“It does sound interesting.”
“A lot of the communes are into drugs in a heavy way. Or else they turn into cults. There’s a leader, and everybody decides he’s getting messages from God, and they have to clear it with him before they pick their toes. But the Land People are supposed to be pretty straight.”
“Is that what they call themselves? The Land People?”
“Uh-huh. I wondered, you know, if you’d like to see what it’s like.”
Somewhere inside him something flared and died, like a star going into nova. If only he could shed these feet of his. If only he could be the person who could take this perfect girl to that perfect society.
But that’s out. No way.
“I wish I could do this,” he said.
“It wouldn’t have to be right away.”
“But your friends are going soon, aren’t they?”
“Tomorrow, as a matter of fact. But we could go, you know, anytime at all. If you wanted.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, deliberately, “I’m going to have to take a small trip. More than a small trip, actually. I expect to be gone for two weeks, perhaps as long as a month.”
“When?”
“I planned to leave the day after tomorrow. I hadn’t told you because I’d been hoping something might come up to make me postpone it, but nothing has.”
“Where do you have to go?”
“Washington.”
“I could come with you. I might even be helpful. I can run errands, do research. And stay out of your way when you’re busy.”
“You tempt me. But it wouldn’t work.”
“Oh.”
He took her hand. “An idea occurs to me. Why don’t you go to the commune with your friends? The Land People? Go with your friends to the Land People.”
“I don’t want to go without you, Miles. I—”
“Let me finish. You go with them. I’ll go to Washington. I’ll take care of my business as quickly as I possibly can. I’ll know you’re at a good place, which will put my mind at ease and thus make the work go faster. Perhaps I’ll be done sooner than I think.
“In any case, I won’t be more than a month. As soon as I’ve finished I’ll find these Land People. If you’ve discovered you loathe it there, we’ll leave. If you like it, we’ll see how it suits us. The two of us, together.”
Her eyes said, Do you mean it? All of it?
His said, Yes.
Her face glowed and he kissed her, and his passion surprised him as it had done so often lately. “Oh, let’s make this the best ever,” she said, fitting her body to his. “How can I go a month without you? God.”
She asked the same question afterward, as she was drifting off to sleep.
“Oh, a week with the Land People and you’ll forget me.”
“I’ll always love you, Miles. Always.”
Will you, Jocelyn?
A fragment of dream awakened him. He was at an amusement-park shooting gallery, rifle in hand. Heads passed by, not the usual two-dimensional targets, but genuine heads, disembodied but nonetheless alive. Clyde Farrar, Jr., Burton Weldon, J. Lowell Drury, Emil Karnofsky, Willie Jackson, Royal Carter — an endless parade of the heads of those he had killed.
And, with no will of his own involved, he kept working the trigger, kept sending bullets into those heads. And each head turned into Jocelyn as he killed it, and each dying Jocelyn head fastened tortured eyes upon him, and yet he kept on working the trigger, kept turning head after head into Jocelyn.
He broke himself out of the dream. When his heart rate slowed, he turned to her, irrationally anxious that something had happened to her during his dream. But she slept peacefully on her side, one leg drawn up and bent at the knee. She was clutching her pillow in her sleep.
Karnofsky, too, had clutched his pillow.
She left in the afternoon, in a car with two boys and two girls. Dorn remembered them vaguely from the party. She took very little with her. Some clothing, and she would stop on the way to collect Vertigo. Her other clothing remained in Dorn’s closet, her books on his shelves, her radio on his kitchen table.
After the car was gone, and after he had given himself up to a few minutes of weeping, Dorn reviewed his performance. As far as he could determine, she had not the slightest suspicion that she would never see him again.
Fourteen
In Washington he took a room in a decent but no longer fashionable hotel. His room was on a high floor and he could see quite a bit of Washington from his window. He rarely availed himself of the view.
One of the first places he went in Washington was a chain drugstore, where he purchased a legal-sized pad of ruled yellow paper and several ball-point pens. He returned with his purchases to his room. There was a small writing desk. He seated himself at it, pen in hand, and stared for several minutes at the blank pad of paper.
Then he began to write.
My Jocelyn,
You hold in your hand a letter from a man you now know as the author of a heinous crime. Writing these lines, I ache at the thought of what you must now think of me. You must wonder how you could possibly have loved me. You must recoil at the realization that there was so much about me you could not begin to know.
And yet you knew me, Jocelyn, as no one had ever known me before.
Jocelyn, you know nothing of the man I have been or even of the man I am. Jocelyn, I first killed a man when I was seventeen years old. I killed him because he was a Serb and I was a Croat. At the time this seemed sufficient reason. By the time I was your age, Jocelyn, I literally could not count the men I had killed. I did not know their number.
He filled page after page in his small neat cramped hand. The words flowed of their own accord, and it was all he could do to make the pen move fast enough to get them down. When they stopped he set the pen down on the desk top and closed his eyes. His forearm throbbed all the way to the elbow. He rubbed it idly with his left hand.
After a few moments he got to his feet. He did not read what he had written, nor did he sever the filled pages from the pad. He went to the massive old dresser and, with an effort, pulled it free from the wall. He lifted the carpet where the dresser had been and placed the entire pad of yellow paper beneath it, then carefully pressed the carpet tacks back into place. Finally he returned the dresser to its original position and left the room.
No day passed without this ritual being repeated. Once every day he would shove the dresser aside and take up the pad of paper. Then he would sit at the small desk and write for as long as he had words to put down. The words did not always flow freely. Sometimes he found himself staring at the page before him for ten or twenty or thirty minutes in an effort to sort out a thought and get a sentence in its proper order. One day he wrote three short paragraphs in no time at all, then stopped abruptly, through for the day. But however much he wrote and however long it took, each day the pad of paper went back beneath the carpet, and each day the dresser was replaced over it.
When he was not writing or sleeping he moved around downtown Washington. He took several tours. On a tour of the White House his group unexpectedly encountered the President, who was then emerging from a conference with someone. The President smiled and shook hands with several members of the tour group. He did not shake hands with Dorn.
The Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were key attractions on the tours Dorn took. He visited both of them afterward, by himself. Standing close to the Washington Monument and dizzied by its height, he thought of its particular appropriateness, an absolute phallus raised in tribute to the Father of his Country.