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.
“
The words are out before I can stop them.
I have to take control.
Concentrate. Make his fingers move.
It’s like trying to bend steel.
Lennon turns.
I recognize his glasses from the cover of
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.
But that night — December eighth, 1980.
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.
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.
He aims.
I send a sharp pain through his head.
He squeezes the trigger. The gun jerks in his hand.
One. Two. Three. Four.
