Nicholson Baker - Checkpoint

BEN: That’s unfortunate.

JAY: Yeah, he invited me over to his place and we ate the chicken. Kind of a wistful moment.

BEN: How was it?

JAY: The chicken? It was good. It might have tasted a little more content with its lot, hard to say. After a while, though, I couldn’t take being on a roof all day long, and the chicken man told me about a fisherman up near Cape Cod who needed some help. So I went up there for a few months and hauled lobster pots. Now that is work, that is punishing work.

BEN: I bet.

JAY: Your arms, your back, oh. But I need to be tired at the end of the day, physically exhausted. I don’t want any free time in the middle of the afternoon, because then I start brooding on political stuff and also that’s when I start wanting a sip of something. Amber waves of grain, know what I mean?

BEN: I know.

JAY: I couldn’t have had a puppy then, either.

BEN: Nope, not if you’re out on a boat all day.

JAY: Nope, no puppy. No possible puppy.

BEN:… So where are the bullets, Jay?

JAY: They’re in the, um — I don’t know if I want to tell you. I’m not sure you’re fully committed.

BEN: I’m not committed. I would like to disarm you.

JAY: I’m on a path, man.

BEN: Well, veer off it.

JAY: There will be no veering. We’ve lost every war we’ve fought. Winning is losing. We lost the Second World War.

BEN: I think it’s widely agreed that we won World War II.

JAY: Well, we didn’t. It was the beginning of the end.

BEN: In what way?

JAY: We bombed all those places — we bombed Japan, right down the islands, cities turned into grave sites. The crime of it began to work on us afterward, it began chewing on our spleens and rotting us out inside.

BEN: Ugh.

JAY: The guilt of it squeezed us and it twisted us and made us need to keep more and more things secret that shouldn’t have been kept secret. We tried to pretend that we were good midwestern folks, eating our church suppers — that we’d done the right thing over there. But it was so completely, shittingly false.

BEN: Yes, in a sense, but—

JAY: And so we lost that war. We didn’t win it. We were corrupted by it, and we became more and more warlike and secretive, and we spent all our money building weaponry and subverting little governments, poking here and there and propping up loathsome people, United Fruit. And the gangrene spread through the whole loaf of cheese.

BEN: Oh, please.

JAY: And Japan couldn’t do that. Their best people spent their days and nights thinking about how to make beautiful things, tools, machines that just felt good to hold. Which they did with such artistry. They couldn’t make fighter planes, we didn’t let them. And so they won the war. We lost.

BEN: Okay, listen, where’s your gun, dammit? Where is it?

JAY: I can let you see the bullets. They’re in with a picture in a biscuit tin.

BEN: Where are they?

JAY: Top drawer. Under the TV.

BEN: I don’t see any.

JAY: In the back.

BEN: In here? Whoa! There really are bullets here.

JAY: I told you there were. They’re specials.

BEN: What’s special about them?

JAY: Okay, the bullets are self-guided. They’re programmable. I’m almost finished programming them. They’re marinating.

BEN: They just look like normal bullets to me.

JAY: Appearances can be deceiving.

BEN: Where’d you get them?

JAY: I’ll take them. Hand them over. Thanks. I got them through a guy.

BEN: What guy?

JAY: Just a guy I talked to.

BEN: Yeah?

JAY: Yeah, I’d heard from the guy who made the, uh, remote-controlled CD saws that there was a man in Cleveland who had these homing bullets, and all you had to do was put the bullets in a box along with a photograph of the person you wanted to shoot and they were able to seek that person out and — and that’s it.

BEN: So what did you do, did you just ring his doorbell and say, Hello, I’d like to buy some of your bullets?

JAY: No, I called him up and I said in a casual way that I’d heard that some particularly accurate bullets might be available. And he said, You mean you want the specials? And I said yeah. And he said, Okay, fifty dollars apiece. He overnighted them to me.

BEN: So, did he ask you what you were going to do with them?

JAY: He did. I said I wanted them because of the checkpoint. And he said, Think about it before you do it. And I said I would. And I paced around. All yesterday afternoon I paced and I walked, and I went to the natural history museum, I bought a natural history hat there, you like it?

BEN: Yeah, it’s a nice hat. Very practical.

JAY: And I wondered what this city would look like after I did it. How would the city look with this man gone? And I realized that the city would not look very different at all. You know? It isn’t like air-to-ground missiles from an A-10 Warthog ripping into a neighborhood. A small, violent point would have been pressed home, that’s all. But I also realized, of course, that I would probably be arrested and executed, or just shot, and therefore I wanted some record of what I’d done and why I did it. So I called you.

BEN: There are six bullets here.

JAY: Well, they’re not foolproof. But if he’s within range, all I have to do is point the gun in more or less the right direction, and the bullet does the rest. It’s like one of those precision guided missiles, Lockheed missiles, except with built-in face recognition.

BEN: A Bush-seeking bullet.

JAY: That’s right.

BEN: Agh! I have a family. I have a wife, I have a son. I have a job. This is so crazy.

JAY: I’m sorry, Ben, for involving you in this — endeavor.

BEN: If the FBI and the Secret Service and what’s his name, Tom Ridge, come after me because I’ve been hanging out with you in a hotel room before you make some crazy attempt on the life of the president, I’m totally cooked. I’m totally cooked, all right? I’ll have to say, Well, what we were talking about was — you know. What am I going to do, lie? I can’t lie. You and I sat here talking about the pros and cons of — of— Yes, you were talking a lot of delusional gobblydegook about homing bullets, but basically your intent was clear. I’ll have to say that. I’m scared. We’re both going to Guantánamo Bay.

JAY: Gitmo, hell — we’re going to Abu Ghraib. They’ll put us in the cages, we’ll be up on the stools. We’re dead men.

BEN: I don’t want to be a dead man.

JAY: Oh, stop fretting. You can say, which is quite true, that you argued against it. And that, however — you weren’t sure — but you felt that you’d perhaps succeeded in convincing me not to go ahead with it.

BEN: Perhaps succeeded, okay, good, okay.

JAY: In fact, if you’d like I can just tell you right now, I can just say, you did convince me. I’m not going to take the gun and go do it, because you were just so damn compelling in making a case that the president should be allowed to live, because, you know, he’s a bad guy but, you know, killing is wrong, and it’s not a good thing to do, and it’s pretty darn bad, and blah blah. You know? You did it. You did a marvelous job of dissuading me.

BEN: You fff— Oh, I’m not happy.

JAY: You just need some lunch. And a drink.

BEN: You know, this isn’t frivolity.

JAY: I’m not being frivolous. There is zero frivolity in my outlook right now. It’s time. It’s way past time. All you have to do is spend a couple of hours on a computer looking up stuff. Look at the pictures of the dead and injured. I did it last night.

BEN: You have a computer here?

JAY: I used the business center downstairs. Look at the pictures. It hurts bad. But do it. There was a child with a severely burned face. And then — are you listening to me? Then, go look at Lockheed Martin’s website. Read their press releases. They make the missiles that deliver the cluster bombs that destroyed those people. And then think for just a moment about the fact that Lynne Cheney was on the board of directors of Lockheed. She was. Right up until when her husband became vice president. Lockheed! The vileness of what they do. It fucking buggers understanding. I printed—