Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River

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Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River Page 2

by Jung Young Moon


  Perhaps Ruby—who was a Dallas nightclub owner originally from Chicago, and who had trouble controlling his temper, and who, it was widely known, had beaten up two musicians who worked at his clubs—was angry that his city of Dallas, which should have become famous for some other reason, had become world-famous, instead, for the assassination of a US president. Perhaps he was so angry, in particular, that none other than a hick from Louisiana had assassinated the president of the United States, of all people. Perhaps he was so angry, indeed, that he decided to kill Oswald, who deserved to die, before anyone else did, but, on second thought, he decided that there was no reason why he should be the one to kill Oswald. But then it appeared that no one else would step up and kill him, which made him really angry, and so he decided, once again, to step up, and although he lacked motive he thought he should ignore that fact. And he also thought that setting out to kill someone included setting out to meet someone, but that setting out to kill someone was certainly different from setting out to meet someone, and this latter thought made him feel all the more excited, and so he pictured himself being arrested, alive, by the police after either shooting Oswald or dying on the spot, and, picturing the camera flashes pouring down on him, he thought the key lay in the detail, and so—as a final touch, while standing before the bathroom mirror wearing a felt hat—he took out the Colt Cobra 38 he’d been carrying in his pocket for two days, since the day of Kennedy’s assassination, and he thought there was something either lacking or excessive in his reflection, but he could not pinpoint what it was, no matter how he thought about it, and then he thought that what was important was the result, not the process, and he thought, perhaps, that there was nothing that was important, and—trying to ease the irritation that was gradually welling up as he kept worrying about the way he looked—he came out of the bathroom and set off with his dogs in the car.

  According to the testimony of Zada, who worked at The Carousel, Jack Ruby’s strip club, Ruby loved dogs and had eleven of them at one time and occasionally gave them away to people. He’d given a dog as a gift to someone he knew when he was released from prison, and giving a dog as a gift to someone who was released from prison did not seem like a bad idea, as a person who’d gotten a dog as a gift could perhaps make an effort not to go to prison again if only for the sake of his pet. But, then again, a person who’d been released from prison could also go back to prison once more, leaving his dog behind even if he’d made an effort if only for the sake of the pet dog under his care not to do anything that would make him go to prison again, his effort having been in vain of course, and in some cases he could think that he couldn’t help but once again do the thing that had already made him go to prison if only for the sake of the dog under his care. Perhaps the person whom Ruby had gifted a dog had had no one to welcome him back when he’d been released from prison, and that was why Ruby had made the dog welcome him back—and the dog, not treating the person any differently because he had come out of prison, had welcomed him back with great enthusiasm. And perhaps he hoped that no one would welcome him back after his release from prison, but thought it would be all right if a dog welcomed him back. But perhaps that night—, being alone with the dog in a room and feeling even more hopeless at the thought that there was someone he had to take care of—, he regretted taking the gift of a dog and considered for a moment giving the dog back and returning to the prison where there was no one but himself to take care of, but thought he should take his time deciding whether he should return to prison or not, since there was no urgency to it.

  Ruby, who in the first place seemed not to have heard, as if through an auditory hallucination, his dogs or one of his dogs somehow giving him an order to eliminate Oswald, thought perhaps that he should kill Oswald—perhaps the thought that he should have killed Kennedy before Oswald did crossed his mind, or a thought similar to the one that crossed Oswald’s mind when Oswald thought he should kill Kennedy, the only difference being the change of target from Kennedy to Oswald—and although the decision was not the kind that should be made on your own, he didn’t really have someone to discuss it with (everyone was sure to oppose for no good reason), and although there was no way of knowing whether or not Ruby gathered together the dogs he called his family to discuss his plans with them, perhaps he told them about his plans and that they should speak up if any of them opposed, which none of them did.

  Ruby—who perhaps took his dogs everywhere with him if possible because he really loved dogs—could have put his most beloved dogs in his car without thinking (some say there was one dog at the time and others say there were two, but it seems there were two: one of the beloved dachshunds he called his child, and Shiva, his most beloved dachshund whom he called his wife). Of course people took their dogs with them when they went on a walk or to see someone, or when they went shopping or hunting; they took their dogs with them when they went swimming in a lake or a river, or when they went on a trip or to a bar or when they went to rescue someone in distress or to find someone who was missing, or when they went chasing after someone or to catch someone; but it wouldn’t be easy to find someone who took a dog with him on his way to kill someone, especially when he himself might die, and perhaps Ruby had thought about this and about how he hadn’t heard of anyone who’d taken a dog with him on his way to kill someone and about how it was somehow inappropriate (he himself may not have realized it, but perhaps he took dogs with him the way people took dogs with them on their way to hunt with a gun), but he could have thought, too, about how because of him people would now be talking about someone who’d taken dogs with him on his way to kill someone, and say a lot of things about how they should interpret the behavior, and, in fact, one of the things people had the most difficulty understanding regarding his murder of Oswald was the fact that he took his dogs with him; and authors who thought they could not help but talk about something like that, including Norman Mailer, wrote about it.

  There was no telling what Ruby thought on his way to the police department, accompanied by his dogs in his car, while Oswald was being transferred somewhere else—or what he said to the dogs—but perhaps he thought that his possibly being killed by the police after he killed Oswald, who’d killed Kennedy, could be a case of serial murder in the truest, most literal sense of the term, as opposed to a serial murder case in which one murderer kills multiple people; that, in the truest sense, this would be the most historically famous serial murder case (perhaps at a later time, someone in the US thought, as an extension of Ruby’s thought, about killing Ruby, who’d killed Oswald, who’d killed Kennedy, but thought—while relaxing and drinking beer at home while watching the news on television about Oswald, who’d killed Kennedy—that he’d wait and see if someone who’d had the same thought he’d had would do the thing he’d thought about but hadn’t done because he hadn’t wanted to bother), and perhaps this notion excited Ruby, but then his excitement quelled as he looked at the dogs beside him, and said to them, “I can’t take care of you any longer so you must take care of one another.”

  Or he could have told the dogs the real reason why he wanted to kill Oswald, which remains unclear and which he hadn’t told anyone, and perhaps he felt that he could tell the real reason only to the dogs. Perhaps he patted the dogs on the head, making them promise not to tell anyone the real reason, which he’d revealed only to them, not even other dogs, and the dogs, as promised, told no one or said amongst themselves that they wouldn’t tell anyone, and so neither he nor they told anyone else, and, as a result, no one knew the real reason why he killed Oswald, and perhaps what he’d divulged to the dogs was something even he couldn’t explain when he asked himself what it meant after he’d talked about it, and the three of them, Ruby and the dogs, tilted their heads at what he’d said. And perhaps in the car he tried to understand his situation as it was, which was difficult for him to understand or accept through a metaphorical expression, and, just at that moment, the thought that his situation was like spilt milk came to his mind, but
, technically speaking, the milk hadn’t yet been spilt, and so he thought about milk that hadn’t yet been spilt, and milk that already had been spilt, but there seemed to be no difference between the two, and it seemed that some milk had to be spilt and that the transformation of some unspilt milk into spilt milk was as natural as ice turning into water, and he thought that he had milk that now only needed to be spilt and so he was able to accept his situation.

  Perhaps a certain thought that didn’t make sense, that came to his mind the moment he heard the news that Oswald had assassinated Kennedy, and came to his mind not because he decided to have a thought that didn’t make sense but because it just did, and seemed to have been spoken by a mysterious voice, made so much sense in Ruby’s mind, more convincingly than anything that did make sense, to the extent that nothing seemed to make more sense; because it made him think that this was what people must mean by a revelation, and that he’d been chosen; although by whom and for what he didn’t know—perhaps a certain thought told him that it made no sense not to do something that had gone from making so much nonsense to making so much sense even though it was difficult to put in words, which in turn amazed Ruby himself and made him think: How did I come up with such a thought?

  Perhaps Ruby, when he was being investigated by officers after his arrest, thought that he couldn’t make the officers understand that the above was the reason why he’d been able to do it (that is, come up with the idea of shooting Oswald) when he might not have been able to (come up with the idea of shooting Oswald), and so instead he talked about things that had nothing to do with the real reason. Perhaps while he was under investigation—while he let the officers’ questions go through one ear and out the other and while he thought about something else—he thought about things not pertaining to the situation at all that didn’t make sense, and things that did make sense, and things that didn’t make sense just before they did, and things that didn’t make sense just after they did, and what took place in between. Or perhaps Ruby had a simpler thought, which may not be the same but which in the end brought about the same result, which was that something that made too much sense was boring, and, being quite sick and tired of people who only said things that made too much sense, he thought that doing something that made too much sense regarding Oswald, or in other words, leaving Oswald as he was without killing him, would be quite boring and he couldn’t leave something quite so boring as it was.

  There was no telling if Ruby—who, according to Jack Ruby and the Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas (a book written by Robert Trammell, an outstanding humorist, who I regret was known only as a Texan poet, to make fun of the stuffy and dull realists of Texas), was interested in avantgarde art, and made fun of the stuffy and dull realists of Dallas, and wrote a letter to Joseph Beuys seeking advice and got a reply, and at the time was reading Elements of a Synthesis by Corbusier, and liked Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian constructivism artist and architect, who left behind a model of the Monument to the Third International, known as Tatlin’s Tower, which originally was designed to be taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris—thought that assassinating Oswald, who had assassinated Kennedy, was a form of avantgarde art. Perhaps he thought that avant-garde art by nature couldn’t help but include things that, to many people of the day, didn’t make sense and that his act could add a page to the history of the movement.

  I hoped that the dogs—whose master had told them to wait in the car for a moment and gotten out of the car and closed the door, looking quite excited, and who waited in the car for a while thinking, He seems excited again, having seen him in an excited state often, only to have him never return, and were taken into custody by some other people who came much later—and had a happy life in someone’s home without the stigma of being dogs who’d belonged to someone who’d killed an assassin of a US president, or that they had a happy life despite the stigma.

  D and N, who knew I’d begun working on a new novel, asked me what the novel was about and I told them it was a novel written by someone who didn’t know much about Texas because he didn’t know about Texas, a novel that didn’t really have much to say, a halfhearted attempt to come up with of a series of groundless hypotheses, a mixture of the stream of consciousness technique, the paralysis of consciousness technique, and the derangement of consciousness technique, a novel that even a passing dog would laugh at, and after I said these things they rang true and my friends seemed perplexed, and I said the novel was going to be a disastrous failure to be mocked by everyone to which we toasted. But there was an advantage to writing with failure in mind, which was to say that failing to write a failure wouldn’t really be a failure, so the fear of failure wouldn’t weigh you down as heavily as you wrote.

  •

  At the Dallas residence of D and N, there were three adopted dogs who used to roam the streets and two stray cats who were semi-homeless and usually spent their time in the garden, but came inside now and then and ate and napped and watched television on the sofa with people in such a natural way that being with them made you feel as if the people who lived in the house were semi-homeless as well (when people were drinking beer in the living room at night with the cats and dogs everyone seemed homeless, and it seemed that leaves should be collected and a bonfire be made in the living room, and it seemed that a bonfire would make everyone—cats and dogs and people—open up and share the stories of how they’d come to be homeless, stories through which they couldn’t sympathize with one another at all, stories they may not want to hear), and these cats made me think of a certain historical cat, Félicette: the first and only cat to have been to outer space and back, sent on a rocket launched from the Sahara desert by the National Center for Space Studies in France.

  Félicette, while being trained as an astronaut, suffered motion sickness and nausea and passed out several times due to tremendous gravitational acceleration in a gravity accelerator and a compression chamber, and was perhaps selected as the final candidate for an astronaut by recovering from her blackouts better than the other cats who were trained along with her, and woke up after passing out in the rocket on her way to outer space and saw, in a near zero-gravity space and perhaps through a little window what seemed to be a strange reversal or mixture of night and day, up and down, and a two-dimensional world and a three-dimensional world, something she had never seen before, without realizing it was outer space, and had to put up with people harassing her, welcoming her back after she passed out and woke up again on her way back to the earth, and was euthanized after people studied what effect space travel had on the body, and so forth; but she probably didn’t know, even in the moment she died, that the place she had been to was outer space, nor why she had been sent there.

  I learned the story of Félicette—who unlike Laika the dog, who became perhaps the most famous dog in the world by being the first dog to go on the Soviets’ Sputnik 2 to the outer space, was forgotten from people’s memory—through an article about someone who was raising funds in order to erect a bronze statue of her in Paris, so that the world would know about her contribution to the history of space exploration. This person had begun raising funds after he found a dishcloth in the kitchen at his workplace in London and thought that it was absurd that the cat’s name wasn’t on the dishcloth, and there was no telling why someone had made of all things dishcloths, as opposed to astronaut cat stamps or stuffed astronaut cats, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first feline journey into space, and there was no telling, either, why someone else thought that it was absurd that the cat’s name wasn’t on the dishcloth, or that it was just a dishcloth and not even an apron, but I thought that if a bronze statue was erected in downtown Paris in memory of Félicette, it would be nice if it was erected in a back alley in Paris, where Félicette, a stray cat from the back alleys of that city, had spent her days, because if it was erected there the stray cats who lived there would then be able to feel that the cat-shaped statue was a fellow cat, and so they’d climb up the statue or stand next to it
or rub cheeks with it, and more than anything, I thought it would be nice if a cat who was in deep thought, even though the thought couldn’t be fathomed by people, was somehow portrayed through the statue along with the fact that Félicette had passed out many times, so that the statue would somehow look like a cat who was in deep thought but also passed-out. And I thought it would be nice if at the unveiling ceremony of the statue someone stated or didn’t state facts that wouldn’t really matter to Félicette, who’d died long ago and who, regardless of her own will, had gone very far, but who, when she was roaming the back alleys of Paris before she became an astronaut, would never have thought that she might leave this place and go somewhere far away, or that, while she was at it, she might go somewhere so far away that there were no cats or people because she wanted to be alone, or that although there were many people who wanted to go to outer space, there were precious few who’d actually gone, and that there were not only people who wanted to leave the earth and go live in outer space forever, but also people who wanted to go to outer space even after they died.

  And thinking about Félicette I thought, too, about something that was a bit uncanny, and that had been found on a neglected farm the size of about three football fields near the outer road of the town of C—it was a spaceship part being circled by a bovine with enormous horns, an ensemble that was more absurd than anything I’d ever seen before. The space shuttle Columbia, which had fallen apart while re-entering the earth’s atmosphere in 2003, taking the lives of seven astronauts, and whose fragments were found all over Texas, was not the spaceship the part had come from, nor was this Texas longhorn, an animal native to North America with long horns stretching out sideways, the bovine I saw.

 

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