Wag the Dog (65 page)

“No.”

“They, the press guys, ask Bush about war—a military option, is what they say. He says his options are wide open. Now they are. Because now there's no one to say that it's a movie. What's he going to do? they ask him. ‘Just wait. Watch. And learn. This will not stand. This will not stand. This aggression against Kuwait.' Those are his exact words. I heard all this on the radio. Out on the boat. Catherine cried a lot. For Tommy and for Maggie too.”

“You, did you cry?”

“I drink,” he said.

“You said something about never being an alcoholic. Like your father.”

“I never have been. But there is a time and a place.”

“I guess so.”

“I'm drunk now,” he said. “Can you tell?”

“Not really. But then I don't know that I've ever seen you sober.”

“No. I guess not.”

“You still haven't told me, what are you doing here.”

“There's thousands of miles of coastline in the Gulf, Brownsville to the Keys. It's a good chance. The boat put in by Matagorda.”

“Where's that?”

“Texas. I steal a car. Go down to Corpus Christi. We very calmly go to a motel and check in. Park around the back. I make a couple of phone calls. There's an early flight to Atlanta. We're on it. I tell Catherine, go to L.A. Go back to work, like it never happened. We sit apart on the plane, like we don't know each other. Which turns out to be good thing, because in Atlanta I see some guy looking at me like he's looking for someone who looks like me.

“I hit the men's room. Change jacket, put on a hat. Stuff tissue's in my cheeks like Brando in the
Godfather.
I get out of there and go to the next terminal. The first flight I see, it's to Newark. Fine. I take it. It's going away from L.A. I get on alright. By now I have another problem. I have a tooth that's abcessing. It hurts like hell. I'm swallowing aspirin and drinking. But I know I have to do something about it before I do much about anything else.

“I ask the guy in the seat next to me, if he knows a good dentist in New York. Or Newark. Whatever. He says yes and gives the name of his dentist. Bruce Milner. He says use his name, say its an emergency and Bruce'll take care of me.

“I call this Milner, he says come on by, he'll slip me in. While I'm sitting in his waiting room, waiting, you come in. You show him the new edition of your last book, the British edition,
Foreign Exchange,
right. I remember you, from talking
to you about maybe an option on another book. And then you talk to Milner about working for the newspaper. Crime reporting. So when Milner is examinin' me, I ask him about you. I find out he's got a summer house, weekend house near you. I think maybe it's a good idea that I disappear for a few days. Also maybe I should tell my story to someone. I kept the secrets,” Joe said. “But they didn't keep their word. Did they?”

“No. They didn't.”

“Taylor and Howard “the Hawk” Dudley, they're the first people I ever killed.”

“What?”

“I meant personally. Not as a soldier. In a secret army I'm still a soldier.”

“And the Ninja.”

“See with Taylor and Dudley, my business with them was over. It's supposed to stop when the war is . . . even for a truce. I did wrong. That's the part that was wrong. Finish the bottle with me. Two more swallows and another dead soldier.” He was on his second of the day.

“No. That's alright.”

“Doesn't show, does it?”

“No.”

“You want to know how drunk I am?”

“Sure,” I said. I was always very agreeable around Joe. He certainly had me convinced he was dangerous.

“I'll tell you something . . . tell you something . . . that I . . . I lied to Maggie once. One time. One Goddamn time. When she asks about . . . I tell her, my father, that he breaks his hand on my head. I tell it like . . . like that's the end. No. That's the middle . . . what happens is, he's too drunk too feel any pain. Too fucking drunk to feel any pain. He just gets madder. He comes after me. At the staircase. He comes at me. I . . . He misses me and . . . He comes at me, see, staircase behind me, I got a sideslip move. He just, he just goes down. Down the staircase.

“His neck . . . God protects fools and drunks, not this time. He breaks his neck. That was the first. First man I killed.”

There's a bed in the corner of the room. Joe walked
slowly over to it and fell down on it. He passed out. Even though it was summer, I put the cover on him. Then I went home and tried to explain to my wife why I wasn't sharing more of the child-care burden. I promised that the crazy man would be gone the next day.

He was up early. Which surprised me. He was right, he had a head like a rock. He asked me if I ran. I said yes, some. He asked how far. I told him two miles, sometimes three. He asked if it was possible to run to the top of the mountain above my house. I told him that if he took Camelot Road, which is a dirt road, over to Meade Mountain Road, that would take him to another dirt road that went to the top of Overlook Mountain. He asked if I'd ever run it. I said I'd thought of it, but all told it would be about four, four and a quarter miles up, then the same coming back: eight and a half miles, about ten yards of it flat.

He said let's do it. I let him talk me into it. It was hot and we broke into a sweat pretty quick. I could smell the whiskey poisons coming out of him. Halfway up he staggered into the woods and threw up. “That's better,” he said and picked up the pace.

I had never run that far. It may sound like no big thing, but his being there carried me along and it felt like a gift of some kind. I was, if only in a small way, a stronger person after that. I still make that run from time to time and it is quite glorious.

When we got back down the mountain he did his pushups and sit-ups. I let him use the shower and such.

“The car I came in,” he said, “it's stolen. I think we should drive it somewhere, then I'll ask you to take me to the bus station.”

“You're a pushy guy,” I said.

“Yeah.”

That's what we did.

“You believe my story?” he said at the bus station.

“Good story. One of the best.”

“Think about it.”

“Where you going now?”

“I made a promise. I told him, that's what I do.”

“I don't know whether to wish you luck,” I said.

“I loved her,” he said. “I'd just as soon die. I loved her that much.”

A week or so later a package came UPS. There were two items in it. A box of discs and a very fat manuscript. The screenplay was labeled
The World's Greatest Caper:
An Original Screenplay, by Ed Pandar. All but one of the discs operated on my Macintosh. They belonged to someone named Teddy Brody.

I still did not seriously think of doing the bizarre story that Joe Broz told me. As I said, I was trying to become less political, soften the edge, do some straight husband-wife, middle-class, or upper-middle-class, murder story. With lawyers. Lawyers are selling big. Scott Turow, John Grisham.

Then four things happened.

One: as I watched the war on TV I felt that I was watching what Teddy had written to his mother was
scribble II
-2-√, which I deciphered as WWII-2-The Video. It was a strange feeling, given that Joe had told me about it before it happened.

Still I didn't act.

Two: I had given the UNIX disc to friends at Teatown Video in Manhattan. I'd forgotten about it almost completely when their chief engineer called me some three months later. He had a printout. It was a section, I believe, of John Lincoln Beagle's multiscreen thought process. A Rosetta stone to how his mind worked, how he planned a war of images.

Three: the BNI scandal broke. That was the story about how money had been funneled to Hussein through an Atlanta branch of an Italian bank. This was right out of Ed Pandar's screenplay.

Four: I ran out of money. And I still didn't have my imitation Turow book happening.

So I decided to write what Joe Broz told me.

As I said, he told me everything in the first person, from his point of view. From the notes and the tapes, I basically organized and edited it down. Then I extrapolated and interpolated what Beagle and Hartman and Bush and Baker and Atwater would have done if Joe's story were true. The memo is
as he recited it to me and he claimed that he'd memorized it verbatim. It certainly makes a terrific amount of sense, and it is persuasive. Obviously the discs helped a lot, with Teddy Brody's part in the story, and also with Beagle and what he did. The agent, the director, the movie star, and so forth, are all fictitious names. As for Joe Broz, Joe was his first name, and since he was of Croation ancestry I gave him the real name of Marshall Tito, the WWII partisan leader who kept Yugoslavia together for thirty-five years.

In other words, this is a work of fiction.

 

 

 

T
HE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
has become the criterion and the underpinning for almost all contemporary thought, even casual, not particularly educated, man-in-the-street styles of thinking. It has become so pervasive, basically, because it works. And we can see that it works. A famous psychic once said to me that thinking thoughts at her was insufficient—“If you want to be sure to get in touch with me, try the telephone.”

The scientific method begins with the objective observation of phenomena. Not what ought to have happened, or we hope happened, or might have happened, but what actually did happen insofar as it is possible for us to observe and verify it. Then we develop a hypothesis to explain why and how it happened.

We can invent many explanations for a phenomenon. How then do we decide which one to use?

By the way, and it's a subtle distinction, science doesn't really say which theory is true, it determines which one to use, as if it were true, because in the context in which you are using it, it will work.

The preferred way is to set up a controlled experiment that can then be replicated. This, very frequently, cannot be done with human and historical events. But there are other standards. If there are two theories, or more, which one best accounts for all the known facts? Which one best fits the other things we know, and can demonstrate, about the universe? And which one is the simplest?

The famous example is the question, does the sun revolve around the earth or the earth around the sun? It is possible—or was, it may not be anymore—to build a model of the universe in which the sun revolves around the earth just as it sort of appears to from where we live, that is, if we have accepted the notion that the earth is round. The problem with it, especially as we observe more and more phenomena, like the moons of Jupiter, is that it becomes very, very complicated and so cumbersome as to be unusable. And then it begins to interfere with other concepts that work for us, including gravity and inertia and so on.

It is an observable phenomenon that Hussein invaded Kuwait and conquered it. That the United States and its allies then sent troops and arms and fought a war that drove him out of Kuwait. And so on.