Dallas in the summertime. There's simply nothing like it. And being a 25-year-old single guy, Wilson Giamatti loved it. The weather is warm and hot and cool and breezy and still; every summer day smells like a spring morning, and every summer night feels like it holds the endless possibilities of youth and the countless experiences of a long life lived splendidly. The days are packed with on-looking tourists in Dealey Plaza and the nights are packed with partying twenty-somethings in Deep Ellum. The museums at the fairgrounds feed the hustle and bustle of families on summer vacation, basking in the warm Texas sun and the cool shadow of the Cotton Bowl. The unmistakable sounds of baseball can be heard from beneath the bright lights of the stadium in Arlington and the cement mixer of highway interchanges flows with the fast-moving streams of cars, trucks, and motorcycles as they cross from one side of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis to the other. A man could live a lifetime and never experience it all. And perhaps that is what makes Dallas the most personal and most anonymous city in the entire world.
Of course, Dallas doesn't always mean Dallas. Dallas also means Plano or Carrollton or Farmer's Branch or any number of Dallas suburbs; but everyone shares the unity of being from Dallas, either from the inside or from the outside. Dallas also means J.R. Ewing and Nolan Ryan and Troy Aikman. Dallas means so much to so many; Dallas means nothing to no one; in Dallas, a man could get lost in the anonymity of being with everyone and the intimacy of being alone. It's the greatest big city on the planet.
Wilson Giamatti makes a unique living in Dallas. As a boy growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s, Wil was categorically obsessed with the conspiracy theories of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Throughout his childhood and young adulthood, he acquired a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of all the different theories which coincided with his memorization of every detail of the shooting, the investigation, the report, and the only trial to be brought forth (against Clay Shaw in New Orleans). He knew the Warren Report front-to-back, he knew every way in which the Kevin Costner film JFK was historically inaccurate, and he'd spent so much time at the Sixth Floor Museum in the old Texas Schoolbook Depository building that the museum attendants all knew him by name, even as an adult.
It's not that Wil was obsessed with the assassination, but rather, he was fascinated by the complete, complex, and multi-tiered levels of deception that surrounded the situation. And after decades of study and reading endless books about JFK's murder, Wil still hadn't settled on his own personal theory or opinion on who assassinated the president on November 22, 1963.
Wil's love of the complexities of the assassination seemed to also drive him to another passion: Illusionists. Performers like David Copperfield and David Blain amazed Wil with their ability to take the concept of reality and make it entirely subjective. What you see is never what you get, and Blain and Copperfield could definitely make something — or someone — disappear.
In a way, that was Wil's business. Wil made a unique living. Wil made people disappear. Wil was a contract killer.
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The Disappearist
General Fiction[Work-In-Progress] SYNOPSIS: As a subtle yet well-known contract killer, Wilson Giamatti makes a solid living making people disappear. With a flawless reputation among the people of his industry, he has a very unique niche among the underground comm...
