Don DeLillo - Libra

He'd picked up a certain amount of sleazy tradecraft in his early years as an operations officer. Before that he'd taught in a series of small liberal-arts colleges in the Midwest, places like Franklin, in Indiana, where a perceptive colleague, affiliated somehow or other with CIA, recruited him for covert training. The idea seemed immediately right, a possible answer to the restlessness he'd felt working through his system, a sense that he needed to risk something important, challenge his moral complacencies, before he could see himself complete. Soon he was taking handy instruction in Flaps amp; Seals, or how to read other people's mail without letting them know about it, and remembering now and then those sleepy afternoons at little Franklin College. After some years in Havana and Central America, including duty as chief of station in Guatemala City, he was one of several men assigned to coordinate the training of a Cuban exile brigade. He was in a constant hurry after that. Underwater demolition in Puerto Rico and North Carolina, paratroop maneuvers outside Phoenix, teams to organize in Nicaragua, Miami, Key West.

He felt sharp now, better than he'd felt in some time, on top of things, alert.

The young man's address book would be next. A major project.

Once he had a handwriting sample, Win would scratch onto those miniature pages enough trails, false trails, swarming life, lingering mystery, enough real and fabricated people to occupy investigators for months to come.

He unscrewed the top of the Elmer's Glue-All. He used his X-Acto knife to cut a new signature strip from a sheet of opaque paper. He checked the length and width of the strip against the bare space on the back of the credit card. Then he dribbled an even stream of glue over the paper and pressed it lightly on the card. He listened to the radio while the glue dried.

He was in a constant hurry then. Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone. Trax Base in Guatemala. Things were quieter now. He had time to turn the pages of all the books he'd been meaning to read.

After the address book came the false names. He looked forward to coming up with names. He removed excess glue from the back of the card with one of Suzanne's school erasers. Then he turned off the radio, turned off the light, climbed the old plank stairs.

His gunman would appear behind a strip of scenic gauze. You have to leave them with coincidence, lingering mystery. This is what makes it real.

He checked the front door. The days came and went. Bedtime again. Always bedtime now. He went around turning off lights, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. This meant all was well.

Someday this operation would be studied at the highest levels of intelligence in Langley and the Pentagon.

He turned off the kitchen light. He began to climb the stairs, felt compelled to double-check the oven, although he was certain it was off. Astonish them. Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it. Create a loneliness that beats with violent desire. This kind of man. An arrest, a false name, a stolen credit card. Stalking a victim can be a way of organizing one's loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections. Desperate men give their solitude a purpose and a destiny.

The oven was off. He made an effort to register this fact. Then he went upstairs, hearing soft music on the bedroom radio.

This kind of man. A self-watcher, a man who lives in random space. If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

Lancer is going to Honolulu.

At one level he operated well. He felt alert, marvelously sharp, very much on top of things. The address book was next. We want a spectacular miss.

A voice on KDNT said that an eight-nation committee of the Organization of American States has charged Cuba with promoting Marxist subversion in our hemisphere. The island is a training center for agents. The government has begun a new phase of encouraging violence and unrest in Latin America.

He didn't need these reminders. He didn't need announcers telling him what Cuba had become. This was a silent struggle. He carried a silent rage and determination. He didn't want company. The more people who believed as he did, the less pure his anger. The country was noisy with fools who demeaned his anger.

He put on his pajamas. He seemed to be in pajamas all the time now. The day wasn't half done and it was time to go to bed again. Mary Frances was asleep. He switched off the radio, switched off the lamp. He spoke inwardly to whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls. He said simply, Please let me sleep but not dream.

Dreams sent terrors you could not explain.

He opened his eyes to the large room. There were high walls, old plush chairs, a heavy rug with a stale odor hanging close. He got out of bed and walked to the window. Hurrying people, long lines for buses. He washed and shaved. He put on a white shirt, gray flannel trousers, the dark narrow tie, the tan cashmere sweater, and stood in his bare feet at the window once more. Muscovites, he thought. After a while he put on his socks and good shoes and the flannel suit coat. He looked in the gilt mirror. Then he sat in one of the old chairs in the lace-curtained room and crossed one leg carefully over the other. He was a man in history now.

Later he would print in his Historic Diary a summary of these days and of the weeks and months to follow. The lines, mainly in block letters, wander and slant across the page. The page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge, crossed-out words, smudged words, words that run together, attempted corrections and additions, lapses into script, a sense of breathlessness, with odd calm fragments.

He told his Intourist guide, a young woman named Rimma, that he wanted to apply for Soviet citizenship.

She is flabbergassed, but aggrees to help. Asks me about myself and my reasons for doing this. I explaine I am a communist, ect. She is politly sym. but uneasy now. She tries to be a friend to me. She feels sorry for me I am someth. new.

On his twentieth birthday, two days after his arrival, Rimma gave him a Dostoevsky novel, in Russian, and she wrote on a blank page: "Great congratulations! Let all your dreams come true!"

Things happened fast after that. He had no time to work out meanings, fall back on old attitudes and positions. The secret he'd carried through the Marine Corps for over a year, his plan to defect, was the most powerful knowledge in his life up to this point. Now, in the office of some bald-head official, he tried to explain what it meant to him to live in the Soviet Union, at the center of world struggle.

The man looked past Oswald to the closed door of his office.

"USSR is only great in literature," he said. "Go home, my friend, and take our good wishes with you."

He wasn't kidding either.

/ am stunned I reiterate, he says he shall check and let me know.

They let him know the same day. The visa of Lee H. Oswald would expire at 8:00 p.m. He had two hours to leave the country. The police official who called with this news did not seem to know Oswald had talked to a passport official earlier in the day. Lee tried to explain that the first official had not given a deadline, had held out hope that his visa might be extended. He could not recall the man's name or the department he belonged to in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He began to describe the man's office, his clothing. He felt a rush of desperation. The second official didn't know what he was talking about.

It was this blankness that caused his terror. No one could distinguish him from anyone else. There was some trick he hadn't mastered which might easily set things right. Other people knew what it was; he did not. Other people got along; he could not. He'd come so far on his own. Le Havre, Southampton, London, Helsinki-then by train across the Soviet border. He'd made plans, he'd engineered a new life, and now no one would take ten minutes to understand who he was. A zero in the system. He sat near the window looking at the open suitcase on the rack across the room, some of his things still unpacked.