The 404 Documents, Installment One.

(Read all 404 Documents)

"Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: The mark inside."

-William S. Burroughs

Artwork by Spoony Boomer.

A “friend” once said to me, “If you want to get press attention- don't write a good book. Blow up a mall.”

It's sad that he was right. Not that I blew up that mall, mind you. I mean, I didn't set the charges. I wouldn't have any clue how to do that kind of thing. I was always zoning out in science class, staring at the dingy floor, eyes unfocused, thinking instead about the broken thermostat in our culture. There was clearly no self regulation. Or maybe that’s where The Buyer comes in.

I'm getting off topic, right? Because you probably want to know more about the mall my friends tried to blow up and less about the systemic dynamics of a culture. But that's just how my mind works. Everything is numbers and patterns to me. Say you're wearing a plaid shirt, right? And you notice I can't pay attention to a word that you're saying. That's not because I'm addle-minded, though a lot of people think so. It's because I'm thinking about the mathematical topology of the patches on your shirt, their surface area, the possible relation of numerological and linguistic categorization systems and those deformed surfaces. Your plaid shirt can teach you the theory of relativity, see? But you're not thinking about that. You're thinking about the news stories, the broken glass, the wall of shrieking housewives. We live in different worlds, you and I. I just thought I'd let you know that, if you want to really understand what happened. It wasn't about politics. It was about physics and fate.

And I’ve got to say, I learned a lot about myself, these past few weeks. All it took was an unintentional act of "terrorism". But I guess it all started a year ago, when I received a phone call from The Buyer. Gut instinct told me to avoid him like the plague since our first collaborations tagging billboards, performing drone and noise music together and abusing cough medication. Something about him wasn't right. It has often been said that the sign of a truly independent mind is the ability to entertain two contradictory notions at once, but Bradley was completely schizophrenic.

He was the only self professed "culture jammer" I had ever met who showed no signs of internal conflict selling poorly made silk screened t-shirts to naive high schoolers for 25 bucks a pop while preaching the evils of Capitalism. Aside from this, I considered him to be dangerously influential in terms of convincing people to do things that were inherently against their better judgment. He played it off to be a part of his act, but after knowing him for a while something in me instinctively knew better...

My first response was to hit ignore on my cellular phone, not least of all because I knew taking a cell call from him was like inviting the NSA to perform more than the precursory roving wiretap on my piece of shit Obama phone. Something about him kept me coming back. His personality, although obviously superficial and carefully calculated to draw in most unsuspecting humans (he referred to them as “marks”), was charismatic and sharp as paper, even if it would bend and deform just as easily if you applied pressure. Perhaps it was his complete lack of caution, his inability to discern fantasy from reality and his utter lack of regard for the sanctity of human life that made him both appealing and revolting. Mostly the latter.

Nevertheless, ignoring my better judgment and hoping to get him to leave me alone by showing a bit of courtesy and basic human decency I picked up after the fifth ring and feigned at civility.

“Hey Brad, it's been a minute. What's on your mind?”

“I have an Op that may interest you. If you are still active in the field, that is.”

I took a deep breath, exhaled and sighed. Fished for a mentholated cigarette from my shirt pocket and lit it. Closed my eyes, rubbed my temples.

“Bradley, I don't know how many times I have to tell you. This- the 'agency', 'syndicate', whatever you insist on calling it depending on what drug you've stuck up your ass in the last three hours... it's all a ruse, man. I think you probably should stick to whatever it is you have been cooking up with that trite 'postmodernist' horseshit you call music... Yeah, we all know you are ironic and glib and you don't like faceless corporate entities raping the planet.... Incidentally, how was your breakfast at Taco Bell this morning? I think I've seen this movie and I know how it ends... Soylent Green is people, you know? You treating yourself to hookers for lunch, too? I guess after that you can write a song about the oppression of the 'working class' from the safety of your parents' basement... Cut the bullshit.”

“Listen, pigfucker,” he snapped back. “I don't know if you realized this, but a young starving artist can't survive on Ramen and Nyquil alone. I can't cook. I have far more important things to do with my time. I never claimed to be immune to cultural brainwash, and understand that after we disassemble Leviathan there will be plenty of time to grow our own produce. Hell, maybe we can even start our own commune. Manson family style. Tell me you never considered what a pretty little acid crazed Squeaky Fromme type could do to you in the sack...”

This was really how we talked to one another. I’m not embellishing. Mini-monologues, back and forth. Rat-a-tat showers of words that even bleach couldn’t possibly remove. Though I guess they were blunted by the transparency of our motives: at the end of conversation he always got what he wanted, and even if I made him look like a slimeball in the process, it really didn’t matter, since it was just the two of us on the line. Well, and the NSA.

“Bradley, despite the fact that I very much doubt given the collapse of Western Civilization anyone would have the technical ability, time and resources needed to synthesize LSD, you are talking about waging a physical war on a ideological construct.”

I paused. I doubt even he could fully parse that trainwreck of a thought. Whatever. I plunged ahead. “I very much think you have gone off of your meds or you have finally taken something that has fried what little sense you have left in that old worn out burlap sack full of rotting memes you call a brain. Now, my time is important to me, and my privacy is equally important. The use of pseudonyms, as you yourself well know, affords me little privacy these days as most people worth pissing off are already well aware of who I am and I've generated so many alternate identities and troll accounts for various Ops that I can't even keep that shit separate anymore. So please, pretty please, get to the fucking point and quick or I promise you I will out you to the secret police and see to it that you are personally drug into the streets and beaten over the kidneys with large tree branches until you piss blood.”

As you wish,” he replied with mock subservience. “Agency or no agency, we both know the power of ideas in influencing primate behavior. Once an idea gets into someone, it ceases to be just an idea, yeah? I wanted to talk to you about the 404 Attacks...”

“Bradley, listen man... Please do not talk to me on a cellular device about this. As I have mentioned to you repeatedly, there are emphatically no '404 Attacks'. It is a literary device. You are taking a fictional literary device from a book you read somewhere and attempting to impose this structure on real life, which as you very well know is a good deal more complicated. And often stranger than fiction. Now I am telling you, I am done with this. I have more important things to worry about. I'm finally stable. I'm getting my shit together. I am in a better place and I don't have time to play games. I really do not know why you are contacting me about this. I've been down the rabbit hole man, and I'm telling you... There is NOTHING THERE.

There is no conspiracy, there is no agency, you suffer from apophenia. You are a very sick individual. And even if I were to help you with this, I don't have much to offer anymore. No financial backing. I cut ties with all of the old operatives. Do you know why I cut ties with them? Because they were over-privileged college kids like yourself, playing Don Quixote taking on ideological constructs with petty DDoS attacks and crudely made zines. Shitty noise music. Poorly made propaganda that would make Mao Tse-Tung blush. What do you want from me?”

Silence on the other end. For a moment I thought he might actually be pondering what I had said, that he might back down or heaven forbid apologize, but then I heard the telltale sound of a lighter clicking on, and the slick inhale that follows. “One more Op. I promise. And then you're done. I will let you be. Your last Op. I swear to baby Jesus.”

“And if I don't?”

“Well, I suppose you can go to living the lie- By the way, how's your girl? She's a sweetheart, that one... She ever do ATM, like those freak bitches in those pornos we are both addicted to? You two make a great couple, you know, I've always thought.

And I'm sure you could just go back to your happy life as a domesticated primate and forget this conversation ever happened and you would sleep quite well at night... Although, I'd have to tell you, it sure would be a crying shame if you were publicly outted for nearly every Op you

have ever participated in. I am sure there is a room full of men in black dress suits with ball-gags, blowtorches and pliers out there in one of those nice FEMA camps I could arrange for you to vacation at... And I am sure they would be thrilled to speak with you personally on these matters... I don't have to do any of this, anyway, you know... You got it set in your head that I have to do things physically. I don't. I THINK IT!”

I winced. Never should have answered the call... I had severely underestimated The Buyer's moral degeneracy. That's what you get for ignoring gut instinct. Turning red, I reached for another cigarette and monkey-fucked it with the cherry of my last smoke, now burnt down to the filter. A day in the life. If I lived to be 34, I'd surely be stricken with cancer, liver disease or any number of incurable terminal diseases. Occupational hazards of the “counterculture,” I supposed...

“Bradley, I want you to listen very carefully to me. Your Manson routine does not cut it with me. I am not afraid of you, you were the one who got me into this in the first place and at the very least there is no blood on my hands. Sure, I participated in a few ops here and there. But you... What the hell makes you think you are immune if they caught me? Like I wouldn't tell them anything and everything about your personal history? I know everything about you. And I know that if I went down, you would go right alongside with me. You were there at the beginning and I know everything about you. What gives you the cojones to threaten my wellbeing?”

“Firstly,” he continued as if I’d said nothing at all, “I do not know you. I once had a contact within the agency that went by the moniker '888'. Yes, I seem to recall an 'Agent 888', however, I never met with him personally nor is there any conclusive evidence that I ever did. How many Agent 888’s have there been before him? Three? Four? How should I know? I barely knew him. Furthermore.... Do you think that I haven't already resolved myself to a slow, painful death? They will find me eventually, and when the time comes, I am prepared. Are you? You can kill a man, friend. You can't kill an idea.”

Perhaps for the first time, with a sort of dreadful finality reserved only for the condemned man, I realized what I was dealing with. Bradley was completely deranged. He was a walking caricature of popular culture. Every single Gen X cliche, from Alan Moore to Tarrantino, from the Doom Generation to Doom, from Chaz Manson emulation to would-be revolutionary posturing was present in the external mask he referred to as his personality. People listened to him and respected him, to make matters worse. I no longer doubted that what once had started as a joke had transformed from hilarious to hideously ironic to... something I didn’t have words

for. A monster. This man was a certifiable psychopath.

“Bradley... I never know with you whether or not you actually believe you’re a character in a book or a movie or a cult leader or a revolutionary or a culture jammer or any number of other cliches you groked from your stupid futurist friends on drugs. But I am here to tell you that you are not. You are a profoundly disturbed individual, possessed by ideals that are by all standards of human decency less than amiable. You want to play chess with yourself and the lives of the people you call your friends? Great. Leave me out of it. You want to play chess with yourself and the lives of the people you call your friends? Great. Leave me out of it. You are what America gets for letting entitled and jaded social deviants read

Machiavelli. I don't want to play your game. And fuck you for threatening me. You're a coward in a Guy Fawkes mask.”

“With all due respect, Guy Fawkes masks went out of style when Anon became a t-shirt slogan for mallrats. Useful for influencing those who are easily swept away by jingles and logos, but not much more. I am going to refer to you as Agent 888. That is your only identity to me, and all you are really good for to me, in the grand scheme of things. So this is what I am going to tell you, and this is the final word: You have your opportunity, Agent, to go down in history as one of the key catalysts in helping to overthrow the established order of Western Civilization.”

“And you don’t think we’re being listened to right now?”

He chuckled and then shouted into the receiver. I had to hold it away from my ear. “CRYSTAL METH LABS! CHINESE BOMB PLANS COCKTAILS LIVE ROOSTER SHOWS PCP RECIPE! QUICHE ATTACK IMMINENT! DIVERT PLACENTAL PRESIDENT DEATH! ENGORGED WEAPONS! TASTY VIRUS! ...What? No Secret agents busting down your door? I don’t see any Men in Black either. Calm down, man. You will have the opportunity to go down in history as a man who helped to trigger a domino effect enabling the mutants and the freaks to regain the power to which they are Lawfully entitled. This is not blackmail, this is a promise. I have nothing to lose. The hammer will come down on me. As you have mentioned, my involvement in the syndicate runs much deeper than yours and you have less to fear than I do. As such, I am prepared to die a free man and take you down with me as collateral damage. I would rather not have to resort to this, as I have always considered you to be a compatriot and a friend...”

This was too much. Far fucking out. This drugged out paranoid schizophrenic with a vendetta against society had insulted my intelligence, threatened my physical and emotional wellbeing, and referred to me as his “friend” in the course of a five minute dialogue. I could barely contain my outrage. Deep down, I was seething with indignity and revulsion. I once considered the Buyer to be a friend and a comrade. I grew up, and now he wanted to take me down on the Hindenburg with him. Regardless, I resolved silently to maintain my dignity in order to maintain the outward appearance of being in control. I also quickly considered the fact that in the years I’d known him, I’d even come to talk like him. I was becoming the man I hated. All he had to do was keep me on the line. Why didn’t I hang up then and there, his threats be damned? I don’t know. I said earlier it was fate, and I do believe that. But there are moments when we have the opportunity to break out of the orbit we’re on and get to a new one. I think that was my chance, and I took a pass.

Instead I said, “Alright Bradley, entertaining this hypothetical... If I were to help you, and I want to emphasize here that it would be to get you to finally leave me alone and mostly because I pity you and the hollow shell of a human being you have become... Why me? Why do you need me?”

He paused. I could hear him breathe. He wheezed asthmatically and coughed. I could sense the gears spinning in his brain in the uncomfortable silence that followed the query.

“I don't need you. You are convenient. I have the dirt on you. As I have mentioned, if I need to get the fuck out of the country in a heartbeat I have arranged for it ahead of time. I've been waiting for this opportunity, the opportunity to make a real difference for years. You poseur would-be activists jerking off onto diagrams of Molotov cocktails and imagining yourselves to be making a difference... You bail at the first possible sign of danger. You got yourself a nice little house and a nice woman now? You think to yourself, 'Well, those days are behind me. Might as well get a nice five figure job... Maybe invest in the stock market, try my luck.' Well, I don't play that game... but I keep at least a few thousand in my bank, Agent. And do you know what my bank is? Not yours. I don't play that game. I invest in the underworld, and do you know what? It has never let me down yet. It is a very lucrative market. I keep at least a couple grand tucked underneath my mattress, and I guard that with a semi-automatic shotgun that could blow a hole the size of a grapefruit in a human's abdomen. You follow me? Yes, I am an entrepreneur. You can call me a hypocrite if you'd like, but I did it on my own terms and I play by no one's rules but my own. And I did it all for the greater good.”

I chuckled at the irony.

“So do the fascists you are fighting your imaginary war against, Bradley.”