On the plus side, the purportedly Albanian family that owned La Cafe had not visited or exercised any oversight over the place for roughly forty years, and the manager, a 60-something woman named Beth who wore knitted winter hats all year round, spent her days in her “office” (the main storage room), gambling on her phone: she was rumored to be an alcoholic, but no one had caught her at it yet. As a result, anyone and everyone was welcome to spend eight to twelve hours a day in the minimally-heated interior of the place, or sit at any of the ten to twelve tables scattered around the grassy, uncovered patio outside, or use either of the two filthy bathrooms hastily relabeled as gender-neutral in the mid-2010s, without ever ordering anything at all. Most importantly, there was free, unsecured wi-fi.
Taken as a whole, then, La Cafe was shunned by anyone with taste, friends, social status, or an orientation towards modern coffee-shop-culture and/or personal safety, but embraced by poverty-stricken graduate students, homeless people, failed academics, intellectual poseurs, con men, the clinically insane, and various lonely cast-offs desperate for any kind of proximity to what they perversely persisted in regarding as the Life of the Mind.
Did I belong to any of those categories? That’s a good question. I didn’t think so at the time: but looking back I have my doubts.
Roughly two years prior to my meeting with the strange man, I had finally finished my PhD after nine and a half years of increasingly strained meetings with my advisor ended with a shouted ultimatum and a rushed, desultory defense over Zoom. For the next few years, I worked as an adjunct, failed to pay my rent, and sent off two applications a week for tenure-track positions and prestigious post-docs with names like “the Young Talent Enrichment Program.” I have never been able to work out whether this was the worst or something approaching the best time of my life.
Then, abruptly, on an icy March day where half of my Persian poetry class had again failed to turn in their final projects, I received an email from Messrs. Snodgrass and Beit cordially informing me that I had inherited from an estranged uncle more money than I had ever imagined.
Up to that point, I had assumed, like most people, that inheriting unimaginable sums from estranged uncles was something that only happened in stories. Since then, I have on innumerable occasions pointed out the folly of this all-too-common misconception: pointing out that most people in America still have siblings and therefore their children will have uncles, that some number of these uncles are statistically certain to become wealthy, that wealthy is said in many ways, that given the growing income gap what used to be considered merely upper middle class is now as good as rich anyway, that earning lots of money often clashes with the time and affections necessary for a happy family life and so leads to estrangement with family members, that even wealthy uncles must inevitably die, that they too must feel the basic cultural and indeed biological imperative to hand on something of themselves to the next generation, that an estrangement with one’s siblings need not necessarily apply to nieces and nephews, that a lack of personal contacts with those inheriting logically must mean less where estates are large and estate-planning largely carried out by lawyers, and that consequently there is in itself nothing more logical and indeed commonplace in human history than inheriting an unimaginable sum of money from an estranged uncle.
Whenever the matter has come up socially since then, I have endeavored–more, I admit, for the sake of my own pride than anything else--to give the impression that the inheritance did not come as a surprise to me, that I had in fact expected it and planned on it for many years, and of course this was why I had pursued a graduate degree in such a poorly-renumerated field as Medieval Persian poetry, failed to complete my PhD in less than nine years, and then worked for two years as an adjunct.
As a matter of fact, this impression is false. I had not even the smallest inkling that my uncle–whom I had seen only twice in my entire life–would choose to leave any money to me, let alone what amounted to his entire fortune. To tell the truth, I had largely forgotten that I had an uncle, and had in fact told several women I dated in graduate school that my father was an only child–using this as a key psychological factor to explain why he had failed to understand my uniquely sensitive disposition and consequently left me unable to feel and receive normal human affection and so in desperate need of remedial attention from women. When I did occasionally remember my uncle, I certainly remembered that he was a fabulously successful and wealthy engineer–but given that my uncle’s first two marriages had between them produced two children, given that he had never actually directly spoken to me that I could remember, and given that the only time I had seen him interact with my father had ended in a shouting match, it had simply never occurred to me that he might choose to leave me anything.
I am still not really sure why he chose to do so. My leading theory has always been spite towards his own children: though I cannot entirely rule out spite towards his ex-wives, my father, his business associates, himself, and/or me. Life is unfortunately filled with mysteries, and I had no interest in unravelling any of them.
In any case, my sudden inheritance left me in a very sticky situation. On the one hand, I had for years been telling everyone I knew how much I hated my job, my students, and my field. On the other hand, my failed academic career had for more than ten years given me my only meaning in life, my entire sense of self, my only topic of conversation, and my only reason whatsoever for ever leaving my bed. Still, in the end I could think of no excuse that would hold water with my colleagues, my students, or my increasingly rare dates: I resigned.
During my time as an adjunct, I had frequently complained that I lacked the time to work on both my academic monograph on Rumi and a science-fiction novel in which my original viewpoint on life would be explored via a painstakingly detailed description of the poetry, literature, politics, society, and sex lives of alien grubs. Having quit my job, I no longer had an excuse not to work on these projects. Unfortunately, I quickly found that I loathed both of them as well.
Theoretically, I could have simply moved away to somewhere warm and inviting, or gone on vacation to the Bahamas and never come back. Every time I considered these options, though, my head would spin, a cold sweat would break out on the back of my neck, and I found myself unable to sleep for the next several days. Like it or not, this town had become my home–and the last thing I needed in the throes of such an emotionally disturbing transition (as I reminded myself constantly during this time, many lottery winners kill themselves) was a drastic change in milieu.
No longer having any colleagues, students, or advisors to ask about what I was doing, I briefly considered simply giving up any active efforts whatsoever, watching television all day, and ordering take-out for all my meals. A devastating encounter with a former student at Walgreen’s, however, confirmed me in my ultimately illusory, but nonetheless deeply felt need to at least fake some kind of productivity.
Hence, within about two months of my inheritance, I found myself spending ten hours a day, six days a week sitting behind my laptop at a corner table at La Cafe, scrolling through Twitter, watching Shakira music videos and DnD streams, and occasionally adding and then deleting a paragraph or two of text to my two project documents.
You may wonder, given my wealth, why I didn’t choose to hang out at any of the much nicer coffee shops on the main drag. On the one hand, I was understandably fearful of the prospect of running into former students or colleagues and having to explain to them what I was doing with my life now. On the other hand, I found that outside of the carefully-controlled environment of the classroom, the sight and sound of undergraduate women filled me with overwhelming, uncontrollable feelings of terror, pity, disgust, lust, longing, anger, hatred, bitterness, contempt, and self-loathing. Even momentary glimpses of a young woman in an off-the-shoulder sweater ruined whole days.
At La Cafe, the only undergraduates present were the baristas, thin, timid girls in unfashionable clothes who froze in terror whenever anyone glanced at them. In my view, the La Cafe baristas were a truly elite class, the creme de la creme of the undergraduate and business populations alike. To get and keep a job at La Cafe, a girl had to be not only unattractive enough to not get hired for any of the plentiful service positions on main street but also not self-respecting enough to reject La Cafe’s illegally low wages and constant bad customer behavior. Just looking at them boosted my confidence.
Unlike the perky, overachieving baristas at the other coffee shops, my La Cafe ladies never made eye contact with me, or asked me how I was doing, or told me about the cafe specials. They didn’t even clean behind the counter: they just sat there, shivering and miserable, and stared at their phones until their shifts ended. Every few weeks, I would ask one of them out: and though they always said no, they were always painfully apologetic about it. Overall, it was a perk.
The baristas played very little role, though, in my experience of La Cafe, since I never in fact ordered anything from them. Instead, I paid to have my breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and hourly lattes DoorDashed from surrounding restaurants straight to my table. I don’t think Beth was ever aware of this flagrant breach of the “No Outside Food or Drink” policy inscribed on a rotting wooden sign over the entrance: and though they occasionally looked frightened, the baristas never said anything about it either. In the old days, I would have considered this daily use of food delivery apps a decadent extravagance, but as it was I spent so little money that my total expenditures for the years spent at La Cafe were outweighed by the interest on my savings accounts.
The biggest reason to spend one’s days at La Cafe, though, are the other patrons. We are (or were) a true band of brothers (and sisters), bound together across all lines of class and race and age and health and sanity by a shared fear of social interaction. We do not talk to each other as a rule: but then we do not have to. We all have our laptops, we all have our important projects to work on–real or fictitious–and we all have the Internet to surf, all day, every day. On the surface, we look quite different, and are there for quite different reasons–but in our true, underlying essence, we are all the same.
One of the most important things that spending time at La Cafe teaches you is that appearances really are deceiving. Most people probably think they could easily tell the difference between a homeless schizophrenic and a world-famous philosopher with a tenured position and a MacArthur Genius Grant: but they cannot.
Dr. Eder dresses primly in simple but well-cut black formal wear buttoned up to his chin, wears clean white gloves, and spends his days staring off into space and writing carefully and neatly in black notebooks: he was released from Barton Asylum three years ago, lives in a tent in the woods, and believes that aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy are communicating to him the secret of dimensional transportation via a transmitter implanted in his left earlobe. Dr. Fink (or “Marty” as he insists everyone call him) exclusively wears Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts, has an unkempt beard down to his knees, and spends most of his time sitting on an armchair with his hairy legs spread out watching pornographic videos of undergraduates: the New Yorker last year called him “the most advanced theoretical mind of the 21st century.”
I learned quite a lot about my fellow inmates over those two years–much of it no doubt false. I have learned that the petite redhead who wears T-shirts and short-shorts, looks roughly twenty years old, and spends her days sitting in the corner typing furiously on her laptop is in fact the head of the University English Department and the world’s foremost expert on George Eliot. I have learned that the grizzled older man who sits across from her and writes longhand on sheets of plain white paper is in fact her graduate assistant with whom she is having an affair: he is also (or claims to be) a former member of the Yugoslav PolitBuro and an amateur poet who writes formal Japanese verse describing flowers that he prints himself and hands out to people on the campus quad. The tall, stooped man of indeterminate age who comes in only on Wednesdays in the afternoon and sits by the door drinking lukewarm tea and watching the rain is (or was) the star baseball player of the 1985 season and later the coach of a number of prestigious women’s softball teams at both highschool and collegiate levels: according to Google, he was convicted in 2004 of child pornography possession, was disowned by his family, and has not worked since.
I do not want to give the impression that all, or even most, of my colleagues have such extreme and colorful backgrounds: far from it. Roger is merely a retired dentist who finally has the time to work on a proposed academic monograph on Lucian that he started and abandoned decades ago. Arthur is merely an alcoholic former housepainter trying to finish a sequel to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Tina is merely a ninth-year graduate student in the Religious Studies department whose funding has been cut off and who is desperately trying to finish her dissertation proposing a new theory that Mary Magdalene was actually Jesus’ mother. And so on.
Nor do I want to give the impression that I know everyone who spends time at La Cafe. Far from it! Many people stop by only briefly, once a week or less: and many new faces constantly cycle through based on the positive Yelp reviews that Beth paid twenty college undergraduates to write ten years ago. Most of the latter do not return: but we have quite a substantial group of the former, people who occasionally stop by for a cup of coffee either because it is late (or early) and their preferred coffee shops are closed or because the main street is crowded or because they live close by and are too lazy to walk the three or four blocks it would take to get somewhere better. And there are even a few people who spend nearly all their time at La Cafe and yet have never spoken to me or anyone else or even themselves in my hearing or given any sign of who they might be or just what has condemned them to our shared limbo.
The man who approached me that day belonged to this last category. When I first entered La Cafe, on a brisk spring day around noon following a somewhat public breakdown at Starbucks, he was sitting there, alone, at one corner of the establishment’s largest table under the crooked mirror and the poster of Charles De Gaulle. This was one of his (not De Gaulle’s) many quirks: that he never sat at one of the many single-seater tables or two-person desks, but always at this large wooden table, which could easily seat six people, alone. Sometimes, people would risk sitting at the same table, and he would watch them intently in silence as they worked, and they would not come back. Most days, he sat alone.
I see, though, that I have entirely failed to describe the man himself. Like a number of academics and homeless people I have known, he wore a heavy black overcoat over black slacks and a light blue button-down shirt. There was nothing unusual about these clothes other than the fact that he wore them every day, rain or shine, and all the year around: which might have pointed to homelessness if it were not for the rows of white, polished teeth he showed when he smiled. (Homeless people do not have good teeth, though there are exceptions).
He was what I would call moderately groomed: he looked like he cut his own hair, but with reasonable enough skill, and his moustache appeared to be trimmed with an electric groomer about once a month. This in turn would almost certainly have led me in the direction of “academic” if it were not for the fact that he never appeared to do any writing, and most importantly never seemed at all anxious. Instead of the ubiquitous laptop, he had a heavy, old-fashioned iPhone which he answered three or four times a week, stepping just outside onto the patio and carrying on low conversations for about half an hour at a time. The rest of the time he simply sat in his place, drinking cup after cup of hot cocoa and watching the other customers with a small, confident smile on his face. Occasionally, he would get out a black leather notebook and BIC gel pen and write what seemed to be notes in it.
I see, though, that I still have not really described him. He was a little taller than me and most men; in age he might have been anywhere from seventy to a hundred and twenty years old. Though he seemed otherwise in good health, his face was round and slightly pudgy, with sagging, wrinkled skin. His hair was steel-gray, and combed back straight in a style that struck me as old-fashioned; an impression underscored by the trim, almost military moustache he wore. His fingernails were generally long. He wore a cheap metal watch on his left wrist, though he never appeared to check it.
As I said, he never spoke a single word in my hearing for the roughly two years and six months in which we shared the main room at La Cafe. Nor did I ever speak to him, or try to catch his eye: to tell the truth, he slightly unnerved me. I have always hated mysteries: I think this is more or less the reason I went into academia, studied Medieval Persian love poetry, accepted the money from my uncle, could never maintain a romantic relationship to save my life, and had spent every day for the last two years including Christmas and Easter at La Cafe. More than half the fun of my new life was that, though I was nominally surrounded by other people, every one of those people was to me an open book, a familiar type, a known quantity, or at the very least silent and nonthreatening. The truth is, I felt secure in the presence of my fellow inmates; that is why I was there.
This man was different. The very way he held his head as he looked around the room, the very way he leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs and drank his hot cocoa sip after sip after casual sip…it all spoke not just of confidence and poise, but of concentration. He was clearly thinking about something; and I had no idea what it might be. This unsettled me.
He was also clearly doing things; and no one at La Cafe ever did things. We were all in theory working on a project of some kind, plugging our way on our laptops day after day after day: but we were all deep down secure in the knowledge that none of it meant anything. Or at least, if some (like George, the seventh year white graduate student in the African-American Studies department who had been ostracized by his peers but declared ten to twenty times a day to no one in particular, like a mantra, that his research would revolutionize the field and he would get a tenure-track position) still held on to some small remaining shards of self-delusion, the meaninglessness of their labor was apparent to everyone else.
Not so with this man. The absence of a laptop in front of his face was, in that social environment, simply obscene, a kind of phatic nudity. The fact that every action he took seemed deliberate, seemed to signify something, accomplish something, was even worse. When I allowed myself to think of him at all, I hated him entirely. Luckily, he was easy to ignore.
Until, of course, he wasn’t. It was November 17, two years to the day from my uncle’s death (though I had only learned of the event a week later) that, at precisely 11:33 AM, with La Cafe more empty than ever as even most lifers disembarked to find more appetizing lunches–homeless people from obliging strangers and trashcans, graduate students from their apartment refrigerators packed with defrosted frozen foods, tenure-track professors from the little ethnic restaurants tucked away out of sight of undergraduates in the surrounding streets–that the man looked at his phone, raised one eyebrow, and, without a moment’s hesitation stood up, walked over to the small table packed with my laptop, my phone, three empty plastic coffee cups, the remains of my delivered breakfast from Arby’s, and the remains of my delivered lunch from Panera Bread, and sat down across from me.
“I imagine you’re rather surprised,” he said in a level tone, looking me directly in the eyes. I see I neglected to mention above that his eyes were brown.
As a matter of a fact, I was not surprised: I was simply terrified. This was not the first time someone had approached me and sat across from me at my table at La Cafe; in fact, it had happened a full seven times in the two years prior to this incident. Only a few months before, Tina (the eighth-year Religious Studies grad student mentioned above) had sat down across from me, smoothed her hair self-consciously, looked away from me towards the exit, and asked me out on a date.
(I had insisted that we have the date at La Cafe, and she had showed up early dressed in an expensive ballgown and pearls. The DoorDashed Chinese food I ordered splattered the gown at several points, staining the yellow cloth orange. Tina was in fact quite beautiful, and we had a lot in common: that was the problem. After talking about our respective projects for three quarters of an hour, an inexorable silence fell between us. Whenever I looked up, I saw in her eyes an absolute, bottomless terror; I imagine she saw the same thing in mine. Despite spending most of the evening in bleak silence, Tina texted me an hour after saying she had had a great time and would love to do it again soon. I did not reply, and we never spoke again.)
I don’t think I am paranoid, but I also think that the man knew about all this: and that the comment was intended as deliberate bait. Of course, I can’t be sure; in fact, I still can’t be sure that everything he told me wasn’t intended as bait. That is one reason–the least important one–why I am writing about it now.
“I won’t introduce myself,” the man said, leaning back and crossing one leg over another. “But I have some things to tell you.” There was no courtesy at all in his manner: the comment was a statement, not a request.
“I suppose you’ve wondered who I am,” the man said after a moment. He took a slow sip from the mug of hot chocolate he had brought with him to the table. “And why I spend so much time here. Well, there are reasons for everything, of course.” He paused and tilted his head slightly, as if expecting a response from me.
“Well,” he said after I had failed to reply for a few minutes. “I won’t tell you any of that. But I can tell you some things that no one but me knows, that no one but me is still alive to know. And I’m going to, whether you like it or not.”
I still said nothing. I was trying desperately to snap out of my haze of terror; my fingers had begun involuntarily tapping. I tried to refocus my eyes on the laptop in front of me.
“It was the summer of 1960, and I had just graduated from college. An Ivy League school, though you don’t need to know which one. Anyway, that hardly mattered. Like all my peers, I lived in a world in which my worldly success, fame, fortune, wealth, and power, was, as we all saw it, entirely assured. The only question was what I was going to do with that success: which is to say, what I wanted to do, not in the world, but to the world.”
I glanced up: he was still looking directly at me. To my profound annoyance, I felt a tremble run through my body. The man smiled confidently and lifted his fingers to his mouth, as if positioning an invisible cigarette.
“You really can’t understand what it was like then.” He leaned back in profound relaxation, pursed his lips, and exhaled, as if releasing a stream of smoke. “Anything was possible…for good or for bad. Maybe it was the Atom Bomb that did it…or maybe that was only a symptom.” He shook his head dismissively. “Anyway, it wasn’t at all the way you kids talk about it: us quaking in the dark about the end of the world. Sure, we all thought we could die at any moment: but that was energy. It was electricity. You get me?”
He leaned forward in his chair, and I had to stop myself from leaning backwards. There was something in his eyes that made me want to get far, far away from him.
“Sure, we’d made something that could destroy the world seven times over. But who cares about that? That wasn’t what it was all about. Oppenheimer’s baby was proof positive that in the world we were building, imagination really could become reality.”
Smiling an odd smile to himself still, he held up one hand and, after a brief, studied hesitation, snapped his fingers. I flinched.
“Hey presto! Abracadabra! Hocus pocus! That’s the way it was. Just wish it and it’s there: a bomb, a car, an Empire, the end of the war, the end of the world. That’s how everything was then. Wish upon a star. Dream a little dream. A world of pure imagination. You get me?”
Despite myself, I shook my head. I was very, very, very annoyed. I was not less frightened than before, though, so when he laughed in my face I didn’t react.
“Of course you don’t. You and the rest of these losers…every miserable son of a bitch born after us….you’ve lost the mojo, haven’t you? You’re living in the world we built…but you couldn’t come up with a vision to save your life. You don’t have what it takes to make the world.”
“That’s not true,” I said, my annoyance overriding my fear for the first time. “I can create…I finished my dissertation. Real scholarship. And I’m working on a book now…two books. I’m an artist, a creative. Better than you. You don’t even write,” I added angrily. “You just sit there all day staring at people while the rest of us engage in…in…artistry. It’s–it’s–” As I spoke, he leaned back slowly in his chair, his eyes narrowing. Terror choked me off again.
“You see?” He looked around in mock-exasperation at Tina and Dr. Eder, who were sitting together at the next table. “Exactly what I was saying. You don’t get it. None of you sorry bastards get it.” He tapped the side of his head three times, slowly, still staring at me. “I’m not talking about artistry. I’m not talking about creativity. I’m talking about…about…” Abruptly, he leaned forward and grabbed my laptop. I blanched: that morning, I had mostly just been doomscrolling and looking at pictures of my exes on Instagram. I had remembered to at least open my academic project, though: and luckily, he ignored the other tabs and clicked on that.
“You see this shit?” He said, waving his hands over the screen. “This is your problem. You and these sorry bastards spend all day in here type-typing away, one word at a time, one paragraph at a time, one citation at a time…checking and rechecking your facts, pulling sources from here and there, quoting and rephrasing, adjusting and readjusting, doing nothing a goddamn AI couldn’t do.”
To my alarm, I saw him pulling up my novel manuscript as well. Since unlike my academic project, this wasn’t based on any preexisting writing, it looked far worse: it was really just a few pages of notes I’d taken last year, combined with some character profiles and a link to a news story (I wanted my novel to reflect the current market demand for true-crime-inspired stories) and three or four scrapped beginnings to the first chapter. Luckily, he barely glanced at it.
“Even when you write goddamn fiction, it’s the same thing: first you develop the plot, then you make all the characters, and write outlines, and get feedback, and make sure everything that happens is plausible, and true to life, and realistic, and contains the right mix of minorities, and passes the Bechdel test, and gives some shithole commentary on current events and issues and perspectives and economics and politics and goddamn religion. You get what I’m sayin’? That’s artistry: cribbing from God, taking other people’s stuff and mixing it up in a big blender, painting it on some borrowed canvas to look like your mother’s face, and even then stopping every five minutes to see if other people like it.” He shook his head emphatically and closed my laptop with a snap. I flinched again.
“Not that I blame you for that, of course,” he said more slowly after a pause. “That’s what people have been doing since the dawn of time. That’s all Homer did, just steal characters and plots from other people’s stories and tell ‘em over again and make sure to pray to the Muses first. That’s all Shakespeare did, and Milton, and Kafka, and goddamn Ernest Hemingway.” He took a deep breath. “But we were different.”
He slammed his fist on the table, causing both my laptop and his cup of cocoa to rattle, and a jerk of nervous energy to pass through my body from head to feet.
“We made things happen. Things that had never been before, things that had never been possible before. Things that no one had even thought of before. And we didn’t do it the way you sorry losers do it. We didn’t spend ten years sitting alone at a goddamn laptop. We did it fast. We did it whole. We didn’t do it by thinking, by planning, taking a bit here and a bit there from God’s good creation and doing our best to get the harmonies right. We did it suddenly. We did it violently. We did it by magic.”
Despite the crazed quality of his words, he did not seem to me to be emotional. He was speaking quietly, slowly, drawing out his words with crushing emphasis, and staring at me all the time.
“A damned empty desert in Nevada, sand and sand and more sand, and then hey presto! A paradise of beautiful women and air-conditioned rooms and golden pillars and gardens of palm trees. Rivers that had been there since the start of the world, rivers that dryads played in, that Indians worshipped: and abracadabra, we waved our magic wand and the rivers were gone and there were concrete dams and inky dark lakes where people swam and bought up real estate and drove their little motor-boats. Andy Griffith was living on a farm, because we wanted him there to look cute for the kids on TV: but as soon as we didn’t want him there, hocus pocus, there were the suburbs: ten million little frame houses with a beautiful wife and kids and a television set and a job at IBM inside.
No one in the history of the world ever did a thing like that: and we did it all over the world, in Europe, Asia, Australia, all those little islands in the Pacific. We took ten thousand years of peasants and said the magic words and they were all wearing button-downs and driving Chevys. That’s what we did.”
I stared at him in silent terror. I wanted to scream, to run, to get up from the table and walk away: but no matter how much my heart pulsed, I found myself still sitting there standing and staring into his bulging brown eyes and flabby face.
“When we started off, all over the world, everywhere you could go, there was just goddam stuck-up Europeans ruling over tribes of dirty naked savages: and hocus pocus, we waved our wands and there were nations there, guys in suits dressing up as the President of the United States and talking about economics and foreign policy and national sentiment. The goddamn Europeans didn’t do that. We did that.
It was the same thing here. For three hundred years we needed subhuman negroes to do our work for us, dumb as dogs, rolling around on the ground like animals: and there they were, and we were damn proud of it. But then all of a sudden, just to spite that asshole Adolf Hitler, we wish on a star and all of a sudden the negroes are all human, they’re just like us, want exactly what we want, what we want them to want: houses and cars and bombs and the power of imagination. It’s not that they changed: it was just we wanted it like that now, so that’s how it always was. You get me? All of a sudden, there never was any racism, no slavery, no goddamn Jim Crow. We waved our wand and right out of thin air came millions of polished-as-hell negroes in suits talkin’ about rights, and cute little girls with pigtails in Sunday dresses, and some goddamn Old Testament prophet on the steps of the capitol saying he has a dream. Well, he was right about that. But it was our dream. We made that happen. We made it all happen.”
“You can’t say that,” I muttered. I had been trying for the last five minutes to speak up–seeing out of the corner of my eye Tina and Mr. Wassmann both shooting glances in our direction–and had intended my statement to be loud and definite. As it was, the man across from me didn’t seem to hear me: though he did smile widely a second later and lean back in his chair, as if regaining a composure he had never lost.
“Well,” he said. “That’s how it was. So you can understand why an ambitious young man like me, brought up in that kind of environment, given the best education money can buy, primed to join the ranks of the haves…well, you can understand why I wanted to do something special with my life.”
I stared at him: he again seemed to me to be smoking an invisible cigarette, lifting his hand to his mouth, raising it in the air, and then putting it to his mouth again. After a moment, he slid my laptop across the table to me and smiled. I opened it reflexively and pulled up the tab where my ex was dancing with her fiance at a wedding.
“Well, anyway, I thought about that a lot while working my first job out of college, at one of the Big Ten firms. Dated around quite a bit, but decided not to get married right away: because, I guess, I felt like I had to be ready when my opportunity came. So I went to work, and drank, and danced, and took notes in a little notebook, and waited. And then, in the summer of ‘62, in a little coffee shop, in this little coffee shop in fact, I got it.”
He looked around for the first time, smiling at the small, mousy barista behind the counter: Ashley I think. She was staring at her phone and did not see him. “You know why I come here every day?” the man asked, still looking around.
“Well,” I said slowly. Something about having the screen in front of me again calmed me. I had pulled open the novel document and had begun typing idly. “I appreciate that it’s less crowded with obnoxious undergrads. And they let you sit in here without paying for as long as you–”
“You fucking coward,” he said. “I hate you.” For the first time since he had sat down, he looked upset. Oddly enough, I did not feel frightened. I felt, in fact, a small, hard sense of triumph, as though I had won an important victory.
“Fucking hell,” he said, frowning. “You don’t get it at all. You don’t…” He sighed, look down, and massaged his temples for a few moments. I ignored him and continued typing nonsense.
“This place…it was the first.” I looked up: he had regained some composure, but was still looking down at his shoes.
“The first what?” I asked, speaking for the first time in my normal voice. Seeing him distraught comforted me.
“The first magical place in this whole town. In this whole state. Hell, maybe in this whole damn country.” He looked pensively towards the counter.
“You have to understand: when the Johnsons first opened this place in the 18th century…there were no coffee shops in this town. There were certainly no French cafes. But they’d been to Paris on their honeymoon: and so when they came back here and settled into the big house on the hill and opened up this place with their inheritance money…well, you can imagine how people reacted. La Cafe? A name in French over the door, and coffee served piping hot in wine glasses, and in the back French pastries baked by some imported chef. Well, not a real French chef…turns out he was actually Swiss. Spoke Romansh, whatever that is. It was a bit of a scandal in the newspapers here when they found out. And from the old menus I’ve seen, he mostly just made regular biscuits and cornbread and cookies and cakes. Nothing too exotic. But I think that was the first…”
He stared off into space. He seemed to me somehow deflated now, a small, old man: and I felt younger than ever.
“Couldn’t you argue,” I said, perking up. “That the entire colonial project was always premised on what you’re describing: the impossible transplanting of European Old-World cultures and folkways and foodstuffs and ways of life to totally new places while rejecting all hybridity with the natives and attempting to assert an impossible changelessness in the face of the flux of history?” I had written three papers on this in grad school, and they were still reasonably fresh in my mind. I felt a warm glow of confidence, and smiled at the man for the first time.
“Maybe you’re right…” he said slowly, looking crestfallen. “Maybe it was always this way…at least here. But no,” he added more firmly. “I don’t think so. It can’t be. This was…”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally, in a new and more human voice. “What happened in the past. Whether it’s true or not…you have to understand that. It doesn’t matter, because…we could change it all. Like this place…it changed things. After it was made…it wasn’t just a copy of a place called France. It was France. That’s what you have to understand. It was better than France. I came here as a kid, a lot: I loved it, the food, the ambience…and because of that, I wanted to go to France, to see it for myself. But when I finally visited Paris, by myself, on my father’s money, over the summer between college terms...” His gaze had recovered a little of its electricity when he looked up at me; but I held his gaze.
“I couldn’t stand it. I had spent my whole childhood thinking that I loved French food, French culture…that La Cafe was the copy, and France the original…and so if I liked La Cafe, I would like France even more. And I was wrong. The whole time I was in Paris, I just kept thinking about La Cafe, and how much better I liked their food, their decor, their architecture, even the way they spoke, than anything I saw in France. At first I was disappointed, angry, yelled at a bunch of French waiters, told them everything they gave me was shit. But then, one day…at sunset…sitting in a little cafe by the Seine…eating quiche and drinking wine…everything beautiful and perfect…I finally understood. It was France that was the copy. It was La Cafe that was the real thing. It came first because…because we had done magic.”
He leaned forward even farther, and for a brief second I thought he was going to grab my hand. I visibly recoiled, but he was too far into his monologue to notice this time.
“This is what you gotta get if you want to do anything with your life, kid. History doesn’t matter…authenticity doesn’t matter…where things come from doesn’t matter…what they are doesn’t matter: all that matters is what you can create, out of nothing, on a whim. It didn’t matter that La Cafe was supposed to be French…what mattered is that La Cafe had made something exist that had never existed before, and the more inauthentic it was the better. It was that I loved...not the place, not the food, but the freedom. La Cafe was proof, just in itself, that magic was real. Proof that I could do whatever I wanted.”
He took a deep breath and let it out, leaned back in his chair, uncomfortable again, and shook his head, as though trying to shake off a fly.
“In France, I felt so…so confined. Trapped. Everyone was so…formal. Polite. Respectful. So themselves. Locked into ways of doing things, ways of thinking. They knew who they were, and what they were doing…and they expected me to be the same. Everywhere I went, they asked me questions…tried to understand me. Where I was from, who I was, what I thought, what I believed. I hated it. I didn’t know who I was…I didn’t want to know. That was the whole point. I was free. They…they lived their lives according to…what they understood…about the world…what they thought things were, who they thought they were, where they were from, what they were for…and…and it was hell to me. Absolute hell. Everytime they served me something authentic, some real thing from some real place…every time they explained something to me…I couldn’t stand it. All I wanted was to be back at La Cafe, where no one would look me in the eye, where nothing would be itself, where I would be free again. Free to dream…”
His gaze grew unfocused and pensive. “And I think that that was the first time I really understood…who and what I was. Who we all were.”
Abruptly, he fixed me again with his eyes. I was too hypnotized now to look away. “Do you know who I am?” He asked.
“No,” I said. “You haven’t told me.” I paused. “Did you say you grew up here?”
“I’m a god.” He said. He furrowed his brow. “Or a superman. Or…or the Messiah. I’ve never been quite sure which one. But, in France, visiting all those churches…that’s what we all were. We Americans. Or at least…the Ivy League ones. The guys in charge. Us. They were people…but we were gods. What Jesus was…what the prophets were. We were what they wrote about and sang songs about and painted about, in all those churches and temples, over all those centuries. All that time, they were waiting for us. Because…they just understood things. But we made things. Like God.”
He looked up at the ceiling and massaged the bridge of his nose. “So when I graduated college…I knew I had to prove that to everyone. Test it out. Show that I was one of us, if you get me. Could make things happen. So I did.”
“How did you…what did you decide to do?” I asked. I was still looking at his upturned face, framed in the square-paned window, the rays from the sun shining through it forming a kind of spiky halo around him. His eyes, turned upwards also, glittered in the reflected glow of the ceiling lights. I felt a stir of unquiet.
“Why, I decided to kill the President. John F. Kennedy. And then I did.” His eyes darted suddenly down to my face.
I nearly burst out laughing. “You…you. Oh,” I said, nearly wilting with relief. In a moment, the man in front of me had gone from a frightening prophet to just another kook. Most likely he was homeless after all; there were free dental clinics in the area, and mouthwash wasn’t that expensive anyway.
“You don’t believe me,” he said, lowering his face slowly to look into mine. There was no disappointment in his eyes. “You think I’m making it all up.”
“No,” I said slowly, fighting to keep the indulgent smile from my face. “I think…well I think you believe that you killed JFK. Or I guess,” I added quickly. “that you made it happen by magic, imagined it and wished for it and so on.” I was getting it: I smiled. This conversation might make a good journal article after all…or maybe a chapter in my novel?
“That’s true,” the man conceded thoughtfully. He smiled back at me, and tapped his chin. “In 1962, on a sunny day like this, I sat on the balcony of my apartment in New York and imagined to myself just exactly how I wanted the President to die. The motorcade, the shots, the screaming wife. All those people with their little cameras. The Secret Service agents running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The President’s head exploding. Two gunmen. And the place: the overpass, the office buildings, the grassy knoll, that little picket fence. I saw it so clearly. All the little angles you’ve seen. It was so clear…so perfect. I knew it had to be just like that.” He leaned back in his chair, his eyes glittering.
“It was only after I did all that that I went looking for a place like what I’d seen: and it wasn’t until 1963 that I actually found one. Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never even been to Texas. Thought it was just a ratty little backwater full of cows and oil mines. I had no idea it was where my destiny was leading me all along…”
I too leaned back in my chair. For the first time in the conversation, I felt secure, in control. I understood this man now. There was no more mystery. There was only another Project to work on: an amusing way to distract myself from my more immediate projects.
“Alright,” I said. “So you think that, in 1962, you imagined JFK being assassinated, and then when it happened in 1963, that made you think you’d done it somehow.” I smiled widely, indulgently: mugging for an audience. From the corner of my eye, I tried to see if Tina was listening. “Maybe you really did imagine something like what happened later on…or maybe it was only after the fact that you transposed elements of what you saw on TV back into your earlier memories. That’s very common.” I felt like an academic again. I crossed my legs. My coffee had run out, and I reached for my phone to DoorDash some more.
“I drew a map,” he said slowly. “In 1961. Still have it. Keep it in the box. A whole book of notes from then, too. Not perfect,” he acknowledged. “But pretty close. The shots, the shooters, sequence of events, locations, angles. I can show it to you sometime.”
“Sure,” I said, no longer trying to keep the patronizing skepticism out of my voice. I ordered a large latte, scrolled to the bottom, and added a small tip. “So you’re a magician. Or was it the Messiah? And you killed JFK. By magic.” I hit enter: in fifteen minutes, a Pakistani man would walk into La Cafe with my coffee. This was the real magic.
“I killed JFK by magic,” he affirmed quietly. “I imagined it, and it happened. I had a dream.” He smiled. “Of course, I did shoot him, too. But that’s a longer story.”
I put my phone down and looked at him. To my annoyance, there was once again a knot of unease in my stomach. “You shot JFK,” I said. I paused, trying to think of something clever to say. “So you’re Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“Oswald didn’t shoot JFK,” the man said calmly. “I did.”
He shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t the only one. There were two of us. But I was the one who got him in the head.” He furrowed his brows, and for a second looked almost worried. “His brain popped out. That was the only thing that wasn’t the way I’d imagined…”
“So you were part of a conspiracy?” I felt a sudden urge to refute this man. I knew he was crazy: but– “You were in the CIA…or the Mafia…or…or something?”
“Of course I was in the CIA,” he said mildly. “We all were. Didn’t I tell you I went to an Ivy League school? Don’t you know anything?”
I glared at him, painfully aware of a nerve pulsing in my neck. How dare this tramp–
“Not that I was an agent or anything important,” he acknowledged finally, looking away from me. “It wasn’t…professional like it got later. If you were the right sort of person…if you knew the right sort of people…they didn’t even have to contact you, or blackmail you, or anything so vulgar. You just knew which professors were on the payroll, and it was most of them, and you knew the friends who’d gone on to careers, and it was more than a few of them. And somewhere along the line, you found that you were in the club yourself, without ever having joined.”
He smiled and seemed to stretch, shaking his arms out. He was remarkably limber for a man of his age–depending, of course, on what exactly his age was. If he had graduated college in 1961…I tried to do the math in my head, and failed.
“Most of the time, no one even told you. You simply had a conversation with someone, a civilized, polite conversation, and they looked at you, and you looked at them, and you knew. Or sometimes it wasn’t even that. One day, the checks would start being deposited into your account. And you were in.”
He laughed and shook his head.
“They were supposed to send you a slip with your codename and managing agent, of course, but sometimes they forgot to do even that. Not that there was anything to it really, most of the time. A lot of us were never contacted at all: just got the money, a little boost from Uncle Sam and the good old friends in the Agency to speed one on the path to success, and don’t you know that we’d remember that all the days of our lives, that we’d be loyal true-blue Americans and vote against the Commies and report the agitators to the Police?” He laughed again, more quietly.
For a few of us, though, once in a blue moon, someone from the Agency would call on the phone, or take you to lunch maybe, and ask you to tell them something, or less often do something: never anything violent or dangerous, though, and as often as not something you were going to do anyway. Take the job, don’t take the job, marry the girl, don’t marry the girl, that kind of thing. Just a few words here, someone’s phone number there, an employment contract, a bit of gossip, an account opened, a radio signal listened to, numbers written down and mailed to some address. And you did it, and that was that. Nothing to it. Just one of the perks of being a magician. That was what it was like in the Agency before they ruined it…”
“So the CIA told you to kill Kennedy?” I was still fuming, but also typing on my laptop again, trying my best to look away from him.
“No, of course not,” he said, mildly perturbed for the first time. “Aren’t you paying attention? I told them to kill Kennedy.” He smiled suddenly, revealing those shining white teeth. “That was what made it so special.”
He leaned back again with the same unmistakable air of someone puffing away at an invisible cigarette. “It’s true the Agency hated Kennedy…and he hated them. It’s true they hated Bobby even more…would have done anything to piss him off. It’s even true they blackmailed Jack into taking Johnson as his VP. But even so…” He chucked to himself slowly. “You should have seen the looks on their faces. My contact’s voice over the phone…the fucking bureaucrat they sent to head me off…they couldn’t believe it. You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but they’d never even considered the possibility. Or at least…that’s what they told me.”
His face clouded over for a second, then brightened again. “It’s that Ivy League thing…sure, we were told to change the world, given the latest technology, the latest ideas… but there was a whole lot of old-fashioned bullshit baked in too. We all read Herodotus, and Sophocles, and got the moral: Don’t defy the gods. Respect piety and patriotism. Accept your limitations.” He mimed this last in a high-pitched, girlish voice. “Bullshit. We were the gods. I told him that when we had our meeting. You shoulda seen the look on his face, man.”
“Told who?” I wanted so badly to argue with him: but somehow, nothing came to mind. I redirected my gaze towards the laptop in front of me, and resumed typing.
He looked at me for a second in wry amusement. “Bill Harvey. The CIA’s assassination guy…or one of them. He wanted to meet in a little hotel that used to be a block from here…I wanted to meet at La Cafe. In the end, he agreed to it, but he glared at me the whole time. Asshole.”
He grinned for a second. “He told me straight-up, though. They were patriotic Americans. They couldn’t assassinate the President. They could kill as many kikes and dagos and chinks as they needed to, here or anywhere else in the world. But they stood for something: America, the Constitution, blah blah blah blah blah.” He grimaced in disgust. “I told him straight-up: what do you think America is? That it’s just some goddamn country? Like France? You think it’s the goddamn Constitution, the President, some piece of paper, some Shamus from Brookline mugging in a suit on TV? I told him: America’s an idea, baby. It’s a dream. And we can do whatever we want. He just sat there and looked at me: and finally he got up and walked right out without a word. But I knew I was in.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, or ask a question: I averted my eyes back to my screen. Over the past half hour I appeared to have typed four or five sentences about a Finnish goat: distressingly, it was some of the best prose I’d written in years.
“Well, even after that, it took a few years. And there were meetings: so many goddamn meetings. Meetings with Cubans in Miami. Meetings with suits in DC. Meetings with oil barons in Texas. Meetings with Mafiosos in New York. At the beginning, it was just me and Harvey: then he passed me on to Angleton, and from then on we were the top guys.”
He laughed, as if lost in memories. I was still studying what I’d written, and barely listening.
“Angleton was a real tough cookie. Half Anglo, half Mexican, but all son of a whore. He could scare you just looking at you, without saying a word. Most of the time he didn’t. Smarter than anyone I’d ever met, anyone I would ever meet. Had his hand in a hundred thousand pies, from Moscow, Russia all the way to Moscow, Idaho and back, spent his days pulling on strings that none of the rest of us could see, in Tashkent, Morocco, Istanbul, Paris. Weaving it all together into something that had never been before. A real magician.”
Silence fell between us, broken only by the tapping of my keys: I was trying to see if I could integrate the goat plotline with my existing True-Crime concept. After nearly a minute, I glanced up to see him looking at me.
“You might wonder why they let me in so fast, and me nothing but a minor asset, a kid fresh out of college. Well, it wasn’t because of my education, I can tell you. It was because I was special. I was the idea guy: and that’s the most powerful kind of magician of all. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how tough you are, or how much you know, or how much you’ve done: in the end, you’re gonna find yourself fetching balls for an idea guy. We’re the real ones: the true elite. We’ve run the world since Hammurabi: and we’ll be running it when Jesus comes back.”
His brown eyes were wide and glaring when I glanced up: he was holding one finger to his forehead. There was no way I could think of to integrate the story of a talking Finnish goat with the murder of a High School football star. “Angleton knew that: I knew that. He had the money and the office and the smarts: but he was working for me. Because…because I had had the idea: the idea that none of them had had the balls to come up with. And because I believed in the idea.” He was staring at me: his gaze was oddly hypnotic. I looked back down at my screen and tried to focus on the words. What was I writing?
“Most of our meetings weren’t really planning or operations. They were come to Jesus meetings, where they brought some powerful goon or other into the room and had me preach to them. And it always worked. They all got what I was saying: because it was what they were living. They had just never put their finger on it before. They were magicians. They were gods. And if that was true, then what to do about Kennedy was just obvious. Not a question. No room for doubt. And we didn’t have problems with any of them. No one ever blabbed. Because they knew. They knew I was right.”
He sighed: I had entirely forgotten about the Finnish goat now, and was simply staring at the man across the table. Now that I thought about it, he looked rather like a goat himself. “The hardest part, though, was what came next. It was easy getting them all on board with the idea of killing the President of the United States. What was hard was making them wait once they were on board. They all wanted to do it right away, at the earliest possible convenience. 1961. But I wouldn’t let them. They kept coming in, to me and Angleton, with plans: assassins, places, maps, codes, accomplices, patsies. And then I’d look them over, and say no. It wasn’t right. None of the places were what I’d seen in my vision. Too big, too small, no bridge, no picket fence, wrong climate, not enough light, no office buildings…I never told them that, though. Had to come up with other excuses for everything…that was tough.”
He frowned, looking directly at Tina now. She glared at him in return, then for good measure glared at me, too: he didn’t seem to notice.
“Only person I ever told was Angleton, after I’d just rejected a foolproof plan in Germany that woulda given them everything they needed to go for Cuba afterwards. And when I told him, he just looked at me with that face of his, for a long, long time. And I knew, for the first time, that he was afraid of me. I could smell it on him. But he didn’t say anything. Just looked.” He licked his lips, as though tasting some forgotten flavor. I shivered.
“I’ll admit, though…even I started to lose faith after a while. More than a year of maps coming in and plans coming in and the Texans getting antsy and the Cubans getting antsy and Harvey getting madder and madder. But I held out.”
Tina had picked up her bag and stalked out of La Cafe. The man again did not seem to notice; he was leaning forward, staring straight ahead of him, lost in thought.
“The truth is…after all that time, I really wasn’t sure that it would ever happen. In fact…I thought… it probably wouldn’t.” He frowned in concentration, as though trying to remember something. “But that didn’t matter to me, because…because, unlike the rest of them…I wasn’t doing it for politics, or, or ideology, or business, or a grudge, or…or, well for any reason at all…except the vision. And I didn’t want to…to spoil that vision. I don’t think any of them ever got it, but–if I couldn’t make the vision come true…just like I saw it…well, I’d have rather have never done it at all. If it wasn’t that plaza, that bridge, that sunny day…I’d rather the President stay alive. Hell, I liked Kennedy. I voted for him. None of them got that: not even Angleton. None of them.”
He shifted his sightless gaze towards the new barista at the counter: Miruel, a psych major at the university, and as crazy as most psych majors I’ve met. She blanched in fear.
“Well, finally even Angleton got impatient. Summer ‘63, the Cubans came in with a plan to gun him down in Miami: and the truth is, it wasn’t near as good as a dozen plans we’d turned down before. It was supposed to put the blame on Castro, but most likely some right-wing Cuban sonofabitch or another woulda gotten caught, and blab, and it would have all blown up in our faces. But by this time, Angleton was mad: and he approved it before I could say a word. Looked at me all the while, as if daring me to say something. He was real mean when he looked at you like that.”
He seemed to mime pulling a cigarette out of his mouth and staring at it. There was nothing in his hand, but for a moment I could almost see the strands of smoke rising slowly towards the ceiling…
“That was just about the lowest I ever got. I went home that night feeling like my whole world was collapsing. The President was going to be assassinated in some palm-tree square in Miami: and it would be all wrong. It wasn’t just that it wasn’t what I’d seen…it would take the place of my vision, the pure and perfect vision that I’d come up with. No one would ever see what I’d created, all by myself; they’d just see some Shamus getting his head blown off by an angry Cuban. I couldn’t believe it. Went to a bar, drank two handles of whiskey. Never done that before. Put me straight back on my ear. Angleton kept ringing my hotel room, but I didn’t even answer. Just about the worst time in my whole life.”
He suddenly sat up straighter, seeming to grow by half a foot or more in a second. I shivered again: but he was still looking away from me, out the window toward the dying light.
“It was the TV…the TV that did it. The most magical thing we magicians ever made. The thing America existed to do. A box of visions for the masses. A sacred stone, a dreaming oracle.” He let out a long, shuddering breath of pure pleasure. “And that day…for me…the savior of the vision.”
To my profound shock, he stood up: but did not step away from the table. Instead, he continued to stare straight ahead of him, ramrod-stiff, and talk in a low monotone only audible to me.
“I was lying in bed with a hangover, watching the tube, when I saw it. Some news story about the Cowboys, and how they were hoping to turn their fortunes around and have a good season. And there was just some shot, some throwaway B-roll, from a car window driving through Dallas: and all of a sudden I saw it. The place. Unmistakable. But…not like I’d seen it before. Something was wrong…and I thought and thought, and eventually realized what it was. The angle was different. This was from the street: but my vision was looking out onto the road, from behind the picket fence. And when I saw that…”
“Well, I called up Angleton right away, and told him that he was right, that we had to move quickly, but that we were going to change it, and make it Dallas. I didn’t even know if Kennedy was going to visit Dallas that year. In fact, I asked him if he was, and when. And he got real quiet on the other end of the phone, and said didn’t I know, Kennedy was going to be in Dallas just a few days after Miami? And I said, of course I knew that, that’s why I was saying it, to avoid delays: and then I added in the kicker, which was that I was going to be one of the gunmen, and fire the rifle that cracked Kennedy’s skull. And there was a long, long silence, minute after minute, and finally he just told me to come in and we would talk about it. But baby, I was back. All the belief, all the passion. I gave the sales pitch of my life to Angleton that day, in the little office with the secretaries bringing in cups of coffee for us every half hour. About how we were too in bed with the Cubans, and about how easy it would be to trace, and how they would let us down just like they did before, and blab and brag about what they’d done. And Angleton just looked at me and said, ‘Well, what about Johnson? Everyone knows Connolly is his boy.’ And I said, ‘Well, what about Johnson? Who gives a fuck about Johnson? Once he’s President he can take care of himself like a big boy.’ And he smiled, and I smiled, and I knew I’d done it again.
“I expected there to be a big stink about me firing the shot: and there was, but not with Angleton. He never said one word against that part of the plan; now I know why. Bill Harvey was real mad about it, though. He was in deep with the Cubans, had his own people ready to go, and I was this fresh-faced kid from the Ivies, and sure, I’d been in the rifle club, but that didn’t make me CIA-material. I was sure to blow it: and if they caught me, I knew way too much about all of them. And all the while Angleton just looked at me and smiled, and I know now what he was thinking: who’d believe him? Who’d believe this crew-cut kid with a rowing championship if he said he was the Presidential assassin? And in the end, after hours and hours of this shit he finally sort of stood up from the table, all quiet-like, and told Harvey to go fuck himself and if he was so worried make sure he had a good backup in place and that was that.
Well, after that, it was just a few months of waiting. I don’t know much about what they were doing then: and most of what I know, I only found out a lot later. I spent my time practicing shooting, and getting coaching sessions from Harvey. Bastard hated me, and I hated him. Rode me about as hard as I’ve ever been ridden in my life. Ten times harder than anything at prep school or college. But I put up with it, for the vision.
The only hitch I heard of is when they finally told old LBJ about it. Everyone in the CIA hated him: for them, like for me, he was just some Texas bumpkin, some cowboy good to order around but not fit to rub shoulders with real polished, sophisticated people like us. They had enough dirt on him to nail him seven times over. Rigged elections, some poor Agriculture man back in Texas gunned down outside his house. Real piece of work. Well, when they told him, it was just a few days before it was supposed to go down. I don’t know who it was did it, but they thought they had enough on him to keep him quiet. Well, if you can believe it, it turned out he had hired some dope to kill Kennedy too: some Texas clod who was years away from being able to do anything about it. Johnson had hoped the guy would do it in Dallas, too, but he’d asked for more prep time. Anyway, that’s what Harvey told me. He hated Johnson, too: hated just about everybody. Maybe he was just making it up to mess with me. I don’t know.
Well, the rest is history, I guess. It all went down as smooth as butter: and the truth is, I was so excited and nervous that I’ve forgotten most of the lead-up anyway. What I’ll never forget is what it felt like when I had him in my sights, and when I pulled that trigger and saw his whole head light up with blood. It was…well, it was just about the best I’ve ever felt in my whole life. Better than you’ve ever felt, I can guarantee. It wasn’t about the violence…or even the power. I had had a vision, a dream, and right there in front of me was my vision made real. My dream materialized. I had made this happen. And the secret I knew, that none of the rest of them knew, even Angleton, was that there was no reason for it at all. I wasn’t an assassin. I wasn’t an artist. I was God.”
I stared up at him; he was standing looming over me, but with his head thrown back, his eyes turned upwards, looking straight out the window as red sunlight bathed his whole face. Then his eyes lowered to mine.
“Well, that was the high point. The high point of everything. History, creativity, my whole damn life.” He sat down, and reached for his hot chocolate.
“The come-down was real hard. The same day, they arrested Oswald. I was crushed. The truth is, I’d intended to turn myself in the next day, tell them everything. Not because that was a part of the vision, but because…” He raised the hot chocolate to his lips, and then lowered it again.
“Well, you won’t believe it, but I wanted the credit. I’d just made the most perfect artistic creation since Mozart, and I wanted people to know what I’d done. Know my name, just like Mozart’s. I had all the proof, too: the rifle, shells, pictures, notes I’d taken, signatures. Ten people or more saw my face and could have identified me. I couldn’t wait to get up on the stand, and tell them everything. I didn’t care a rat’s ass about Angleton, or Harvey, or the CIA, or any of them. I wanted the credit.” He smiled to himself, a little abashed, and played idly with his cup.
“And, I confess…I wanted an audience to preach my gospel to, one last time. I wanted to tell them all, everyone across America, what America was, and what they were, and what I was. I wanted to tell them we were gods.” His brows knotted again, and to my surprise I saw a single bead of sweat standing out there. It glittered in the darkening red light. “And…I…I really think…if I’d told them…if I’d been able to tell them…it would have been different. It would…all be different…”
He shook his head moodily, and took a swig of his hot cocoa. It left a glittering residue about his lips that in the sunset light looked like blood.
“Of course, looking back now, it’s obvious what happened. I don’t think Angleton knew everything, what I was planning to do: but I know he was scared of me. All the other plans, there was a patsy set up to take the fall: but once I’d moved it to Dallas, we didn’t talk about it much. They mentioned Oswald’s name, but that was about it: Angleton just said that he’d been a Commie, and had gotten in with the Cubans, and would make a good set-up. That was it.
In all those plans, though, there was always supposed to be a week, a few days at least, a manhunt, you know, to make the thing look more real. Catching the killer a few hours after the shooting? After he gunned down some random cop? Based on a vague bulletin that might have applied to anyone? Well, it looked bad: and it still looks bad. Angleton could have done way better than that: in fact, he would have. But I had spooked him. Looking back later, I felt good about that: but at the time, I was just mad and upset.
Well, I thought about turning myself in, anyway: but I knew deep down that it was too late. They wouldn’t believe me; and even if they did, Angleton’s boys were bound to be around sniffing, and they’d never let me live long enough to make a statement. Oswald could have messed it up: he didn’t know anything, but he knew he’d been set up. He made statements: I read them. I still had hope. Technically, I had a week to lose any tails and report back in. So I waited a few days, hanging around the hotel, taking walks in the park. Drinking hot cocoa. Seeing what would happen.” He took another swig of the substance. The light was dim now but still red, and Miruel was on her phone and hadn’t turned the lights on yet. I could barely see his face.
“As soon as Oswald was shot, though, I knew it was over. I came in all quiet to Harvey, gave him the gun and the bullets and the clothes and all the proof I had. And he took it, and left: and I never saw any of those people again.”
He sighed, and for nearly a minute stared straight ahead of him, his face entirely in shadow. I stared back.
“Angleton never called me…” His voice now was even lower than before, and I had to strain to hear it. The room was entirely dark, with only the light of laptops illuminating five or six strange faces scattered around the room. “I never called him. I think both of us were afraid to. Six months later, some chump from the CIA, some suit, called me up and got lunch with me and told me how very pleased the Agency was with all that I’d done for them and would I like to be rewarded with a permanent position? And I just looked at him and said, no, I had no interest in a permanent position in the Agency. And he looked at me, and paid the check, and left. And I never heard from them again. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they paid me a lot of money over the years: and when I went into business eventually, everything always worked out just like I wanted it. I’m sure they felt they were doing all that to keep me quiet…but it didn’t matter.”
Abruptly, Miruel hit the lights, and our faces were bathed in glaring yellow light. I blinked back tears, and when my vision returned I found myself looking at an entirely ordinary older man with a pudgy frown, sitting drinking hot cocoa across from me. It was a startling transformation.
“Well,” the little man said, a little louder. “After that, I knew exactly what would happen: and it did. They got greedy.” He took a larger swig of cocoa, spilling a little on his chin. It was thick and brown and powdery and looked nothing like blood. “They didn’t get it at all, none of them. They thought that because they were gods, they could do whatever they wanted: but all they wanted was just to fulfill some ideological goals, protect America, fight communism, build a better society, fuck some broads, get some promotions, kick some people they didn’t like in the face so they felt it. They were all still just Ivy League kids deep down.” His lip trembled as though he was about to cry, and for a second he stared down into the reflective brown surface of his cocoa.
“They didn’t understand why I’d done it…none of them did. And so of course once they got away with it once they did it over and over again, til everyone got sick of it. Bumped off the Prime Minister of India in Tashkent. Gunned down Bobby Kennedy in a hotel kitchen. Shot that negro preacher in broad daylight. There was no elegance in any of it: no vision. It was just ugly. Just a bunch of thugs with guns, little kids trying to solve problems with a hammer.
And every time I heard, my heart sank a little lower. I’d done something beautiful, shared my vision with them, told them the truth: and this is what they’d done with it. I’d told them they could make whatever they wanted, take heavenly visions and materialize them in broad daylight for everyone to see: and then I’d proven it to them. And all they wanted to do was beat up kids in the church parking lot.”
He set the cup down carefully in front of him, and then glared at me. “I was so bent out of shape, I’ll tell you: I wouldn’t have worked for them if they’d paid me a million bucks, and given me the keys to the White House jet. So it felt real, real good when Nixon came in and gave them hell. He knew what they’d done: and he didn’t want kids with knives skulking around the White House waiting to stab him in the back. So he went to town on them, held Angleton’s feet over the fire til it singed, and drubbed as many of them as he could out of there. Aired as much of their dirty laundry as he could carry.” His lip twisted in amusement.
“Of course, they brought Nixon down too, in the end: but he won. He broke their dream all to little pieces: and no one will ever put it together again. The Agency is gone; it doesn’t exist any more. Now there’s just a bunch of kids in suits playing dress-up.
The worst part of all, though, is what these people were reduced to in the end. Lots of them turned on each other, tried to make recordings, write books, give interviews, all about what they’d done. Their kids got in on it too. Selling little scraps of info, begging for attention from journalists, trying all the while to put the blame on each other. Pathetic.
Harvey talked, blabbed to everyone who would listen. He was just a drunk by the end, and a mean one. Couldn’t live with the idea that he had betrayed his precious honor, done something against his country. Felt guilty about it. So he drank himself to death.”
Abruptly, his face grew angry again; but now it was crumpled and sulky, like a child’s. I stared at him.
“Angleton, though…he was the worst. The biggest bastard I ever knew. He never talked…never gave out a scrap of info. Never admitted to anything. And you know why?” He jabbed one finger into his own chest.
“There’s only one reason why: to spit in my face. He knew that I wanted people to know what I’d done…what he’d done. He knew that I wanted the world to see my vision made real…to recognize that we were all gods. And he hated me, feared me: hated the truth I told him. The greatest magician of the 20th century, maybe, but he didn’t want to be. Deep down, I think he wanted to be some kind of mathematician, some kind of music conductor: taking what God gave him and winding up the strings real nice til they sang. Just a mean, spiteful little man. He hated me: and I hated him.”
His lip trembled, and for a second I thought he was going to cry, a little boy sobbing to himself out of sheer spite. Then his face lifted again, and composed itself: he raised his fingers to his lips, and again seemed to smoke his invisible cigarette. His voice grew quieter.
“But you know the really galling thing? Seventy years on…more books than I can count written about it all. And none of them have so much as mentioned my name. No journalist has come calling on me. They kept me out of it; they all kept me out of it. The bastards…
Of course, I wasn’t in the Agency, didn’t have any position there: so only a few people ever really knew who I was. Only Harvey, and Angleton. Even Harvey’s man on the plaza didn’t know my name. But Harvey had blabbed: so why weren’t they calling?”
His eyes shifted to a point just over my head: for the first time, tears stood out in his eyes. He looked, no longer spiteful, but genuinely hurt: like a child whose ice cream has been stolen.
“Do you know what the bastard said about me? It wasn’t til forty years after that I found out: when his kids published that goddamn book. You know what that drunk fuck called me? ‘A French assassin.’ ‘The French assassin on the knoll.’”
For a second, his breath seemed to catch in his throat, and he gestured helplessly with his hands.
“French. I couldn’t believe it. French…after what I’d done, to be remembered as one of them. Not a magician, not an American…just another goddamn European with a history. French…” Again, he seemed at a loss for words: his mouth opened soundlessly, and his face turned red. Again, he leaned back, fanning his face with one hand to calm himself while the other one desperately mimed smoking.
“Of course…” he said finally. “I’m still not entirely sure why he said that.” He took a deep breath and lowered his invisible cigarette into a nonexistent ashtray. “My main theory is his brain was so fried by the alcohol that he did think I was French…or at least, the only thing he remembered was meeting me here, at La Cafe, after I insisted on it.” He frowned. “Or maybe in the fucker’s mind it was a joke, or a code he used with himself, because of La Cafe. Or maybe he just told them that to screw me over, because he hated me, and because he knew how much I loathed the French. Not that I can remember telling him…but the bastard had ways of finding out. He knew I’d been to Paris…”
For a minute, he fumed again, staring off into the blank night.
“Anyway,” he said finally. “because of that journos have spent the last forty years checking on goddamn Corsican gangsters who might have been in the US in 1963. Not on some Ivy League kid with a banking job and two kids at Princeton. And that was it for me…for the dream.”
He closed his mouth with finality, and slouched back in his chair. He seemed small, defeated now: entirely different from the imposing man who had approached my table hours before. I stared at him; and he ignored me.
“But…” I said finally. My voice was hoarse. “But…if that’s true…why didn’t you just tell someone? A–a–journalist,” I added hastily. “Lots of people write books about JFK stuff…there’s still lots of public interest. You could–”
“I couldn’t do that,” he said quietly. “Even if I could persuade them…even if they believed me…it would be no good. After all this time…it would just be one more book. One more claim. I don’t have proof…”
“Surely you have to have something?” I said, still hoarse. “If it’s really true…there would be things. Things you’d remembered. Names, faces…you could at least make it plausible. And if there’s some corroborating evidence out there…something in the CIA archives, or in other witness testimony…how could you know unless you tried?”
“You still don’t get it..” His eyes glared at me, filled with tears. The pain in them was palpable. “Even after all this time…everything I’ve told you.” He looked down at his congealing cup, fighting back tears. “It’s like with Dallas,” he said finally. “And Miami. I’d imagined…I’d dreamed…me preaching to everyone. To the world. Getting the credit…being able to prove to everyone that I was a god. That we were all gods. After that…to have to prove it all, bit by bit, probability by probability, to some rat-ass journo, some professionalized kid who didn’t know shit about what it was like back when we were really doing things? And even if I could…to read the reviews, the newspaper stories, to have to listen to goddamn professors tear it all to shreds, to have to defend what I’d said, to have to prove it, to keep proving it for the rest of my life, to go on talk shows and podcasts and write editorials and give affidavits and testimonials and all that shit?”
His lip was twisted, his face curled with absolute disgust. “Even if it did work in the end…even if people did believe me…I couldn’t ruin the vision like that. After all these years…it would be worse than death. Much, much worse.”
To my surprise, he smiled, a small, pained, watery smile, and glanced up at me. “After all…I had my moment, didn’t I? My one perfect moment. Even if it didn’t work out like I wanted…I couldn’t ruin that, too. Take my one precious memory and tell it over and over again and have it torn to bloody shreds and defaced and blasphemed by every Philistine and loser like you. I’d rather no one ever know.” He nodded with a strange, almost military decisiveness; and his eyes glittered.
“Well,” I said slowly, after a moment. My brow was furrowed, as I tried hard to think out what he was saying. It was the hardest I had thought since my undergraduate years. “If that’s true…why…why are you telling me about it?”
There was a long silence as he leaned back in his chair and studied me with dark, glittering eyes. Then, abruptly, he sat up ramrod straight again, put his elbows on the table in a businesslike fashion, and began to speak to me in a clear, enunciated fashion entirely unlike his previous demeanor.
“Why indeed? Well, for three reasons. First, because I’m dying, and will be dead within the year. Second, because for all my devotion to magic for magic’s sake I still wanted to tell someone about it, preach to someone, someone susceptible and spineless enough to immediately buy everything I told him without question. And after watching you for the past two years, I figured you were just about the best I was going to get. And third–” Abruptly, he stopped talking and stared at me.
“And third…” he said, in a new, slow voice. “...because I’ve had another vision. And for that, I need you.”
I didn’t move. In a moment, the scene had entirely changed again. I was sitting at a plastic table under electric lights, and there was a little man in a suit in front of me offering me a business deal. I did not feel frightened; but neither did I feel intrigued. I felt nothing.
“What vision have you had?” I asked, in a level voice. I sat up a bit straighter, and put my own elbows on the table.
“I want to assassinate the President again,” he said, in an equally level voice. “The current President, not JFK. And this time, I want to make sure I get all the credit.”
I nodded promptly. To my surprise, this did not surprise me; in fact, it made sense. I nodded again, for good measure. “Well,” I said, “good for you. But why do you want me?”
“Well, my problem last time,” he said quickly, “was the people I worked with. Ambitious people. Visionaries. Hard-asses. They had their own visions, see, and the strength of will to fight me. So this time, I decided to work entirely with losers.” He smiled confidently. “Which wasn’t hard, I have to say. There are so many to pick from these days…in fact, it’s hard to find anyone with vision, or strength of will, or any knowledge of magic. Sometimes I think I’m the last one left.”
“The last what?” I asked, calmly.
“The last magician,” he answered. For a moment silence fell between us again. It was very dark outside, but over our table yellow light hung suspended in air. He looked at me, and I looked at him.
“Anyway,” he said finally, looking away towards the darkness outside, “the last few years I’ve been carefully taking notes and making plans, and hiring people to carry out my vision. It’s been more difficult than I remembered, to be honest: though some of that I’m sure is just that I’m older and less driven. But it will come together in the end: that I’m sure of. There’s just one element left to be put in place: the most important one of all. You.”
“Why me?” I asked. I felt–though I would have been ashamed to admit it–flattered. I had had job interviews before, though not many: but never one where I had gotten the job, or indeed where my prospective employers had seemed to view me with anything but contempt. This was a new experience; and I found that I liked it.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. “You’re the most pathetic, contemptible person I’ve encountered in my entire life. You have nothing at all to live for. You’re better off dead. And I am the only person in the world who could ever see anything of value in you, or give your worthless life and death any meaning at all.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at me: I looked back at him.
“Please don’t think,” he said finally, a pained look in his eye. He was still speaking levelly and clearly, like a businessman. “that this is merely a surface judgment. I have researched you as thoroughly as I could: I know everything there is to know about you. Much more than is worth knowing. And the more I learned, the more astonishing I found you: until I knew that you alone, out of all the people in the world, could fulfill my vision.”
He seemed a little embarrassed, and looked down at his own hand. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “You are in many ways deeply emblematic of your entire generation, and indeed of an entire country and civilization that has lost its way. But within this framework you nonetheless surpass everyone I have ever known.” He stared down at the table, a pained expression on his face.
“You have dedicated your entire life to the pursuit of abstract knowledge, yet to the best of my knowledge have never actually learned anything, or indeed shown any interest whatsoever in anything, even your chosen subject. I read your dissertation, and in all three hundred and fifty pages there was not a single insight or a single sign of interest or indeed of understanding about the beautiful, ancient songs of passionate love you were ostensibly writing about. Your social media pages are full of constant hateful remarks about your fellow scholars, your friends, your family, your students, and your field. And yet despite repeating this resentful bile every day you lacked even the modicum of self-knowledge or self-will it would take to leave your field and do anything else with your life.”
He leaned back in his chair as he continued this litany, but still looking down. He did not seem angry: and neither was I.
“You then became astonishingly rich, and unlike more or less every person in the history of the human race to suddenly acquire great wealth you have done nothing at all with it, for good or for ill. You have not indulged in hedonism of any kind; you have not given a single red cent to the poor and suffering; you have not indeed managed to spend any money on anything, even earning more money. In my sight and hearing, beautiful women have all but thrown themselves at you, and you have refused them for no reason that I can see. You seem indeed to detest the sight and company of beautiful women. And yet you are plainly not a homosexual, or a catamite, or some other kind of interesting pervert. You seem indeed to have no vices of any kind such as men of my generation would recognize. You do not drink or smoke. You indeed barely seem to eat; and the food you eat is generic, undistinguished, and bland. You do not watch movies or television. You do not take recreational drugs.
Far from living a life of leisure, your time appears to be entirely taken up with pretending to perform tasks and achieve goals despite the fact that no one is monitoring you or has any power over you or indeed cares whether you achieve these tasks or any tasks at all. Yet this lack of worldly interests is not the result of any asceticism or interest in the transcendent. You have no beliefs worth speaking of. In your younger years you would mock those with religious beliefs, but you no longer do so. When it was fashionable to do so, you posted messages to your social media accounts supporting gay marriage and Barack Obama, but have so far as I can tell never taken a single stance remotely controversial in your immediate social circle. You have also never voted, or attended a protest, or committed a crime. You have done nothing.”
For some strange reason, this recitation, delivered in a pained voice while continuing to study the table in front of him, did not upset me; in fact, I felt if anything rather flattered. He looked up at me, and frowned.
“You may have gathered from my remarks today that I have a…well, a rather high opinion of myself. That I regard myself as a remarkable person. The truth is, though…” His frown deepened, and he seemed to struggle with his words for a moment. I smiled. “...well, the truth is…that in the grand scope of human history and experience…I am really far less remarkable than you. Magicians have, I think, always existed: at least since the founding of America. People like you, though…people entirely lacking any conceivable human motivations or goals or interests or desires…well, so far as I can see, they have never existed at all until the past two or three decades. And yet now they…that is to say you, are everywhere. That is the truly disturbing thing…the…the…”
He again struggled with his words for a moment. “That…that you are in your own way as emblematic of your generation as I am of mine. Which means, so far as I can see, either that the human race is at its end, and will shortly vanish from the face of the earth after drowning itself in ennui and failing to reproduce…or that, as the last of the magicians, I have…well, a responsibility of sorts…to save it. Which is where my vision comes in. And you.”
“Why would I want to assassinate the President?” I asked, looking at him steadily. In a strange way, I felt our roles had reversed: I was now the one with power. I did not entirely like it, but I had not yet decided how to deal with this new state of affairs.
“Why would you…” He seemed to struggle for breath again. My smile broadened. “Why would you not want to assassinate the President? You have nothing to live for…no reason to draw breath. You are, in plain terms, already dead. And what I am offering you is nothing less than a chance for the first time in your misbegotten life to live.”
He raised his head and stared at me levelly. I felt my back prickling: it was not unpleasant. “If you do what I ask of you, your life will have meaning. All your endless empty days and nights will be magically, retroactively fulfilled: by magic, the past will be altered, and made to have been for a purpose. And that purpose will be, will have been, the greatest purpose of anyone of your generation, perhaps the greatest in all of human history. You will be fulfilling the last vision of the last of the magicians: a vision so potent, so beautiful, that it will be remembered for all time, that it may well revive the very wellsprings of desire, and save the human race. You will be something much greater and more meaningful even than an assassin: a scapegoat, a sacrificial ram, a martyr. You may well prove to be the Messiah himself: the true, only Messiah. When you kill the President in my name…you will not only be rectifying a historical injustice and giving me the credit that for so many decades I have so richly deserved but which has been denied to me…you will yourself be taking your own place in the pantheon of the heroes and saviors of mankind. I will be God, yes, the creator out of nothing: but you will be what all mankind has wanted to be from the time of Abraham: God’s true and chosen and perfect instrument.”
He leaned forward and stared directly into my eyes. I had the creepy feeling I was being hypnotized, mastered: he was bending all his power onto me. To tell the truth, I again rather enjoyed it.
“You have no conceivable reason to refuse: no conceivable ability to refuse. Because…because this is the truth you have always known, deep down, every day of your miserable life. All your life, you have waited for the thing that would master you, that would direct you, that would make something of you at last. And I have waited for you.”
His voice had deepened by several octaves: it was rhythmic, resonant, and vaguely British now. His eyes did not leave mine. In the brown murky depths, I could see my own reflection, looking back at me.
“You are matter: I am form. I am will: you are representation. That is the real meaning of both our lives, and both our generations. We are not enemies, but counterparts: thesis and antithesis, leading to synthesis. My magic failed because I lacked a sufficiently pliable material in which to manifest my vision: and your life collapsed into formless chaos because you lacked a vision to shape your life and actions. We were made for each other: and all we must do is agree to work together, in a common purpose, and in so doing bring all of history, the human race, perhaps the universe itself, to fulfillment. You cannot refuse.”
He clasped his hands, shut his eyes, and stopped talking. I looked into his face: he was trembling in fear.
I stood up. “That’s really very interesting,” I said. “We’ll have to talk about it more sometime. For now, though, I really should be getting home. It’s getting late.”
“Please,” he said. His eyes were still shut, squeezed tightly with obvious effort, but tears were beginning to escape. “You can’t…it’s all I have left. I have to…I’m dying,” he said in a dull whisper. “Dying…and I’m the last…the last of the–”
“I really did enjoy talking to you,” I said breezily, packing my laptop away in my bag. “You should come over to my table again sometime…or I’ll come over to you. And I’ll certainly think about everything we talked about.”
He reached his hands towards me imploringly. There were tears pouring down his cheeks. “Please…I–I’m sorry…I need you. I need you…to help me. Do what…do what I–”
“Of course,” I said, turning away. “I’m not saying that I necessarily believe everything you said. A lot of it was kind of implausible…and of course it all contradicts the Warren Report and the consensus of mainstream scholarship on the JFK assassination. But it’s a great story. You have a real knack for that.”
He whimpered out loud, his eyes open but red and pouring with tears. “Please…” he said, reaching for me again. “Please…it…it doesn’t matter…whether what I told you is the truth or not. It’s my last hope…your last hope…to find fulfillment…to make it all worthwhile.”
“Maybe you should write a novel! Like I’m doing. It could be a big hit,” I finished lamely, already stepping towards the exist.
“Please,” I heard him say, in a weak whimper, from behind me. “Please…I beg you…have mercy…have mercy…help me…I need–”
I didn’t hear the rest of what he had to say, because I had already shouldered my way out of La Cafe and into the night.
When I left that day, I fully expected to meet and talk with the man again; but in fact, I never did. The next day I worked at Caribou Coffee instead, and found it, although full of undergraduates, less obnoxious than I had remembered.
When I finally made it back to La Cafe a few days later, though, the man was gone from his usual place; and over the next few months, though I returned nearly a dozen times, at ever-lengthening intervals, he never did. Perhaps he died: perhaps he was killed by the CIA.
I realized too late that I had never asked for or learned his name, which made any research I might do on the subject to confirm his story seem rather pointless. Still, I read one book on the JFK Assassination (Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, arguing for the veracity of the Warren Report) and then lost interest. I have never really thought about the topic since.
Well, times change, as they usually do. Though I did not stop going there entirely for nearly a year, my meeting with the man has always served in my mind to mark the real end of what I privately call the “La Cafe” era of my life. Over the next year, Caribou Coffee gradually, and then definitely, became my haunt of choice. That is where I met, or rather re-met, Adrianna, a former undergraduate student of mine now working in town as a data entry specialist. Within a year, we had gotten married, and I had bought the large house in Malibu where we now reside, behind large gates and protected by a private security force: and the rest, as they say, is history.
So if everything worked out like that, you might well wonder: why am I bothering to write this down at all?
Because, I confess, the old man’s story has stayed with me over the years and decades: and only done so more the more I have tried to put it from my mind.
I am reasonably confident everything he said was nonsense: no more or less real than the ravings of Dr. Eder or of Ralphie, the crack-addict who used to sit in the corner and tell everyone he was the real man to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. Still, reasonably confident is not certain: and even if all the facts the man said were lies, I confess I have found his worldview and beliefs–on magic, matter, history, and the troubles of my own generation–more and more compelling as I have grown older and watched the continuing and ever-accelerating decline of our once-great nation. Of course, I have never had the slightest temptation to assassinate the President, or anyone else–nor, after my La Cafe days were over, did I ever even try to produce any work of art or scholarship. Adrianna and I have lived a peaceful and pleasurable enough life in Malibu–though we have admittedly done some things that would, I think, disprove his theory about my complete lack of vices! But I digress.
Still, after the lavish parties of our early years here, things have for many years gotten quieter and quieter. In the mornings now, before Adrianna wakes up, I rise and put on my robe and go outside and sit on the veranda, where it is warm all the year round, and our butler, Mr. Priest, brings me a cup of coffee with cream, and I sip it quietly and watch the ocean.
Nearly every day now, though, I find myself seeing not the ocean but the tan walls and torn wallpaper of La Cafe, and the faces of my fellow patrons hunched behind their laptops. And it seems to me, somehow, in my early morning mind only half-sprung from sleep, with the bitter salt of the sea and the rich aroma of coffee around me, that those tan walls were in fact the shells of an egg, the canvas of a tent, the flesh of a birth canal, leading, if only I had found the right way, outside themselves to something new.
And then, inevitably, I remember the face of the strange old man across from mine, and the things he said. And an awful, painful sense of mystery takes hold of me–that great mystery I have spent nearly every waking moment since my childhood trying to escape knowing–and for the only time in all my days I sit alone in the sunlight and wonder.
Who was that man? Who were any of us? What was that place, and why were we all there? Why was I there, and why did I leave? Was anything that he told me the truth? What was the right way out?
Or perhaps I should have taken him up on his offer after all?
No comments:
Post a Comment