~4.21~

Marley was dead to begin with.

He had been, as so many young men of his generation were, a victim of the American-led police action in Vietnam. His military career was cut tragicomically short when his mother was notified of his combat death the very day after he was drafted. Like so many young men of his generation, he’d been faced with a troubling moral conundrum where neither solution was in alignment with his moral principles, which were aligned very strongly against being imprisoned or killed… so finding out he’d already died simplified things for him considerably.

Exactly what sort of typically oxymoronic bureaucratic thinking led to this happy happenstance was never determined, because the only man who knew it had happened wasn’t curious enough to inquire. It may have been an example of the sort of odd thing that happened in the vicinity of Jericho, the sort of mistake that was only possible… or at least easier… in a place where basic reality had started to go a little soft around the edges.

Or it could have simply been the government bureaucracy. It was a tough call.

In the years following his extremely timely demise, Marley had felt the need to move around and keep a low profile lest he be resurrected and prosecuted. In that time, he cultivated the habits of anonymity and learned to live his life off the grid. With each passing decade… and eventually every year… this became harder and harder. It was almost impossible to imagine an eighteen year old disappearing from the government’s records as completely as he had while continuing to live any kind of normal life, but Marley had gotten his start in an earlier, simpler time and he felt comfortable enough with his non-existence that he’d eventually even moved back to Jericho. He had to pick somewhere to not live, and he preferred to not live in the town in which he had grown up in, and the one he had died in.