Checkpoint

by Nicholson Baker

  BEN: People get fierce about this, Jay, because, you know—

  JAY: What?

  BEN: Because in the old days women died.

  JAY: Ah.

  BEN: There were desperate women who went to back-alley doctors who did terrible things. And they died.

  JAY: Because there were evil doctors and incompetent doctors, and people who pretended to be doctors but were really killers, who harmed desperate women, therefore we must continue to permit the deliberate killing of the unborn? What kind of an argument is that? That’s not an argument, that’s a piece of shit!

  BEN: No, it’s not a piece of shit.

  JAY: Yes it is. It’s like saying, Because Saddam gassed his own citizens, we had to drop bombs that would kill his citizens so that he could be removed from power.

  BEN: I don’t see that they’re parallel at all.

  JAY: What the left is all about is equality before the law. If you’re arrested for DUI, you can’t have your father fix it for you. You can’t send a cruise missile into a restaurant because you think a dictator is having dinner there with his family. And if you’re pregnant and you would rather not be, you can’t hire somebody with a suction machine to destroy your kid. It’s as simple as that. The laws of the land apply to evil people, to good people, to old people, to unborn people. That’s why babies are so beautiful, we feel how vulnerable and helpless they are. The medical profession has cut this link. They’ve sterilized our instincts.

  BEN: People I know very well have had abortions.

  JAY: I’m sure that’s true.

  BEN: I know them very, very well. They’re not happy about it, they grieve over it.

  JAY: Grief, now that’s truth—they’ve got something there.

  BEN: Well, they grieve. That’s all I’ll say.

  JAY: You remember Sarah, the one with the bracelets? The doctor said she probably couldn’t get pregnant because when she was young she’d had two abortions. Scar tissue. Now, she suffered over that. Don’t you think some of the kids, the soldiers, over in Iraq who get caught in some sudden riot and fire off a round, and then they see that they just shot some six-year-old boy who’s now dead on the sidewalk, don’t you think they’re going to grieve later on? Some of them? Try to figure out a way to tell themselves that their life is part of some larger good even though the most memorable thing they ever did was to shoot that boy dead in the street? Don’t you think they’re going to feel guilt?

  BEN: Some of them will.

  JAY: They definitely will. It’s wrong for the government to do that to people, to put them into a position where some of them will do things that are obviously totally wrong and that they will recognize to be wrong later. And it’s wrong for us to allow women to live with that grief for the rest of their lives. That was their one child, maybe. Maybe that was the baby that they were meant to have, and there weren’t going to be any others.

  BEN: You’ve obviously thought a great deal about this, and that’s fine, and what I would recommend is that you—well, you know what I’m going to say.

  JAY: What?

  BEN: I was going to say, Why don’t you get yourself a notebook, one of those little composition books with the marble design on the covers, and write all this down? Just for your own personal clarification.

  JAY: It’s intertwined. I get jittery when I try to write, I go here, I go there. I have to emit the words at normal talking speed. To somebody. When I go “Word, word, word, word” it doesn’t make any sense. That’s why they leave me. I wear people out.

  BEN: Are you able to read at all?

  JAY: Some, sure. Not like I used to, but sure, I go to Barnes & Noble, absolutely. I went a couple of weeks ago, had a cup of coffee. God, I’m parched. Shouldn’t we break out a couple of these little bottles? Clinky clinky?

  BEN: Not with you talking about this “path” of yours. Put that back. Put it back, Jay, I’m not kidding. You know what I tell my students to do?

  JAY: What?

  BEN: Some of them are upset about the war, their brains are addled. I say pick a book that you admire. Pick any book. Get a notebook and start copying it over. Copy the book from cover to cover. It’s like running a flax comb through your mind. You card the wool.

  JAY: Copy it?

  BEN: Yes, start at the beginning and go right through to the end. Don’t skip. You’ll become the world’s expert on that book.

  JAY: Do you do that?

  BEN: Sure. Well, I used to. I probably should again.

  JAY: What books did you copy?

  BEN: Let me think back. A book called The Oregon Trail. I copied that whole thing over one summer in Bermuda. I learned to write very very small because I didn’t have that much paper. It was a lovely time.

  JAY: How many pages was it?

  BEN: I don’t know, three hundred.

  JAY: Really. Wow. When was this?

  BEN: I spent a summer with my grandmother. It was hot, it was a sauna, and the cockroaches are big there. You been to Bermuda?

  JAY: No.

  BEN: The cockroaches are big, and the spiders, yike, they’re like huge crabs, they’re red and white. But it was nice. So I would sit all morning copying out Francis Parkman, and then I’d go for a swim, come back, have lunch, and then toward twilight my grandmother had her evening battle with the roaches. She had a tremor in her hand and when she used the bugspray I’d hear it, in the stillness, fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft. She didn’t have enough finger strength to really press the spritzer down and hit the roach with a full dose. So hours later, in the middle of the night, I’d wake up to this sound, turn on the light, and there was the poisoned roach in its death agony, upside down, beating its wings along the baseboard.

  JAY: I’ve seen that.

  BEN: But here’s what I realized. There were plenty of roaches around when Francis Parkman was writing The Oregon Trail. There were roaches around when all those Dutch landscape artists were painting their landscapes. Ruisdael and Hobbema.

  JAY: The smaller kind of roach, I believe, not those biggies.

  BEN: It doesn’t matter. The painters were doing the things that they could do, never mind about the pests—the pests were bracketed off. They didn’t impinge. The painters looked at the trees. That’s what you’ve got to do.

  JAY: Maybe. I did—

  ROOM SERVICE: Room service!

  JAY: Ah, that’s lunch.

  BEN: Thank God.

  JAY: Coming!

  ROOM SERVICE: Good afternoon, gentlemen. How are you this afternoon?

  JAY: Great, thanks, how are you?

  ROOM SERVICE: Fine, thank you. On the table, gentlemen?

  JAY: Yes, perfect, right here.

  ROOM SERVICE: If you would please sign both.

  JAY: Two and seven is nine, eight and four. There you go. Thank you.

  ROOM SERVICE: Thank you very much, have a nice afternoon.

  JAY: Ah! Here’s your steak, man. They didn’t give me any ketchup. Damnation.

  BEN: Here’s some.

  JAY: Oh, great. Thanks. So you sat there in the heat copying out that book?

  BEN: Sweat trickling off the backs of my hands, but yes, I copied it out, and it really taught me a lot. Mmmm, tasty.

  JAY: Isn’t that good steak? Peppercorn steak.

  BEN: Dee-licious.

  JAY: They have a good cook down there. Is it done medium?

  BEN: It’s medium. Bang on. You were right. Hits the spot.

  JAY: Good. You want some of my fries?

  BEN: Sure, I’ll take a fry, thanks.

  JAY: We need wine, at least. They’ve got a bottle here called Bella Firenze. Sounds a little bogus, but what do you say?

  BEN: What time is it?

  JAY: A quarter to two.

  BEN: Is it that late?

  JAY: Yep, yes it is.

  BEN: Well, a glass of wine can’t hurt. This is on me, all right? I’ll settle it with them downstairs.

  JAY: Okay, thanks. So I did go to Barnes & Noble a couple of wee
ks ago.

  BEN: Did you?

  JAY: Yeah, and I browsed around, and I went to the American history section. Oh, first I went to a section called True Crime. Lots of murders of women. There’s obviously an appetite out there for murders of women. Slashing and killing of women. It’s really odd, the hunger for it.

  BEN: Do you read those books?

  JAY: No way. What’s the point? I can’t muster the tiniest amount of interest in the particulars of some killer’s life. They’re mostly just dumb people who happen to have a violent streak. I mean, look at the president. I stick to the history section. You know there’s a glossy new book on the Kennedy assassination?

  BEN: I can’t say it surprises me.

  JAY: Supposedly Lyndon Johnson did it.

  BEN: Johnson did it? I thought it was the mob.

  JAY: It changes from day to day.

  BEN: Listen, you’re spending way too much time in the wrong parts of the bookstore. Forget the books. You need a nice long break. You need some gentleness and some love. Just like that good old Grace Slick said.

  JAY: I’ve got to find somebody to love?

  BEN: Yes, you do.

  JAY: I agree. I feel like an asteroid. I’m so far out I’m somewhere beyond the Kuiper belt. But I think I first have to get rid of this impulse.

  BEN: Yeah, well, get rid of the impulse.

  JAY: By acting on it.

  BEN: No, just get rid of it. Rid yourself of it.

  JAY: No, Ben, what the man stands for is this whole entire tradition of blood and greed and bullshit. Blood, greed, and bullshit! Dietrich Bonhoeffer, think of him. A mild-mannered person, and he sees Hitler and he decides the only right thing to do is to kill the guy. There’s a point beyond which even Dietrich Bonhoeffer has to act.

  BEN: You think Bush is as bad as Hitler?

  JAY: No, he’s not. Of course he’s not as bad as Hitler. But we’ve reached a point beyond the normal— We’ve reached a point of intolerability. And he’s escalating. And we’ve got these new scandals just popping up like daisies. We’ve got to shut the man down.

  BEN: Shut him down—you sound like Kissinger.

  JAY: Excuse me?

  BEN: Think of your kids. Why aren’t you there with them? Why aren’t you being a father to them? You need to take a look at that.

  JAY: Come on, I love those kids. I know, I know I’m too much of a naysayer, I know that.

  BEN: You can’t naysay all the time, it’s deadly. I have to be careful about it myself. It’s not fair to Julie.

  JAY: Lousy naysayers, always down on life.

  BEN: When we were in high school, did we sit around on our beanbag chairs thinking about the Vietnam War? Plotting how we would take bayonets to Richard Nixon? No. We did our chemistry homework.

  JAY: You did, I didn’t.

  BEN: We read the books Mrs. Hunsell assigned. Point Counter Point, remember?

  JAY: God, that was awful. Deadly stuff.

  BEN: We listened to all that Zappa. “What will you do when the label comes off—”

  JAY: “And the plastic’s all melted, and the chrome is too soft?” I believe we smoked a joint or two.

  BEN: I believe we did. But were your parents always talking about the war? Mine weren’t.

  JAY: No, mine weren’t, either.

  BEN: I just wonder if they had spent every evening upset over that war—and you know, there was plenty to be upset about, there were the atrocities, My Lai, there was Operation Ranch Hand. Would it really have been better for us to have been raised in a state of constant misery over that war?

  JAY: No, you’re right, I had a good childhood. I made a few mistakes, everyone does. Totally fucked myself up later on. My poor mother. Remind me what Operation Ranch Hand was?

  BEN: Oh, the defoliation. Agent Orange.

  JAY: Right. More Bella?

  BEN: I probably should switch over to coffee. But yeah, hell, give me a little more. You know, you’re mellower now, I think. Or am I imagining things? You don’t have that squinty look. Where’s the gun?

  JAY: Mmm? Oh, it’s available. And I know a way in through the fence. One of the corners.

  BEN: You won’t get fifteen yards, man. You might as well give me the gun and let me shoot you right now. Save yourself a walk.

  JAY: I think I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance.

  BEN: What can I say that’ll make you stop? Whistle the theme to the Andy Griffith Show?

  JAY: Not now, please.

  BEN: What if I threw this glass at your head? Would that be a good idea?

  JAY: No.

  BEN: Then, when you ducked, I’d knock you down with the chair, maybe.

  JAY: Don’t do anything like that. I’m jumpy enough as it is.

  BEN: Here’s an idea. Just a suggestion, okay?

  JAY: Okay.

  BEN: And, you know, you can take this for what it’s worth because it’s not like my life is some shining example of how to live a life.

  JAY: I know that.

  BEN: But my suggestion is, get yourself a camera.

  JAY: That’s your suggestion? Get myself a camera. Sure thing. Take some pictures of our nation’s capital, great. Heh heh heh.

  BEN: No, I mean it, it’s been an enormous help to me.

  JAY: It’s just that there’s no time now. The marination—it’s complete. This is the day.

  BEN: I know what I’ll do, I’ll give you my—well, I’ll loan you my camera. How about that?

  JAY: Thanks, but I don’t need to take pictures.

  BEN: You don’t have to take any pictures. Honestly, you’ll enjoy just loading the film. The rolls of film are exactly the same shape as they were back when George Eastman’s engineer first designed them a hundred years ago. Back then they were called cartridges—they looked like shotgun cartridges. Now it’s called one-twenty film.

  JAY: Is it expensive?

  BEN: Yeah, it’s pretty expensive, but it’s worth it—the grain is so fine now. So when you can’t stop thinking about the war, about how evil George W. is, how corrupt Cheney is, all that—all of which is true—but when it’s paralyzing you, and you’re not doing anything but thinking about the horror and the gangrene, load some film and go outside. Is there a park near where you’re living?

  JAY: There’s a little green spot, yeah.

  BEN: Fine, so go there. You might see, oh, I don’t know, a nuthatch on a fence. You think, take the picture? No, no. There’s somebody’s cat, sniffing at a blade of grass. Take the picture? No, no. You move on. A twisted piece of wire on the ground. Yes? No, no. You see what’s happening?

  JAY: I’m not sure I do.

  BEN: What’s happening is that the weight of the camera in your hand—and remember, it’s a heavy camera—the holding of it is changing the way you look at everything. You look up at the buildings, the stonework up there—ah, and then you see the trees. You put your eye to the viewfinder, and you’re in the lens.

  JAY: You’re in the lens?

  BEN: Exactly, you’re in the lens. And then you focus. That’s the great moment, when you turn the barrel of the lens and all the little wisps of fog sharpen a little, sharpen some more, and become parts of a tree. All these branches branching off.

  JAY: The trees really get to you, eh?

  BEN: Especially the old twisted ones. The last couple of months I must have shot, oh, maybe a dozen different trees. It’s best to get to them before their leaves are out, so that you can see the whole structure.

  JAY: I guess I’m out of luck, then.

  BEN: No, no, leaves can be good, too. Leaves are good. Oh, but there was this one enormous catalpa tree a couple of miles from our house. It was kind of a wet, misty day, and I walked up to it, and I went “Whoa,” and I brought it into focus and the whole thing just came alive for me in the viewfinder. It was an incredible explosion of black twigs reaching in every direction. I was down to maybe a thirtieth of a second, and I squeezed the trigger—

  JAY: The trigger?

  BEN: I
mean the shutter, the little button.

  JAY: You’re as messed up as I am.

  BEN: Anyway, I squeezed it, and the camera kind of shuddered. See, there’s a heavy mirror in there that has to flip out of the way, so it kicks a little when you take the picture. But very fast. Cloonk.

  JAY: Heavy but fast.

  BEN: Yep, and I knew I had that catalpa in the bag. I knew its secrets. Yet there it was still out on the street for everyone else to enjoy. So who cares then about George W.? He’s irrelevant. He’s irrelevant. You see?

  JAY: It’s kind of funny—I hate to say it, but you know what all this makes me think of?

  BEN: What?

  JAY: The Sixth Floor Museum.

  BEN: What’s that?

  JAY: You don’t—? Oh, that’s the museum at the Texas School Book Depository, in Dallas.

  BEN: You went there?

  JAY: I did indeed. They have a row of cameras under glass there—all the cameras that people were using on the day of the assassination. The old home movie cameras, and a kind of Polaroid camera that took a picture of a blob that supposedly was a person in a bush on the Grassy Knoll, but it’s really a blob. In fact, it isn’t even a blob anymore, because the Polaroid has faded, so all they’ve got is this enhancement. But the row of cameras is great, it’s like a memorial. And you look at them for a little bit, and you nod, and then you walk over to the corner of the floor—the sixth floor—and you stand in the place where supposedly the guy aimed his rifle and shot the president.

  BEN: I see.

  JAY: They’ve got the boxes of schoolbooks piled up so that it looks pretty much the way it did. To me, frankly, it seemed like a very awkward vantage point. There were two guys there who were hunters, and one of them said, “Lord, that’s one tough shot.” They talked about how slow the car was moving, and the other guy said, “All I can say is, I sure couldn’t make that shot.” They were talking softly, you know, and for a moment we were all thinking like assassins.