Chapter 1: The Last Breath and The First
Marcus POV
The last thing Marcus Webb remembered was the pizza.
It was a Tuesday. He was almost certain of that. A Tuesday in February with the kind of cold outside that did not just chill you but got into your bones and stayed there, and he had ordered a large pepperoni pizza from the place three blocks down because he did not feel like cooking and he never really felt like cooking on Tuesdays. He had been sitting on his couch in his apartment on the north side of Chicago with the television on and the volume low, half watching some documentary he had already seen twice, and the pizza was sitting open on the coffee table in front of him because he had never owned proper plates, just paper ones, and he had gone through the paper ones earlier that week and never replaced them. That was the kind of person Marcus Webb was. He noticed when things ran out and then forgot to replace them until the absence became inconvenient.
He was twenty nine years old. He had a job processing insurance claims for a company he did not care about, working from a desk in a building he could not have described in detail even then, and he came home every evening to this apartment that was clean enough but never warm, never quite lived in the way places are supposed to feel lived in when someone has been there for three years. There were no pictures on the walls except for one. A framed photograph above his television of Michael Jackson on stage during the Bad World Tour, 1988, caught mid-spin with one arm extended and the spotlight carving him out of the darkness behind him like something summoned rather than born.
Marcus had bought that photograph at an estate sale when he was nineteen years old and it had been the first thing he hung in every place he had ever lived since.
He had reached for another slice of pizza and then something happened in his chest.
It was not dramatic the way it is in movies. There was no crescendo. No sudden understanding. Just a pressure, dense and wrong, spreading outward from the center of his chest like something had been squeezed too hard and could not recover. His left arm went strange. Not numb exactly, more like distant, like it belonged to someone standing slightly to his left. He had set the pizza down with remarkable calmness given the circumstances and he had thought, clearly and without panic, that something was very wrong.
He had reached for his phone on the cushion beside him and knocked it off the couch instead. He had leaned forward to pick it up and the pressure in his chest had become something enormous, something without edges, and the last thing Marcus Webb saw before the darkness came was the carpet of his apartment, pale beige and slightly worn near the coffee table legs, and the edge of the pizza box above him, and the underside of the couch, and then nothing.
No light. No tunnel. No voice.
Just nothing, and then an abrupt and violent and overwhelming everything.
---
The first sensation was sound.
Not music. Not voices. Just sound in its rawest form, enormous and close and everywhere at once, surrounding him with an intimacy that felt almost violent because there was no distance from it, no ability to turn it down or step away. Every sound was the same size. A creak somewhere above him was as large as the low murmur of a voice somewhere beyond a wall which was as large as the sound of his own breathing which was fast and shallow and strange in a way he could not immediately understand.
Then came the light.
It pressed against his eyes from above, pale and diffuse and shifting, the kind of light that comes through thin curtains on an overcast morning, and it moved very slightly the way light moves when there is something between it and you, fabric perhaps, something breathing, something alive.
Marcus tried to process where he was.
The ceiling above him was close. Closer than any ceiling he had ever looked up at from a bed, which meant either the ceiling was very low or he was very high up, and neither of those things made immediate sense. The surface beneath him was thin, whatever it was, thin and slightly rough and smelling of something clean and faintly chemical, like fabric that had been washed too many times with cheap detergent. There was warmth around him, bunched and pressing on all sides, and the warmth was not unpleasant but it was confining in a way that made something in him want to push against it.
He tried to sit up.
What happened instead was that his arms moved in a way that arms are not supposed to move. They came up in front of his face, both of them, and they were so small that for a full and paralyzing moment Marcus Webb's mind went completely and utterly blank because those were not his arms. They were the arms of an infant. Round and soft and creased at the wrists with the particular plumpness of a newborn, fingers curled loosely, knuckles dimpled, nails translucent and impossibly tiny.
He stared at those hands for what felt like a very long time.
His mind, the adult mind of Marcus Webb, twenty nine years old, deceased apparently, from what he could only assume was a cardiac event on a Tuesday in February on the north side of Chicago with a pizza going cold on the coffee table, that mind was fully present. Fully intact. Every memory, every piece of knowledge, every emotional weight he had carried through twenty nine years of living was right there, accessible, real. He could remember his mother's voice. He could remember his third grade classroom and the name of his teacher, Ms. Aldridge, and the way she smelled like eucalyptus and old coffee. He could remember the first time he heard Thriller, really heard it, sitting in his uncle's car at age seven with the volume too loud and the bass doing something to his chest that felt like being chosen.
He remembered all of it.
And he was looking at the hands of a newborn baby.
The panic arrived then, not all at once but in a wave that started somewhere in the center of whatever chest he now possessed and radiated outward, and he would have screamed except that when he opened his mouth what came out was not a scream and not words and not any sound an adult human being makes. It was the sound an infant makes when it is overwhelmed. High and thin and completely outside of his control, pulled from him before he could stop it, embarrassing in a way that had no business mattering under the circumstances but somehow did anyway, because Marcus Webb had always been a private and self-contained person and making that sound in front of anyone felt like a violation of something fundamental.
The sound he made brought a response immediately.
Footsteps, quick and light, crossing a floor somewhere close, and then a face appeared above him and Marcus Webb's entire nervous system, infant body and adult mind combined, went into a state that he would later struggle to describe. Because the face looking down at him was not a stranger's face.
It was a face he had spent years studying.
Softer than the photographs, younger, unlined in a way that the photographs from this period did not quite capture because photographs flatten the quality of softness out of a face. But the eyes were the same, warm and careful and deeply attentive, the kind of eyes that look at you and actually see you, and the mouth was already moving, making sounds, words in a low and gentle voice, and Marcus could not fully parse all of them because his auditory processing in this body was still new and the acoustics of the room were strange to him.
But he understood enough.
He understood the tone. He understood the care in it. He understood that this woman bending over him with that particular quality of attention was not going to let anything happen to him, not right now, not in this moment, and something about that understanding moved through him in a way that bypassed his adult mind entirely and went straight into the body, the infant body, which relaxed almost against his will, the crying tapering down to something quieter, something that embarrassed him slightly less.
Katherine Jackson looked down at her newborn son and smiled.
And Marcus Webb, inside that son, lay completely still and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
---
He spent the first several hours simply cataloging.
It was the only thing his mind knew how to do when confronted with something that had no framework, no precedent, no rational structure to hang itself on. He cataloged. He observed. He filed information carefully and without judgment because judgment required a foundation of understanding that he did not yet have.
He was in a crib. The crib was wooden and the paint was worn in places and it was positioned in a room that was small, smaller than his bedroom in Chicago had been, with walls that were a pale color he could not name exactly in this light, somewhere between white and the color of old paper. There was a window to his left, covered with a curtain that was clean but thin, and through the thin curtain came the sound of a neighborhood, cars and distant voices and somewhere a dog and the general ambient texture of a residential street in a city that was not wealthy.
He catalogued the sounds of the house.
There were many people in it. He could tell this not from seeing them but from the constant low-level presence of sound from multiple directions, the particular density of noise that a house has when many bodies are moving through it, cooking in it, sleeping in it, existing in it in the close and complicated way that large families exist together. Voices in another room, a child's voice rising briefly before being quieted, something being set down on a hard surface in what was probably a kitchen, the creak of someone's weight on a floor that had learned the specific language of every person walking across it.
He cataloged what he knew.
August 29, 1958. He had no way to verify the date yet but it was where his mind went immediately and he was almost certain it was correct. Gary, Indiana. 2300 Jackson Street. A two bedroom house with a family in it that the world would one day know as the Jackson family, though the world did not know that yet and would not for almost a decade. Katherine Jackson and Joe Jackson and the children already born, Rebbie the oldest, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon, and now this one, this newest one, this baby that the world would later decide belonged to everyone.
Michael Joseph Jackson.
That was who he was now.
Marcus lay in his crib in the summer of 1958 and let that fact settle over him the way heavy weather settles over a landscape, completely and without negotiation.
He was Michael Jackson.
Not metaphorically. Not in some dream state that he was about to wake from. He was in the body of Michael Joseph Jackson on or very near the day of his birth, in a house in Gary, Indiana, with Katherine Jackson's voice moving through the wall between them, and every single piece of knowledge he possessed about what was going to happen in this life was sitting in his adult mind like a file he had spent twenty nine years compiling without knowing why.
He now understood why.
The thought that came after that one surprised him with its clarity. It arrived not with drama but with the quiet certainty of something that had always been true and had simply been waiting for the right moment to make itself known.
He could change this.
He lay very still and let that thought expand. He could change this. He was here, he was present, he was inside the life from the very beginning of it, and he knew everything. He knew every moment that was going to damage this person, every relationship that was going to betray him, every industry predator and false friend and opportunistic stranger who was going to attach themselves to the most famous man in the world and take whatever they could carry. He knew the specific mechanics of how Michael Jackson's life went wrong. Not just the broad strokes that everyone knew but the details, the precise and specific details, the names and the dates and the turning points where a different choice would have produced a different outcome.
He knew about Joe Jackson's hands and what they did during rehearsals. He knew about the rhinoplasty in 1979, the first one, the one that started a process that became impossible to stop once it had begun. He knew about the settlements and the documentaries and the doctors and the insomnia and the medication and the morning in June 2009 when it all finally stopped.
He knew Conrad Murray's name. He had known it for fifteen years.
Conrad Murray would never come within a mile of him. That was the first decision Marcus made in his new life. He made it lying on his back in a worn wooden crib in Gary, Indiana, with his infant hands curled at his sides and the sounds of his new family moving through the walls around him. He made it quietly and without ceremony and with absolute certainty.
That was the first thing he was going to change.
He was going to change so many things.
---
Jermaine came to look at him before the day was done.
He appeared at the side of the crib without announcement, which was the way children appear when they are still young enough to move through the world without self-consciousness, and he gripped the railing with both hands and looked in at Marcus with the frank and uncomplicated curiosity of a three year old confronting something new and not yet sure what category it belongs in. His face was round and open and entirely unguarded, and he studied Marcus with an expression of solemn assessment that Marcus found unexpectedly moving.
This was Jermaine. Jermaine Jackson, who would grow up to have one of the most complicated relationships with fame and brotherhood and loyalty of any person Marcus had ever read about. Who would stay with Motown when the others left because he was married to Berry Gordy's daughter and the professional and personal had become too tangled to separate. Who would rejoin. Who would drift. Who would love Michael in the particular way brothers love each other, deeply and imperfectly and sometimes at a distance, which is to say the way most people love the people they grew up with, with old injuries folded into the affection like stones in bread.
Right now he was three years old and his nose was running slightly and he was looking at Marcus with complete and total concentration.
Marcus looked back at him.
He wanted to say something. That was the absurd and overwhelming impulse, to say something to this three year old child who was his brother now, who was going to grow up alongside him, who was going to share stages and dressing rooms and arguments and silences with him across the better part of a lifetime. He wanted to say something that would mean something, that would cross the distance between what he was and what he appeared to be, but all that came out when he opened his mouth was the same helpless infant sound as before and Jermaine watched it happen with wide eyes and then broke into a grin of enormous delight.
He called for Katherine.
His voice was a child's voice, loud the way children's voices are loud, without any awareness that there is a volume other than the one that reaches the person you need. He called Mama and the word moved through the house and brought Katherine back into the room with that same quality of attention she had brought the first time, and she came to the crib and looked in and said something soft that Marcus caught only partially, something about the baby being awake, something warm and ordinary in the way that the language of mothers around their new babies is warm and ordinary in a way that the rest of language almost never manages to be.
Jermaine watched the whole thing with his chin on the crib railing.
Then he wandered off, satisfied, to rejoin whatever the rest of the house was doing.
Marcus watched him go.
He had siblings now. Five of them already in this house and two more who had not yet been born, Randy who would arrive in 1961 and Janet who would arrive in 1966, and Marcus knew all of them, had spent years reading about all of them, and they were going to grow up around him and share this childhood with him and he was going to have to be a child with them, genuinely a child, present and participating, because the alternative was to be a ghost in his own life and that was not something he was willing to accept.
He could do this.
He had to do this.
He had no other option, which was in its own way a relief, because Marcus Webb had spent twenty nine years living a life that felt provisional, always slightly waiting, never entirely committed to the specific Tuesday he was standing in. That quality of waiting was gone now. The life in front of him was not provisional. It was not waiting. It was the most specific and consequential and irreversible situation he had ever been placed in and there was nothing to do but meet it.
The afternoon light shifted through the thin curtain. Somewhere in the house Jermaine had found the others and whatever game they had been playing before resumed, the sound of it low and running under everything like a current. The house settled around him, breathing and ordinary, and Marcus lay in his crib in Gary, Indiana in the summer of 1958 and felt something he did not immediately have a name for.
It took him a while to identify it.
It was the feeling of mattering. Of being in exactly the place where the story was happening, not watching it from a couch in Chicago with the volume low, not reading about it afterward in a biography or a documentary or a court transcript, but inside it, present in it, the person it was happening to.
He had spent his whole first life loving Michael Jackson's story from the outside.
Now he was inside it.
He closed his infant eyes in the worn wooden crib and listened to the sound of his family moving through the house around him and made himself a promise so quiet it barely qualified as a thought.
He was going to get this right.
Not perfectly. He was not naive enough, even now, even in this extraordinary and impossible circumstance, to believe that he was going to navigate sixty years of one of the most scrutinized lives in human history without making mistakes, without losing ground, without facing things that his foreknowledge could not fully prepare him for because knowing something intellectually and living through it physically are two entirely different forms of understanding. He knew that. He had always known that.
But he was going to get it right in the ways that mattered most.
He was going to make the music. Every note of it, earned the way it was supposed to be earned, felt and struggled for and pulled out of something real. He was not going to shortcut that. The music was not something to be managed or deployed strategically. The music was the point. The music was the reason this life had mattered the first time and the reason it was going to matter again.
He was going to protect the boy. The boy who was going to grow up in this house under the specific and complicated pressure of Joe Jackson's ambition, who was going to be told in a hundred explicit and implicit ways that his value was located in his performance, in the perfect execution of steps and notes and the ability to make a stadium full of strangers feel something they could not feel on their own. That boy was going to need someone in his corner who understood what was being done to him even when he did not understand it himself. Marcus was going to be that someone. He was going to be it from the inside.
And he was going to find a way, across however many years it took, to make sure that the morning of June 25, 2009 arrived differently than it had the first time.
That was the mission.
Everything else was the work.
The curtain moved slightly in a breath of wind from somewhere. The house settled. Katherine's voice moved through a wall, low and steady, saying something to one of the children that Marcus could not make out but did not need to, because the tone of it was enough, the particular steadiness of it, the quality that said I am here and I see you and nothing is going to happen to you while I am in this house.
Marcus Webb, inside the body of Michael Joseph Jackson, on what he was almost certain was August 29, 1958, in a house on Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana, exhaled slowly.
And began.