Checkpoint

by Nicholson Baker

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHECKPOINT

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Nicholson Baker

  Copyright Page

  For Carroll,

  and in memory of Bob

  May 2004

  Adele Hotel and Suites

  Washington, D.C.

  JAY: Testing, testing. Testing. Testing.

  BEN: Is it working?

  JAY: I think so. [Click . . . click, click.] Yes, see the little readout? Where’d you get it?

  BEN: Circuit City.

  JAY: Three hundred and ninety minutes. That should definitely do it. I’ll pay you back.

  BEN: No, it’s fine, honestly.

  JAY: Well, thanks, man. I just feel I have a lot in my noggin right now.

  BEN: So I gather. You look good, Jay.

  JAY: Really? I was working on a fishing boat for a while, dropped some pounds. Are those new glasses?

  BEN: Yeah, Julie helped me pick them. Did you know Brooks Brothers made glasses frames?

  JAY: No, I did not. Let me see them.

  BEN: Sure.

  JAY: “Made in China.” I always check. Anyway, they suit you. Really, you look less like a bird.

  BEN: I’m glad to hear it. So tell me what’s up.

  JAY: Oh, let’s see. Where to begin? Where to begin?

  BEN: Obviously you have something on your mind.

  JAY: That’s true.

  BEN: You could begin with that.

  JAY: Okay. Uh, I’m going to—okay, I’ll just say it. Um.

  BEN: What is it?

  JAY: I’m going to assassinate the president.

  BEN: What do you mean?

  JAY: Take his life.

  BEN: You’re shitting me, right?

  JAY: No.

  BEN: Tell me this is one of your little flippancies.

  JAY: It’s not a flippancy.

  BEN: Come on, Jay. This isn’t—turn that off.

  JAY: No, I’d like it on. Before I do it I want to explain, for the record.

  BEN: Please turn that off right now.

  JAY: It’s got to stay on.

  BEN: I think I better go.

  JAY: Already?

  BEN: Yes already. You’re talking about the pres-ident, am I right? That is what you said. Or did I just hallucinate?

  JAY: No, that is what I said. But you can’t go.

  BEN: This isn’t what I thought you were calling me about. I thought maybe your girlfriend had left you.

  JAY: She did.

  BEN: Well, okay. That’s more like it.

  JAY: But I also have this plan that I need to execute. Calm down, will you?

  BEN: That’s pretty funny.

  JAY: What?

  BEN: You’re telling me to calm down when you’ve got this . . . deed on your mind. It’s a major, major, major crime. It doesn’t get much more major.

  JAY: I know, and it’s high time, too. I haven’t felt this way about any of the other ones. Not Nixon, not Bonzo, even. For the good of humankind.

  BEN: Do you have a gun?

  JAY: I don’t like guns.

  BEN: But do you have one?

  JAY: I may.

  BEN: That is so low. You’re a civilized person.

  JAY: Not anymore.

  BEN: You can’t—the country has no need for this service.

  JAY: I think it does. I think we have to lance the fucking boil.

  BEN: No, I’m serious, he’ll be out of power eventually. Either he loses and he’s out, or he wins, and then he’s out a little later. Either way, his time will pass in a twinkling. Many years from now you’ll be reading the comics in some café somewhere, and you’ll think, Boy oh boy, I’m sure glad I didn’t do that.

  JAY: I’m going to do it today.

  BEN: Let’s just set it aside, shall we? Just put that off to one side. You know you’ll never get away with it. They’ll shoot you full of bullets and you’ll die. Or they’ll fry you. Seriously, you’ll die. And for what? Do you know what a bullet does?

  JAY: It tears into your flesh at high speed. It rips through your vitals.

  BEN: If you get hit here? Half-digested material leaks out of your intestines into your abdominal cavity.

  JAY: That’s what happened to McKinley.

  BEN: You mean President McKinley?

  JAY: Yes.

  BEN: Well, right. Do you want that to happen to you? They have snipers up on the roof.

  JAY: I know, I’ve seen them. They’ve got missile launchers up there, too.

  BEN: Those guys want to put bullets into you.

  JAY: They don’t know about me.

  BEN: Oh, but they know that there are bad people out there.

  JAY: That’s true, and I’m one of them.

  BEN: I don’t think so.

  JAY: No, Ben, this guy is beyond the beyond. What he’s done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It’s too much. It makes me so angry. And it’s a new kind of anger, too. There was a story a year ago, April last year. It was a family at a checkpoint. Do you remember?

  BEN: I’m not sure.

  JAY: It was a family fleeing in a car. The mother was one of the few survivors. And she said,

  “I saw—” Sorry. I can’t.

  BEN: It’s all right.

  JAY: I’m not going to let him get away with this.

  BEN: You think this is all him? What about, you know, Cheney? What about Donald? What about all the generals who came up with the attack plans? And the hopheads who flew the airplanes?

  JAY: Hey hey, ho ho—George Bush has got to go.

  BEN: Look, he’s going to go, it’s inevitable, he’ll have a successor.

  JAY: Now. He has to go now.

  BEN: Set it aside. Just set it off to one side, please, will you? What have you been up to?

  JAY: Oh, I’ve had a bunch of jobs. I got into a slight financial scrape.

  BEN: How bad?

  JAY: Well, I nearly had to declare personal—insolvency, shall we say.

  BEN: Ouch.

  JAY: It was intense.

  BEN: I bet.

  JAY: So I’ve been working as a day laborer.

  BEN: You haven’t been teaching at all?

  JAY: That kind of ended. It was really a part-time thing, anyway, so . . . But the day labor has been really good for me. When you do gruntwork for hours and hours you actually have a lot of mental time.

  BEN: Mm.

  JAY: Your body is working and your brain can kind of cruise here and there.

  BEN: Yeah, I find in the evenings, like when I’m chopping up a cucumber to make salad, that rhythmic chop, chop, chop, sometimes I think of a little connection that didn’t occur to me all day.

  JAY: So tell me how your book is coming.

  BEN: Which one? You mean the one—

  JAY: The one about the government department during the war, the department that steamed open the envelopes.

  BEN: Oh, the Office of Censorship, right. Well, I kind of hit a retaining wall with that one. But we don’t need to talk about that.

  JAY: I want to. It sounded very interesting when you told me about it.

  BEN: Well, okay, I spent some time at the National Archives and then I went to Wisconsin, and I spent some time there, that’s where some of the papers are, and, well, the material hasn’t started to sing to me yet. But it will, it will.

  JAY: When did we last get together? Was that three years ago?

  BEN: May have been. Long time.

  JAY: I’m so sorry about that wheelbarrow, man.

  BEN: No no no.

  JAY: I felt bad, I just didn’t see it in the dark.

  BEN: It’s fine, it still works. It lists a little, that’s all.


  JAY: Really sorry. So what have you been working on instead?

  BEN: Instead of what?

  JAY: Instead of the book about the steaming open of the envelopes.

  BEN: Oh, a few things—a few Cold War themes that I’ve been pursuing. And my classes take up time—I co-teach an honors seminar every spring.

  JAY: Some good students?

  BEN: A few. Oh, and I bought a camera! That’s my big news.

  JAY: A camera, huh? Digital?

  BEN: Well, I have a digital camera, but no, this one that I bought is a film camera. It’s called a Bronica—a Bronica GS-1.

  JAY: A Bronica GS-1. What’s that?

  BEN: It’s a big heavy camera, it uses a wider kind of film.

  JAY: Where’s it made? Germany?

  BEN: No, no, Japan.

  JAY: Oh, of course. And it’s heavy, is it?

  BEN: Yeah, but the great thing is, you don’t have to use a tripod. You can hold it with a handle called a speed grip. I love it.

  JAY: It sounds very professional.

  BEN: Oh, it’s definitely professional—I mean, I’m just an amateur, but it’s a privilege to hold this thing. I bought a couple of lenses for it, a beautiful hundred-and-ten-millimeter macro lens, butter smooth. I’m really into lenses now.

  JAY: Remember that photograph of the girl, the girl running?

  BEN: What girl?

  JAY: The girl in Vietnam running from the napalm? She’s naked, she’s crying.

  BEN: Oh, yeah, yeah.

  JAY: Well, they’ve used napalm in Iraq.

  BEN: I may have heard something about that.

  JAY: Right off the bat they used it. At first they denied it. It came out in a newspaper. Napalm bombs. And some PR guy from the Pentagon wrote an outraged response. “We did NOT use napalm, we got rid of our stocks of napalm years ago, this is a GROSS INACCURACY and a DISSERVICE TO YOUR READERS,” and so on and so on. Well, then, of course, it turns out that, well, uh, yes, they’re shooting missiles full of this goop that starts intense fires and, well, yes, they’re using it to burn people alive, and, uh, yes, all our Army commanders do call it napalm, but it isn’t technically napalm because it’s not naphtha-poly-toly-moly-doodlemate, whatever. Whatever the formula was when they first invented it back behind the stadium.

  BEN: The stadium.

  JAY: The Harvard stadium. That’s where they invented it. So this is a different chemical formula, but the people who shoot the missiles call it napalm, the generals call it napalm, because hey, it’s exploding globs of fiery jelly that cause an agonizing death. In fact, it’s improved fire jelly—it’s even harder to put out than the stuff they used in Vietnam. And Korea. And Germany. And Japan. It just has another official name. Now it’s called Mark 77. I mean, have we learned nothing? Mark 77! I’m going to kill that bastard.

  BEN: No you’re not.

  JAY: Penisfucker!

  BEN: Jay, relax.

  JAY: Why should I relax? Jiminy Cricket. Anyway. So you bought a camera, did you? How diverting. How much did you spend?

  BEN: It doesn’t matter.

  JAY: Look, we’re having a talk. You tell me you bought a camera. I say that that’s glorious news, and I ask you how much it was.

  BEN: I got it used.

  JAY: I see, so it was probably cheaper than it would have been had you gotten it new, am I right?

  BEN: Yes.

  JAY: How much cheaper?

  BEN: Oh, it cost me, let’s see, about twelve hundred for the body and the macro lens.

  JAY: Whoa, not that cheap.

  BEN: Yeah, and then I got a wide-angle lens for another six hundred, and another lens after that, and I got an extension tube coming, so it continues.

  JAY: Boy, that’s serious money. You know I sold my car last week? I got eighteen hundred dollars for it. Of course the hood kept flying up in my face. “All right, where’s the road?” But I’m sure your camera is worth it. And your “speed grip.”

  BEN: Well, you can get some amazing deals right now, because everybody’s panicking and dumping their film cameras so that they can raise enough money to buy one of those super-expensive digital cameras.

  JAY: I thought film was dead.

  BEN: It’s dying, but it isn’t dead. The larger formats still hold more detail. Look, my friend, look. Okay, they used napalm. That’s very bad. I agree. Shooting the head of state is not a solution.

  JAY: I don’t like guns.

  BEN: What are you, a swordsman? Are you going to flip a dagger into him?

  JAY: No.

  BEN: Are you going to blow up the White House?

  JAY: Of course not; think of the innocent people. That’s what they would do. In fact, that’s what they did do.

  BEN: So—how were you planning on doing it?

  JAY: Couple of ways. I’ve got some radio-controlled flying saws, they look like little CDs but they’re ultrasharp and they’re totally deadly, really nasty.

  BEN: Deadly nasty saws.

  JAY: They’re incredible, lethal as hell. And a few other avenues of effort going forward, as well. I’ve got a huge boulder I’m working on that has a giant ball bearing in the center of it so that it rolls wherever I tell it to. And it’s indestructible. It’s made of depleted uranium and it’s a hundred tons of metal that just rolls, baby. So that’s an option.

  BEN: You’re going to squash the president?

  JAY: If I have to, I will. I met this inventor at a bar in Nahant. This guy is brilliant. He came up with the aimable saws, and if anything he’s more upset with the war than I am, so he’s not about to sell his inventions to the military.

  BEN: So—where’s all this gear? I didn’t see any big boulders parked in the entrance when I came in.

  JAY: You know that you can almost see the White House from this window? See that little tuft of trees there? I think it’s just to the right of that. Right there. I have some unusual bullets, too.

  BEN: You know, you’re getting me nervous.

  JAY: I’m getting myself nervous. Yesterday I walked around looking at all the people, wondering who’s a staffer, who’s a lobbyist. All these earnest faces. Parts of Washington are so beautiful, the Capitol Building, I mean, wow, that thing is stately. Big dome sitting on top of it. Then looking down over the Mall. A lot of money expended on that Lincoln Monument. And then you’ve got the White House, a little over to one side. And in your mind you have this piece of dark mischief, and you wonder if people can tell.

  BEN: Oh, brother.

  JAY: The problem is that the real elements that are moving Washington are not on the Mall. The Department of Defense is off across the river in that huge fortress, that brain-warper of a building. Five sides. It’s like it’s intentionally made to drive you over the edge just thinking about it.

  BEN: Don’t think about it.

  JAY: Wolfowitz is there. I mean, what’s up with him? And then the CIA over in McLean, Virginia.

  BEN: “The truth shall make you free.” You know they’ve got that chiseled in the marble of the lobby?

  JAY: No, I didn’t. And then all the consulting companies and the big federal departments out in Silver Spring, and Alexandria, Virginia, and Bethesda, and all these places. Spread out all over, far as the eye can see.

  BEN: That’s deliberate, that they’re spread out. The whole beltway idea—

  JAY: Yeah, so what you have in downtown Washington is this artificial image of a capital city. You’ve got the grandeur, you’ve got the art museums, the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian, the Natural History Museum, you’ve got the museum of the African American, you’ve got the museum of the Native American—gee whiz, kids, this is the United States of America! And then you’ve got this unelected fucking drunken OILMAN over there squatting in the house itself. Muttering over his prayer book every morning. Then he gives the order to invade. That’s how this began, you know.

  BEN: How it began? Why don’t you tell me.

  JAY: Do you really want to know, or are you just being thera
peutic with me?

  BEN: I don’t care. You don’t have to tell me anything. You called me up. I’m here.

  JAY: But do you want to know?

  BEN: Sure, I want to know. Yes.

  JAY: Well, so last year, I marched on the White House. This was at the very beginning of the war. First they had a tip that Saddam was in a certain house, so they sent in that cruise missile to kill him. But, oopsie, he wasn’t there—yet another totally illegal assassination bungled by the CIA. And then, I think it was the next day, there was the huge attack on all the palaces. Not military targets. Against the Geneva Conventions.

  BEN: “Decapitation.” I remember.

  JAY: So just after that, I took a bus here, because there was supposed to be a big march on the White House. There was going to be an even bigger march in New York City, too, but I wanted to be in the place where the crime was being committed. To assign blame, you know? I felt there was nothing else to do. All the reasonable arguments against an attack had already been made, all the op-ed pieces had been written. It didn’t seem to matter. There was bloodlust in the air and there was a thrilled feeling that it was all inevitable. “Let’s see what happens!” So the planes went in, and the missiles went in, and all I had left to do was to come here and shout till my voice stopped working. That’s all I could do.

  BEN: Yeah, we—

  JAY: And there were all these cops on horseback that came trotting briskly, mounties, all lined up, self-important mounties, with blank faces. We were just a bunch of people with signs who wanted to march to the White House and shout that the president was a war criminal, but the funny thing is that nowadays here you can’t march to the White House, you’re really not allowed anywhere near the White House, they’ve got things blocked off and this maze of barriers around, so all you can do is pretend that you’re marching on the White House when actually the house itself is way way off in the middle distance, and you’re in a little sort of park, with your sign in the air, standing there.

  BEN: What did your sign say?

  JAY: “Murderers.”

  BEN: Ah.

  JAY: So then the crowd started to get bigger and we poured out into the street, and then it became kind of interesting because the horse cops were trying to keep three different phalanxes of gathering protesters apart, but we just oozed, man, we were like a huge amoeba of dissent and we poured around the block from one side and then another side and suddenly we were in front of the horse cops and behind them and coming in from the right, and they looked kind of silly there—because what were they blocking?