1963, November 21, Thursday, Dallas
ell arrived by bus Thursday afternoon. It was misty, but other-B wise pleasant, in the mid-sixties. She took a cab to her hotel.
After checking in, while walking to the elevator, she passed a stack of newspapers. She glanced only fleetingly at the headline above the fold of The Dallas Morning News. She was waiting for the elevator when the words she’d read registered consciously. She walked back and reread the entire headline: Storm of Political Con-troversy Swirls Around Kennedy on Visit.
A Kennedy visit? Where, she wondered? Scanning the first few lines of the lead article, she found her answer: the president would be in Dallas tomorrow.
She hadn’t known that, but it didn’t alarm her. Her presence here couldn’t have anything to do with President Kennedy. She walked away, then stopped, went back and bought the paper. Only five cents. Wouldn’t hurt to read the article.
As she rode the elevator to her floor, the newspaper tucked under her arm began to feel bothersome. She ignored it at first, determined not to panic at the chance encounter with a few words of text.
But the feeling grew stronger, as if the paper might reveal a glimpse into her future. She knew it wasn’t logical, but logic hadn’t played an important role in her life, thus far. She’d learned to trust feeling over logic. That kept her safe. She was tempted to rip the paper open now and start scanning the article, but she wanted to be alone when 14
she learned whatever it had to tell her. When the elevator doors opened, she hurried to her room, dropped her suitcase and small duffel bag just inside the door, closed it, and opened the paper.
On the front page were two tiny articles about upcoming classical concerts, a small weather blurb, six column-inches about a USA/Russia confrontation on the Berlin autobahn, and a quip, prominently displayed at the top-right corner of the page, that proclaimed, “Nixon Says JFK May Drop Johnson in 64”. The remaining 90% of the first page comprised three full stories about the JFK
visit to Dallas on Friday. She began reading the first one as she walked to the bed and sat on the edge.
She felt better after reading the first two articles. She’d found nothing to suggest that her trip to Dallas involved the president. The third piece gave her pause. It described the route the presidential motorcade would take as it made its way through Dallas. That’s when the first real voices of worry began to nag at her.
Bell had memorized the street intersection to which she would take a cab on Friday, shortly before noon. She had also picked up a Dallas city map at the bus station and stashed it in her duffel bag.
She took it out now, found her intersection on the map, and then looked at the grainy map sketched in the newspaper. “Oh please, no,” she said, aloud, to the empty room.
She stood up and began pacing, nearly in a panic, muttering to herself, “This can’t be. Just can’t be.” It’s too big, she thought, whatever this is, involving the president, it’s too important, and she was just one small girl. What if she failed? What if…
But I’ve never failed. Never before. Self-aware from the day she was born, she knew her gift was a side effect of that awareness.
She had done things with her gift, even when she was young, but she had acted unconsciously then. Her own awareness of her gift, and things she could do with it, had come only in increments throughout her life. Fragments of an incident would occasionally migrate from her subconscious to her conscious mind. Leakage, she called it, and by her early teens she had begun hacking into that leakage, into her own subconscious, looking for answers.
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She stopped pacing, looked up and found her own likeness staring at her from a mirror mounted above a low dresser. Five- eleven, dark complexioned, her long black hair in a chignon today. The clear blue, steely-eyed gaze radiated confidence and determination.
Staring into their depths, she recognized the truth. She hadn’t failed as a child, a mere bystander who looked on while her subconscious did all the work, and she hadn’t failed more recently, after she’d learned to control the telepathic ability that had laid buried in her subconscious for so long . She hadn’t failed before, and she would not fail now. It was all there in her eyes.
She studied the maps again, but gained nothing. The map in the paper was a low-quality sketch. She couldn’t determine, with certainty, how close she would be to the president. She glanced at the window. It was still light out. On impulse, she grabbed the city map, her newspaper and purse, and hailed a cab in front of her hotel. She asked the driver if she could get to the intersection of Elm and Houston before dark. The driver said yes, twenty minutes, tops.
She arrived at 5:01 PM, asked the driver to wait, got out of the cab and looked around. Her position Friday was to be in a parking lot behind the tall building. She walked around the building, and from halfway across the parking lot, she could see the place she was to stand, in the shade of a few trees. Looking up, she got a sick feeling in her stomach. Something about that building, she thought.
She walked back to Elm St. The grainy newspaper sketch was barely readable. She still couldn’t determine if the motorcade would stay on Main Street, keeping the president a good block away from the tall building, or turn on Elm, which would, for a short time, place the president directly below the building. She walked to the cab, and the cabbie rolled down his window. She showed him the newspaper, asked if he knew, was it Main or Elm?
With no hesitation, he said they would have to turn down Elm to have access to the ramp to Stemmons Freeway. He advised her to stay on Elm if she wanted the best view. He thought she was scoping out the best spot to watch the parade.
There it is, she thought, as she walked down Elm again and 16
looked north to her spot. She would be a stone’s throw from the president. She got a chill. It was dark now. She got back into the cab. On the ride to her hotel, she thought about her predicament.
She understood, now. This incident would be important, perhaps the most important of her life.
For most of her nearly twenty years, she had believed herself alone with her ability. Over the last two years, however, she had twice noticed people being helpful, in ways she could not explain rationally. It felt as if a thread connected her to people around her, a thread she could not see, though it influenced events, causes or outcomes. She still wasn’t sure if she was on her own, or if a greater force worked within her, but she had long ago given up trying to understand the “how and why” of her ability. She had learned to accept that it would govern her life. She was comfortable with that.
She felt that her life had been, and would continue to be, enriched by the good she could do. She could tell no one of her ability. No one would believe her. She was comfortable with that as well.
She still hoped this incident would not involve JFK, but she braced for the worst. She had good reason: in previous incidents she had interfered with death. Therefore, she reasoned, with JFK involved, it could mean only one thing: assassination. Right now, it was the scariest word she knew. If that word was the reason she was here, then powerful men in high places, men unaccustomed to losing, had likely ordered it. It was audacious of her to think she could stop such a thing from happening. She began to panic. Imagined failure. Imagined collecting her suitcase and boarding the next east-bound bus. No one would know. Not even her dad. She could make up a story; he’d have no way of knowing it wasn’t true. No, wait. If JFK really were assassinated, her dad would want to know why she had to be in Dallas on the same day. He’d even have to wonder if she’d had something to do with it. That would be worse. Being suspected of such a thing would be worse than failing to prevent it. Her panic intensified. Her head spun. Just as she was about to abandon her suitcase in the hotel and tell the cabbie to head for the bus station, the words welled up from deep within, and she spoke them 17
aloud: “I am one. I am old.” The cabbie looked at her in the rearview mirror. She forced a smile. “Pay me no mind,” she said. “Just talking to myself again”
She had all but forgotten them: the words that had formed in her mind so long ago, before she had even learned to speak. Recalling them now, she thought of how far she had come since that day. Life had been so much simpler then… She was thirty seconds into her reverie when she realized her panic had subsided. Six words from infancy had calmed her panic—not completely though. Panic still lurked, like a giant hand encircling her heart. Even now, she could feel wild pounding in her chest as the hand squeezed again…
her breathing choked off… “I am one. I am old,” she began muttering, whispering, so the cabbie would not hear…
Seven repetitions later, she breathed normally again. The six words were like a mantra that chased away the panic, allowing her to think. But she had nothing to think about. She’d known it from the start. She had to stay in Dallas. She had to try. She couldn’t imagine living with the weight of this if she didn’t even try.
She felt as if she were stepping off a ledge into darkness, teth-ered to an ability that still controlled her more than she controlled it. She was frightened out of her wits, but she would keep reminding herself that she had never failed before, and she was better equipped now than she had been in times past. Now, she had her mantra.
The next day, Friday the 22nd, Bell Houston checked out early.
The motorcade was scheduled to cruise through Dealey Plaza at 12:10 PM, but she wasn’t about to fail because her cab got caught in a traffic jam caused by JFK’s own motorcade. She caught a cab in front of her hotel at 8:45 AM, dumped her bags into a bus station locker, and asked her driver to take her to the café or bakery nearest to Dealey Plaza. She had a light breakfast and sat for an hour nursing the last cup of coffee.
After a trip to the restroom, which included 21 mantra repetitions, she hiked the two blocks to Dealey Plaza, arriving at 11:35.
From the time she left the small bakery, no one saw her, not even 18
those who looked right at her. She would make decisions now, and whether she succeeded or failed, she thought it best that no one recalled seeing her here. In like manner, her taxi driver and those in the bakery would not remember her. It was an easy mental twitch.
If only the rest of the day would pass as effortlessly.
At 11:59 AM, Bell Houston stood in the shade west of the tall building. The murmur of the crowd on Elm Street had abated. The very breath of the city seemed held in anticipation. Perhaps it was just her. She waited. She worried.
Standing alone, unseen, she thought about other incidents she had experienced—the kids at horse camp, Sally’s mom—so long ago, before she had acquired conscious knowledge of her gift. She would never forget the incredulity she’d felt when she’d stumbled upon it in August 1959. She was 15. It was two weeks before school started. She’d been lying in bed, unable to quiet her mind long enough for sleep to take her. There’d been no gradual build-up to the knowledge. Rather, the sudden jolt of clarity had felt like a slap in the face. She’d sat upright in her bed, rushed to turn on every light in her room, and then she’d sat scrunched up in a corner for the rest of the night, afraid of the knowledge she’d gained.
The thought process that had first led her to the clarity was one way to find it, difficult at first, much like the concentration required to add two large numbers. But once she’d been there a few times, it had become just another mental process, as easy as adding two plus two. Though she’d known nothing of synaptic connections, she had felt the instant each neural pathway established itself. Over a dozen, she’d thought, although she lost count. New pathways! She couldn’t explain how she had come to understand it, but she knew the new pathways connected obscure areas of her mind that had never before connected to each other.
The result, she’d known instinctively, was that she had activated a function that had lain dormant, awaiting the day when she would discover it: telepathy, the ability to communicate, consciously, through her mind. The pathways remained energized while she was engaged. As soon as she lost focus, the pathways de-19
energized. Like a safety interlock switch, she thought. It fascinated her, but it was scary too. She wondered if she could accidentally harm someone.
She didn’t think the contact itself could harm another person; she’d been involved in such contact subconsciously for years and had harmed no one. However, if she consciously engaged another mind, suggesting someone stop to tie his shoes, for example, it would alter that person’s timeline. If he then crossed the street and was killed by a bus, would she feel responsible because she had delayed him for several seconds? She thought so. It made her cautious. She didn’t test her ability for over six months.
Dale Duland was a high school senior who had given up. Bottom of his class. He came to school to sleep. And Bell had changed him. With one session, less than ten seconds, she had planted a seed in Dale’s mind, a desire to learn. He hadn’t climbed far from the bottom; he had a lot of catching-up to do. But he had started reading.
Thinking about Dale, and the dozens of times she had used telepathy since that time with Dale, Bell realized that the dynamics of her involvement were different this time. In the beginning, she had acted only as a conduit to the ability locked inside her subconscious.
That had changed when she learned to activate telepathy. And it changed again today, for today she saw outcomes. She saw the outcome of this day, each hour within this day, each minute, and every instant: a confusing array of mental images that lacked chronologi-cal order. More important, she sensed she was on her own. She saw no means to accomplish the outcomes, or to make sense of the disordered images. Previously, she’d only been required to show up.
Why, she wondered, was it all suddenly up to her?
It had been years since the horse camp incident. Perhaps her maturity had caused the change to her involvement, in which case it was inevitable, would have occurred under any circumstances. Or, perhaps her meddling, her having developed the telepathy into a conscious ability, had caused the change. In that case, she had herself to blame. Either way, she owned it now. Autopilot was off, control switched to manual. She would have to make decisions now.
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What if she chose wrong?
She had free will. She could still walk away. The thought occurred, but only briefly. She had rejected that option last night in the cab. She might fail, but not without trying. She recited the words, moving her lips, but producing no sound: “I am one. I am old.” She repeated the six-word phrase only seven times this time.
Four other times, earlier today, she had called upon the calming method. The first, while still in her hotel room, had required 29 repetitions of the phrase to calm her. The next required 21, then 18, and 13. And seven this time. A good trend, if she could trust it.
Three Dallas cops walked into her parking lot within minutes of her own arrival. All young, she noted. Probably chosen by a supervisor for duty away from the action, where their inexperience wouldn’t matter. If only that supervisor knew, she thought.
The cops were over 100 yards away, and he was ninety percent obscured by the other two, but she knew it was he. His carriage was the only clue she needed. Before he had even turned to face her, she knew he was the same boy she’d seen only once, four years earlier, in Chicago’s Grant Park; another thread, another connection. She’d been admiring Buckingham Fountain when he and his family had walked past her. From overheard conversation she deduced he was from a small town in Wisconsin, in Chicago visiting relatives. A boy then, perhaps, but a man now, emitting the same air of calm, earthy confidence that had made him stand out from the crowd four years earlier. A shade under six feet, one eighty-five, light sandy hair.
She no longer felt as if she’d be working solo today in Dallas.
Almost 11:45. To be certain her cop patrolled nearest the tall building, she sent a gentle suggestion to all three. They split up and began walking their posts. She knew the complexity of life was about to change for her cop, and she wondered what his life had been like before today. But her telepathy was one-way; she couldn’t read minds. She didn’t even know his name.
21
