CHAPTER V
THREE FORTY-FIVE ET SEQ: “Excuse me,” I say to the small man who has been pointed out to me over and over again in the scans as Abraham Zapruder, “May I have a word with you?” It is ten minutes before Scop’s materialization, twelve and a half before the motorcade comes into sight. All of this has been carefully, carefully calculated but efficiency or not all confidence seems drained as I face the man. Calculate as you may, work the machines onto the finest point of calibration, the acts will still have to be carried out by humans, the acts will still have to be lived from the inside. The machines can never, never grant us the ethos through which we must regard our condition. “It is very important,” I say. He is a shabby old man, frayed but pleasant. He is not bitter like Scop. Scop’s bitterness destroyed our relationship; even without the other factors I would have surely left him. One cannot live this way. “I must talk to you.” Rolls of film are revealed in the open pouch which dangles from his shoulder. His hands are gathered around his camera like a breast. “Please,” I say.
“What is it?”
“You must take no films,” I say. “You must take no portraits, no moving portraits.” My grasp of idiom is insecure or at least it does not have the fluidity which Scop himself has developed but it will do, it will do, my purposes at least are made clear to him in the sudden shifting of his features. “You must put the camera, put the gear away,” I say, “and you must leave here at once.”
“Leave here?”
“It’s the only way,” I say, “if you are here you are going to be implicated. Believe me,” I say passionately, finding a level of feeling that I have never entertained in these exercises before, “Nothing, nothing will come out of your portraits but shame, disaster, the confirmation of breakdown. All that will be seen in them is the worst, the very worst that we all have become and your name will be a curse, it will even to this day be cursed among all those whom—”
The old man is backing away from me. Onlookers are staring which is exactly counter to the instructions; I was supposed to attract no attention whatsoever, I was supposed to be as inconspicuous as possible in order that I might float underneath the waters of circumstance. “Please,” I say to Zapruder, “I am completely sincere, I mean this, you must not take motions, you cannot do it, if this were not serious I would not ask you,” and his mouth begins to move although rather in distress or comprehension it is impossible to say, perhaps both, there are bodies between the two of us filtering contact and I press through them heedless, warned not to use force or the special devices with which I am implanted except in the case of the most dire emergency I still find myself attempting to be reasonable. “Don’t you have any consideration for your heirs?” I say, “your name will be reviled; they will be persecuted through all the generations,” and of course ambiguity has quite passed from his face by this time, it is quite apparent what the nature of his response is and it is only futility which drives me forward, hurtling forms now adding a real ugliness; I think that in a little while I might be apprehended. “Fool!” I say to him, “fool, coward, liar, cheat!” and his little pouch banging against his forearm, his little eyes clouded with tears or regret Zapruder, completely humiliated, turns to run, this will not work either, nothing will work and something must have happened to my timing, to my control of the instance because here is Scop, he is already at Dealey, bounding from the little hollow where he has hidden the converter, his face dull and murky with the effects of passage but the heaviness already beginning to lift as he sprints toward us. Disorientation is quite brief but disquieting to see; perhaps we really were not meant to travel through time. Scop comes toward me, his uneven, pounding stride easily clearing the grass and now the crowd’s attention has shifted toward him, it was never that much upon me anyway; no one really was paying any attention. It is hard and harder yet to realize this, to realize that despite the illusion of consequentiality, vast forces, manipulations, the fate of the universe hanging at stake and so on and so forth very few people pay any credence to these events and indeed for all the effect we are having upon the common lives of those surrounding us . . . well, for all the effect that we are having we might as well be shouting and pounding within dim narrow cubicles at some far remove.
Scop closes upon me. His hands clamp upon my wrist. The odors of his breath, the upheaval of his body pressed against mine reminds me of other times, other places in which we mingled differently but I cannot remind him of these even though the sentiment is overwhelming. Nor can I remind him that this has all happened before; that we have been at Grassy Knoll a hundred times and will be here a hundred times again, that what we are undoing is in itself merely another stop-action frame in the endlessly unreeling Zapruder of our future. “Come with me,” he says and begins to push me toward the converter. He hits me on the jaw. “Come with me now.”
The abduction has begun. A hundred times he has hurtled me over these slopes, at least as many I have heard the tumult of the motorcade in the distance, seen the fast faces of the crowd pouring past me as heedless of them we hurtled toward our destination. A hundred times this blow has failed to stun me, sending me only as it were to a more solemn level of consciousness, a heightened attention as the single mindedness of his intent, the desperation of his determinism came through to me as it never had in bed. “Please,” I say, “it makes no difference,” but he is excited, pulls me harshly. “Please don’t do this,” I say but he refuses to listen, nothing new here, he has never listened but I go through this over and again not accepting perhaps the simple message of repetition: that it will always be the same. Nothing will change and we will cycle through this over and again to the same conclusion. Nevertheless, if just once, if one time we could break through the pattern—
“Into the converter,” he shrieks, “get in quickly you bitch or I’ll murder you, I’ll really do it you know, you’d better not defy me,” and I cannot even breathe cooperation with him; he wants to hear assent as little as resistance. Nothing to do but to keep up with him which I do in my stumbling and misdirected way. “Inside,” he says as we duck behind trees, as I see the squat grey oval in which we have traveled so many times. He batters me in the small of the back, I stagger, a plate opens, I sprawl inside. He is over me, raving, pulling the hatch shut with a clang and then he throws the switches. I feel the lurch of passage. It it hard to believe that this it all happening again; there is a feeling of novelty to it, each time new and terrible although to the same conclusion but I must do what I can, must accept the fact that we seem to be in cycle and deal with that. Passage begins. He moans and natters over me. I know that he will wait until we reach his cubicle until the attack begins and yet I feel now as before that it is all he can do, all that both of us can do to restrain from having at one another in the enclosure like beasts.