, the engines off, the convertor merely a shell, plunging and plunging a thousand yards beneath circumstance and as stone closes over him he knows (or at least he thinks he knows) what must happen next. And before. And over again.