Haunted by Kennedy

I was five years-old when President Kennedy was assassinated. Even at that young age, I knew something fundamental had changed. The memories remain very real.

Experts tell us that memories are not really archived in our brains, but rather rebuilt each time we reach for them. We overlay them with other detail enhancing some details, deleting others and ultimately placing the memories in context. So memories from childhood have been reconstructed countless times. I can only wonder how different my current recollections are from their originals.

One such memory of an event occurring just weeks after the assassination served as the basis for a chapter in my upcoming novel, Revelation 11. On a cold December day I played outside on our swing set. Looking up, I saw what looked like a black figure standing on a cloud looking down at me. What began as curiosity, turned to fear as I watched this strange apparition for several minutes. Ultimately, I ran inside, but never told my parents or my brother about the event until years later. To this day, I don't know why.

The event's fictional version appears below to give you a foretaste of the novel. It will be published in time for Easter 2014.

December 1963

Epiphany

“Who is the president now, mommy?” Ben Davis asked.

“President Johnson.” She replied.

He had asked the same question each day for two weeks as if changing presidents could now be a daily occurrence. The five-year-old had come in from playing for lunch two Fridays before to see his mother crying in front of the television. He remembered looking at the screen and seeing a large room filled with people moving back and forth in confusion. The announcer had said the room was the luncheon that President Kennedy was going to address, but he had been assassinated.

“What does assassinated mean, mommy?”

“It’s when someone important is killed.”

A large, black man crossed the screen in a white server’s coat. The tears streamed down his face. Ben had never seen a grown man cry like that.

Over the next days, images of death flooded the TV screen-the President’s body in state, the funeral cortege, the burial at Arlington.

In the gray days that followed, angst fed the nation’s subconscious. Even children like Ben knew something was different as a pall fell over the nation with the first days of winter. He heard stories that psychics had predicted the assassination, that a family received a message on Ouija board reading, “Thank you for praying for me while I was in purgatory.”

“What’s purgatory, mommy?”

“It’s something Catholics believe in. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Was President Kennedy a Catholic?”

“Yes, he was.”

“So he has to worry about purgatory, right?”

Even at this age, he could tell when his mother was uncomfortable with a question. “That’s hard to say. Why don’t you go out and play on the swings until dinner?”

Ben bundled up against the cold, gray day. Dark, low clouds floated by against the lighter gray matte above them. He swung on the swings, watched the sky begin to succumb to the winter evening’s gloom. A small dark spot near one of the low, gray clouds caught his eye for a moment, then disappeared behind in the swirling vapor.

He continued to swing and look around the neighborhood to see if any of his friends were out playing. But this was the Cumberland Valley's appointed dinner hour and they were all crowded into the identical postwar crackerbox rancher eat-in kitchens.

His mother always saw the local custom of eating dinner precisely at five o’clock as peculiar. As a point of pride, and to accommodate his father, Jeff Sr.’s habit of having a few drinks before coming home, Ben’s family ate at 6—6:30, whenever, but never at five. Most likely, it would get dark before dinner and his mother would call him in.

He could just barely make out the sun’s position over the western mountains through the gray. He stood up to push off and swing as high as possible, pointing his toes and throwing his head back to look at the sky above him. The dark spot hovered above him in the clouds. Planting his feet to stop the swing, he stared up. More clearly defined now, the spot had a distinctive shape; a head, shoulders, and body apparently standing on the cloud. Long flowing hair crowned the robed figure. The fading light glinted off the suggestion of an eyebrow. Its face appeared to be looking down directly at him. To Ben, the figure looked like the silhouette of Jesus, the face subsumed in shadow.

The dark Christ moved as the cloud moved. What Ben imagined to be the face continued to gaze at him. He looked around his neighborhood. No one was out. All the dutiful diners safely huddled in their homes.
The more Ben identified the form’s distinct features, the more curiosity gave way to fear. He wanted to tell someone, anyone …or at least not be alone. But the five o’clock suburban dinner communion trumped all, even a heavenly figure standing on a cloud. Ben took one last look across the haunted landscape, saw no one, and ran inside to the light and warmth of home.

The End is Near

Wow! Has it really been since March that I posted something? Well, time flies when you're busy.

Revelation 11, my first novel, is complete and is off to the editor. I would describe it as Deliverance meets the The Da Vinci Code. I've tried to capture the concept of a man who views himself as civilized being thrust into a primitive world and forced to make difficult choices. Deliverance is essentially a retelling of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The main character in Revelation 11 is Trog Davis, a hard-living Harrisburg reporter, who is assigned to cover a gruesome murder in isolated Shade Gap, Pennsylvania. So rather than the navigating Cahulawassee or Congo rivers, Davis traverses the Pennsylvania mountains via the PA turnpike's tunnels, each moving him farther from civilization.

Davis soon discovers that the dead minister was a childhood friend of his who had told him years before that he was one of the two witnesses identified in Chapter 11 of the Book of Revelation. Before he even arrives in Shade Gap, he learns that the minister's megachurch also believes he is one of the witnesses and will rise from the dead in three and a half-days.

Trog tries to sift through Biblical prophecy and present day murder clues to find the truth. But the truth can be elusive, especially when Trog looks inward.

Work, Work, Work

Here is an update on various writing projects I have on tap. A revised version of In the Shadow of Midnight: Daedalus-a tale of Savannah will be released in early April. It will include photographs and some of the blog postings I've done explaining the backstory. Around the same time, my first novel, Revelation 11 will be published by Valhalla Press. It will be in Kindle format to start and others will be added later. FYI, Kindle formats work on all PCs and MACs. You can download and read even if you do not have a Kindle reader.

I plan to begin work on a second novel almost immediately entitled SNUF. It is more of a science fiction dystopian story of a man whose job it is to permanently delete files from computers around the world. SNUF stands for Specially Noted Unrecoverable File-the code his corporate bosses use to identify those bits of information targeted for destruction.

I also plan to get significant work in on a story called Militia's Mischief, which is also the name of an online video game favored by right-wing extremists in the novel. They use the game to launder money and illegally move weapons to trouble spots around the world. The protagonist is a novelist who starts out investigating the game, makes a few outrageous posts and then finds himself the target of several different government investigations. Despite the fact that he is quite liberal, the right-wing media adopts him as a hero. The complications ensue.

This should keep me busy the rest of the year.

Musings on Death

It is winter and I am thinking of death. The Northeastern winter is a punishment to be endured. No longer the magical season of snow, it has been globally warmed and weather channeled into slush storms and wind chills. Beauteous snowstorms and winter wonderlands belong to the past, having escaped to the north ahead of onrushing greenhouse gases.

This year, the season’s first snowman has thawed and refrozen into a dirty, hardened gray ice pile in the brown grass. We’ve plucked the hat from the corpse and thrown out its carrot nose lest the decay metaphor take on a nasty olfactory component.

Two winters ago, my mother died. She had asked for a funeral at a defunct chapel to be performed by a now retired minister. As the arrangements were made as best as they could, the weeks dragged on. We grieved in suspended animation until time could be pried from everyone’s schedule to meet, grieve and remember.

The experience made me decide two things. First, I always thought I would be cremated, but you don’t get off that easy. I’m going into the ground with whatever I have left and you better bury me before I start to stink. Secondly, I’m going to have an old fashioned Irish wake. The drinks are on me, or more precisely my life insurance proceeds. So if I mean anything to you, drop whatever you’re doing, get to my wake, and attend my funeral. I’m working on an efficient way to let everyone know I’ve died. I think Facebook should create some way to simply change your status to dead.

Regardless of how you are informed, here’s my point, if you can’t make it on three or four days notice, I wasn’t that important to you and I don’t want you drinking my booze even if I’m dead at the time.

I may sound bitter, but I’m doing this for all of you. Come party, drink, reminisce, laugh, cry, and then get back to living.