The room they put me in is bare; four walls, two chairs and a single table. The walls are empty, uncovered cinder block. I’m seated in the chair facing the door so I see him as he enters. His face is chiseled, the skin pulled tight over his bones. His hair has gone uncut since the media coverage and now it sits slightly above his shoulders, hanging in greasy strands.

He nods at me as he steps through the doorway and takes the seat across from me. His escort leaves the room, shutting the door behind him. Our time is limited, so I figured I would skip the pleasantries and get to the point right away.

“Why don’t you tell me why you did what you did John?”

“Why did I do what? Why did I try to change the nation? Is that why you are here?”

“That certainly is part of it, your need to make a difference must have had an impact on the events. But that isn’t only that. I want to know why you did everything that you did to get you here now. I want the whole story. I want to know what it is that makes John Heaton.”

I had never spoken to John Heaton before now but I had heard nearly everything the news had to offer about him. The media always seems to have their own speculations on events, and rarely are any of them fully true. I was here to get the truth directly from then source. How else would I be able to tell his story any different than everyone else?

“I am glad you agreed to this John, you aren’t an easy person to get an interview with, you know.”

“Not these days, no. I don’t have a chance to get out much.” A smirk flashed across his face. He leaned forward, “I want you to know why we’re having this interview. I have read some of the biographies you have written and the essays covering historic events and I have admired the way you tell the stories. It seems to me that you have a way to tell a story fully without showing a bias. I have never finished one of your biographies and hated the subject, even if they did something horrible. I want others to read my story and finish it with the same feeling. Will you do that for me?”

“I will certainly try, but you will have to tell me the truth about everything.”

I know, after what he did, I should think twice about everything he says. But for some reason I don’t. I have only been speaking with him a few minutes and he’s put me at ease. This isn’t the person I expected to meet today.

“Well, I suppose I should start from the beginning then?” he said calmly, leaning back in his chair. “It was only a few years ago, five I think, when we started. Back then it was only me, Helen and Lance. Lance and I had been best friends as long as either of us could remember; all through grade school and into college. Nothing really happened in the years before college, I just think you should know that Lance and I were always together those years.”

“Tell me about it. For the sake of my story, tell me about it.”

“There isn’t much to tell, we were inseparable. We didn’t have friends other than each other. It wasn’t that we couldn’t have other friends; we just didn’t need anyone else. Lance had my back and I had his. We were terrible little kids. We wouldn’t hurt anyone physically because neither of us was big enough, but we would play mind games with the other kids. We’d really get them going on little ideas and those dumb kids would believe us. At the time, it was hilarious and even now,” his eyes flashing, “it’s still a little funny.

“Then it came time for college. Luckily for both Lance and I, we were at the same level intellectually. We slacked off too much in high school to get into schools like Harvard or Georgetown. Instead we went to Elmira College in New York. I think that if we had the chance to do things differently, knowing what we know now, we’d still go to Elmira. Both of us had the best years of our lives there. Plus the teaching was good enough that we received first-rate educations and the campus was small enough that we could make ourselves heard if need be.”

“I heard you first met Helen at school. Did you two share the same dorm?”

“Nah, she lived in Anderson. But since there are only six dormitories on campus, it wasn’t hard to meet her. Not that I was trying. It was actually Lance who met her first and introduced us. They shared a Political Science class together first semester freshman year. They got to talking and Lance thought it would be a good idea to set Helen and me up on a date. Now I’m going to be honest like you asked, Helen and I didn’t hit it off right away. She thought I was arrogant. I thought she was a stuck up bitch. But Lance liked us both so we were forced to hang out.

“After a while, we got to know each other better. And then it just happened, things changed. We fell for each other. And it worked, but you know that already, don’t you? Sure you do, the whole nation knows how well Helen and I worked. That’s the kind of thing that people learn when you become the center of the media’s attention. You know, I have read some of the letters that people write to me. Most of the letters are from crazy people telling me that they hope I would die; half of those letters come with a promise that the writer will deliver the death themselves. Almost all of the rest are from people giving me their support. Isn’t that a good one?” Throwing his head back in laughter, “Their support. I would guess that after last month, I don’t need their support. I have secured my place here until I die.

“Anyway, I was reading through them one day and I came across one that had broken down the media’s coverage of me. In a twenty-four hour span, they talked about only Helen and me for thirteen hours and twenty-three minutes. Can you believe that? Over half a day telling the world about how I met the most beautiful girl in the world.”

This was not an unfair statement of Helen’s looks. She was beautiful. Tall, leggy and slim with a face that looked as though it would never age. Her hair was dark and it shone while it blew in the wind. She looked to be the kind of girl every man would want to steal away with, but every man knew that John would throw everything he had at them to prevent it from happening.

“Did you get a chance to see any of the coverage yourself? Was it accurate? I mean I heard some pretty absurd stuff about your relationship. Things like, the two of you going to one another’s lectures just so you wouldn’t have to be apart ever. Are those things they said true John? Could you not stand to be away from Helen even for a moment?”

“I heard that one too; I only caught a few small bits of my coverage. There was so much of it and I lived through all of it, what would have been the point for me to try and watch any of it, because most of it was speculation and the rest was almost always skewed facts of the story. When it is put like that, though, it sounds so negative that we had to be together all the time. Was there time when I would be away from Helen? Yes. But, I don’t know, I guess I still felt the need to watch after her; to make sure she didn’t get into any trouble.”

John looked irritated, as though I had asked a question that he thought was crossing a line. He sat there now with his eyes wandering about the empty room, waiting for me to continue questioning him.

Something about what John had just said put me on edge. I can’t tell if he was telling me that he and Helen were inseparable, or if they could get along by themselves. I will let him finish his story and maybe he’ll answer it for me, otherwise I will come back to it later.

“What did Lance think about you and Helen? Was he ever jealous? It seems that he might have regretted setting up his friends like he did because he would have lost face time with both of you. Especially you John, you said you were inseparable.”

“Sure, sure he did. If I had a buck for every time he tried to coax me out of hanging out with Helen so I could go off and do things with him, I would have enough money to buy my way out of this life and never look back. Eventually I had to sit him down so I could convince him to knock it off. After that, he was fine.”

“How did you do that?”

“I told him how in love I was with Helen.”

There it was. This whole thing seems to boil down to the love of that woman, like a tale older than time itself. If only I could interview her too, but it seems that my chance for that has passed.

“John, why don’t you tell me why you tried to change the world. That’s how you put it right? Changing the world?”

“It was more than changing the world. Our government is corrupt and we wanted to clean it out. Helen, Lance and I convinced normal citizens to start the change. We made sure that they knew how corrupt their representatives were. We would bring them bills that passed that they thought were in their favor, but then we would show them sections detailing funding for side projects of senators and house members. If only you could have seen the looks on people’s faces when they realized what their politicians were doing.”

“That is how you are going to boil it down? You showed people that politics is an inherently corrupt system? I don’t buy it.”

“Well, how about this. When we were first starting to change the way people thought, we did it as a joke like we did in grade school. There was this one guy on our floor in the dorm freshman year who we could not stand, Nathanial Bellinger. He was running for student government. To be honest, his platform for running was solid; every issue was covered smoothly as not to offend anyone. We didn’t want him to get elected on principle. So we made some stuff up. We took the solidity of his platform and we poked holes in it. We’d spread rumors to people, things like Nate wanting to raise the prices of cafeteria food to fund some project or another. The word slowly spread that Nate might not be the best candidate for the job. He didn’t get elected; his opponent crushed him.

“After that we realized that we could get things done by spreading rumors. It was simple. As long as we kept each rumor believable to an extent, it could work. The three of us did it for kicks. There was even one time when we spread the rumor that class was going to be canceled campus wide on a Tuesday. No one went to class that day. It was easier for people to believe what they heard than to verify it.”

“So what you are saying, John, is that you tricked people. But what about when you started doing this to make a difference? At some point there you three must have thought that you could get important things accomplished. When was that? Did you have to alter your methods?”

The answer was obvious; I knew that the three of them had to change what they were doing because they couldn’t get by on lies alone. There was also a relaxed arrogance that came over John when he spoke of ‘changing the world’ and to me it seemed as though he believed every bit of what they were doing, no longer doing it just for kicks.

“There was a time, for a while, when the three of us would sit in the Student Union lounge and we would talk politics. Politics always seemed to be on our minds, mostly from the fact that Lance would never drop the topic. He was a political science major. But the things he said made sense to Helen and I. He was a guy who knew his stuff, and it inspired us.

“After a few weeks of these nightly chats that we had, other people started sitting with us and listening to what we had to say. Some people would come and argue for the sake of arguing while others would sit in the back and take it all in. We were seniors, a semester and a half away from graduating, when we were doing this. There was a group of freshmen who we called the ‘regulars’. They looked up to us, though I never figured out why. Lance always joked that they thought they were sitting in on a meeting that would look good on a resume. It made sense too, because we could have gotten them to do anything for us and they would respond with a ‘Yes sir, right away sir’ or, ‘Anything you want Mr. Heaton.'”

The notorious Regulars. This is where they came in. It’s because of them that I am in this room right now with John, trying to write a new story.

“The Regulars were a source of amusement for us. We treated them the same way that we treated the kids in grade school and Nathanial Bellinger. We messed with them; put them at odds with one another. They didn’t hate us for it either, though we aren’t sure they caught on ever. Eventually they started to compete with each other for our recognition. It was quite amusing. It’s like we had our own small army of servants.

“I guess you could say that we never really altered our methods, just our focus. Lance, Helen and I continued doing what we had always done but for different reasons. Lance convinced Helen and me that the government needed to be cleaned of corruption. He thought we had just as good of a chance at starting the cleaning as anyone else, so we might as well try.

“We started testing the waters with local government. We used the regulars to go about town and spread some rumors about public officials doing the wrong things with their political power. The same went for anyone who stepped up to run against them in the election that year. The Regulars framed politicians, blew whistles, and told lies to ensure these people would not have a career in politics again. I know it was wrong what we did to those lives, but it was a necessary evil.”

“John, that disgusts me. Do you know that one man took his life after you and your Regulars ruined his career?”

“Yes, I am aware. But as I said, it was a necessary evil,” he said while picking at the dirt beneath his fingernails.

“After we had some success cleaning out the city government Lance told us that we should go directly to the national government. He knew it would take longer because of the scale of the government, so he wanted every minute he could get while he was alive to get it done.

“We did our research. We learned who represented what parts of the country and the things that they had done that could be used against them. So we started spreading the word. We used Elmira as our base camp. Lance, Helen and I would take turns traveling different areas spreading rumors in information. Every time one of us would go somewhere, we would bring a few of the Regulars with us to help spread the word faster. If I went out to work an area for a few days, Lance and Helen and the rest of the Regulars would stay back and dig up information on our next target. What we were doing wasn’t easy and it didn’t always work. But we figured out the things that people believed easier than others and used those things to make public opinion polls go down for their elected officials.”

John leaned back as far as he could in his chair with a look of satisfaction on his face.

I had to know now. I didn’t come to the interview for all of this. Sure, it helps make sense of things, but I want him to tell me why he is sitting across from me with his hands cuffed to the table in an orange jumpsuit with ‘Heaton’ printed over his shoulders. I have the back story; I just want to know why he did it.

“John, why did you do it? Why did you kill them?”

“An abrupt change, I like your style. I didn’t kill anybody. Look over the court records and you’ll see it’s true.”

“If you didn’t kill anyone, then why are you in here John? You ordered the Regulars to kill them. You did everything but pull the trigger. I want to know why you did it.”

“There was no gun involved, no one fired any weapons.”

“You know what I mean, John. You had a group of people bash in their skulls with baseball bats. I want to know why.”

“Read over all of the statements from the court trials. Everyone who testified swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“I did, John. I followed the whole case. You and ten of the Regulars were convicted of murder. You aren’t fooling me by saying you didn’t do it. We both know you did. I guess, I guess I just want to know why you did it. Why did you have the Regulars kill Helen and Lance?”

“You mean you don’t believe that Lance and Helen were going to bomb the Capital? That they wanted more than change, they wanted abrupt change? You should believe it you know. It’s the truth.”

“Stop bull-shitting me John. Something about that story doesn’t feel right. It may only be a gut feeling, but either way it’s a feeling nonetheless. You and the regulars were convicted because there was no evidence of Lance and Helen building a bomb nor were there plans to build one. The judge might not have given life sentences if there was evidence. So what is the real reason?”

He shifted a few times in his seat, his face was confused. It looked as though his mind was wrestling with what he should tell me.

“John, I want to tell your story.”

“You want the truth then? Seven months ago, before it all happened; I was out with some of the Regulars trying to get rid of someone running for a recently deserted seat in the Senate. When we got back, I checked in with Lance and Helen and gave them a report of the progress. They told me what they had found for the next target and we discussed plans for the future.

“As I left the apartment we used as our headquarters to get a coffee, I was surrounded by ten of the Regulars who had not come with me. They said that they had something to tell me, so I invited them to come along with me to get my coffee. As we were walking, each of them looked uncomfortable and no one said much. While sitting at a table with coffees in hand, they spilled their news.

“Apparently, one of them went back to the apartment late at night to get a folder with information he was working on and he ran into Lance and Helen. Naked and in the act. The Regular who saw this was pretty sure that they didn’t see him. He thought I should know. I thanked him and then asked my favor of the other Regulars with me. I told them that they would have my undying support if they murdered Lance and Helen for me. Being the Regulars that they are, they would have done anything I asked them. And then–”

“They killed them. So why the bomb story, John? Why didn’t you tell the truth?”

He pulled himself forward using the handcuffs to get as close as he can to me, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. “Before they left to bash in Lance and Helen’s skulls, we agreed upon the bomb story we used in court. I may be considered a murderer by the court of law, but I am still a man with honor. I would have been humiliated if the word got out that I had been cheated on by my own best friend.”

“But John, don’t you realize that everyone is going to know once I write your story?”