KENNEDY SHOT DEAD, all of the papers say; there's not a one of them that doesn't by the time the late editions roll off the presses that evening. In succession, they're unfolded to be read and gathered and catalogued: the collected grief of a nation scattered across kitchen tables, office desks, front porches.

And as they do, they ask one another, in an echo that ripples out over the entire country, "Where were you when Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy?"

Charlie says that we'll never be able to start the new order without crushing the unfaithful under our feet like so many skittering cockroaches. Most people are swine, he says. If they lived, they'd end up corrupting the rest of us and bringing down everything that should be good and right in the new world -- just like diseases infecting the body, you know? So when the apocalypse happens and man starts devouring man, it's all of the weak and unworthy ones that'll have to be the first to go.

Lots of things that Charlie says make sense like that.

When I picked up my gun, I thought that President Ford was just one more disease we had to stomp out before it started spreading. He wasn't a public servant and he wasn't a good president -- not like how Charlie would be, anyway. Once Charlie saved the world, he'd be the kind of public servant that Ford could only dream of being. He'd bring light and prosperity to everyone eventually, and it would all be how it should be, and I'd be right there beside him the whole time helping him guide humanity into a glorious new dawn.

But see, the other thing Charlie always says whenever he starts talking about what's coming is that we're born covered in blood, and that's how anything else is gonna have to be born, too. We'll rule over the whole world as king and queen, but only after the chaos that's gonna happen when the old world ends. That's just how it is. It's the natural order of things; it all goes in cycles, like the seasons or the tide.

Every beginning you can think of only happened because something else ended. So you're not ending anything when you try to kill someone, you know? You're beginning it.

Okay, so maybe I'm selfish, but sometimes you've just gotta do what's best for you. It's like that, whaddyacallit...oh, I don't know, I can't remember. Some kind of principle. What you put in is what you get out? It has to be balanced? Something like that.

Anyway, my point is, if you do something big, you're going to get big results out of it. That's not too hard to agree on, right? And I needed something big. Sure, I'd settled down; I had the kid, I had the job, I had the marriage (all five of them), but that -- that's not any kind of stability. That's just the same thing everybody else has. Well, maybe not all of the marriages, but all the other stuff, sure. And where's the bigger stability in that, huh? Where's the thing that's going to fix you in place not just in your little life that affects maybe you and two or three other people, but in history, too?

Hardly anybody ever gets that. People like me definitely don't get that.

So yeah, I bought a gun, I followed Ford, and I shot him. Okay, tried to shoot him. And then, well, after that, there I was. Sara Jane Moore: assassin just turned out to be Sara Jane Moore: attempted assassin. Even that didn't work out too well when I was done.

But I don't know. Maybe it worked out well enough. Both of those're still a lot better than Sara Jane Moore: housewife, aren't they? They've got a way better ring to them. And sticking a great word like "assassin" in there, even if there's an "attempted" in front of it? Now that's something nobody's gonna forget. That's permanence.

That's all any of us want, isn't it? To know that we're still going to be around after we go. That we can take our life and grow it into something more -- something that'll last for a lot longer than we will.

Not long after Leon shot President McKinley, they arrested me and held me prisoner. They asked me if I had helped him. I told them no; they believed me, in time, and let me go. Why would they not? For that is, in most ways, the truth: I knew of no plot to assassinate the President when I spoke to Leon.

But it is not the truth in all ways.

I never fired the gun myself, of course; I would not wish to do so. The taking of a human life is a deplorable thing. But ideas...they can change so readily into action when they are given to the right people. They are the ammunition that can be fired in the struggle to uproot the injustice that feeds upon America. That is so very often how history works in its slow unfolding: it uses the foundations of others to build itself higher. We see by standing on the shoulders of giants, as a wise man once said.

And when we come across a wolf that is destroying a flock of sheep, do we collar the animal, take it aside, and replace it with another wolf? No. We kill the creature on sight.

Society has poisoned so many of us. It births our actions, for good or for ill; it birthed people like you and I, and it birthed people like Leon. The solution, then, is to find ways to end this creation. It is in endings, at times, that we can do the most good.

And so I gave him that ammunition, and I continued on my way as our paths diverged. I did not look back. It was his place to make something of himself, however he chose. It was not mine.

Years later, they will ask America, Where were you when Oswald shot JFK?

We three will say in one voice: We were with him.

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