Chapter One

Gathings of gushing goo

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The beginning of any end is seldom seen in real time. Historians have the job of labeling a date or event as having been the beginning of something called "the end" at a later time. 

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What Ben Kowalski knew from his five decades of wrestling with history was that historians were more artist than scientist and they often got their art absolutely, positively dead wrong.

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Ben Kowalsk saw the beginning of the end in real time. He knew when an event happened how history would treat it before history had been written. A psychologist would have called his gift intuition, but it was too precise. Why he had this gift he didn't know. He didn't always consider it a gift. It was a curse as well. Even in his drinking days he could see events having greater or lesser impact than his peers could figure out. In part, his sense of precognition may have been why he drank as copiously as he had.

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The way Ben saw history, the end began one October morning in a shipping mall in Wisconsin in the year 2020 when a third-party candidate for the presidency of the United States held a seemingly meaningless, certainly inconsequential, political rally. Ben had followed the story on television as a curious onlooker and, like the rest of the nation, found what happened an unbelievable sequence of events.

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He was ironing a shirt, watching a game show when the newsman interrupted with the startling news. A presidential candidate had been shot.

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The nominee of the Independence Party, Marshall Warren, had pegged 18 percent in the polls. He couldn't win the election just eight days away but, for certain, he could influence who did win. Warren was pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-environmentalist; a self-proclaimed 'progressive Libertarian and conservative tradionalist.' He was, in theory, all things to all people. He covered the full rainbow of social and political diversity. What he didn't believe in, he hedged in political gift wrapping. His campaign was an appeal to the segment of America willing to believe anything - which was considerable. 

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In the crowd that day was a young man whose name, Timothy Korb, would soon become a synonym for futility. In the popular lexicon the phase 'korbed' or 'korbed up,' would become a phrase kids everywhere would subsequently use to describe anything lacking in design, thought or execution - or could flatly be called insane.

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Timothy Korb had been kicked out of college for his deficient grades - which were the result of a habitual taste for marijuana, LSD and just about anything that could alter his mental state. In his pocket, Korb had a loaded snub-nose .38. H was tired of being ignored, tired of being insignificant. He was a loose cannon with a wandering, vacant statement to make and the means to do it.

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When Korb had gotten up that morning, he wondered whether he should even go to Marshall Warren's political rally. Warren wasn't his candidate. Warren was simply a name, a venue or Krob to act out his wretchedly deficient drug-induced, delusional fantasy. Before crawling out of bed he lit a joint. He toked it all the way down before his feet even hit the floor. It was how he put the world on his playing field. The pot had recently begun to have some new effects on him. Unlike the past when it would make him mellow and giddy, it now made him anxious, paranoid and indecisive.  He figured more pot would take away the paranoia. It didn't. He paced and fretted and finally concluded that he had to go somewhere, to do something, to be somewhere, to actually try to interact with humanity. To soothe his growing anxiety he decided that a hit of acid would take the edge off. Why he jammed the gun in his pocket was unknown to history.

 

When candidate Marshall Warren took to the podium, a stoned and borderline psychotic Timothy Korb pressed toward the rope line. A Secret Service agent would later remember that he had spotted the young man, but that he didn't appear too out of place - only that he looked unkempt and his demenor was, well, stoned. The Secret Service agent later admitted that candidate Warren attracted an unusual number of those types because of his stated position on the decriminalization of marijuana. Pot-heads always attended Warren rallies. It was a given. When the speech was over, the candidate pressed forward into the rope line to shake hands. The delusional Timothy Korb was still 20 feet from the candidate when his hand slipped into his pant pocket for the .38. It was a gun he had stolen from his father, a former police detective. He had never fired it. He had never fired a gun, period.

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"Guns," he had argued in college, "are, like, dangerous."

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"Tell me why you think so, Tim," his prof had asked.

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"I dunno. They just are, 'cuz like there's no real reason to use 'em."

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"What if some guy was coming at you with a knife?"

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"I juist don't think that could happen, man, 'cuz I don't really have any issues with anyone."

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Korb was about to contradict himself. He did have issues. And in the tradition of being totally korbed, he was in the process of trying to make a statement even he wouldn't have understood.

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What was unknown to Timothy Korb was that the gun he gripped firmly in his pant pocket had a hair-trigger. He pulled the hammer back and felt it click. When he pulled it out of his pant pocket the hammer caught on his belt and the gun discharged into his genitals.

 

Timothy Korb was starting his day off poorly. For a brief moment of clarity he considered life without genitals. He knew it was not a positive development. His drug-addled brain ran a quick assessment. He was lying on a shopping mall concourse without his goodies - they were spread about the floor in gatherings of gushing goo. That was a done deal. There was no way to undo his undeniable lapse of thinking. To make matters worse, he was in a drug-induced psychosis. In his brain three billion synapses were misfiring simultaneously. He concluded through his pain and psychosis that he must finish what he started. After all, he was supposed to do something.g Doing something was why he had come to the rally. Doing something was why he had gotten out of bed in the first place. He pointed the pistol at the only part of Marshall Warren he could see through the maze of panicked chaos in font of him - his feet.

 

Timothy Korb was about to become a legend in mendacity. His shot hit Marshall Warren squarely in the ankle. His futile and wretchedly stupid one act play was almost complete. Video replay would show that it took the Secret Service agent precisely 2.63 seconds to defuse the situation by putting two bullets into the head of Timothy Korb.

 

 Guns, Korb had now clinically proven, were, like, dangerous.

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Normally an assassination attempt is neither so poorly executed, nor so poorly conceived. Shooting a third-party candidate in the ankle isn't nearly as sexy as knocking off a household name. Still, the Ballad of Timothy Korb was now a part of the national archives. Had he lived to see the story on the evening news he would have laughed and said 'man, I must have been totally whacked.' He might have even considered checking himself into rehab, given the psychotic nature of his act - had not the Secret Service agent extinguished the option.

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Ben Kowalski saw the event at the shopping mall in different hues. He knew, intuitively, this was a development that would have ripple effect. His sense of precognition told him that this was an event that would swing the tenuous pendulum of history.

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What he didn't know was that he, himself, would be swept up in the back swing.