Imagined

By Tom Maremaa

Imagined is a heart-warming, poignant novel about the return of a man who either is or is not John Lennon, the famous Beatle whom the world thought was assassinated on a cold, dark night in December some twenty years ago. The man who wakes from a coma in his hospital bed, speaks in Liverpool dialect, and sings Beatles songs is truly an original creation. He takes on a world that wants to believe. And in less than a week takes us on a magical journey from the madness of New York City at Christmas to the hippie heart of San Francisco, and even a sudden leap from the Golden Gate Bridge. In the end, Imagined brings us the real promise of a Beatles reunion, and delivers a message of hope, love and reconciliation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 26, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469731025

Tom Maremaa

Tom Maremaa grew up in the Midwest and was educated at Dartmouth College, University of Zurich, and the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked as a tennis professional, carpenter, magazine editor, and CEO of his own software company. He currently lives in Mountain View, California, and writes technically for Apple Computer, Inc.

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All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 1999 Tom Maremaa

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

This edition published by toExcel Press,

an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse.com, Inc.

620 North 48th Street Suite 201

Lincoln, NE 68504-3467

www.iuniverse.com

ISBN: 978-1-469-73102-5 (ebook)

ISBN: 1-58348-625-9

Portions of this book were originally published in different

form on the World Wide Web at <www.bagism.com/Imagined>.

Contents

PART I

PART II

PART III

TO MIMI

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

—John Lennon

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

The shadow energies seem to be a part of the human psyche, a part of its 360-degree nature, and the shadow energies become destructive only when they are ignored.

—Robert Bly

Be patient, for the world is broad and wide...

—Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Part I

Prologue

Things could not have got much worse that year. My marriage had broken up and I’d lost custody of my son in a legal fight that had left me drained of energy and pocketbook. A giant chasm had opened up in my life. I could neither move forward nor regain anything from the past. I was depressed. At the time, when my friend first told me the news—which seemed incredulous—I was suffering from a monumental writer’s block. Mornings, I would get up early and make a pot of coffee for myself and then stare at blank pages on the screen until I began to feel nauseous. Nothing came.

When I took a few stabs at the page—a sputtering of words on the key-board—I grew even sicker.

Your writing will run as true and deep as your feeling when it’s running truest and deepest, I remember the great Gertrude Stein once saying. But the words I wrote were not true; they rang hollow to my ears, and they certainly had no feeling because most of the time I was numb.

My body ached from the numbness; I had trouble focusing because of the dyslexia which flipped almost every letter on its head and made mockery of my attempts at spelling. The dyslexia had grown more aggravated with time. I thought I should learn Hebrew or Arabic because it seemed easier for me to write from right to left than the other way around. And to further the humiliation, my stomach growled savagely at me those mornings, as I struck the wrong keys and hopelessly misspelled words; my whole body had become an angry beast of prey fed by endless cups of coffee and sleepless night. The wolf was at the door, I figured, reflecting my writer’s shadow in its ice blue eyes. After the divorce most of my friends had drifted away; and this was especially painful because friendship had meant a great deal to me coming from a small town in rural Ohio where you knew your neighbors and relied on your friends during times of crisis. It meant even more later in life because once it was lost—which seemed to happen a lot in the big cityóyour chances of ever recovering it were about as good as your chances of selling a screenplay to Hollywood: one in a million. That may be why the story held such a singular fascination for me, why it pushed me to the limits: it was as if a great friend from the past, lost but not forgotten, had suddenly returned to grace our lives once again. An impossible dream, these days, the kind of thing that just doesn’t happen very often anymore.

It had not broken yet as major news when it fell unceremoniously into my lap, or as fate would have it, my laptop computer. It had not yet become one of those monster media events like the Rodney King beating or the Simpson chase in that Ford Bronco or the plot to destroy Nancy Kerrigan’s skating career—an event that would hold the country glued to the tube for days or months on end, commanding all our attention before, ultimately, dying on the airwaves and disappearing completely from public consciousness—as if it had never happened.

One night in December, around eleven o’clock, I got a phone call from my old friend Tad German, who works as a reporter for CNN in New York. I hated to answer the phone; it made me, for some reason, more depressed than I already was, and my first impulse was simply to let it ring through and let the answering machine pick it up with my standard, Blah blah blah. Leave a message at the beep. And I’ll get back to you pronto.

(Yeah, right. One time, during those dark days, I had fifty-three messages on my machine I was going to get back to pronto.)

You won’t believe what’s happened, said German, his voice quivering. You just won’t.

What?

"I’m on to something big, really big."

Tad German was a man who, despite being fifty-two years old and the father of three grown sons, still gushed with boyish enthusiasm whenever he reported on a story that was pure breaking news. And he was certainly pumped for this one.

Every story is big, I said, throwing a little cold water in his ear to dampen the heat of enthusiasm. It’s life that’s small. Go back to sleep, Taddy boy. The wife needs you.

"You gotta listen to me. You gotta, he kept insisting. Jake, are you there?"

Yes. Why?

"Because you’re the only one who’ll believe this," he insisted in his booming, TV-trained voice.

Thought you said I wouldn’t it.

Shut up and listen, Jake, he cried. I’m sending you an e-mail right now with a photo image attached. Did you hear what I said? Check your laptop in a few minutes.

Oh, God. That’s the last thing I want to do, I said.

Jake, you’re only man in town I can trust with this.

So Jake Ryder is the only man you cano

Don’t dick with me, he interrupted.

Tad, I’m royally depressed. It’s midnight in the garden of evil, no good, and you want me to download some goddam, stupid photo.

Listen, I’m sorry she left you, old sport. These things do happen in life, you know?

Tad, this is no time for clichEs, I said. Your story better be good. Damn good.

It is. Just boot up your machine and take a peek, okay?

At the time I was living in a small walkup apartment in the Village, just me and my cat and those visiting armies of cockroaches. Life had definitely reached a low ebb. I was ekeing out a meager living by pen, writing my music reviews (when I wasn’t completely blocked) on a second-hand laptop I had got cheap from a friend who worked in Sales at one of the magazines. Unfortunately, it had a built-in modem and connections to various online services, which meant I had an Internet address and could be regularly bombarded with reams of e-mail from editors and readers. It was worse than a FAX machine.

I logged on to my beloved America Online and, sure enough, that friendly, computer voice, with all the charm of an encyclopedia salesman, cried, You’ve got mail!

I downloaded the picture.

Well, you’re a music critic, said Tad German, calling me back later, panting like a dog in heat. Now who the hell do you think that is?

Sunday

The hospital room is almost completely dark, except for a thin tube of fluorescent light that glows above the head of the bed. The curtains are partially drawn; shadows against the wall. The nurses have kept it that way, a room in a state of perpetual twilight, at the request of the family. Night blends into day, blurring the rough edges of time. In a remote corner down a long white corridor, the room is isolated from the rest of the hospital. The name on the door, apparently, has been changed so many times that even the nurses do not know the true identity of the man lying in bed connected to the machinery of life support.

The patient is scruffy in appearance, his hair shaggy as a dog and his face covered from cheekbone to chin with gnarly strands of beard, now gone salt-and-pepper gray. His eyes are shut tight and his breathing has almost stopped. In bed twenty-four hours a day, his body swollen and slightly blubbery, he remains motionless, a sleeping whale adrift in a sea of dreams.

That morning, early December, his eyes are flickering rapidly from left to right, as he is lying comatose in bed.

• • •

Two men are hovering now around me bed. Mr. Bloat, whose shadow fills the room, is laughing heartily while his partner, Mr. Bones, is busy disconnecting the tubes attached to my body. The patient, me, I, this living, breathing thing, is feeling sick. Oh, my God! he cries. I’m a real goner. that!"

In Central Park, after eluding me followers, I, he stops for a drink of water but the water coming from the fountain is frozen. I begin to shiver. A blanket of fresh snow suddenly covers the fields of strawberry near the corner of West 72nd and Central Park West. There is nobody to talk to, not a soul; and no birds are singing. I panick. Betterget back to where you belonged, I mutter to me self.

In the hospital room Roger, the sadist male nurse, bangs on my head with Maxwell’s silver hammer. I am bleeding...

• • •

He suddenly bolts awake from the dream. His entire body bathed in a sea of icy sweat, he tries to sit up but cannot, and falls back on his pillow, banging his head against the bedframe.

It is only the second time in ages that he has awakened from the throes of his deep, permanent sleep. His head is a little bit fuzzy. When he opens his eyes he has trouble focusing; things flipflop because of his dyslexia. Looking around the room, he sees nothing familiar. For a moment, panic strikes again: where is Roger, the sadist male nurse? Gone, at least for now, he figures. Roger works A.M.s, not P.M.s, so it must be afternoon. There is still time to hide before Roger returns to bang again on the back of his skull with Maxwell’s silver hammer.

Bloody bastard! cries the scruffy-looking man, as a surge of anger shoots through his body, tightening his muscles, wiring his frazzled nerves. He wipes the cold sweat from his brow.

What am I doing here? he is thinking. Who am I? He feels the contours of his face, stroking his bristly beard. In a tiny oval mirror that is lying on a table alongside his bed, he stares at himself with grave curiosity. He cannot, for the life of it all, recognize the face that stares back at him in the mirror. His mind draws a complete blank. Who is he? There are lines on his forehead, yes, and wrinkles around his neck. His jaws are puffy, even a bit jowly. But he has not aged badly at all. He appears, in fact, much, much younger than his years, although it matters little since he has no idea what he had looked like once before a long time ago.

He twists and rolls his neck. Fists clenched, he pounds on his bedframe. Then he begins to grow tired again. His eyelids are drooping, he feels weary, slowly ready to fall back to sleep. This is me bloody fate, he tells himself, with a sigh of resignation.

Outside, somewhere down the corridor, he hears voices, and soon the latch on the door unlocks. Two nurses, a mother and daughter pair, come strolling in. Thankfully, one of them is not Roger!

They turn up the lights and stand by his bed and start their routine checks, examining his body, poking and prodding him. He tries not to wince at the pain, or give any hints that he is awake.

Well, Johnny, how are we doin’ today? Feelin’ any better? says the older mother nurse, cracking a smile.

I guess not, replies the daughter nurse. Well, maybe tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s another day, Johnny Boy, says the mother nurse. Small comfort for your lot, though.

Johnny Boy is lying silently in bed, his body aching, his muscles stiff as a board.

Lois, remind me to get some food refills, says the mother nurse. His supply is gettin’ low.

You know, I been on this shift for three whole weeks and not once, even, he’s opened his eyes, says the daughter nurse. Can you believe that?

That’s the way it’s been with our man Johnny Boy, says the mother. Long as the family keeps paying the bills, our job is to keep him alive.

Momma, he’s practically—a veg-jet-able.

No, he ain’t. Nobody calls my Johnny Boy a veg-jet-able, her voice grows indignant. You hear me, girl?

Sorry. Didn’t mean no disrespect. Who he is, by the way? You know?

There is an awkward silence between the two nurses, fussing over Johnny Boy.

You really wanna know?

’Course I do.

You keep a secret? I mean, girl, really keep a secret? Not tell Roger, says the mother nurse.

My lips are truly sealed.

Well, all right then. Sure as the sky is blue and the old sun sets in the west, sure as we ain’t in Kansas no mo’, this man with the kind heart, with the gentle soul is, the mother nurse gulps, John Lennon.

The daughter nurse drops her pen and clipboard with a loud thwack on the floor.

John Lennon, the Beatle? Oh, no. No way, she cries, batting her eyes and shaking her head in disbelief. Not possible, Momma. Not! What you talkin’ about? John Lennon, he died. Why, he died so long ago I weren’t even born.

Listen, Lois, you’s new. I been here since the day they brought him in day he was shot. Nobody thought he’d live, everybody sayin’ he was a goner, and no family ever come see him. Only me to take care of him.

Well, he sure look like John Lennon.

He is. Believe me.

I believe you, Momma. But what about his family? What’s her name? That Yoko woman?

Well, I’ll tell ya. They’s kept it a secret the whole time. Only the business manager, this Barney Somebody ever comes to see him. Figures, says the mother nurse.

What?

Why they don’t want to tell nobody. Too embarrassed at the poor man’s condition, says the mother nurse. Word ever gets out, lot of folks—you know, he had fans—they gonna reject him as less than human.

Sad is what it is.

"Sure it’s sad. But I’s done my best taking care of him. Besides, I been singing him Beatles songs for twenty years in case he done forgot