So I heard myself say, “I love you too, Desi. But I can’t leave the planet Earth. I can’t even leave Bovary.”
That’s about all I could say. And Desi didn’t put up a fuss about it, didn’t try to talk me out of it, though now I wish to God he’d tried, at least tried, and maybe he could’ve done it, cause I could hear myself saying these words like it wasn’t me speaking, like I was standing off a ways just listening in. But my spaceman was shy from the first time I saw him. And I guess he just didn’t have it in him to argue with me, once he felt I’d rejected him.
That’s the way the girls at the hairdressing salon see it.
I guess they’re right. I guess they’re right, too, about telling the newspaper my story. Maybe some other spaceman would read it, somebody from Desi’s planet, and maybe Desi’s been talking about me and maybe he’ll hear about how miserable I am now and maybe I can find him or he can find me.
Because I am miserable. I haven’t even gone near my daddy for a few months now. I look around at the people in the streets of Bovary and I get real angry at them, for some reason. Still, I stay right where I am. I guess now it’s because it’s the only place he could ever find me, if he wanted to. I go out into the field back of my trailer at night and I walk all around it, over and over, each night, I walk around and around under the stars because a spaceship only comes in the night and you can’t even see it until you get right up next to it.
“JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction”
When we turned onto Seventy-second Street and saw what awaited us, my handler flinched, and he tightened his grip on the wheel. I suspect he wanted to accelerate on by and abort the whole plan. But he knew the Director had okayed it and he looked at me.
“Are you sure, Mr. President?” he said.
The only thing you could see of Sotheby’s was a white awning. The front of the building had completely disappeared behind television trucks and satellite dishes. It was a risk, of course. But things that Jackie and I had lived with were disappearing into the hands of strangers, and it made me feel as if I were dead. The CIA could get me in only on this third day, and I knew well enough already that the four thousand dollars I’d been able to scrape together from my ration of pocket money probably wouldn’t allow me to buy back even a tie clip. But there were other things working on me. I had to go.
We passed an NHK satellite truck beaming to Tokyo and then a BBC truck, and I said to my handler, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price.”
“Mr. President?” he said, pressing me to prove I wasn’t rambling. He was a very young man.
“You probably never even read my inaugural address,” I said.
He was reaching for his cellular phone.
“Dave, you don’t have to call. I’m just having a little joke. It’s all right. The Director and I talked it over. There’s no better place to hide than the glare.”
Dave pulled his hand back to the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
“That’s okay, Dave. In case of domestic insurrection, the president has contingency plans to go to a safe house in Arlington, Virginia.”
His hand went for the phone again.
“Chill out, Dave. That was President Johnson’s plan. Old news. I said that on purpose as a joke.”
“I respectfully request that you don’t joke like that, Mr. President.”
My handler is right to be nervous. After all, loose talk is why I’m in the position of having to sneak into the public auction of the effects of my late wife. It’s why my long-suffering Jackie was led to live, unaware, as a bigamist, the wife of a Greek who had a face that could stop a thousand ships.
The bullets fired on that fateful afternoon in Dallas killed only the editor in my brain. After that moment, I could not hold my tongue about anything. I woke up on the gurney rolling into the hospital and began at once to disclose all the state secrets of that very secretive time. Of no use now. But it’s far too late to explain any of this to a world that the Agency determined quite quickly must never have even momentary access to me.
I completely agreed with the decision. It’s only the editor that’s gone. My powers to reason are still completely intact, and this was the only reasonable course. Anyone who came near me would become a security risk. And of no import to the CIA but critical to me, I would have talked endlessly to Jackie about the things that we agreed would never be spoken. Along with the secret details of our foreign policy, the smells and sights and tastes of all the women I’d ever known would come tumbling out. There was no choice but to bury the wax dummy in my place. Not only is my faculty of reason untouched, so are my powers to remember. Sweet memory. It’s been the great comfort of my confinement.
Still, I’m very glad now to be sliding to a stop in front of this white awning. I know I can meet my commitment to silence. I realize that it’s still important. I say that what I know is of no use. But I suspect that if I were to speak now of the doomsday rocket silo twenty miles north by northeast of Burgdorf, Idaho, in the Gospel Hump Wilderness, I would be speaking of something still in place, though perhaps the target agenda of Moscow, Peking, Pyongyang, and Hanoi would have changed slightly. But I am determined to withhold even the faintest allusion to these things.
As I pointed out to the Director, I never asked to go to the funerals or the weddings. I didn’t ask to go to Teddy when he left that girl in the dark water at Chappaquiddick or to my nephew, who never even had a chance to know me, when it was clear to me that he needed to speak honestly of what he’d done to that girl in Florida. I didn’t even ask to go to John-John to warn him about the magazine business. But this auction was a different thing.
I step out of the car. I suspect the Director has watchers in the crowd. I am never out of sight. But for a moment I feel alive again. I feel that I am living in my body, in the present moment. How sweet that is, I’ve come to realize in these thirty-two years of exile. How often in the life I used to lead was I in a place that could have filled me with memories, but my mind carried me elsewhere. I missed the moment. Now, on the sidewalk in front of Sotheby’s, I head to the end of a long line of people whose faces once would have turned to me, whose hands would have come out to touch me. It took me a long time to get used to that touching. I never quite did. But I crave it now. They touch me now in my dreams. Hands trembling faintly from excitement, warm with the flush of desire. I touch them back, each one.
But here, the TV lights glare and the crowds line up and they yearn to touch only the things I touched. I think this is similar to what Abraham Lincoln dreamed the week before he was killed. He dreamed that he awoke from a deep sleep and he heard distant sobbing. He arose and made his way through the empty hallways of the White House to the East Room, where he found a great catafalque draped in black. A military guard stood there and Lincoln asked, “Who is dead?” The man replied, “It is the President.” I could ask anyone now in this line, “Whose French silver-plated toothbrush box with cover is this, being auctioned off to strangers?” And the reply would be, “It is the President’s.”
I pass all these hands stuffed in pockets or clutching purses or fluttering in conversation. I pass all these faces turned away from this bearded man with close-cropped hair and the faint line of a scar on the side of his skull and the hobble of a very bad back. And I know I should be glad that there is not the tiniest flicker of recognition. The Director and I are in complete agreement. He’s stuck his neck out for me. Pity for an old man and his past. Trust that old age has slowed my tongue, which it has, somewhat. But part of me is ready to tell, at the slightest glance from a stranger, how Mayor Richard Daley found fourteen thousand votes in the cemeteries of Chicago to swing a state and elect a president. And I would point out the debt of gratitude the whole planet owes those dead voters. None of us knew at the time of the missile crisis of 1962 that the Soviet general in charge of troops in Cuba was authorized to use tactical nuclear weapons. After the Soviet Union broke up, the general appeared on TV–I get all the cable channels — and he said if the American President had chosen to send troops to the island, they would have been nuked. If Richard Nixon had been the President, he certainly would have sent those troops. What does this mean? It means those dead Chicagoans prevented a nuclear holocaust. My impulse to talk about these things aside, credit should be given to this necropolis of American heroes.