Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Apparently not quite. The screen cuts to Magic Bullet itself, in extreme close-up, a picture never shown in the Warren Commission Report. After smashing through Kennedy’s neck and into Connelly—his chest, ribs, arm and finally wrist—this bullet had come to rest in the flesh of Connelly’s thigh. Job done. Perhaps because of its miraculous changes in direction, it also revealed itself quite unmarked when it was discovered—the doctors found only its final, and empty, hole in Connelly’s thigh—on the Dallas Hospital floor an hour later, fallen from no one knew which, if any, stretcher; perhaps someone had stepped on it.

  Quite unmarked. O marvellous Magic Bullet, flying destruction everywhere without killing. Described in the Report signed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, Earl Warren himself, and six others as: a bullet. The most venerated of American death-dealers, the perfect solution so every TV crime problem could end on the hour with ads included; but no solution here.

  Lovingly the male voice lingers over the image of that bit of lead, a faint gleam along its right side—such blunt photographic silence—framed on blank paper. The voice grows profoundly deep when recalling the entire century now nearly completed, approaching the millennium and every trace of humanity anywhere on the globe: the greatest, the mostest—more than the World Series and Oscars and Super Bowl combined?—this simple made-in-the-USA mail-order lead bullet that has become the unfathomable mystery of the century. Icon forever. And suddenly washed over by a long skiff of laughter.

  As if he had laughed himself. Adam has dropped the book he held, though the remote control seems still in his right hand. He can feel it.

  The gaunt woman is talking now. Seated with calm, number confidence beside the man who explained the inexplicable bullets, she is listing the names, ages, home addresses of witnesses and ever more volunteer witnesses. The unassailable TV evidence of numbers, running lists like accumulating weather, scrolling too fast to read but most irrefutably there. Five hundred and fifty-two in all, yes, every one of them, the names vanishing as Adam hears them explained: so many hundred-and-something witnesses who had been clustered around that corner of Houston and Elm where the motorcade turned in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and who had declared to someone or other that they wanted to testify to the Warren Commission, but only a small number (how many?) had actually been interviewed, most of them superficially, without tape recorder or even notes being taken; and of the five hundred an amazing percentage (how many?) were in 1992 already dead. More than a statistically probable percentage (how many more?) of these dead had died of non-medical causes: single-car accidents, suicides, fires, lightning or tornadoes; plane crashes, caveins; they dropped out and vanished untraceably even to their nearest families. Lloyds of London had calculated the odds of such a series of disappearances happening within thirty years to that number of persons gathered fortuitously in one spot as being in the range of seventeen trillion to one.

  Who laughed? A TV audience unrevealed by the camera? Seventeen trillion was laughable, but one was not.

  On the hotel bed, staring along his legs stretched towards the TV in its imitation oak cupboard, Adam thinks: vanishment. Also a decision.

  No, forget that, shift the camera two inches from those two ordinary people talking and you’ll destroy the illusion of what I believe I see, a shift to me sitting here, my possible cock a possible stick in my hand, as easy as the shift to the exact moment, the exact place where I first heard of that disappearance—no—of that shot.

  Or three shots, as the Commission claimed. Or more than four, as various people, never officially believed, insisted. Oddly, on November 22, 1963, Adam was in the United States, at the University of Illinois completing a three-week seminar on endocrinology. He was talking to the senior professor in his office—an exchange of calm information between scientists who know everything they need to control their laboratory world, the complexities of hormonal secretions in Native North Americans, or Indians as they were then called, on U.S. reservations—when Adam’s freckled lab assistant thrust her red head in at the door and gasped, “They have shot my president!” Just like that: “They have shot my president,” and fled, sobbing.

  He smiled then, stupidly, puzzling whether this might be a new student joke; perhaps he even laughed. Though he could not forget his first clear thought: You Americans! You’ll try to make an Abraham Lincoln out of a photogenic president even if you have to murder him. His American colleague stared at him; he must have laughed, or worse, spoken aloud. He knows for sure he stood in the crowded residents’ lounge watching small-screen history being fumbled about, summary and detail upon inconsequential detail in inconsequential repetition and the grey voice of Walter Cronkite; to see him remove his heavy glasses and glance up at a studio clock offscreen, to hear him say “ … thirty-eight minutes ago,” was to believe. Women and men and doctors and students alike were weeping aloud.

  The ultimate TV murder, with the killer, including full-length and close-up photos, rifle and complete U.S. Marine biography, revealed on the screen within three hours. Not to miss the New York evening news? And formally charged at 1:30 in the morning local time, November 23. Adam’s flight home arrived in Edmonton just in time for him and Susannah together to see the show continue, with Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on TV between two policemen. She had bought their first set because, Susannah told him, she didn’t want to miss the funeral.

  We made naked love that night, Adam remembers suddenly, on the rug in the bathroom with mirrors standing on the floor all around us. As if to replicate at least our bodies into infinity.

  Now only a book lies beside him on the hotel bed. Where it fell from his left hand: A Gun for Sale. It first appeared that afternoon in a box of books he pulled out from under a rummage sale table in the Bloor Street United Church Hall, still spine-coded G 311 but stamped all over in capitals DISCARDED from the George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology Library, Casa Loma Campus Library, Toronto, last Date Due Apr 1 1986. Six and a half years gone, a dog-eared orange-and-grey Penguin whose first words emerge out of forgotten distance like an intimate, ghostly voice:

  Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred. He had only seen the Minister once … an old, rather grubby man without any friends, who was said to love humanity.

  The voice of a narrator invented by Graham Greene, fifty-six years ago. Speaking the strange enchantment only language can create out of fear and botched murder and luck, harelips and gas masks, a chorus-line dancer (such an un-Canadian Anne with an e) tied, gagged, and thrust up to die grotesquely in a fireplace chimney, but she doesn’t die, tough chorus-line Anne apparently untraumatized by hours rammed up into sooty claustrophobia; an accumulating double hunt into the black hole of criminal and business and military and individual amorality. Subtitled “An Entertainment.”

  The short man behind the church hall rummage was labelled “Hello, my name is Arnold.” Too close to mine for comfort, Adam thought. He stood holding A Gun for Sale against his chest, and it came to him like words in his ear: there will be other books for me here. And discovered his right hand already resting on one: The Death of ADOLF HITLER / Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, by Lev Bezymenski. In perfect hardcover condition complete with somewhat ragged dust jacket, undiscarded and unmarked—no one, not even a library, would acknowledge owning such a book—available for one Canadian dollar. Between his fingers it opened like a trap: a black-and-white picture of a small, ghostly head, eyes shut and bruised mouth, held erect by rubber gloves cupping chin and hair, “Helga Goebbels after autopsy in Berlin-Buch.” And on the facing page, “Corpses of Goebbels, his wife, and two of their children,” this captioned upside down, so that the charred, horrible remains of the adults were at the bottom, the unburned children with their delicate hands and legs protruding from white night-clothes lay side by side at the top. The smallest was a tiny girl, her head tipped forward
to reveal only her nose and dark lashes, her left foot bent shyly over her right.

  The hubbub in the crowded church hall shifted like a shudder washing over Adam’s body; as if every straggler and book lover stood motionless with him, an exploded book in their hands. The human animal run to ground.

  “Quite a book, eh, for Wednesday?”

  From his open mouth it seemed that Hello-my-name-is-Arnold had spoken. In a voice as small as a Canadian apology, but precise too, in the texture of his lumpy sweater. The small voice nagged at Adam along the dusty book spines crammed into boxes, in jumbled heaps on the folding tables more accustomed to serving coffee and day-old doughnuts to people hunching in from sleep somewhere under Toronto cardboard: Adam sensed he was standing on a book. Its edge slipped aside under his foot, and he kicked it away, anywhere.

  “Remembrance Day I mean, next Wednesday, that beast”—gestured at the red, squared name.

  “Oh … shouldn’t insult the beasts.” But Adam felt distantly stupid, he closed the book softly on the gruesome pictures as if they might crush. The small men of rummage sales should shut up and shuffle books, who wants to feel observed confessing their ashes there? It was enough to try and walk thoughtfully down the north side of Bloor with November sunlight almost warm off the brick and concrete walls with the careful, heaped trash of transients buried in the corners of cemented parks, and not be required to make a sound louder than breathing in a charity hall or pretend there is a reason why you are in this enormous city—where did Hello-Arnold get the gall to utter a word? Had he made the mistake of catching his eye? Not consciously—could you catch someone’s ear? By the mere pass of hearing?

  Adam was at the left corner of the cashier’s card table with his two books, and he laid them down, fumbled as if he were looking for … and discovered himself bent over the wondrous blank of romances. Tender pastel chapters always ending when Eric’s or whoever’s hard but gentle hand just brushed Isabelle, or whoever, at whatever sensitive place, oh, so gently. Shit—he turned to see a dark, belted man who might at some point have been standing beside him hand the Bezymenski book to the cashier. Were there two? Or had he been spared? His own was no longer on his small pile, gone, surely he could resist going back to see if another one—his heart leaped quick as if he had bolted oxygen. There was cosmic design, I did not run to it, it has been taken from me, and in his hand he found another air-brushed paperback woman, one Regan O’Farrell to be exact, bosom about to be undraped by Ashley Darlington Crockford III in Wildfire Dreams by one Megan Flanders:

  Last evening, with one incandescent kiss, for one unending

  moment he had pressed her soft: skin between his hard hands,

  against his steely body, and she had felt herself melt, spread wide

  and warm like the burning wax of a holy candle.

  Good God, Regan, already on page 17? And with “this primal drive to fuse,” on page 29, my my, how will you ever (“she knew he would lead the way”) reach page 189 (“like the thrust of a glowing steel rod”) unpenetrated? Try page 34: “First, we must be careful. Are you safe?” A psychological sheath.

  Forever Romance number 5A3Z8. There was no one in front of the utterly young cashier, whose slim hand was pushing The Death of ADOLF HITLER aside. The belted man was gone, did not buy it. Perhaps he accidentally picked it up together with his own worn selections and, seeing it when he paid, said, “I don’t want that.” The cashier girl—too young to be tempt-able?—had pushed it behind various plastic containers of paper money rolled on edge, a huge map of coins spread at her fingertips. That’s the way to treat money: stand it indistinguishably on edge in recycled plastic, dump it in a heap in front of you, all this careful ordering, this dedicated veneration of numbers and penny-counting taxes on every goddamn copper, throw it on a pile, pluck out what you need and finally scrape it all, paper, coins, plastic, dirt, off the table from too many dirty books into a sack—Adam put the books in his hands down, and placed Hitler on top.

  “This one too.”

  “Great!” exclaimed the girl, unmolestably cheerful. She was a counter only, her unlabelled hands flew. “One dollar for the hardback one for two paperbacks two dollars in all thank you have a nice day!”

  And no fourteen cents tax. He bobbed his head, trying to focus on her, but his bifocals fuzzed: to see her exactly he would have had to lift his glasses and bend to within eighteen inches of her good, round face, perhaps even take her by the shoulders and lift her firmly so his eyes … you could not touch a woman in public, especially a young woman. She wasn’t even looking at him, it seemed her mouth actually meant what he heard. A nice day: I have no idea who you are and I don’t want to know, just have one. It was only on the street that he saw the third paperback he had carried away, forgotten in his left hand: a dark, glowering bald face, by Roderick Stewart, The Mind of Norman Bethune. A book twice as big as the others, in fact, folio size.

  Inadvertent theft, fifty cents; but he did not go back. His recognition of theft happened in the shadow of what was once spaced-out and blissful sixties Rochdale College, so what could one worn paperback matter? He almost laughed aloud: he was politically left correct, stealing Norman Bethune!

  Adam sits on the hotel bed with his legs spread and glasses beside him, beside the spot of battered orange Greene, the afternoon light in blotches careening about the room. The steady TV drone of the stout man continues until Adam finds the mute spot at his fingertips and the sound fuzzes away as well. He remembers the venerable brick assemblage of Bloor Street United Church once overflowing in a good memorial service for the novelist Margaret Laurence. Why cannot goodness lurk between rummage books? Behind old brick and cracked concrete, in urine-soaked corners and around peeling trees grown lopsided with survival, why not that, waiting patiently through a January funeral to waylay you into purity and care and enduring compassion and reconciliation with at least the members of your own small family, goodness all humanity prayed for, blossoming inside you like pain before you were aware of it and could set yourself against its wilful seductions? He had always been a coward, always a fucked-up weakling about goodness. Disappearing into work or excuses or—hiding; if not in a blank then among the sadly forgettable dead.

  He has already gulped Hitler to page 51, the indigestible brutality of Document 12:

  Concerning the forensic examination of a male corpse … The remains … disfigured by fire were delivered in a wooden box … severely charred and smells of burned flesh … Height 165 cm. [5 ft. 4.35 in.] … On face and body the skin is completely missing.… Part of the cranium is missing.… Berlin-Buch, 8. V., 1945 … In the upper jaw there are nine teeth connected by a bridge of yellow metal (gold)…. The heart muscle is tough and looks like boiled meat.… The lower jaw consists of fifteen teeth, ten of which are artificial.… In the scrotum, which is singed but preserved, only the right testicle was found. The left testicle could not be found.… A smell of bitter almonds … The left foot is missing.

  A male so far right as to have no left foot or testicle? Or left cranium? That actually made sense.

  There is a knocking at the door. And again, like persisting memory. His door? No one knows he is here. Then the rattle of keys with another gentle knock makes it obvious, and he calls:

  “Yes? Come in?”

  He hears the door open; the hotel maid. The skin of her bare arms and her face is not quite as black as the stockings on her slender legs; her superb hair, if possible, blacker.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just here to turn down your bed.”

  She may have said that. He is looking at her and after a moment she comes towards him, very close between the two queen-sized beds, and places a rectangle of silver-wrapped chocolate beside the telephone on the table nearest his elbow: two. Does she think he is expecting someone? She turns her back to him, lifts counterpane and blanket from the bed on which he is not sitting, folds it back triangular with one smooth motion to the white sheet, the white pillow; the pale skin of her inner fin
gers sharpens that edge straight at herself quick as a gesture.

  Such bent textures of slender black; such tightness. There is a seam of her uniform tucked at her waist and he speaks to that.

  Would you care to earn some extra money?

  Her back straightens into an instant of hesitation, then she turns. The beds are so close he must very nearly touch her. Her right thumb and finger offer between them at the exact point of his shortsighted focus a plastic package. A condom.

  You will have to include the 7 per cent Good Service Tax.

  He swings his legs towards her and she is standing between his knees, so close his nose edges a button of her uniform. The uniform is buttoned grey up between her breasts to the dark vee of her neck, down the middle between her thighs, one straight line up and down, five buttons only for easy egress, ingress, aggress, under her fingers they are slipping open, top to bottom, he does not need to move his head, he can hear it, and she wears nothing underneath, he can hear it, only the pantyhose, black textures changing in the light tighter than glistening skin; her body absolutely there. As it of course always has been, somewhere.