Freddie Mercury was halfway through singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” when he dropped his microphone.
He had the sudden feeling of walking through a dream, or that perhaps he’d spent the afternoon drinking too much wine. He turned to look at his bandmates who stood staring back at him with their mouths opened.
Freddie then became aware of the sweating throng of an audience in Wembley Stadium, standing motionless, gawking toward the stage. For several seconds there was absolute silence — almost frighteningly so — a stillness nearly impossible amidst a throng such as this, in such a venue, amongst a sold-out audience of over 140,000 frantic fans who at the moment had lost all their franticness, despite seeing a man on stage that had been dead for nearly three decades.
Roger reached over with his drumsticks and hesitantly tapped the cymbals of his drum kit as if maybe they weren’t even there. As if he didn’t expect the sound to come from them that did.
Freddie blinked rapidly, his mouth with his jutting teeth hanging agog as he bent over to pick up the microphone. He wiped the thick sheen of sweat off his forehead.
“I’m, uh…” he started, and then from the audience, one person started screaming, and then another joined in, and then another, a gathering hum like an approaching swarm of hornets. Others called out in excited whooping yells, but not for the performers standing dumbfounded on the stage, but for others in the audience.
Freddie watched as people hugged desperately, crying, the once-still congregation of people slowly starting to move again as if a pause button had been released and an old movie on a worn out VHS tape began to play again. In patches throughout the stadium, a slowly undulating ripple trembled at the outset of a wave. Others stood relatively deadlocked, looking around them with blank stares, swallowed in spellbound confusion as deep as the ocean.
“Freddie, is that really you?” John called incredulously across the stage, his bass guitar hanging by a strap over his shoulder. “Is this a bloody dream?”
“We’re in Wembley,” Freddie said, not realizing he was still holding the microphone up to his mouth, which then amplified his words throughout the stadium.
“FREDDIE!” someone screamed out from several rows back.
Brian and Roger both stood staring at him, eyes not so much wide open as they were squinting, trying to focus.
John walked over to Freddie and swept him up into his arms, the bass guitar between them. John was sobbing.
“If this is a dream, it’s the realest bloody dream I’ve ever had,” John said in a garble of words.
At the same time Freddie Mercury dropped his microphone in Wembley Stadium, Michael Jackson stood similarly transfixed and unsure in the tiny confines of a soundproof recording studio in Los Angeles, thick padding on the walls, a stool pushed into the corner. The last thing he could remember was taking a pill out of his prescription container — perhaps too soon since the last one. But now he was staring through a small glass window where three vaguely familiar people sat looking back at him, one holding a half-smoked cigarette with an inch-long length of ash precariously waiting to fall.
Within an hour of those two concurrent events, a man with ties to an underground white supremacist movement entered without question into the southeast Chicago offices of the Developing Communities Project, walked up to an almost twenty-five-year-old Barack Obama, and shot him dead. He had not yet married Michelle, nor had they given birth to Malia and Natasha. Though as the man with the swastika tattooed on his right hand approached him, the once future president could only see those three women in his mind, their smiles. Flying with them on Air Force One. Dancing with his wife.
At that exact moment, a recently turned 40-year-old George W. Bush was finishing up a vacation in Colorado Springs when a disgruntled bellhop who years later would lose his home in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina confidently stepped up to the future president and stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. He, too, died almost instantly.
In the White House, Ronald Reagan sat at his desk with a phone to his ear, staring at a bowl of licorice jelly beans. His favorite. He hadn’t thought of licorice jelly beans in many years. But now here he was sitting at his desk - another site he hadn’t seen in quite some time - staring at the bowl of jelly beans.
“Hello?” said a man with a thick Russian accent on the other end of the phone.
“Hello?” President Reagan responded.
“Ronald?” the voice asked.
“Mikhail?”
Suddenly, five men in black suits burst into the Oval Office with a fevered racket.
“Sir, you need to come with us,” the leader amongst them insisted, moving behind the desk and removing the phone from the former and now reinstated President’s hand.
“Is this all real?” the President asked as he dreamily stood to follow them, one of the men holding onto his elbow.
“Honestly, sir, I have no idea,” one of the secret service men answered as they swept him away to a secure bunker.
On the other side of the country in a Hollywood board room, James Cameron was watching commercials played from a grainy VHS tape. They were television spots for Aliens, which had originally opened in theaters the following week. The movie had already grossed over $131 million, yet here he was in a room with a world preparing to watch it all over again for the first time.
At the exact same moment, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Robin Williams and Chris Farley, Prince and David Bowie, Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers were all staring at themselves in mirrors, wondering how they got there.
And in a small room with pink walls, a girl with gorgeously red hair was looking at a calendar of kittens pinned to her wall. She slowly walked over and took the calendar into her hands. The first ten days had been crossed off.
It was July 11, 1986 once again, and Dr. Tabitha Small was just five days past her tenth birthday. Again.
“Dr. Watts,” the girl said. “You stupid, stupid woman. What have you done?”
Oohh. This has my attention!
Wow, great start! Looking forward to the adventure!