Libra - Don Delillo [2]
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Some years ago I received a letter from a newspaper editor asking whether I might be interested in writing an essay about American assassins. Oswald’s name was included in the letter, his first name spelled L-e-i-g-h. I stared down at the page for a moment, absorbing the impact. The error changed everything. I imagined this fellow, Leigh Oswald, slim and fit—sprays his hair for lasting shine and all-day control. He wants to be an actor or a model. He moves to New York and enrolls in acting class, waiting on tables to pay the rent and to allow an occasional small binge at Bloomingdale’s. History turns on a misspelled name.
It also repeats itself as performance art. Ant Farm, a coun terculture collective, re-enacted the spectacle of the presidential motorcade in Dallas on a summer day in 1975. Two members of the group played the Kennedys, both men, one in drag. Tourists began to gather in increasingly large numbers as the limousine ride down Elm Street was repeated twenty times in the course of the day. The collective had its own film and video crew and the tourists had their own Instamatics. There were no simulated gunshots, there was no one in the role of Oswald. But some people, watching, wept as the performance-president lurched suddenly in the rear seat, suffering an image death. Ant Farm was recreating a media event, not a shooting. They were, in effect, restag ing the Zapruder film, the original home movie of the shooting. Their version, called The Eternal Frame, is an act of eerie deadpan surrealism, with meanings collecting by the minute in an enormous plastic baggie of assassination aura.
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The tremendous bruising force of history, sometimes random, often without logic or resolution, may produce a work of fiction that leans for its effectiveness on structure and pattern, on a detailed unraveling of some old perplexity or anxiety, some lingering confusion out there, in three dimensions, where the blood is thick and real but the gunshots can go uncounted.
One day, after this piece is written but perhaps before it appears, particle physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will finish work on their digital scanner and prepare to extract a signal from the asymmetric grooves of the object known as Dictabelt No. 10.
Then, maybe, there will be a number to attach to the flurry of gunshots.
Three or four—or will it be five? This latest number was advanced as a result of an acoustical study made in 2001.
Can any number be definitive?
Technology by nature, in its brilliant futurity, incorporates a will to surpass the advances of the year, the week, the minute before. Waveform analysis, confocal microscopes, digital replicas. How soon before one technology yields to another? And where, finally, is the truth in this matter? Can some scattered noises in a crowded outdoor setting on a day in 1963 be recovered from an old damaged dictaphone belt, its grooves 75 microns wide, five microns deep? Recovered, copied, deciphered. We want to believe they can. A character in the novel maintains that facts are brittle things. He maintains that the past is changing even as he sits and thinks about it. But we want to believe we are dealing with science, not metaphysics. We are also dealing with human beings, of course, people in the shadow of an epic event that has generated strong controversy, conflicting scientific findings and the endless disputations of proponents for this or that version of the truth.
It is possible to imagine an effort that does not yield a clear answer to the question of the gunshots.
It is possible to imagine a clear answer followed by a passionate set of informed objections, or specious objects, or objections flung from the far limits of delirium.
The opposing views may well be defined, as always, not only in terms of the politics of the case but also within the supposedly stricter limits of scientific inquiry.
See the truth and know it, if you can.
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A contemporary aspiring actor, not Leigh but Harv perhaps, moves from New York back to Dallas