Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  “i think i will still go,” Brad wrote back. When he showed up at an Indymedia headquarters in Mexico City en route to Oaxaca, they told him his white skin would make him and anyone standing near him a target.

  “You’re treating me like my mom,” Brad said. “What are you made of? This is what it’s about. This is the uprising.”

  And yet he’d learned a certain caution. John Gibler, a radical print journalist with deeper roots in Mexico, remembers Brad showing up in Oaxaca’s central square, a tall hipster American with a fancy camera—Brad had sunk his life’s savings into it—that made him look like a professional. Which is what he was becoming—a Venezuelan network, Telesur, told him they’d buy whatever he sent them. “The media painted a picture of a gung-ho idealist who didn’t know which way was which, but the guy was not clueless,” says Gibler. “That first day I said, ‘Hey, Brad, you wanna come along to the barricades tonight?’ He looked at me, and he said, ‘I can’t wait to get out there, but people are getting killed. I need to get a feel of the place. Walking around at night without that is not a smart move.’”

  He found a place to sleep (the floor of the headquarters of an indigenous-rights group) and a place to stash his videotape—he’d learned in Brazil that a hiding place was a requirement for an Indymedia journalist lacking the protections of a big news agency. “I liked his style,” says Gibler. “Whatever was going on, he’d get the action shot, then he’d move into what was really happening. He’d go away from the center of attention.” He ate with the APPOs, as the protesters were called, marched with them, slept on the ground beside them on hot evenings. He told them about his politics before he asked about theirs. He laughed a lot, his ridiculous guffaw. Slowly the APPOs began to trust him. Brad was on the inside of what Rolling Thunder, an anarchist magazine back in the States, would call “the closest our generation has come to seeing an anarchist revolution.”

  BRAD’S FOOTAGE ON October 27 begins on a suburban street, strewn with rocks and sandbags, a pillar of black smoke rising in the background. Minutes before, there’d been a battle, paramilitaries with automatic weapons versus protesters with Molotov cocktails. Brad zooms in on a silver van consumed by flames. Then he cuts back to the crowd, old men in straw hats, teenagers in ski masks, big women with frying pans. They begin to shout: “The people, united!” Bullets pop from a side street, and the fight careens into a narrow lane of one-story buildings. “Cover yourselves, comrades!” someone shouts. The protesters advance car by car, lobbing Molotovs that bloom from the blacktop. The sky darkens, bruised blue over dusty green trees. A dark-skinned boy in a black tank top kneels and aims his bottle-rocket bazooka. Bullets are cracking. Brad remembers a war photographer’s maxim: “Don’t get greedy.” That’s when you get killed. He turns off his camera.

  When he starts shooting again, the protesters are crouching outside a white building in which they believe a comrade is being held prisoner. They batter the door, darting out into the open to deliver dropkicks. “Mire!” Brad shouts. “Look!” From down the street, more gunfire. Brad runs. Next to him someone is hit. “Shit!” Brad shouts. “Are you okay, comrade?” someone asks. Brad zooms in on an old woman fingering her prayer beads.

  Then the final footage, played around the globe on YouTube a half a million times: a red dump truck used as a barricade and a battering ram, a wounded man led away, gunfire answered by bottle rockets. “Diganle a este pinche guey que no saque fotos!” somebody shouts. “Somebody tell this fucking guy to stop taking photos!” Brad keeps shooting. He steps up from the street onto the sidewalk, his camera aimed dead ahead. The compañeros are crouching; Brad rises, a pale white gringo above the crowd.

  “I watch this, and I say, ‘Brad, stop! Don’t do this!’” says Miguel. “I ask myself if he really knows where he is. I ask myself if he knows he can die.”

  Bang. A bullet hits Brad dead center, just below his heart, exploding his aorta.

  Brad falls down.

  Bang. Brad falls down. That’s how his friends experience it now, watching the tape over and over, trying to understand. Bang. Brad falls down. Warcry has watched it at least one thousand times. These days she works as a caterer; her activism is watching her best friend die over and over, searching for a clue. She is not alone. There are others, hunched over the frozen images. They study his death; they debate it; if they prayed, they would pray over it. They believe in it: It is evidence, an answer, the promise or the rumor or the echo of justice for their friend, their martyr. They do not like that term, it seems old, religious, not revolutionary. But “martyr” means “witness,” and Brad died with his camera in his hands. Bang. They slow the tape down, frame by frame, zoom in 800 percent, chart every pixel. There, on the left side of the screen, above the hood of the red dump truck, in the green of the trees, a tiny white starburst, visible for a fraction of a second. Brad falls down.

  “Ayúdeme!” he screams, his Spanish too polite and formal for what he means: “Help me!”

  “Tranquilo, tranquilo,” someone says. “Take it easy.” A photographer gives Brad mouth-to-mouth, and he gasps and opens his eyes. There are last words, but nobody knows what they are; the men who rush him to the hospital in a Volkswagen that runs out of gas don’t understand English, and Quebrado, “Broken,” has forgotten how to speak his mind.

  HIS OLD GIRLFRIEND GLASS was in Hawaii when she heard. She’d been e-mailing Brad a lot. She missed him, and it seemed he missed her, too. They’d met in New York right before he’d left for Oaxaca to go on a bar crawl. He’d had a girlfriend with him, but in the pictures from that night it’s Glass on Brad’s arm.

  The day he died, she was sitting in a park, singing songs she learned from Brad. She didn’t care if she looked like a crazy woman. By then, for a while anyway, she was. She’d burned out. She’d quit the fight, she was looking into sustainable living. But she still remembered the songs. She sang the anarchist anthems, then Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo Lullaby.” She sang Brad’s favorite, “Angel from Montgomery.” She tried to hear his voice. He’d be John Prine, she’d be Bonnie Raitt.

  I have to e-mail Brad, she thought. This is so great! Then her phone rang. “This is Dyan, right?” a stranger’s voice said. “Can you call Brad Will’s mom? He’s hurt.”

  “What? How?” The stranger wouldn’t answer. “What do you mean?”

  “Call Jacob,” said the stranger. He gave her another stranger’s number. She dialed. “I was told to call this number about Brad?” she asked.

  “Yeah, it’s been confirmed,” said the voice on the other end.

  “What?”

  “Oh, he’s dead.”

  Glass walked into the road and began tracing a circle, screaming, all the songs gone.

  IN OAXACA THE APPOS combed Brad’s long hair and dressed his body in white. They draped a gold cross around his neck and laid him in a coffin. There were no fiery speeches, just weeping. Then-president Fox used the death of the gringo as an excuse to invade Oaxaca with four thousand federal police. The U.S. ambassador blamed the violence on schoolteachers. The APPOs fought on, but by December the uprising was dead, twenty protesters had been killed, and Brad Will was a story Oaxaqueños told one another. “He was with us from the beginning,” they said, though he’d only been there three weeks.

  And Brad’s killers? It seemed like an open-and-shut case—a Mexican news photographer had even taken a picture of the men who appeared to be the shooters, a group of beefy thugs charging toward Brad and the APPOs with pistols and AR-15s. The Oaxaca state prosecutor, a Ruiz loyalist, grudgingly issued warrants for two of them, police commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar and Abel Santiago Zárate, known as “El Chino.” But at a press conference two weeks later, the prosecutor announced a new theory: Brad’s murder had been a “deceitful confabulation” planned by the APPO. In this version of events Brad was only grazed on the street. The fatal bullet was fired point-blank by an APPO on
the way to the hospital—a physical impossibility, according to the coroner. No matter. At the end of November a judge set the suspects free.

  Brad’s parents traveled to Mexico to request that the investigation be turned over to federal authorities. They won that fight, only to be fed the same story with a half dozen variations, including a PowerPoint presentation intended to prove that Brad was a “master of technique” so skilled he could hold his camera steady at arm’s length in front of him even as he swiveled to face his real killer, behind him. Believability wasn’t the point. “In political crimes in Mexico,” says Gibler, who came to act as the family’s translator, “there’s an impeccably neat history of immediate obfuscation and destruction of evidence. The authorities immediately flood all discussion with conspiracy theory. There’s a tradition of exquisite incompetence, so that later only speculation is possible.”

  THE WILLS ARE NOT, by nature, speculative people. At sixty-eight Hardy Will is a solid, fit man with white hair worn in a boyish curl. He still drives more than an hour both ways Monday through Friday, to his factory in Rockford, Illinois. Kathy Will’s health is beginning to fray, but she bounces like a loose electron around the Wisconsin lake house in which they now live, where I visit them one night in the midst of a blizzard. Designed and built by Brad’s great-grandfather, a lumber heir, the home is a mansion of broad, dark cypress beams, filled with Asian antiques from the travels of long-gone Wills. The house had left the Will family and begun to fall to pieces, but Hardy and Kathy bought it back when Brad was a boy and spent years restoring it, dreaming of a home to which their children would always want to return. Now it is perfect, spotless, disturbed only by neat stacks of documents, arranged on the great oak dining table like settings for a seminar on Brad’s achievements as a boy, Mexican politics, and ballistics.

  It’s on this last matter that the case still turns. That is, in their new dream, the one in which their child’s killers will be held accountable, which is almost as unlikely as Brad coming in the front door, home from his adventures. But if justice were to be served—if the Wills are ever to be able to say, “This is what happened, this is how Brad died, this is the man who killed him,” they must determine what sort of bullet killed him and where, exactly, it came from. The initial coroner’s report said the bullets were 9 mm, which would rule out the .38s carried by the men Brad filmed. But a reexamination of the evidence has revealed that the bullets were .38s after all. Hardy shows me a photograph of them, two squat slugs hardly dented. “They only passed through soft tissue,” he says.

  But from how far away? The government says Brad was shot nearly point-blank. The Wills are certain he was shot by the policemen at the end of the street. Proving that, they believe, may be the first step toward bringing their son home, reclaiming his memory from the murk of a broken revolution.

  I’ve come bearing what passes for good news to the Wills these days: a frame-by-frame analysis of Brad’s last minute made by Warcry, who has entrusted me to act as her courier for a package that also includes a video of Brad belting out “Teargas Anthem/Washing Machine Song,” collectively composed after the 1999 Seattle protests and so named for the heavy thump-thump of sneakers tumbling in a washing machine, being cleansed of the tear gas that clings to fabric and leather long after a demonstration. Brad sang one of the verses he’d contributed:

  . . . and you asked what I would do,

  And I told you the truth dear sister, when I spoke these words to you

  I will stand beside your shoulder, when the tear gas fills the sky.

  If a National Guardsman shoots me down I’ll be looking him in the eye.

  Warcry also sent a fifteen-page report that begins: “All POSSIBILITIES must receive due consideration (even the unlikely ones offered to us by the Mexican government) but our search for Brad’s killer will be most effective if we narrow down the variables to the most likely PROBABILITIES.”

  “Well, this is what we’ve been waiting for,” says Hardy. We gather in a TV room, the three of us standing as Warcry’s distilled images play on a giant screen. “That’s it!” Hardy exclaims. The white starburst of the gunshot appears, expands, drifts, visible for a fraction of a second, blown up into giant, pale pixels—possibly the bullet that’s about to hit Brad. Proof, Hardy believes.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” says Kathy.

  “Should we watch it again?” Hardy asks.

  Yes. Rewind. Pause. Kathy’s head drops, and she backs out of the room. Rewind, Pause; Brad falls down, over and over. “Yes,” says Hardy quietly. “This is what we need.”

  Then I ruin it. Warcry also has stills, I tell Hardy, images of a man in a yellow shirt she believes is holding a sniper rifle. This confuses Hardy. Warcry is still operating on the belief that the bullets were 9 mm, not yet aware of the new evidence that they were .38s after all. Hardy believes his son was hit by an incredibly unlucky shot fired from a two-bit police pistol a block away. “Show me the pictures,” he insists. “She can’t be right.”

  It’s eleven-thirty at night. I call Warcry; she’s up, waiting to hear from the Wills. Send the sniper pictures, I tell her. Kathy serves us apple pie while we wait. “This could really change everything,” Hardy says between mouthfuls. We gather around his computer in his study, a dark room looking out on a frozen lake, to wait for Warcry’s pictures. We’re surrounded by animal heads from African safaris and memorabilia from Hardy’s Yale football days. I pull up the image, a man in a yellow shirt at a distance, a long gun barrel rising above his left shoulder. Hardy peers down, then sighs. He walks over to a well-stocked gun cabinet, removes a rifle, and turns around, aiming at me, posing perfectly as the man Warcry believes is his son’s killer.

  “It’s not a sniper rifle,” he says, looking at the gun in his hand. “It’s a carbine.”

  A clumsy old weapon that would have been no better for targeting Brad at that distance than a .38. The puff of white smoke is the best piece of evidence they’ve seen in the year since Brad died, but they still can’t explain how he was shot twice at long range by an inaccurate gun.

  Hardy slumps into a seat in the corner, thinking of one more theory—one more chance at certainty—dashed.

  Kathy brings us tea. Like Brad, she has soft, sleepy eyes and a broad smile. “I like talking to people,” she says. “I’ll talk to anyone. I guess that’s where Brad got it from.” Hardy is exhausted. The clock has passed midnight, and he must drive to his factory in the morning. He says goodnight, but Kathy sits up, watching Brad’s old videos—Brad fleeing tear gas in Miami, Brad dancing in the street in Quito, Brad quietly explaining to a camera why he fights.

  “It’d be laughable if they weren’t serious,” she says, the room dark but for the glow of the screen, a paused video image of Brad.

  Hardy was always the skeptical one, shielding his wife from the ways of the world, but now it’s Kathy who’s grasping the roots of her son’s political discontent. She doesn’t have the ideology, still doesn’t get the politics, tsk-tsks when she sees Brad sitting in front of an upside-down American flag—a crisp Stars and Stripes snaps on a pole outside the house, and there are three bands of colored stones, red, white, and blue, on her finger. It’s not anything that Brad said that has changed her point of view. It’s what the Mexican government says, its PowerPoint about her son’s “technical mastery,” its surreal “pivot theory,” the lies they told her to her face. “What they’re really telling me is that Brad was there for a very good reason. Believe me, I didn’t want him there. But he was absolutely right. He was right about all the injustices. I didn’t know it then. I really didn’t know. I know it now.”

  We watch Brad’s videos together for a while, no longer talking. Too long, maybe; outside the snow is deep, drifting up to the Wills’ door so that we can barely open it. My car has disappeared, as has the lake and the road and the world beyond.

  Kathy knows just what to do.
“You’ll stay here,” she tells me, and takes me up the stairs to an empty bedroom, its windows ticking gently against the wind and a draft threading across the floorboards.

  “You have everything you need?” Kathy asks, standing by the door, as if she’s going to turn the light off for me.

  I nod.

  “Good. You’ll sleep well. This was Brad’s room.”

  ONE OF THE MOST common clichés about radicalism in America is the myth that it’s all about the parents—activists rebelling against or proving themselves to Mom and Dad before they settle down and become Mom or Dad. That wasn’t Brad Will. Had he come through that firefight on October 27, 2006, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to his mother. Instead, he’d’ve told her about the great Mexican food he’d had, and she’d’ve said that the lake was flattening in the cold, and that soon it would be frozen, that maybe when he came home for Christmas he could go ice-skating. His video likely would not have been seen outside activist circles in the United States, the echo chamber of the already persuaded.

  But the bullet that killed him ended up broadcasting what he had learned far beyond his usual channels, all the way back to where he’d begun. With Brad’s death, knowledge came to Kathy Will. It was the most awful kind of knowing: a new understanding of the world as it is, almost blinding her to the glimpse she had caught, maybe for the first time, of the world as Brad had imagined it could be.

  “The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself,” writes Hakim Bey in the long and wild poem that had turned her son on to those possibilities. “An invisible golden cord that connects us.”

  6For Every Life Saved

  FOR YEARS AFTER the war and after the camps, Chava Rosenfarb woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to write. She’d open her eyes in the darkness and slip out of bed without waking her husband, make herself a cup of coffee, and sit down in her study, still wearing her nightgown. The study was even smaller than her kitchen—barely large enough for the table she had bought from a doctor’s office for ten dollars. On it she kept her notebooks. Sipping coffee, she’d start with the one on top, and by the light of a table lamp, beneath a portrait of the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz, she’d review yesterday’s stories. Rereading drew her back like a current, not into her pages but into the world to which she wanted to return. When she felt that world thickening around her, she’d skip ahead to where she’d left off the night before, pick up a pencil, and begin to write, slipping from her apartment in Montreal back to the last days of the Lodz ghetto.