Checkpoint (2 page)

JAY: 
No.

BEN: 
Are you going to blow up the White House?

JAY: 
Of course not; think of the innocent people. That’s what
they
would do. In fact, that’s what they did do.

BEN: 
So—how were you planning on doing it?

JAY: 
Couple of ways. I’ve got some radio-controlled flying saws, they look like little CDs but they’re ultrasharp and they’re totally deadly, really nasty.

BEN: 
Deadly nasty saws.

JAY: 
They’re incredible, lethal as hell. And a few other avenues of effort going forward, as well. I’ve got a huge boulder I’m working on that has a giant ball bearing in the center of it so that it rolls wherever I tell it to. And it’s indestructible. It’s made of depleted uranium and it’s a hundred tons of metal that just
rolls,
baby. So that’s an option.

BEN: 
You’re going to squash the president?

JAY: 
If I have to, I will. I met this inventor at a bar in Nahant. This guy is brilliant. He came up with the aimable saws, and if anything he’s more upset with the war than I am, so he’s not about to sell his inventions to the military.

BEN: 
So—where’s all this gear? I didn’t see any big boulders parked in the entrance when I came in.

JAY: 
You know that you can almost see the White House from this window? See that little tuft of trees there? I think it’s just to the right of that. Right there. I have some unusual bullets, too.

BEN: 
You know, you’re getting me nervous.

JAY: 
I’m getting myself nervous. Yesterday I walked around looking at all the people, wondering who’s a staffer, who’s a lobbyist. All these earnest faces. Parts of Washington are so beautiful, the Capitol Building, I mean, wow, that thing is stately. Big dome sitting on top of it. Then looking down over the Mall. A lot of money expended on that Lincoln Monument. And then you’ve got the White House, a little over to one side. And in your mind you have this piece of dark mischief, and you wonder if people can tell.

BEN: 
Oh, brother.

JAY: 
The problem is that the real elements that are moving Washington are not on the Mall. The Department of Defense is off across the river in that huge fortress, that brain-warper of a building. Five sides. It’s like it’s intentionally made to drive you over the edge just thinking about it.

BEN: 
Don’t think about it.

JAY: 
Wolfowitz is there. I mean, what’s up with him? And then the CIA over in McLean, Virginia.

BEN: 
“The truth shall make you free.” You know they’ve got that chiseled in the marble of the lobby?

JAY: 
No, I didn’t. And then all the consulting companies and the big federal departments out in Silver Spring, and Alexandria, Virginia, and Bethesda, and all these places. Spread out all over, far as the eye can see.

BEN: 
That’s deliberate, that they’re spread out. The whole beltway idea—

JAY: 
Yeah, so what you have in downtown Washington is this artificial image of a capital city. You’ve got the grandeur, you’ve got the art museums, the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian, the Natural History Museum, you’ve got the museum of the African American, you’ve got the museum of the Native American—gee whiz, kids, this is the United States of America! And then you’ve got this unelected fucking drunken OILMAN over there squatting in the house itself. Muttering over his prayer book every morning. Then he gives the order to invade. That’s how this began, you know.

BEN: 
How it began? Why don’t you tell me.

JAY: 
Do you really want to know, or are you just being therapeutic with me?

BEN: 
I don’t care. You don’t have to tell me anything. You called me up. I’m here.

JAY: 
But do you want to know?

BEN: 
Sure, I want to know. Yes.

JAY: 
Well, so last year, I marched on the White House. This was at the very beginning of the war. First they had a tip that Saddam was in a certain house, so they sent in that cruise missile to kill him. But, oopsie, he wasn’t there—yet another totally illegal assassination bungled by the CIA. And then, I think it was the next day, there was the huge attack on all the palaces. Not military targets. Against the Geneva Conventions.

BEN: 
“Decapitation.” I remember.

JAY: 
So just after that, I took a bus here, because there was supposed to be a big march on the White House. There was going to be an even bigger march in New York City, too, but I wanted to be in the place where the crime was being committed. To assign blame, you know? I felt there was nothing else to do. All the reasonable arguments against an attack had already been made, all the op-ed pieces had been written. It didn’t seem to matter. There was bloodlust in the air and there was a thrilled feeling that it was all inevitable. “Let’s see what happens!” So the planes went in, and the missiles went in, and all I had left to do was to come here and shout till my voice stopped working. That’s all I could do.

BEN: 
Yeah, we—

JAY: 
And there were all these cops on horseback that came trotting briskly, mounties, all lined up, self-important mounties, with blank faces. We were just a bunch of people with signs who wanted to march to the White House and shout that the president was a war criminal, but the funny thing is that nowadays here you can’t march to the White House, you’re really not allowed anywhere near the White House, they’ve got things blocked off and this maze of barriers around, so all you can do is pretend that you’re marching on the White House when actually the house itself is way way off in the middle distance, and you’re in a little sort of park, with your sign in the air, standing there.

BEN: 
What did your sign say?

JAY: 
“Murderers.”

BEN: 
Ah.

JAY: 
So then the crowd started to get bigger and we poured out into the street, and then it became kind of interesting because the horse cops were trying to keep three different phalanxes of gathering protesters apart, but we just
oozed,
man, we were like a huge amoeba of dissent and we poured around the block from one side and then another side and suddenly we were in front of the horse cops and behind them and coming in from the right, and they looked kind of silly there—because what were they blocking?

BEN: 
Nothing.

JAY: 
And then the motorcycle cops came, about a hundred of them, with those low-slung panniers. I don’t mind the sunglasses and the engine-revving, it’s part of their act, but some of them drove down the sidewalks at forty miles an hour, freaking people out. The crowd had gotten big by then.

BEN: 
You were pulling in people.

JAY: 
Yeah, we were pulling in people, it was a spontaneous surge of humanity, because we were so furious about that bombing. It was so obviously terror bombing—and I didn’t even know about the napalm then. There were government employees marching—I overheard them saying, “Keep your head down so they can’t take a picture.” And there was one guy, oh, he stood up against an equestrian statue, and he was holding a small white sign, right in front of his chest—it said SEE YOU IN THE HAGUE, MR. BUSH.

BEN: 
Good one.

JAY: 
I thought, Right on, right on. And I shouted stuff that I never would have believed that I would shout. My voice was destroyed by the end of the day, I was just croaking. “Stop the violence! Stop the hate!”

BEN: 
That’s called peaceful protest. Julie and I—

JAY: 
Oh, it was really something, for about an hour in the middle they had us caught, walled off between two streets, with rows of Plexiglas shields and nightsticks and paddy wagons—and I just thought, Man, all we want to say today is, This attack is wrong, so get the shit out of our way, you shitassing bluebeards, so we can just
say
this. But actually, you know what?

BEN: 
What?

JAY: 
They were very restrained, they were. I’ve heard things about Washington cops, but this really wasn’t bad. Their jaw muscles were jumping, some of them were angry, but they held back. And some of them beeped their little motorcycle horns in rhythm when we were chanting.

BEN: 
Did they really?

JAY: 
Oh, that made us cheer. And any time somebody flashed a peace sign from a window or a roof we would cheer, I mean it really felt straightforwardly democratic, and there were no bloody incidents, one or two guys got a little testy and they were wrestled down and hauled off, but we were standing there in front of the Plexiglas shields, and, you know? I had nothing really in common with all these people I was marching with—I’m not actually, you know, if you really want to know, pro-choice, for instance. In fact, quite the contrary.

BEN: 
Hmm.

JAY: 
This war, Ben? Is an abortion. It’s an abortion performed on a whole country. I mean in some ways I’m actually surprisingly conservative, if you get down to it. But there I was with my fist in the air, I’m sobbing, I’m screaming with these people because we all sensed and we knew, regardless of what we did or didn’t have in common in other ways, we all knew that the war that the United States was waging on that patchwork country was, was—it was ushering a new kind of terribleness into the world. And we knew that we had to do something. So we marched and marched and marched, and we shouted till we couldn’t shout anymore, and then we all went home and we put on our pajamas or our whatevers, and we went to sleep and woke up the next morning, and what? People were still getting their limbs blown off—families were still being killed. I’d given it everything I had. I felt like a lump of depleted uranium.

BEN: 
Well, you’d walked all day.

JAY: 
Yeah, oh, and at the end all the cops were lined up in a long long row to keep us from going into a certain park, and as I passed I thanked them, I said, Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, nodding to each one of them, because they had been restrained, and there hadn’t been any violence, and that’s something. That’s really important.

BEN: 
So you thanked them.

JAY: 
I did, and the next day, when I woke up, I told myself you’re not going to read blogs all day. Because I’d been reading Daily Kos and the Agonist, Talking Points Memo, checking Google News twenty times a day.

BEN: 
I don’t read blogs so much.

JAY: 
I said to myself, No more, because where does that get you? You’ve got to detach. It’s happening no matter what you do, no matter how well informed or not informed you are. And I lay there in this big house where I was staying, listening to myself breathe, not moving my head, just blinking. That’s when it happened. There was an old
National Geographic
map of the solar system on the wall near the bed, and it was just when the sun was coming into the room in a certain way, so that the sun hit one of the pushpins that was holding a corner of it, a lower corner, to the wall, and there was a moment when this yellow pushpin shined out. It was as if at that moment the pushpin was a celestial body. And I thought, The solar system, man, now that’s neutral, it’s eternal, you can’t politicize it, it’s on a different scale or plane, and I found that that was quite a comforting idea. The remoteness of the planets. The fact that the sunlight had come ninety-three million miles down through space and into that window just in order to light up the end of a pushpin—and I was thinking all this in a kind of peaceful way. . . . Is this working?

BEN: 
I think so, you could check it again.

[
Click, click.
]

JAY: 
Good, because—well, anyway, I thought, it doesn’t matter to the solar system what my status is. It doesn’t matter to, say, the Oort cloud whether I’m in jail or dead or alive, and it doesn’t matter whether the president is dead or alive. You see? It’s a matter of complete indifference to the universe at large.

BEN: 
Uh-oh.

JAY: 
So anyway, I had a moment of clarity, that’s all. Just a moment of understanding that I was capable of something that I didn’t know that I was capable of. That was all last year. And then he was on the aircraft carrier with that freaky flight suit on, and it was supposedly over, and then there was the Sunni Triangle, and the “insurgents,” you know, death everywhere, and now it’s all ramping up again, there’s a new massing of forces. And I know I’m capable of it.

BEN: 
You’re scaring me, man. Let me see your pupils. I have a feeling that you’re going back to the bad time. Are you?

JAY: 
No, now that was totally different. That was a simple dispute.

BEN: 
Sawing the legs off the chair of the assistant principal?

JAY: 
The man took joy in persecuting people. And the sawing made a valid point. People thanked me. Anyway, very different situation. What I mean is, that day that I marched taught me a lot, and I think by doing it I was pushed beyond some inner barrier of restraint. Have you taken a look at Ellsberg’s book?

BEN: 
You mean Ellsberg as in the Pentagon Papers?

JAY: 
Yeah, I saw him on C-SPAN, too. He’s so smart, and I think he really is someone to admire. He goes to a peace conference and there’s this Harvard kid there—this is in the late sixties—and the kid is talking about how he’s going to go to jail soon and how that’s the best thing that he and the other kids can do to protest the war is to fill up the jails, and Ellsberg goes into the bathroom, goes into a stall, and he sits there for an hour crying because he says to himself, This is the best thing that our children can do, the best hope that this Harvard kid can have? Is that he can go to jail? And he says to himself, We’re eating our young. And that’s when he made the decision. And those Pentagon Papers, man, they are so bloated with old wrongs, under Kennedy, under Johnson. Just an ever-blooming flowerbed of evil.