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1.
He should be dead, but he is not.
He is not the man who bled out on the floor of a barn so many years ago. He is a collection of words on a page, a picture in a history book, a hero, a traitor, a symbol of something - of pride, liberty, violence - it doesn't matter to him. It has always been this way. Even when he was alive he was always more like an idea than a person. Such is the price of fame, to be buried under layer after layer until you're not quite sure whether you're on the stage or off it. If he thinks about it, the only time he can remember being nobody but himself was alone and angry and half-crazed on the floor of a barn with a gun to his head and a stream of violent insults in his mouth. If he thinks about it, he might wonder if that was who he was all along underneath the fine suits and practiced charm, but he doesn't think about it.
He doesn't dwell on what could have been if he had lived longer, either. Immortality suits him, he thinks. If he is honest with himself, which he rarely is, it had always been his aim. There is something tragically romantic about dying young for your country. Theatrical, even. Better to go out in a blaze of glory than rot in the shadows. There's no such thing as bad publicity, after all.
How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown!
To be remembered in a hundred years, a thousand, two thousand, is better by far than to live ten or twenty or fifty more years. He tells this to himself often.
So oft as that shall be, so often shall the knot of us be called the men that gave their country liberty.
He tells himself this often, too. The funniest thing of all is that he believes it.
2.
He should be dead, but he is not. Men like him can't be gotten rid of quite so easily.
The strange thing about it is that he remembers the hood over his head, he remembers the noose tightening, hell, he thinks he remembers the feeling of his neck breaking, but he isn't dead. He shouldn't be surprised by this. He always knew he'd get out of it somehow. He always does.
So what if he never got around to his presidential campaign, or his lecture tours, or his consulship in Vienna? So what if they denied him what he rightly deserved? He cannot be mocked or rejected or forgotten now, not ever again. It only goes to show you justice will always be done in the end. The righteous and the wicked both get what they deserve. He laughs often to think those jackasses called him insane for holding onto hope, and now they are rotting six feet under, and Charles J. Guiteau is forever alive!
3.
He should be dead, but he is not. Or perhaps this is simply Hell.
He knows he was executed; he had accepted that he would be from the moment he pulled the trigger. He knows what happened after the execution, too. His body dissolved with acid and his few earthly possessions incinerated, as if whatever had driven him to kill the president was a deadly contagion, as if it could be destroyed with him. It was because they were afraid. Afraid he could become a martyr, a rallying cry for the forgotten and downtrodden of America. They were more afraid of him in death than they ever had been in life. Yet here he is, seemingly alive and solid, or at least something close to it, untouched by the electric chair or the sulfuric acid or the fire. The anger and desperation of the working people cannot be destroyed, no matter how hard they try.
Unlike certain others, he rarely reads the things that were written about him after he died. He knows well enough already what they think of him. The only thing he has bothered to read is a torn old newspaper clipping that he keeps safe between the pages of a book.
I feel that he was a soul in pain, a soul that could find no abode in this cruel world of ours, a soul "impractical," inexpedient, lacking in caution (according to the dictum of the wise); but daring just the same, and I cannot help but bow in reverent silence before the power of such a soul, that has broken the narrow walls of its prison, and has taken a daring leap into the unknown ... And my heart goes out to him in deep sympathy, and to all the victims of a system of inequality, and the many who will die the forerunners of a better, nobler, grander life.
Emma Goldman
4.
He should be dead, but he is not. It is maybe a cruel joke, he thinks.
He thought death at least would offer some respite. It does not. He is dead but he is still here, watching the kings and presidents and capitalists get richer and fatter off the blood of the poor, and his belly is still on fire with pain. If this is not a cruel joke he does not know what is. Death was his last resort, and it has failed miserably. He welcomed it, begged for it, and now he is trapped forever with only his pain and anger and a miserable crowd of other angry people to keep him company.
He takes some measure of comfort in the fact that, even if he couldn't be rid of the pain, he gave the bastards a taste of it while he had the chance.
5.
He should be dead, but he isn't, because apparently he can't catch a goddamn break.
He contemplates occasionally whether it was worth it to be remembered as the moron who shot the fucking pilots of the plane he was hijacking before it got off the ground, or whether it would have been better to go out with the sum total of his achievements being four kids who were better off without him, a failed marriage, and a probable world record for Budweiser consumption. He always comes to the same conclusion: at least you made them listen. Even just for a second in the cockpit of that plane before it all went to shit, they listened. They were scared. They knew, for a fraction of a second, what it felt like to be one of the losers. One of the suckers. One of the people they were pushing down, pushing around. That's better than nothing, right? Isn't it?
On a positive note, there's booze in the afterlife, or wherever the hell he is, but the hamburgers are still cold. Guess you can't have it all.
6.
She should be alive, but she isn't.
Apparently, she is supposed to be out of prison with a new boyfriend and a house in upstate New York. She doesn't think too hard about how this works. This contradictory existence suits her. She is alive and dead, everywhere and nowhere, here and there. Opposites have never been incompatible to her. Devil and God, love and killing, life and death, right and wrong. Everything is the same.
Still, she misses them. Sandy and Sadie and Katie and Lulu and Tex, and Charlie. Always Charlie, most of all Charlie. She misses being alive - long burnt orange days on the Ranch and cool laughing twinkling nights, Charlie playing the guitar, all the girls singing - but more than being alive, more than feeling and thinking and breathing, she misses Charlie, because he was feeling and thinking and breathing to her.
She tries to make do here with this new family she has chosen, but it isn't the same. She misses the other girls, and Sara Jane doesn't count because she's the only one and it's not the same as having girlfriends your same age. She misses the sound of the guitar, and it doesn't count when Hinckley plays it because he never lets her listen anyways. The lights of the carnival keep everything in a perpetual pink and orange twilight, and it is nothing like the freedom of the desert. At least it's better than being alive, being an old lady in a boring old neighborhood, where everyone has forgotten and rejected Charlie except for her and Sandy. Sometimes the thought of that makes her so angry she can't even breathe. Someday, she tells herself, Charlie will be back for her, and he'll smile that same smile and ruffle her hair and say "Good job, Red," and everything will be okay again.
Until then, she floats in a haze of carnival lights and smoke, alive and dead in a world of contradictions.
7.
She should be alive, but she isn't.
She should be hurrying somewhere, rushing back and forth to the school or the hairdresser's or the soup kitchen or the grocery store. She always had a million things to get done, but they'd always felt so empty. No real purpose to them. Like she was doing them just for the sake of doing them, and if she stopped for a moment she'd remember that none of it mattered in the first place. Now she was - she was - she didn't know what she was. Or where. Or why. To be fair, she never really had.
So now she has eternity to do nothing. To sit and wonder where she is coming from and where she is going. She wonders how her kids are doing. If they still visit their crazy, scatterbrained mother who finally went off the deep end but couldn't even go off the deep end right. She wonders if her friends ever understood. If she finally made them understand what she meant when she talked about her ideas, her politics, or if they just think she's stupider than ever. She's not sure she understands anymore.
Did she really do all that? Did she really pull a gun on the president? Was that her, or was that someone else, just like it is someone else living out her life on Earth, in her body, while she does her best here to keep busy in a place with nothing to do?
8.
He should be alive, but he isn't.
The Proprietor showed him a video once of a man playing the guitar, said it was a video of him, but he doesn't recognize the old man bearing a worn version of his face. Apparently he got the record deal. Got out of his parents' basement. None of that matters. How can the old man in the video think it does? Nothing ever mattered except her. He never mattered without her. He cannot understand this version of himself. He hates him for trying to pretend he is anything but a failure, that anything could ever matter after he failed.
Here, he is like a photograph frozen in time. Like the photograph of her he still keeps carefully folded in his jacket pocket, the same jacket he was wearing the day he came here. He does not age. He does not move on. He can't. Doing that would be like giving up on her. The old man with his face might have, but he won't. He might have failed everything else, but he won't fail her. Not again.
9.
He should be dead, but he isn't.
He does not remember dying. He does not remember anything after pulling the trigger. Sometimes he feels like he shot himself at the same time he shot the president, and yet he isn't dead. At the same time, he isn't quite alive either. He is not himself. It's as if the moment the gun fired, he ceased to exist. As if he traded whoever he was before for whatever he is now. He is beginning to forget the things that came before pulling the trigger, as well. Who was he, anyways? Why'd he do it? Dozens of people have tried to figure it out, in books and articles and conspiracy theories, and his guess is as good as theirs.
That person never mattered, anyways. Maybe that's why he did it - to matter to somebody, anybody. So his name would mean something. So they'd feel something about him - love, hate, he didn't give a shit. Did it work? He doesn't know. Frankly, he doesn't care. He got what he wanted, or at least that's what he tells himself. He belongs somewhere now, even if he doesn't quite know where that somewhere is. If you think too hard about this place, it screws with your mind. He'll wake up one morning and it's a Monday in October sometime in 1831, and the next day it's the spring of 1978, but somehow it's always a pleasant summer evening with the lights of a merry-go-round reflecting in a mirror maze and the smell of shitty carnival food in the air. Like two hundred years and 3.797 million square miles condensed into one place, hurtling through an endless void of time and space.
He doesn't regret it. What is there to regret? You can't take back a bullet even if you want to. You can't undo immortality. Booth remarks to him every so often that in two thousand years they'll still be talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and John F. Kennedy the way they talk about Brutus and Caesar. The thing about that, he thinks, is that nobody cares what Brutus was thinking when he took the knife in his hand. Nobody knows what he wanted, or if he really thought he was doing the right thing, or if he thought of his wife back home as he walked to the Senate.
It is simultaneously 1963 and 1933 and 1901 and 1974 and 1865 and 1975 and 1981 and 1881, and something that might be the sun is setting on a carnival that is everywhere and nowhere, and he is everyone and no one all at once. He is neither dead nor alive, but something else. They all are.