Conspiracy Theory

I shot JFK

I wrote those words as the beginning of a poem, my first inkling of what was to come, and I set it on the dashboard of my car. The windows were open, I was driving fast, and the wind picked the piece of paper up and took it out the window. I watched the paper as it grew smaller in the distance, my eyes in the rear-view mirror interrupted only by my bulbous nose, how bulbous my nose grows!

In Seattle, an ex-girlfriend of mine gets a call, late at night, from someone who hangs up before she gets to the phone, seven rings. She is certain it is me, but it wasn't. It is a man from the western part of town, near the ocean, the wrong side of the tracks, who is calling his sister because he had a sudden vision of her death in his dream. He hung up because he had a feeling of having dialed the wrong number as soon as he heard it ring once. It took him thenext six rings to put the phone down and try to dial the number again.

His sister picked up the phone. "Hello?"
"Hi," says her brother, "Did your phone just ring?"
"Sure, that's why I picked it up." She is irritated, having been awakened in the middle of the night by the sort of idiot who asks questions like this (even if it is her brother).
"No, I mean before I called." He has forgotten the vision of his sister, bloody and gasping, in his dreams.

My ex-girlfriend digs in her closet for a box in which she vaguely remembers seeing a piece of paper with my name, address and phone number written in crayon with a drawing of a crude stick figure. After a time, she finds it and calls me, letting the phone ring exactly seven times and then hanging up, feeling a group of very upset insects in her stomach as she does this. Guiltily, she goes back to bed, hoping she didn't wake me, but then wondering where the hell I am, not to be answering the phone this late at night (remember, she lives on the west coast and I, in the midwest, where times are two hours later).

I am not home.