Foop! First Chapter

I’ve always thought that the existence of Abraham Lincoln provided conclusive visual evidence that humans are indeed descended from apes. I look at apes, and I look at men, even Cro-Magnon man, and I think, there’s gotta be something in between. Where’s the link? The link is Abraham Lincoln. The man looked more ape-like than some apes do when they’re dressed in shorts and suspenders and wearing sunglasses.

Ape Lincoln. Imagine seeing those Neanderthal cheekbones, bushy eyebrows, and way-the-hell-deep-set-back eyeballs that constantly remind you of the spooky skull underneath. I’d give him a two percent chance of being elected in the TV years. People today would lock him in a cage and throw bananas at him before they locked him in the White House. And even if he did manage to get elected I imagine people would still throw bananas at him. At least I would.

He had that same sad expression on his face that all primates have, especially Koko, that poor gorilla they taught sign language. The sad eyes and slightly protruding lower lip mirrored that mysterious inner agony that my dad once compared to the anguish a monkey at the zoo feels when it looks out into the glorious freedom beyond its cage and sees a man, its evolutionary superior and only hope for the future of life on earth, wearing a fanny pack.

There’s something about that ape—Koko, not Abraham—that always makes me lonely when I think of her. Long dead before I was born, I saw a video about her in high school that gave me nightmares for years after. Koko was the first of many gorillas taught a type of sign language while in captivity. Towards the end of her life, when her own personal zoo ran out of funding, she was released back into what was left of her natural habitat. There she tried to use sign language to chat with the wild apes.

I used to have nightmares that I was Koko, returning home to my family, trying to tell my daddy, using the elaborate hand gestures taught to me since I was a baby, how much I loved him and in return only getting blank stares, confused offerings of bananas, and finally hot fresh feces hurled at me, driving me deep into the forest to a life alone when all I wanted was to tell everybody “Hi! My name is Koko! K! O! K! O!”

Enough. This explains nothing of what happened that night at Ford’s Theater.

“Do it or you’re fired,” my boss told me after I refused to shoot Aperaham Lincoln.

“It’s murder,” I tried to tell him.

“You can use Booth’s gun,” he added, as if this perk made it worth it.

“No.”

“I’ll give you a raise.”

“I can’t.”

“You will.”

It isn’t easy arguing with my boss, Robert Burk. Born in New Orleans and raised in Texas, the man was as thick as a longhorn. Even though he was pushing sixty, the guy was still physically intimidating. If Lincoln was an ape then Burk is a gorilla—just like Koko. His neck was about the same size as my thigh, and I could probably, in a pinch, take a nap on his chest. He also has these intense green eyes that have a slight flicker of insanity in them, which makes it difficult to look him in the eye for very long without fearing for your life.

“I’ll open the curtain, you shoot Abe, and I’ll toss Booth over the balcony.” He said this with a hint of whatsthebigdealedness in his voice.

“Why can’t I toss him?” There were clearly two tasks to be completed, and I didn’t see why I had to do the killing. Bosses should delegate, but this was ridiculous.

“You’re weak. You’ll never be able to pick him up.”

“He’s a toothpick. I can handle him.”

“No, you can’t.”

Mr. Burk was right. Physically, I’m weak and can barely carry myself around let alone an adult male. In high school I was the skinny dork, not to be confused with the fat dork, who was, I admit, my only friend, but senior year he turned all of that fat into muscle, and I was left with the kid who always wore a long black trench coat as my only friend, and he, I admit, was incredibly annoying.

I looked down at the stage. Act III, Scene II of Our American Cousin had come. For the first time in the play there was only one actor on stage, Booth’s personal cue to get ready to plug Lincoln. Most of the audience, except for Abe, who was looking his usual somber self, was in hysterics. The play was a laugh riot to people in 1865, a comic farce that played over a thousand performances, but didn’t elicit a mere chuckle out of me. The tour group I had been leading didn’t get anything out of it either, not that it mattered, as they were there to see an assassination, not dated stage humor.

As I looked across the audience to check on the tour group, I saw John Parker, the man assigned to guard Lincoln that night, sitting in the dress circle, laughing so hard I thought his head would explode. He was supposed to be stationed outside the Presidential Box, but decided to sit elsewhere so he could see the play, apparently preferring the sensation of his head nearly exploding from laughter to the satisfaction of knowing that the President’s head would not literally explode.

As I pondered whether I would have made the same choice as John Parker did that night, somehow, without my approval, Mr. Burk’s plan was put to a vote, unanimously agreed upon, and put into action.

“On the count of three, we do it.” Mr. Burk told me, holding up three fingers in case I needed a visual representation of the concept of three. “ Then what?”

“Then we run like hell.”

“Won’t the group see you tossing Booth over?”

“I’m going to toss him from here, behind the curtain.”

“He is still alive, you know.”

“I know. Ready?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Good. A-One and a-two and a—”

“Wait! How’s Booth gonna yell ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis!’ if he’s unconscious?”

“Does the group even expect him to say that?”

“It’s in the brochure.”

“OK. Fine. I’ll do it for him. I know how to throw my voice.”

“Oh please.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No.”

“Right then. A-one and a-two and a-three!”

I stepped through the curtain. The sight of its occupants—Lincoln with perfect posture, looking like a monkey about to be shot into space, his wife next to him, doubled over, laughing manically, Major Rathbone slapping his knee and shaking a finger at the stage, his cute little fiancée, with her fingers over her mouth, her cheeks red—was too much for me. They looked happy. Not O Happy Day happy. Real happy.

Neither my BA in History, my teaching certification, my one year teaching US History to hormonally insane teens, nor my stint as a Park Ranger in the nation’s capital, prepared me for what I was about to do to keep my current job. So right after pointing Booth’s derringer at Abe’s head, I did what most people do when they’re about to do something physically simple but morally complex—I closed my eyes. Imagining that I was only shooting into the blackness I saw behind my eyelids, I waited for the line in the play that would send the audience into a level of hysterics hitherto unknown at Ford’s Theater, the line that Booth used as his cue.

The character left on stage at the end of the act yelled out, “You sock-dologizing old mantrap!” The audience broke into a fit of laughter so intense I expected every one of their heads to explode, one by one, from the pressure. But only one head exploded.

Tick.

That’s the sound the gun made. I expected a BOOM! Something that would rattle the whole theater, sending aftershocks through the capital and even out across the Union. But all I got was a tick.

It was enough.

The audience immediately screamed. I opened my eyes to see Booth’s limp body wiz past me in mid-air and fall the eleven and a half feet to the stage below, culminating in a loud, dense thump, directly followed by two sights. One being Mr. Burk holding his cupped hand to his mouth, yelling in a high-pitched voice that sounded nothing like Booth and everything like a talking mouse, “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” And the other sight being Major Rathbone charging me, looking a tad bit angry.

I closed my eyes again since there wasn’t anything pleasant to look at. Then I heard a punch land on what sounded like someone’s face, directly followed by the feeling of someone grabbing my arm and dragging me away to what I supposed was the gallows. But the familiar sensation of entering a wormhole, pins and needles all over my body, made me realize that it was Burk who was dragging me away to safety and not Rathbone dragging me to the nearest noose.

All of my visits to the past felt like dreams. Like I was an observer in a world where I could do anything—a world without consequences. And that’s because of the Shaved Cat Principal, which will be explained soon enough.

Just as one feels a bit out of sorts on waking up after having had an elaborate dream where you wined and dined your grandmother at a fancy restaurant with the clear and obvious intention of getting her drunk and back to your place, and then succeeding, I felt out of sorts about shooting Lincoln. Not that I thought of it as murder, because the man was supposed to be shot, but as something else, something without a name because it’s not something many people do, that is, to go back in time and kill a person who should have been killed by someone else. But I’m certainly not the only person ever to perform an irrational act for the good of his company. History is littered with such suckers. From the guy who hurriedly eats a four-page memo while the Feds search the office next to his, to the chef who hides a dead rat in the soup du jour, the list is long.

But I didn’t appreciate being added to that list, or any list, and it was for that reason that I planned to inform Mr. Burk, the very next day, that I would never do such a thing again.

At least not without a raise.