1.

Under the California Code of Counter Terrorism Section 230 the crime of conspiracy to commit acts of dismemberment through bombing and in furtherance of terror is defined as: an agreement between two or more people to use devices of explosion to tear one limb from another with the intent to bring about the subjective feelings of terror in others. Subsection (d-147-a) further states that the act of writing about bombings that are in furtherance of terror is a tort and can be found under the subsection in the California Code of Tort Crimes entitled Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.

What this means is that the very act of writing about dismemberment and bombs and terror is a crime because it intentionally brings about feelings in another. It is now considered a criminal act to create a feeling in another.

Besides the tort crime of intentional infliction of emotional distress, if the writings about dismemberment and bombings and terror are found to be in regard to actual and factual occurrences then you are also potentially guilty of the crime of subjective emotional assault and battery, in which the act of creating an environment where another might experience emotional shock against their will is no longer tolerated by society.

We are a very fragile race.

On the TV, which is never off, thirty of them blasting through the cells on each floor of the Penitentiary for the Criminally Fucked, there is a news story about four hundred and three people who believed that God had come and gone, that the second coming had actually occurred and they had been forgotten or betrayed and to show their complete abject terror at this idea they set themselves on fire in front of the Vatican of the New Catholic Church in Newark, New Jersey. They left a letter for God in case their souls were lost telling him exactly where they would be. In hell. Dear God, we will be in hell waiting for you.

The easy banality with which people take their lives overwhelms me.

I set off three bombs that killed a total of 298 persons through the crime of dismemberment. I did it in a conspiratorial way. The bodies littered the streets of Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles creating terror in everyone who witnessed the deaths. I am now writing this in order to cause something in you. In the hopes that there is something left.

 

2.

That first night I met Kent was at a death gathering at the Los Angeles Philosophical and Spiritual Society for Gays, Lesbians and Gender-un-specifics. Someone neither of us knew only had a few more hours left before they finally passed away from EID (Ecological Immunity Disorder). It was a relatively new disease believed by certain right wing doctors and priests who were trying to taint the public’s opinion to be the Earth’s natural cleansing process, though it seemed to only be infecting gay men and some minorities, mostly blacks. The Office of Unintended Infectious Diseases was busy assuring everyone that it was not in any way related to the other diseases that have been found to have been created in Government labs under the auspice of theological warfare and research.

There was nothing new to any of this. Most of us knew the truth even if we never said it. AIDS had been found in 2010 to have been created by a secret division of the CIA that no one had ever heard of. Microscopic parasitic worms had been implanted inside children in Africa. Chinese women were infected with a yellow virus that made their menstruations lethal. Young men who had run away from tyrannical families and were found squatting in the cities of Peru were lobotomized and hooked up to computers in the hopes of re-establishing a new connection to the human spirit.

Gay men dying in Los Angeles due to governmental and religious conspiracies was old hat. No one in the general population in South Dakota much cared anymore. God might be dead but the men who killed in his name were alive and willing.

After the ceremony was over and the minister from the Homosexual Theological Center was done saying the last rights, the life support buttons were terminated, and the end was near. It was the moment I loved most. Just as they were leaving. Dying. Terminated. Fucked in the biggest fuck of all. I kept my eyes wide open. You never know. I had heard stories of people who had seen them, their souls, just as they departed. I’ve never seen a soul and I strongly doubt their existence, but there is nothing like a good dying to make you feel human.

The room was quiet except for the failing breaths of the man on the table. He couldn’t hold air. His lungs had collapsed, like his bowels and his kidneys and his cheeks and lips and chest. He struggled just to remain intact, let alone breathing. Air was too much to expect. Slowly, with each rasping breath, he was suffocating. As if we were holding a pillow over his head, refusing him anymore air.

The room was a typical death room. Black stone floors polished and waxed to reflect the light from the candles that were spaced through out the room. The walls were a soft white. Coffee white. Off white. Not really white, but an abstraction of white. Nothing too bright. Everyone dressed in red in celebration of the tainted blood that would soon be drained and sent to the human toxic waste plant floating off the Santa Monica Pier. Everyone except Kent. He was dressed in black jeans and a black t-shirt with orange flip-flops. He was standing over the dying man, watching the red tinted spit bubbles form on his lacerated lips, only to be sucked back in to his sunken yellowed mouth.

Kent looked up at me and smiled. He winked. He was short with dark black curly hair, broad shoulders, thick arms, a crooked grin that revealed his top two teeth that had been coated in gold layering, and the most amazing green eyes I have ever seen outside of a computer generated image.

“It looks like he’s begging,” Kent whispered.

I moved closer to the dying man and to Kent.

“Fucking pathetic,” Kent whispered, this time to the man on the table and not to me. I was just a bystander invited to witness. He looked up at me. God, those eyes. They were the softest lost green I have ever seen.

Kent turned to look around at the other people, the legitimate guests of the dying man. Most had their eyes closed to show their respect for the passing, the rest were looking at the floor or the ceiling. Anywhere but at the man who was dying.

“Open your mouth, cock sucker,” Kent whispered, bending down so he was close to the dying man’s lips. “Open up and maybe you’ll be saved.”

The dying guy was hoping for something, some last act of tenderness, some last kindness no matter how improbable. Dying in a room of loved ones is no less lonely then dying alone in the dark. The dying man opened his mouth, the cracks in his lips extending over his ruined face like cracks in rain parched ground and Kent smiled.

“That’s it. That’s a good cock sucker.” Moving closer it almost looked to me like he was going to kiss him, which considering the potential lethality of EID would have been suicide, but we were both wrong. Me and the dying man. Kent wasn’t leaning down to kiss him. Instead he was making a hock hock sound, swishing whatever was mixing in his mouth together, loud and sickening, gathering all the phlegm and snot together in a huge goober which, just as a woman cried out in shock, he spit into the open mouth of the dying man.

The crying woman drew the attention of the other mourners and the minister, causing a moment of chaos where no one knew what to do so they just started yelling “Stop!” or “Call Security”.

“Come on,” Kent said, his eyes sparking like some kind of lost island un-discovered or forgotten.

The question is why did I go with him? Who runs off with a man who spits in a dying man’s mouth? The very act of running off with him makes me a monster, makes me almost just as guilty. I could have turned around at that moment and hocked my own goober into the cracked lips of the endlessly suffocating man and it wouldn’t have mattered because I was grabbing hold of Kent’s hand and allowing myself to join in. I was now a person who, if not actually spits into the mouth of dying men, runs off with men who do.

And the answer is: I had nothing better to do. That should have been obvious. If I did I wouldn’t have been at the death gathering of a man I had never met. I was a death gathering crasher which was the lowest of the low. Maybe running out with Kent was the last chance at something I was going to get.

And because it was my job. This is what I do. I’m the one who requested this as our first meeting spot when he called me, asking for my particular services. Which maybe I should have said first, but even if I wasn’t getting paid for meeting Kent I might have still left with him in that moment. The air around Iceland can’t be as pure as those green eyes. The moment we let the bombs drop on Iraq, Iran and Syria, deracinating a whole tribe of people, the completeness of their deaths couldn’t have been as absolute as his smile.

So there I went. Out the doors, ignoring the shock and horror that was gathering in velocity behind me, and into the baby blue car of a short pit bull of a man with the most outrageously green eyes. Eyes so green they made you feel like maybe you weren’t so alone.

We drove south on the 101 from Hollywood to Echo Park. The moon full and malignant as it hung over downtown.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked him.

“Are you a top or a bottom?”

“What?”

“You like to fuck or get fucked? A top or a bottom?”

It took me a moment to think about that. Not that I didn’t know the answer, but I had to think about it in relation to him. Did I want him fucking me or did I want to fuck him?

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” he said, exiting at Alvarado. “Cause I’m gonna be fucking you tonight.”

Kent’s dick was fatter than it was long and he didn’t waste anytime taking it out and pushing me to my knees.

“I won’t love you,” he said as I tried to take in the abstract coloring of his walls as well as the fatness of his dick.

Kent lived in a small one bedroom overlooking the park and the bridge made famous by the movie “Chinatown” and as the place where the members of the Mexican group Native Right To Return took turns shooting themselves to show their protest of the continued occupation of land that they believed rightfully belonged to what they referred to as an indigenous people. Kent had bookshelves filled with books and a hardwood floor covered in porno magazines with overly developed men shoving surgically enhanced penises into bizarrely stretched anuses. Above the small metal bed was a picture of Christ on the cross. Christ had large white bones pieced through his nipples and a swollen cock with a metal ball hanging from the head. The blue eyes of God looking down on the room. Next to the bed was a small wooden table with a copy of Madame Bovary on it.

On a table next to the bed was a glass jar filled with white lilies and some purple flower with little red hanging bulbs that looked almost like hearts.

He fucked me that night. Naked Kent was like a solid box of flesh and muscle painted in the various tattooed memories of his life. The next morning he woke up and fucked me again and I wondered if my ass looked as stretched and as vacuous as the ones littering the floor around us.

 

3.

I make the bombs. Precise. I know the exact moment they will go off. The damage that I’ve calculated. The looks in their eyes at the exact moment their arms are being torn from them. Their faces ripped by pieces of glass or metal or wood, depending on the location. I did this before I met Kent. It’s why I was the one called. Because of my precision. Rarely does anyone live when one of my bombs goes off. And those who do do so without the service of the majority of their limbs.

I make the bombs and Kent delivers them. We leave them scattered throughout the City. By admitting this I am admitting to more crimes than I have been charged with, but my intent is no longer to claim innocence. There is nothing innocent left. I make the bombs and Kent delivers them and then, using the video camera on his cell phone, he documents our achievements and accomplishments. He loves to fuck me while I hold the phone, watching all that destruction while he pounds himself into me. I love to close my eyes and feel my vacuous self open up.

Once he left one of my bombs at a child care center in North Hollywood. Seventeen five to ten year olds were decimated as well as two child care workers. I remember the feeling of Kent’s hands pushing down between my shoulder blades as he plunged himself in and out of me at the exact moment the bomb went off. I remember watching it on the news later that night, the feeling of emptiness created by the hugeness of Kent’s cock pulsating through me.

Mothers cried. Fathers raged. Police chiefs and Special Agents promised retribution.

“No one talks anymore,” Kent said, watching as a mother and father held up a picture of their destroyed son. “Maybe now they’ll have something to say to each other. We probably saved their marriage.”

It isn’t a huge leap. From spitting in a dying man’s mouth to blowing up child care centers. Not nearly as huge as you think. The concept is the same. The scale just a little larger.

“We don’t have a manifesto,” Kent told me when he first mentioned the group he belonged to. “Just an acceptance that there are less and less trees and more and more people every day. So far that’s been enough.”

The group was three other people besides Kent and I. Kia, a girl with a pink Mohawk and two straight brothers, identical twins with tattoos and piercings, Tony and Anthony. The common factor we all shared was Kent and a reliance on the fact that maybe somewhere behind his instructions was an over-arching belief in something. I doubted if Tony and Anthony actually cared why we were doing what we were doing. They loved the killing. They loved it so much sometimes they did it for free. For the fun of it. Usually to the whores they picked up and fucked then had to kill. Had to for no reason other than they liked saying it.

“Man, what choice did we have? Bitch had to die.”

I told myself I was there for the money and the chance to do something that meant something. And because of those eyes. The green eyes of God.

“We’re falling,” Kent said to us the night he unveiled his great plan. “All of us. And this is our act. Our falling act.”

It reminded me of what he had said to me the night before. Holding my head down on his cock, his cum shooting against the roof of my mouth like some final promised act. He said, just as my mouth filled with him, “We’re dying. That’s all I’ve been saying all along. We’re dying and I’m here to make sure everyone knows it.”

“This falling act. This final descending drop of ascension. That’s what I’m trying to do here.”

He loved talking like that. In words that meant almost nothing. Almost.

Whenever he came in my mouth he made me hold it there, kneeling in front of him, he made me open my mouth and show it to him, sloshing it around for him, then he would kneel down next to me and open his mouth, waiting for me to spit it back to him. Then he would do the same, sloshing it around for a few seconds then spit it back to me. Back and forth it would go till one of us ended up swallowing it. One night we went like that for almost two hours.

Whatever sickness he had I had. Whatever death was eating at me was now eating at him. And I remember him saying, “I won’t love you.”

“All you have to do is turn the TV on,” Kent said, rain pounding the walls and the ceiling of the building we had met in to build these final three bombs. “Everyone is dying. The air is ruined. Nine hundred blue whales washed up on the shores of Australia yesterday. Thirteen fourteen-year-old girls drank lye, screaming and laughing as it burned through them, because they wanted to show their love for some musician. A hundred and thirty seven mothers jumped off the golden gate bridge to protest the building of a new super mall in Marin. Seventy-eight gay men stuck flame throwers up each others asses, igniting themselves. No one knows why. They left no instructions. Now they’re just charred bone and ash. And the Government tells us it’s illegal to smoke on City streets or to use cuss words in public. The Church says that we must love Christ. It’s illegal to watch porn on Sundays. Talking about my dead mother might cause someone to remember their best friend’s dead aunt allowing them to sue me for negligently inflicting them with pain. I say, fuck it. I say it’s time to set something big on fire. Really make a statement.”

We were going to destroy three buildings. The Cathedral of Jesus Christ and His Disciples on Crenshaw, The New Non-Denominational Church of the Virgin for Gays and Lesbians on Schrader and the Loving Orphanage For Children of Terminally Ill Parents in Brentwood. The goal was to put to end the lives of over five hundred people. What we didn’t factor in was the rain. It meant less people would go to worship. People in LA hate driving in the rain. But Kent said it wouldn’t matter. Enough would go to pray and the orphanage was full so things were to continue as planned and we would accept the loss of the loss of life.

 

4.

Growing up my mother made small cookies in the shapes of animals. Their eyes were tiny chocolate chips. Or pieces of round candy, like M&M’s or caramel drops. I grew up in New Jersey in a small suburb of New York. She would sing while she made these cookies. She would sing and cry.

My father had volunteered as a relief suicide bomber for the FBI. His ticket had been punched. His number called. He was being sent in to infiltrate a drug ring somewhere in Upstate New York. He would go in wearing the bomb. He would come out in pieces. His death would guarantee my mother and I would be financially secure. My college would be paid for. The down payment on my first house taken care of. Enough to help me begin my life. Enough for my mother to live out the rest of hers.

After his death she stopped making the cookies. Instead she watched TV. Sometimes I would try to get her to go for a walk, but she always said she was too tired. She would rather I went alone and I could tell her about it when I got back.

Kent took me up to the roof. The rain was like a metal screen blocking out the lights of the City. He laid me flat, my head hanging over the edge, and he was inside me. Below, through the falling metal screen I could see the lights of cars as they made their way through Armageddon. Kent was whispering in my ear. His breath was hot inside the cold wetness of the rain.

My mother died one night. She died in front of the TV. She had mistakenly eaten a bowl of crushed glass. Blood had poured from her mouth and ears and eyes. There was a puddle of blood at her feet that had dripped out of other orifices. She had mixed the glass in with cherry bing ice cream. Mistakenly. We had to fight for that word. If she had intentionally mixed the glass with the ice cream she would have committed a crime and not been allowed to be buried under the laws set up by the Government and the Church. They would have burned her and thrown her ashes out. We fought hard for the word mistakenly to be written on the death certificate. Many people remembered my father. Many people thought he had been heroic. They were willing to help us out.

“I know what we’re about to do is nothing,” Kent whispered inside hot breath, his cock buried as far inside me as it could go. His hips barely moved, twisting slightly. I could feel all of him. I could feel his heart beating inside me. Inside the falling rain. “I think I should carry one of the bombs in. Kia said she’d take one. The twins want to take the one for the orphanage.”

I closed my eyes. The rain was almost louder than his words. I could almost pretend I hadn’t heard them.

“I was wrong,” he whispered, “I did love you.” And he came, shooting himself inside me, infecting me.

 

5.

There are discussions about my intent. My lawyer says that I had no knowledge of what the bombs I was making were going to be used for. And she’s probably right. Just not the way she thinks. She argues that my intent was not to cause damage. My intent was to make bombs. The DA argues that under the laws of foreseeability and substantial certainty my intent was to cause the dismemberment of limbs. They argue about the intent of my intent. They argue about the importance of my subjective thoughts verse my objective actions.

298 people is a relatively small number. In consideration of the larger numbers. The fact that 189 of them were orphaned children with no real lives to have lost in the first place will be taken into consideration.

Kent cried after he came inside me. Every time. But mostly that night in the rain. I couldn’t tell the difference between his tears and the drops of rain but I could hear him sobbing. His arms wrapping around me. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to live either. It’s a funny problem if you think about it. I’ve spent many nights laughing over that one.

My cell is small. It’s made of a clear thick plastic. Outside are the guards. They sit in front of the TV’s watching the endless repetition of news. Bombs detonating. Four hundred die in Alaska protesting the killing of whales for perfume. One thousand two hundred and thirteen Buddhists kill eight hundred and ninety seven cows, covering themselves in the blood and raw meat in protest of nothingness. Forty-nine twelve year olds slice their stomachs open in front of the National Institute of Abortions, in protest of our national disregard for the rights of fetuses. An African American lesbian in Akron, Ohio walked a bomb into the city’s Gay and Lesbian Center killing eighty-seven women involved in lesbian mothers united Lamaze classes in protests of the Center’s inherent racism. A new disease is killing gay men. It’s unclear if it’s airborne. Citizens of Nevada are suggesting placing all gay men in quarantine until more facts are known. The President of the United States and the King of South East Israel are announcing their intentions to drop a nuclear bomb on the inhabitants of the North West Quadrant of Jerusalem. No monuments or artifacts of historic or religious value will be hurt. Just the lives of the inhabitants. They will begin de-radiation seven days later.

Somewhere in that rain filled night Kent told me he loved me. I’m sure of it, but it seems to be fading under the weight of the present moment. A news reporter mentioned my name to the Mayor of Los Angeles who said he had never heard of me.

“I know what we’re about to do is nothing,” Kent had whispered through his sobs, “but if we don’t do it than what?”

There is a chance I will only have to serve one year. The jails are filled to capacity and my crimes are not enough to warrant the death penalty. Political Statements still have some Constitutional standing, even if the writing of them is considered an act of such extreme terrorism that I will probably be executed if this ever gets published.

When I close my eyes I can still see those green eyes. Rarely has color fascinated me so much.

The floors of my cell are clear plastic just like the walls. Below me a woman arrested for carrying a sign protesting the use of serial bombers by the government is taking a shit. The plastic is thick enough that I can’t hear the noises she makes as she defecates below me but as I look down she looks up at me and she smiles. I wave. She waves back and for a moment I think I can smell what her insides must smell like. Musty and wet. Brown. A little garlic from the pasta we were all fed for lunch. But these things, these smells, must be in my head. The thick plastic and the constantly changing pumped air makes it impossible for me to smell anything from the other cells.

She smiles and gives me the thumbs up. I return the smile, minus the thumbs up.

 

© 2005 Jeff Leavell - Contributor's Bio