Five Dead, More Wounded
The protagonist is named Gabriel, a name with biblical intonations not directly mapped to the story. The climax of the story is when Gabriel murders the other three in front of their children. The set-up leading to the climax is a brief overview of Gabriel’s life, situated in such a way that it blends touchpoints of his own existence with the broader sweep of human history. The hope is the story paints a searing emotional portrait colored with murky suggestions of conspiratorial intrigue.
For example, the story might begin by describing Gabriel’s childhood in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, his father an insurance broker, his mother a hairdresser. Gabriel would be a middle child of four and his childhood would be marked by feelings of isolation from others at school. These feelings would be illustrated by choice examples such as the songs he would write on the guitar he was gifted one Christmas that included lyrics like “uncool people don’t get to play/they just sit inside and wait all day” or the year he told his mother he didn’t want a birthday party because he didn’t want to embarrass his parents if no one attended. In the background, key world events would transpire such as September 11th, the anthrax attacks, the proliferation of the internet, Operation Iraqi Freedom, various mass shootings, the financial meltdown of 2008, more mass shootings, and the ambient rise of American despair as counted by debt, synthetic drug addiction, and suicide. Gabriel would learn about the abstract shape of these vents, but only in the way a young person does, such as half-glimpses at the television during dinner, snippets on the car radio during the ride to school, sitting on the stairs while his parents talked in the living room, or through the small lectures of an opinionated math teacher. His primary method of understanding these world events would be through limited but direct experience of them, such as asking his parents if terrorists would attack their home next, going to bed afraid he’d be drafted off to war once he turned 18, ordering freedom fries from the school cafeteria, no longer having family pizza night once a month, spending long summers at home, helping his father on a midnight paper route, helping his mom turn a laundry tub in the basement into a salon sink for hairdressing, watching his father lose weight after taking a door-to-door sales job, asking if he could be home schooled, crying after his father smacked one of his sisters, crying when his aunt told him about the antichrist, saying goodbye to his older brother after they were forced out of the house for doing drugs, saying hello to his brother after they came back to live in the basement, learning a patriotic song to sing in school, hearing his father say he loved him, discovering heavy metal, gaining weight, talking to a school psychiatrist, wondering why life felt so much better in third grade than it did in seventh, wondering if life would feel good again in high school, feeling a sense of pride and victory when Saddam Hussein was captured, discovering pornography, recycling big garbage bags of beer bottles for spare change, discovering chat rooms, getting punched by his brother, helping his mother convert the salon sink back into a laundry tub, hating
At this point in the story, there would be an abrupt shift in content and tone in order to discuss the broader history of assassination, violence, and intelligence during the 20th century. First the text would introduce Operation Gladio, a project that saw the CIA and foreign equivalents pouring arms and funds into European far-right paramilitary brigades after World War II. The brigades, which were little more than loose collections of thugs and mafioso, were given carte blanche to commit terrorist attacks and kill innocent people in order to stop the spread of communism, though the perpetrators themselves did not seem to be ideologically motivated. The text would imply that in addition to “stopping communism,” the reigning post-war political order benefited from the instability created by the violence, that the specter of lone wolf attacks gave sufficient reason for administrations to pass various security laws, consolidate power, and increase budgets. The text would be careful to not paint Operation Gladio as the planned work of machinations, but rather as an arrogant and sociopathic proposition that escaped the control of those who set it in motion. Notably, this would all be framed as a neglected but otherwise accepted piece of history, thus avoiding the stench often found in revisionism and conspiracy theories. This same aloof perspective would be brought to high-profile political assassinations, such as JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcom X, implying that all such killings were the work of intelligence agencies in some way, but only in the sense that the interests of individual employees intersected with petty, private interests of others—for example, it would posit that JFK was murdered not because the president was a singular voice sent to bring about world peace and destroy the military-industrial complex, but because some people in and outside the agency were preternaturally bitter about the Cuban Missile Crisis and wanted to inflict pain. The conspirators behind these assassinations did not cause or solve anything, the text would argue, at least not what was originally intended, and any swerves of history that occurred after those assassinations were coincidental, the effect of larger market forces brushing against one another. Like Operation Gladio, assassinations were a wisp of the chaos beyond control. There would be a melancholy assertion that even if the victims meant to change the world before they died, such as MLK or Malcolm X, they would have failed anyway, for they were up against too much. After a paragraph break, the text would detail the wave of serial killers that plagued America around the time of these political assassinations. In addition to being mentally ill, some of these killers were peripherally related to intelligence and authority. It would highlight Charles Manson as a person involved in early studies on the effects of LSD that was orchestrated by architects of the infamous CIA project MK ULTRA, such as the psychiatrist Jolly West (by including proper nouns, the text would suggest the reader research these topics on their own). There would be a small, angry non-sequitur that pointed out many rapists and murders of this era were eventually revealed to be pigs outside their uniform. This would then segue into assassinations and attempts by individuals who had no clear connection to intelligence and rather were simply mentally ill, such as John Hinckley Jr., Mark David Chapman, and Cesar Sayoc. At the point, the text would appear contradictory, deliberately introducing pieces of evidence against its former thesis, suggesting most
The third and final act of the story would return to Gabriel. During the interlude, Gabriel would have descended further along his path and the narrative would pick up in the middle of something, such as Gabriel attending a party or convention, approaching one of the three figures mentioned in the first paragraph. If it were a party or convention or some other sort of mass gathering, the three figures would be grouped together, perhaps on a stage. If not, they would have reason to all be in the same general area at once, such as attending a function like Art Basel Miami. In the first scenario, Gabriel would approach the stage and shoot each of the three figures in the head. Their brains would splatter out the back of their skull, pieces of bone would land on their families, and blood would run from their ears. Before that happened, the story would pause on their face, describing the moments of bleak horror that descended upon them once faced with the barrel of a gun or graze of a bullet, the realization that this is how it ended for them, their money, property, and power had all been for naught, they were being murdered in front of their children. Gabriel would then be shot by security or he would shoot himself. In the second scenario, Gabriel would be in a more strategic sniper’s nest position so he could pick off these figures one by one. While this would have more exciting pacing like an action movie, it would be more complex to set-up and risk ruining any verisimilitude established thus far in the story. In either case, both scenarios would end with Gabriel dying. He would be martyred by some, villainized by others, but, in the end, forgotten by all. His great plan and great project for the killings was vile and inchoate, doused in uncouth conspiracies and faulty reasonings. However, he unintentionally succeeded in showing the world that the people in charge were made from flesh and blood and had organs that failed. They could be punished for their actions, they could be killed in front of their children. Sadly, whether or not the wider world picked up on this lesson did not matter, for equivalent replacements for each of the three were easily found and the general trajectory of things continued on. Gabriel was an ill person marked for death. The story would end on an ambiguous note, suggesting that outside of fiction the course of events may not be so fatalistic while still deriding violence in all forms.
In real life the story is not over yet. The person Gabriel is based on, Eric Lapelle, is very much alive and not fictionalized. Some of the biographical details are shared between the two characters, but most are invented. For example, Gabriel from the story has never told me that once his mother dies, he plans on killing himself, but Eric has. Being vaguely suicidal myself, I don’t always have the best advice for cheering someone up, and I get the sense there’s a deep loneliness and pain in Eric’s life that I alone could never combat, especially now that I live in another state and have a life of my own. Instead, I respond with a groan, like I’m in the nosebleeds watching a ball fly afar of the foul pole. Perhaps I failed him, or, better said, am currently failing him. Or perhaps he will never kill himself and in the end this hand-wringing is self-indulgent, only a mourning of the person he’s come to be. Thinking of Eric as I used to know him, I think of the times we spent together in high school. He was a few years older than I was, and thus responsible for many of the experiences that constitute my life. I would skip class and he’d pick me up in the school parking lot before driving somewhere like New York or Chicago to see a punk band play in a basement. We would come up with innocuous pranks, like winning a giant life-sized tiger plush at a carnival and hiding it among the trees next to an overpass. We