The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (27 page)

“Somebody pulled me up and yelled that we were supposed to all go to in front of the Hilton. I ran like hell all the way to the railroad tracks along with everybody else and that was where the Guard caught us with the tear gas. Man, I thought I was going to die of tear-gas suffocation if I didn’t get trampled by the people I was with. Everyone was running around like crazy. I don’t know how we ever got out of there but somebody found a way onto Michigan Avenue and somehow we all followed. And the Guard followed after us. Somebody said later they weren’t supposed to, but they did. And they weren’t carrying popguns.

“Well, we ran smack into Ralph Abernathy and his Poor People’s Campaign mule train and that was more confusion. Then the Guard waded in and a lot of Poor People went to the hospital that night (it was after seven by then). I’ll never forget that, or the sight of all those TV cameras and the bright lights shining in our eyes. We were all staggering around when a fresh bus-load of riot cops arrived, and that’s another sight I’ll never forget—two dozen beefy bruisers in riot gear shooting out of that bus like they were being shot from cannons and landing on all of us with both feet and their billyclubs. I lost my front teeth and I was so freaked I didn’t even feel it until the next day.

“I was freaked, but I was also furious. We were all furious. It was like, Johnson would send us to Vietnam to be killed or he’d let us be killed by Daley’s madman cops on the Chicago streets, it didn’t matter to him. I think a lot of us expected the convention to adjourn in protest at our treatment. At least that Bobby Kennedy would speak out in protest against the brutality. The name Kennedy
meant
human rights, after all. Nobody knew that Kennedy had been removed from the convention center under heavy guard because they were all convinced that someone would make another attempt on his life. I heard that later, before they clamped down on all the information. He was about to get the fucking
nomination
and he was on his way back to his hotel. They said Madman Johnson was more like Mad-Dog Johnson over that, but who the fuck knows?

“George McGovern was at the podium when we busted in. I hadn’t really been intending to be in that group that busted in, but I got carried along and when I saw we were going to crash the amphitheater, I thought, what the fuck.

“I almost got crushed against the doors before they gave, and I barely missed falling on my face and getting run over by six thousand screaming demonstrators. And the first person I saw was Annie Phillips.

“I thought I was in a Fellini film. She was dressed in this godawful
maid’s
uniform with a handkerchief around her head mashing down her Afro, but I knew it was her. We looked right into each other’s eyes as I went by, still more carried along with the crowd than running on my own and she put both hands over her mouth in horror. That was the last time I saw her until she was on TV.

“I managed to get out of the way and stay to the back of the amphitheater itself. I just wanted to catch my breath and try to think how I was going to get out from all this shit without getting my head split open by a crazy Guardsman or a cop. I was still there when the bomb went off down front.

“The sound was so loud I thought my ears were bleeding. Automatically, I dropped to the floor and covered my head. There was a little debris, not much, where I was. When I finally dared to look, what I saw didn’t make any sense. I still can’t tell you exactly what I saw. I blocked it out. But sometimes, I think I dream it. I dream that I saw Johnson’s head sitting on a Texas flagpole. I’m pretty sure that’s just my imagination, because in the dream, he’s got this vaguely surprised-annoyed expression on his saggy old face, like he’s saying,
Whut the fuck is goin’ on here
?

“Anyway, the next thing I knew, I was out on the street again, and somebody was crying about they were bombing us now, along with the Vietnamese. Which was about the time the Guard opened fire, thinking we were bombing them, I guess.

“I was lucky. I took a bullet in my thigh and it put me out of the action. Just a flesh wound, really. It bled pretty impressively for a while and then quit. By then, I was so out of my head that I can’t even tell you where I staggered off to. The people who found me in their front yard the next morning took care of me and got me to a hospital. It was a five-hour wait in the emergency room. That was where I was when I heard about Kennedy.”

Part of the data recovered
from a disk
 taken in a raid on an illegal
software laboratory,
March, 1981

Jack Kennedy had died in the middle of a Dallas street, his head blown off in front of thousands of spectators and his horrified wife. Bobby Kennedy had narrowly missed meeting his end during a moment of triumph in a Los Angeles hotel. Ultimately, that seemed to have been only a brief reprieve before fate caught up with him…

Jasmine Chang:

“Everyone heard the explosion but nobody knew whether it was something the demonstrators had done, or if the National Guard had rolled in a tank or if the world had come to an end. I ran down to the lobby with just about everyone else on the staff and a good many of the hotel guests, trying to see what was happening outside without having to go out in it. Nobody wanted to go outside. That night, the manager on duty had told us that anyone who wanted could stay over if we didn’t mind roughing it in the meeting rooms. I made myself a sleeping bag out of spare linens under a heavy table in one of the smaller rooms. The night before, the cops had cracked one of the dining room windows with a demonstrator’s head. I wasn’t about to risk my neck going out in that frenzy.

“Well, after the explosion, we heard the rifle-fire. Then the street in front of the hotel, already crowded, was
packed
all of a sudden. Wall-to-wall cops and demonstrators, and the cops were swinging at anything they could reach. They were
scything
their way through the crowd, you see—they were mowing people down to make paths so they could walk. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. For a while it was
the
worst. I wish it could have stayed that way.

“The lobby was filling up, too, but nobody really noticed because we were all watching that sickening scene outside. The whole world was watching, they said. I saw a camera crew and all I could think was their equipment was going to get smashed to bits.

“I don’t know when Kennedy came down to the lobby. I don’t know why the Secret Service didn’t stop him, I don’t know what he thought he could do. He must have been watching from his window. Maybe he thought he could actually address the crowd—as if anyone could have heard him. Anyway, he was there in the lobby and none of us really noticed him.

“The demonstrator who forced his way into the revolving door—he was just a kid, he looked about fifteen years old to me. Scared out of his mind. The revolving door was supposed to be locked, but when I saw that kid’s face, I was glad it wasn’t.

“Then the cops tried to force their way in after him but they got stuck, there was a billy club jammed in the door or something. And the kid was babbling about how they’d blown up Kennedy at the convention. They threw a bomb and killed Kennedy! They blew him up with Johnson and McGovern!’ he was yelling over and over. And Bobby Kennedy himself rushed over to the kid. I’m pretty sure that was the first any of us really noticed him, when it registered. I remember, I felt shocked and surprised and numb all at once, seeing Kennedy right there, right in the middle of a lobby. Like he was anybody. And nobody else moved, we all just stood there and stared like dummies.

“And Kennedy was trying to tell the kid who he was, that he wasn’t dead and what bomb and all that. The kid got even more hysterical, and Kennedy was shaking him, trying to get something coherent out of him, we’re all standing there watching and finally the cops manage to get through the revolving door.

“They must have thought the kid was attacking Kennedy. That’s all I can figure. Even if that’s not how they looked. The cops. They looked…
weird
. Like they didn’t know what they were doing, or they did know but they’d forgotten why they were supposed to do it. I don’t know. I don’t
know
. But it was so weird, because they all looked exactly alike to me right at that moment, even though when I looked at them again after, they weren’t anything alike, even in their uniforms. But they looked like identical dolls then, or puppets, because they moved all at once together. Like a kick-line of chorus girls, you know? Except that it wasn’t their legs that came up but their arms.

“I know that when they raised their guns, they were looking at the kid, and I thought, ‘No, wait!’ I tried to move toward them, I was reaching out and they fired.

“It was like another bomb had gone off. For a moment, I thought another bomb had gone off, just a split second before they were going to fire. Then John Kennedy—I mean, Bobby,
Bobby
Kennedy— that’s a Freudian slip, isn’t it?—he did this clumsy whirl around and it looked like he was turning around in anger, like people do sometimes, you know? like he was going, ‘Dammit, I’m leaving!’ And then he went down, and it was so awful because— well, this is going to sound really strange, I guess, but… well… when you see people get shot on a TV show, it’s like choreographed or something, they do these kind of graceful falls. Kennedy was… they’d robbed him of his dignity. That’s the only way I can think to put it. They shot him and humiliated him all at once, he looked clumsy and awkward and helpless.

“And I was outraged at that: I know it must sound weird, a man got shot, killed, and I’m talking about how he looked undignified. But that’s like what taking someone’s life is—taking their humanity, making them a thing. And I was outraged. I wanted to grab one of those cops’ guns and make
them
into things. Not just because it was Bobby Kennedy, it could have been anyone on that floor at that moment, the kid, the manager, my supervisor—and I hated my supervisor’s guts.

“Right then, I understood what the demonstrations were about, and I was against the war. Up until then, I’d been kind of for it—not really
for
it, more like, ‘I hate war, but you’re supposed to serve your country.’ But right then, I understood how horrifying it must be to be told to make somebody into a thing, or be told you have to go out and risk being made into a thing. To kill, to be killed.

“All that went through my mind in a split second and then I started screaming. Then I heard this
noise
… under my screams, I heard this weird groan. It was Kennedy. They say he was dead by then and it must have been the air going out of his lungs past his vocal cords that made the sound. Awful. Just awful. I ran and pulled the fire alarm. It was the only thing I could think to do. And this other chambermaid, Lucy Anderson, she started pounding on the front windows and screaming, ‘Stop! Stop! They killed Kennedy! They killed Kennedy!’ Probably nobody could hear her, but even if anyone had, it wouldn’t have mattered, because most of the people out there thought Kennedy was already dead in the explosion.

“It wasn’t the Fire Department that used the hoses on those people. The cops commandeered the fire trucks and did that. And we were stuck in that hotel for another whole day and night. Even after they cleared the streets, they wouldn’t let any of us go anywhere. Like house arrest.

“The questioning was awful. Nobody mistreated me or hit me or anything like that, it was just that they kept
at
me. I had to tell what I saw over and over and over and over until I thought they were either trying to drive me out of my mind so I wouldn’t be able to testify against those cops, or trying to find some way to make it seem like I was really the one who’d done it.

“By the time they told me I could leave the hotel, I was mad at the world, I can tell you. Especially since that Secret Service agent or whoever he was told me I’d be a lot happier if I moved out of Chicago and started over somewhere else. He really screwed that one up, and it was lucky for me he did. I left, and I was far, far away when the shit really hit the fan. I started over, all right—I got a new name and a new identity. Everybody else who was in that lobby—Lucy Anderson, the manager, the other staff and guests—they all disappeared. The last anyone saw of them, the Secret Service was taking them away. The cops vanished, too, but I have a feeling they didn’t vanish to quite the same thing as the others. And the kid killed himself.
They
said. Right, sure. I bet he couldn’t survive the interrogation.

“Of course, all that was a long time ago. Hard to imagine now how things were then. I was only twenty, then. I was working days and taking college courses at night. I wanted to be a teacher. Now I’m in my early forties, and sometimes I think I dreamed it all. I dreamed that I lived in a country where people
voted
their leaders into office, where you just had to be old enough and not be a convicted felon and you could vote. Instead of having to take those psychological tests and wait for the investigators to give you a voting clearance. It is like a dream, isn’t it? Imagining that there was a time in this country when you could be anything you wanted to be, a teacher, a doctor, a banker, a scientist. I was going to be a teacher. I was going to be a history teacher, but those are mostly white people. My family’s been in this country forever, but because I’m Oriental, I’ve got conditional citizenship now… and I was
born
here! I suppose I shouldn’t complain. If anyone found out I saw Kennedy get it, I’d probably be unconditionally dead. Because everyone
knows
that the rumor that Kennedy was shot by some cops with a bad aim in a hotel lobby is just another stupid rumor, like the second gunman in Dallas in 1963. Everyone knows Kennedy died in the explosion at the convention center. That’s the official version of how he died and if it’s the official version, government certified, that’s the truth.