Shadowbahn(34)

“Is that right,” says Jesse, just as the other man said it a moment before, in just the same tone.

“Journalist . . .”

“Did you write about everything?” Jesse seethes.

“I wrote about history. Published a book or two. Won an award or two. Then I thought, Why write about what you can change?”

“So you changed everything then.”

“No,” Jack says, leaning as far across the small table as the prison of his body and chair allow, the smile vanishing as quickly as it flashed, “you did.”





variables


Jack says, “What you and I share is how each of us was supposed to be someone else. You understand that, don’t you.” It’s not a question.

“No.”

“Everyone,” he says, relighting his cigar, “talks about . . . lessons of history when what they really mean are”—he seems to ponder the cigar a moment—“auditions of history. History always auditioning for one last performance that’s never delivered because it’s always rewritten. To, uh, talk of the ‘lessons’ of history suggests . . . models that can be applied to other instances, when no moment really is enough like another that any model applies, without turning the model into something that’s so much something else as to make it, well, not obsolete, but not all that relevant either.”

? ? ?

I’m certain I don’t understand a thing you’re saying, Jesse thinks, staring fish-eyed at the other man, who laughs, “I’m certain you understand exactly what I’m saying.” Jesse contemplates slugging the man. “So,” the man says, slightly puffing his cigar, “all that, uh, Marxist theory about the science of history . . . you know, cause and effect, how there aren’t really any Great Men . . . wants to turn history into math, or an equation, take out the variables of, well, people, when you and I both know—”

Calm down, Jesse tells himself.

“—you and I both know that if there’s one lesson of history,” says the man in the wheelchair, “it’s that part of being great is being lucky. And that means the rest of us being lucky as well. So if we really know anything about history, we have to accept the . . . caprice—”

“The what?”

“—the random. Swallow hard the fact that if we . . . shift Churchill or Lincoln off their place on the timeline by a hundred kilometers here or a hundred miles there, or a decade here or there, then everything turns out differently.”

“Well now, that’s all mighty interesting,” says Jesse flatly, “that’s all real fascinatin’. So if y’all excuse—”

“That’s why,” Jack continues without the slightest indication that Jesse has said anything at all, “the only sort of writing that can’t possibly be about everything is history. The whole point of the historian”—he takes another puff as cool as his regard for the other man—“is to convey an understanding of the general, when more than anyone the historian is a registrar of happenings. Taking stock of the specific. I suppose that from a narrower perspective, I have you to thank—I’m alive, after all, if you call this living,” he says, looking at the steel cocoon enveloping his bottom half, “spine crumbling like confetti without a hard-on to my name. From the perspective of a dedicated hedonist in the Indian summer of his years, I suppose this is preferable to dead martyrdom, if we can forget, you know, the vanities of immortality. Anyway,” he adds, “dead martyrs aren’t here to tell us otherwise. Are they?”





July 13, 1960


Once, on the eighth-floor balcony of a hotel overlooking a square named for a World War I general, a candidate for president of the United States surveyed the city before him and all its high black windows in the surrounding buildings, where a more paranoid man might have imagined enemies lurked with long-range Italian rifles.

? ? ?

But such grand paranoia was premature. I haven’t earned it yet and now never will. Just inside the suite’s double doors, out of sight from anyone who might have happened to look up and spot him standing there incongruously, the candidate had set his crutches, which he never allowed the public to see him use when his back was killing him, which was almost all the time.





jigsaw


As the presidential candidate gazed out at the square and the broken summer sky above, for a few seconds on the balcony it was the quietest that it had been since he arrived in Los Angeles a few days before, fully prepared to accept his party’s presidential nomination. Behind him, bedlam overtook the hotel suite so completely as to ignore the candidate, who was the subject of a furor that was some mix of dismay, panic, and wrath among all the campaign’s young turks.

? ? ?

Out on the balcony the candidate wasn’t especially startled, only slightly bemused, to note that a piece of the sky was missing. The entire azure ceiling from east to west was hairline fractured, filled with fine and nearly imperceptible cracks like a well-assembled jigsaw puzzle, except now one part had gone astray and in its place was just black. It wasn’t the black of outer space but rather blankness, its absence revealing nothing behind it. From the hole in the blue, musical notes fell like rain.





yes / no