Two Men in A Window

I have always been fascinated by the JFK assassination. The truth about that event is, to me, the Holy Grail of conspiracy theories rivalling even the Roswell crash. Indeed, one of my earliest, coherent childhood memories is of watching a black and white TV (with rabbit ear antenna) and being transfixed by the grainy images of large horses pulling some type of cart. My mother was sitting next to me and she was crying. In time, I came to understand that we had been watching JFK's funeral.

The following story ("Two Men in A Window") is, in part, inspired by that memory as well as by an old newspaper article I happened to see while aimlessly surfing the web as I was waiting for an appointment. Although centered around a "real" historical event, this is wholeheartedly a work of fiction. The story intentionally blurs the lines between fact, speculation, documentary and the sheerest fancy.

Additionally, and from a more philosophical standpoint, it suggests that imagination and narrative invention are modes of knowing equal to -- or perhaps even more powerful than -- direct experience and empirical observation.

Two Men in a Window by James C. Clar © copyright 2026

What follows is a work of fiction. It makes no claim to truth, adduces no hidden evidence, and corrects no official record. Any resemblance to documented events or persons is intended for literary purposes only. If this exercise in speculation seems plausible, or unsettling, that effect belongs solely to the power of narrative. Or to history’s occasional tendency to mimic and even outdo invention …

We begin, then, with an item from the Dallas Morning News, December 19, 1978:

“Several witnesses, interviewed years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, now state that two men were observed earlier that morning at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Officials caution that memories degrade and that such claims are difficult to verify so far removed in time from the actual events.”

This yellowed and rather elliptical clipping entered my possession by way of an antique trunk purchased at an estate sale in Ithaca, New York. The woman running the sale shrugged when I asked about it.

“Belonged to a professor, I think,” she told me. “That or a collector. I don’t recall.”

The clipping was not, I should say at once, the most extraordinary thing in the chest. That distinction belongs to a memorandum typed on onion-skin paper, unsigned, and to a photograph of a man who, at first glance, appears to be asleep behind the wheel of a Ford Galaxie. The photograph is stamped Property of the Dallas Police Department and dated March 3, 1964.

The memorandum refers, obliquely, to a probationary patrolman whose name appears once and then not again. The letters of the name are blurred by carbon. I will render it as Randall.

This Randall, assigned that morning to a route that blew a kiss at Dealey Plaza without embracing it, reported something he saw. Or perhaps thought he saw. The memo hedges. It takes refuge in the conditional.

The young patrolman saw a movement in a window where movement was not expected.

“I’m telling you, Sarge, there were two of them.”

“Two what?”

“Men, up on the sixth floor. I saw …” He hesitated, as if replaying it over again. “They seemed to be passing something back and forth.”

“You’re new, kid,” the Sergeant said after a moment. “Windows cause reflections, the sun casts shadows …”

“I know what I saw.”

“I’m sure you do. Return to your patrol.”

After the shooting – and after the plaza became a grammar lesson in the past tense – Randall told his story over and over again. Each retelling shaved off a certainty, added a maybe. He eventually spoke to the F.B.I. where he was humored.

For the purposes of this story, we’ll allege that the memorandum supports that thesis. To be humored is to be listened to without being believed, to be granted a hearing but denied the courtesy of consequence or follow-up. Or, it may be an indication of something more than disrespect, of something genuinely nefarious. I’ll leave such conclusions to the reader.

“Officer Randall,” an official voice might have placated him from across a desk. “We appreciate you coming forward. We’ll take it from here …”

The Bureau’s subsequent report, which I have not seen, is summarized in a marginal note: Lacks corroboration. That annotation is underscored. The hand that wrote it pressed down hard, as if certainty could be achieved by pressure.

The “several witnesses” of the clipping came later, much later. Memory, like a witness who arrives at a trial after the verdict, is always suspect. It’s not just that they spoke after the fact, it’s the fact that they spoke long after the story of what happened the morning of November 22, 1963 had learned how to tell itself … as good stories often do.

The paper also cautions us: distrust the late, the vague, the ambiguous. That caution, however, doesn’t prevent us from filling in the gaps with our imagination.

“Is it conceivable,” I once suggested to a friend as we discussed the possibilities, “that imagination is more reliable than memory?”

In my imagination, therefore, the photograph in the trunk shows Randall dead from an apparent heart attack, not asleep. He is slumped forward; his forehead resting on the steering wheel. The Galaxie is parked precisely, the keys are in the ignition.

I would have the memorandum quote an anonymous officer in a voice I have invented, “no signs of trauma.”

I would also be tempted to assert further that Randall was eliminated. I am equally tempted to say that he was a man whose heart simply failed him, as even young hearts sometimes do. The universe, it must be admitted, is frequently indifferent to our desire for causes. While he never actually said this, the great Argentinian artificer, Borges, might well have observed that infamy requires intention and coherence; death does not.

What, then, are we to make of the two men who were seen on the sixth-floor of the Book Depository? The clipping insists on their belatedness. The memorandum insists on their being merely provisional. The photograph insists on nothing at all. Perhaps there were two men. Perhaps there was one man and a reflection. Perhaps Randall saw the ghost of the future, a duplication of a figure created by the event itself; a second figure conjured by the demands of the story that would soon follow.

It is possible, and this is the sheerest conjecture, that the authorities needed only one shooter and thereafter taught us to see only one. It may well also be that Randall was wrong and right in equal measure, as were the subsequent witnesses.

The clipping rests safely in the trunk. The memorandum is folded neatly in a book of essays. The photograph is pinned to the corkboard above my desk. This story, like the event it circumscribes, refuses clear resolution. I offer it not as evidence but as a footnote to our doubt, as a gloss attesting to the lasting efficacy of imagination and literary invention.

The End