The Destruction of the Temple

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

The year is 2016, and President Kennedy is being murdered - again and again and again. The director has come to the charred ruins of New York to re-enact a mad dream from the past - the assassination of President Kennedy. As actors, he has the primitive race who inhabit the city. With them and his glamorous, dark haired lover, he rehearses everything - the motorcade, the shots, the panic. But at the last moment it all goes wrong. When the flower-filled limousine rounds the bend, the passenger is not Kennedy - but the Director himself. Shots ring out in a wild explosion of roses.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 142

Sample

Oswald shoots Kennedy.

Well, so far so good this time around, but then it all goes wrong again. There is simply nothing to be done with these people.
Kennedy, that idiot, has decided to try this standing in the limousine and without actor’s grace he falls heavily across Jacqueline and into the roses which collapse underneath.
Explosion of petals. Oswald, unaware of the disaster, thinking as all of them do only of his own performance, throws the rifle
cheerfully down ten stories and disappears from the window as I run out frantic.


The rifle is deflected by a third-floor balcony on the Municipal. It slams left off a flagpole, drops to an eave, arcs out
beyond the building, and finally misses my ear by only inches, catching me a terrific blow on the shoulder. For a moment I
think that I have reached the end right here, right here – to die on the city stones from a blow inflicted by an idiot.


No such luck.

All will go on; my duties will not conclude so abruptly. I come to my feet, flex limbs, everything works. I rub the shoulder
convulsively until some of the pain recedes. It goes away quickly. Perhaps I make a little more of the pain than it really
is. I will admit this. But they must be taught a lesson. If I die, so will they all in this pigpen: they will learn regard
for my person. Precautions will hold. The situation is in flux but it will hold.


And so they gather around me quickly then: Kennedy now bounding from the car. Jacqueline, Johnson, Connally. The security
forces. Even though I have finally taught them the necessity of staying within the roles at all times I can see fear hammering
at the edges of their characterization. What will they do if I die? Who will speak for them when the incendiaries open? They
look frantic. Good. It is necessary that they show me the proper respect. I am their only chance for release from the city and my person priceless.


‘Are you all right?’ Kennedy asks. He runs his hand over his jacket, other hand pumping away in a side pocket. Masturbation
under stress is an old habit of the Kennedy clan or am I confusing them with these lumpen? Of course, there are no Kennedys now, all of them are dead; it is the lumpen who have no control. Separate history from situation; cleave memory from instance. These lumpen are insane. Difficult to believe that Kennedy was shot and in extremis only seconds ago. He has worked himself almost totally out of the role, not even a transitional sense. Discipline. I have
got to teach them discipline!


‘Get the hell back in the car,’ I say, still rolling the ball of the shoulder under fingers, then stagger toward him threateningly.
The sun is uncomfortable; the air binding. Ruined New York makes an inconstant Dallas, the landscape itself is inimical to
the sense of the production. Kennedy was killed in open spaces. ‘What are you waiting for?’ I say to those idiot faces clumped
around me, docile, but yet threatening. ‘Get back to it. Keep on with the production.’


‘We were worried,’ Jacqueline says. She runs a hand across her wide, blank forehead. Fat stupid bitch! I cannot bear to see
them in gestures of appeal. How many times have I told them this? I have only allowed her to play the role because she begged.
Records will attest to this; she is no actress. She is no actress, Kennedy is no actor, Connally does not know what he is
doing. None of them, possibly excepting Lee Harvey Oswald, have any conception of professionalism or of the peculiar and terrible
obligation which all of them have incurred. Have incurred! Nor is there any way in which I can tell them. Certain channels
of communication with the lumpen are frozen. They are not human.


Note that it is Oswald who joins us now. At a run from the towers he comes toward me limping from some pointless injury, his
eyes dilated. He has seen the flight of the rifle then; now he sees the cast gathered around me, the concern on their faces,
the way in which I hold my shoulder (I admit that to some degree I exaggerate the pain to make an impression on them) and
he understands what has happened. He has some moderate sensitivity, unlike the others who function on the bestial level of pleasure – pain. I really do not
know how he has gotten into this pack but it is unwise in any event to speculate. He is here, he can be used. Were it not
for him the reenactment would fail utterly.


‘Are you all right now sir?’ he says, stepping some feet away, backed off from the others. He is still locked into the role
– timorous, shaking, but latently aggressive – which is good. None of the others would have had even this elementary understanding.
‘I guess you’re all right,’ he says, turning. ‘So the hell with you then. There’s much work to do. I’m on my way.’


‘So you are,’ I say, facing the others who, anticipating this rage, have begun to scatter. ‘Get on with it damn you!’ I shout.
‘Can’t you do anything right, don’t you have any sense, any discipline, any professionalism?’ – the same pointless rant: set
it to music, score it for flute and let it be gone, no hope, no reason, no possibility, no form, no depth, slam the timpani. I am sick of delivering the recitative, sick of hearing it refracted through the damaged consciousness.
But it works. They shuffle back to their cars, stake out positions on the ground. Already we are three minutes behind the
projected schedule.


Hopelessness overcomes me. Three minutes! I resist an impulse to fling myself upon the ground and weep. Is this my penance
then? to extract performances from the lumpen forever on this burning ground, nothing to ever work out? I do not know how I will get through it.


For a moment, I think of cancelling. I actually consider telling them my thoughts in some detail and striking the set. But
they have, in their way, worked so hard to this point that it would not be fair to them or to me to let that work dissipate
and there are also notes given them from the last run-through which I will have to reinforce in performance. It leads nowhere.

So they are my burden. I will carry them. ‘Let’s go,’ I say, struck by this epiphany (I have had so very many recently), raising
my hand, and they see me in the sun, see me standing there, those lumpen, the power oozing from that hand and slowly the cars begin to move. I hear the sirens. Oswald is already gone; it is not impossible
that in his haste he will retrieve all of the lost time. I take my pad from the place where it was dropped and taking the pen from my pocket, continue the observations.


Locked within the directorial detachment it is as if none of this is happening now, but has happened a long time ago – in
a southwestern city, fifty-three years ago next Thursday it will be, already frozen into artifact, their bones become sealing
wax and how much longer, I question, before I lose all patience?


Later. With Lara I try to relax and put all of this from me, however momentarily. She is the only one of the players who I
will call by her real name even in these notes which as part of the study are supposed to preserve the confidentiality of
the principals and to be opened by outsiders only decades after the fact, 2050 or something like that. It is so difficult
to keep track of everything and people should understand the problems I am having with my mind. ‘Preserve the confidentiality of the principals!’ Committee actually thinks in this fashion.


Under the terms of the grant, however, I am compelled to keep these notes in order to make a good impression upon future researchers,
this being the phrase Committee used – good impression – Committee having no gift for the language at all. But if it were all the same to those future researchers, I would not
care to make a good impression or a bad as I find most recollections boring. The past is dismissed, the future is a dream.
Only the present is interesting, but how much of a present do I really have now? Well, there are no answers, let alone easy
ones. Back to Lara. I swarm in her flesh like insects.


She played the Governor’s wife today. I have shifted her through all of the females, even once to Jacqueline, but none of
the available principals suits her qualities, whatever those qualities might be. She becomes frozen at critical times, postures
aimlessly, often allows sentiment to overcome her to the point where she cannot function at all. There is that kind of actor,
and Lara is a specimen, who can get into roles only through denying themselves. A pity. She has more than moderate sensitivity.


Lara, to be sure, is a bad actress, but she is a good fuck. Even the Director must take his pleasures where he can. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of this?’ she asks, her head now leaning across my legs in a posture of relaxation, her hands rather
aimlessly pedalling my thighs, slivers of sensation coming through that way although in the basic sense I am not to be moved
by any of them. Even by Lara. Limited people for limited purposes and that is all. Field research. ‘I would think that you’re getting bored.’


‘I am not getting bored. I never get bored. It’s work, that’s all there is but you’re something different. Don’t try to explicate
my feelings, Lara; essentially I must be a mystery.’ Directorial detachment.


‘All right, then,’ she says in a mollifying way, increasing the small, deadly rhythm of her strokes as if this could affect
me at all. ‘You don’t have to lose your temper. I was only asking.’


‘I did not lose my temper,’ I say. Pomposity extrudes; I wrench it away. ‘I never lose my temper. Do you have the presumption
to think that any of you people could affect me at all?’


‘But I don’t understand why you want to do this. I can see everything else, that you were sent here on a study, that you’re
working on a project, but why would you choose something like this? Aren’t there topics, areas, possibilities you could take
up with me?’


Lara is indeed the most intelligent and the only one with whom I can converse at all, but intelligence is relative. Actually,
she is as disastrously stupid as the rest and I perceive, not for the first time, the hopelessness of any relationship with
her. ‘Now stop it,’ I say then, ‘I don’t want to discuss this any more. It’s a project, that’s all it is and I should be able
to put it behind me. If you want to pursue this you’ll have to leave, Lara, you were the one who initiated this relationship,
not me. And I warned you at the very beginning that it would have to be on its own terms. I can do you no favors.’


This is not a pleasant thing to say, particularly to a woman who has indulged my fantasies as industriously as she, but her
incessant probing disturbs me more at some times than at others and the run-through today has brought me to embitterment.
It is really quite hopeless. I cannot get work out of them. They will simply never get this down right for the damned tapes and as they become overly familiar with the clichéd plotline they are losing even that childish simplicity by which I might have lucked them through and are settling
into rigidity. It is possible that on the first run-through after the initial set of notes with no real preparation, they
did as well as they ever can and that from here on in matters can only become worse. The rifle will fall tomorrow and I will
be decapitated. Kennedy will wave his arms at a signpost and fall out of the car. Three more days and I am out of the field:
it will all be over then but what have I learned? Have I learned anything at all?


No. I have learned nothing, will never learn. I am just like them. The anxiety-hysteria overtakes me again; nothing will change.
I am what I am, no less than lumpen. ‘Go,’ I say, inflamed by this realization, ‘if you have nothing comforting to say to me, then just go.’


‘All right,’ she says, lolling to my other side, ‘if you want, then I will,’ picking herself up gracefully in a single gesture,
and opening ground. ‘If you want me to I really will, if you want me to stay I’ll do that too, it’s always been your choice,
you know, on everything. Why won’t you ever talk with us? Why won’t you answer the questions?’


‘Never mind.’

‘Once I thought that you were doing it for our own good because something awful was about to happen, but I’m afraid that it’s
only because you have no answers. Is that true?’ Her breasts swing over me, the nipples little blind eyes. ‘Do you really
want me to go?’ she asks cunningly. ‘I don’t think you do.’


I do not. I reach for her. My cardiovascular and sympathetic nervous systems have been previously immobilized, this be. . .