CHAPTER IV
GRASSY KNOLL: “Excuse me,” he said to Abraham Zapruder. “Might I ask you for the time?”
Zapruder shrugs, adjusts his camera, looks at his watch. “It’s noon,” he says. He is an old man, slightly dishevelled but kindly. He is here to take pictures of the motorcade which he hopes his grandchildren will enjoy. “Another few minutes,” Zapruder says, “I hope that the exposures are correct. The day is beautiful but the weather here is so treacherous and there might be cloud cover.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Scop said. “I am sure that the weather will be fine.” He shifted his stance slightly, letting his eyes roll down the thoroughfare where in the distance he thought he could hear the sound of engines but then again it might merely have been heightened apprehension. He and Zapruder after all are old friends, although they have never spoken he has studied the charts and films so closely, dug through the biographical materials with such assiduousness that he sometimes feels that he knows Zapruder more intimately than anyone with whom he has actually dealt to say nothing of the Masters. Of course he must maintain perspective on this, Scop has realized; Zapruder does not have a reciprocal sense of intimacy. For that matter Abraham Zapruder has been dead for seventy years. Carefully, sneakily, Scop inserts a finger underneath the strap holding the camera to Zapruder’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?” the old man says. He is a grandfather, a retired toy manufacturer who warms himself on pleasant fall days by planning expeditions for his grandchildren, zoos he can take them to, pictures he can bring home but nevertheless he is no fool. Alertness cascades through his attentive old eyes. “Why are you touching my strap?”
Scop withdrew his finger, cursing the devilish cleverness of the old man, uncertain now but angry within his own uncertainty. In the distance he could see the first flourishes of the motorcade which was now no more than five minutes from this point. It was time for determined measures yet Scop somehow could not summon the will.
“If you will excuse me,” Zapruder says, “you are in a position which is somewhat blocking my light. If you would be good enough to move—” He beams upon Scop, defenseless, benevolent, a grandfather whose films will be transferred down the alleys of all the decades and will someday form the Master’s justification for their hideous and illegal acts. “I wish to get set up,” Zapruder says, “if you will merely—”
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.