Do it, Kira
"I have too great a heart to die like a criminal." That's what John Wilkes Booth claimed, when he was on the run from his crimes. But I'm not like him, I'm not some philosophical racist who madly attacked a President. In fact, I've never done anything wrong. And my heart is breaking for it. It is too great to let me die like some criminal. I'm well read enough to know what John Wilkes Booth did in great detail, for example. Is that the mark of some degraded, shriveled, criminal soul? This is me – a well read scholar. A scholar! But I am too great to let a friend – a young, frightened friend – die like a criminal, so that is my fate instead. Though I hate to dabble in crudeness – fuck.
It started five years ago, or thereabouts. I didn't write down the exact moment that it happened, but the result is definite enough. I ended up in a group that could be characterized as rebellious. How I ever let myself get involved in such a group is beyond me now; I'm so jaded, and I've seen more of the system than I ever wanted to. But back then I was so idealistic, I had no thought as to what was possible. I just did thingsimpulsively and stupidly. Despite all my intelligence and experience with books and history, I joined a rebel group. Jesus, it's pathetic! Wait a moment. Maybe it's because I was so immersed in books that I thought that I could change the world in such a retarded way. I really thought the world in terms of achievable quantities, plots with a beginning, middle, and an end. And perhaps, in my own way, I've made my story such a one. It has a beginning, sure, as all lives do, and a middle. And now my end will be meaningful, in some twisted way. Great. In attempting an epic, I inadvertently generated a tragedy, in perfectly Millerian form. I fought the law, and the law won. Great.
Our group was formed, originally, to protest the political system itself. We saw very sensible things that were wrong with the political system, things that weren't ever talked about because they were too simple, too immutable to be considered. We just wanted to make people think again. We didn't have specific issues; we just valued discussion. We believed that the current system was stifling discussion, and that was all. We didn't want one person or group to hijack the world, as the political system was doing.
And one day, it all went wrong. An accident, but that was everything. Our subchapter of the group in my area was ordered to stage an event, about two years after I had joined the group. "Stage an event", jesus. That's what our liaison told us, "stage an event". Specifically, we had to barricade the street around a political office. Nothing big, just cut off foot traffic into the building, make people aware. The more, the merrier, I guess was the idea. Or maybe that's just how I interpreted it. Because that is my personal belief. Maybe that was just what I wanted to hear. It's what I tried to execute, so it may as well be what I was told to do.
I had become subchapter leader by this point, through an odd way of working through the organization's strata. I was dedicated, and through that dedication I rose to power. I had a day job, certainly, one that I thoroughly loved. But this group was important to me, and my intelligence had secured for me a place in the hierarchy. So I staged the event. It was mine, and the evidence floating through the organization could show it. My event. My activism. To open up the discourse of politics and morality and legality. To let the status quo just open up, wide as can be. That was our goal. Or so I thought. How idiotic I had been.
Well, we knew that there was an off-chance of violence at the event, though violence was not my goal. I expressly made sure that only a very few people would be armed, with concealed weapons, should we get attacked first. I was one, of course, as the leader. I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, though. I had never fired a gun before. I did not want the kids to know that, however, and I wanted them to think that they did not need to be armed, that I myself had things under control. And in the end, only a few of them felt the need to be armed, so everything seemed to work out. The only others who came with their weapons were Brian, Ellina, Leo, and Stephen. Stephen Loud, the poor young innocent, despite his difficult life. Made the rest of us look jaded by comparison. He had been a high school dropout, who over the few years of my activism had been persuaded by some of us in the group to go back and get his diploma. Now he was 20, though he looked much younger, and had finally finished high school. He was applying to college that year. Many of us were excited for him, since he was a brilliant kid, and could write his ticket nearly anywhere. He had grown up in a rough area, so he knew how to handle firearms, and was one of the few armed people there.
We didn't realize that the building we had been ordered to surround was on private property. We were technically, legally trespassing. We weren't just expressing our right to assembly, no! We were breaking a law, but we were too large, and too stubborn a group to see it. The police surrounded us, but I held firm, not realizing the problem. This was my big fight; I had these glorious visions in my head of fighting off the great establishment singlehandedly. I was, in short, an idiot.
And that's when it happened. They opened tear gas on my group. One policeman in the group, acting rather officiously, decided to send us a definite message. They dumped the irritating gas on us, and most of us were completely thrown – we were mainly a group of suburbanites, after all, civilized humans. We had no idea how to deal with this. In the first few instants of the mayhem, I heard a gunshot, and the sound ended my world. The policemen in the area started screaming, and they returned fire, mostly ineffectually, as my group was able to run to safer, less reachable places behind the building. I heard someone yell out from where the policemen were – someone had been shot, likely killed, by that first shot, if what I heard was real. As I started to get my vision back, I saw Stephen Loud, sobbing hysterically. His gun was still smoking. It was his shot. He instinctively reacted to the tear gas, and had killed a man, completely without meaning to. I don't know what inspired me to do what I did next. All I knew was that a terrified, college-bound kid should never have to throw away his future over a mistake. I fired a harmless blank into the air, and then ran towards the kid and grabbed him by the shoulders, yelling at him to snap out of it. We ducked around a building's wall, where the gunshots from the police were less prevalent. At this point, both Stephen and I would have gunshot residue on our hands. And then I traded guns with Stephen. We wiped down the guns, and made sure that our fingerprints were placed as would be consistent with our new story. I was going to take the fall. I made the terrified child realize that. I was going to be the man who fired the first shot from our group – he the harmless second shot. That was our story. I regrouped with everyone in our chapter before we were arrested, and told them to be reticent if they could not remember my new story, and to corroborate if they could remember it.
My last, deadly choice.
I had no idea what I was getting into. I knew that killing a policeman could be a capital crime, but only in certain circumstances. I didn't realize that we were in those circumstances. Our group, our precious rebel group, wasn't just around to tweak the system. It was a terrorist organization of the most fervent anarchist mode. It didn't matter that my section was moderate, no one would ever know that. Who would believe it? I swore, over and over, in the course of the trials, that I didn't know anything about the higher-up structure of the group. No one believed me. I was roughed up by policemen who believed that I had killed one of their comrades. I was trampled on by the system. Well-dressed prosecutors read me documents relating to classified information on the group I had joined, assuming that I was in the know. They taunted me with it, with their knowledge that I had indeed conversed with a liaison from the higher ups on numerous occasions. They were right. But they did not know that my particular incident was a simple mistake. A wrongful death – but no murder. An accident! I swore over and over that my shot had only gone astray, that I was a terrible shooter, and therefore could not have aimed willfully. They laughed at me, and the jury did not believe me either. My court-appointed lawyer begged me to allocute, to plead out. I refused… I couldn't admit guilt where none existed.
I was an idiot through the trial too. I showed zero emotion. Stephen showed emotion in his testimony, nearly broke down completely. That didn't help me, though I was touched… people saw his devotion to me as driven by some cultish mechanism. I was a cold, calculating terrorist to this jury. A charismatic one, sure, but that made me all the more dangerous.
Something else upset me here. No one was allowed to hear this trial outside the people in the room – everyone was sworn to secrecy, and even my name wasn't given. That depressed me. All this, and for nothing. No one would ever know what I had done. Our group's pure mission – our at least my part of our group's mission – would go to waste. When I realized that, I did cry – a little. But at that time, I was alone, in my cell. Too late to show the jury that I was a person. Too bad.
He shows no remorse. His denials are dry, stiff, and repetitive. He has every mark of a sociopathic killer. That was what their court psychiatrist said of me. Bastard. Just because I refuse to let them into my world, because I refuse to beg and plead, and instead just swear solemnly to every force of justice that I am innocent… damn them all, every prosecutor, every officer... And they're just doing their jobs. Since I'm lying, I can hardly fault them for finding something unlike the real truth in my testimony. Also, I have been lied to, by my group's leadership. So no wonder I am the victim of further false ideas. The truth is so powerful, and betraying it is no mean action, with no mean consequences. And I do not have the luxury of telling the truth. I must be calculating, because I am lying. But not to protect myself – all for that poor kid. I am not sure why I did it.
But I was found guilty, all under cover of the utmost government secrecy. I understand why – after hearing evidence about my group's terroristic actions, I know why the government doesn't let the news out. There would be a panic. The government knows so much about our group, and is cracking down, but dares not leak information that would simply blow us out of proportion. So I was a guilty man, put on Death Row for killing an agent of the state. Due to the secrecy, I was put in solitary, with minimal people aware of my incarceration.
Very few people ever visited me, one of whom was Stephen. He visited me at least once every other month during my two years of prison. He went to school, a good one. He had never been convicted of anything, and the secrecy of his trial meant that the schools he applied to could not find out about the incident. It worked out splendidly for him. He tended to thank me repetitively each time he saw me – a tiring tendency. Then, one day, I had news for him.
"Hi, Mr. Tailor. How are you doing? I am really worried about you – have you heard the news?"
"It's wonderful to see you again, Stephen, and yes, I have heard the news. Don't worry about it. I should be safe, at least for now. But be aware, after next week, I will…"
"What is it?"
"You will not find me here."
"What?" His young face drained of color. My nervousness almost betrayed me here as I tried to respond… I had tried to not think of death since my incarceration, and to make the most of my time left, but now I could barely choke out the words, and my nervousness redoubled in Stephen's responses to me after I did.
"Well, I have made a deal with the authorities, Stephen."
"What kind of deal?" He was suspicious.
"I am going to confront that killer from the newspapers. I will show him my name, as per request from the man who asked me to do this, and appear on television to lure out this 'Kira'."
"What? He… he'll kill you!"
"That is a distinct possibility." I echo the flat tone of the detective who had made the deal with me.
"But you still have a year to go before your execution! Please, don't do this… Mr. Tailor!" His voice caught, and he quickly wiped at his eyes with one hand.
"Stephen! You don't understand… please! I have to do this. I can confront this man who wants to turn this world into an authoritarian hell! Stopping power consolidation was what we were trying to do all along! If you want to truly repent for what you've done, and at the same time, be faithful to what we tried to do, you will also fight this Kira after I'm gone. You have a good civic head on your shoulders, Stephen. You can't fight city hall. Not the way we tried. And now with an even worse enemy around, you should join city hall. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, like they say. I probably have to sacrifice myself to Kira, but you can really help. My life was forfeit the moment I believed in our group, but yours isn't! Go."
"Mr. Tailor. Thank you." He was composed now. He left quietly, not looking back. Good.
The next day, I was briefed again on my job, which I would execute in five days. I never met the man I was to impersonate, but I spoke with him a few times. He was shocked to find a criminal as perfect as me. Not only could I be well-spoken enough to pull off the international mastermind role, I also was a Death Row inmate with a name riddled with L's. Great. Except for the fact that he believed in my innocence, he was thrilled. ("I don't believe for a moment in your cock-and-bull story", he had said, and implied that he knew that the young kid was guilty.)
I was less thrilled. But I knew, at this point, that the establishment, especially the establishment represented by this renegade detective, was hardly the enemy here. I had to fight Kira. If whole governments couldn't always perfectly execute the death penalty, how could some unilateral force do it better? No. It couldn't be better to have some crazy individual at the helm. So I could finally do what I had wanted, and fight for a cause. At least L wasn't lying to me. Who would lie about a mission that will kill the person they're telling about it?
I felt like a cross between a modern day Jesus and live bait. I guess, in a way, I was both. What a mix of high glory and low bullshit. I was dressed in a suit for the occasion, which made me happy after three years of prison clothing. I was able to speak fluently for a cause, which also made me happy. This isn't so bad a way to go, I thought, as the cameras started rolling.
"I am the sole person able to command police forces in every member nation of the ICPO – I am Lind L. Tailor, also known as L."
The speech tripped off of my tongue as if I were the very man. I was, of course, my harsh and formal self, and not whoever this L was, but he seemed to be okay with it when I had practiced the speech, painstakingly, over and over, into the computer's microphone, hearing the distorted voice comment back. He had liked it then, so I used my normal mannerisms. It made the speech seem natural.
I hated Kira as I spoke. I honestly did. I put every ounce of hatred I had left into that speech, and fought for my cause. And then, it was over. A blinding moment of pain, a caught breath, and that was it.
Kira! I can't believe it. You can really kill without being present. If you did kill Lind L. Tailor, the man you just saw die on television, then…
L went on to challenge Kira to kill him. And all that was left of a passionate rebel from the United States was the cry of a scared, impressionable Japanese innocent calling,
"Do it, Kira!"
A few days later, when the incident was aired on American television, a college student majoring in forensic science shooed the rest of his friends out of the television room to watch the broadcast. When one of his friends re-entered an hour and a half later, to retrieve a charger for his laptop that he had left by accident, he saw Stephen Loud still there, with tear stains down his cheeks.
"What's wrong, man?" he asked, sitting down near Stephen.
"Nothing, I'm just really stressed, and that broadcast didn't help."
"I hear you, man. So, what's going on here?"
The two of them watched for a few moments in silence as the American news network covered the events of the Kanto region, showing L's subsequent challenge to Kira. Both Stephen and his friend were chilled to the bone as they heard the calls from the excited populace, completely unintelligible. The newscaster reported,
"The people in Japan were shocked at L's challenge to the killer, and different people spouted very different reactions. Some begged L to take back the challenge, some begged Kira not to kill the detective, and there were even the occasional shouts of, 'Do it, Kira'."
At this, Stephen's friend turned to him. "'Do it, Kira'. That's the sickest fucking thing I've ever heard, man. Try not to get too crazy over this stuff, ok? I'll see you around."