Jose Alvarado

The following document appeared in The Nation as part of a dossier examining how media coverage shapes the American public’s understanding of the war against terror: (Note: this story was written by Leon Keller, as part of a therapeutic program prescribed by doctors at the Philadelphia Youth Study Centre . Leon was encouraged to tell the story from his perspective, with full details, in his own words. It should be noted that the event as he relates them coincide with the facts offered by investigators.)

Good Aim by Leon Keller

Some people say that boys like me are desensitised to death and violence, because we watch a lot of movies and play video games, but they’re wrong, they’re the ones that don’t think about it, to me death is enormous.

There were no clouds in the sky to hide the orange explosion, but the smoke floating over from the factory farms where all the pigs die gave the fireball a grainy look, like in the car bombs I saw explode on the internet. Everything that happened felt unreal. The airplane was a silver arrowhead. It pointed down to the mountains then exploded for good.

I couldn’t believe what I’d done. A snowball’s chance in hell was better, I knew that. I thought maybe dad’s gun cooled hell over.

A sound like thunder washed into the wheat where I was standing. I spun around thinking it might smash the windows of my house.

I couldn’t think straight. I shot the plane down, but I was paralysed. Something huge had happened, so big I couldn’t move. The wreckage field was in my head. I needed something bigger than it, I looked up to the sky and thought about how putting a bullet at any exact point up there had to be the work of a genius. I said good aim, out loud to myself, and that made my legs work.

It was four o’clock and the whole house was still mine. I liked to make a lot of noise when I was by myself, but when I needed to think I went to the basement. Down there I’m like the president. People have to do what I say when they’re in the basement. I put my bed down there when I was fourteen.

The walls are covered in newspaper articles that I cut out and taped up. Just above my pillow was a fresh batch of stories from that year. Most of them were about hostages, prisoners, interrogations, torture and kidnappings. That shit snakes around my room and fades out in yellow and brown where it started, by the light switch opposite my bed. I’ve been into the news ever since I was seven years old, that’s when we were bombing Kosovo. I found pictures of anti-air craft missiles and defence diagrams in the newspaper that I cut out and stuck to the wall of my old room, right beside the Eagles poster my dad bought me when we went to a game.

I took off my shoes and socks, unbuckled my jeans and slid them down slightly, so I could warm my icy palms between my thighs. The basement was full of dingy air, I breathed it in and out and it made me feel cold inside. I rolled underneath my heavy wool blankets.

I closed my eyes and tried to find it the crash site, floating around like a tiny orb between flanks of scrap metal that twisted as easily as aluminum foil. I wondered if the airplane had broken in half and smeared the ground with mess like an egg. There was nothing on the walls to help me visualize a plane crash, just movies and comic books that I could think of. I floated into a jet engine that was basically intact and still spinning, not slowly like you’d imagine, but roaring a vortex sound that sucks in the spirits. I saw the naked bulge of a calf muscle. My ghost eye dipped down on the track of a femur, then bounced up and down on bare toes. I floated up, over hairs that look thick and long up close, and climbed, but there was nothing more, just a red hole where the leg severed below the knee.

I imagined a man, dark skinned Arab, frightened on the burnt grass between smoke and shiny metal. His face was trembling. I fell off the mattress and my feet touched the cold floor, as I scrambled to the foot of my bed for my shoes. Upstairs the front door opened and shut. The search and destroy mission would have to wait until after supper.

Over peas and corn I thought about bondage, it would be necessary. There were spools of rope in one of the basement storage rooms. The roasted half chicken was an obvious and crude omen. The greasy skin slid off the meat like a loose sock. I struggled every time I tore off a strip of cooked muscle with my teeth, because it seemed like just that. The pieces I did manage to shove in my mouth gradually made it back on to the plate in a half chewed spit-syrup. I dumped it into tupperware and told mom I’d finish it later.

It was six o’clock when I set out, holding my old air rifle that I hadn’t touched in years since I found the key to the real thing. The top third of my face was shielded by an MP helmet I bought at an army surplus in Union City. It limited my vision to a range of about fifteen feet in front of me.

I pinched my nose at the crash site, in the jaws of an unholy odour like I’d never smelled before. Corrosive and thick, it was a boundary I had to penetrate. My flashlight didn’t immediately encircle any obvious evidence of disaster, but there were bends in the grass and plough marks thorough the earth for me to follow.

The stink of burnt gasoline grew stronger up the side of the mountain, where my flashlight found the first glinting tooth of shrapnel. I chased it, and the light bobbed around the grass, dissolving into the sky as I ran, so couldn’t spot the large hunk of debris that clipped my shin. My eyes watered up a bit and I dropped on one knee, feeling up and down my leg for a gash that wasn’t there.

There was more shrapnel further up, but it was spread around enough to feel unimpressive. I spotted what might have been gutted corpses, but turned out to be passenger seats with their stuffing out. The yellow foam in strands and billows camouflaged the first body parts I did find. But underneath that and the torn luggage, were what appeared to be spare parts for a human body. The ground looked like the floor of a Frankenstein lab.

I trained my light on a fin shaped piece of metal, then lifted the sheet and flipped it on its face, revealing a shocking feminine form. She was naked from her feet up to her blue and white dress, twisted up about her waist. Her chest rose and fell in a wheezing effort that I couldn’t stand to look at.

I screamed out every swear word I could think of, I even spit on her. Then I prodded her with the barrel of my gun, and her breathing became suffocated, like she was under a pile of flak jackets. She opened her eyes and assessed an unrecognizable surrounding. The man in the army helmet seemed mysterious to her, I could tell by her face. I watched her eyes adjust, and the rifle in my hand materialised. The shadow over my face cut out everything above my lips, and they said get up.

She was about two feet taller than me, but I asserted myself anyway by motioning for her to turn and when she did I tied her wrists together. I pushed her and she marched on her long wide feet, occasionally emitting what sounded like gibberish in the tone of a question. Just keep walking I screamed.

It was almost nine o’clock when I spotted the porch light on in the distance. To her, it must have seemed like a military outpost. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell it was just a big house. I took a handkerchief from my pocket and used it to blind fold her. This brought out more panicked gibberish which I answered with less gentle gun prodding.

I led her though the front door and into the kitchen. She must have smelled the raw fish thawing overnight in the sink, because I certainly did. The television was on in the living room, Dad must have been asleep there. I led her carefully down the tight stairwell, into the cellar.

I made her sit down, and then I remove the blindfold. Her eyes found evidence of free running liquids in the form of a rusty drain the middle of a dried out swirl was. The cold walls absorb her scream. I stuffed the handkerchief into her mouth. Be quiet. I took up the rifle, and waive it menacingly in her direction, put one finger to my lips, shhhh, and backed out the door into my room.

She probably heard my mattress springs, at least I hoped so, because I was pretending to fuck her. Once I finish I lay back, with my hands locked behind my head, and considered my options. The newspaper clippings should have helped me decide my next move, but there were so many of them, so many tiny printed words and nothing jumped out, except for two black and white photographs. One was of a naked human pyramid, the other of a ragged, kite-like figure, standing on one leg, a black triangular hood over it’s face. That gave me an Idea.

I ran upstairs and slowly pried the door of my parent’s bedroom, tiptoed around my mother, and took the camera from the top drawer of their dresser. It had twelve exposures left.

I stood at the cellar door, gun in hand, and prepared myself to be an interrogator. I asked myself a question, What do I want? The answer came immediately, not in words, but in a face. Gathered from movies, TV, comic books and everything else; an expression of pain and humiliation. I tensed my arm muscles and threw the door open, the way I imagined a Nazi would. She was standing right in front of me. I jumped back and swung the butt of my rifle. It grazed her stomach as she fell back in a cold dark corner, the way I wanted to find her in the first place.

My fingers twitched on the trigger, felt its resistance. I knew the gun wasn’t loaded and didn’t shoot real bullets anyhow, but she’d bought into it, and so had I. The weight of the camera bent my head forward a bit, it was an old automatic type, and I have a skinny neck. She saw the lense and I swear I could see it reflected in a corner of her eye. She was imagining pictures of her own violated corpse, and that froze me again, like the crash had, her thoughts must have been chaotic, like music, like fear, I wanted to know.

Stand on one leg, I shouted.

She seemed to understand, but hesitated to do what she was told.

One leg, I repeated.

One leg, she whimpered, in some fucked up accent, and she raised one foot in experiment.

Yes, I answered and raised one foot of my own to show her she was on the right track.

Now close your eyes.

She did, and I threw a laundry bag over her head, tightening the loop around her neck as she tripped and fell. She tried to get the bag off by pushing her head along the floor, almost knocking me over as she scuttled around like an enormous cockroach. She shot up on her feet and I pistol whipped her on the collar bone, then I screamed out my order again.

Stand on one leg.

She tried, but couldn’t, I guess because she was hurt. I watched two damp circles appear over her eyes, watched her mouth kick out and suck at the material. Something inside me was trying to squirm its way out, like fish in a net. Everything I wanted was inside the laundry bag, but I couldn’t move an inch to get it.

I raised the camera to my eyes and tried to focus it. The green light wouldn’t turn on, the stupid shit had no battery. I threw it to the ground and crushed it with my foot, and that made me feel a bit better, until I remembered that it was my mother’s camera, but the sound scared her, It was good that she couldn’t see me then.

I lay in bed listening to her tearful blathering.

Praying to what, I wondered.

It gave me another idea. I scanned the wall for a particular article I’d taped up about interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo bay.

It was one o’clock, at the kitchen table I was drinking my dad’s beer and eating popsicles from the freezer. I figured out a plan. With two more beers in my hand I ran upstairs to my sister’s bedroom (she was away at college).

At two I re-entered the cellar wearing my sister’s prom dress and a silver Halloween wig that was supposed to make people look like Rod Stewart on my head. My lips were puffy and red. My prisoner had rid herself of the laundry bag, saving me the trouble. I left the door open just a crack so that she could see in the light of my bedroom that I was a woman now. She watched me kneel down in front of her, I could tell she was confused. There was a big purple bruise on my white hairless leg.

So you like praying to your God do you?

I picked up my skirt and reached into my underwear, grabbing hold of a red pen, snapping it, and sloshing the ink around, letting it run all over my hand. Then, I took my hand out and held my palm in front of her so she could see that it was bloody.

Lets see what your God thinks of you now.

I smeared the ink around her cheeks, and worked it with my fingers over her nose and forehead. When I finished, she looks a bit like one of those jungle women you see on the cover of National geographic, but besides that, she looked like someone whose house was torn to shit by a freak hurricane. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected, but it was satisfying. I threw her a blanket and shut the door, hoping she’d watch the last sliver of light on the floor die as I turned off my lamp.

Good night.

I woke up early the next morning, put my stereo down an inch away from my hostage’s slumbering head, and put my loudest cd in the tray, Strapping Young Lad, cranked up the volume and hit play. The scary ambient intro gave me a few seconds to step back and get a good look as the screaming vocals kicked her awake. Her veins were so thick on her head. I tried to tap my thigh to the drumbeat, but that’s impossible, so I let myself out of the room with some serious head banging.

The morning paper was spread out on the kitchen table. The headline said: Terrorists detonate bomb on aeroplane.

Why is that music on so loud, asked my mother.

I ignored her and she went on making coffee. Suddenly, the house shook under the sound of helicopters. I went out where my dad was watching them fly over his head, and I didn’t know it yet, but my hostage had opened the cellar door and was with walking around the house.

Shut up, I Screamed at the helicopters, she can’t hear the music.

Leon, cried my mother from the kitchen. It was impossible to tell if she meant me or my dad. We both turned and sew a red faced barefoot woman, charging out of our front door. She rans away from the house so fast that she tripped and fell into the wheat.

(Adah Elgurt, an olympic runner of Latvian decent, was the unlikely survivor of El al flight 667. In subsequent interviews she described her role in the events as that of a befuddled pawn. When told of her abductor’s age she only added that he appeared the whole time to want to do much more with her than he was actually doing.)

Jose Alvarado

AHistory Of

weird stage

A Hanging

half life

New Series

Heaven's Gate

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