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CHAPTER XI


PAIN LIKE TEARS: “Give me that Aeschleyus quote again,” Scop said conversationally to Robert Kennedy. It was three nights before the California campaign’s end and Kennedy was lying on the bed in his hotel room, shoeless, tie less and in that easy stage between sleep and consciousness where all things, even appari­tions from the future seemed possible. Scop knew that the can­didate was neither astonished nor disconcerted. No word appeared in the histories of this dialogue so that he knew he was safe. “I’d like to hear it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Robert Kennedy said and closed his eyes again. “None of this is happening. You’re not really here.”

“Nevertheless,” he said and found a more comfortable posi­tion against a wall, crossing his legs, leaning into the bare, burnt surfaces of the wall, “whether I’m here or not there is an obligation upon you to accept the found reality. Isn’t that one of the subjects of your many fine campaign speeches: the need to deal with reality, to live in the real world? Anyway,” Scop added, “no one will ever know whether I’m here or not, the room isn’t tapped, you’re in complete privacy. Indulge yourself. Act as if I was here. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is within me,” Robert Kennedy said, “within my sanity I mean to say,” but his face seemed quizzical and interested, the famous political candidate and historical personage seemed barely able to restrain his curiosity and ironic involvement in all around him, try as he might. This encouraged Scop. “What are you doing here anyway?” Robert Kennedy said.

“I’m waiting for you to quote Aeschleyus. It’s a very profound and inspiring quotation.”

“See Sorenson.”

“I don’t want to see Sorenson, I want to see you. You’re the one who speaks these things, it’s a matter of complete indifference to me who may look it up. Come on,” Scop said, “think of me as a time traveler from the future. Imagine a future in which time travel has been developed by private technology at enormous ex­pense so that certain privileged scholars and members of the aristocracy can bear direct witness to fabulous people and events. Think of what it might have cost me to come here and indulge me.”

“Is that true? You do come from the future? Are you a time traveler?”

“That’s neither here nor there. I said, imagine that this is the case.”

“Did I win this election?”

“Come now,” Scop said, moved by the cleverness of Robert Kennedy; none of that cunning indicated by the historical texts appeared to have been manufactured. “If I were what I represented to be, you can imagine that divulging information of the kind you ask for would be the most serious crime we would commit. The future is the product of the past; we change the past at our peril for no matter how unsatisfactory it may have been without it we would not have been here at all. I can give you absolutely no information at all which would risk changing the past.”

Kennedy stretched on the bed, looked away from Scop, looked at the ceiling again. “I’ll keep it to myself,” he said. “It’s just a matter of curiosity. What harm could it do to tell me?”

“If I told you you did not succeed you might abandon the campaign now which would lead to changes of a different sort. If I told you that youdid your attitude might change which in turn would change that of others.”

“But either way the future would not change.”

“I will not,” Scop said, “I will not under any circumstances get into the laws of temporal paradox. We simply will not discuss that.” He looked at Robert Kennedy, admiring him. Unquestionably much of what had survived about him to Scop’s time was true; the man simply had an unusual shrewdness, an acuity and sense of self-definition which was lacking in Scop’s rather mis­erable and self-indulgent era. It would have all been different, he thought, all would have been different indeed if people of this quality were existing in twenty-forty; different conditions would have fully applied . . . whya Scop himself might not have been necessary. Of course that is not the case now: he realized that such thoughts must be put out of his mind. “You want to give me that quote?” he said, “I really would like to hear it.”

Kennedy shook his head. “No,” he said. “Definitelynot. I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here or exactly what the sense of all of this is supposed to be but one thing is for sure, I’m not going to be an exhibition for you. I would suggest that you leave.”

“I agree with you. Still, I’ve come here at such enormous risk and inconvenience that I’d hate to just give it up without staying as long as possible.”

“Suit yourself,” Kennedy said. He flexed on the bed, closed his eyes. “Just don’t bother me if you would. I’d like to get a little rest.”

This seemed to complete the issue. Kennedy seemed to fall into a deep and even slumber, the sound of his breathing large and rhythmic in the room, paying no further regard to Scop at all. It was obvious that whether or not Kennedy paid credence to his presence there would certainly be no further discussion with him: the man was sealed into his subjectivity, a subjectivity whose rational dimensions (Scop suspected) would not admit any province of the imagination which this interview would signify. Scop wandered around the hotel room for a little while, trying to pick up from it, from the sleeping form on the bed some indications of the temper of the man, some sense of the personna which would grant him connection but there was none. It was always very difficult for him to establish a relationship with one who was sleeping or otherwise unconscious or dead; all three applied in the case of Robert Kennedy. Moving over to the bed, standing poised, then, above the man Scop had a vision and in that vision he descended upon Robert Kennedy with hands grown ferocious and enormous through need and tore his throat, beat him severely around the temples until he was dead and the need to do it was momentarily palpable, Scop could feel it stalking within him. He could kill the man. He could do this. No one would believe that he was he and when it was over it would all have been for the best anyway because Kennedy was going to die. Kennedy was doomed; whether he died by bullet or by slaughter in his bed his death would be just as absolute as would the world which pivoted from that circumstance.

He could have done it. In fact, Scop leaned forward, thrust out his hands in a rigid, militaristic gesture to do just that, to begin the slaughter and evisceration of Robert Kennedy. But as his hands moved down, as he felt the rhythms of attack falling upon him something stronger than desire came up against him and he stopped in mid-gesture paralyzed, at attention, searching the walls of the room as if for indication of some exterior force that had restrained him, nothing to be seen within the walls but he could perceive it within him nevertheless. He could not murder. He could not do this. There were seemingly limits even to his voyage, his condition: he could not perpetrate. All that he could seek was the obliteration of circumstance, not its renewal. Rape was different, to be sure.

Scop moved away from the bed. Pain like tears moves within the skull of memory. He crouches. He does not want to weep. He waits for the machine to take him out of here. The process is not instantaneous. He weeps.