Freebird

by John Raymond

  The meeting in Colonel Owen’s office, a plain corner room overlooking the Potomac, went on for two hours, with many interesting twists and turns. The initial presentation of the forensic information went quickly, after which much of the time was spent developing a psychological profile of the possible perpetrator or perpetrators in question, which was fun. It was almost like being a guest at your own funeral, your own autopsy, exactly the kind of conversation a person was never privy to in waking life. Ben listened with fascination, too pleased to appear deferential among the brass.

  “The perp is obviously frustrated,” said Colonel Owen, showing his leather soles on his desktop, “angry with his own lack of recognition in the larger world. Old story: He comes out of the services, and he can’t integrate back into daily life, can’t get those warm fuzzies he’s used to. No one knows what he did over there. No one knows what he’s capable of. His self-perception and his recognition in the world are not syncing up anymore.” The colonel’s tapered fingers clasped one another in an elegant braid and, as elegantly, unbraided. “He doesn’t think the world is listening to him. He cracks. It’s classic PTSD. A bid for attention, even the bad kind.”

  “He’s not stupid,” said the HUMINT guy, Jerry. He was a pumpkin-headed Indian data whiz, unimpressed by the guesswork thus far. “Fairly literate. The letter was coherent, grammatical.”

  “Assuming he wrote it.”

  “You think he didn’t write it?” Ben said. “Who else would?”

  “A friend. Or maybe it’s plagiarized.”

  This suggestion offended Ben—how could the perpetrator, i.e., he, have plagiarized something so obviously tailored to the mission at hand? Not to mention the self-evident originality of the letter’s whole slant. But he didn’t have time to make his case. The next suggestion offended him even more:

  “It’s not plagiarized,” said the SIGINT guy, a featureless twenty-something with wire-rim glasses, too young even to have built a face. “If it was plagiarized, it’d be a lot better written.”

  “What do you mean, ‘better written’?” Ben said. “The letter is good. It gets right to the point. The argument is clearly stated. The demands are plain. It’s written for a general audience. What else would you want in that kind of letter?”

  “It’s functional, sure,” said the SIGINT guy. “But it’s also demented and illogical. That’s a big handicap.”

  “Illogical?” Ben said. Now he was getting pissed. “How is it illogical? Seems pretty straightforward to me.”

  “The guy is obviously totally warped by his raging martyr complex. He blames the world for his own pathetic delusions of persecution.”

  “Blames the world for his own pin dick,” chimed in the HUMINT guy.

  “Let’s just say he’s no scholar—put it that way,” Colonel Owen said, trying to rechannel the conversation back into more productive directions. “But he is a thorough, detail-oriented, foresightful risk taker. We can agree on that.”

  “He knows how to shoot a guy in the dark,” agreed HUMINT.

  “I found the letter provocative,” Ben said. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen that exact argument made in the public sphere before. It took synthesis. That’s critical thought.” Ben could see he wasn’t going to win anyone over with his literary criticism. But if nothing else, his opinions further muddied the waters as to the perp’s identity, so he could rationalize sharing them.

  “A SEAL, possibly,” said Colonel Owen, moving on.

  “Maybe a Ranger,” said SIGINT.

  “A Green Beret,” Ben added, expanding the pool. “The skill set this guy shows is not unique to the SEALs or the Rangers. Assuming it was one guy. I’m still interested in the idea of a trio.”

  “I think the letter says SEAL all over it,” said HUMINT. “The whole operation says SEAL to me.”

  “Why’s that?” Ben asked, offended anew. The motivation for this mission had nothing to do with his SEAL training. If anything, it cut directly against the SEAL mentality. He hadn’t learned how to think for himself in the goddamn SEALs. He’d learned how to jump out of an airplane and how to slit a man’s throat, but he hadn’t learned to think. He’d learned all his thinking on his own.

  HUMINT had a point, however: “Only a SEAL would be this full of himself.”

  Ben exited the debriefing room in a state of smoldering pique, but also exhilaration, and in possession of a hard file of classified data, his homework for the week. At the next meeting, everyone would come bearing plausible theories based on closer scrutiny of the forensic information, ready to formulate the best, most penetrating, most richly imagined memo the Joint Chiefs had ever seen.

  There were still hours left in the day, so Ben took a jog along the mall, trotting past the brooding Lincoln Monument, the occult Vietnam Memorial, and toward the penile Washington Monument. He circled the base twice and headed west, until his run ended at a statue of Albert Einstein a few blocks down the mall. Now here was a true hero, he thought. A scientist and a humanist, a man of genius and tolerance. Perhaps the most beloved Jew of the last century, barring Bob Dylan.

  It was standing there with Albert Einstein that Ben conceived his second mission. The meeting with Colonel Owen had been undeniably thought provoking, and he’d come away happily undiscovered as the perp in question, but the conversation had also confirmed his suspicions about the first mission’s ultimate failure. It was now painfully obvious that his message had been misunderstood. It had been too subtle, he saw, too tightly focused. He’d overestimated the power of a singular statement to impress meaning on the oligarchy’s consciousness, let alone the citizenry’s. The news cycle had shredded the statement’s significance almost before it had emerged, and the whole event had been treated as an isolated crime as opposed to an indictment of society—not that it mattered, anyway, because it had been lost so quickly in the morass of competing information, buried in all the subsequent mudslides of data. How had he ever thought that a single mission would alter the nation’s destiny?

  Leaning on Einstein’s knee, he could see it was going to be necessary to establish a larger pattern if he wanted to convey his whole meaning. A compelling story demanded multiple plot points, a gripping motion of action and suspense. This was just remedial rhetoric. He was going to have to carry the lesson through a series of examples. Only then would he seize the zeitgeist in the way he desired and inspire his fellow patriots to rise up.

  Back at his hotel he logged on to the Web, and within five clicks he had the next mission in hand. The target this time would be none other than Shane Larson himself, reviled host of The Shane Larson Show, whose daily remarks reached some 3.4 million citizens of the United States. Among all the celebrated politicians and culture heroes of the world, Ben thought, Larson would serve as a true wake-up call to the sleeping potato people of the nation. His death would shock them and jump-start the corroded critical faculties of his once-determined people. Shane Larson, grandson of Goebbels, the voice of the very industrial communication technology that had created fascism itself.

  Another two clicks, and Ben knew how the Mission would go down. Two weeks hence, Larson would be making his annual pilgrimage to the Bob Hope Invitational, a golf tournament in Palm Springs and a veritable magnet for bloated media icons of all color and stripe. The tournament would occur on the Indian Canyons Golf Resort, a renowned course at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains. The weekend’s schedule was posted on the invitational’s site, with the entire celebrity guest list emblazoned in a banner at the top, and a convenient map of the links and their relation to Palm Springs’ downtown core.

  Toggling through the site, Ben felt as if the world was speaking to him, sending him clear signals. He was touching the deep energies of the universe, whispering directly to the dark matter itself. The idea of terminating Shane Larson on a golf course was obscurely thrilling. The long sight lines of the fairways would prove excellent for shooting, and the crowds could well work in his favor. He wouldn’t hide in a hole this ti
me. Instead, he’d hide in the jungle of humanity, blending into the docile herd itself. And then there was the symbolic register. A golf course named Indian Canyons. That said it all, didn’t it? In this, he was taking a lesson from bin Laden himself, the great genius of modern mass communication. Say what you would about his craven attack on the World Trade Center; the event stood as one of the most effective spectacles of the young century. Against the society of spectacle, he had cast a flaming spectacle. Against the Great Satan of images, he had flung an indelible image. In turning the Twin Towers into pillars of flame, bin Laden had waged his ancient Muslim iconoclasm using the very tools of the modern Occidental icon. His fundamentalist mind had conceived and directed the ultimate episode of Jackass.

  Drinking beer in the hotel bar, Ben contemplated his new mission until it became a certainty. The first mission had laid the groundwork. The second would deliver the true apostate message. Let the world contemplate the violence upholding the golf course. Let the world contemplate these green oil slicks expanding over the West. Let the world contemplate the true meaning of this leisure as Larson bled out in the rough.

  He flew back to California and drove directly to Palm Springs, arriving in the punishing heat of midafternoon. The week of meetings with Colonel Owen had gone much as expected, generating almost nothing in the way of usable information but much in the way of “areas for further discussion,” many of which were currently heading up the line of Command for review. It was obvious nothing was going to happen on that front for months, and, as none of the current arrows of suspicion pointed remotely in the direction of Ben, the time seemed ripe for his next action.

  Just west of town, at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains, he located the entrance of the Indian Canyons golf course and took the measure of the fence line in the hard desert light. He stared at the shadowless grass and the receding fan palms and the low, modern clubhouse shimmering like a mirage in the distance. He kept on moving and parked at the end of a cul-de-sac near the eighth hole, where trailheads led into the nude, brown mountains overlooking the course. Hiking the blazing earth, taking the heat like a shower, he thought about the hallowed golfers of yesteryear. Bob Hope, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Benny had golfed here. Walt Disney was an Indian Canyons golfer, too. He’d owned an estate along the second hole, and the grotesque fountain on the eighteenth hole, a blue lotus flower, had been his gift. And from these thoughts Ben moved on to thoughts about the Cahuilla Indians, the original denizens and namesake of these canyons. They’d grown melons, squash, beans, and corn in this earth. They’d walked this land, breathing this clean air, before the putter and the iron had ever been imagined by man.

  Walking on the dry earth, he could feel the spirit of the Indians inside him.

  The day was still too bright for trespassing, so Ben hiked deeper into the desert instead. He climbed the canyon walls and crossed into God’s country, the stark rock-and-sand wilderness stretching to Utah. As usual, he didn’t see God, but he might have felt His hand on the back of his head, keeping his eyes off His face. Yes, Ben could feel the hand of God on his skull even now. He could feel God, as always, behind him, out of sight.

  He mounted a ridge and arrived at a perch overlooking an arid playa. Cloud shadows glided below, glowing gray on the white earth. Sunlight speckled his arms and neck. The clouds changed and then changed again, casting new shapes on the white bed. He breathed the desert air deeply into his lungs, taking in the smell of nothingness itself—nothingness tinted with fine sand, baked rock, and sage. He breathed again, drawing particles of desert-clean oxygen into the tiniest branches of his capillaries. The scent of Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, every God-blighted desert on every continent of the world. It was the smell of a perfumed abyss.

  He remembered Kuwait. He’d seen his first desert sandstorm in Kuwait—this vast, orange-brown cloud approaching over the emptiness. He’d watched it billow and grow, getting wider and darker, until finally it had engulfed him, sending him into a torrential blackness like he’d never known. It was like a mine shaft collapsing over and over again, a furious vortex of sand and blackness. Fine grit swarming into his hair and his ears, scraping on the panes of his goggles. The memory of the sandstorm blurred into other desert memories. His asbestos gloves on the hot barrel of his M60, the Pig. The donkey-dick radio antennae on the desert patrol vehicle. The woman with the yellow Chinese grenade on the street of Nasiriyah, destroyed by his .300 Win Mag.

  The desert before him was like a movie screen, bouncing his own thoughts back at him. He watched two shit-head civilians driving their car into the middle of the firefight in Ramadi, those stupid, stupid fucks, ignoring his flash grenades, not even noticing the mangled bodies on the ground, until finally one of them took a bullet in the knee, and they’d managed to limp away, bleeding but alive, into the alley. How lucky could two assholes get? Much as he tried to slow his thoughts by watching the clouds on the desert floor, their pulsing, shifting grace, he couldn’t get there. That was the speed at which his mind should go, he thought, the speed of a cloud. The speed of God’s breath over the land. If only he could get his mind to slow down, he thought, he might still be all right.

  Night came, and he returned to the golf course. He parked a mile away and walked through the cold desert air under the moonless sky.

  He climbed the low fence and stalked the fairways with the infrared goggles he’d bought that afternoon at the army surplus store. The goggles attached to a helmet and allowed him to walk with his hands free, casting a beam of visibility into the darkness from his face. The greens were moist and springy from their twilight watering, and the smell of cool, mineral earth mixed with the smell of desert rock. The green luminosity of the goggles made the manicured landscape look like a fairy playland—the glowing green palm trees, glowing green grass, glowing green golf carts parked in sleeping rows. The whole world overflowed with a fuzzy life force, green energy bursting from its starlit skin.

  The moon was on the horizon. A tiny sliver. He goggled the moon, and the moon turned green in his lenses. Was there life and heat out there in the cosmos? He believed so, yes.

  He prowled to the fourteenth hole, the fifteenth, scanning the landscape for clean shooting lanes, catching sight of the giant white whale of the hospitality tent already erected near the clubhouse patio. In that giant tent Shane Larson would soon be mingling with his fellow plutocrats. They’d all crowd inside and eat their seared tuna and drink their pinot gris and smoke their cigars as the descending pyramid of adjuncts and toadies thumbed their phones on the sidelines. From thousands of miles away, shrimp and avocado would be delivered in refrigerated trucks. From every corner of the world, useless women would be assembled to talk about their children’s yoga practice. And when the party was over, the tent would be rolled up and shipped to the next celebration of nothing.

  Ben stared at the tent, sick to death of his argument with America. His mind was like a broken record on the subject, the needle turning in the rutted grooves, causing him physical pain. It was like a tattoo in his brain. Over and over, the same lines. This land had been a land of bison and beaver, and now it was a land of Angry Birds and vape shops. This land had been a land of Crazy Horse and Mark Twain. Now who? He’d thought these thoughts so many times over the years, releasing the same toxin of hatred into his blood, that the thoughts almost seemed to think themselves. Once again, he realized he was composing his open letter to America, laying out his branches of logic, polishing his dagger clauses. To know that his repeating thoughts had some eventual outlet and would someday find shape and audience gave some solace. The killing of Shane Larson was only a crucial means to his artistic ends.

  He was taking a piss in the rough near the seventeenth hole when he spotted five teenage boys scuttling over the fairway. They moved in a hunched lope, trying and failing to cross the golf course without being seen. He watched them going from cover to cover, sometimes rolling into positions as if they were on some covert op. He stood against the tree trun
k and observed them with his blazing night ray. They were terrible creepers, to a man, too drunk and stoned to walk straight, let alone execute a mission, not to mention they were pushing a wheelbarrow with a scronking, rusty wheel.

  He watched the boys stumble up the slope of the eighteenth hole and skirt the weedy pond, making their way toward the billowing, white hospitality tent. He’d avoided the tent, not wanting to get too close, but listened as the boys clanked around inside the fabric walls. When the boys emerged he understood what all the grunting and clanking had been about: in their wheelbarrow they now carted a gleaming, silver keg.

  He watched the boys come and go from the tent two more times, aglow in the infrared lenses, spilling their life energy onto the grass. They looted the tent of two kegs, ten cases of imported beer, numerous bottles of gin and vodka, some mixers, some snacks, and many promotional golf balls. Throughout the robbery, they could barely stop laughing, they were so shit-faced. And Ben had to laugh along with them from his hideout near the rushes. What buffoons. What funny, devious boys. What good, solid, all-American kids.

  21

  They arrived in L.A. by dusk, under a melting sherbet sky, and Aaron helped his grandfather into his house and turned on the heat. He cooked the chicken breasts they’d bought at the store, plated them with unsalted green beans. He ate with him and waited while he changed into clean sweatpants and took his place in the leather recliner.