Nicholson Baker: Checkpoint

JAY: Waste disposal.

BEN: That’s it, that’s what it was, when it wasn’t simple savagery. That was the war that really undid me. Seeing those bombs float down silently on TV. My blood froze, I had to turn everything off — I remember one night I went down to the basement and I sat there for ten minutes listening to the furnace. All those sorties, and Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes on TV cheerfully chatting away.

JAY: They were high on it.

BEN: Suddenly everyone was using that word, “sorties.” We’d been working with Saddam for years. Total devastation. That’s on Dick Cheney’s head, and George Senior’s head. Not George W.’s head. He was just fooling around with a baseball team back then.

JAY: They got away with it in ’91.

BEN: They got away with it.

JAY: This time, they won’t.

BEN: Well, we’ll see. Who knows whether the man will be reelected or not? At the moment, he’s dropping, but he may bounce back.

JAY: He won’t be reelected, because he’s going to be dead. Marines standing in rows with their hands on their hearts, hundreds of limousines, mourners filing past.

BEN: Come off it.

JAY: No, this time, this war, that he imposed on the world, when the whole world said no to him so CLEARLY, in the streets, in every country, this war that he forced on humanity — this war will be avenged!

BEN: Okay, but first, how about we get a bite to eat? I’m ready to chew my thumb off. I drove all the way down here at eighty miles an hour because I thought you were going to jump out a window.

JAY: The window does open.

BEN: That’s nice to know. Listen, I saw a couple of restaurants on the way in. We could go, or I could — I could just, you know, I could hop out for a second and get us something and be back in a jiffy.

JAY: No, no, no, no need to do that. You might come back with federal agents, and we need to continue this. There’s room service.

BEN: That’ll work.

JAY: And the menu’s here somewhere. Ah: “All Day Dining.” Club sandwiches. Hey, I can tell you they make a peppercorn steak that’s kind of nice. I had it last night.

BEN: Have they got a Caesar salad?

JAY: They do. You want that?

BEN: Yes, I would. A Caesar salad and a steak.

JAY: Good.

BEN: On me, though.

JAY: No, you drove all the way down.

BEN: No, no, no. You said you’re having pecuniary difficulties.

JAY: Yeah, but that’s not really going to matter too much. I’m charging everything to my room. Hi — yes, is this Inez? Hi, Inez. I talked to you last night, I believe. How are you? Good. We’d like to order some lunch. That’s right. For two. My friend’s in town. Ben. Could we possibly have, let’s see, one Caesar salad. … You want anchovies on that?

BEN: Sure.

JAY: That’s an enthusiastic yes to the anchovies. And the peppercorn steak, please. It was so good last night. How do you want it cooked?

BEN: Medium.

JAY: He’d like it very well done, please.

BEN: No no.

JAY: It’s okay. And a cheeseburger and fries. Extremely well done. Right. And we’ll have a big bottle of, uh, sparkling water. Not flavored, just clean, fresh sparkling water. That’s it. And a big tub of coffee, as well. That’ll be great. Thanks, take it easy. Boy, she’s very nice. She says half an hour. We can have some bagel chips or something now from the minibar if you want.

BEN: No, I’ll just wait for my, uh, very well done steak.

JAY: You have to do that these days, trust me. If you say you want it medium, they’ll bring it to you raw, and I mean raw raw, bleeding all over the plate. Just raw.

BEN: I see, so if you ask for well done—

JAY: If you ask for well done, you get medium rare. I’ve been there, man. If you ask for very well done, you get medium. And that’s what you wanted.

BEN: How do you get well done?

JAY: There’s no way, it’s impossible. Nobody’s going to cook your steak well done in this day and age. Forget it.

BEN: Well, thanks for looking out for me.

JAY: No problem. Yee, it’s bright out. Let’s crack the window a little.

BEN: Why?

JAY: Just to be aware of what’s going on outside. Way over there, beyond those trees, that’s where the snipers are on the roof. The sharpshooters. But that’s okay, because I’ve got my special bullets.

BEN: Consider this: You kill him and boing, Cheney’s driving the truck. He’s twice as bad.

JAY: Well, once you go down that road, man — that’s a slippery slope, let me tell you. You start to think, Okay, I know I’ve got to get rid of Bush, oh, but wait, Cheney’s twice as bad, got to take him out, too, maybe some kind of tiny scorpion that climbs up his leg just as he’s being sworn in, bites him, he slumps. The scorpion has no memory of what it’s done— The Manchurian Scorpion . But wait, hmm, Rumsfeld’s just as bad as Cheney, so in fairness — and don’t forget Powell — maybe you don’t kill Powell, because he was less enthusiastic, maybe you just want to put him in a coma. And then there’s Tommy Franks and General Richard Myers, with all his medals, and it just goes on and on. And eventually you start thinking you have to somehow do away with about thirty or forty people. Which is pretty outrageous. And then you think, well, thirty or forty people, what’s that? That’s NOTHING. They’ve killed thousands of innocent people. People who are utterly blameless. Thousands of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with any warlike activity.

BEN: Yeah, no, wrong road, we definitely don’t want to go down that road.

JAY: The proportions are skewed. It’s like peeking into the hole in one of those miniature rooms — those little Dr. Caligari rooms, where everything looks right, but it isn’t right at all. People think these prison photos prove how bad the war is. Actually, no, the prison photos are nice compared with how bad the war is. If the prisoners had had clothes on, even bloody clothes, the Republicans would have said, Hey, sometimes you have to break a few eggs, you know. It’s the nakedness that made it a scandal.

BEN: Perhaps so.

JAY: They say, in hushed tones, they say, “Some of the Prisoners Have Died.” Well, what the fuck? Yes, some have died. Some have been packed in ice and spirited away. But more than ten thousand Iraqis have been killed in this war. It’s off the charts. Tanks firing on apartment blocks. Morgues and hospitals filled to capacity, blood splashed on the walls. None of it is secret. It’s known, it’s been reported around the world for a full year, and yet there’s no outrage about that, there’s no scandal. What, that? Oh, that’s just the war. I mean, standing naked with a hood over your head while a dog barks at your dick, okay, that’s horrible, but having a missile hit your house is a hell of a lot worse, because you may be carrying your own kid out of the rubble.

BEN: There’s something really sinister about those hoods.

JAY: The hoods are bad, it’s all bad! It’s so unbelievably bad! How can somebody like Wolfowitz be involved in this? That quiet delivery that he has. He’s certainly smarter than Bush — I’d even say he’s smarter than Rumsfeld.

BEN: Julie says he must have been persecuted when he was a kid, one of those playground victims. He was in on the first Gulf War, you know. He was there urging Cheney on, right from the beginning.

JAY: Was he?

BEN: Yeah, he was so unhappy when we didn’t go in, when we stopped at the gates of the city. Now he’s got his wish.

JAY: I want to talk to him, I want to reason with him, I want to say, “Wolfowitz, you fuckhead! You’re killing people! You’re not humble enough before the mystery of a foreign country!”