CHAPTER IV


DESOLATION ROW: His hands are enormous on me as he yanks me away toward the little hidden spot behind. “Come with me now,” he says, “don’t fight, I’ll kill you if you fight,” and even though I have been prepared for this it is terrifying to see what he is doing. Even though I have been warned that he will act in ex­actly this fashion and that I am in no danger whatsoever as long as I cooperate and stay within the role the thought brushes my mind that he is capable of anything, even killing me. We stumble through the grass, his hands seeming to touch me in a hundred hidden places, obscene and yet certain in their persuasiveness and I wonder if he will kill me. If he will kill me right here I will have in one sense succeeded because he will have directed all of his passion onto me but in another way I have lost because I do not want to die. Nothing in or out of this world is worthy my death, my life pivots around the certainty of my continued life; perhaps this sudden insight is worth something. Most likely it is not. I can hear the shouting now, dim applause in the distance as the motor­cade approaches and I want to turn, to see, I have never been within distance of this President before and the least I should be able to take out of this experience is to see him but Scop is push­ing me toward the machine and I cannot adjust myself within the parameters of this body which they have given me; I cannot adjust and stagger in front of him, the touch of him like insects on my being and we are jammed together in the convertor, heel to heel, the fumes of his breath pattering on my cheeks. “Now,” he says, “now,” and hits the controls. It seems that we have been through this before but I cannot tell. The sense of chronology has been shattered, all molds as well as the sequential value and it could have been the first or the tenth time that we have been together in the spaces of this machine. I was warned about this too; the fal­tering and then the breakage of causation so that I might go through one act fifty times and another directly antecedent not at all but the important thing was to maintain courage and per­spective. Not to panic. “You damned bitch,” he says, “you damned bitch, Elaine,” and I say nothing, biting my little lips, clenching my little hands, nothing that I say can possibly affect him. The machine stops and we lurch out together onto the bright pavement of a city, scattered with refuse, facing the large doors of a shut­tered building. He grabs me by the elbow. “In there,” he says, wrenching me around, “in there,” and pushes me toward the doors.

I stagger on the filthy and putrescent stones, fighting for bal­ance, then losing it, going to my knees but being yanked upright by him immediately and he impels me toward the door now in front, dragging me. “Hurry,” he says, “oh hurry, hurry, it’s going to be too late, you bitch, oh you bitch Elaine,” and the pain is terrible. I would not have known that there was so much force in him, would never have measured his brutality even as our worst moments together, even in the clanging and interruption of orgasm as he groaned over me, screaming with astonishment at his discharge he never hurt me so much and I want to tell him then, I can no longer maintain the focus of the lie, I want to tell him who I am and what I am to do to him. “Scop,” I say, “Scop,” and his face, birdlike, wheels around, he seems at the verge of rec­ognition and as I look at him, as we stand poised, locked on the top step of the building I find that I cannot go through with this; I cannot say to him what I want to and the instant passes. My conditioning has been true; I have been bound in. “No,” I say, “no, forget it. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

“How did you know my name?”

“You told that to me.”

“No,” he says, “no I did not, Inever told you my name, who are you, who are you?” and there is an instant or maybe several at which time I could reveal everything to him, could indeed break through just as I had fantasized but then it is me to back away from this possibility and I say, “Yes you did, you’re so upset, you don’t remember anything, don’t remember anything at all,” and his face blinks like a bulb, astonished at my control and then it is me, me not him who seizes the doors and tugs them open, stumbles into the dense and intolerable spaces of what seems to be a small temple, now in the process of a service: heat, light, dust, crowds, noise, blazing fluorescence from the podium, a tall man shouting and gesturing, cries from the onlookers, perhaps forty or fifty of them in here and a moment with Scop a long time ago comes to me, a promise he made me on the bed, “No,” I say, “you’re not taking me here, you can’t be doing this to me,” and he saysstop ! with terrible energy, hurtling himself at me, I tumble over him, hit the floor, feel his own weight cave against me and then overhead I hear the crack of rifle fire from behind, from the door through which I had entered. There is the sound of collision ahead, a gasp, a thin scream, the sound of a body top­pling and then the voices, discordant and desperate have broken over us, “No,” they are saying, “no, Malcolm, no, no,” and another spate of fire, shorter and less purposeful than the last, then the banging of the doors and there is a sudden lush moment in which there is no sound at all, the silence inevitably more provocative than the screams . . . but the screams begin again, jangled and in­termixed this time, as fervent as chant but more ragged and lying on the floor I incline myself toward Scop lying on his stomach, his arms crossed, eyes closed, a strange look of satisfaction carved on his face as if put in there by a clumsy but demonic miniatrust, little pleasure-wrinkles at the side of his eyes which I had seen sometimes while he was coming and underneath the screams, the cries mounting, tumult of movement in the chapel I say to him, “You bastard, why did you take me here, why am I in Harlem now?” and then I remember that the assassination of Malcolm according to what Scop had told me did not occur until a year, almost two years after the assassination of Kennedy and that therefore in my guise as a tourist of this period I am not supposed to know of this. I cannot concede the knowledge of event; instead it is as if I had come to it afresh. Ihave come to it afresh, of course; I can allow my reactions unhindered. My thoughts are confused, disordered, as if little pellets embedded in glassine. “Now,” Scop says moving on the boards, “now,” and comes to his feet, it is very confused in the terrain surrounding; it is hard to perceive exactly what he is doing, perhaps he is doing nothing, this thought occurs to me, that the events are meaningless, his witness is meaningless . . . I try to get to my feet in the astonish­ment but my limbs seem to revolve upon the floor rather than grasping, bodies come in more tightly, it is then that I feel myself lifted, vaulted to a standing position, blocked in by heads, bodies, some of them whimpering, others laying their hands upon me in a way as abrupt and ferocious as had Scop and I see him then through a sudden break in the foliage of witness, at the podium, leaning over the dead body of Malcolm, an aspect of panorama imparted by this, the frieze of his attention as kneeling he stretches out a hand, touches the forehead of the dead man and then the crowd closes in again. I can see nothing.

He has equated the death of Malcolm with Osborn’s slaughter of Kennedy; I know that now, knew it before, but I cannot un­derstand why he has taken me to this temple, what he can hope to gain by making witness to further slaughter. Does he feel somehow that I am energized by death just as he is, that all of us can be brought alive only by dead, moody speculations, they are bro­ken, he comes through the crowd toward me, his face blotched and broken into damp and although he is examined no one touches him. He reaches out toward me. “We must leave,” he says. Our hands touch. “He is dead.”

“No,” I say, “I can’t go with you, not like that, this has got to stop, sometime it has got to stop.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” I say which is almost the truth, “I don’t know what I am talking about,” and forms collide; we seem to be at the center of a mass of struggling, weeping people some of whom resemble us but others of whom do not. “Why did you do this?” I say pointlessly, “there had to be another way,” and there is the sound of hands beating at the doors, the wood buckling, they must have locked it behind us when we came in although then again it might have been the assassin: who knows? Who knows about anything? “You fool,” I say to him, reaching forward, grasping his wrists, impelling him toward me, “You dumb fool, this surely is not the way. This is not the answer, you can’t change things by retracing the past over and over again, we are living in a future which will be the product of the past no matter what we do; the future is immutable you see, you have it the wrong way,” and he looks at me, looks at me intensely, seems to be trembling on the verge of real understanding, certainly an insight which I cannot bear and then as he is about to break into the speech that will destroy everything, ruin all of the frail plans of the temporals it is too much to bear: “No,” I say, “no, don’t do it, don’t say it, don’t do anything at all,” and lunge away from him toward the doors which are open, they part, I plunge through them, I run heedless through the wild and the darkening streets.