PART FOUR


CHAPTER I

DREAMT AS IF IN CUNNING AND POWER: Lee Harvey Osborn (1934–1963) has a dream and in that dream he has killed the President of the United States of America. The course of history has been changed enormously: seventy-seven years later the consequences of his action are still being examined, still being enacted in the common lives of six billion citizens of the Greater and Lesser Earths but in the dream Osborn has no time to consider such large matters; he is in desperate flight. He has not wanted to kill the President or then again he has, it is difficult to disentangle his motives; it is even possible that he hasnot killed the President but has merely come to this flight through an excess of desire . . . but be that as it may as he flees through the alleys and motion picture theaters, the bars and buses of this large American metropolis of the predynastic epoch his thoughts are cluttered with images of the gallows and electricity, slow evisceration and constant pain. He has not wanted it to happen in this way. If he had to do it all over again it would be different.

But in the dream there is no returning; what he has done is irrevocable. Even as he mumbles and twitches on his miserable pallet in an Army barracks dreaming not only of this but of the novel that he will someday write . . . even as he retreats against the edges of the dream, it coalesces, becomes sharper and now in the abscesses of a motion picture theater he thinks he sees a nest of patrolmen in the outer lobby, prowling in, cutting open the darkness with lights like knives looking for him. There are very few people in this theater; there cannot be more than twenty altogether what with it being a Friday afternoon and the President’s visit having brought the whole city to curbside or its television sets, that part of the city which does not work that is to say. Lee Harvey Osborn is also unemployed; sometimes he is quite bitter about this and at other times he is not knowing that his is a much greater destiny than ordinary employment in an obscure office or factory but what controls him now more than anything else is fear, the fear that the patrolmen will find him.

He does not know exactly why he is so frightened. In the dream he has killed the President of the United States of America and that is certainly reason for him to be sought but he is also outside of the dream in a simultaneity of conviction and here he knows that he has no more to do with the police, then, than anyone else within these walls. But the dream is peculiar and gelat­inous, it drapes around him like a garment which he both is and is not wearing and he decides, finally, that the fear must take precedence, it is the fear with which he must deal since it is possible, at least possible that he is the man they are seeking . . . and slowly, slowly he arcs himself out of the seat, stumbles past a fat old man clutching himself so quietly in the darkness and into an aisle. He will try to leave the theater as inconspicuously as pos­sible. He will leave the theater and return to his bedroom and there, silent and alone, he will try to work out these difficulties in his mind.

Lately something has been happening to his mind. He does not seem to be thinking with the same clarity and insight which he used to muster, his thoughts seem jumbled and strange to him (the dream is part of that disturbance) and hypochondriacal to the last moment Osborn believes that he may have a brain tumor, something terrible and inoperable which is eating away at the corners of his cerebrum and will soon tap the gross motor at which time he will be dead. He will not see a doctor because he cannot bear to have these fears confirmed; it would be far better to die, to be eaten away, to perish from the center than to sit in an office across from a man who would lay out for him the fact of his own death. He is almost at the door toward the lobby, his undershirt coming against him in tight, streaked blotches where he has sweated it through when the lights in the theater go on, all of them, hit by some master switch and in the glare he finds himself facing a patrolman; the next thing he knows he is braced up against a wall facing the drawn gun and other police are coming in from the sides. Their faces are angry and yet unyielding; he feels that he has never seen such faces before and as he confronts them, as in that continuing silence they bear down he realizes that he has never been so frightened. He tries to speak but he cannot. “You son of a bitch,” the nearest patrolman says, “you son of a bitch, we’ve got you. We’ve got you now.” He reaches out and slashes Osborn across the face with the back of his hand. His condition is such that he does not even feel the pain, only a greater panic.

“Don’t kill him,” someone says, “don’t hurt him bad, just take him in; we’ve got all the time in the world to deal with him later,” and they close in nodding; feeling their hands on him, the whisk and stutter of their grasp Osborn decides then that he has had enough of the dream, it is a bad dream, one he does not wish to continue and he tries to vault himself out of itbuthecannotdoit ; he cannot escape the parameters of the vision embracing him and so, struggling, he submits but submission is not easy either; they seem no more willing to accept his collapse than they were his struggle. Humiliation is in the transversal of their hands as they put them upon him; humiliation also in the way that their eyes seem suddenly and terribly knowledgeable as they come in closer, putting handcuffs on him, their fingers beating at him. Again and again he tries to will himself out of the dream like a man trying to batter his way through an orgasm that will not occur, that the very motions deaden; again and again he tells himself that this cannot be happening, that all of these events come from within his own skull but as he tries again to heave himself out of that lobby, as he tries repeatedly to either leap or go under the dream so that he is back again in his bed the first outlines of understanding begin to appear to him as if in the daz­zle of fluorescence through which they take him to the waiting car. He wanted to do it, that is what he sees; whether or not these events are really happening they partake of what must have been his real desire to become the Killer of the King and he finds this insight so shocking and yet so absolutely correct, such an utter confirmation of what he must have long known about himself that he gasps, inhales, shudders in their grasp and that is the way they put him into the car and so he is taken away from there and toward the police station where in due course he will find the true and final explanation of what he has become.