Work Text:
Well, if you were going to kill yourself, it might as well be at work. You weren't going to do it at home. You couldn’t do it at home, not in front of the girls. The last thing you wanted was for either June or Rachel to find your dead body in the house after you had blown your brains out. You wouldn’t want it for Marina either, of course, you wouldn’t, she was your wife. But at the same time, she was the adult in all of this; she’d have to see what you did to yourself eventually. So might as well do all that you can to make sure the kids don’t have to see their dad like that when possible.
The song on the radio starting to fade out brought you back to reality. You haven’t shot yourself, not yet, at least. You scan the note you brought with you before putting it away in your lunchbox. You told Marina last night that you were going to make your lunch for today. That was a lie. You actually bought lunch from somewhere earlier and used your lunchbox to hide your suicide note and the gun you were going to shoot yourself with. You sigh and get up as the song ends, getting to the radio as the announcer comes back on.
“That was the Blue Ridge Boys and ‘Heartache Serenade’. And now we take you to KTEX reporter Harry-” the announcer started before you shut off the radio.
You go back to the boxes you were sitting on earlier and take out the note again, reading it more thoroughly before taking out the gun from your lunchbox. You can’t help but muse on it slightly. That little hunk of metal could kill a man in just a couple of seconds, if someone had the proper aim. It was going to kill a man; it was going to kill you. You bring yourself back to the present moment and bring the gun to your head. You close your eyes and try to calm your nerves; for all the planning that went into this, it was still quite nerve-wracking. But before you could pull the trigger, you heard whistling from behind one of the bookshelves. You were confused; everyone who could’ve been up here had left for lunch already. And not only that, the song gave you a weird sense of déjà vu. You swear you’ve heard it before, but you couldn’t place it. It sounded too folky for it to have been playing on the radio recently, but you swear you’ve heard it before. It almost reminded you of one of those old folk songs you had to learn in elementary school.
You turned to look at the source of the whistling and saw a man walking slowly down the aisle between bookshelves. Was he browsing? In a goddamn schoolbook warehouse? His clothes looked about a century out of date, but he still looked well-dressed. His face almost looked familiar; this was someone you knew you should recognize from somewhere, but for some reason, your brain wasn’t connecting the dots. The dark, curly hair, the mustache that only he could make work, the weirdly out-of-date clothes, this guy’s name was on the tip of your tongue, but it wasn’t coming to you.
“Oh! I’m sorry,” he apologizes once he sees you, “I was just browsing, please just carry on with whatever you were–”
The other man cut himself off when he noticed the gun in your hand. You felt yourself flush as you scrambled to shove the gun back into your lunchbox. He clears his throat and motions towards the only clock in the room.
“Is that the right time?” he asks.
You just glare at him and nod. You had this all planned out. You were going to stay here on the sixth floor while everyone went to lunch and watched the presidential motorcade, and shoot yourself in the head while everyone was out. It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.
“Yes?” he double-checks as he pulls out his pocket watch, looking down at it, “I don’t know what’s the matter with this thing. Excuse me for a moment-”
De-escalation, shit, that was smooth. This guy was annoyingly charismatic. You hated that. You hated his charisma, his charms, his goddamn accent, that fucking drawl he has…He puts the pocket watch away and walks over and turns the radio back on, and comes slightly closer to you.
“-speaking to you from Love Field, where the President’s plane has just touched down and is taxiing over to us across the tarmac.” You hear over the radio, “ We understand the President intends to speak briefly here at the airport before proceeding into Dallas, where-”
You race over to the radio and turn it off again, unknowingly switching places with the man you were speaking with. He picks up your note behind your back and scans over it.
“Dearest Marina,
Today, I end my life so your life can begin,” he reads out loud, “Last night you said I oppressed you, that-”
You quickly race over to him as you realize what he was reading and snatch your suicide note out of his hands, cutting him off before he could finish reading it.
“I’m sorry, is that yours?” he asks.
“Fuck you,” you sneer as you stuff the note back into your lunchbox.
“We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot here.” He responds, looking taken aback, “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t-”
You don’t give him a chance to finish trying to de-escalate a second time before picking up your lunchbox and turning around. If this southern piece of shit wasn’t going to let you finish this out, you were going to find somewhere else to do it.
“You aren’t leaving, are you?” he asks.
You hear footsteps behind you; no doubt, this guy is following you. His steps were uneven, like he had a slight limp. Then a thought pops into your head that his left leg had broken at some point, and something happened that stopped it from healing properly.
“Don’t leave now. Come on, I didn’t mean to…” You hear him plead, his voice sounding almost sympathetic.
You were from down south. You knew fake sympathy when you heard it, and this guy’s voice was oozing with it. You knew he had all the sincerity of someone’s grandma telling you to bless your heart. Either way, you continue towards the staircase that leads to the ground floor of the depository. If your intuition about his leg was true, there was no way he could follow you. You had given your coworkers the ok to close the elevators, and there was no way he was comfortable enough to follow you down six flights of stairs.
“Alik!” You hear him call behind you.
You stop dead in your tracks. You couldn’t believe what you just heard. Did he have the gall to call you Alik? After all of the bullshit he was pulling? How did he even know you used to go by Alik?
“What did you just call me?” you ask, your disbelief and anger clear in your voice.
You couldn’t help but laugh and shake your head slightly. The worst part was that you didn’t even know if he was meaning to piss you off this much.
“Alik.” He repeated. “You used to like that nickname. Back in Minsk. Marina said Lee sounded Chinese, so she called you Alik.” He drawled, leaning onto his cane slightly, “Of course, I don’t have to call you Alik. I just thought-”
“How do you know what Marina called me?” you drilled.
“Oh, I know a lot about you, Lee,” the other man chuckled knowingly.
Now you weren’t sure if he was pissing you off or scaring the shit out of you. He had to have been a part of some three-letter agency. There was no other explanation. All of this had to be some fucked up cover story to get to Marina or the girls.
“Let’s see…Born, November 19, 1939.” he started rattling off, “Father, Robert, died before you were born. Crazy mother, Marguerite. Dropped out of high school at 17. Joined the Marines. Court-martialed twice.” he said that with a bit of second hand embarrassment, “Defected to the Soviet Union, October 1959. Defected back, June 1962. Married, Marina Nikolavena. Two children, June and Rachel. Current employment: stockboy, Texas School Book Depository, Dallas, Texas.”
You just stood there, stunned, trying to take it all in. Whoever this was had basically your whole biography memorized. There was nothing you could say to him, and that was if you wanted to speak with him to begin with. You didn’t. Now, all the doubts that he was some weird ass fed were gone from your mind.
“... Oh,” he continued.
Great. He wasn’t done.
“And this morning, depressed over your estrangement from a wife who views you as a dismal and pathetic failure, you rose before dawn, kissed your sleeping children, put your last hundred dollars and your wedding ring into a demitasse cup which Marina’s mother gave you for a wedding present, and came up here to kill yourself.”
“Who are you?” you drill.
He smiles, more of that fake ‘southern hospitality’ for sure, “I’m your friend, Lee.”
You sigh and roll your eyes. He couldn’t be serious. This guy wasn’t your friend. You barely even knew him.
“I don’t have any friends,” you huff.
“Of course you do,” he chuckles, “You just haven’t met them yet.”
You stare at him for a second and pinch the bridge of your nose. That was the most stereotypical anti-suicide rhetoric you have ever heard. You couldn’t think of something worse if you tried, and you were in no mood to try right now.
“Show me your badge,” you demand.
“My what?” he asked, looking quite confused.
At least he expressed something genuine during this conversation.
“You bastards think you're so smart,” you complain, “I know my rights. You try to interrogate me at my place of business, I-I can sue for harassment. I can-”
“Ah!” he realized, “You think I’m with the FBI!”
“I have a right to see your badge.”
The man dramatically opens his coat and holds out his arms, and smirks at you. Screw being a fed, no fed had this kind of flair naturally like that. That leads you to believe that this guy was an actor or something.
“Search me, Lee,” he goaded, “You think I’ve got a badge. Come on, search me.”
Damn, he was persistent. You almost didn’t want to search him with how he was baiting you. But eventually, you oblige him and start patting the other man down.
“The FBI…” he scoffs, “You really love those morons, don’t you?”
The only thing you found of note was an interesting-looking gun. You were in the Navy, yeah, but you weren’t necessarily a gun guy, so you couldn’t tell specifics. Except that it was old, something that wouldn’t be produced today, and weirdly small for a gun. You remember seeing a drawing or a photo of someone who looked like him with a similar-looking gun. If only you could remember the context, then maybe you’d know why this guy seemed so familiar. But you put it back in the pocket where you found it.
“Hell, why wouldn’t you?” he chuckled, “No one else cares if you live or die, those guys can’t get enough of you. ‘How was your day, Lee? Sell any secrets to the Soviets? Sabotage any defence plans? Kick off your shoes and tell us all about it!’”
That sets you off, and you shove him hard. So hard he stumbles back and has to brace himself on some boxes.
“Fuck you, whoever you are! ” you sneer.
That made you realize that you never did learn his name, with all his ‘I’m your friend, Lee’ bullshit.
You wanted to scream at him more, shove him harder, something, anything, just to get him to leave you the hell alone and go back to wherever the fuck he came from.
“Lee…” you hear him say behind you in that grading drawl he had.
You turn around and you see him with the most annoying ass fucking smile behind you.
“I’m sorry, Lee. It’s just so sad…” he consoles, placing his hand on your face.
You recoil, but before you can make distance, he grabs your wrist. Oh… you were definitely convinced now that he was one of those people. When you finally dared to look him in the face again, you noticed his expression had softened. Was he feeling actual sympathy now? Or was this another trick to get you to calm down enough to be open to whatever he came up here to sell you?
“I mean, it’s all you ever wanted, isn’t it? Someone who won’t leave you alone. Someone who wants to hear about your day,” he says softly, and you swear you feel him stroke your cheek.
And as quickly as he was intimate, the other man lets go of you and starts to walk away from you. Your eyes were drawn to the slight limp he had, and you guessed you were right after all.
“Someone, anyone – your mother. Mother Russia. The Marines. Your wife Marina,” he shakes his head, “Attention must be paid.”
“What does that mean?” you ask.
“It’s from a play,” he explains, “About a salesman. A man very much like you, Lee.” He turned around and looked back at you. “Independent, proud, a decent man who tries and tries but never gets a break. So he does something dumb. When things go really sour, when he realizes his whole life has been a failure built on lies, he kills himself. And when he’s dead, his wife stands at his grave and says, ‘Attention must be paid. ’ She has to beg the world to pay attention to this poor, misguided nobody…” He sighs and clicks his tongue, putting his hand on his hip in some sort of display of pity. “I’ll tell you something, I’m an actor, Lee. And I’m a good one. But Willy Loman is a part that I could never play. And I don’t think that you should play it either.”
Ok. He just beat his own record for most annoyingly stereotypical anti-suicide rhetoric. That was the worst bullshit of an excuse to not kill yourself. It made you want to shoot yourself in the head even more, really. But either way, your mind couldn’t help but latch on to that name he mentioned. Willy Loman… that guy almost sounded familiar. You think about it for a second before letting it go.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you tell him.
“What do you want, Lee?” he asks.
You stare at him blankly in disbelief, “You know so much, why don’t you tell me?”
“You want what everybody wants. To be appreciated, to be vaulted. To be in other people’s thoughts. For them to think of you and smile…”He walks towards you and puts his hand on your shoulder. “You want someone to love you, Lee. Right?”
You guessed he was right; those were all universal experiences if you thought about it. You couldn’t help but feel a bit of a pang in your chest at how true his words were.
“Isn’t that it?... Lee?” He asks, backing up to give you space.
You sigh, rubbing one arm as you look down and away from him.
“Yes,” you admit sadly.
“Forget it,” he shrugged.
“What?” you asked.
You couldn’t help but laugh. You couldn’t believe it. This guy was just trying to get you to not kill yourself, but he just told you to forget about one of the most basic human experiences.
“It’s never going to happen,” he explains, “It’s a fantasy. You’ve got to give it up.”
“I’m going to kill myself!” you cry, “Don’t you think I've given up?!”
“No. I think you’re going to kill yourself because you think that’s how you get it,” he tells you, “‘When I’m dead, then they’ll be sorry! When I’m dead, they’ll know how much they loved me!’ When you close your eyes, you probably see the funeral, don’t you, Lee?”
You’re glaring at him, starting to genuinely consider a murder-suicide right about now.
“A gentle rain is falling,” he stretches his arm out, as if painting a picture, “Everybody has umbrellas-”
“Shut up!” you yell with tears in your eyes.
“There’s Marina, weeping quietly. Your sobbing children clutching at her skirt. Your mom, your dad, every boss who ever fired you-”
“ Shut the fuck up !”
You’d say more, at least something about bringing Marina and the kids into this if you weren’t about to cry. You wipe the stray tears from your eyes, hoping that he didn’t notice how close you were to crying.
“I’m sorry, Lee,” he says with a hint of a laugh in his voice, “It’s just so childish. It’s so dumb -”
“You think it’s dumb ?” you ask, still sounding closer to tears than you’d like, “If I shouldn’t kill myself, what should I do? Go home? Beg her to take me back? Plead with her? Beat her up?”
Marina’s screams still rang in your ears if you listened closely enough: all the fights that turned screaming matches, her wails as she begged you to stop beating her. More tears threatened your eyes as you thought about it.
“You tried all that. It doesn’t work,” he comments.
“I know it doesn’t work!” you plead, “So tell me what I should do!”
“You should kill the President of the United States,” he suggested.
You blink a couple of times. He couldn’t be serious. He did not just suggest you murder the president. You came here to kill yourself, not to commit murder.
“ What ?”
“His plane landed at the airport fifteen minutes ago,” the other man elaborated, “He’s coming down to make a speech. His motorcade is going to go right past this window. When it does, you shoot him.”
“You’re nuts,” you laugh.
“Maybe I am,” he shrugs, “So what?”
“I didn’t come here to shoot the president,” you remind him.
“He didn’t come to get shot…”
What kind of logic was that? No one goes anywhere to get shot by someone else, unless they were getting executed or something.
“All your life, you’ve been a victim, Lee. A victim of indifference and neglect. Of your mother’s scorn, your wife’s contempt, of Soviet stupidity, American injustice. You’ve finally had enough, so how are you planning to get even? By becoming your own victim.”
“I’m not a murderer,” you plead.
“Who said you were?” he asks.
“Lee, when you kill a president, it isn’t murder,” he says, placing a hand on your shoulder, “Murder is a tawdry little crime; it's born of greed, or lust, or liquor. Adulterers and shopkeepers get murdered. But when a president gets killed, when Julius Caesar got killed… he was assassinated. And the man who did it…:
“...Brutus…” you respond, finishing his sentence.
“Ah! You know his name. Brutus assassinated Caesar, what, two thousand years ago? And here’s a high school dropout with a dollar twenty-five an hour job in Dallas, Texas, who knows who he was,” he chuckles, “And they say fame is fleeting…”
He smiles at you. You just stare at him. He was insane, thinking you’d just kill the president on the dime.
“This is stupid. Up here on the sixth floor, what would I do? Throw school books at him?” you muse out loud.
“What’s in the package?” the other man prompted.
“What package?” you asked, looking around.
“The package you brought to work,” he clarified, indicating a package wrapped in a blanket, “What’s in it?”
Duh. You were so caught up in the moment that you forgot the curtain rods you brought in today. You even told multiple people about them.
“Curtian rods,” you told him.
“You sure?”
You were 100 percent certain they were curtain rods. You specifically remember Marina calling you at work, asking you to get rid of them yesterday, packing them last night, and telling Wesley about them after he asked you about them on the drive to work this morning. Plus, you had ridden home on a weekday, you never do that.
“Sure I’m sure. Marina wanted me to take them to the-”
You were cut off by the man throwing you the package. You barely catch it. The package didn’t feel like the curtain rods you brought into work this morning. You readjust the package and fold back the blanket once you have a better grip on it, far enough to reveal a rifle wrapped in it. You look at it silently, baffled at how someone managed to switch curtain rods for a goddamn rifle and for nobody to have noticed. You can’t help but laugh at it.
“That’s a Mannlicher-Carcano. 6.5 millimeter. Stopping range, nine hundred yards,” the man explained, “The sight’s already been adjusted.”
“Who are you?” you ask, still in shock at how someone managed to sneak in a gun underneath everyone’s noses.
“My name is John Wilkes Booth, Lee,” he said smugly.
“John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln…” you think out loud.
You blink for a few seconds. That’s where you recognized him, history textbooks. And it explains why he was trying so hard to get you to shoot Kennedy. He wanted you to follow you follow in his footsteps… But at the same time, you can’t help but have this feeling that you met him before. You know for a fact that couldn’t have happened, Booth died on a tobacco farmer’s porch in Virginia almost a century ago. You couldn’t shake the image, though; you were in a red flannel(why a flannel though was your best guess; you weren’t sure you even owned flannel print anything), talking with him for some reason, you vividly remember the smoky haze and smell of burning wood, along with the crack of a musket as Booth crumples in front of you. The musket ball had fatally severed his cervical spine at the base of his neck, though it wouldn’t kill him immediately. You shake your head, trying to get the memories out of your head before they get to anything too gruesome.
“Attention has been paid…” Booth says to himself with a smirk.
John walks over to you and puts his hand on your shoulder. Even now, you weren’t sure why he was so keen on keeping his hands on you, but feeling his hands on you helped to assure you that all this was real, no matter how much you wished it wasn’t.
“All your life you’ve wanted to be a part of something, Lee,” he tells you, “You’re finally going to get your wish.”
Booth then gestures to the room around you, and more people walk out of the woodwork.
“W-what is this?” you ask, looking around at all the new people.
“The past you never had,” Booth explained, “the future you’d abandoned- it’s called history, Lee.”
The first man stepped up. He was a little shorter than you with light, wild eyes.
“My name is Charles Guiteau,” he introduces cheerfully, “I assassinated President James Garfield.”
Another man steps forward; he is a little more sullen-looking. He was blond with the same light eyes as Guiteau, but he had more of the appearance of a sad puppy instead of a crazed man.
“Leon Czolgosz,” he says quietly, “William McKinley.”
He had a slight accent. It was too light for you to place exactly, only for you to notice that it existed.
Another man comes up to introduce himself. He was wearing a cheap-looking Santa outfit.
“Sam Byck,” he says, sticking his hand out, “I’m going to try to kill Dick Nixon.”
Unless you were going crazy, and god only knew you had convinced yourself that you were already losing it, Nixon lost the election and wasn’t in any political office right now. Either way, another person coming up to introduce themself snapped you out of your thoughts.
“John Hinckley,” he says with stars in his eyes, “Ronald Reagan.”
The two women step up together and look at each other for a second before nodding.
“Lynette Fromme,” the first one, a ginger wearing a red robe, introduces herself.
“Sara Jane Moore,” the other one says.
“Gerald Ford,” they say together.
Gerald Ford? As in House Minority Leader, Gerald Ford? What did that guy do to either of them to get them to want to kill him, nevertheless, both of them?
You see movement from your peripheral vision, and when you look towards the movement, you see this dark, tiny, intense-looking man.
“Zangara,” he says, placing a hand on his chest, “FDR.”
He had a heavy Italian accent, which would’ve explained how dark he was.
You look around at everyone again in confusion. You had no idea what was happening, even less than before.
“I don’t get this-”
“It’s simple, Lee,” Moore says.
“You’re going to bring us back,” Czolgosz says as he nods to those who came before you, the names you recognized as actual US presidents.
Hinckley then nodded to the names you were confused about, “And make us possible.”
You felt your head spin as people started talking. You don’t know who was saying what before they start clapping. You shake your head again and start gathering everything.
“What’s he doing?” you hear Hinckley ask.
“Getting out of here,” you respond.
“You mean you’re not going to do it?” you hear Guiteau ask as you look to the door.
“Goddamn right.”
You hear uproar behind you as you try to push your way past the others to try and inch your way towards the door.
“Lee, I’m sorry,” you hear Booth come up behind you, placing his hand on your shoulder. “I know things are happening kind of fast here. But you can’t leave now.”
“No?” you laugh, “Watch me-”
You shove him off of you and make a beeline toward the door.
“You have a responsibility here, Lee,” Booth called out to you.
“To who? To you?” you respond, still not turning around.
You hear a chorus of yeses from behind you, and you roll your eyes.
“I’m responsible to me and no one else!” you yell as you turn around.
“Not anymore, Lee,” Booth says ominously, walking towards you, blocking your way from the door. “Fifty years from now, they’ll still be arguing about the grassy knoll, the mafia, some Cuban crouched behind a stockade fence, but this- right here, right now- this is the real conspiracy. And you’re a part of it.”
Booth pokes your chest for emphasis. You sneer at him; you would’ve shoved him like earlier if your arms weren’t full with the gun he snuck into the building.
“Get out of my way,” you tell him.
But he doesn’t move, still stubbornly standing his ground.
“Listen to me, Lee,” he warns you, “You have to do this. You won’t get another chance.”
“So what?” you laugh, “So I’ll do something else. I’ll shoot my wife. I’ll shoot my kids. I won’t shoot anyone! Who cares?”
You could tell that really set the other man off. He didn’t show it right away, but you could tell that behind that perfectly rehearsed gentlemanly persona he had, he was absolutely seething. He was furious that everything wasn’t going exactly to plan. That the man he was trying to groom to follow in his footsteps and kill the president dared to question him and the crimes he was trying to make you commit.
“He wants to know who cares–” he starts before cutting himself off, finally letting his persona slip, if only for a few seconds. “I care, you stupid fool! We all care! Haven’t you been listening for Christ’s sake! Are you such a vapid, vacuous nonentity– ”
The others in the room calm him down, and he takes a couple of deep breaths and closes his eyes.
“Sorry…” he starts, putting his persona back on, “I’m sorry. John?”
“Yes, sir?” the other man asks.
Getting a closer look at him, this other John, Hinckley, you think his last name was, looked about your age, if not a year or two younger.
“John,” Booth started, “when Lee was eight, he had a dog. What was his name?”
“Tex,” Hinckley responded immediately.
You felt a pang in your chest as you remembered your old dog. Even to this day, you still miss him. How Hinckley knew about your childhood dog was your best guess. But you still appreciated all the good memories you had with Tex either way.
“The Marines sent him to radar school.” Booth continued, “Where?”
“The Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, Florida.”
“The KGB official who debrfiefed him in the Kremlin, what was his name and rank?”
“Lieutenant-Colonel Boris Kutzov.”
How on earth did this guy remember all of this? You couldn’t even remember half of it.
“Eighteen years from now, when John tries to assassinate President Regan, they’re going to search his room,” Booth says, almost reading your mind, “and you know what they’re going to find? Every book about you ever written.”
Hinckley comes up to you again, still with that star-struck look in his eyes.
“Can I have your autograph?” he asks, almost like he’s meeting his favorite actress or something.
Booth makes his way to one of the windows and gestures out of it.
“Take a look, Lee,” he says, “You know what that is? That’s America. The Land Where Any Kin Can Grow Up to Be President. The Shining City, Lee. It shines so bright you have to shade your eyes…” he laughs and shakes his head. “But in here, this is America too… ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ An American said that. And he was right. But let me tell you something. There are no lives of quiet desperation here. Desperation? Yes. But quiet? I don’t think so. Not today. Today, we’re going to make a joyful noise. This is the big one. You’re the big one. You’re the one that’s going to sum it all up and blow it all wide open.”
You hesitantly walk towards Booth. He meets you in the middle and places his hand on your shoulder again.
“I’ve seen the future, Lee. And you’re in it,” he tells you softly.
He snaps his fingers, and the radio turns back on.
“-and now the motorcade is turning into Elm Street. There’s someone holding up a banner, ‘All the Way with JFK.’ The President is smiling and waving as his car heads for Dealy Plaza, where it will swing past the Texas Book Depository and on to the Trade Mart-”
Booth snaps again, and the radio turns off. You could hear the sounds of police sirens and people cheering, gradually getting louder. Booth goes and gets the rifle and holds it out for you.
“People will hate me.” You tug at the neckline of your shirt.
“They’ll hate you with a passion, Lee,” Booth affirms, “Imagine… people having passionate feelings about Lee Harvey Oswald…”
You start to reach for the gun before hesitating. You weren’t a murderer, despite what everyone else was trying to convince you and Booth’s semantics. You stand there with your hand in place, staring at the rifle Booth was presenting to you. You then drop your hand. If you were going to kill someone, especially someone as important as the president, you had to be sure about it.
Booth shakes his head.
“Somebody help me,” he sighs.
The others look at each other, mumbling about something, before you see someone mouth something like ‘we’ve got you’, and Zangara sighs and walks up to you and Booth.
“Per favore, ti preggo, ti supplico,” he starts.
If only you knew Italian. No wonder he seemed so nervous about speaking; maybe he doesn’t know how to get these thoughts out in English.
“Please, I beseech you,” somebody translated.
“Noi siamo desperati. Smarriti.”
“We are the hopeless ones, the lost ones.”
“Viviamo la nostra vita in esilio…”
“We live our lives in exile…”
“Rimpatriati nella nostra terra…”
“Expatriates in our own country…”
“Siamo portati sin dalla cascita a disperarci…”
“We drift from birth to death, despairing…”
“Inconsolabili...”
“Inconsolable…”
“Ma attraverso la tua azione, possiamo sperare…”
“But through you and your act, we dare to hope…”
“Attraverso le tue azioni possiamo vavvivarchi, darci un senso…”
“Through you and your act, we are revived and given meaning…”
“Ognuna delle nostre vite e delle azioni diventano significative…”
“Our lives, our acts are given meaning…”
“Le nostre frustrazioni svaniscono...”
“Our frustrations fall away…”
“I nostri sogni profondi diventano veri…”
“Our fondest dreams come true…”
“Oggi, attraverso te, siamo rinati…”
“Today, we are reborn, through you...”
“We need you, Lee,” Booth says.
“Without you, we’re just footnotes in a history book,” one of the women says.
“Disappointed office seeker,” Guiteau smiles.
“Deranged immigrant,” Czolgosz mumbles.
“Vainglorious actor,” Booth rolls his eyes.
“Without you, we’re a bunch of freaks.”
“With you, we’re a force of history.”
“We become immortal.”
“Finally, we belong.”
“To one another.”
“To the nation.”
“To the ages.”
“Bring us together, babe.”
“You think you can’t connect? Connect to us”
“You think you’re powerless? Empower us.”
“It’s in your grasp, Lee,” Booth tells you, “All you have to do is move your little finger–you can close the New York Stock Exchange.”
“Shut down schools in Indonesia,” Guiteau says.
“In Florence, Italy, a woman will leap from the Duomo clutching a picture of your victim and cursing your name,” Moore says.
“Your wife will weep,” Czolgosz says.
“His wife will weep,” Fromme says.
“The world will weep.”
“Grief. Grief beyond imagining.”
“Despair–”
“The death of innocence and hope–”
The bitter burdens of which you bear–”
“The bitter truths you carry in your heart–”
“You can share them with the world.”
“You have the power of Pandora’s Box, Lee. Open it…”
Booth holds out the rifle again. You take it this time and head to the window. The others start saying stuff behind you, but you drown them out. You breathe to try and calm your beating heart.
You fire a shot, but miss. You fire two more, and one of them hits. You turn around and see that everyone else in the room has disappeared. That’s when you really started to panic. You drop the gun and start running down multiple flights of stairs. You quickly stop on the second floor to get something to drink out of the vending machine. The whole time you were looking around the room, paranoid that everyone knew that you were the one who just shot the president. You run down the rest of the stairs, and instead of finding yourself in Dealy Plaza, you’re blasted with carnival lights and the smell of fried food.