CHAPTER IV

A SOLEMN DECLARATION OF PURPOSE: He takes himself then to be at the bedside of the dying Robert Kennedy, trying to make it all clear to him in the few moments that he has. Kennedy is hooked up to life-support mechanisms and does not seem to be very attentive; the oxygen pumps away, the intravenous burbles its hearty burble as it sends sugar into the concealed wrist, all of Kennedy is shrouded underneath a sheet and yet Scop keeps on talking; his time is limited, he must do the best that he can under the circumstances. “Listen here,” he says, “you know that this was the only way that it could be, I had to turn the times around; I had to take drastic action.” Kennedy says nothing of course; Ken­nedy is legally dead, the brain stem destroyed, only the gross motor functions continuing and those under mechanical assistance. He will remain legally dead for another twelve hours and then upon the decision of the family he will be declared absolutely dead and all supportive mechanisms will be removed. For the moment however Scop can persist in the illusion of connection. He is alone in the hospital room. It is one of those moments when family and doctors and friends having nothing else to say have retreated once more to the corridors and the exhausted nurse dozing off in the corner will never remember this. The convertor has brought him close to the bed and he can communicate with Kennedy without raising his voice, without even moving his lips. “We’ve got to start again,” Scop says, “we’ve got to act as if this had never happened and try a fresh start in a different direction. We cannot go on this way. You must understand.”

The intravenous flask chucks another two cc of pure dextrose into the Kennedy veins, a merry burbling sound coming from its center. It is not a response, not really, but it serves the same purposes as one might provide; it gives Scop the feeling that he is obtaining response from the form no matter how shrouded. “Now there are those,” Scop says, “and I have met them and I have had the opportunity to discuss these issues, there are those who think that I’m a little obsessive about all of this business, that I’ve taken a single-minded attitude and won’t really change my mind but they just don’t realize the seriousness of this as you do. I’m sure that you agree with me; you were always a serious-minded man and you can see that a future based upon a series of murders wouldn’t be a very happy one. I want to tell you that twenty-forty is a terrible place to be alive and I’m not even getting into the matter of personal unhappiness, just looking at this objectively. So you see, I’ve got to do what I can to straighten the matter out even though it makes things even more difficult for me than it might be otherwise.”

In the corner the nurse stirs, mutters something in a thick doze, relapses into sleep. She must be having a dream, Scop thinks, a dream very much like some of his own: blood, death, pain dripping from the walls of the night but she will recover from hers in time whereas he will not and as far as Kennedy, there is no way in which he can apprehend what is going on in that brain at the present time. The higher nerve centers have been destroyed but that may only give the nightmares a rawer tinge. “Right now,” Scop says conversationally, “I’m concentrating on Dealey Plaza and that business with your brother. It’s my opinion that if the basic changes can be effected there then this will never happen to you; that that’s the place of original sin so to speak and that if we can straighten things out there everything else will fall into place. I hope so,” he says, “I certainly hope so.” He moves away from the bed then, stands at the doorway. The nurse snorts, comes to a posture of attention with her eyes closed, her hands outstretched, grasping as if to seize some object intensely visible, then subsides to her original position, eyelids fluttering. It will not be long now until she has awakened. “I’ll have to go,” Scop says. “I just wanted to tell you what I was doing, to let you know that I was trying to do this for you also. It’s your future too.” This does not sound quite sufficient; he knew what he wanted to say when he came in here but now it seems to be spinning away from him. “It’s a shared future,” he says, “don’t you see that?” and he imagines that the body sits straight up in the bed, that Robert Kennedy looks at him with great compassion and understanding, bonded to him in that searching glance which restores his features, smoothes out the ruined skull, turns him once again into the person that he must have been and that Kennedy now says, “Yes, I see that, I see what you’re trying to do, it’s all right, it’s a good thing, I’m glad, everybody’s glad, no one can blame you for this, you’ve done the right thing, just keep on doing it, you’ve got to keep on struggling, struggling, Aeschleyus, pain like tears, the darkness, the darkness,” but then again none of this may have happened at all; Scop may have invented this scene out of his great need to give some justification to his excessive activities and in any case he cannot remain to wonder about it any longer; he hears noises in the outer hall which can only indicate that relatives are once again going to come inside. Perhaps they have decided to remove the life-support equipment at this time. In that case they would be most surprised at how active and lively has been Robert Kennedy’s recent participation. But enough, enough. He looks for the convertor, finds it jammed under some tubing, quickly compacts himself, dives inside and is taken out of there. The equipment, at least, never fails.

It is strange, he thinks; it is a strangeness. He thought that he felt for these icons; that at the center there was a deep and profound emotion, a complicated grief to speed him on his way, that all of the time what was taking him onward was that quality of feeling . . . but looking at Kennedy in the bed he had realized that he felt nothing, that was it; he felt absolutely nothing toward any of them but weariness and the sensation that history had made abstractions of them all. Of them all. It was not pain but circumstance which he had chosen to relieve.