(no subject)
Forget the curved circle, for whom distance means the sheer size of what it holds inside. Build a road. Make a line. Go as far west as the limit of the country lets you-Bodega Bay, not Whittier, California-and make a line; and let the wake of the line's movement be the distance between where it starts and what it sees; and keep making that line, west, farther and farther; and the earth's circle will clutch at that line, keep it near to what it holds, like someone greedy with a praline; and the giant curve that informs straight lines will bring you around, in time, to the distant eastern point of the country behind you, that dim master bedroom on the dim far eastern shore of the Atlantic; and the circle you have made is quiet and huge, and everything the world holds is inside: the bedroom: a toppled trophy has punched a shivered star through the glass of its case, a swirling traffic-flickered carpet and massed wooden fixtures smelling of oil soap and the breath of the ill. I saw the big white Bufferin of the President's personal master bed, stripped to sheets, variously shadow-colored by the changing traffic light at the Washington and Kennedy Streets' intersection below and just outside. On the stripped bed-neatly littered with papers and cards, my notecards, a decade of stenography to Lyndon-lay my lover, curled stiff on his side, a frozen skeleton X ray, impossibly thin, fuzzily bearded, his hand outstretched with dulled nails to cover, partly, the white face beside him, the big white face attached to the long form below the tight clean sheets, motionless, the bed flanked by two Servicemen who slumped, tired, red, green. Du-verger's spread cold hand partly covered that Presidential face as in an interrupted caress; it lay like a spider on the big pill of the man's head, the bland, lined, carnivore's mouth, his glasses with clear frames, his nasal inhaler on the squat bedside table, the white Hot Line blinking, mutely active, yellow in a yellow light on Kennedy. Duverger's hand was spread open over the face of the President. I saw the broad white cotton sheet, Duverger above and Johnson below, the sharp points of Johnson's old man's breasts against the sheet, the points barely moving, the chest hardly rising, the sheet pulsing, ever so faintly, like water at a great distance from its source.