Checkpoint, Page 4

  JAY: The hoods are bad, it’s all bad! It’s so unbelievably bad! How can somebody like Wolfowitz be involved in this? That quiet delivery that he has. He’s certainly smarter than Bush—I’d even say he’s smarter than Rumsfeld.

  BEN: Julie says he must have been persecuted when he was a kid, one of those playground victims. He was in on the first Gulf War, you know. He was there urging Cheney on, right from the beginning.

  JAY: Was he?

  BEN: Yeah, he was so unhappy when we didn’t go in, when we stopped at the gates of the city. Now he’s got his wish.

  JAY: I want to talk to him, I want to reason with him, I want to say, “Wolfowitz, you fuckhead! You’re killing people! You’re not humble enough before the mystery of a foreign country!”

  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.

  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 kno
w, 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—

  BEN: “Buggers” or “beggars”?

  JAY: Take your pick. I printed out one of their web pages, where is it? Yeah, here. Here. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. It says that their products “help ensure peace and stability around the world.” Have you ever in your life heard anything more patently false than that?

  BEN: That’s a little over the top, I must say.

  JAY: Fort Worth, Texas, is where they make the F-16, the killer plane. There’s all this tough talk of “lethality” and “extreme lethality.” They sell these weapons and warplanes all over, and the countries that buy them, like Turkey, buy them with aid money from the United States. So in other words, we pay other countries to buy these machines from Lockheed. Holy mackerel-economics! Cheney’s wife was on the board of directors of Lockheed from something like 1994 to 2001. She was getting a hundred and twenty thousand a year for helping to guide and oversee this merchant of misery. Lynne Cheney, this merchant of multinational MISERY, man. It’s staggering when you take time to think about it for more than twelve seconds. And here she’s all in a flusterment about the nasty lyrics of Eminem.