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The Balladeer was born from the best in Americans. The righteous revolutions, the fights for freedom, the songs sung ‘round campfires, singing of the beauty of the nation. And he loved these things with all his heart, which he decided he did indeed have long ago, for there was something in his chest that swirled and twisted and thumped away. Very little in the world confused him, but one of the only things that did was why, after being created from the best of American nature, was he continuously subjected to the worst of it.
There were many he nearly forgot, and thus, history did too. Yes, the Richard Lawrences and the John Schranks of the country were largely forgotten by the public, and strangely enough, never showed up at the carnival. That isn’t to say that the average American citizen knew the likes of Giuseppe Zangara or Lynette Fromme any better. The average American citizen had an extraordinary knack for not really knowing anything. But The Balladeer’s interactions with the assassins that wound up in the carnival were certainly more memorable than the others.
He supposed that’s why they show up where they do. He’d once heard someone comment that you only really die when people stop thinking of you. And when The Balladeer, The American Dream, a conceptual force of history, can’t keep you out of whatever brain-adjacent organ it has, you can’t really fade, can you?
–
He remembered the first time the most.
For most of it, he just watched. He sat in Ford’s Theatre, perched on the railing of the president’s box, staring down at a comedy. He was as solid as the people around him, but imperceptible to the human eye. It was the first time in a long time the president and his wife had allowed themselves to laugh. It should have been a nice night, but a strange, uneasy feeling washed over him, and he was compelled to turn around. The Balladeer saw the man, with his gun and his knife, seconds before the disaster.
The voices from the stage below were garbled and unimportant now, but even so, one line broke through the haze. “-you sockdologizing old man-trap!” Instant laughter from the crowd. And a sickening bang from the box. The seconds after remain fuzzy in The Balladeer’s mind. He remembers Booth jumping out of the box, and he remembers intentionally sticking out a leg to trip him as he jumped, feeling a boot spur digging into his jeans. Whether this broke the man’s leg or not, he didn’t truly care. And whether the muffled words the actor shouted were poetic or not didn’t concern him. All he knew was that a new kind of disgust had formed in the twisting, swirling, thumping thing he called a heart. And it hurt.
It wasn’t until The Balladeer recovered from the shock of the moment, that he felt the warm trickle of blood rolling down his cheek. Raising a hand to his forehead, he found that he was bleeding quite a lot, though there appeared to be no wound. He healed quickly, he supposed. Like the country. Or perhaps the wound just wasn’t his.
The following days were stressful, to put it mildly. And he just watched. Walking on some road of time and space, where each step took him to a different scene to witness. Step. The president’s deathbed. Step. A hurried escape out of the city. Step. A frantic search. A call for a manhunt. Step. A journey across the river. Step. A barn, about to be set on fire.
It was here The Balladeer truly stopped. Here was John Wilkes Booth, weak (though he’d never admit it), injured, and frantically writing down his side of the story. Like it was worth anything.
It was here that he started singing. To cope with it all. The loss and the rage and the hatred. Everything that had somehow built up inside him over the course of days for Booth, mere minutes to him. He already knew everything about the man’s sorry life, and he sang about every bit of it. Booth seemed to grow more irritated as the music went on, which The Balladeer had originally chalked up to coincidence. No one could see him, hear him, or realize he was there. At least, no one had before.
So on he sang. “They say it wasn’t Lincoln, John…”
“Shut up.”
He glanced over at the two men occupying the barn. David Herold was begrudgingly writing down Booth’s words, and seemed to be focused on that. Booth, however, was staring directly at The Balladeer. There was an annoyance, a hatred, in his eyes, and unless he had an immense dislike for the crate he was sitting on, that meant he could see him.
Booth turned back to Herold and continued. “Three…” The Balladeer, curious and quite unwilling to believe the man could truly see him, started singing again.
“You’d merely had a slew of bad reviews~”
“I said. Shut. Up.” Oh, the wretched man could see him alright. His eyes were boring into what was supposed to be an imperceptible being with the kind of hatred only matched by the loathing bubbling up in The Balladeer’s own chest. Instead of continuing, he raised his hands away from his banjo in a mock surrender. He’d get to play again. He knew how this ended. So he just watched.
He watched Booth wallow in a disgusting mix of self pity and self righteousness, watched Herold flee the barn, watched the barn get set ablaze with Booth still inside. Watched Boston Corbet, a fairly strange man himself, take a shot through the burning wood, just as Booth attempted to make a move. He watched Booth die. And he began to play again. There was a satisfaction to it now. The boiling rage inside him subsided somewhat. But he somehow knew this wasn’t the last he’d see of the actor.
The Balladeer was, unfortunately, correct.
–
The next time was far less exciting, but no less strange. If anything, it was more so. Banjo slung over his shoulder, he stood in a train station, absentmindedly tracing lines on the ceiling with his eyes. Once again, he was engaging in his favorite pastime of watching. He watched as an eager man approached the president and exchanged a few words, which seemed to go horribly for him, based on his body language. Watched as the gun came out and the president went down.
Not again was all The Balladeer found himself thinking, looking down to see blood staining his shirt, spreading from a wound not his own.
He spared himself the ordeal of sitting through tedious trials next to Charles Guiteau. He knew the sheer disaster that was his defence, and wanted no part in the experience.
Though, there were very few nearby times and places he could go to that weren’t a disaster as well. He couldn’t even stand to watch the doctors fail to treat James Garfield. If Guiteau was right about one thing in his rambling, it was that the doctors were the ones who really killed the president. Despite the truth of the statement, the fact of him shooting the man remained.
The Balladeer found himself watching the execution. It was painful to witness, with Guiteau’s lousy attempt at sung poetry assaulting his ears all the while. To spare himself from the clumsy lyricism, he whipped out his banjo and started to play. There was very little hatred in this song, especially compared to Booth’s, but it was dripping with exasperation.
Once again, he had the strange feeling that the man at the scaffold could see and hear him. He stopped his singing (thank the lord) on several occasions to stare directly at The Balladeer, seemingly miffed that he kept interrupting his own song, before breaking back into “I Am Going To The Lordy” once again.
The two men continued this back and forth for a bit, and after a while, Guiteau actually seemed scared of the death that awaited him. The Balladeer felt no desire to comfort him, and instead sang a couple words of "encouragement" that sent him off just fine. Though, he wasn’t truly gone from The Balladeer’s world.
The company of Guiteau in the carnival wasn’t desirable, but at least he annoyed Booth. It was the small victories that mattered, yes?
–
Leon Czolgosz baffled The Balladeer.
He could sympathize with those with revolutionary thoughts. It was what gave him life after all. And the strange thing was that he almost felt inclined to agree with the motives of the man. It was at least refreshing somewhat, after the blatant racism of Booth and ambitious insanity of Guiteau. But the blood on Czolgosz’s hands was undeniable. It actually made The Balladeer sad.
He found himself standing in line to shake hands with the president, just behind his future assassin. To pass the time, (and maybe just to entertain himself, he could admit it) he once again pulled out his banjo and started playing. He’d come to expect the assassins being able to see and hear him at this point, so he expected glares at the very least, or perhaps a punch to the gut if Czolgosz was feeling extra testy. He was about to shoot the president, so that wouldn’t be out of the question.
However, the man in front of The Balladeer showed no signs of acknowledgment whatsoever. Instead, he just kept moving forward in line, speaking only to a young boy offering him a drink.
It wasn’t until they reached the front of the line, and Czolgosz finally took two shots and wounded William McKinley, that for a split second, the man turned around and locked eyes with The Balladeer. The hatred and determination in his gaze was familiar. He didn’t have to look to know blood was now soaking his clothes, coming from a wound not his own.
Then The Balladeer vanished, and the real man behind Czolgosz attacked
–
The next few attempts were less eventful. It seemed the unsuccessful assassins couldn’t really tell he was there. Not until the moment they failed.
The Balladeer found most of the interactions uninteresting. Most of them didn’t even know who he was and didn't acknowledge him at all. This, of course, didn’t apply to Giuseppe Zangara.
From the minute he was certain he would die, he had locked eyes with The Balladeer, and started talking to him. The people around him certainly thought he was crazy, but Zangara had just killed a man (not the man he intended to kill, but a man nonetheless), so it probably wasn’t out of character to them.
He just sat and listened to the man’s pleading, all the way up to the point he died. He didn’t have to say a word, and at that point he’d given up ever trying to. Perhaps it was wrong of him to insult these men without actually trying to dissuade them from committing murders. But, somehow, knowing how things will end instilled a kind of mildly amused apathy in him that was sure the assassins hated. He half hated it himself.
Once again, after 1933, the next few were uneventful. They all failed to notice him, as they had failed in many other aspects. For several consecutive decades, The Balladeer saw no sign of the familiar faces from the carnival. One decade, he couldn't even interact with if he wanted to. Wherever trying to interact with the early 1960s, a strange static-y feeling washed over him, and he’d wind up somewhere else. He once tried asking The Proprietor if it was his fault. He’d just smiled mischievously like he always did and denied any involvement.
He eventually dropped trying to figure it out. He had a feeling he’d find out eventually.
The Balladeer was once again, unfortunately, correct.
–
And now what? They’d killed him.
The Balladeer was dead in every sense of the word. And yet, he was still somewhere. He could feel the forces of time and space pulling at him, but he knew not where they wanted him to go, nor what part of him they were pulling on. He wasn’t even sure there were parts of him to pull on. He felt entirely disconnected from himself, like he’d been torn apart and scattered across the universe. And, in a way, perhaps he had been.
Some way, somehow, he managed to pull himself together and follow the tugging. It wasn’t until he experienced a familiar migraine-inducing static that he realized when he must be. Ah, early 1960s… he thought …good to see you.
Only, unlike all previous attempts to interact with the time period, the static actually cleared, leaving The Balladeer dangling precariously on a window ledge, multiple stories above the street below. He shouldn’t be able to balance on it, but he appeared to have no real weight, or even a corporeal body. He could barely make out his own hands in front of him, they were so faint. He might as well be his own reflection in the window behind him.
Turning to stare into said window, he had the sudden thought that maybe he was a reflection, for what was supposed to be him in the glass was much more solid that he felt. After a good few seconds of staring, it occurred to him that the man at the window couldn’t be him. The Balladeer could admit that he had a tired appearance. It came with the job of dealing with the assassins all the time. But he never lost the spark, the hope, in his eyes.
The eyes staring back into his own, while also the wrong color, were devoid any kind of hope at all. Not to mention, staring into them made him weirdly nauseous. After this, he started to notice other small inconsistencies. The texture and color of the hair, the slightly skinnier frame and, of course, how could he have failed to notice? The faded flannel The Balladeer still wore in death (though he distinctly remembered it being ripped off of him), was missing on this man that he was very quickly deciding could not possibly be him.
Even so, the stranger looked so much like him. It was scary. The Balladeer watched him leave the window and walk up to a radio that had just finished a song. Shutting it off, he started pacing. It went on for a painfully long time, and probably could have continued forever, but a new man entered the room and caught both him and his ghosty counterpart by surprise.
The Balladeer quickly found that he could faze through the window and found himself inside the room staring directly at John Wilkes Booth. Every other sensation he’d had since arriving on the window ledge had been incredibly numb, almost making him feel like he was half asleep, but at the sight of the actor, a familiar, disproportionately strong, feeling of pure hatred boiled up in his chest.
As if he could sense the waves of loathing radiating off of him, Booth glanced over at the exact area The Balladeer was standing. His small, insufferable smirk widened ever so slightly, before he turned back to the third man in the room. The sense of nausea returned. He suddenly wondered what on earth he could actually throw up.
And now he was back to his favorite pastime. Watching.
He drifted in and out of what felt like consciousness, but what was probably existence, only catching bits and pieces of what was going on around him. The only thing that was crystal clear was seeing this man, who was Lee Harvey Oswald, he was now sure of it, holding a rifle and getting ready to shoot. He saw the assassins standing there as well, staring at him hungrily.
The Balladeer’s sense of dread only worsened. He wanted to stop whatever was about to happen. For once in his strange strange life, he actually wanted to stop something horrible. And it was the one time he couldn’t.
The gun fired, and whatever pieces of him had pulled themselves together for him to be there immediately tore themselves apart. Every bit of him burned and wanted to die, and the universe seemed to oblige their wish, for after several solid seconds of pain, it stopped.
And he was gone.
–
He was certain he was nothing.
And nowhere.
And no one.
Numbness could not describe the lack of feeling he had, nor the absence of consciousness. These thoughts only came to him when, after what felt like an eternity, he was suddenly aware of himself again. The moments before felt like a gap in memory, and his body felt far more solid than he was used to.
After a few seconds, it felt completely normal.
And then the pain came.
He grasped his abdomen, looking down to see blood spreading from a wound entirely his own