CHAPTER III

THE TRUE AND THE REAL AND THE FINAL MEANING: Still in the dream which has now become familiar, comforting, almost reality itself, certainly too close to all the secret places of him to fight against, still deep in the dream which is the only reality he will ever again know Lee Harvey Osborn now takes himself to have been in the basement of a police station for almost two days, submitting to interrogation with only short interruptions for food or elimination; once a brief nap. They are not trying to torture him they have made clear, only to try to work with him to obtain the true and the real and the final meaning for what he has done. By this he gathers that they want a confession but of course that is the one thing that he cannot give them since he is not sure as to whether or not he shot the President. Everything seems so terribly unclear; his memory of the events of recent weeks is blurred, chirascuro. All that he is clear about recently is the movie theater and what he was doing when they caught him: he was thinking about masturbating, tell the truth and be done. It must be the brain damage. He knows he has a brain tumor. For months it has been eating away into his soft, vulnerable grey tissue, chewing up little parts of his memory and reason until at last, within only a little time he would have had nothing up there at all except the neural sockets that sent instructions to his hands to pull off. This is better. At least he is under custody now. Eventually a doctor will examine him and at that point they will be clear as to what has happened to him and they will not bother him any more. He may even get an operation. He may get the help that he needs.

But for the moment they try to coax out of him a confession. Why did he do it? Where was he when he did it? What did he do with the rifle and for that matter how had he gotten the rifle to begin with? Had he planned this for a long time, mapping out the President’s route or rather was it an impulsive thing decided on the day itself? He gathers that they have been in his apartment but there is nothing that they could find there. He does not even remember what is in his apartment. As far as his wife; that means nothing. He is not even sure that he has a wife. It has been so terribly long since he has thought of her. It has been so terribly long since he has thought of anything. Mostly he is interested in going to the Bijou and beating it off.

They want to know what his plans were for escaping. Did he really think that he would get away with it? Where was he going to go? Did he have assistance from a foreign country? Did he have contacts in some foreign port which would enable him to flee? They are quite polite for all the brutality of the process. He has dealt with a lot of police in a lot of cities through his time and certainly these must be given credit for courtesy; the southern accents, the curiously formal tilt of their faces as they ask the most shockingly intimate questions in the most distant and apologetic fashion is remarkable and would be something worth remembering in other circumstances, if he believed that he had any kind of a future. He would put all of this down in his novel except that he is pretty sure at this point that there is not going to be a novel that he, Lee Harvey Osborn, is for all intents and purposes finished. Maybe not. How has his sex life been? Not too bad, he says, like anyone else’s sex life. Of course with the baby recently and certainly the problems they had had with his not being able to get a job. . . . Maybe he would like to talk some more about that. Except that he would not. There are certain things it turns out and to his surprise which he really cannot talk about. Like his wife. He begins to cry.

But crying is no more helpful to him in this dream than it was ever outside of it. It seems that they are not impressed and that indeed his crying, as a sign of weakness, gives them encouragement to pick up the pace of their questioning, to dig into him in a way that they had not before. The politeness begins to drop out of their voices. They begin to ask their questions in a more strident fashion, facing him now, hurling the questions to him in grunting passion, one syllable at a time and they start to get through to him, the emotional significance of the questioning that is: they are serious here, they are serious,theybelievethathehaskilledthePresident and it is possible that until this moment he has not taken them seriously, has not believed that they could possibly have this on their minds. How could he have killed the President? He loved him, revered him, didn’t everyone? The President was going to occupy a very important role in the novel that he was writing, a whole chapter devoted to his life and works and in praise of the man to say nothing of his beautiful wife; that was what he thought of the President but they do not believe this. They do not seem to take him seriously. No one took him seriously, that was always one of his problems Osborn thinks but this is in a more dangerous fashion because he begins to see that these people want him dead. They really do. They will not be satisfied until he is dead despite the fact that their tempers are still well in check and they maintain the outer edges of their politeness. How could he have believed that essentially these people were on his side and willing to help him, to work with him? What a fool he has been! Of course it is too late now. He keeps on denying however. That is the only thing he has to hold onto, the denials, the fact that he has not done what they have accused him of. He knows that he could not have done it. Everything is a blur right up to the movie theater, the brain tumor, that is it, has wiped out his memory but still he knows himself. He must have faith in what he has been. He could not have done something like that.

If he did what they said he has, if he indeed killed the President then he is mad. That is something which Osborn cannot face. His brain may be turning to pulp because of malignancy but what remains of it would be good, sane, decent up until the end. The other way means that he would be totally out of control. He tries to tell that to them. He tries to make it clear, to gain their confidence, to show them that what they are suggesting is wrong but it does not seem to make much of an impression upon them. They have their own problems he can surmise. It must be very bad for them.

Of course he has no idea of what it may be like outside the police station. He is denied newspapers, reporters, rumors of any sort; everyone who comes into his presence has obviously been instructed to say nothing. This for Osborn is the worst. At least he wants to know what has happened out there; whether or not the President is dead, whether his wife knows that he is in this station. The President must be dead or they would not be doing this to him . . . but as for the other part, he does not know. They will not let him get a lawyer. They allow him nothing except piss call and coffee and a sandwich now and then and in off-hours a slight nap. Nor do they show any signs of breaking the schedule.

After a long time, it may be a week but he has utterly lost perspective; it is impossible for him to judge how many hours he has been in this basement the questioning stops. They tell him that he may be alone for a while and then they withdraw leaving only the mighty strobe focussed upon him in the locked and guarded basement and in that time Lee Harvey Osborn makes his last and greatest attempt to escape from the shackles of his dream, to return to the bed of choice which he has deserted a long time ago. He closes his eyes and squeezes his fist, wills himself out of the basement and into the enclosure of his bed where he wishes to awaken and find that all of this is a construction and that now it may pass from him. The physical effort involved in renouncing his circumstances makes him literally ill; he feels weak and drained, little patches of color passing in and out of his face, uneven respiration, nausea and a feeling of self-revulsion as profound as any that he has ever known . . . and yet try as he does he cannot take himself out of the basement. It is as if the dream has contaminated his being and left all of him foul and corrupt, not only the part of him that is in this station. After a very long time he opens his eyes and finds that he is still there, still indisputably there and it is then that he finally accepts his position as if for the first time. It may be a dream, it may not, there is no way that he can tell right up to the moment of termination but he will have to act, henceforth, as if it were real. There is no way out for him any more than there is for the poor dead President.ThepoordeadPresident! and an image of Kennedy flips up in his mind like a placard, the face, the broken little lines at the corners, the strange vulnerability of the eyes and he begins to see some of the pain that might have been involved; a pain that is no longer his own. He would weep but he cannot. He is drained. The time for weeping is past.

After some time they come back into the room and tell him that the questioning is over and that it is now time for him to be taken somewhere else and formally arraigned. For the murder of the President of the United States. He comes to his feet, starts to say something and then realizing the futility of this sits down slowly; there is nothing to say. There is nothing that he can add. They ask him if he is ready and he says that he would like something to wear; how can he go over in an undershirt and work pants? Isn’t he at least entitled to some dignity? People will see him. They assure him that there will be no pictures and that an area has been cleared for him which he can come through without ever having to see the press or they him. That relieves him a little and then he asks if he will be able to see his wife, if he will be able to call a lawyer. They tell him that there will be time for all of this soon just as soon as they get the formal arraignment out of the way. They are very calm and reasonable, with a reasonableness which matches his own new feeling of confidence. After all, the worst has happened. It has come to this and he is still dreaming. He cannot come out of it then. The worst that can be done to him has already been done; all that they can do now is to kill him. And then he will wake up.

They help him out of the chair. Walking he feels disconnected, transluscent somehow, barely making connection with the floor and he stumbles, they have to support him with large, kindly hands, then take him down the long line of the room and through the door which opens into an even longer corridor, smoke through it, voices at the end of it. He rears in their hands. “No,” he says. He is overtaken by fear. “No, I won’t do it. Please don’t make me.”

“Come,” they say but he balks, roots in place. They tug at him. He feels his face freezing into hard lines, lines of stone; nothing like this has ever happened before. “What is wrong?”

“I won’t go,” he says. “I won’t go.”

“Come on,” they say and pull on his wrists. “Move now.”

“No,” he says. “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me out there.”

“No they won’t!”

“They will!” he says and he knows that this is the truth. When he has a conviction of this sort he has never been wrong, not once, not ever: he has it now. “I don’t want to die,” he says. “Not this way.”

“Let’s go, Osborn,” one of them says. “Let’s go or I’ll knock you unconscious.”

“No you won’t,” he says with sudden cunning. “I have to be awake when you walk me through there. I tell you I can’t go.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“They’ll kill me!”

“The area has been cleared. Everyone is standing back.”

“I don’t want to die,” he says. He knows it is the truth. He has wavered from time to time but always he has tried to hold onto life and it is not living which he regrets so much as how much he has maimed, detested his mortality. “Please,” he says, “don’t do this to me.”

They begin to pull at him again. He is really quite helpless. He has balked them for a moment only by the force of will but, of course, he has absolutely no control; there is nothing he can do that they will not permit him and at that moment they want him to walk the corridor. He resists for another moment and then he gives himself over to them, something nearly exquisite in the yielding, in the realization that he has at last gone over the line of option and is now completely in their hands. He is utterly at the mercy of others and this is something entirely new for him; it has never been this way before. “All right,” he says as he begins to move with them, quite briskly now considering how impeded his circulatory system has become, “all right, have it your way but they’re going to kill me; they are as sure as hell going to kill me.”

He feels almost cheerful about this. There is a heartening sense of progress, of self-realization in accepting one’s own imminent death. It is a great adventure; that is what a lot of theologians say and although Osborn has never had much to do with religion believing that it is essentially an oppressive device he is interested in knowing after all these years whether the theologians have something on the ball. Maybe they do. Who is he to say that they do not? As terrified as he was before he finds himself almost euphoric now; violent swings of mood: great underlying depression is indicated but what the hell. What the hell, it is out of his hands now. Almost jauntily he swings behind them through the corridor and at the end of it a door is open, he sees the teeming blankness of the room ahead, understands that it is crammed with more police, press, photographers, reporters, observers . . . he is going to be famous. He is famous already. His life is not to be measured in beating it off in the bijous; rather he has achieved at last some measure of that to which he was always entitled. He always knew that he would make a big reputation and even if for all the wrong reasons here it is. Maybe it is for the best. He has to believe this. He feels that the police surrounding him look at him almost enviously now as he walks into the light. There is a pressure in his chest. Someone has shoved a gun into his chest. He knows the unmistakable feeling of a pistol; he has dealt with weapons in the army, now he looks down to verify and only then in a quick, vaulting instant does he move up, seek recognition but all that he sees is the hand, the splayed hand against the gun and before he can catch the eyes to find out who is doing this to him, who has done this to him something tears its way into his chest with the ferocity of a snake striking and it all falls away. He does not feel himself going down. That has already happened. It happened a long time ago. It has nothing to do with him whatsoever. He does not; he absolutely does not give a damn.