Normal kids don’t grow up to shoot ex-Beatles.
—MARK DAVID CHAPMAN
The child awoke in the middle of the night to a sharp slapping sound. Light from the hallway filtered along the edge of a partially opened bedroom door as he waited in a chilled silence for the sound he knew would come again. At last he heard it, a sickening slap of flesh against flesh followed by his father’s gruff voice and his mother’s muffled sobs. Turning his face to the wall, the child squeezed his eyes shut and tried to hold back tears. Moments later he heard the faint squeak of a door hinge as his mother gently pushed open the door to his room.
Pausing momentarily at the doorway to turn and switch off the hall light, the statuesque woman stepped softly across the room in darkness and sat at the edge of the bed beside her ten-year-old son. The bed shook briefly with the final snubbed spasms of the woman’s swallowed anguish. Mark flinched as he felt the light touch of his mother’s fingers against his shoulder.
“It’s okay, Mom,” he whispered, his face still turned to the darkened wall. “I won’t let him hurt you. It’s okay.”
“Oh, Mark, I’m sorry. I thought you were still sleeping, baby. I’m sorry I woke you. It’s nothing. It’s all right. Daddy’s just angry and Mommie’s just sad. It’ll be all right in the morning. Let’s just go back to sleep. Goodnight, honey. Sweet dreams.”
The child awoke alone in his bed the next morning. He lay for a long time contemplating a scattered array of toy soldiers, planes, and helicopters that littered his bedroom floor. His eyes lingered on an arrangement of four miniature plastic soldiers arrayed upon a stagelike cardboard pedestal. Tiring of war games with the imaginary soldiers, he had cut away four of the plastic figures’ weapons. Instead of rifles, these soldiers were armed with guitars and with a tiny drum set that Mark had fashioned from paper and cardboard.
He would sit, sometimes for hours, playing Meet the Beatles, his only rock music album, while rocking back and forth in front of the tiny stage. He recited the words of the songs and applauded at the end of each tune. Occasionally, he would join the band, strumming a tiny plastic guitar and broadcasting the music from a pulsating ache in the center of his brain. He beamed the rhythmic signals into a pretend sound system so that it could be rebroadcast into the homes and shops of the Little People.
Mark couldn’t recall when the Little People had first revealed themselves to him. It was as though they had always been there, since the day he was born—perhaps even before he was born. The Little People knew everything about him because they had been everywhere that he had been in his short life, from Texas to Indiana to Georgia to Virginia, then back with him to Georgia again. Like guardian angels, they had been looking out for him even when he didn’t know it.
The Little People had remained invisible until a morning when he had awakened to see them coming and going from their homes, offices, and shopping centers inside his bedroom walls. At first, he had thought it odd that no one else could see them.
He remembered that the Little People had appeared to him on a morning after a restless night. He had been upset and unable to sleep because of the clamor and crying that had erupted from his mother’s bedroom. He also had gone to bed early with a fever and a bad cold the night before the Little People appeared. He recalled that it was some time after he had seen Toby Tyler, a movie about an orphan boy who had run away from a cruel uncle to join the circus. Mark’s parents had remarked to him during and after the movie that he resembled Toby. They said he was a handsome boy like Toby, with a glossy mane of straight, black hair. He had a cherubic, round face with blue eyes set deeply above a pug nose and dimpled chin, just like Toby.
His father had bought him a Toby Tyler circus set after the movie. Mark had retreated in solitude to his room with the cardboard figures and toys for several days afterward, losing himself in imaginary adventures. The Little People were somehow connected in his mind to Toby Tyler and to another favorite movie, The Mysterious Island.
Angrily pushing aside the memory of his mom coming to his bedroom the night before, the child lowered his head and beamed a signal to the tiny soldier-musicians he had adorned with guitars and drums. Sitting up in bed and crossing his legs, he began rocking his body, twisting as hard and as fast as he could from side to side until he felt the bed begin to move beneath him.
Mark stared straight ahead, scrutinizing the spaces inside the walls. He twisted his head and moved his eyes methodically from the baseboard to the ceiling of each wall in the room. At last he saw that the Little People had picked up his signal. They were beginning to stream into the streets and sidewalks from their tall apartment buildings and offices inside the walls. Some of them were singing along with the tune he was imagining for them. He could hear the music being rebroadcast from radios in their apartments and shops. It was blaring from stacks of speakers at neighborhood gathering spots. Many of the Little People were smiling. They were rocking their bodies like tiny metronomes in tempo to the tense rhythm that Mark projected for them. They cheered him and loudly called his name.
“Mark, the king of music,” they called to him. “Mark the king of the Little People. Long live the king of the Little People.”
King Mark smiled benevolently upon his multitudes. The hundreds who had come out at the first sounds of the music were soon joined by thousands, and then by millions, of their countrymen. There were far too many for Mark to count, and he only knew a few of them by name. He waved to them.
As the crowd settled expectantly before him, he began silently moving his lips. His face appeared simultaneously on four giant electronic screens above the tall buildings inside the walls of his room.
“Something serious has come up,” he announced. He paused ominously for effect and to be sure that he had the Little People’s undivided attention.
“Something very serious has come up and I need your help. Remember what I told you before, the other day? Remember about my dad? About what he was doing to my mom?”
The Little People turned sadly to each other. Some shook their heads slowly in dismay. Some of the little women and children began to cry.
“It happened again last night,” he said angrily, punching both his small fists sharply into the mattress beside his crossed legs. The Little People fell back and began to murmur apprehensively among themselves. Mark saw fear in their eyes.
“It’s got to stop,” he continued. “You, my people, have got to help me. You’ve got to make my dad stop hurting my mom.”
He hesitated. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that some of his audience had fainted and fallen to the street. Others were trying to sneak away.
“It won’t do you any good to try to hide from me,” he admonished them. “You know what happened the last time you disobeyed me.”
The Little People cast timorous glances at each other, too fearful to meet their creator’s gaze.
“Don’t you remember? I got very, very angry. I know you don’t like my dad, either. So you’ve got to do this. Just go in my mom’s room tonight and stop my dad when he tries to hurt her. You’ve got to do this for me. If you don’t, I won’t send you the music. If you don’t …”
Clambering suddenly from his bed, the boy scooted on his knees across the carpeted room and came to rest before his record player. He pulled his Meet the Beatles album from a pile of children’s records and pushed the 33 rpm disc onto the turntable, cranking the speed to 45 rpm. As the high-pitched, chipmunklike voices began spilling from the speakers, he laughed aloud and turned up the volume. He began to sing along, twisting and rocking his body in a frenzied effort to keep time with the music. Unable to maintain the pace, he switched the turntable back to 33 and laughed again as the recording seemed to belch before slowing to the appropriate pitch and tone.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” he sang, his body quivering to the syncopated rhythm of the rock ballad.
Sliding across the carpet to the four miniature musicians on the pedestal, he applauded the performance as the song ended. He bent over to kiss the tiny plastic faces of each one. The electronic screens above the walls had faded and the Little People had begun returning to their homes and jobs inside the imaginary buildings that honeycombed the walls.
Hearing his father’s car roar to life in the driveway, Mark hastily stripped off his pajamas. He dressed himself in a clean white T-shirt and pair of blue jeans. He stepped into his sneakers without stooping to tie the laces. Racing to the bedroom window, he lifted the curtain aside and peered out as his father’s old blue Pontiac backed from the driveway and turned down Green Forest Drive toward Atlanta.
Leaving his bedroom, the child discovered that he was alone in the house. His mother had taken his three-year-old sister to the baby-sitter before going shopping. Mark liked the house best when he was alone. He returned to his room and scooped up the toy musicians onto his Beatles album. He took them downstairs to his favorite room, the den.
Setting up the plastic figures on the carpet before him, he put the Beatles record on his mother’s hi-fi and took a seat at the end of a thickly upholstered couch. As music began to fill the room, he sat with the empty album cover on his lap and studied the faces of the four musicians. John, George, Ringo, and Paul stared like four half moons from the cover of the album, one side of each of their faces obscured in deep shadow. Each of the half-faces was capped by a shaggy helmet of hair. Mark had discovered by reading the back of the album cover that the Beatles’ haircuts were called “pudding basin,” a style that dated back to “ancient England.” It made him think of castles and kings—and of the Little People, for some reason.
He also learned from the album cover that John Lennon was the group’s leader and that “Beatlemania” had caused four thousand fans to stand all night in pouring rain for tickets to a Beatles concert. He read that some teenage girls had camped at a ticket office for four days and nights and that fans had battled police at concerts and suffered “unnumbered broken limbs.”
“Wow,” the child said to himself, flipping from back to front and staring at the grainy, close-up photograph of the Beatles’ faces. Studying the musicians’ eyes, the child imagined a fantasy kingdom of music in “ancient England” where all the people worshiped musicians as kings, just as his Little People worshiped him.
He put his face close against the album, scrutinizing each of the four musicians. They were identified by name in a smaller photograph on the back of the record jacket. He had trouble identifying John Lennon, whose picture looked Oriental. On the front of the album, however, Lennon’s face seemed full and round. His lips were a thin, straight line, not as defined or as interesting, Mark decided, as the faces of the other three Beatles. After studying Lennon’s features for a long time, he decided that he didn’t especially like the face. He didn’t know why.
Putting the album aside, he slid from the couch and went to the hi-fi to flip the record. As the music began, he returned to the couch and started rocking his body forward and backward, slamming his head into the cushioned back of the sofa. He rocked so hard it made the record skip. Then he summoned the Little People, who began to appear at the top of the wall above the hi-fi. As the crowds gathered before his mind’s eye, he slowed the violent pace of his rocking and resumed a gentle back-and-forth rhythm in time with the music.
“Little People,” he sang, changing the words of the Lennon-McCartney tune “Little Child”:
“Little People, won’t you play with me.…
Little People, you must stay with me.”
As the song ended, he laughed aloud at the new words he had made up for the song. Staring at the crowds inside the walls, he thought again of his mom and dad as he began rapidly moving the fingers of his right hand, depressing a series of imaginary buttons on the arm of the couch.
Without warning, he pursed his lips and started making staccato sounds and explosions, the sounds that children make when they play war. Inside the walls, the Little People began screaming and falling to the streets. Their buildings tumbled around them. Many screamed for help from beneath the rubble of fallen debris. Ambulances exploded in the street as they raced to the scene of the disaster the child had created.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, “but that’s what happens when I get angry.”