Note from the author: I wrote this after watching The Perfect Storm.
I don't know why, but I just thought that it would be different if we could see things from another perspective than the one we usually see things from.
I had read a JFK article and it was fresh in my mind and I started to write.  John Hawkes' face was all I could see when I saw Lee.

Blink

A Work of Fiction
by
Harry Gordon

He sat in the chair facing the open window.  The eviction notice fell to the floor.  Behind him Marina stood with her hands on her hips staring at him.  In her broken English she berated him.

"You are not a man!  My boyfriend from Russia was a real man.  He could make love to me all da night.  He knew what da woman needed.  If he was here he would take me here right on dis floor.  You are not a man at all!  You are da sissy boy.  A Russian man takes care of his woman.  You make me to sleep in da street." 

Lee tried to ignore her but her words cut him like a knife.  He hid it well.  He had a lot of practice hiding his feelings. But it was no different than it had always been.  Even as a boy, his mother ridiculed him.  "Poor little Lee.  You will never be a man.  You are just like your father with that little thing of yours.  You will never be able to be a man.  You will always be here for me to take care of.  Another mouth to feed."  Lee would try to approach her and crawl up into her lap.  She would push him away.  He couldn't remember if he had ever known any other way.  He wondered sometimes if those things he heard about happy families were just the imaginations and stories that people sometimes made up to impress other people.

As he sat in the holding cell in Dallas, Lee's mind wandered.  Finally they had given him a few minutes to rest.  They would be back for him soon and it would start all over again.  He flashed back to the detective that had struck him.  He knew shortly that they were going to transfer him.

He forgot where they had said he would be going.  He knew there would be lots of news people and cameras.  Perhaps he would be able to speak to them.  Maybe they would help him.  He knew they had lied to him and he was upset that they wouldn't let him make a phone call.  He had rights.  He could not focus as his mind slipped back to when he was a child . . ..

The climb down the cliff on the bluff overlooking the reservoir wasn't a rugged climb, but for a nine year old boy it was a chore.  He had gone there before and with his hands and a stick had dug out a small cave that overlooked the lake below.  It was just big enough for him to sit in and be out of the sun to think.  Sometimes he would curl up in the shade and go to sleep.  He spent a lot of time here thinking about stories he heard where mothers loved their boys and fathers took them fishing or hunting.  He could only think of such things.  He would never know these things.

When Lee arrived home, he was already beginning to run a fever, and was too tired to even eat supper. He would never complain to his mother but she noticed he was not himself.  She walked over to him and placed her hand against his forehead.  "You've got a fever," she said to the small boy.  She walked into the kitchen and returned with  aspirin and a glass of water.  She handed them to Lee and instructed him to take them.  Then without any further conversation Margaret sent him to bed.

That night, Lee tossed and turned restlessly in his sleep, and by the next morning his fever had worsened.  His mother felt his forehead and shook her head.  "Just what I need," she muttered to herself.  She made the assumption that Lee was catching a cold or the flu.  She didn't care about the many mosquito bites that the child had on his legs and back.

Lee's condition worsened until he couldn't get out of bed.  It was only then that Margaret drug
the boy out to the car and took him to the free clinic in Dallas.  Some medicine was prescribed and bed rest for a few days and lots of water. But when the few days of rest had passed, Lee appeared to be getting worse, not better.

In those days his mother worked as an insurance salesperson.  She would put Lee in the back seat of her car  and he would wait while she went into peoples homes trying to sell insurance that she herself could not afford.  Finally, she saw he was getting worse and took him to the hospital in Dallas.  It was fortunate for Lee that she did.  The small boy was diagnosed as being in the early stage of encephalitis.

"Where did he get all those bites?" the doctor asked Margaret.

"In the hills just above the reservoir," she told him. "Where all the boys play."

"Your son is very ill Margaret.   He's very ill indeed.  He needs to be kept here in the hospital."

The Doctor explained that encephalitis was an acute inflammation of the brain caused by a contagious viral infection. It could be caused by a number of untreated illnesses such as chickenpox, measles, mumps, and smallpox or even by lead poisoning, with Lee however, it was caused by the bites of mosquitos or other insects carrying the virus.

Lee spent the next month in a darkened room, enduring enlarged pupils, double vision, fever, headaches, and severe stiffness in his neck and limbs. He eventually recovered -- physically, at least, but in a very short time, his mother noticed, but quickly dismissed, the fact that her son had developed an unusual depression that he could not seem to come out of.  Unlike before his illness, Lee was listless, and tired a lot.  He began staying in the house instead of going outside.   Sometimes he read, other times he simply stared at an open book, never turning the page.  Boredom overtook Lee and finally it forced him out of the tiny house and he ventured away from home.  It was at this time that Lee discovered the Public Library.  So during the many hours that he spent alone, he would walk the three miles into town and go to the library where he was introduced to Marxism and he developed an interest in politics.  It is also at this age that Lee began to withdraw even more from personal relationships with other people and his way of thinking slowly turned inward.  He began to rationalized that others knew what he was thinking and that they didn't like him because he was small and weak.  He developed deep feelings of inadequacy that he learned to mask with the outward appearance of superiority and intelligence.  One day, when he got home, he found his mother had loaded all their belongings into the car and a trailer.  She told him to get into the car, they were moving to New York.  He wondered if he hadn't come home when he did, if she would have left without him and left him there all alone?  Lee curled up in the back seat and slept as they drove away from the medical bills that had piled up.  His mother never let him forget that they were running away from bills he caused.

Later in life, his relationship with his wife was often stormy, and it did not seem that she respected him at all. The couple got married after a courtship of only 6 weeks, a part of which Lee spent in the hospital.  Lee wrote in his diary that he married his wife shortly after his proposal of marriage to another girl, Ella, had been rejected.  She turned him down because he was an American . He wrote that "In spite of the fact I married Marina to hurt Ella,  I found myself in love with Marina," but like so many other times, Lee was a vehicle to be used and then  discarded.

Many of the people  whom Lee and Marina became acquainted with  after their arrival in the United States thought it obvious that Marina had married her husband primarily in hope that she would be able to leave the Soviet Union and become an American.  Marina  denied this.  The difficulties which Lee had in his marriage he would have had in any relationship.  They certainly were not reduced by his wife's conduct and immaturity.

Marina was immature in her thinking and responsible to a great deal for the many difficulties that the couple had.  She admitted that she provoked Lee and often put him down.  She grew bitter over Lee's inability to sometimes have sexual intercourse with her.  She often threw it up to him about past relationships she'd had in Russia and would become quite graphic in trying to hurt him and raise a response.  As is usually the case, the wrong response was what Lee gave her, and it is probable that in any situation, Lee would not have been able to give her any response that would have been the right one.  There is no doubt that provocation existed.  Lee would occasionally strike her, and for that he would fall deeper into his cycle of depression and self doubt.  One such occasion was when Lee found a letter when he picked up the mail, that devastated him.  It had been returned to sender for insufficient postage. Marina had written to her former boyfriend in Russia telling how  her husband ( Lee ) had changed a great deal and that she was very lonely in the United States. She was sorry that she had not married the him instead, and that it would have been much better for her, had she stayed in Russia.

Lee's train of thought was broken when the outer door to the holding cell opened.  One of the guards entered with a tray of food and some apple juice.  The guard placed the tray on the floor and pushed it through the slot that was made in the cell door for such purposes.  The guard then left without the exchange of a single word.  Lee felt guilt well up inside of him as he often did.  He knew the guard hated him and he believed that it was indeed probably his own fault.

Automatically he pushed the emotions back down into that place where they can't be felt and ate the food that was on his tray.  He was especially grateful for the apple juice.  It was his favorite.

Remembering back, Lee could hear his mother reminding him and his brothers that they were orphans and that the family's financial condition was poor.  She placed Lee's two brothers,  John and Robert, in orphanages.  From the time Margaret  returned to work on December 26, 1942,  Lee too was sent to the orphans' home as well.  He was cared for principally by his aunt, or babysitters and by his mother, when she had time for him.  He liked his aunt.  She was nice to him.  But his mother controlled the relationship and often it seemed she tried to keep Lee away from anything that might have been stable or loving.  She felt that strong men were tough and didn't need to be loved.  It only made them weak and turned them into sissy's, like her boy  Lee.

Lee grew up in this atmosphere of constant money problems and critism, and it had quite an effect on him.  When his mother worked during the school year, Lee had to leave an empty house in the morning, return to it for lunch and then again at night, his mother having trained him to do that rather than to play with other children.

In September of 1952, Lee enrolled in  a junior high school in the Bronx, where the other kids teased him about his "western" clothes and Texas accent.   Once again Lee withdrew from contact with other people.  He began to stay away from school, preferring to read magazines and watch television at home by himself.  This truancy continued despite the efforts of the school authorities and, to a lesser extent, of his mother to have him go to school.  Truancy charges were brought against him alleging that he was "beyond the control of his mother insofar as school attendance is concerned."  Lee was remanded to the Youth House, an institution in which children are kept for psychiatric observation or for detention pending court appearance or commitment to a child-caring or custodial institution such as a training school.   He was in Youth House from April 16 to May 7, 1953, during which time he was examined by its Chief Psychiatrist, and interviewed and observed by other members of the Youth House staff.   At 13 years old, he was considered "a well built boy with superior mental resources and functions only slightly below his capacity level in spite of chronic truancy from school."   No finding of neurological impairment or psychotic mental changes could be made. Lee was diagnosed with a  "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive--aggressive tendencies." He was seen as an emotionally and quite disturbed young boy who suffered under the impact of existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self-involved and conflicted mother.  Lee was tested and found to have an  IQ of 118 on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. This indicated a "present intellectual functioning in the upper range of bright normal intelligence."  He was reported as being "presumably disinterested in school subjects in that he operates on a much higher than average level."  On the Monroe Silent Reading Test, Lee's score indicated no retardation in reading speed and comprehension.  He tested with a better than average ability in mathematical reasoning for his age group.

Lee thought back to his time in the Marine Corps.  While there is nothing in his military records to indicate that he was mentally unstable or otherwise psychologically unfit for duty in the Marine Corps, but he detested the conditions he found in the service.  Especially he detested the officers.  They had told him he was not leader material and he was held back from rising above the rank of private first class, even though he had passed a qualifying examination for the rank of corporal.  His Marine career was not helped by his attitude; that he was a man of great ability and intelligence and that many of his superiors in the Marine Corps were not sufficiently competent to give him orders.  While Lee did not seem to object to authority in the abstract, he thought that he should be the one to exercise it.   Lee thought "You'd think that in an organization like the Marine Corps, there ought to be someone in charge with the ability to recognize talent such as mine." 

Lee felt that even without a college degree, he should have been put them in a position of prominence.   He manifested this feeling about authority by baiting his officers.  He led them into discussions of foreign affairs about which they often knew less than he did, since he had apparently devoted considerable time to a study of such matters.   When the officers were unable to discuss foreign affairs satisfactorily with him, Lee regarded them as unfit to exercise command over him.   Lee began to verbally cut down anybody that was high ranking in those arguments and make himself come out top dog.

Lee shuffled through the pages of the Life magazine that they had given him.  The pages were all loose because the staples were taken out in case he decided he would make a weapon out of them and escape from the County Jail.  Lee thought that was funny.  He had no way of knowing that his picture would be on the cover of the next issue of Life magazine along with many other magazines, however, his face would be contorted in an agonizing grimace.  The infamous photograph would be taken less than thirty minutes from now.

His mind turned to the President.  They really thought he killed the President.  Lee chuckled to himself.  He wished he could have.  "I am the scapegoat," he thought to himself.  "It was the Mafia and the CIA.  Probably even those guys he had met in New Orleans or that guy he met once in Dallas.  What a creep."  One thing he knew for certain was that they were well connected and controlled the police and the local political scene.  He knew though that once he got into court he could prove his innocence and lead to the real assassins.

Through the bars of his holding cell he could see a door that led out to an office with desks.  He would occasionally see the detectives grouped together talking.  At one time he saw them drawing some sort of diagram on a blackboard.  Some kind of hallway or something.  There were x's all over it and arrows.  He saw two x's with circles around them.  One was surrounded with many x's and the other was just one out of a line of many other x's.  He could see them crowding around the chalkboard and one man talking and pointing to others and to the x's on the board. He understood that they must be talking about the route they would be taking to transfer him. Then he saw the flash from cameras as a photographer took a couple of photos of the board. Then he saw the one he had met before in Dallas.  He was a stocky man with a grey suit and a brim hat.  Not a cowboy hat like the cops wore but a business type suit and hat.  He had seen him the night he met the others in Dallas at a strip joint.  The mans name was Ruby, Jack Ruby.

Lee's thoughts turned once again Marina.  He loved her, but he knew that she didn't love him. Maybe once she did for a short while.  But he was sure she didn't anymore.  Tears welled up in his eyes as he fought to suppress the feelings.

The door opened to the holding area and an army of detectives and cops in cowboy hats came in. Lee stood at the back of his cell.  One of the Cops ordered him to face the wall and put his hands against it and lean forward.  Lee complied.  Somewhere in the Officers command, Lee thought he heard the words "asshole."  " What did it matter anymore wether they liked him or not," Lee chuckled to himself.  The door to the cell was opened and four of the largest cops stepped inside.

Others had drawn their guns.  Without further conversation they shackled him and led him out through the office into the garage.  Just outside of the garage they stopped and in front of him were hundreds of cameras and news people.  "This is where they will do it," Lee thought to himself.  "The American people have been eating lie after lie for decades.  What better lie than one filmed for national TV," Lee thought to himself.

They stood there on the sidewalk that bordered the driveway that served as an exit for the garage, a bank of microphones had been set up.  The Detective next to Lee leaned over and whispered in Lee's ear, "You've got three minutes, no more."
Lee Harvey stepped up to the microphone.  He would speak to the world and tell them the truth.

Before he could speak, a thousand voices simaltaniously began shouting out questions.  Mostly asking if he killed Kennedy.  Lee had thought he would be OK but now his mind reeled, refusing to focus.  He was confused and heard something come out of his mouth about being a patsy.

Then he was grabbed by the arm and the sea of reporters parted and Lee saw the diagram on the chalk board become a reality.  The body of detectives moved in unison as they stepped out onto the concrete driveway.  They went about ten feet and there was a comotion from somewhere to his left.  The Detective that had been standing in front and to his left, not twelve inches away was gone.  Lee turned, another man was coming toward him.  The man from the Strip Bar, wearing a grey suit and a hat.  Not a cowboy hat but a business type hat.  The man extended his hand and Lee saw the flash and heard the explosion of a gunshot.  He felt the searing pain in his stomach and back.  He could not stand and doubled over in pain. He saw lights flashing all around.  He fell to the ground but he didn't remember falling.  All he saw was Marina walking toward him with her arms reached out toward him.  She had come for him, finally, she realized she did love him and she came for him.

The pain was still there but it was ok now.  She walked toward him and their hands touched and they embraced as his lips found hers.

Lee Harvey awoke in the ambulance.  The sirenes were blaring and the air was hot and sticky.   There were far to many people riding in the amulance with him than he felt comfortable with.  They continued to yell questions at him.  He felt the vehicle stop and the doors flew open.  He felt himself being drug out on the gurney and rolling along a hallway.  He lost count of the lights as they passed over his head.  Suddenly he was looking up at three large lights that blinded him.  He felt his clothes being cut off.  Needles poked him in both arms and in his ankles.  The pain came and went.  Lee rolled his head to the right side to see if he could see where he was.  A sudden quiet came over the room.  People were still there and running to and fro but he could no longer hear them.

In front of Lee the man appeared as out of nowhere.  He was perhaps four or five feet away from where he lay bleeding on the operating table.  Lee didn't think he knew the man but in a way he was fimailar, like an old acquaintance, perhaps someone he had known long  ago.  The man was dressed in simular fashion as the medical staff.  A white slip over outfit but with no mask or head covering.  Lee was soothed by the mans voice as he spoke to him.  The stranger reached out toward Lee, with a soft yet strong looking hand, as though he were offering it to him. The man spoke, saying, "Come home Lee."

He did not know why but for the first time in his life, he felt as though he could trust someone.   Lee Harvey sat up on the table and slid his legs off of the surface onto the floor.  He was afraid he would fall as his weight bore down against the floor.   The man stepped closer and reached out and steadied Lee.  Lee took hold of the mans hand as he stepped closer. 

"Good seeing you again," the man spoke.  "It's been a long time.  Let's get you home.  The others are waiting ." 

When the man touched Lee,  in the blink of an eye he was changed and he understood everything that had ever happened to him in his entire life.  Never had his thoughts been so clear and filled with purpose.  Lee walked with the man into a light that only they could see.  Before the light absorbed them, Lee glanced back into the operating room and saw the frantic condition of the people in the emergency room and the still body that lay on the table that they worked so feverishly over.  His heart had changed and he knew why.  For the very first time, ever, he felt compassion for other living souls.  As he walked into the light he stopped and one at a time shook each of his feet as though kicking the mud or dust off of them and then he was gone.

-30-

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