Nicholson Baker - Checkpoint

BEN: Somehow I don’t think you’d get very far.

JAY: But I don’t want to send my scorpion after him. That’s the thing. I don’t feel he has to die. He should be one of those guys who go to jail for a while, and they grow a beard because they’re tired of seeing their face in the news.

BEN: They write their memoirs, like John Ehrlichman.

JAY: Yeah, I think Wolfowitz is genuinely crazy, but in a stealthy way, so you don’t pick up on it at first. Whereas, as you know, people think I’m a little off, but really I’m on an even keel. I’m just candid. I mean, sure there have been some problems — but I’m steady!

BEN: You’re a bit ragged around the edges, that’s all. What was I going to ask you, though? Oh, yeah. Have you ever been fingerprinted?

JAY: Yes, I have.

BEN: And have you… talked to anybody else about this?

JAY: Not in so many words.

BEN: Nobody?

JAY: I may have used the word “assassination” once or twice, but not with any specifics.

BEN: What happened with that nice woman you were going with?

JAY: Which one was that?

BEN: That one I met? Sarah, was it? Lots of bracelets?

JAY: Oh, Sarah.

BEN: She was very nice.

JAY: She moved on to other things. I ranted and raved too much.

BEN: Ah. Do you ever see Lila? How about your kids?

JAY: Sure, yeah.

BEN: And how are they?

JAY: It’s a little hard to tell. The youngest and the oldest are into their own little worlds, but Mara’s twelve now, and she’s got some real fire in her. Maybe she’ll carry the torch when I’m gone. It’s hard to say good-bye to them. But I did. Sometimes you’ve got say, Okay, this is my thing, and I am going to do it. Nobody else can do it.

BEN: I really don’t think this is your thing.

JAY: I just wore Lila out. You know? With me, everything’s political. I mean, she’s political, too, but not as much. A couple of years ago I got into a spat with her father. He’s one of those people who’s simply not capable of rational thought. So it was a little unpleasant. And the children weren’t in the room but they were in the other room. All of that led to a word of wisdom from the judge, that I should moderate my behavior. And that affected how much I see the kids. I’ve made a bollix of my life, that’s for sure.

BEN: You mean you’ve bollixed it up?

JAY: Yes, I bollixed it up!

BEN: Well, shouldn’t you try to un-bollix it? Why would you think that doing this would help in any way?

JAY: You know that sounds very therapeutic, and I don’t want you to be therapeutic. I just want you to be an attentive person I can talk to.

BEN: Yeah, but see, what you’re doing here, though, and I say this as gently as I can, is you’re using me. I didn’t know when you called that you wanted to tape our discussion prior to killing the president of the United States. I did not know that. If I had known that I would have said, No thank you, I’m going to be scanning some transparencies and I think you better call somebody else, because I’m not going to drive to Washington to hear the gory details.

JAY: I know, you wouldn’t have come.

BEN: What you said was “I really need to talk to you.” And I thought, Oh, okay, he really needs to talk to me. Sounds like the poor guy is in a crisis state. We’ve all been in states of despair. But, but. I didn’t know that you wanted to talk to me about doing this . I don’t like this. And then, this whole thing that you just laid on me, that if I call the law you’re going to whip out a firearm and all that — I don’t like it. I’m not sure that I want to be threatened with violence, with being shot in the leg, it’s not enjoyable. I’m not going to tolerate it, in fact. I’m going to walk out right now.

JAY: Go ahead. You threatened me first with John Ashcroft, you know. But go. Go.

BEN: If I walk out right now, are you going to go off and do something absurd and permanent and horrible, and something that’s going to totally unhinge the world even more than it is unhinged? Are you going to cause bloodshed?

JAY: I’m going to prevent a certain amount of bloodshed. By causing a minor blip of bloodshed in one human being I’m going to prevent further bloodshed.

BEN: But that’s where you’re completely misguided. And I’m your friend, I can say this to you. You’re completely misguided in that. It could cause any amount of bloodshed. If you think — what’s your plan? Okay, first of all — let’s see the gun.

JAY: I may have one.

BEN: You said that. I want to see it.

JAY: You want to see some bullets? They’re special bullets.

BEN: All right, show me the special bullets.

JAY: First I need to know whether you’re in or out.

BEN: What? I’m out, I’m so out.

JAY: Are you with me or not?

BEN: I’m not with you! Not with you.

JAY: I’m disappointed but I can’t say that I’m surprised.

BEN: I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Jay. But I don’t even want to impeach the guy. He’s committed impeachable offenses — lied us into a war.

JAY: That war speech he gave on the eve of the attack — he was bonkers that night. Staring. “When the dictator has departed…”

BEN: Well, so — should he be impeached? My feeling is that maybe he should be, if you consider his case in isolation. But you can’t do that. If we now impeach him after that whole rigmarole with Clinton, then we’re on this nightmare seesaw where each side tries to impeach the other side and the country goes even further down the toilet.

JAY: Imagine if somebody had the sense to kill him last year, during that speech. Imagine if somebody had wired up the leads from an elecric chair to the podium. So he walks up, he lays out his papers, he takes hold of both sides of the podium in that authoritative way, and buzzap . Imagine how much death the world would have been spared. All that looting. The antiquities.

BEN: I think the war machine would have ground on.

JAY: Oh, no, no, I can’t agree. It would definitely have slowed things up. No question. Do you want to see the bullets?

BEN: You know what you need?

JAY: What?

BEN: A dog. A puppy.

JAY: Well, I travel a lot, so I don’t think I could have a puppy. It would be nice. I worked for a roofer in Birmingham for a while, he was a Korean guy, really smart, his eyes had been burned by the sun, he never wore sunglasses. It gets so hot up there on those houses, wow, really hot. You can’t touch anything, everything’s glittering. It’s a hostile environment. One guy fell and cracked a rib. But then he was right back up there. I think that job sautéed my brain.

BEN: It’s possible.

JAY: Something was readjusted, anyway.

BEN: Recalibrated, eh? As Rumsfeld would say?

JAY: Recalibrated. I got a new perspective. I feel I want my life to count for something.

BEN: Lots of people feel that.

JAY: I feel it more intensely now. But no, I definitely couldn’t have had a puppy because I was gone all day.

BEN: I guess not.

JAY: One of the roofers was a kind of interesting guy who was trying to raise free-range chickens. Before work he’d drive out to some land and get all his chickens going. He had this enclosure that he moved around on the land, so that the chickens would have a new patch of grass to mess around in, and I gave some thought to starting a chicken farm, but the guy said that it wasn’t really accurate to call it free-range, because the kind of chicken that customers expect, that restaurants expect, is a super, super fleshy chicken, it’s a kind of monster, and when a chicken puts on that much flesh, it can’t walk very well, so that even though it has more room to peck in than a factory chicken that’s been, you know, raised in solitary confinement, still it’s been bred for meat for so many generations that it’s really more or less imprisoned by its own bulk. One day we were having a drink and he was all upset because one of his birds had gotten its leg crushed under the frame when he was moving it that morning, so he had to slaughter it.