Libra - Don Delillo [188]
The horror of the day swept over him. He began to sob, talking to a newsman by the back wall.
Ask the weasel why he did it, boys.
The reporters wouldn’t stop shouting. The prisoner tried to answer a question or make a statement but no one could hear him. It was a riot in a police station. Too crowded here, a danger, and the detectives moved in to end the session before it even started.
They took him back to the cell. He stripped to his underwear and sat on the bunk, thinking, feeling the noise of the assembly room still resonating in his body. A cell is the basic state, the crude truth of the world.
He could play it either way, depending on what they could prove or couldn’t prove. He wasn’t on the sixth floor at all. He was in the lunchroom eating lunch. The victim of a total frame. They’d been rigging the thing for years, watching him, using him, creating a chain of evidence with the innocent facts of his life. Or he could say he was only partly guilty, set up to take the blame for the real conspirators. Okay, he fired some shots from the window. But he didn’t kill anyone. He never meant to fire a fatal shot. It was never his intention to cause an actual fatality. He was only trying to make a political point. Other people were responsible for the actual killing. They fixed it so he would seem the lone gunman. They superimposed his head on someone else’s body. Forged his name on documents. Made him a dupe of history.
He would name every name if he had to.
In Dallas
Dealey Plaza is symmetrical. A matching pair of colonnades, stockade fences, triangle lawns and reflecting pools—split down the middle by Main Street, which shoots straight out of the triple underpass into downtown Dallas. To one side of Main, Elm Street curves out of the underpass and proceeds at a gradual elevation past the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Oswald stood in the sixth-floor window with a rifle in his hands. To the other side of Main, Commerce Street carries incoming traffic eastward past the Carousel Club, six blocks into the downtown core, where Jack Ruby sits in his office at 4:00 A.M. cursing the smirky bastard who killed our President.
He was alone and vomiting. He vomited the meals of the last three weeks. Crying for five minutes, vomiting for five minutes. He couldn’t bear to hear the name Oswald one more time. Even off in his own mind the name was waiting at the end of every shrunken thought.
Some of the clubs stayed open Friday night. Jack closed the Carousel and Vegas. He was committed to closing for the weekend in honor of the President being shot.
He vomited into a polyethylene bag he had somebody manufacture for his twistboards. Then he picked up the phone and called his roommate, George Senator.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“What am I doing? I’m sleeping.”
“Schmuckhead. They killed our President.”
“Jack, that was yesterday.”
“We’re going out to take pictures. Where’s the Polaroid?”
“At the club.”
“You know those Impeach signs? There’s one around here someplace. I’m coming to pick you up.”
“I want you to know. There’s this constant interference of the time that I wake up and the time that you go to bed. Which don’t match.”
“Get dressed fast,” Jack told him.
He found the camera and drove out to his apartment building. It was located over a freeway and looked like a motel that changed its mind. The whole scene was removable. George was sitting on the iron stairway in baggy clothes and slippers. They headed back downtown.
Jack explained the nature of the assignment.
First there was the ad in the Morning News. It said, Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. A series of lies and smears. Not that Jack fully absorbed the points in the ad. It was the nasty tone he noticed most. And of course the black border. And of course the fact that the ad was signed