Libra - Don Delillo [200]
He believes the Jews of America are being put in kill machines and slaughtered in enormous numbers.
He is miscast, or cast as someone else, as Oswald. They are part of the same crime now. They are in it together and forever and together.
The lawyers leave, the doctors come waltzing in. The cancer is spreading. He can smell it on the hands of his examiners. Jack Ruby reads his telegrams.
Does anyone understand the full measure of his despair, the long slow torment of a life in chaos, going back to Fanny Rubenstein toothless on Roosevelt Road, screaming in the night, going back in time to the earliest incomprehension he can remember, a truant, a ward of the state, living in foster homes, going back to the first blow, the shock of what it means to be nothing, to know you are nothing, to be fed the message of your nothingness every day for all your days, down and down the years?
You have lost me, Chief Justice Warren.
He begins to merge with Oswald. He can’t tell the difference between them. All he knows for sure is that there is a missing element here, a word that they have canceled completely. Jack Ruby has stopped being the man who killed the President’s assassin. He is the man who killed the President.
This is why Jews are being stuffed in machines. It is all because of him. It is the power and momentum of mass feelings.
Oswald is inside him now. How can he fight the knowledge of what he is? The truth of the world is exhausting. He lowers his head and runs into the concrete wall.
And Nicholas Branch studies the psychiatric reports. He reads into the night. He sleeps in the armchair. There are times when he thinks he can’t go on. He feels disheartened, almost immobilized by his sense of the dead. The dead are in the room. And photographs of the dead work a mournful power on his mind. An old man’s mind. But he persists, he works on, he jots his notes. He knows he can’t get out. The case will haunt him to the end. Of course they’ve known it all along. That’s why they built this room for him, the room of growing old, the room of history and dreams.
Sunday night. Beryl Parmenter sat watching TV in her little house in Georgetown. They were showing reruns of the shooting.
Over and over. The screen is full of broad-shouldered men in hats, all around Oswald, who is bare-headed, his features whited out by glare except for his left eye, shining darkly. Jack Ruby comes into the frame, bulky and hunched. His hand is bright static around the gun. The picture jumps. The surprise and pain in Oswald’s face remove him from the company around him. He is alone, already far away, the only one not wondering what has happened. A cold moment of stillness after the shot. Then everything flies apart.
She didn’t want these people in her house.
The camera doesn’t catch all of it. There seem to be missing frames, lost levels of information. Brief and simple as the shooting is, it is too much to take in, too mingled in jumped-up energies. Each new showing reveals a detail. This time she sees that Ruby carries dark-rimmed glasses folded in his breast pocket. Oswald dies unchanged.
Why do they keep running it, over and over? Will it make Oswald go away forever if they show it a thousand times? She knew exactly what Ruby was thinking. He wanted to erase that little man. He wanted him out of here. He didn’t want to see him or hear him or think about him. Just like the rest of us, Jack. We want him out of here too. And now he’s gone but it isn’t helping at all.
Beryl had admired President Kennedy. She’d even felt a small personal involvement in his rise, a sort of landed interest, inasmuch as the Kennedys had lived for a time in a brick house on N Street, practically around the corner, when Jack was a senator. She wanted to feel a satisfaction in the death of Oswald, some measure of recompense. But this footage only deepened and prolonged the horror. It was