by Joel Arnold
“I smell ducks,” Harvey said, and grimaced. He bit off half of his gray hot dog and swallowed. He felt it swim down his esophagus.
The Park was a city-mandated nirvana of silicone and cement, containing iron trees scattered in computer designed patterns, a central lake, and numerous benches. Most of the benches were coated in slime formed by decades of gum, spit and crushed cockroaches. Harvey spotted a fairly new one with about a two-foot space free of muck. He sat down, holding the remaining half of his hot dog over his head.
“Quack!” Harvey yelled. He waited and listened. “Quack!” He watched the ground intently. A cockroach skittered out from behind an iron tree. Cockroaches were the only wildlife in this area, apart from a few species of mutated flies.
Harvey followed the cockroach closely with his eyes. “Quack!” he yelled again, and flung the remainder of his hot dog at the roach. He missed, with the bun flying to one side of the bug, and the meat flying to the other side. The cockroach waddled toward the hot dog as if running to the aid of a fallen comrade. It grabbed the meat and pulled it behind the tree.
“Damn ducks,” Harvey said, getting up. He peered around the iron tree and spotted the cockroach. He stomped on it three times before it stopped moving. “Goddamn ducks getting bigger every year.”
The Park was Harvey’s favorite getaway, his favorite retreat. It was a rationalized Eden of geometric shapes juxtaposed around manufactured liquid waste. The liquid waste constituted the contents of the cement-encased lake. Harvey’s attention slowly shifted toward it.
The lake was a perfect oval in the exact center of The Park, one hundred meters long and fifty meters wide, with an indiscernible depth. The surface of the lake was what had lured Harvey Waller to this spot years ago. It was covered with swirling rainbows of spilled oil, dancing and turning the fluorescent light of morning into a palette of shifting color. Harvey could watch for hours if he’d had the time — red bleeding into orange bleeding into yellow bleeding into green. There was nothing more beautiful, nothing more sensuous on earth, than the surface of that lake.
Except, of course, for Harvey’s color book.
He looked nervously about for signs of people. Normally, he wouldn’t dare look at his color book — not here, not at this time of day. But the ethereal display on the lake’s surface was of exceptional beauty today, and instead of satisfying Harvey, t made him want more.
He sat down on the bench, lifting his briefcase to his lap. He looked around again, listening for signs of any movement. He opened the briefcase slowly, lifting up the papers inside. Underneath was a false bottom, one he’d constructed himself, specially designed for the color book. He unlatched the false bottom and reached inside, grasping the book’s binding. He pulled it out.
Lifting open the cover was like glimpsing into the blinding glory of Heaven and Hell combined. Each of the first three pages of the book was a block of primary color — red, yellow and blue.
This was foreplay.
The rest of the pages consisted of various mixtures, various shades of these colors. Blue-green. Dark purple. Light pink. Orange. Lemon yellow. Fluorescents. Pastels. Colors that reached out and touched Harvey’s soul, contrasting greatly with the real world, whose primary colors were black and white, mingling with various shades of gray.
Harvey’s favorite page of the color book was filled with a deep red-orange. It flared out at him, lapping at his heart, giving substance to feelings that often flashed through his mind. It made that confusing flash of heat in Harvey’s brain almost tangible. Harvey ran his fingers over the page, caressing the red-orange color, wishing it would leap out at him, engulf him and form a cohesive bond with his entire being. He hoped it would fill the emptiness he felt.
There was a sharp tap on Harvey’s shoulder. His body went rigid as he slammed the book shut.
“Harvey Waller!” the voice over his shoulder boomed. “It’s decision time.”
Harvey turned and looked into the smoke-filled eyes of the man behind him. Harvey’s heart turned to cold metal, while the man’s face remained granite, carved with saw-toothed wire, jagged and rough.
“Do you love your country?” the man barked. “Do you love your country?”
Harvey stumbled for a reply, feeling the hot dog rise in his stomach.
“Don’t let your hesitation give me the answer,” the man said, his eyes boring a hole through Harvey’s retinas, through his bleached irises, lighting his brain on fire.
Red-orange fire.
The heat in Harvey’s brain was a wonderful feeling. A wonderful color. It warmed Harvey’s mind, sparking off of the metal plate in his head.
“Do you love your country?” the man asked again, grabbing Harvey’s shoulder, digging in with hard fingers.
The pain shot more fire into Harvey’s brain and flashed through his eyes.
“Yes!” Harvey cried. “I love this country more than anything. More than life. More than my mate. More than my children.” Harvey sneered. “I love this country even more than death.”
“Then give me that book,” the man demanded, his buttoned-up trench coat bulging with the promise of a quick, violent end.
Harvey ran his fingers over the cover of the book, feeling the indentation of the word COLOR ripple under his skin. “I won’t look at it again,” Harvey said. He looked sheepishly into his lap. “”I’ll keep it shut.”
“Give me the book and this will be forgotten.”
Harvey slowly handed the book over. The man grabbed it and threw it on the concrete. He produced a vial from one of his many pockets and poured a clear liquid over the book’s surface. It immediately smoked and spit, the acid disintegrating the cover, then the pages, leaving nothing but a pulpy slush.
“I ought to make you lick that up,” the man said. He turned and started to walk away.
“Wait!” Harvey shouted. He stood up. The man stopped and turned.
“I love this country more than anything.” Harvey took a step toward the man. “I love this country more than life. More than my mate.” A sneer grew on Harvey’s face. “More than my children.” Harvey took a giant step and stood looking up into the man’s eyes. The smoke in them began to clear.
“And I love this country more than death!” Harvey cried as he threw his arms around the man, hugging him tightly.
The man was caught by surprise — Harvey felt it. The red-orange glow in his brain told him so.
“Quack!” Harvey said.
“Quack?” the man said.
“Quack!” Harvey said as he reached into the man’s trench coat and wrapped his fingers around cold metal, squeezing it as fire raged through his brain. Red-orange. The color the sun should be, Harvey thought. The color of fire.
Squeeze. A charge went off, filling the man’s nose, Harvey’s nose, as the man slumped forward. Harvey let him drop and heard the crunch of a hundred glass vials as the man hit the concrete. He began to smoke and spit, bubbling, dissipating into the air, becoming nothing more than a vile odor.
Harvey sneered and walked to the edge of the concrete encased lake. He watched the oil swirl and dance, the colors bleeding into each other endlessly.
Working Class Hero Worship
I’ve got a secret to tell you.
I can sing you songs you were never meant to hear. They were his songs. Beautiful songs. I’m the only one alive who’s ever heard them.
Here’s another secret. Mark David Chapman did not kill John Lennon.
This is what I know.
Listen.
I see his breath rise in front of his eyes. Feel the chill in Chapman’s face, his beating heart. I see through his eyes. Hear with his ears, feel with his skin. I smell Central Park, I smell sweat and excitement through his nose. I hear the voices in his head.
The gun is heavy in his pocket, a five-shot short barrel .38 caliber Charter Army Special containing five hollow-point bullets. I know that unless I stop him, unless I can fight through the legion of voices in his head and take control
of his body, four of the bullets will hit their intended target, rip apart his body as if it were a piñata, and end the life of one of the greatest songwriters in the world. The voice of a generation.
I have to take control.
I have to stop him.
A white limousine pulls up. A woman steps out. A woman I recognize. Black hair cropped short over a complexion of cream-kissed coffee.
Then he steps out.
The man I’ve idolized since the age of ten. The man whose music, whose voice, whose words and actions have become almost a religion to me.
The body I’m in reaches a chilled hand into its coat pocket, wraps its fingers around the dense metal of a gun.
“Mr. Lennon.”
The words are out before I can stop them.
I have to take control.
Concentrate. Make his fingers move.
Concentrate.
It’s like trying to bend steel.
Lennon turns.
I recognize his glasses from the cover of Season of Ice. On the album’s cover, they are still coated with his blood.
The skyrockets going off in Chapman’s mind nearly overwhelm me. His arm rises with the gun.
Concentrate. Push.
I have to stop him. I must.
If you’re old enough, I bet you remember exactly where you were when you heard that Kennedy was shot, the moment deeply chiseled in your heart.
But that was before my time.
My milestone of shock and grief happened on a cold December night in 1980. I heard the news during a football game. Howard Coselle, of all people, made the announcement.
John Lennon had been shot.
It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. Life stopped as I lay in bed that night, my heart beating painfully in my throat. John Lennon was a singular voice of honesty and clarity and intelligence in this world, and now he was gone. The earth seemed to falter in its rotation, as if it, too, wasn’t sure how to proceed.
But even the worst effects of tragedy become malleable over time. The immediate hurt turns to a dull pain turns to an emptiness evoked by things like anniversaries and songs heard on the radio.
And my talent remained.
My talent.
It used to frighten me. Images slid unbidden into my head. Images from nowhere, it seemed, distorted and dim and confusing. As a child, my schoolwork suffered. Why did my mind wander? Why wasn’t I paying attention? Eventually, the images became clearer. Cohesive.
Like—
Mr. Marpoli, my third grade teacher; images of his affair with Mrs. Cravitz, the Kindergarten teacher.
Like—
Images of the undulating webs of Ms. McKay, my fourth grade teacher, as she battled with demons who quietly insisted she hang herself.
Like—
—the assistant principal, Mr. Olaf; I felt the guilt he suffered, saw it as a slow-turning pinwheel of crimson-tinged blue. The guilt he felt for offering a janitor twenty bucks to suck his cock. The janitor threatened to tell Olaf’s wife if he didn’t pay him two hundred dollars to keep quiet.
I learned to control whose head I was in. If I focused, if I concentrated, I could be there in moments.
December, 1980. John Lennon was back in the public eye after five years of caring for his son Sean. Double Fantasy was released and was an immediate success. Once again, John Lennon was on top of the world. He seemed so happy this time around, so full of hope and excitement. Maybe that’s what made his death that much harder for so many of us. The world was anticipating so much more of his music.
But that night — December eighth, 1980.
“Mr. Lennon?”
Lennon turns, his face flush and happy after a night in the studio. Chapman’s arms rise, both hands on the gun now, and Lennon squints at the gleaming metal object aimed at him.
My talent. I practiced. I learned to focus. It got me through those tough months, those months of shock and grief that followed the death of the one person I’ve never been ashamed or embarrassed to call a hero. It filled part of the void left within me.
Life continued. I graduated from high school. College. Met Jill. We had a baby. Brianna. Bree.
Jill found humor in my obsession with John, but she accepted it and let me put up my Beatles posters and framed Beatles albums and agreed not to throw out my box full of magazines and books about John. She even went along with buying the Carter’s collection of Lennon baby paraphernalia when she was pregnant with Bree. Baby blankets, crib bumpers, wall hangings, lamps, bookends, all featuring the whimsical artwork he’d created for Sean.
Yet, I continued to practice, to learn. I spent hours shut in our den, the lights out, shades and curtains pulled tight. At first I told Jill I was suffering headaches and needed the rest. Then I began coming home over lunch while Jill was at work and Brianna was at daycare. I simply lay on the couch with a pillow beneath my head and traveled. That’s what I called my talent. Traveling.
You’d think that over the years, the shock of John’s death would wear off. To some degree that’s true. But even twenty-six years later, there were still those times while hearing a song of his on the radio, I felt the wound left in my heart widen.
So I made a decision. A decision to use my talent for something important. Something monumental.
I traveled. I searched.
I reached out into the gauzy ether, grabbing onto thin threads of time and space, following them, backtracking, jumping to other threads and seeing where they led.
See, here’s another secret; space is not an empty void. It’s an endless mesh of multi-dimensional threads leading like highways back and forth across time and distance, mass and brainwaves. Finding a particular thread is like untangling a thousand greased and electrified fishing lines hopelessly knotted together, trying to work to the center in search of one particular hook.
And I found it. I found the right thread, the right hook. And I followed it. Followed it back, twenty-six years to that cold December night in 1980.
“Mr. Lennon?”
John turns. He squints. A flicker of recognition plays across his eyes. Maybe you’ve seen the infamous photograph of John signing an album for Chapman earlier in the day.
The body I’m in drops to one knee. Even now, I can feel the struggle in Chapman’s mind. Two sides of a coin. Heads. Tails. Yes. No. Shoot. Don’t shoot. A brief, violent struggle.
I have to focus. Act quickly. Take advantage of the quickened pulse, the flood of adrenaline rushing through his body.
I push. Push hard.
His finger tightens on the trigger.
I make his nose bleed. Make his eyes water. I become another voice in his head. Stop it! Don’t!
He aims.
I send a sharp pain through his head.
No no no no no
He squeezes the trigger. The gun jerks in his hand.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Five.
Oh, God. Please, no. But the shots — all five of them — go wide.
Why not Gandhi? Why not JFK? Why not prevent the events of 9/11? Gandhi and JFK were too far in the past. It would’ve taken many more years of practice, and there was too much involved that I didn’t know about. And the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, involved getting into too many minds. I would’ve killed myself trying, and not a damn thing would’ve changed.
I woke up in a hospital after saving John Lennon’s life. My head pounded. IV’s dripped into my veins. I had no idea where or when I was. It took me a while to remember my own name. I fumbled for the cord that held the call button for the nurse’s station. Even as I pressed it, I felt the phantom vibrations of a discharging gun. A nurse arrived, tall and pretty and young.
I smiled stupidly at her.
“You had us worried,” she said.
“What year is this?” I gasped.
She told me.
I was back.
I emerged from the hospital into the bright sunlight of summer. I searche
d my new memory for who I was. Where did I live? Instinct led me to a studio apartment above a noisy pizza joint, but on the way there, I stopped at a Tower Records. I looked under L.
LENNON, JOHN.
My mouth dropped open. I barely held in a shout of joy. There were eight compact discs of Lennon’s music that had been recorded after 1980.
I’d done it.
This was the world now. The new world. Here John Lennon still lived and breathed and wrote music. Eight CD’s! I carried them to the counter as if carrying a handful of diamonds and pulled out my wallet. The clerk rang them up.
All I had was a ten-dollar bill, a driver’s license, and a library card. What happened to my Citibank MasterCard? My World Perks Visa? My Platinum American Express? What happened to the pictures of Jill and Brianna?
I looked at the clerk. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I—”
The clerk sighed, as if to say Thanks for wasting my time.
Jill and Brianna.
The clerk asked, “Are you okay?”
I turned and stumbled out the door, gasping, choking on the stale air that filled my mouth.
I ran to the apartment without thinking, my new memory guiding me there. I didn’t notice what a shit-hole it was at first, because I was so desperate, crazed, thinking about Jill and Brianna. Where were they? What had I done to them?
Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “A Sound of Thunder” about a man who travels back to the time of the dinosaurs and accidentally kills a butterfly. When he returns to the present, he realizes with horror that this one misstep has changed the course of history.
I always knew it was possible. But I never thought I’d lose Jill because of my actions. And God help me, I never thought I’d lose Brianna. Sweet little Bree. I don’t know how, exactly. What different steps through life I took due to John Lennon surviving that assassination attempt all those years ago. But now I owned two sets of memories. The old one turning slowly to fog, the new one solidifying like coal into a diamond.
