Dealey Plaza

Dallas's downtown is, like other American cities', very small -- ten blocks long and two blocks wide, and almost deserted after 5 pm. It has a district of funky cafes in old warehouses, this one called the West End. A new light rail system takes you to a shuttle bus that takes you to the airport (though I was in a sluggish red rental car). There's a lot of money there, clearly -- tall gleaming skyscrapers and art galleries for people who are looking to invest -- and there's even more money outside the city limits, in Plano, which is all high-tech clusters round freeway exits and hotels improbably constructed around a ten-storey-high central arch.

But the assassination is still huge. I went to the JFK cenotaph first, a white roofless room one block over from Dealey Plaza itself. It's supported on short pillars, so the main walls of the room end a short way off the ground, and at night they turn on lamps embedded in the bottom of the walls so it looks like the structure's supported by the light. A homeless guy sold me a copy of a fake newspaper about the assassination; that was what I'd come for, so I have no business complaining about ghoulishness, but I found myself getting surprisingly uncomfortable as he went through his top selling points, "the MARK ON THE PAVEMENT", "the NECK wound", "the FATAL HEAD wound", "the autopsy pictures" and I was glad when he left.

The first thing that strikes you about Dealey Plaza itself is how small it is. It's just two blocks wide, marking one end of downtown, where the two roads down either side of downtown and the one down the middle funnel together to go under a railway line. In fact, the whole story takes place on an impossibly small stage. The building on the north-west side is the School Book Depository. The next building round clockwise is the jail where Oswald was held. The next building round is the courthouse where he was killed. Looking at the tiny park, you find yourself amazed that anyone could spend long enough there to get themselves shot. If it had been a normal day it would have been thirty seconds at most of waving and smiling to the crowds, a warm afternoon almost immediately forgotten.

My god, you think, he almost got away.

There's white paint marks on the curb marking the spot where the limo was when the first and second bullets hit. When you stand at them, you notice that there are black tar crosses in the middle of the three lanes, at the exact spot, so there's no mistake. Families go up to the white picket fence at the grassy knoll, heads down, busily looking for something. I'd gone there expecting nothing more than ghoulish fun but, when it got down to it, I found that I really didn't have the stomach for it.

On my way back to the freeway, I drove over the second tar cross and flinched.

(honesty forces me to admit that this was originally a mail to Caroline, but I liked it enough to post it here)