Checkpoint (5 page)

BEN: 
No, I’ll just wait for my, uh, very well done steak.

JAY: 
You have to do that these days, trust me. If you say you want it medium, they’ll bring it to you raw, and I mean raw raw, bleeding all over the plate. Just raw.

BEN: 
I see, so if you ask for well done—

JAY: 
If you ask for well done, you get medium rare. I’ve been there, man. If you ask for very well done, you get medium. And that’s what you wanted.

BEN: 
How do you get well done?

JAY: 
There’s no way, it’s impossible. Nobody’s going to cook your steak well done in this day and age. Forget it.

BEN: 
Well, thanks for looking out for me.

JAY: 
No problem. Yee, it’s bright out. Let’s crack the window a little.

BEN: 
Why?

JAY: 
Just to be aware of what’s going on outside. Way over there, beyond those trees, that’s where the snipers are on the roof. The sharpshooters. But that’s okay, because I’ve got my special bullets.

BEN: 
Consider this: You kill him and
boing,
Cheney’s driving the truck. He’s twice as bad.

JAY: 
Well, once you go down that road, man—that’s a slippery slope, let me tell you. You start to think, Okay, I know I’ve got to get rid of Bush, oh, but wait, Cheney’s twice as bad, got to take him out, too, maybe some kind of tiny scorpion that climbs up his leg just as he’s being sworn in, bites him, he slumps. The scorpion has no memory of what it’s done—
The Manchurian Scorpion
. But wait, hmm, Rumsfeld’s just as bad as Cheney, so in fairness—and don’t forget Powell—maybe you don’t kill Powell, because he was less enthusiastic, maybe you just want to put him in a coma. And then there’s Tommy Franks and General Richard Myers, with all his medals, and it just goes on and on. And eventually you start thinking you have to somehow do away with about thirty or forty people. Which is pretty outrageous. And then you think, well, thirty or forty people, what’s that? That’s NOTHING. They’ve killed thousands of innocent people. People who are utterly blameless. Thousands of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with any warlike activity.

BEN: 
Yeah, no, wrong road, we definitely don’t want to go down that road.

JAY: 
The proportions are skewed. It’s like peeking into the hole in one of those miniature rooms—those little Dr. Caligari rooms, where everything looks right, but it isn’t right at all. People think these prison photos prove how bad the war is. Actually, no, the prison photos are nice compared with how bad the war is. If the prisoners had had clothes on, even bloody clothes, the Republicans would have said, Hey, sometimes you have to break a few eggs, you know. It’s the nakedness that made it a scandal.

BEN: 
Perhaps so.

JAY: 
They say, in hushed tones, they say, “Some of the Prisoners Have Died.” Well, what the fuck? Yes, some have died. Some have been packed in ice and spirited away. But more than ten thousand Iraqis have been killed in this war. It’s off the charts. Tanks firing on apartment blocks. Morgues and hospitals filled to capacity, blood splashed on the walls. None of it is secret. It’s known, it’s been reported around the world for a full year, and yet there’s no outrage about that, there’s no scandal. What, that? Oh, that’s just the war. I mean, standing naked with a hood over your head while a dog barks at your dick, okay, that’s horrible, but having a missile hit your house is a hell of a lot worse, because you may be carrying your own kid out of the rubble.

BEN: 
There’s something really sinister about those hoods.

JAY: 
The hoods are bad, it’s all bad! It’s so unbelievably bad! How can somebody like Wolfowitz be involved in this? That quiet delivery that he has. He’s certainly smarter than Bush—I’d even say he’s smarter than Rumsfeld.

BEN: 
Julie says he must have been persecuted when he was a kid, one of those playground victims. He was in on the first Gulf War, you know. He was there urging Cheney on, right from the beginning.

JAY: 
Was he?

BEN: 
Yeah, he was so unhappy when we didn’t go in, when we stopped at the gates of the city. Now he’s got his wish.

JAY: 
I want to talk to him, I want to reason with him, I want to say, “Wolfowitz, you fuckhead! You’re killing people! You’re not humble enough before the mystery of a foreign country!”

BEN: 
Somehow I don’t think you’d get very far.

JAY: 
But I don’t want to send my scorpion after him. That’s the thing. I don’t feel he has to die. He should be one of those guys who go to jail for a while, and they grow a beard because they’re tired of seeing their face in the news.

BEN: 
They write their memoirs, like John Ehrlichman.

JAY: 
Yeah, I think Wolfowitz is genuinely crazy, but in a stealthy way, so you don’t pick up on it at first. Whereas, as you know, people think I’m a little off, but really I’m on an even keel. I’m just candid. I mean, sure there have been some problems—but I’m steady!

BEN: 
You’re a bit ragged around the edges, that’s all. What was I going to ask you, though? Oh, yeah. Have you ever been fingerprinted?

JAY: 
Yes, I have.

BEN: 
And have you . . . talked to anybody else about this?

JAY: 
Not in so many words.

BEN: 
Nobody?

JAY: 
I may have used the word “assassination” once or twice, but not with any specifics.

BEN: 
What happened with that nice woman you were going with?

JAY: 
Which one was that?

BEN: 
That one I met? Sarah, was it? Lots of bracelets?

JAY: 
Oh, Sarah.

BEN: 
She was very nice.

JAY: 
She moved on to other things. I ranted and raved too much.

BEN: 
Ah. Do you ever see Lila? How about your kids?

JAY: 
Sure, yeah.

BEN: 
And how are they?

JAY: 
It’s a little hard to tell. The youngest and the oldest are into their own little worlds, but Mara’s twelve now, and she’s got some real fire in her. Maybe she’ll carry the torch when I’m gone. It’s hard to say good-bye to them. But I did. Sometimes you’ve got say, Okay, this is my thing, and I am going to do it. Nobody else can do it.

BEN: 
I really don’t think this is your thing.

JAY: 
I just wore Lila out. You know? With me, everything’s political. I mean, she’s political, too, but not as much. A couple of years ago I got into a spat with her father. He’s one of those people who’s simply not capable of rational thought. So it was a little unpleasant. And the children weren’t in the room but they were in the other room. All of that led to a word of wisdom from the judge, that I should moderate my behavior. And that affected how much I see the kids. I’ve made a bollix of my life, that’s for sure.

BEN: 
You mean you’ve bollixed it up?

JAY: 
Yes, I bollixed it up!

BEN: 
Well, shouldn’t you try to un-bollix it? Why would you think that doing this would help in any way?

JAY: 
You know that sounds very therapeutic, and I don’t want you to be therapeutic. I just want you to be an attentive person I can talk to.

BEN: 
Yeah, but see, what you’re doing here, though, and I say this as gently as I can, is you’re using me. I didn’t know when you called that you wanted to tape our discussion prior to killing the president of the United States. I did not know that. If I had known that I would have said, No thank you, I’m going to be scanning some transparencies and I think you better call somebody else, because I’m not going to drive to Washington to hear the gory details.

JAY: 
I know, you wouldn’t have come.

BEN: 
What you said was “I really need to talk to you.” And I thought, Oh, okay, he really needs to talk to me. Sounds like the poor guy is in a crisis state. We’ve all been in states of despair. But, but. I didn’t know that you wanted to talk to me about doing
this
. I don’t like this. And then, this whole thing that you just laid on me, that if I call the law you’re going to whip out a firearm and all that—I don’t like it. I’m not sure that I want to be threatened with violence, with being shot in the leg, it’s not enjoyable. I’m not going to tolerate it, in fact. I’m going to walk out right now.

JAY: 
Go ahead. You threatened me first with John Ashcroft, you know. But go. Go.

BEN: 
If I walk out right now, are you going to go off and do something absurd and permanent and horrible, and something that’s going to totally unhinge the world even more than it is unhinged? Are you going to cause bloodshed?

JAY: 
I’m going to prevent a certain amount of bloodshed. By causing a minor blip of bloodshed in one human being I’m going to prevent further bloodshed.

BEN: 
But that’s where you’re completely misguided. And I’m your friend, I can say this to you. You’re completely misguided in that. It could cause any amount of bloodshed. If you think—what’s your plan? Okay, first of all—let’s see the gun.

JAY: 
I may have one.

BEN: 
You said that. I want to see it.

JAY: 
You want to see some bullets? They’re special bullets.

BEN: 
All right, show me the special bullets.

JAY: 
First I need to know whether you’re in or out.

BEN: 
What? I’m out, I’m so out.

JAY: 
Are you with me or not?

BEN: 
I’m not with you! Not with you.

JAY: 
I’m disappointed but I can’t say that I’m surprised.

BEN: 
I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Jay. But I don’t even want to impeach the guy. He’s committed impeachable offenses—lied us into a war.

JAY: 
That war speech he gave on the eve of the attack—he was bonkers that night. Staring. “When the dictator has departed . . .”

BEN: 
Well, so—should he be impeached? My feeling is that maybe he should be, if you consider his case in isolation. But you can’t do that. If we now impeach him after that whole rigmarole with Clinton, then we’re on this nightmare seesaw where each side tries to impeach the other side and the country goes even further down the toilet.

JAY: 
Imagine if somebody had the sense to kill him last year, during that speech. Imagine if somebody had wired up the leads from an elecric chair to the podium. So he walks up, he lays out his papers, he takes hold of both sides of the podium in that authoritative way, and
buzzap
. Imagine how much death the world would have been spared. All that looting. The antiquities.

BEN: 
I think the war machine would have ground on.

JAY: 
Oh, no, no, I can’t agree. It would definitely have slowed things up. No question. Do you want to see the bullets?

BEN: 
You know what you need?

JAY: 
What?

BEN: 
A dog. A puppy.

JAY: 
Well, I travel a lot, so I don’t think I could have a puppy. It would be nice. I worked for a roofer in Birmingham for a while, he was a Korean guy, really smart, his eyes had been burned by the sun, he never wore sunglasses. It gets so hot up there on those houses, wow, really hot. You can’t touch anything, everything’s glittering. It’s a hostile environment. One guy fell and cracked a rib. But then he was right back up there. I think that job sautéed my brain.

BEN: 
It’s possible.

JAY: 
Something was readjusted, anyway.

BEN: 
Recalibrated, eh? As Rumsfeld would say?

JAY: 
Recalibrated. I got a new perspective. I feel I want my life to count for something.

BEN: 
Lots of people feel that.

JAY: 
I feel it more intensely now. But no, I definitely couldn’t have had a puppy because I was gone all day.

BEN: 
I guess not.

JAY: 
One of the roofers was a kind of interesting guy who was trying to raise free-range chickens. Before work he’d drive out to some land and get all his chickens going. He had this enclosure that he moved around on the land, so that the chickens would have a new patch of grass to mess around in, and I gave some thought to starting a chicken farm, but the guy said that it wasn’t really accurate to call it free-range, because the kind of chicken that customers expect, that restaurants expect, is a super, super fleshy chicken, it’s a kind of monster, and when a chicken puts on that much flesh, it can’t walk very well, so that even though it has more room to peck in than a factory chicken that’s been, you know, raised in solitary confinement, still it’s been bred for meat for so many generations that it’s really more or less imprisoned by its own bulk. One day we were having a drink and he was all upset because one of his birds had gotten its leg crushed under the frame when he was moving it that morning, so he had to slaughter it.

BEN: 
That’s unfortunate.

JAY: 
Yeah, he invited me over to his place and we ate the chicken. Kind of a wistful moment.

BEN: 
How was it?

JAY: 
The chicken? It was good. It might have tasted a little more content with its lot, hard to say. After a while, though, I couldn’t take being on a roof all day long, and the chicken man told me about a fisherman up near Cape Cod who needed some help. So I went up there for a few months and hauled lobster pots. Now
that
is work, that is punishing work.