Checkpoint (6 page)

BEN: 
I bet.

JAY: 
Your arms, your back, oh. But I need to be tired at the end of the day, physically exhausted. I don’t want any free time in the middle of the afternoon, because then I start brooding on political stuff and also that’s when I start wanting a sip of something. Amber waves of grain, know what I mean?

BEN: 
I know.

JAY: 
I couldn’t have had a puppy then, either.

BEN: 
Nope, not if you’re out on a boat all day.

JAY: 
Nope, no puppy. No possible puppy.

BEN: 
. . . So where are the bullets, Jay?

JAY: 
They’re in the, um—I don’t know if I want to tell you. I’m not sure you’re fully committed.

BEN: 
I’m not committed. I would like to disarm you.

JAY: 
I’m on a path, man.

BEN: 
Well, veer off it.

JAY: 
There will be no veering. We’ve lost every war we’ve fought. Winning is losing. We lost the Second World War.

BEN: 
I think it’s widely agreed that we won World War II.

JAY: 
Well, we didn’t. It was the beginning of the end.

BEN: 
In what way?

JAY: 
We bombed all those places—we bombed Japan, right down the islands, cities turned into grave sites. The crime of it began to work on us afterward, it began chewing on our spleens and rotting us out inside.

BEN: 
Ugh.

JAY: 
The guilt of it squeezed us and it twisted us and made us need to keep more and more things secret that shouldn’t have been kept secret. We tried to pretend that we were good midwestern folks, eating our church suppers—that we’d done the right thing over there. But it was so completely, shittingly false.

BEN: 
Yes, in a sense, but—

JAY: 
And so we lost that war. We didn’t win it. We were corrupted by it, and we became more and more warlike and secretive, and we spent all our money building weaponry and subverting little governments, poking here and there and propping up loathsome people, United Fruit. And the gangrene spread through the whole loaf of cheese.

BEN: 
Oh, please.

JAY: 
And Japan couldn’t do that. Their best people spent their days and nights thinking about how to make beautiful things, tools, machines that just felt good to hold. Which they did with such artistry. They couldn’t make fighter planes, we didn’t let them. And so they won the war. We lost.

BEN: 
Okay, listen, where’s your gun, dammit? Where is it?

JAY: 
I can let you see the bullets. They’re in with a picture in a biscuit tin.

BEN: 
Where are they?

JAY: 
Top drawer. Under the TV.

BEN: 
I don’t see any.

JAY: 
In the back.

BEN: 
In here? Whoa! There really are bullets here.

JAY: 
I told you there were. They’re specials.

BEN: 
What’s special about them?

JAY: 
Okay, the bullets are self-guided. They’re programmable. I’m almost finished programming them. They’re marinating.

BEN: 
They just look like normal bullets to me.

JAY: 
Appearances can be deceiving.

BEN: 
Where’d you get them?

JAY: 
I’ll take them. Hand them over. Thanks. I got them through a guy.

BEN: 
What guy?

JAY: 
Just a guy I talked to.

BEN: 
Yeah?

JAY: 
Yeah, I’d heard from the guy who made the, uh, remote-controlled CD saws that there was a man in Cleveland who had these homing bullets, and all you had to do was put the bullets in a box along with a photograph of the person you wanted to shoot and they were able to seek that person out and—and that’s it.

BEN: 
So what did you do, did you just ring his doorbell and say, Hello, I’d like to buy some of your bullets?

JAY: 
No, I called him up and I said in a casual way that I’d heard that some particularly accurate bullets might be available. And he said, You mean you want the specials? And I said yeah. And he said, Okay, fifty dollars apiece. He overnighted them to me.

BEN: 
So, did he ask you what you were going to do with them?

JAY: 
He did. I said I wanted them because of the checkpoint. And he said, Think about it before you do it. And I said I would. And I paced around. All yesterday afternoon I paced and I walked, and I went to the natural history museum, I bought a natural history hat there, you like it?

BEN: 
Yeah, it’s a nice hat. Very practical.

JAY: 
And I wondered what this city would look like after I did it. How would the city look with this man gone? And I realized that the city would not look very different at all. You know? It isn’t like air-to-ground missiles from an A-10 Warthog ripping into a neighborhood. A small, violent point would have been pressed home, that’s all. But I also realized, of course, that I would probably be arrested and executed, or just shot, and therefore I wanted some record of what I’d done and why I did it. So I called you.

BEN: 
There are six bullets here.

JAY: 
Well, they’re not foolproof. But if he’s within range, all I have to do is point the gun in more or less the right direction, and the bullet does the rest. It’s like one of those precision guided missiles, Lockheed missiles, except with built-in face recognition.

BEN: 
A Bush-seeking bullet.

JAY: 
That’s right.

BEN: 
Agh! I have a family. I have a wife, I have a son. I have a job. This is so crazy.

JAY: 
I’m sorry, Ben, for involving you in this—endeavor.

BEN: 
If the FBI and the Secret Service and what’s his name, Tom Ridge, come after me because I’ve been hanging out with you in a hotel room before you make some crazy attempt on the life of the president, I’m totally cooked. I’m totally cooked, all right? I’ll have to say, Well, what we were talking about was—you know. What am I going to do, lie? I can’t lie. You and I sat here talking about the pros and cons of—of— Yes, you were talking a lot of delusional gobblydegook about homing bullets, but basically your intent was clear. I’ll have to say that. I’m scared. We’re both going to Guantánamo Bay.

JAY: 
Gitmo, hell—we’re going to Abu Ghraib. They’ll put us in the cages, we’ll be up on the stools. We’re dead men.

BEN: 
I don’t want to be a dead man.

JAY: 
Oh, stop fretting. You can say, which is quite true, that you argued against it. And that, however—you weren’t sure—but you felt that you’d perhaps succeeded in convincing me not to go ahead with it.

BEN: 
Perhaps succeeded, okay, good, okay.

JAY: 
In fact, if you’d like I can just tell you right now, I can just say, you did convince me. I’m not going to take the gun and go do it, because you were just so damn compelling in making a case that the president should be allowed to live, because, you know, he’s a bad guy but, you know, killing is wrong, and it’s not a good thing to do, and it’s pretty darn bad, and blah blah. You know? You did it. You did a marvelous job of dissuading me.

BEN: 
You fff— Oh, I’m not happy.

JAY: 
You just need some lunch. And a drink.

BEN: 
You know, this isn’t frivolity.

JAY: 
I’m not being frivolous. There is zero frivolity in my outlook right now. It’s time. It’s way past time. All you have to do is spend a couple of hours on a computer looking up stuff. Look at the pictures of the dead and injured. I did it last night.

BEN: 
You have a computer here?

JAY: 
I used the business center downstairs. Look at the pictures. It hurts bad. But do it. There was a child with a severely burned face. And then—are you listening to me? Then, go look at Lockheed Martin’s website. Read their press releases. They make the missiles that deliver the cluster bombs that destroyed those people. And then think for just a moment about the fact that Lynne Cheney was on the board of directors of Lockheed. She was. Right up until when her husband became vice president. Lockheed! The vileness of what they do. It fucking buggers understanding. I printed—

BEN: 
“Buggers” or “beggars”?

JAY: 
Take your pick. I printed out one of their web pages, where is it? Yeah, here. Here. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. It says that their products “help ensure peace and stability around the world.” Have you ever in your life heard anything more patently false than that?

BEN: 
That’s a little over the top, I must say.

JAY: 
Fort Worth, Texas, is where they make the F-16, the killer plane. There’s all this tough talk of “lethality” and “extreme lethality.” They sell these weapons and warplanes all over, and the countries that buy them, like Turkey, buy them with aid money from the United States. So in other words, we pay other countries to buy these machines from Lockheed. Holy mackerel-economics! Cheney’s wife was on the board of directors of Lockheed from something like 1994 to 2001. She was getting a hundred and twenty thousand a year for helping to guide and oversee this merchant of misery. Lynne Cheney, this merchant of multinational MISERY, man. It’s staggering when you take time to think about it for more than twelve seconds. And here she’s all in a flusterment about the nasty lyrics of Eminem.

BEN: 
Eminem is no favorite of mine.

JAY: 
Well, no, he’s not Zappa. But that woman, I’m sorry to say, is the real obscenity.

BEN: 
Oh, Lynne Cheney did some good things when she was at the NEH. You’ve got to lighten up a little. She’s not a viper. She was just on the board of directors.

JAY: 
How could she be on the board of that company and look at herself in the mirror? How can she look at her husband in the mirror? Halliburton and Enron and all that. Enron wangling to profit from the pipeline across Afghanistan. It’s a sickening spectacle.

BEN: 
Do you think they look at each other in the mirror?

JAY: 
Probably they do from time to time. But you know, the straightforward corruption is never worth wasting too much time over. There are always going to be corrupt people who sip from the firehose. No, it’s the death-dealing. It’s the creation of suffering and hate. That’s when you have to move.

BEN: 
Yeah, yeah, okay, but—yeah, all right, all right, this is all relevant and useful information. Dick Cheney is the shadow warrior—it does certainly seem that way. And Lynne Cheney was until very recently in the pay of the arms merchants. But that’s just the Cheneys. And you’re talking about—

JAY: 
I’m talking about direct action against the guy who’s nominally in charge. George W. Tumblewad. If you as the guy in charge allow killing to go forward, if you in fact actively promote killing, if you order it to happen—if you say, Go, men, launch the planes, start the bombing, shock and awe the living crap out of that ancient city—you are going to create assassins like me. That’s the basic point I’m making. You are going to create the mad dogs that will maul you. And that’s what he’s done.

BEN: 
Oh, Jay. My head, my head. I have a job. Let me have those bagel chips, will you? Oh, man. So, I take it, um, you’re no longer in the lobster business?

JAY: 
I had to bring that effort to a close.

BEN: 
Why? Seems like the fresh air, you know.

JAY: 
I saw one too many lobsters. They’re primitive creatures, extremely primitive. What goes on in those cold heads down in the murk at the bottom of the bay? Some people get terrified looking up at the emptiness of the night sky. I get that exact sensation looking at a lobster.

BEN: 
So you’ve been between positions?

JAY: 
Well, no, I’ve been working for a landscaping company in Tennessee, moving flag-
stones around, stone benches. For a while I had this idea that I wanted to get a job in a real factory, so that I could be part of something important, some manufactured product that went all over the country and went into everyone’s life, I wanted to punch a clock,
whomp,
time to work, just do the same thing over and over, go into autopilot, and that’s when I started to get a troubled feeling.

BEN: 
A troubled feeling, you? Hah hah hah! Who would have thought!

JAY: 
I still had this childish image of a factory in my head, which is obviously no longer a true idea, because face it, we’re not making anything anymore. It’s kind of scary.

BEN: 
Well—

JAY: 
What do we make? Huh? Do we make TVs, do we make shoes, do we make pillowcases, do we make electric motors? Do we make radios? Clocks? Dishes? Forks? Knives? What do we make? Hammers?

BEN: 
We make pickup trucks.

JAY: 
That’s for sure. We make light trucks for fascist fiddlefucks to drive around in.

BEN: 
We make corn syrup.

JAY: 
Corn syrup. That we do.

BEN: 
Military hardware?

JAY: 
There you go. Unmanned CIA robot attack drones. We do make those. Although I bet if we could we’d be outsourcing our attack drones to the Chinese. Slap an FAA sticker on them and sell them to tiny fearful countries.