Libra - Don Delillo [135]
Here on the road in the Deep South he saw something that showed how strangely and completely a hatred for this President reached into certain parts of the culture, into daily lives. During, the first long day of driving he’d wandered into Georgia by mistake and passed a drive-in theater where they were showing a movie about young Kennedy the war hero. It was called PT 109 and under the title on the signboard there was a special incentive: See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.
It scared him all right, the signs he saw on the road in the U. S. Here was Louisiana in heavy rain. He would tell T-Jay everything he’d seen and heard with Alpha 66 in the Glades. The conclusion wasn’t hard to draw, that Kennedy was the object of the mission.
Something in his heart longed for this murder, even though he knew it was a sin.
The Curator sends autopsy photos of Oswald. Nicholas Branch feels obliged to study them, although he doesn’t know what he can possibly learn here. There are the open eyes, the large wound in the left side, the two ridges of heavy stitching that meet beneath the clavicle and descend in one line to the genital area, forming the letter Y. The left eye is swiveled toward the camera, watching.
The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. There are photographs of skulls with the right cranial portion blown away. There are bullet-shattered goat heads in close-up. Branch studies a picture of a gelatin-tissue model “dressed” like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked. There are documents concerning exit velocities. There is a picture of a human skull filled with gelatin and covered with goatskin to simulate a scalp.
The Curator sends FBI memos concerning the President’s brain, which has been missing from the National Archives for over twenty years.
He sends an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell.
He doesn’t know why they are sending him this particular grisly material after all these years. Shattered bone and horror. That’s all it means to him. There is nothing to understand, no insights to be had from these pictures and statistics, from this melancholy bullet with its nose leveled and spread like a penny left on trolley tracks. (How old he is.) The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point. They are rubbing his face in the blood and gunk. They are mocking him. They are saying in effect, “Here, look, these are the true images. This is your history. Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is lead penetrating bone.”
They are saying, “Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses. Not your roomful of theories, your museum of contradictory facts. There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab. The open eye staring. The goat head oozing rudimentary matter.”
They are saying, “This is what it looks like to get shot.”
How can Branch forget the contradictions and discrepancies? These are the soul of the wayward tale. One of the first documents he examined was the medical report on Pfc. Oswald’s self-inflicted gunshot wound. In one sentence the weapon is described as 45-caliber. In the next sentence it is 22-caliber. Facts are lonely things. Branch has seen how a pathos comes to cling to the firmest fact.
Oswald’s eyes are gray, they are blue, they are brown. He is five feet nine, five feet ten, five feet eleven. He is right-handed, he is left-handed. He drives a car, he does not. He is a crack shot and a dud. Branch has support