CHAPTER VIII


I WANDERED LONELY AS A CROWD: On the Knoll after the as­sassination. Curiosity takes me here; just once it would be interest­ing to see what it is like afterward, in the part that is unrecollected. Here it is not five minutes after the car has gone away, the sirens pouring through the eaves of the city and still the crowd is here in little broken pieces, wandering over the landscape, looking for a bit of information or if not that some shared memory as to what has occurred. No one seems quite sure exactly what has happened and I would not enlighten them. They do not pay any attention to me nor I to them; it must be understood clearly that I am not part of their time nor they of mine and now that I do not in this new cycle have to be disguised in the garments of their contemporaneity that dis­junction is clear; it is impossible that I could be regarded as one of them. But my appearance is not bizarre. It has been carefully mod­ified to avoid undue distraction; the colors are soothing, the cut modest, I look very much as a proper citizen of twenty-forty should look adorned for the Games where the object is to take as little attention away from the field as possible.

There is confusion here but it is of the most modest sort; there is pain but it is well controlled. No one, after all, knows exactly what has happened.I do not know exactly what has happened although at this moment the President, of course, already dead must be in the emergency room at Parkland, the top of his skull being checked for cosmetic changes. There is very little to be done about it. Someone, taking offense at me for no reason which I can understand, casting me for an outsider, suddenly comes against me heavily, a young man in his twenties and begins to push me back against the trees, screaming. I do not know what he is trying to say but it has something to do with the man in the big white hat. The man in the big white hat is out to get him. His motions appear ferocious but have no force in them; he strikes at me with limbs like pins and his efforts to thrust me to the ground are successful only because I cooperate, because I allow myself to fold slowly from the waist and go into the grass. It is always best to cooperate. It is best to make as little of an example of oneself when traveling out of time as possible; dislocations are to be min­imized. These lessons I have absorbed well from the temporals if none other. Nevertheless, the sheer accumulation of blows begins to weary me after a time and no one from the crowd seems in­clined to help. In fact, they seem quite pleased and interested at the antics of the young man who seems to be acting on behalf of all of them. Have I, after all, managed to make myself that con­spicuous? It is a dismaying thought to say nothing of being filled with pain. “Stop it,” I say to him as he begins to kick at me, “now just stop that.”

Oddly, he does, as if the suggestion were something entirely outside of his ken; something so astonishing that it needed fuller consideration. He looks at the sky. “Why?” he says. A little spittle falls from the corner of his mouth. The crowd sighs. “Why should I stop?”

“Because your President is dead.”

“He can’t be dead; he was just here. He just rode by us in a big white car.”

“He was shot and killed,” I say, “didn’t you see that?”

He bends toward me. Like all young psycopaths he is incredibly flexible; his body conforms to laws which only his strange brain can emit. Hands on hips he says, “How did you know that?”

It occurs to me that I am not in an optimum position, sitting on the grass, giving out news of the assassination. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, kicking my legs straight out, “it might not have been that way.”

“What do you mean he was shot and killed?”

“Maybe he wasn’t,” I say. “Everybody has a different point of view on that. I might have been looking at it from a bad per­spective. Now—”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he says and kicks me. There is no power in his kick either but a weak blow with a foot is more dangerous than one with a hand. I feel little waves of anticipatory pain moving through my upper thigh and draw up my legs, reel over, crouch, haul myself into a standing position. There are forty or fifty of them in a loose circle looking at me with expressions which I cannot deduce but which do not look helpful. I realize that the converter is at a good distance from me, more than a hundred yards, tucked securely behind a bench. This was stupid; Scop always kept his converter at much closer range and now I can see exactly why. It was unwise to take this situation as frivolous. I should not have done it but who was to know what it was like in the Plaza after the assassination? For one thing no one had ever been here before. “You bitch,” the young man says and moves forward to kick me again, “tell me the truth now. Tell me how you knew that he was killed!”

I seem to be in trouble. I seem to be in some kind of trouble but all is very confused and bedazzling; perspectives alter even as I sit and the rising of sound from the circle might only be the own blood’s messages ringing distantly. I never anticipated this kind of difficulty when I came here. Scop would not have antic­ipated either, that is my only comfort. He would have been in even worse difficulty. “Now just stop it,” I say. I back away from him, three steps that carry me toward the edge of the circle. “Now there’s no reason for this at all; you know that this is ridiculous,” but my voice is carrying toward a shriek the way that it almost always does when I am tired or under pressure. “You’re not being reasonable,” I say, “how would I know that he was killed, it was just something that I was saying.”

Someone, an old man I think grabs me by the elbow, wheels me around. I look into the ravaged face which brings back mo­mentary impressions of the Robert Kennedy diorama but there is intensity as well as corruption to his gaze. “I think you ought to answer some questions,” he says, “we’re not fools here you know,” and swings me to pull me in tighter and at this I break. The situation is clearly more serious than I took it to be until a few moments ago and now I can see the risks. It might not be only the President who is slain in Dallas on this day and the implica­tions, of course, burst upon me: the alteration of history will be grievous. Everything will be changed if my death too becomes a historical fact. I push my way out of his grasp, tearing his hands from me as if they were paper claws, something seeming to tear within him as I do this and then I blunder my way past him pushing hard, falling to the grass, coming erect and just as Scop has so many times so I do it as well: run. I run.

I must make it to the converter and the advantage of my surprise start gives me at least a chance of achieving it but as I begin to work my way in clumsy winding course toward the place where the machine is hidden I can hear them behind me beginning to gather for chase. Some part of me gifted with observation and great acuity paces behind is a part of the crowd, sees them mass­ing, gathering, then coming toward me in a great overpowering rush which gathers up the slowest and weakest and sends them along with the rest, an undifferentiated mass is the phrase that I think that I am seeking, not that I am exactly “seeking” anything in this undifferentiated and terrible chase but the converter itself. Where is it? Where did I put it? Exactly why did I think that it was necessary to come back to Dallas at this time; what did I expect to find here? Well, it would be interesting to say that I was able to deal with such complicated and abstruse questions in flight but of course I did not, fear and self hatred carried me along and helped me to shut out their sounds but I became aware then of footsteps alongside me, someone drawing up to match pace and as I threw a frantic glance over the left shoulder I saw the thin and terrifying youth with which all of this had begun and I tried to run faster but no hope, no way, I was extended to my limits and not used to physical action in any case, breath coming une­venly, coursing through my lungs and burning. “Keep running,” he said to me, the words distinct, “I’ll guard you.”

“What?”

“You’ll get there,” he said, “just trust in me and don’t worry about any of this, just keep on running,” and astonishment dis­appeared into the reservoir of pain, everything sunk into the pain, all of it falling away from me as if now in the true historical past of the nineteen sixties, none of this happening now, all of it a long time ago and I could see the bulky shape of the convertor jammed against the bench where I had left it, gaping open like a mouth. This gave me heart and I extended my stride, tried with what little strength left to allow the will to enter me freely and the youth was ahead of me now, the crowd slightly behind, he dove for the convertor, flung it open. “Now,” he said and gestured but I did not need the gesture, needed it not at all; instead I plunged within, he followed me; I knew what would happen even before it did, life contained no surprises, all possibilities had con­tracted, the convertor closed, it lurched, I felt the moments of passage: turned toward him then, the youth in the converter and saw him looking at me in the dim and protected light of course: it had to be that way it could have been no other. No other.

Scop!