Nicholson Baker - Checkpoint

BEN: That’s bad.

JAY: Liberators. Such bullshit. It’s just one event. The grandfather was killed, too. You know what he had on? He was wearing a pin-striped suit so that he would look more American. Ho, man. Ho, man. And that creep, that fucking Texas punk, who can’t even talk, with his drugged-out eyes, he brought us to this point, to this war, and for nothing, for not one red fucking thing . And I thought, I want to see what it feels like to be in the last place where a president was shot dead. Where somebody had moved from the fantasy stage over to the reality stage, shall we say. So I took the bus there. And I stood there. And I thought, Man, there’s no way I could do this. Too sharp an angle.

BEN: Good. That’s good! That’s good!

JAY: The feeling ebbed a little, and then a couple months ago it began to build again. Fallujah. Marine snipers on the roofs, shooting at everything. At ambulances. At children. Shooting at an old woman holding a white flag. Mosques hit. F-16s again, flames everywhere. And Kufa, boys with shrapnel wounds. Six people in a family died there, three children. And the prisons. The mockery on the

guards’ faces. It’s like when he was governor of Texas, smirking over the executions. The man’s personality trickles down through the entire military hierarchy and makes everyone meaner and nastier.

BEN: Including you.

JAY: Including me. And nobody around him is saying, Stop. Pull the Army out, get the Delta Force out, get the SEALS out, get the Green Berets out, get the CIA out, get the Marine snipers out, get the F-16s totally the fuck away from that part of the world. Right now. Yes, cut and run. Get away from that country that you have so royally fucked up. You know? Nobody’s saying it to him. So then the desire for justice just starts moving through me. It’s like a huge paddlewheel, it just churns up all of this foam and fury. VENGEANCE.

BEN: Please don’t stand up! I mean it, this will invalidate any point you will ever want to make.

JAY: This is the point that I want to make. You’re blocking me.

BEN: You’ll just become another nutcase. What if I knock you out with this bottle?

JAY: Don’t.

BEN: And what if coincidentally tonight, while you’re out cold, somebody else shoots him, and tomorrow morning you wake up and you read the headline, and it says, you know, CRAZED MAN WIGS OUT AND SHOOTS PRESIDENT? I mean, what would your reaction be?

JAY: Now, that’s a good question, that’s a very good question.

BEN: Would your reaction be that this was a good thing? Remember what’s happening tomorrow, okay, Cheney’s on TV from some hideout, the stock markets are tumbling, the, um—

JAY: The stock markets? They’re all just Styrofoam pellets. They’re just big boxes of Styrofoam popcorn, that’s what stocks are.

BEN: In any case, the day after, are you going to think, Ah, good, he did that, so I don’t have to?

JAY: I’m going to think, I wish he hadn’t done that. I wish I’d done that. Because this is the one thing that I have to contribute.

BEN: You’re going to have other things. You will. Be patient.

JAY: Let me ask you. I’m going to go down there now and I may well get hit before I make it very far. But I may not. There’s a hole in the fence. I’ve seen it, I know it’s there, and I’m just going to RAM my way through that fucking hole. And I’m going to be out there on that lawn, and I’m going to run like a crazy man with my gun and my hammer. And those guys on the roof, you know? Here’s the thing. The chances that somebody is going to be running toward the White House at any given moment are practically zero. They’re like the people at the bomb-detection machines at the airport. There’s no chance that they’re ever going to find a terrorist. So even though every piece of their training says to look for the danger signs, they know that there are no danger signs. Okay. So I’m counting on that. The guy’s working his way through a bag of Skittles up there. His job is so awful. His job is to sit on the roof day after day, squinting at nothing. I mean, of all the pointless things to spend your life doing. Not only that, maybe he doesn’t even like the president. Maybe the president spoke sharply to him one time. Or maybe he loves him. Anyway, he’s beginning to have his doubts about the war. So he’s not as attentive.

BEN: He’s—

JAY: So I push my way through. I break out across the green, no cover, but I’m sprinting, and I’m fast, and I’m going to make it.

BEN: Then what? You’re still outside.

JAY: Then, with my hammer, I smash my way through the windows. And then I leap in. I wave at Condoleezza. “Stick to the piano, baby!”

BEN: And then you’re shot, and you fall.

JAY: Maybe, maybe not. But here’s my question for you. Say I’m down, I’m bleeding on the rug, but I’ve got the gun under me and I’ve got just enough strength left to point it toward him — won’t part of you think, He’s got it coming to him? Huh?

BEN: I don’t—

JAY: Won’t you think to yourself, Man, I hope that little peckerfuck gets it right between the eyes?

BEN: I don’t — I’m not — I can’t predict how I would react if the president were actually shot.

JAY: You know part of you would celebrate.

BEN: I think that the simple sight of any human being stilled, you know — dead — that there’s a basic patheticness to that. There’s just a sadness or a stillness of one’s emotions that comes from their not being able to speak, that is so, so… I don’t want to say “sobering,” but so quieting. So that, no, I don’t think I’d feel any need to celebrate. Much as I dislike the guy. In fact I think I would feel a certain amount of horror knowing that to an extent I was part of it. To an extent I had something to do with it because I’d talked to you about it at length, and I’d failed. I wasn’t successful in convincing you not to do it.

JAY: Don’t be so hard on yourself.

BEN: But don’t you think that if you — I mean, you’ve seen the tape of when Kennedy was shot. You’ve seen the frames that were cut out of the film because all that blood is blasting from his head? A spray of brain? I mean, it’s a horrifying sight. It’s a human being that is now just nothing. You want to be a part of that?

JAY: That’s the thing. I have allowed myself to feel that feeling with the people in Fallujah, in Karbala, in Nasiriyah, in Basra, in Baghdad, in Mosul — all these cities. And Afghanistan before that. I’ve seen the pictures. And I feel that they — I mean Bush, any Marine sergeant, any soldier — all these guys are in the war business, one way or another. So they know that there’s a certain risk involved. You can become a casualty of the wars you incite, or that you volunteer for. But these kids who are having their limbs blown off, they don’t even know what’s going on. There’s just a sudden sound of the jet engines. Have you ever heard a Warthog?

BEN: I don’t think so.

JAY: Well, they make this sound. Arrw. It’s a kind of a walrus sound, almost, it’s really disturbing. Arrw. I don’t know if it’s some sort of adjustment that the engines do as they’re descending, but it’s a fearful sound, it’s like a giant swallowing. And you know, here are some kids playing in a street, they hear this walrus sound, and suddenly there are bits of really hot metal flying through the air. They look down in surprise and their own blood is coming out, and they’re feeling cold. And they’re dying fast. They don’t know what’s going on. They can’t even explain to themselves what happened. They’re noncombatants. They’re innocent, they’re innocent even of the knowledge that they are innocent. They’re people just living their lives, and now their lives are over.