Nicholson Baker - Checkpoint

BEN: Not with you talking about this “path” of yours. Put that back. Put it back, Jay, I’m not kidding. You know what I tell my students to do?

JAY: What?

BEN: Some of them are upset about the war, their brains are addled. I say pick a book that you admire. Pick any book. Get a notebook and start copying it over. Copy the book from cover to cover. It’s like running a flax comb through your mind. You card the wool.

JAY: Copy it?

BEN: Yes, start at the beginning and go right through to the end. Don’t skip. You’ll become the world’s expert on that book.

JAY: Do you do that?

BEN: Sure. Well, I used to. I probably should again.

JAY: What books did you copy?

BEN: Let me think back. A book called The Oregon Trail . I copied that whole thing over one summer in Bermuda. I learned to write very very small because I didn’t have that much paper. It was a lovely time.

JAY: How many pages was it?

BEN: I don’t know, three hundred.

JAY: Really. Wow. When was this?

BEN: I spent a summer with my grandmother. It was hot, it was a sauna, and the cockroaches are big there. You been to Bermuda?

JAY: No.

BEN: The cockroaches are big, and the spiders, yike, they’re like huge crabs, they’re red and white. But it was nice. So I would sit all morning copying out Francis Parkman, and then I’d go for a swim, come back, have lunch, and then toward twilight my grandmother had her evening battle with the roaches. She had a tremor in her hand and when she used the bugspray I’d hear it, in the stillness, fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft . She didn’t have enough finger strength to really press the spritzer down and hit the roach with a full dose. So hours later, in the middle of the night, I’d wake up to this sound, turn on the light, and there was the poisoned roach in its death agony, upside down, beating its wings along the baseboard.

JAY: I’ve seen that.

BEN: But here’s what I realized. There were plenty of roaches around when Francis Parkman was writing The Oregon Trail . There were roaches around when all those Dutch landscape artists were painting their landscapes. Ruisdael and Hobbema.

JAY: The smaller kind of roach, I believe, not those biggies.

BEN: It doesn’t matter. The painters were doing the things that they could do, never mind about the pests — the pests were bracketed off. They didn’t impinge. The painters looked at the trees. That’s what you’ve got to do.

JAY: Maybe. I did—

ROOM SERVICE: Room service!

JAY: Ah, that’s lunch.

BEN: Thank God.

JAY: Coming!

ROOM SERVICE: Good afternoon, gentlemen. How are you this afternoon?

JAY: Great, thanks, how are you?

ROOM SERVICE: Fine, thank you. On the table, gentlemen?

JAY: Yes, perfect, right here.

ROOM SERVICE: If you would please sign both.

JAY: Two and seven is nine, eight and four. There you go. Thank you.

ROOM SERVICE: Thank you very much, have a nice afternoon.

JAY: Ah! Here’s your steak, man. They didn’t give me any ketchup. Damnation.

BEN: Here’s some.

JAY: Oh, great. Thanks. So you sat there in the heat copying out that book?

BEN: Sweat trickling off the backs of my hands, but yes, I copied it out, and it really taught me a lot. Mmmm, tasty.

JAY: Isn’t that good steak? Peppercorn steak.

BEN: Dee-licious.

JAY: They have a good cook down there. Is it done medium?

BEN: It’s medium. Bang on. You were right. Hits the spot.

JAY: Good. You want some of my fries?

BEN: Sure, I’ll take a fry, thanks.

JAY: We need wine, at least. They’ve got a bottle here called Bella Firenze. Sounds a little bogus, but what do you say?

BEN: What time is it?

JAY: A quarter to two.

BEN: Is it that late?

JAY: Yep, yes it is.

BEN: Well, a glass of wine can’t hurt. This is on me, all right? I’ll settle it with them downstairs.

JAY: Okay, thanks. So I did go to Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago.

BEN: Did you?

JAY: Yeah, and I browsed around, and I went to the American history section. Oh, first I went to a section called True Crime. Lots of murders of women. There’s obviously an appetite out there for murders of women. Slashing and killing of women. It’s really odd, the hunger for it.

BEN: Do you read those books?

JAY: No way. What’s the point? I can’t muster the tiniest amount of interest in the particulars of some killer’s life. They’re mostly just dumb people who happen to have a violent streak. I mean, look at the president. I stick to the history section. You know there’s a glossy new book on the Kennedy assassination?

BEN: I can’t say it surprises me.

JAY: Supposedly Lyndon Johnson did it.

BEN: Johnson did it? I thought it was the mob.

JAY: It changes from day to day.

BEN: Listen, you’re spending way too much time in the wrong parts of the bookstore. Forget the books. You need a nice long break. You need some gentleness and some love. Just like that good old Grace Slick said.

JAY: I’ve got to find somebody to love?

BEN: Yes, you do.

JAY: I agree. I feel like an asteroid. I’m so far out I’m somewhere beyond the Kuiper belt. But I think I first have to get rid of this impulse.

BEN: Yeah, well, get rid of the impulse.

JAY: By acting on it.

BEN: No, just get rid of it. Rid yourself of it.

JAY: No, Ben, what the man stands for is this whole entire tradition of blood and greed and bullshit. Blood, greed, and bullshit! Dietrich Bonhoeffer, think of him. A mild-mannered person, and he sees Hitler and he decides the only right thing to do is to kill the guy. There’s a point beyond which even Dietrich Bonhoeffer has to act.

BEN: You think Bush is as bad as Hitler?

JAY: No, he’s not. Of course he’s not as bad as Hitler. But we’ve reached a point beyond the normal— We’ve reached a point of intolerability. And he’s escalating. And we’ve got these new scandals just popping up like daisies. We’ve got to shut the man down.

BEN: Shut him down — you sound like Kissinger.

JAY: Excuse me?

BEN: Think of your kids. Why aren’t you there with them? Why aren’t you being a father to them? You need to take a look at that.

JAY: Come on, I love those kids. I know, I know I’m too much of a naysayer, I know that.

BEN: You can’t naysay all the time, it’s deadly. I have to be careful about it myself. It’s not fair to Julie.

JAY: Lousy naysayers, always down on life.

BEN: When we were in high school, did we sit around on our beanbag chairs thinking about the Vietnam War? Plotting how we would take bayonets to Richard Nixon? No. We did our chemistry homework.

JAY: You did, I didn’t.

BEN: We read the books Mrs. Hunsell assigned. Point Counter Point, remember?

JAY: God, that was awful. Deadly stuff.

BEN: We listened to all that Zappa. “What will you do when the label comes off—”

JAY: “And the plastic’s all melted, and the chrome is too soft?” I believe we smoked a joint or two.

BEN: I believe we did. But were your parents always talking about the war? Mine weren’t.

JAY: No, mine weren’t, either.

BEN: I just wonder if they had spent every evening upset over that war — and you know, there was plenty to be upset about, there were the atrocities, My Lai, there was Operation Ranch Hand. Would it really have been better for us to have been raised in a state of constant misery over that war?

JAY: No, you’re right, I had a good childhood. I made a few mistakes, everyone does. Totally fucked myself up later on. My poor mother. Remind me what Operation Ranch Hand was?

BEN: Oh, the defoliation. Agent Orange.

JAY: Right. More Bella?