Saturday 20 October 2007

Chris Carter 'Stranger In My Shadow'

I can still hear the pounding of the footsteps coming from below as they came for me. Racing up the staircases and echoing along the corridors. And then they were upon me. Bursting through the door, arms and legs crashing down. My face pressed against the bare wooden floor, the musty smell of vacancy and dust filling my nostrils. Faces distorted as they bore down upon me, my arms twisted behind me as the kicks and punches rained down.
And I remember thinking how quick they had been, in tracing me. Too quick. The sound of mayhem spiralled from the streets below, as if the whole city were caught up in the winds of some kind of giant hurricane. Screams and sirens split the clear blue sky and they would leave wounds across the skies of the world that would never fully heal.
And only minutes before I was sitting alone, among the empty crates and boxes of the vacant office floor. Absorbing the scene below. The Dallas streets lined with cheering, waving, God loving Americans, as the President of the United States sat in the back of the shining black convertible motorcade, his wife Jackie by his side.
It must have been a wonderful day to feel alive, to feel American. But I felt nothing. And the sun had shone.
I traced the movements of John F. Kennedy and his wife, through my rifles telescopic sight. Adjusting the focus, a fraction here, a fraction there. And they did make a beautiful couple, there was no denying it, irrespective of what political views one held. Kennedy, with his flashing white smile and sporty neat hairstyle, tailored suit and crisp white shirt. He looked so cool, as if he were reflecting the sun. And then there was Jackie. I shifted my sights across to her and her beauty flooded the lens like water up a pipe. Deep brown eyes shone like onyx, her hair looked as smooth as silk and rested perfectly on delicate shoulders. She wore the most immaculate suit of blossom pink and she radiated a warmth and elegance that melted the hearts and the ice creams of the crowd, quicker then the soaring Texas sunshine.
The imposing shape of the motorcade turned left onto Deeley Plaza, just as they told me it would. Crawling along, barely more than 10mph, grassy banks on either side. And the President grew clearer through the eye of my scope. I took two deep breaths and then eased into a normal breathing pattern, like a hundred times before. I’d had a dark blue bandana tied around my head to prevent perspiration from trickling into my eyes, like a hundred times before. And in my mind I was back in the steaming jungles of the Pacific.
Perched high in a tree or lying among the insects and the dirt of the jungle floor. Blending into my surroundings, perfectly still, like a star in the night sky. The familiar feeling as the trigger nestles in the crook of my finger, cradled like a baby. And I was in total control. Calm and collected, that dispassionate, cold surge of power I always felt before I pulled the trigger, knowing that fate, someone’s destiny rested in my hands, was running through me. And when it was all over, the power would fade but the coldness would remain, numbing everything I had ever felt, frozen through my kaleidoscope of death.
In me, they had found just what they were after. But they knew that. A human shell, destitute of any emotions or feelings. No political or moral stance. Just a marksman, a trained assassin, taught to follow orders, to the letter, no questions asked.
The war had left me that way. The fresh faced boy, the school’s leading track and field star, who couldn’t wait to sign up, itching to fight the enemy, to help defend his homeland, to liberate the world from evil, was another person, someone I once knew. It wasn’t me who had grown up in small town America, where every neighbour was a friend and life rocked, gently by like the chairs resting on the front porches. Wasn’t me who had comic book images of war printed on the pages of my mind. Good prevailing over bad. Those memories belonged to another, someone who once lived insider me. That person had gone now, moved on, lost amidst the horrors and the carnage of the jungle, disappeared in a hail of bullets and booby traps. To be replaced by the killer, I believed, that waited in the shadows of every soul. No comic book I could remember portrayed images of the hero removing the limbs of his comrades from the undergrowth after they had stepped aboard a mine.
The jungle changes a man. Hot and humid in the day, cold at night. If the Japanese army didn’t get you there was always malaria or typhoid waiting, or the snakes and scorpions. And then there was the personal war to fight. The battle of the mind. Gnawing away at the psyche’s defences, nerves shredded like paper, reducing hardened soldiers, men, who feared no one in hand to hand combat, into mental wrecks, incapable of fighting the enemy within.
From then on, with every enemy that appeared in my rifle’s sights, with every life that I took, another piece of me shrivelled and died, like withered grapes on the vine.
And when I returned from the war I found I couldn’t return to myself. Couldn’t relate to the familiar surroundings of my past. It was as if I was living in the remnants of an old dream that clings to the mind. Well-known faces in well-known places but none of it real. I couldn’t breathe in the crisp, morning air or smell the humming of the cattle or the horses. There was no room for anything but the sickly stench of death that floated through my senses, couldn’t escape it, it seemed to ooze from my every pore. I felt repugnant to, and dislocated from, the entire world. The army had taught me how to kill and how to survive, trained my mind, body and soul to deal with the rigours of war. Everything geared to the battleground, every muscle toned, they planted a sixth, seventh and eighth sense insider me. But what then? What if you actually came through this labyrinth of madness? Expected just to step back into the normality of the real world without even breaking stride, to melt back into society like ice in water? I couldn’t sleep at night for the deafening silence that exploded in my head. So I sloped off, headed for the big cities, New York, San Francisco, sprawling jungles of a different climate. I floated through life, lightly touching down whenever the mood caught me. I cleaned floors, washed dishes, menial empty work, and then I would move on, leaving no time for relationships or to establish roots. I would sit, alone, in parks, cafes or diners and watch the world rush by, people busy treading the road of life. But everyone I saw, or came into contact with, I saw through the sights of a rifle. Everyone became a potential victim, every building or window a possible platform for a shot, senses constantly wrapped round the intangible trigger of imagination.
The day before they found me I was teetering on the brink, slowly slipping into a place there would have been no returning from, into the murky depths of madness. I saw a face that day stare back at me from behind a gloomy bar in Downtown San Francisco. And through a dark, drunken haze I finally realized it was my own reflection. But it was the face of a stranger. There were glimpses of a person I once know, mannerisms, the squint of an eye, the crooked parting in the hair, but what i saw was the face of a ghost, a dead man walking, colour and life slipped away like sand through a timer, until there really was nothing left, just a shell.
I stumbled out the door and aimlessly through the streets that dropped off towards the bay, staring blankly at my feet, afraid to look up, to catch my reflection in a shop or car window, scarred to see the corpse that I had become.
I moved slowly along The Embarcadero, drifting with the wind like the sailboats in the white-caped bay. I stood by one of the many piers that lined the side, staring at the water below. It had been four days since I had last slept and nothing inside seemed to connect. Everything felt dead, burnt out like a fused circuit board. Just empty chambers where the current of life had once ran.
It seemed from somewhere that the depths of the bay were calling me, voices echoing through the empty channels of my body, resonant in my head. And there was a light below, swimming up to the surface, growing brighter as it burst through the water. And all the victims of my past swarm up to meet me, a gallery of all the soldiers who had been caught within the web of my sights, paraded by.
I turned and ran blindly, once more without resolution, through the streets of the city. Finally I collapsed beneath a tree somewhere near Telegraph Hill. I was finished, physically and emotionally spent. I looked to the sky and waited for my vision to clear. The Coit Tower loomed into focus, but to me, all that I could see was a giant fluted statue of a telescopic sight, a monument to the faceless assassin. My conscience wouldn’t let me forget my past, images, like mirages in the desert, floated across my mind, optical illusions fading in and out like the very breath in my body.
And it was strange really, because in a way they rescued me. Gave me a purpose, however crazy. For the clouds of madness were closing in on me like the early morning mist that fell across the bay.
And then they were there at the door of my dingy one room apartment. Three men, all dark suits and trilby hats. They took me away, far away to an old ranch house somewhere in New Mexico. They dried me out, fed me properly, put more money than I had ever seen in my hand, with the promise of more to come, after the job. And then they handed me a rifle. And I can remember shaking, physically quivering with the fear of holding a weapon again. But when they put a target before me the trembling ceased. Instinct took over, checked the chamber, adjusted the sights, and it was as if I had been reconstructed. Like the wreck of a car, not just the bodywork repaired but the engine too, retuned and serviced. Until I was ready, once more, to become a killing machine. And I hit everything they asked, bull’s-eyes’ nailed on trees, up trees, moving targets, partially hidden targets, one shot, every time.
And there was I, a heartbeat away from taking the life of America’s President of the new decade.
The motorcade drew ever nearer, a line of five police motorbikes led the way, the sun bouncing off their windshields and helmets, Jackie sitting on the left, Kennedy to her right as they occupied the rear of the open top limousine. And Kennedy’s head filled the lens of my scope. One shot. Everything checked, and double checked. My breathing fine, clarity, distance perfect, no wind. One shot. My finger closed around the trigger. One shot. Had to be now or the shot would be gone...But something inside flickered, momentarily but it was there. Memories of Kennedy’s term in office suddenly exploded in my head, slivers of his achievements embedded somewhere in my conscience. His efforts to dislodge the stubborn roots of racism buried deep in the south. The strength shown demanding Krushchev remove his country’s missiles from Cuba.
‘And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.’
Kennedy’s words from The Inaugural Address two years earlier rang through my head like the tolling of a church bell. And what was I going to do for my country? About to snatch its hopes and dreams like a thief in the night.
‘And so, my fellow Americans...’ And that’s exactly what he was...what I was! ...A fellow American. War veterans’ the pair of us, had served in the Pacific together, comrades, brothers in arms. I had risked my life for men like Kennedy, men whose names I never even knew. And there I was ready to play my instrument of death, a hostage to the faceless conductors who had orchestrated the whole sorry nightmare.
And so it was true I had taken many lives, watched the scene of death unfold before me like a silent movie, countless times, through my sights. But I realized it had been for what I believed in, in the name of my country, for peace, justice, right versus wrong. What I had been trained to do, everything I had done had been an order, the fortunes of war, I could see now a kind of twisted logic behind it all. But this, this was different...personal...wrong!
And suddenly the clouds that had smothered me for so long, lifted. Reality shifted back into place. Everything seemed clearer, colour and sound, sharper, reverberating all around me. Is this what it had taken to jolt me back to life? I had been on the brink of self-destruction, teetering on the edge. But the ice which had run through my veins, numbing everything inside, had finally thawed. I knew there were images of the war that I could never remove, a part of me now, like the stained glass in a church window. But slowly, life had begun to flow again. I lowered my rifle and stared blankly at the oak panelled floor. ‘And what now?’ I asked myself.
And then the world erupted. Outside, shots rung out then chaos reigned. The glorious scene of a few moments earlier had been shattered. Kennedy had been shot, his body slumped sideways, head a bloody mess, Jackie on her hands and knees, frantically crawling over the back of the motorcade, blood and brain splattered across her lap. The Texas Governor, John B. Connally sitting in the front of the Kennedy’s, had obviously been hit as well. The limousine raced away as everywhere people swarmed like unearthed ants.
And I had seen it all before, only moments ago. I had written, and played out the scene in my mind. Only I had changed the final act. The carnage below had been cut, edited out. Replaced by a scene in which Kennedy and his wife arrive for lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart, followed by a stirring speech, healing all rifts within the Texan Democratic Party.
But that was just a dream and I was left with the desperate reality below, only moments before everything had started to slip back into place but now the picture jumped again, sliding off the canvas of my mind. I fought to regain my composure, to keep my head from sinking back below the surface, above the icy waters of madness.
If it had been my shot, if I had pulled the trigger I would have been out of the room, and making my way from the building by now. Detached from emotion, sniper training taking over, following the golden rules of the marksmen. But it hadn’t been my shot and like the crowd below, shock paralysed my senses.
Below me, I could hear the cracking the splintering of wood as doors were kicked from their hinges, and the floor vibrated from the pounding of what seemed like a thousand different feet.
But eventually my rifle would tell them that no shot had been fired just as clearly as if it could speak for itself. Unlike the Italian rifle, with telescopic sight, that had been found in the Texas School Book Depository.
They said it was from a sixth floor window there that witnesses claim shots were fired. But many claimed they heard shots coming from the grassy knoll, unmistakably a position for a clearer shot.
But when the police had stormed the building, they could find no trace of an assassin. But with me it had been different. They had arrived immediately, a set up, a tip off. But by whom? And for what?
They arrested Lee Harvey Oswald in a downtown theatre, some time later, a known Communist sympathiser and his fingerprints all over the gun. He protested his innocence for two days before he was shot dead, on live television as he was being transferred to County jail, by a night-club owner by the name of Jack Ruby.
None of it seemed to make much sense. Like me, Oswald was just a pawn in the game, but what kind of crazy game? And who were the players? CIA, FBI, the mob? I doubt the world will ever truly know.
It would have been so simple if I had pulled the trigger. The headlines were probably already written; ‘PYCHOTIC WAR VETERAN ASSASSINATES PRESIDENT’. What would there have been left to explain? Embittered ex. Soldier, a loner, a vagabond, unable to adjust to life after the horrors of war, finally spirals out of control, into a vortex of insanity, and takes his twisted revenge on the country that sent him to war by killing its President.
But I hadn’t pulled the trigger and the world can never really be sure that Oswald did either. The emergence of a home movie, filmed by a member of the public, seemed to prove that there was more than one marksman. But The Warren Commission, a year later, reported that Oswald was the sole assassin, acting alone. But the critics, and there were many, believed this to be impossible. The dispute rumbled on through the Seventies, with committees and organizations spewing out theory after theory. Tales of conspiracies shot round the world like satellites, but nothing could be proved.
And as for me, I was swept away under the carpet. Two attempted assassinations on the President on the day was, apparently, too much like bad publicity. I was interrogated by so many different people, in so many different places, so many times that I struggled to remember my own name. And what could I tell them? Very little. I was whisked away, my existence denied, a missing person, finally declared dead. A few years back I was offered my freedom, new identity, new life, nothing outrageous, one bedroom apartment, a job pumping gas or serving customers somewhere, always a watching eye on me, but a life nonetheless. But what did I want with the outside world anymore? What could I do for ‘Me fellow Americans’ or they do for me now?
And now, some forty years on from that fateful day I look around my tiny cell. Small but neat and tidy with a feeling of cosiness like a warm blanket. The comforting sounds of my music echo gently off the walls. My gaze falls upon my books, rows and rows of books where a window should be. That was where I lived now. My body might be locked away but my mind was as free as the wind. Inside each cover another world existed, as refreshing and inviting as a crystal clear pool twinkling on a hot July day. And all I had to do was dive in and drift wherever the mood took me. Every word on every line seemed to lift from the page, creating a kind of giant 3D image in my head, and I would fall into the blinding white ocean behind, the words forming around. And in my mind that’s where I would live, in the story, until the last page had been read and I would, literally, move on to the next chapter of my life.
And this is where I belonged, within the safety of my own soul, unable to step out from my own shadow, and I know that this is the safest, sanest place I have ever been in my life.