ennedy leaned forward in his chair and rested his forearms on K his knees. “Ok, what did the voice say?”
“‘Turn. Now.’ Only loud, very loud.”
“Then what?”
“I turned, saw him, just a glimpse, but I knew he’d been hiding.
I lost him, saw the door closing, and followed. Voice yelled, ‘Hurry, Hurry.’” Kennedy waited, and Casey knew he had to tell the next part, no matter how bad it sounded.
“Running to the back door, something else happened. I blacked out. I’m running, the next instant I’m falling. Turned my shoulder before the lights went out, otherwise I’d have landed smack on my face. I was out 20 seconds, 25 tops, although I can’t explain how I know that. The voice was there screaming, ‘Hurry Hurry’ when I came back. Kept it up, too. All the time I was going up the stairs, 80
peeking around corners, it kept yelling for me to hurry, until I got to the sixth-floor hallway. Then it went silent.”
“You’ve never before blacked out, right?”
“Never.”
“So, the voice only said ‘turn now, hurry.’ Those words, nothing else?”
“I don’t think so. No, wait. Twelve thirty. It said ‘twelve thirty,’
several times,” Casey said.
Kennedy froze as he drew forth in his mind the image of the newspaper article that would have pinpointed the time of his assassination at 12:30.
“It never said, ‘Follow that man, draw your weapon, and shoot that man’?” Kennedy asked.
Casey only stared at Kennedy.
“Casey, I don’t know how much this will help, but I don’t believe a voice in your head directed you to kill a man. Whatever it was in your head, only made it possible for you to see the shooter.
YOU assessed his behavior as suspicious. YOU decided to follow him, and YOU decided to shoot when you did. Conscious decisions, a result of your instincts as a person and as a cop. You saved my life. I only wish we could tell the rest of the world.”
“Well,” Casey said, “there’s something else you should know.”
Casey knew he’d begun to treat Kennedy as his confessor. He supposed it was a natural response to speaking to someone predisposed to believe him.
“I screwed up. Couldn’t pull the trigger. Let him have the first shot, point blank. Would’ve been a kill shot, if he’d-a remembered to flick off the safety. That’s what saved me. What saved you. The safety. Not me. I was just an instrument, sent by that voice. And I almost screwed that up, too.”
“That’s incredible,” Kennedy said. “He’d pointed his rifle at you, you saw him try to pull the trigger, realized his safety was on, then you shot?”
Kennedy’s words sent Casey back to the room on the sixth floor, to the instant he saw the gunman attempt to pull the trigger, 81
and to the next instant, when Casey expected to feel the impact of the bullet in his chest. But Kennedy had asked a question, and Casey slowly, painfully, returned to the present. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much, that’s what happened.”
“Hmm, that would have been fatal. For both of us. You allowed your humanity to compromise your survival instinct. There is no-bility in that.”
“Doesn’t feel noble, not from where I sit.”
“Well, in spite of everything, you succeeded,” Kennedy said.
“And know this: whoever or whatever that voice was, it chose you.
From everyone it could have chosen, it quite possibly picked the one man who could succeed.”
“It picked the closest man with a gun.”
“Hmm.” Kennedy stood and paced again, then said, “Wait a minute! You didn’t meet the residency requirements to apply to the DPD. You even received an unsigned letter telling you how to navigate around that.”
Casey looked at Kennedy. “Now how did you know that?”
“Just a tidbit of extraneous information in the report. Didn’t think it had much relevance when I first read it,” Kennedy said. “But now, you know what this means, don’t you?” he continued. “You were chosen months ago. They, it, whatever, could have avoided all the extra logistics necessary to bring you to Dallas, months ahead of time, by choosing someone already assigned to the DPD. Why did they choose you, from a small town in Wisconsin?”
Casey only looked at Kennedy with a blank expression, as blank as he could manage, but Kennedy saw through it. “Of course.
I should have realized,” he said. “You thought of this already. Haven’t you?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Jack,” Kennedy reminded him.
“Jack.”
“And?”
Casey heaved a great sigh, ran both hands over his short hair, 82
then drew them down over his face, and held them there two seconds before dropping them to the arms of his chair. “I near about went nuts thinking about that question.
“If we believe whatever is behind this can do the things we know about, then it probably can do just about anything else it wants to do. Perhaps it can see every possible future, and it chooses the one that matches its needs. If it needs no lingering loose ends supporting any story about an assassination attempt, it would choose someone with no ties to Dallas, someone who will cut and run, leave the department, and leave Texas, as I most certainly will.”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Yeah.”
Something nagged at Casey, something else he should tell Jack, but he couldn’t quite call it forth. In the last few days his conscious mind had formed the early stages of another reason he had been chosen to save Kennedy. Before it became a fully formed thought, however, something had distracted him, and his subconscious had seized the opportunity to bury the thought, way back in a part of his mind he could ignore, for now. He would think of this moment in the future, when he could no longer deny the other reason, likely the main reason, he’d been chosen.
Kennedy sensed Casey might be holding something back, but he let it pass, moved on.
“It. Do you realize Casey; we’ve been talking about our experiences as though we accept as a fact that our minds and actions have been influenced by an all-powerful being?”
“Would make quite a headline,” Casey said, grinning. “‘Wisconsin Man Converses with President Regarding Astral Beings’”
Kennedy laughed. “In all honesty, I must tell you, for a couple of weeks there I wondered if you might be the astral entity. You must admit, it fits with some of the evidence.”
It was Casey’s turn to laugh. “I guess I can understand why you’d like to rule that possibility out, Jack.”
“So, you aren’t then, are you?” Kennedy asked, looking at Casey. “An immortal entity?”
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Casey laughed again. “I’m human and mortal, Jack. I don’t think I’d care to be otherwise. Although, now you mention it, it would be kinda nice to get the offer, wouldn’t it?”
Kennedy picked up his bottle and held it out to Casey. “That it would. Here’s to being human and mortal, Casey.” Casey extended his own bottle and clinked Kennedy’s, and they each took a healthy swig.
“What about this?” Kennedy said. “Just so I can say we covered this possibility, is there any chance you, yourself, made these things happen?
“I thought about that too,” Casey said. “Do I have a sixth sense that generated the voice in my head, made me turn when I did? I’d say no. The voice came with a lot of other… components, I guess you’d call them. Mannerisms, that I’d recognize again. It’s like when you meet someone. Beyond what they look and sound like, you see their facial expression. You can sense things about their mood, their carriage. Sometimes you even get a sense of whether to trust them. I’m not saying I saw an image, only that the voice carried with it other qualities that, taken as a whole, make it unique, and recognizable. And not me.”
“Male, or female?” Kennedy asked.
“It’s funny, but at first it just sounded old. After that, it sounded like my own voice.”
“Really? I guess you have no idea what happened to the body, or who it was?” Kennedy asked.
“Not a clue.”
Casey told Jack about the painting tarp. “I didn’t mention the tarp to the department. That’s why they couldn’t find blood evidence. If I’d-a mentioned it back then, well, I figured it’d just give them more reason not to believe me. Sorry. Might have been a mistake. Just add it to the list.”
“Ok, it’s my turn,” Kennedy said next. “Your part in this drama seems to have ended at the time you pulled the trigger. That’s where mine began.”
“That makes sense. You start where you would have ended.
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You’ll do the things you would have done if not for assassination.”
“Yes, and no. See, while I was in that trance, that ten or twelve seconds, I was infused with thousands of images, millions maybe.
The images told a story, many stories. Of all the awesome, overwhelming things I saw, one stays with me every waking moment. I saw what happened after my death. Everywhere. A few celebrated, and others wept. I saw my funeral, my wife and little children bravely exposing their grief to the public and television cameras. I was missed. I believe many people truly missed me. Some whom I know, most whom I don’t. I could see them, you see? I could see them grieving, as if I were standing next to them, people I didn’t even know, never met, crying, for me, Casey. You can’t imagine how that feels. It gave me a new understanding of what a leader should be. A leader should be equal to that grief. I wasn’t.”
Casey sat back in his chair. He sensed the president had not finished, that he wanted to tell Casey something important.
“Now, I want to do this job differently. Better. I’ll never do enough good to earn the accumulated grieving of all those people, Casey. But I want to try. If I live one hundred years, I must spend it chasing that prize. To do enough good to be worthy of the sorrow of my passing, at least in small part.”
“Well,” Casey said. “A determined man, with your power, wealth and fame, could do a lot of good if he tries. You don’t have to look very hard to find a wrong needs righting, a problem needs a solution. I’ll tell you right now though, and I hope you don’t mind my saying it, I’ve had a less than positive attitude about politicians.
Seems they create more problems than they fix. If you could just avoid that, I’d count you as a notable exception.”
Laughing, Kennedy said, “I think that’s called a left-handed compliment, Casey. It’s ok. I deserve it, as do most politicians.”
Kennedy sat, staring at the fire, a troubled look on his face.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Casey said.
“Yes,” Kennedy said. Elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands clasped in front of him, staring down at them, his voice came from far away. “In those few seconds I also saw what this country, 85
this planet, will be like a year from now, ten years, a century, and more. All thrown at me, into me. It was like decades of reading and study, as if from the view of a historian, looking back on our history from a future place. Some successes, but mostly our mistakes. I believe I saw an accurate representation of where we are going, given our present priorities. I can tell you it is not a good place, where we are going. If we don’t change course, in a few short decades we will look back longingly on this day, this year.”
“No kidding? You gathered all that information in ten seconds?”
“It was like reading history books not yet written.”
“Whew,” Casey said. “Ok, well, that’s good though, isn’t it? If you know which mistakes lead to the worst outcomes, you know where to concentrate the most effort. Right? Jack?”
Kennedy, still staring into the fire, turned to Casey now with a wistful expression. “I thought the same thing, once. But it isn’t that easy. Someone, I don’t recall who, once penned the phrase, ‘The Law of Unintended Consequences.’ Each action I consider taking has reactions I didn’t visualize.”
“You just lost me. If, in your vision, you saw where we are headed given our present priorities, how can you know about reactions, intended or not, to your attempts to change it?”
“You’re right on point, Casey!” Kennedy said excitedly. “You zero right in to the quintessential crux of an issue. If I saw only the future that would have occurred after my death, how could I claim to know how a policy decision, implemented now, will alter or change that future? You’re gonna love this, Casey. Sit back, clear your head.” Kennedy then explained about the legal pads, and how they came to be.
“So,” Casey said, “you wrote for, what, three days? Everything you could remember from your, what should we call it, your hallucination?”
“Um, not sure I like the connotations of that word.”
“Prophecy? Prevision? Revelation?
“Um…”
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“How about Lightning Bolt?”
“By God Casey, I think you’ve got it. Speed, mind-numbing power. That’s how I feel about the thing. Lightning Bolt it is.”
“Ok. You wrote for three days, everything you could remember from the Lightning Bolt?”
“No, that’s not accurate,” Kennedy said. “I received two separate gifts. I saw the vision of our future, and I remember it. Most of it. You might call it an outline, I suppose. The major headlines describing where we will be, far into the future, given our present tack.
“The legal pads are different, almost indescribable. It felt like a… a subset of skills I didn’t have before. The writing seemed to flow from some deep storage place in my head, through the pen and onto the paper, without my conscious awareness of what I wrote.
When I finished, I had the very real sense that I had emptied out the deep storage place. I have no memory of it.
“In working with the legal pads, as I have for a few weeks, I’ve come to understand that they don’t speak of that one dreadful future we are presently heading for. Rather, they contain clues, a roadmap, you might say, to an almost infinite number of futures. Some better than our present heading, some worse.”
Casey thought for a moment, and then said, “Well, that would seem to be quite a nice thing to have. Twelve nearly filled legal pads, showing us the route to Nirvana. You should be happy, elated.
Why are you not? What else haven’t you told me, Jack?”
“Well…”
“With all this buildup, I can’t wait to see them. Is that in the cards? Am I going to get to hold one of these mysterious legal pads in my hands and read it myself? Jack?”
“Yes, to the first, no to the second.”
“Huh?”
Kennedy wearily got up from his chair. He faced Casey and said, “I’ve brought two with me. I’ll show them to you. It may help me explain this next part. But I can tell you right now, you’re not going to like it.”
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