Joel Arnold - Fetal Bait Apocalypse - 3 Collections in 1

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.

“Mr. Lennon?”

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. Stop it! Don’t!

He aims.

I send a sharp pain through his head.

No no no no no

He squeezes the trigger. The gun jerks in his hand.

One. Two. Three. Four.

Five.

Oh, God. Please, no. But the shots — all five of them — go wide.

Why not Gandhi? Why not JFK? Why not prevent the events of 9/11? Gandhi and JFK were too far in the past. It would’ve taken many more years of practice, and there was too much involved that I didn’t know about. And the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, involved getting into too many minds. I would’ve killed myself trying, and not a damn thing would’ve changed.

I woke up in a hospital after saving John Lennon’s life. My head pounded. IV’s dripped into my veins. I had no idea where or when I was. It took me a while to remember my own name. I fumbled for the cord that held the call button for the nurse’s station. Even as I pressed it, I felt the phantom vibrations of a discharging gun. A nurse arrived, tall and pretty and young.

I smiled stupidly at her.

“You had us worried,” she said.

“What year is this?” I gasped.

She told me.

I was back.

I emerged from the hospital into the bright sunlight of summer. I searched my new memory for who I was. Where did I live? Instinct led me to a studio apartment above a noisy pizza joint, but on the way there, I stopped at a Tower Records. I looked under L.

LENNON, JOHN.

My mouth dropped open. I barely held in a shout of joy. There were eight compact discs of Lennon’s music that had been recorded after 1980.

I’d done it.

This was the world now. The new world. Here John Lennon still lived and breathed and wrote music. Eight CD’s! I carried them to the counter as if carrying a handful of diamonds and pulled out my wallet. The clerk rang them up.

All I had was a ten-dollar bill, a driver’s license, and a library card. What happened to my Citibank MasterCard? My World Perks Visa? My Platinum American Express? What happened to the pictures of Jill and Brianna?

I looked at the clerk. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I—”

The clerk sighed, as if to say Thanks for wasting my time.

Jill and Brianna.

The clerk asked, “Are you okay?”

I turned and stumbled out the door, gasping, choking on the stale air that filled my mouth.

I ran to the apartment without thinking, my new memory guiding me there. I didn’t notice what a shit-hole it was at first, because I was so desperate, crazed, thinking about Jill and Brianna. Where were they? What had I done to them?

Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “A Sound of Thunder” about a man who travels back to the time of the dinosaurs and accidentally kills a butterfly. When he returns to the present, he realizes with horror that this one misstep has changed the course of history.

I always knew it was possible. But I never thought I’d lose Jill because of my actions. And God help me, I never thought I’d lose Brianna. Sweet little Bree. I don’t know how, exactly. What different steps through life I took due to John Lennon surviving that assassination attempt all those years ago. But now I owned two sets of memories. The old one turning slowly to fog, the new one solidifying like coal into a diamond.

I never met Jill, so we never had a daughter.

What, then, had I become?

I searched my apartment. It already felt familiar. I knew where everything was even before finding it — not that there was much to find. Pay stubs from a place called the Rigel Company. What did I — I was a mailroom clerk there. Jesus, I already felt a pang of the job’s drudgery.

In my old life (I’m calling it “my old life” already?) I was an accountant at a software company. Not the best, but it paid well. A lot better than a mail clerk position. Jill was the one who got me out of the world of dead-end jobs, encouraging me to finish my college degree, to give myself some credit.

Jill—

But here in the trash and piled up next to it were empty pizza boxes, empty cans of tuna and Campbell’s soup and three empty bottles of Jim Beam. God, how long had it been since I’d had a drink? In this new life, apparently not long. Already I felt my tongue slide across my lips in anticipation of a bourbon and Coke.

This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right. But—

Something caught my eye. A stack of compact discs piled next to a portable CD player. Within that pile were six post-1980 John Lennon CD’s.

I forgot about my loss, my newfound poverty, and picked out a CD.

On the cover was a picture of John and Yoko walking through Central Park with a seven year old Sean. I slid a disc into the CD player and pressed play .

Strangely enough, the songs were familiar, like old friends, already stored in my new set of memories. And just like John’s pre-1980 songs, these cut to the bone. He sang with such raw emotion and power, I wondered how he was able to keep from breaking down during each take. It was amazing. Tears dripped from my eyes in a slow, gentle rain.

Listen—

Music bypasses the skin, the muscle, the bone and travels directly to the heart and mind. It amplifies our feelings and reminds us of our soul. Music, like nothing else, spreads our humanity from person to person like the shockwave of a nuclear bomb.