Slipping through the fabric of Time

CW: Death, mental health, grief, historical trauma, violence

Memphis April 4 2025

Seamus opened his eyes to find he whirled across the Earth like a comet, spinning through the cosmos. The memory of the knife attack on the New York subway wrapped him in a shroud. Now he had no body, just thoughts, and memories, floating through the ether.

Was this the same for everyone when the coffin lid is closed? I’m not religious, no Pearly Gates, and brimstone stuff, but this somehow feels like what the Buddhists believe. It’s another existence, another chance to see the universe from a new perspective.

Grief overwhelmed him. He thought of his family he’d left behind. Jenny and the children; how will they cope? He felt desolate, unable to do anything.

The world below spun like a carousel, faster and faster. Then it clicked back into place like a roulette ball clunking into the pocket. A scene unfolded below: a neat town, its streets thronged with thousands of singing, hand-holding African Americans.

Black and white - was that what this is all about? Here in America, it’s not a metaphor; it’s a way of life. Below, he seemed to recognise landmarks: Did he remember being there, or did someone tell him about it? Jenny was nearby, but he couldn’t see her. Perhaps she was a figment of his imagination, or a presence so strong in his memory, that she remained in his ethereal consciousness forever.

The Mississippi, thick and slow as molasses, curled beneath him, drawing a dark, bruised line through the land. From above, the city spread out - low buildings, factory roofs, clustered homes - its geometry taut with an unease that came with the name. Memphis.

The tension was ambient, atmospheric, as though the very air recoiled. Tennessee, for all its slogans about union and progress, still held firm to segregation – jobs, accommodation, hospitals, schools, public spaces. The law was the architecture of exclusion, and everyone knew it.

Then, as if drawn like iron filings to a magnet, he found himself near a white, stuccoed building: the Lorraine Motel. A sign gave its name, but the building had its own memory. The Lorraine had offered sanctuary in a city that did not. Musicians came there -Aretha, Otis, and Sam Cooke. They had no key cards to the Peabody’s five-star front desk. There, the velvet rope was invisible but absolute. White trumped Black - every time. And everybody in Memphis knew the rules.

Beneath him, he saw a well-muscled African American talking to an athletic looking white man. Then he recognised them both. The photographer was Rory Thompson, with his sidekick, Paul Kościuszko, a reporter for the New York Times.

There was no warning. Just a subtle dislocation, as if a trick of light had turned the world translucent, and then he was falling through it. The thought came unbidden. Seamus knew what he had to do before he did it. Like a birthmark; his role was there from the beginning.

Paul Kościuszko will be my guide. Whatever remained of me will inhabit his inner consciousness. There was no logic in it. The absurdity struck me even as it was happening. Am I a ghost, or something similar, a spirit fusing into the thoughts of a living man? It sounded like the last chapter of a cheap paperback. What astonished me was not that it could happen, but how easily it did.

Could it be a case of same for same? I had been a journalist. Paul was one too. Was there some spiritual bureaucrat somewhere, like Orwell’s angel of history, who filed the dead by profession and posted them to haunt the living in the same state of affairs?

But there was no time for theory. The melding of minds had happened. A twitch at the corner of Paul’s mouth, an involuntary jerk of the shoulder; as if a sudden shiver rippled down his spine. I registered it with a shock of recognition. Perhaps all the dead did this. That brush of cold air when alone in a room, the sudden certainty of being watched. That vertiginous sense that one’s own shadow was someone else; perhaps these were the touchpoints of spectral transit. I had no physical body now, and yet the shudder came. It rippled through me not as a sensation, but as something existential. I am inside a world that had always been beside the known one, a parallel universe, hidden, but not separate.

Rory took the hire car and said he would find accommodation. Paul walked the streets, recorder in hand, soaking up the atmosphere. Before they’d parted, they’d agreed to meet up for lunch at ‘The Four Way’, the famous soul-food restaurant.

Rory slid into the booth opposite Paul. They ordered fried catfish, fried chicken, and peach cobbler. Rory slapped the Lorraine Motel brochure on the table. OK. Here’s the deal. I convinced the owner that you’re part of King’s security team, and we’re happy to share a room.

Paul raised an eyebrow.

Rory shook his head. Don’t give me that look. The Lorraine Motel doesn’t cater for white folks, so you’re lucky. Our room there is mighty convenient, for Martin Luther King and his close friend Ralph Abernathy are only three doors down.

Paul laughed and punched his partner on the shoulder. Just kidding! That’s fine; you’ve earned your lunch.

Soon after they’d settled in at the Lorraine, Paul thought it was a car back-firing. But Rory reacted as if it was a war zone. As soon as he heard the distinctive sound of the rifle shot, he ran out of the room with his Leica M3 and started taking photographs. Paul ran after him, and then stopped when he saw the scene on the balcony three doors away.

Martin Luther King lay on the concrete balcony with black arterial blood pooling around his head. Ralph Abernathy tried to staunch the blood with a white towel. Andrew Young looked down, devastated. Jesse Jackson, by his side, urged Abernathy to stop the flow. However, he soon realised it was a fatal injury. But then, Andrew Young looked skywards as if seeking divine help and pointed his right hand towards the nearby building, saying. That’s where the shot came from.

Whoa! I checked the date on the newsstand at the corner. April 4, 1968. On this day fifty-seven years ago, and twenty-eight years before I was born, this event played out in real time.

Later that evening, Seamus sensed the shift. Rory was numb with grief. His photo of King’s last moments splashed on the front page of the nation’s dailies. He never wanted fame in that way. He felt like the assassin’s accomplice. If he could turn back the clock, he’d rewind the film and expose it in the sunlight, like it never happened.

Paul was silent. Not the silence of distraction, but of someone trying to make sense of what lay before him. Five years on the Sports Desk had given him fast reflexes, sure instincts. But now, Paul shook his head - he was out of his depth. This story wasn’t a result you could print above the fold. Paul sat on the edge of the bed, staring at his shoes. His gut tightened - something physical, like taking a blow to the ribs. Martin Luther King was dead, and the country was turning on itself like a machine stripped of oil.

Then Seamus heard a scream. At first, he felt only the velocity; the jolt of her rising from the chair too fast, the room spinning as her feet hit the floorboards. With no preamble, he’d entered the domain of a middle-aged Black woman as easy as yesterday’s memories.

Grief tore through her like fire through dry cotton. Her immediate thoughts lay at the front of her mind like a newspaper headline. The screen had said it plain. Shot. Memphis - And then, dead. She burst out the door, into the open air and fell to her knees in the grass; arms limp at her sides, her mouth working in silence before the prayer found shape. Her words tangled with sobs and with the weight of too many names already buried.

Lord, why? Why him? Why again?

Seamus felt her memories as fragments: the bus boycott, the marches, the dogs, the hoses, the Sundays in pressed dresses, holding her child’s hand. The sound of King’s voice: velvety, grave, biblical - echoing from the kitchen radio, steadied her hands as she shelled peas for dinner.

He sensed her dread; not just for herself, but for her son, for the next generation. She could already hear the gunfire to come, see the flames licking up storefronts, smell smoke in the streets. And beneath it all, a soft, stubborn voice inside her still prayed. Not for vengeance. Not even for peace. Just for the strength to keep going, to keep standing, to bury one more Black man without burying hope.

The front door stood wide open when he’d moved back to the Lorraine Motel, where the air still tasted of death. It began with the scent of burnt powder and the copper tang that hit the back of the throat before the eyes could confirm what lay ahead.

A uniformed policeman scratched his neck as though something stung him. Seamus slipped into the police officer’s mind at the precise moment his boot scuffed a discarded cigarette packet near the railing. The man’s name was Doug, twenty-five, with the closed-off inwardness of someone taught to mistrust softness. A lifetime of instruction not in words but tone: locker rooms, squad cars, beer-soaked porches.

Seamus felt the recoil of Doug’s body as he looked up. Blood had found its way in slow tributaries down the pale pink of the balcony floor, pooling by the ironwork in a shape that seemed deliberate, as if grief had geometry. Doug had seen blood, yes, and once a corpse slumped over a steering wheel after a drunken crash, but not this. Not someone important. Not someone who could still be alive in the photograph blinking from the newsstand down the block.

And then Andrew Young came. His face strained under a weight Doug hadn’t imagined a man could carry in a glance. He saw something that collapsed the narrow scaffolding of everything known: dignity amid devastation, sorrow untouched by rage. For a moment, Doug wanted to speak. To say what, he didn’t know. Seamus felt the effort and the failure, like a man reaching for a ledge already fallen away.

A voice inside Doug: once a mere whisper beneath bravado, stirred. What if the sermons, the marches, the sitting-in and standing-up and singing and dying, had always pointed to something he had chosen not to see? The idea embarrassed him. Shame came not with force, but with a slinking gentleness that made his eyes sting.

Seamus stayed silent inside him, a mere observer, but he recognised the paradigm shift in the novice policeman’s attitude to racial segregation. Memphis still had separate toilets for Blacks and whites. Now he questioned whether that was right.

Did I read once, long ago, about Martin Luther King’s death? Did I see that image of a man standing on a balcony, a moment torn from the cloth of time, and the world keening like a widow? Or, have I dreamt it, folded as I am now in this strange half-light, as though the mind itself has opened a secret door?

For I am a fledgling reporter, scribbler of other men’s truths, struck down one night in the bowels of New York by a poverty-driven African American with hunger in his eyes and steel in his hand. I remember the press of the crowd, the smell of the train brakes, then the blade entering my belly like a cold idea. And after that: silence; or perhaps it was music, and then this: this haunting drift between worlds.

Maybe the wound became a doorway. Maybe the soul, when unmoored, goes searching through the wreckage of history for kindred hurt. Perhaps that is why I see what I see, why I wake among ghosts who never knew my name, in times I never lived.

And yet, even as I ask, I know there will be no answer. The mind turns its lantern into the dark and finds only its own trembling light. So let it be that I am merely a witness, a vessel for what once was. Let the living make their judgements. I am content now to listen: to breathe in the thoughts of others, the heartbreaks; the mercies, and to know that even in ruin, something still remembers.

Already the edges blur. The sounds of this other century: shouts, hymns, the sharp cracks of destiny are fading to a far shore. I feel myself loosen from the weight of breath and pain, light as smoke in a morning wind. If this is death, it is gentle. I drift in the echo of a sermon never finished, of voices rising for a justice not yet born. For I am no longer a journalist, nor a man undone, I am the witness only, and the witness fades. And so I pass into that soft expanse where memory becomes mercy.