Chapter 34: Chapter 33 – Ruminations on Capitalism

The shooter is brought to the medical tent and treated for his minor injuries. Police question him about the gun, and then higher up FBI investigators are brought in to interview him. He’s moved to jail, in preferential housing, because as soon as the FBI investigators realize how close he was to the shooter, they want him protected. He reveals information about the shooter that only the shooter or a very close accomplice could know. Expert after expert comes to interview him. He’s exposed to a battery of tests from Forensic Psychologists, and little by little, he proves to them that he was just a fan of the shooter, and that he’s a naive and sheltered former college student, who had gotten in too deep during his unhealthy obsession with the charismatic and manipulative shooter. He had made fan videos and posted on forums, he’d ran fan accounts and dedicated his life to following and supporting the shooter. 

Of course, this obsession had crossed a line at some point into a criminal realm, and this former college student was in no way innocent of every crime in the book, but no— he was not the devil behind those streams. He was not the finger pulling the trigger on all of those innocent victims. He had not lead a manhunt across America and cost the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, salary, etc., for the innumerable resources they’d used trying to catch him, and he had not turned Disneyland, the happiest place on Earth, into a war-torn hellscape that made Syria look like, well, Disneyland. 

Yes, he had joined the shooter on his last rampage and even organized a donation fund for the shooter when he had almost died, but no one could prove he’d pulled the trigger while at the rampage, and based on the security camera footage and parts of the stream when he appeared on camera, it could be argued that he was always more of a hostage than an accomplice, and any involvement he had during the battle of Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure was involuntary and done under the threat of death or serious bodily harm. One could argue he was a victim of the hyper saturation of violence in the media, and lax gun laws that made rampages such as this one possible. But yes, he would be punished for organizing that donation fund, and yes, he would be punished for possession of an unregulated handgun, without a license, to the full extent of the law.

As the shooter serves his 1.5 year prison sentence, reduced from 3 years for good behavior, in protected custody, he proves to be an extremely valuable asset to the FBI and domestic terrorism unit, for his firsthand knowledge of the shooter’s tactics, psychological profile, background, and motives. He gains more and more media attention because he could provide such detail about the dark heart of this repulsive criminal, who had so brutally met his end at the hands of the unknown assailant who had apprehended him in ToonTown. While some of the more shrewd investigators had inklings and hunches and intuitions that the college student fanboy who’d turned himself in and knew so much about the shooter might actually be the shooter, and the dead shooter himself might actually be the college student, they were never able to prove it— and the rest of their organizations were happy to let things be, because they had a happy ending and the public did too, with the shooter’s brutal death.

When the shooter is released from prison, he becomes the lucky subject of a bidding war for a book deal about a first hand recounting of his story and the story of the most prolific mass shooter in U.S. history. I don’t know how much the book deal went for but I’m told it was in the eight figure range, and he chose the one that included a first look deal with a movie studio. He is currently developing a show on CBS about an ex-mass shooter who teams up with the FBI to stop mass shootings before they happen. The working title is “Shot Clock.” A few A-list talent are attached already.

#

As Karen drives her car up the 5 freeway, she blinks her eyes against the overpowering smell of cowshit and the brown fields of dirt that stretch out to the horizons on either side of her. She looks out onto the cows milling about amongst each other, ignorant of the slaughterhouse right in their midst. Her focus settles on a particularly dumb looking cow, a black smudge against the shit brown she stands before. 

Karen thinks about the cow: She’s just going to stand there and eat the grass or corn supplement, and shit, and watch cars go by, and shit again, standing right next to that slaughterhouse, and then one day she’ll get herded in there instead of getting herded into his sleeping pen, or feeding pen, and her head will get chopped off by some big anonymous industrial blade, engineered specifically to cut through cow-neck, and she’ll end up on some plate in a restaurant somewhere. Or part of some ground beef in an In-N-Out burger with some other cows that might’ve been her friends or enemies, or even total strangers that died on some other farm somewhere, and I guess it won’t matter to her anymore, anyway. She’ll be dead. But then some sad fuck like me has to pay to eat her so they can keep going, to earn more money, so they can eat more cows, so they can produce more money, and so on. And just because I’m eating off a plate or out of a cute paper bag with a log on it and shitting in a white porcelain bowl and flushing my shit down a pipe instead of letting it out on a hill in the open so cars driving by can smell it, does that make me any better off than the cow? It might make me worse off. Because at least they can eat without having to work or produce anything. Sure, they give up their body in the end, but they only have to do it once— we all give up our body eventually, but if you’re a human these days, you have to give it up every day by being some link in some chain of production of something or other, or by letting someone fuck you and giving them kids, and you have to keep giving up your body every day just to survive… and then you give it up one last time anyway, so how’s it any better? The human brain is a supercomputer whose sole purpose is to come up with ways to waste time and make excuses for its own existence. We crawled out of the primordial stew to complicate things for ourselves and set up complex societies so that we could work harder to do that thing our single celled organisms were doing millions of years ago: eating, shitting, and reproducing. 

As Karen makes her way up the 5, and out of shit-smell-country, the sun sets, and the evening becomes darker, which somehow makes her thoughts less dark. She takes the exit for Santa Cruz and soon enough, she’s pulling onto the cul-de-sac that contains the townhouse that her sister lives in. She can see her breath in the chilly Central Californian air as her sister comes out to greet her. They hug and her sister helps her with her bags. She didn’t pack heavy so it’s easy work. 

It’s warm in the townhouse and the ex-development executive feels cozy in her hoodie as she sits on the old leather couch. They watch Mirrors (2008) with her sister’s roommates. It stars the guy from 24 and he plays some security guard who is haunted by ghosts in mirrors. It’s stupid enough to not be too scary but scary enough to make the warmth of the townhouse and the company of her sister and her sister’s roommates feel even warmer and safer. They drink Old Fashioneds and talk about stuff only college students talk about. Once they’re all drunk, they bring up Disneyland.

“What was it like there?” 

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“It was pretty fucking scary.”

“Did you think you were going to die?”

“Yeah.”

“What was that like?”

“It’s weird, no matter how badly you don’t want to die, when it’s happening, when it’s over and you’re safe, you sort of wish you did die. But then you do something like this and you’re glad you’re alive.”

After a few moments one of the sister’s roommates says “Aw, that’s so sweet.” 

#

Later on that night, when Karen’s thoughts are hazy, she and her sister step out for a cigarette. They smoke Newports. The minty smoke feels tingly and refreshing in Karen’s lungs, and she approaches the large tree in the townhouse’s communal backyard. She hugs it, feeling self conscious but determined. She feels the life within it, pulsating against her own heartbeat.

 

The End.

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