CHAPTER XIII
REALITY AS THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NEED: He dreams that he was able, somehow, on the Grassy Knoll to deflect the bullet, the angle, the windage factor of the riflist, the aim of Zapruder’s camera; he dreams that he was able somehow to call off murder and now he is back in the arena where the slaughter games would be conducted . . . but there are no slaughter games, never were, the field took an entirely different plan and is now filled with flowers. He strolls among them, aisles and sculpturings of plants, admiring the huge constructions which loom at him at the end of corridors: enormous flowers shaped like bells, their stems like handles on precious artifacts. He is overwhelmed by the beauty of these gardens, particularly since there has been nothing like them in the twenty-forty he knows. He reaches out, takes a large purple flower shaped like a bowl, grasps it by its curiously pendant stalk and twists it off roughly to sniff at it. Thick vapors curl back at his senses, their odor curiously penetrating and grasping him with smells that seem to carry him into the vault of memory: other times other connections. Perhaps he is overreacting to the aspect of these gardens but then again there is no question as to the reality of his sentiment: never has he seen anything quite so beautiful as this or then again he is peculiarly conscious—how could he not be conscious—that he is undoubtedly dreaming.
Nevertheless, Scop continues to wander through the gardens, following a single, circuitous path that takes him through sprigs of displays to a deeper, shadowed portion where behind gates he can see large blooming roses, beyond the roses he can see the trunks of dwarf trees, perfectly formed from the ground to the branches, then strangely misshapen. Leaning against the gate, taking the hard iron into his palms as he might caress a woman’s breasts he tries to look into the trees, tries to reach through the gates and merge with their stately, unmoving corporeality in the strange windlessness but the gate does not shift under his hands, his aspect does not quicken or change; he can get no closer, then, to the trees then he is now. After a very long time he allows his hands, one by one, to slide from the gate and turns on the path to wander back the way he came.
He tires now of his isolation, of the strange peace of these gardens. As the demonstration of a world unmade they are moving but sheer symbol has never been able to affect Scop deeply; what he needs is activity, some sense of dramatic heightening which will bring the gardens into closer alignment with his own thoughts, murky as they maybe . . . but there is no one. He feels the surfaces of the dream then beginning to clamp upon him, annoyingly tight and confining in what is, after all, merely an impression of reality and he would like to awaken; he does in fact struggle through the motions of waking, turning in place on the path, waiting for the giant hand of consciousness to reach through the dim bowl of sky and take him out of this, the lesson of the gardens already known, on then to other things . . . but nothing happens. No hand descends to yank him away. Indeed, he feels more deeply within the dream than ever, the gardens shimmer, reassemble in colors even brighter. A little breeze begins to churn against his face and with it comes the first odors of putrefecation as if the flowers were blooming not petals but little excrudescence of dead flesh. The air tickles his lungs. He feels as if he is about to vomit.
Further down the path, trudging back from its winding departure into a little abscess of magnolias comes Elaine Kozciouskos. What she is doing in these gardens; exactly what the symbolism of her appearance in his dream might be Scop does not know but as she raises her head, sees him, begins to react he finds himself seized with a dread that has nothing to do with the putrefying odors, ever stronger in his nostrils. He is not sure exactly what he fears but it has something to do with her turning upon him, with her running away. Here, more than ever before, he wants her good opinion. This is the world which, in part, he has created for her; he cannot deal with the possibility that even in these places she would turn from him in disgust. “Hello,” he says, weakly raising a hand. “Hello, Elaine.” He has never used her name before. It must signal a new relationship between the two of them. Maybe not. “Hello Elaine,” he says again. “How are you? Where have you been?”
“You fool,” she says to him. She lifts her face. Her eyes are luminescent; absolutely excited in a way which he has only associated before this with sexual passion. “You stupid damned fool.”
“Me?”
“Of course,” she says. “You thought that you could change the future and you can’t even change the past.”
“I don’t want to discuss that Elaine,” he says. Somehow he had not imagined himself in dialogue with her; at the corner of his consciousness, in some pocket of the mind when he first saw her, he admits that there might have been a thought of sex, some hint of coupling beneath a sprig of tulips he can just see at the left peripheral vision, a bow of them strung between two bushes . . . but thoughts of fornication have certainly dwindled; it is hard for him to think of such things when she is being accused of stupidity. He does not think that this is an abnormal reaction. Still, her features are so dusted with light that it might be need which informs them. “Oh you fool,” she says again, “do you think that life is a garden?”
“It could have been. It could be yet.”
“Nothing,” she says, “it could have been nothing,” and stretches out her arms toward him, in the very heavy symbolic overcast of the dream it is as if clouds gather around her fingertips although this would be climatologically impossible even in the very advanced technology of twenty-forty. “The past is immutable, you see,” she says, “all that you can do by going back and meddling with it is to make it occur over and again in different guises. But of course,” she says, her face changing expression, a strange wink spreading a cast over one eye as her hands sink to the level of her waist now cupped gracefully, “if you want to do it you may. No one can stop you. It’s your life. All that you’ll do is discover and rediscover this on your own and no one ever can make you see that until you see it yourself. You didn’t have to take me from Grassy Knoll,” she says, “that wasn’t necessary at all. I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have done it to you.”
But Scop has now lost interest in her. He has lost interest in the dream as well, it has been superseded only by an urge to get out of it but the dream is as thick and heavy and clinging as the memory of the shots levelled one and two into the dead form of the President, the body already taking evasive action in the limousine, swinging off-angle at cross-purposes to itself as it hit the purposeless cushion, the head rolling, limbs lolling, the face already kneaded into that high parody of itself which is always known by the dead, the sound of the sirens as they went through Dealey Plaza with the thrill that the ruined blood must have crept into the assassin’s Joins. “Get away from me,” he says to her, “I don’t believe in you, I don’t believe in anything. I just want you to leave me alone.”
“Why should I leave you alone? You summoned me.”
“I did not. I couldn’t—”
“But you did,” she says, “I wouldn’t have been here otherwise. Come on. Let’s have sex.”
“What?”
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? That’s what you called me here for. I don’t care. It’s all the same to me whether you do it or not so you might as well take advantage. You lecherous fool,” she adds with a little wink. “You can’t change the way in which we live so at least you should be able to change the level of sperm in your vesicles. Don’t you agree?” she says. He has never seen her so devilish. Indeed, she is a woman in her late forties, early fifties, hardly sensual, at least as he recalls her from the circumstances of meeting on the Grassy Knoll yet she seems to be absolutely inflamed now with passion. “What the hell,” she says, “come on and do it. Don’t you think that the symbolism of the gardens is just a little bit transparent? That’s what has been on your mind from the first you know.”
“Get away from me,” he says as she seems to advance upon him, her palms extended, “get away from me right now. I mean it.”
“Ah,” she says and hooks her arms around him, draws him in, places her lips against his forehead to give him a long if not sensual kiss in that spot, “don’t run away from it. It’s hopeless and besides you know it’s always what you wanted.”
“It isn’t what I wanted.”
“It isn’t?” she says. She draws back. “Then why are you here?”
It is too complicated and wearying for him to explain why he is here. He is not even sure that the explanation would hold together. “No,” he says. He considers possibilities of flight staring in the distance which dazzles over her left shoulder. Swift calculations almost musical in their regularity, their order, the way in which they blend together assault him. “No,” he says again. He crouches in a sprinter’s stance. He thrusts himself forward on perilous feet. He flees.
Brushed away by the force of his spring Elaine Kozciouskos stands on the path wiping at her skirt, shouting now with humiliation. He cannot see her but since this is a dream he can see her very well. She waves at him and screams through the flowers. She curses him. He has never heard a woman curse like this before even at the Games. He is immersed in spangles of daffodils.