Nicholson Baker - Checkpoint

BEN: You’re scaring me, man. Let me see your pupils. I have a feeling that you’re going back to the bad time. Are you?

JAY: No, now that was totally different. That was a simple dispute.

BEN: Sawing the legs off the chair of the assistant principal?

JAY: The man took joy in persecuting people. And the sawing made a valid point. People thanked me. Anyway, very different situation. What I mean is, that day that I marched taught me a lot, and I think by doing it I was pushed beyond some inner barrier of restraint. Have you taken a look at Ellsberg’s book?

BEN: You mean Ellsberg as in the Pentagon Papers?

JAY: Yeah, I saw him on C-SPAN, too. He’s so smart, and I think he really is someone to admire. He goes to a peace conference and there’s this Harvard kid there — this is in the late sixties — and the kid is talking about how he’s going to go to jail soon and how that’s the best thing that he and the other kids can do to protest the war is to fill up the jails, and Ellsberg goes into the bathroom, goes into a stall, and he sits there for an hour crying because he says to himself, This is the best thing that our children can do, the best hope that this Harvard kid can have? Is that he can go to jail? And he says to himself, We’re eating our young. And that’s when he made the decision. And those Pentagon Papers, man, they are so bloated with old wrongs, under Kennedy, under Johnson. Just an ever-blooming flowerbed of evil.

BEN: You know that on the Net you can listen now to Nixon and Kissinger talking on the phone the very day the Pentagon Papers came out?

JAY: Nixon and Kissinger, really?

BEN: Nixon and Richard Helms, too, but there are some long beeps in that one. I think it’s at the National Security Archive. Kissinger and Nixon talk about how many soldiers have died, and then Kissinger says something like, “Vat the papers make clear, Mr. President, is that it didn’t start vith you but vith Kennedy and Johnson.” Which is certainly true.

JAY: The point is that you reach a moment when a different kind of action is necessary, and I’ve reached that point.

BEN: Well, now, Daniel Ellsberg sent a bunch of Xerox copies to some newspapers. You’re talking about something very different. Very different. You’re talking about suddenly leaping onto the world stage. You don’t have any idea what you might set in motion, what kind of uproar, what kind of clamping down would follow. There’s no way to predict. You want this wastebasket of a man to become a martyr?

JAY: Just listen to me a little.

BEN: I’ll listen, but you see I’m in a bit of a pickle now. If you then go do this, or attempt to do this — because, believe me, you will fail if you try — but if you attempt it, then I become an accessory.

JAY: I hate that legal language. Skip it, skip it.

BEN: What I should be doing is picking up the phone and calling the Justice Department and saying, “Um, Mr. Ashcroft, there’s this guy I know who may need to go to Guantánamo Bay for a while and cool down. No, he doesn’t need a lawyer.”

JAY: You wouldn’t do that.

BEN: Maybe I should, though.

JAY: If you picked up the phone, I might pull out a gun.

BEN: I don’t think you would.

JAY: I might — I might well. And I might threaten you with it.

BEN: I just don’t think that that’s in your nature.

JAY: And when you saw the gun, you would put the phone down. Wouldn’t you?

BEN: Yes.

JAY: And because I’d threatened you with the gun, with an actual physical bullet — not a bullet in the stomach or the head, of course, but a bullet, say, in the lower leg — it would stop our conversation, because it’s a violent threat, and I would ask you to leave, and you would leave, and do you know what would happen then?

BEN: I’d be very upset, extremely upset, because you’d pulled a gun on me and I’d start driving home, shaking my head, after having come all the way down here, for Christ’s sake, at your request, you sick prick! And I’d call Julie on the cell phone and tell her that you were delusional. And then she and I would figure out what to do.

JAY: And you might be compelled to call the, uh, authorities and say that there’s this guy you know who’s talking about etcetera, etcetera. And I would know that that’s what you would feel you had to do, and that would mean what? What?

BEN: I don’t know.

JAY: Just that I would have to hurry up and proceed with my plan so that I could get it done before the warning would get through.

BEN: So in other words, if I tried to lunge for the phone right now?

JAY: There would be an ugly scene of one kind or another, and you would leave. And your leaving would ensure — would absolutely guarantee — that I would go ahead.

BEN: Oh.

JAY: How is Julie?

BEN: Ummmmm. She’s fine, she’s doing well, she’s good. She’s fine.

JAY: And your son, how’s he? How old is he now?

BEN: He’s thirt — no, that’s right, he’s fourteen.

JAY: Whoa, fourteen.

BEN: Yep.

JAY: And you’ve taken up photography.

BEN: Yes.

JAY: It’s helpful to have a hobby. I have a hobby, too.

BEN: Jay, assassinating the president isn’t a hobby.

JAY: I’m sure not getting paid for it. It’s pro bono all the way. So, what are you photographing?

BEN: Oh, I don’t want to — nothing — I don’t know.

JAY: You must know what you’re taking pictures of.

BEN: I’m taking pictures of trees, actually. Tree pictures.

JAY: Trees are good.

BEN: Yes, they’re very specific. Each one is different.

JAY: And what are you going to do with these tree pictures?

BEN: They’re just for me to have.

JAY: And you’ve stopped working on your book about the Office of Censorship? What’s wrong, man?

BEN: Nothing’s wrong.

JAY: Well, then?

BEN: I’m into Cold War territory now.

JAY: What about the Cold War?

BEN: Passive defense.

JAY: Passive defense?

BEN: Yep, that’s what I’m looking into. You know what that is?

JAY: No, enlighten me.

BEN: It was the whole idea that we could design things and rearrange things — cities, for instance — so that they would be less damaged during an atomic attack.

JAY: Oh, I see.

BEN: The more spread out the cities are, the harder it is to do a lot of damage with only a few bombs. So there were names for various urban configurations, like the galaxy pattern. I think that was the ideal pattern. One think tank in the sixties did a few studies on “ordered sprawl.” That was their dream, ordered sprawl, because it would result in the fewest deaths in a nuclear attack.

JAY: Groovy. And you’re looking into this?

BEN: Yeah, and earlier, in the fifties, the tax rules were changed so that developers could use accelerated depreciation when they built strip malls — and so suddenly all these strip malls started making money — and the question is, Why were the rules changed? Was it just the real estate lobby, or was it the civil defense people?

JAY: Oh, I get it.

BEN: And then of course there was the National Defense Highway System — all these ring roads and beltways built to encircle the cities — and what I really want to know is how much institutional overlap was there between the city planners, and the highway planners, and the real estate lobby, and the defense planners?

JAY: Fascinating, very interesting.

BEN: Well, no, it’s not that interesting, but it interests me. You go on these little research forays.

JAY: Sure, sure, that’s what it’s all about. For you.

BEN: Some of the federal money — you may get a kick out of this — some of the money that paid for the studies on ordered sprawl went through the Stanford Research Institute. Now that was a classic Cold War think tank — they were doing all kinds of stuff for the CIA. In fact, the CIA hired them in, I think it was the seventies, to do remote viewing experiments. Did you hear about that?