So, I’m working on Darkship Renegade and hoping to finish before my subconscious clamps the lid on it. Also, I have my own rubber ducky challenge to pick up on, otherwise everyone else will outstrip me in ducks. Sat here for half an hour, wasting good (fiction) writing time because I couldn’t come up with a topic to blog about.
Have decided to give up on that and, instead, give you a blue plate special free short story to amuse you while I’m working.
The story below is from my second collection, Wings. It’s not available electronic, yet, though it’s contracted for epublishing with Baen books. It is available on paper via amazon.
I hope you enjoy it. (In a note, I was an exchange student when John Lennon was shot. My best friend was a girl called Lydia Hohol from Leeds, England (Her parents were Ukranian emigrants) whose birthday was on the day John Lennon was shot, something she took as a personal offense. I remember being sort of shocked but not really because I was seventeen and, hey, celebrities do the craziest things, including getting shot. I’d consider myself the least likely person in the world to write a story about Lennon. But — as these things often happen — I found myself somewhere with a biography of Lennon and no other reading material and by the time I was done reading, I had this story.)
Super Lamb Banana
John Lennon thought he was going to be mugged.
And it shouldn’t happen here. He was at Liverpool docks where the tourists were as thick on the ground as muck in a back alley. He thought he’d be safer than near his rent-subsidized flat. But these days there was nowhere safe.
John peered with near-sighed anxiety at the man approaching through the foggy evening. He looked taller than John and big and approached with the sort of purposeful confidence only criminals had.
Turning away, John tried to use his cane to steady himself on the cobblestones that the fog turned slippery.
The steps got closer.
Tap, tap, tap, John pushed his cane against the cobblestones, balancing himself, desperately, trying to move faster, to–
The water slap-slapped against the moorings of Albert dock. The bracken smell of river water surrounded him. Somewhere, far away, noise of women laughing and glasses tinkling echoed, so faintly that it might as well have come from another world. Probably at the Liverpool Tate gallery. Or the Beatles Museum.
But out here, John was alone with his pursuer.
John had nothing that anyone could want. He wore an old turtleneck and threadbare jeans and, in his pocket, kept his return bus ticket back to his flat. None of which would be worth much, even at a flea market.
But it didn’t matter. The mugger might lose his temper. He might kill John for kicks. Or for nothing.
John tried to walk faster. His heart sped up and his breath came in short puffs.
The steps behind him neared, relentless. John tried to run.
His feet went out from under him, as the too-worn shoe lost purchase on the slick cobblestone. He gave a faint cry and struggled to hold himself upright with his cane. Somehow he could not set it firmly on the pavement.
The ground rushed up to meet him. He hit on the side of his face. His bad hip sent a vibrating pain through his body that made him curl in a ball and keen.
Behind him, the steps turned into a run. Jackals always got excited when prey fell.
John tried to get up, scrabbling to his aching knees. Cold breeze blew where his jeans had torn against the stone. In front of him, a blurred yellow glare like a boulder painted an unholy color offered a grip to help him get up. He couldn’t quite see what the thing was, since his glasses were badly out of prescription. But he reached out, anyway, and scrabbled with his hands at smooth cement, trying to find a handhold.
“Sir, are you all right?” a man’s voice asked. Strong hands, on John’s shoulders pulled him up, helped him balance against the yellow thing.
John rested against it, panting, the sweat from his exertions cooling fast on his body.
“Mr. Lennon, did you hurt yourself?”
Dizzy, his head aching, his skin abraded, John turned to look at the man. Was this the same person who’d followed him through the fog?
He sounded like a yank. And, up close, he had that well-scrubbed, clean-shaven look that so many yanks had these days – always giving the impression they were overgrown school boys. Couldn’t look less like a mugger.
“I’m fine,” John said. “Perfectly fine.” The last word faltered, as he realized that the man had called him by his name. The man had recognized – John.
Which – considering how difficult John found it to recognize himself when he looked in his mirror and saw his domed, balding head, his rheumy eyes, his sagging chin — must rate as some sort of a miracle.
The yank seized hold of John’s hand and shook it up and down with much unnecessary vigor. “I’m Richard Sforzi,” he said. “I’m so glad to meet you at last. I was hoping you’d be coming to the reception at the Beatles Museum.”
He stopped, doubtless because he couldn’t fail to notice how John’s eyes had narrowed at the mention of the Beatles.
John knew that when anyone said he was a great fan of John’s, he actually meant he was a great fan of the Beatles. He’d probably flown all the way across the Atlantic to go to the reception at the Beatles Museum – which celebrated the fact that Paul had given the museum his gold plated Rolls Royce, or perhaps the gold plated thong underwear of his young wife.
John felt his lip curl into a snarl, and controlled it by an effort of will. These fans – his or not – were often good for a pint of beer, or – rarely – two fingers of something stronger. Really rarely they would have other, illegal substances they were willing to share.
John forced a slightly daft smile upon his lips, and looked at the man with what he hoped was an encouraging gaze. “So, a great fan of the Beatles, are you?” he asked. “I was going to the museum me’self. To have a gander at what not that McCartney has donated now. Good old Paul McCartney, that, always finding way to make money out of the three notes he knows, no?”
“I always thought you were a much better musician than McCartney.” Sforzi swallowed. He grabbed John around the wrist and spoke in a great rush. “You probably still are, er… if you’re still playing… The only reason I came England was that I hoped to meet you, and the Beatles museum seemed like a place to find you.”
It was, of course. Not just because it allowed John to get away from his lonely flat for a few hours. Not just because there would be free food, and there was always the hope of a fan to touch for a drink or a handout.
No. Most of all, Lennon came to these things for the same reason one’s tongue dwells upon an aching tooth. Because sometimes the pain is too great to do anything else.
There was a time he’d been as well known, as famous, and as wealthy as Paul. Where had he gone wrong?
He looked through the fog, towards the subterranean entrance to the Beatles Museum – marked by an iron arch. It was all so long ago. And so few people remembered him. Really remembered him. They remembered the Beatles. That was all they remembered. John had sunk from their consciousness.
“Well, I was thinking,” Richard Sforzi said. “I’m not very interested in the museum, now that I’ve met you. If you’d let me take you out for tea and some cakes, or– ” He looked around, with a stranger’s helpful certainty that a tea room will materialize in front of him, and spoke with the yanks’ assurance that there was nothing a Britt ever needed more than a cup of tea.
“Make it a pint or two and you’ve got a deal,” John said. “My cane fell down, somewhere.” He held onto the big yellow bulk behind him.
This close up, he identified it as Super Lamb Banana – a sculpture erected back in the eighties to – the artist said – symbolize the perils of genetic engineering. It had the front of a lamb, the end of a banana and an idiotic expression on its near featureless face. For some reason, it always reminded Lennon of Paul McCartney. Perhaps it was the air of great self-satisfaction.
John let go of the statue, as Sforzi handed him his cane.
He smiled as Sforzi said, “The super lamb banana. I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it. It’s the sort of empty-headed, feel-good commercial art that takes up too much space in the real world.”
It was going to be a fine evening.
***
The pub was the kind of upper class pub – all shadowy nooks and heavy oak tables, and a roaring fireplace located so it could be seen from almost anywhere — where no man would dream of meeting his mates or having a friendly game of darts.
These days, it was a world closed to John – a place of money and privilege where he simply could not enter. So he relished his moment back in, remembering those days – now like a dream – when he could have bought the place twice over.
Sforzi navigated amid the tiny, candle-lit tables with the assurance of a man to whom this type of place was all too common and sat down at a white-cloth draped table.
When the slick and blonde waitress approached, Lennon ordered two fingers of single-malt — amber and cold in the thick-walled glass. Sforzi ordered something thick and bright green.
“Absinthe,” he told John. “Though they don’t make it with wormwood, anymore. No madness….”
Sforzi started speaking. John just sat there, contented to have his drink and stare at the roaring flames in the fireplace. He concentrated on appearing to listen, but he knew there was not much point. Fans always raved, and yanks were the worst of all.
There was that woman, three years ago, who’d told John that if only he’d married her, instead of marrying Yoko, everything would have been fine. Forgetting, of course, that John had once been in love with Yoko and that the fan-woman didn’t have even a tenth of Yoko’s personality.
At first Sforzi’s conversation seemed headed in a similar – if less romantic – direction. What John would have filed under how great you could have been, if only.
Did the fans really think that these things had never occurred to him? That he didn’t run through his memories in the night, trying to figure out where all his fame and all his power could have gone?
But then he heard, “in most worlds, of course, you did not make it so big, you know. But I’m sure there must be one. If you change just one thing and manage to make that world real, it could make you the biggest ever – bigger than Jesus, you know, as you said.”
John blinked at the man. “Worlds?” he asked.
“Yeah, I was telling you,” Sforzi looked around, like a spy who fears being followed. Having satisfied himself that no one was listening in, Sforzi turned back to John. By the light of the candle, his blue eyes shone unnaturally bright. “I work for NASA,” he said. “On a secret project. You see, every time that you make a decision…. every time one of us makes a decision, it generates another universe… another world. All these worlds, going on forever, compressed together like pages in a book, but never touching.”
John lifted his eyebrows. Ah, it was not a madman but his near cousin. A science fiction chappie. John himself had watched Star Trek religiously once upon a time. He understood this. Besides, at least, the bloke was not saying John should have married him and not Yoko.
“Parallel worlds,” John said, firmly, to show he understood. Also to prevent the conversation from getting stranger. “I understand that. Now, if there were a way to find a better one, eh?”
Sforzi’s eyes shone brighter. He leaned forward across the table. “There is,” he said. “There is.” He looked weirdly Mephistophelian with the candle lighting him from behind, as he hesitated. “At least, there is a way of going back in time to the fork in the road and taking a different one from the one that’s led you here – and if you find the right fork…”
“Time travel?” John asked.
“It’s actually a quantum uncertainty mech–” Sforzi stopped, waved his hand expansively. “Close enough. Yes. Time travel.”
“So I can go back to my younger self and–” John said, helpfully. The man was insane, of course, but it was an entertaining form of insanity.
“Warn him. Tell him what to do, what not to do. And then he can…. change.”
“Why would my younger self believe me?” he asked. “I don’t even look like myself, anymore.”
“Well,” Sforzi scratched his head. “Well… is there something you could give him? Something that could prove you are… him?”
“My journals,” Lennon said, happy to solve this hypothetical puzzle.
“Journals?”
“I wrote them since I was fourteen or so,” he said. “So if I were to meet myself anytime after that, he’d see that the first journals were his. Also, he would know where my life went wrong without my needing to tell him all of it.”
“You don’t have the journals with you, right? I could take you back in time right now. Car is outside.”
“Car?” Lennon had been so carried away with the fictional puzzle, he’d forgotten this man believed it. But a car? He expected them to travel back in a car?
Sforzi shrugged. “I built the quantum device into it. Makes it easier. Just a rental car. I’ll remove the device when I return it.”
“Ah…”
“Why don’t I take you to your flat now, and we get your journals and go back in time?”
Why not? Because Sforzi was delusional? Because John had no time for this?
But John had all the time in the world, and even if he got nothing more out of this adventure, the lark allowed him to spend a longer time in Sforzi’s brand new BMW with its leather upholstery. It would be a few moments away from the squalor John’s life had become.
***
He’d gotten the journals – twenty red-cover notebooks in a box. John had been slapdash in journal keeping after he and Yoko had been deported by American immigration authorities back in the seventies. He wrote almost every week. Well, sometimes every month. Definitely at least once a year.
There wasn’t much to write about. Yoko hadn’t been able to endure England for very long and it seemed like only a few minutes before she filed for divorce and left for Paris with most of John’s money and copyrights and…
Not that John begrudged them to her. He’d always admired the way she looked out for herself. And besides, she’d left him plenty to live on until he issued the next big album.
But then, there had been parties – he was free, after all – and drinking and… other stuff, and somehow the album never got made, and, by degrees, so slowly he hardly knew how, he’d found himself living alone and forgotten in a bloody state-subsidized flat. And the world had gone on. Twenty year olds didn’t even know his name.
“Well,” Sforzi said. “Do you know where you want to go?”
“Yes,” John said. He’d thought about it, all the while he was making his rickety way down the eight flights of stairs from his flat to ground level. The elevator was on the blink again. He knew where he wanted to go, on the off chance this worked. “I know exactly where I want to go. I want to go back and never get involved with Super Lamb Banana.”
“Super–”
“McCartney. Paul. We’ll see how far he goes without me, shall we? We’ll see how Super Lamb Banana does without the real artist to make it all seem important. We’ll see about his albums and his concerts then.”
He held the cardboard box on his skinny, withered legs and thought maybe, maybe another world existed in which John had a chance to be the artist he should have been without Paul grinning around him, fuzzy, undefined and vaguely benevolent — like Super Lamb Banana.
And then, John wouldn’t need drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of his stolen art. And he could have kept on. He would still be wealthy. He would be famous. He would be the greatest artist in the world.
***
Seventeen year old John Lennon stood outside the Quarry Bank public school. School was over for the day.
He wore his Teddy boy tight pants and flamboyant jacket, but he felt as if he was quite a different creature from the teenage boy who had left the school yesterday. Yesterday, when the old man had handed him a box full of tattered diaries.
At first he’d thought the old man was a bum. Then he’d noticed a certain air of family resemblance – the sharp nose, the angular chin, and he’d thought it was his father, come to reclaim him after all this time.
But, while anger and bewilderment and relief all rose in John together, rendering him mute at seeing this long lost father, the stranger spoke. He said he was not Freddie. He was John himself, come from the future.
John had spent the night awake, reading those diaries – at first euphoric as the diaries “predicted” that he would be one of the greatest musicians of all time. But then the tone of the Journals had changed. John had become bewildered by the constant betrayals by friends and lovers. And then shocked at his abandonment, his disappearing from the public mind.
The old man – his old self? – had scribbled a note at the end of the journals, telling John to steer clear of Super Lamb Banana. Super Lamb? Banana?
John had no idea what that meant. But he did understand the other things the old man had told him, “McCartney is no good for you. McCartney will only live off your art.”
From the diaries written in the last years of the band, John understood that Paul McCartney had taken over John’s music, that he’d overpowered John’s greatest creativity and cheapened John’s art. Made John irrelevant.
John frowned. And Paul seemed so nice, too. In fact, John had just about decided he would let Paul join the Quarry Men. Well, forget that. John would take the Quarry Men to glory all on his own.
He saw Paul walking towards him down the sunlit street, a smile on his face. Right. Time to stop that friendship before it went anywhere.
***
John Lennon straightened his tie, self-consciously. He’d been retired from his teaching job for twenty years now, and he’d grown unaccustomed to his tie. But business men always wore ties. And suits. And John was meeting with an important movie producer, after all. A man who wanted to make a movie about the Quarry Men.
Bloody time, too. Rock-and-roll had been an important form of music, even if now defunct. Though it had come from the Americas and had petered out without reaching most Europeans, those it had reached, it had marked deeply. It was about time someone realized what a great thing the Quarry Men and other groups like them had been and how their experimental sound could have changed the world. Perhaps even introduced a new way of thinking to a generation — broken the bonds of Puritan morality that still encased British society.
John had heard that in America sometimes men went to work without their ties, but that would be unthinkable anywhere in Europe.
Which is how John spotted the yank who was supposed to meet him. He got out of his BMW, looking florid and well-scrubbed, wearing a grey suit of the best cut and a shirt open at the collar. No tie.
John, stood near the absurdly yellow sculpture of Super Lamb Banana. Built in the eighties, it seemed to Lennon to embody all that was phony about the commercial art that surrounded him now. If only he’d got a chance. If more people had appreciated rock music. If it could have reached the masses.
“Hello,” the man said. “I’m Richard Sforzi.”
“I’m John Lennon,” John said, stepping forward.
“Oh, Mr. Lennon,” the man said. “I know.”
***
“Of course I remember the old man, when I was in school,” John said, leaning across the table. “He was the reason I never took in that chappy… Paul McCartney. Fellow went on to make himself a pretty good album or two, I think. Made some money, dropped out of music, immigrated. I heard he’s a building magnate somewhere in Canada.”
The American waited, on the other side of the table, staring – as if there were something obvious that John should be realizing.
“You mean, his story was real?” John asked. “That he… That I… Time travel?”
“If you didn’t think it was real, why did you turn Paul down, when he tried to join the Quarry men?”
John shrugged. “Well, back then I thought it was real. I thought– ” He shrugged again. “But then… nothing happened that the diaries talked about. No flower power. Nothing. I mean, the yan– the people in your country got pretty wild there for a while, but it seemed it never reached the children of the middle class, and it all…” He shrugged again, unable to convey the impossibility of sons and daughters of the middle class prancing about in velvets and silks, with flowers in their hair, experimenting with different substances and different ideas. Oh, they’d all dressed a little wildly in their youth, but then they’d settled down to careers. They’d settled in. Even John, when he’d got his job as an art teacher–
“Don’t you miss playing?” the yank asked. “Don’t you think you could have been much greater in music? Much, much greater?”
“Do you still have the diaries?” Sforzi asked.
“Somewhere, back at my flat,” John said. He’d never married. Every time a girl got close enough, he thought they might turn out like the two wives, mentioned in those disturbing diaries. He lived alone in a neat little flat that contained everything he’d ever acquired – carefully catalogued and itemized. “I think under the desk in the parlor.”
“Well, why don’t you go and read them and tell me where you’d like to go to try the next fork in the road to greatness.”
“Travel back in time?” John asked. “Really?”
“You’ve done it before,” Sforzi said.
“But I don’t remember that,” John protested. “I mean, I don’t remember being the person to go back. So… how come you…”
Sforzi shook his head, as if forced to explain something elementary. “Because you grew up in this reality. I didn’t go back. I just came here. To see if it had worked out.”
“Oh.”
“I have the car right outside,” Sforzi said. “Waiting for you.”
***
John didn’t know why he believed the man. Or rather, he did. Too well. The man had left the impressions of his fingers on John’s glass, when he’d bought John a drink, after school. And John had looked at those prints, and his own. They were the same.
Then the man had given John diaries, the earlier ones of which were exact replicas of the little red notebooks in John’s room at aunt Mimi’s house – Mendips in Menlove road.
So, either the impossible had happened or John had traveled back in time to warn himself. He was not to stick with the Quarry Men. The Quarry Men would never go anywhere.
Oh, the man had given John a sheaf of diaries, too, but John had yet to get past the first two diaries – those that described the events in the next year or so. The diaries seemed to talk of a fictional future in which John and the Quarry Men changed their name to The Beatles – why not the rockroaches? Or perhaps the loco-usts? – and went on to change music and the world.
But though that diary and the part of the second John had read sounded so hopeful, he knew how it would all end. He’d heard the older John talk about it. The Quarrymen – and thus, probably the Beatles – would go nowhere. It was time John found a better way to express his art. A way to change the world and make himself known.
He’d stashed the diaries away in his room at Mendips. And he would drop the foolishness of music, he decided. He would stick with art, stay with it. He could do great things in art.
***
John Lennon thought he was about to get mugged, when the man came at him out of the fog. John was just walking from the Liverpool Tate to the car park and was just walking past Super Lamb Banana, when he saw the man come at him, full of confidence and certainty, like a man who has a purpose in life.
Most of the time, this sort of purpose is to mug someone.
John stood, trembling in his cashmere turtleneck, his hands deep the pockets of his well-cut pants – his artist uniform. To run or not to run. Well, he had only a few pounds on him, and a handful of cards all easily cancelled and reissued. He put a hand out, to hold on to the Super Lamb banana, which stared idiotically next to him.
The man walked briskly towards John, and stopped a few steps away, looking as little like a mugger as it was possible for a man to look. He looked well-scrubbed and eager, like an overgrown boy scout. “Mr. Lennon,” he said, and Lennon placed the look and the accent together. A yank?
The man waited a moment, as though he felt that Lennon should know him. Lennon didn’t, of course, and the man registered that minimal let-down that people did when their favorite artist did not recognize them at first sight.
He rallied admirably, though, smiling wide and extending a clean, square-fingertipped hand. “Richard Sforzi, Mr. Lennon. I’m one of your greatest fans.”
Lennon nodded and refused to show any surprise, though so far as he knew all his fans were British. He made a decent living and all, and his art – canvases suffused with light from which emerged creatures as strange and distorted as everything had looked when Lennon had refused to wear glasses, back in adolescence – sold very well to a cultured elite, appreciative of the outre.
But he’d never made much inroad into other countries. Other countries were more conservative than Britain. Since WWII there had been a tendency to conformity worldwide. A closing of the ranks against the strange. And John’s originality wasn’t appreciated. In fact, this was something that nagged at him, as he rounded his mid-sixties.
He shook the man’s hand. “You’re an American dealer, then?”
But the man had grinned, a strange, crooked grin as though he felt guilty for something for which he could not apologize. “I’m an American, though my work…”
“You’re an artist?” John asked, impatient, sure that this was only a fledgling come asking for advice or help.
The man shook his head. “No, not at all. Look.” He hesitated. “I think I can help you. Make your art have more impact, make you better known, make you the influence you were supposed be in the world at large.”
Well, that was more like it, John thought, as he put his hand in his jacket pocket and absent-mindedly jiggled the keys there to the tune of Three Blind Mice. Maybe this was one of those mad Yanks that made their money in sugar beets and then spent it all in promoting a baseball team. This one wanted to promote John’s art.
John gave a look over the man’s impeccably tailored grey suit, his well-cut hair. He thought very few muggers dressed that well. And John was not a well-known enough artist to attract a kidnapper.
“Would you come with me and have a drink?” Richard Sforzi said. “I’ll explain it all to you.”
John shrugged. “Right, why don’t we walk?”
The man was probably not a kidnapper, but there was no point being stupid.
***
“You’re bloody mad,” John said, as he sat back, with the whiskey in his hand. “I mean, of course I remember the man. And he said… Well, let’s see – that he was from the future. Let’s say he was. And that you’re the one who helped him time travel. What are you saying? That I still haven’t got it right?”
He twirled his glass around, with minimal movements of the wrist, imparting a swirling motion to the amber liquid within. “Why would you think that? My art is well liked. Critics say it burst upon the British art scene like a breath of fresh air. I sell enough to support myself, and Cynthia. And our boy… Well, he’s married now. But I raised him decently. Nice little house. I never had any real problems making ends meet.” He gave the man across the table an appraising glance. “So, even if you’re telling me the truth… why should I trade this success I have on the off chance of something bigger? The chap – myself, I guess – who gave me those diaries didn’t look like much of anything. I’d say I’ve improved considerably upon his fate. Why should you think I can do better?”
Richard Sforzi looked anxious and exasperated, all the while attempting to look endearing. He looked, in fact, like a little boy in need of going to the loo while his busy mother drags him on a shopping trip. “But… haven’t you read the diaries,” he said.
“Oh, the beginning. Till it became clear the Quarry Men would go nowhere,” he said.
Richard Sforzi leaned across the table, “But they did,” he said. “They did go somewhere. Not the Quarry Men, really, but the other group that came from them. The Beatles. They– ”
“Beatles? That’s an idiotic name for a group. Why not the crickets?”
Sforzi just shook his head. “The Beatles,” he said, putting great emphasis on the word. “Changed the world of music. The world of everything. Their music, at first innocuous enough to penetrate into middle class homes, attracted fans from every walk of life. And then, when they got experimental, their entire generation followed them. They created a freer world, a more creative world than ever been before. They changed the world in their image and semblance.”
John grimaced. “You make it sound like a messianic religion.”
“It was. In a way. You– I mean, him… I mean, you in another alternate world, said in an interview that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. And for just a moment it looked that way. You were certainly bigger than any other man in recent memory. I just thought you could have been bigger. I still think…”
“Right,” John said, and tossed back his drink in a single gulp. “Listen, I really have to get back. Cynthia is expecting me. It was fascinating to– ”
He got up, and started to walk out of the expensive little pub. But Sforzi grabbed at his arm. “No. Listen. You may go if you want. But promise me one thing. Promise me you’ll go home and read those diaries. You still have those diaries, right? Why don’t you go and read them? Just so you see how much bigger you were in that world? That first world. How your art, your… critical acclaim pale beside the kind of revolution you helped start once…”
“I can’t really promise–” John started.
“Come on. Are you afraid of finding how short you’ve fallen of your potential?”
“No. You see, the grandchildren–”
“You still do have the diaries, right?”
“I’m sure they’re in the attic, somewhere.”
“Why don’t you read them, tonight?” Sforzi asked. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” Sforzi said. “If you should find you want to travel back in time and change anything.”
John frowned and, without dignifying that with an answer, he turned around and walked back to the carpark. But by the time he got to his car he was already thinking – his art was good, but he’d never set the world on fire. He’d always felt deep within that there was something he was supposed to do. Something big he was supposed to accomplish.
He wondered if that feeling came because some part of his subconscious mind knew how much bigger he could have been if only….
There had been an ache within him all along and the stranger’s words had ignited it into excruciating pain. He could imagine greatness that even he had never dared dream of. And it was all lost.
That night, after Cynthia lay asleep, he’d crept up to the attic and found the diaries, together with the collection of biographies of famous people that he’d brought there from Aunt Mimi’s when aunt Mimi had died and he’d sold Mendips. Now, sitting on the dusty floor of the attic, by the increasingly weaker beam of a flashlight, he read diary after diary.
How great a man he’d been, in that other reality. But then… why had he looked so much like a retired school teacher? And if he’d been all that famous, all that wealthy – if he’d had fame and power to change the way an entire generation perceived the world, why had he tried to go back in time and warn himself?
John read on. Little by little, it started to make sense. The bad relationships, the betrayals, the substances required to dull the pain. He read, half-cringing, about his deportation from the States for drug use. The deportation he’d never thought to fight because he really, secretly, wanted to go back to England and this was the only way Yoko would allow it. Of course, she had divorced him soon after the deportation. But the end of his marriage hadn’t freed him. Instead, it had started his slow spiral into penury and irrelevance.
If only he could have held on. If only he could have continued. If only he could have remained at his peak forever.
But how? How could he ensure that?
He was willing to suffer for his art. He was willing to endure the friendship gone sour, the love gone bad. But was there anything he could do to stay famous and influential forever?
By morning, he thought he had it. From the tension between his pride in his art and the nagging certainty he could have been much better, a huge plan blossomed. A crazy, risky plan.
He kissed Cynthia after breakfast, as he had every day of their marriage. A dutiful kiss, not meaning much.
Afterwards, instead of going to his studio in the back of the garden, he walked out of his tidy little suburban home to his car. He would not be coming back. Sometimes a sacrifice was required to achieve something really great.
***
John Lennon followed Yoko Ono out of their limousine and into the Dakota.
He’d been working all evening on their last joint album. Double Fantasy. After this he was going to tape something all his own – to reclaim his solo career. And it would be great. It would be the culmination of all his plans.
He was glad that the man who’d met him – so many years ago outside his public school – had told him that marrying Yoko would be worth it in publicity, even if sometimes she would seem strange. And he’d told John that it was important to make sure he didn’t get deported. Because Yoko couldn’t stand to live in England. And if she divorced him, she’d take him to the cleaners.
In fact, he’d outlined an entire life plan for John, till John knew everything he was supposed to do, down to the last minutia of promoting this album. The other John, the older John, had said he’d worked it all out with the inventor of time travel. He’d worked to make sure John got what he wanted. At last. He would remain forever great.
Now, on this cold autumn morning, John walked half-bent over, carrying in his hands the tapes for Yoko’s session, and he followed his wife towards the building where they’d lived for so long.
He barely saw the little man that approached from the right. He half-registered by the corner of his eye that it was a pudgy young man, well scrubbed and neat, like an old boy scout.
He had barely understo od that the object in the man’s hand was a gun, when the bullet ripped into his chest.
John staggered, as burning pain and a blazing cold tore into him. He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. Another bullet. Another. Time seemed very slow. He couldn’t escape.
With a sort of distancing numbness, he was aware of his body’s tripping, staggering away from the gunman, stumbling through the glass doors onto the floor of the foyer and falling. He thought of saving the tapes, but his hands couldn’t hold them.
He fell on the floor of the foyer and heard the doorman yell hysterically. “Shot.” “Hurt.” “Emergency.” Those words emerged, clear, from others John could not understand.
Far away sirens wailed.
John felt cold. Very cold. Someone threw a blanket over him.
Idiots. That would do nothing.
He tried to take a breath, but the air had nowhere to go, and blood oozed in his mouth. He inhaled it, drowning in blood. Curiously, he wasn’t in pain. It all felt very distant.
He was aware of Yoko, and the doormen, and other people, touching, lifting him. But it didn’t matter. This did. Because for the first time – in pain and shock — John could see the implications, the ramifications, the exquisite detail of the plan the older John had formed and got this John to follow, unawares.
Everything, from fighting extradition back in the seventies and staying in the States – where crazed murders of celebrities were so much more likely – to the right interview given in the right tone to inflame the fanatic who’d think John had sold out. It had been a gamble, all designed to achieve this end. And it had paid off.
John would die before he could destroy his power, his influence, the memory of his art.
He coughed once.
“It will be all right,” someone said, from nearby.
John tried to nod. It would be all right. His art would live, after him, untouched and all the stronger for his having died so suddenly. Everything he had done would acquire even greater meaning. He’d remain true to himself. He’d never become irrelevant or embarrassing like Super Lamb Banana.
He fell into the darkness and there found peace at last.
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