(Silver Hill, 4/5/70–12/4/70)
The bed, the lawn. The white buildings, the injected sleep.
Coercion got him in. He spent thirty days then. He stayed eight months now. Thirteen years of penance tithes formed his time between stays. His first visit was happenstance. The context was drunken neglect. The issues raised were guilt payments and abstinence. This stay resulted from reckless intent and cruel political thinking. The death toll was uncountable. The mind-set that created the actions mandated a conscious address.
He was here. She was wherever she went when she vanished. She knew she was complicit. Her heedlessness had spawned chaos on other occasions. She went away to build the will to return.
Silver Hill was beautiful. His stay covered three seasons. He got spring blaze, summer glow and snow.
He sent Mr. Hoover a telex. It stated his need for a long rest and did not state his location. Mr. Hoover knew he’d be here. A card arrived a month later.
Take as much time as you need. I have a new job for you. It’s in Los Angeles. You’d start in January.
“File superintendent.” “Dirt-digger,” euphemized. Hoard gossip and scandal skank. Feed the old girl’s private stash.
Low-risk work. A non-death-causing assignment.
L.A. was L.A. He might feel safe north of the southside. Karen was there. Joan might surface and find him.
He collapsed in New Orleans. He chartered a Bureau plane and flew straight here. Doctors examined him and found him physically sound. They force-fed him big meals and put proper weight on his frame. They sedated him. He slept eighteen hours a day for six weeks running. He woke up startled. He saw his lost ones the moment he opened his eyes. He sobbed. He segued into panic jolts and threw himself at walls. Male nurses shot him up. He went back to sleep and did it all over again.
His bedroom walls were padded. The throws didn’t hurt. He wanted to cause pain. He thought it would blur the dead people’s faces.
He got through that part of it. Repetition burned it out. The docs decreased his sedation. He avoided the head-shrinkers and the other patients. He spent time with a flock of tame goats. They lived protected on the grounds. They were there to console the burnouts.
He fed them and petted them. He mail-ordered stuffed animals and sent them to Karen’s kids. He pretended that the kids were his kids and that he had a life where nobody got fucked over and hurt. Those thoughts killed him. He’d lose it and weep and get afraid that he could never go out in the world again.
His lost ones came at him. He’d sit still with them. He spent weeks listening to them and weeks talking to them. He got to where they could coexist.
They came and went. He started to see what they wanted and what he owed them. They gave him his mind back on a consignment basis.
Karen sent him notes full of Quaker prayers for peace. The girls sent thank-you cards for the stuffed animals. Karen sent a photo of all three of them. Their address and phone number were scrawled on the back. Dina wrote above it: “If this man is lost, please return him.”
He carried the photo. He spent hours with his goats. He thought all of it through and began to see it.
A detailed operation. A multicontext design. An explicative scenario. Tell it like it was then and how it is now.
Mr. Hoover’s racial lunacy. The FBI’s war on the civil rights movement. Its calamitous faux pas with black-militant groups.
A huge feat of exposition. A densely packed indictment. A treatise on the collusive mind-set. JFK, RFK and MLK are dead. Let me tell you how.
A big social document, with key players brightly lit. Marsh Bowen: a duplicitous homosexual and merciless provocateur. Mob figures with vile ghetto ties. Mr. Hoover’s orbit of hired guns. Special Agent Dwight C. Holly—called forth to confess.
An event of gravely stern measure. A grand idea culled from Mr. Hoover’s file mania. An epic of malign paperwork rendered banal by the staggering weight of its emptiness. A text so deep that it would defy all easy reading and inspire contentious study for all motherfucking time.
He saw it all. He wrote nothing down. He rested and nuzzled his goats.
Karen sent him a peach pie for Thanksgiving. He shared it with his goats. He got fretful about them. He braced an administrator.
The man said, “They’ll never be hurt, Mr. Holly. They’ll be here for life. They’re here for people like you.”
He rested. He slept. He had some peaceful dreams about Wayne. He revised and embellished his idea. He could tell her soon. He knew he couldn’t find her. He sensed that she’d find him in L.A.
He was wrong. It happened abruptly. She found him there with his goats.
He heard footsteps. He turned around and saw her. She looked more fierce and breathtaking than he had ever seen her. She had carried every bit of her weight.
He said, “Hello, comrade.” He pulled out the little red flag.
She said, “What are we going to do?”
He said, “Let me tell you.”