26.

Decades later, when, for the first time, I’m watching the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination on the Internet, it occurs to me that I am seeing my era, frame by grainy frame, come apart, just as John Kennedy’s head seems to explode when the bullet hits it: yes, that’s it. That was the beginning of the end. That was the real “Fable of the Final Hour”—not 1959; not that poem I was reading to my roommates on that Friday in 1963—but here, on Elm Street in Dallas.

I sit there at my desk, in the terrible dark of two A.M. on a day in the twenty-first century, and feel lost and alone as Kennedy slumps over, and I’m frightened and I think I’m wandering around the back of the tapestry, where this piece of yarn connects to that one over there and I hold them and run my fingers along their coarse texture and wonder what the story on the other side is—the story I can’t see, the story I probably don’t want to know.