Brady’s homemade bomb vest

Brady’s homemade bomb vest is an improvised weapon Brady first intends to wear into the ’Round Here concert at the MAC. He ultimately decides he no longer needs to wear it: he dismantles it, redirects its explosive toward a planned attack on Hodges, and repurposes its ball bearings for another concert-related device. The vest matters not as a finished object but as a changing stock of components through which Brady’s plans repeatedly take shape and change.

Design and Initial Plan

At his worktable in the control room, Brady considers how to get into the concert wearing the vest he has carefully constructed. The plan weighs on him as demanding work, alongside his separate question of how to reach Hodges. The vest is therefore part of an intended mass attack, but in this moment it exists chiefly as one laborious possibility among plans Brady is not sure he will carry out. His attention drifts from practical planning toward thoughts of killing himself, leaving the vest’s intended use unsettled.

Dismantling and Repurposing

Brady’s plans change when he turns to a separate attack on Hodges. He assembles a shoebox bomb from homemade explosive stored in a shoebox, fitting it with a disposable cell phone and a detonator powered by AA batteries. He plans to leave the bomb in Hodges’s Toyota near Soames Funeral Home, then wait at a distance for Hodges to drive past. As Brady’s attention shifts to this scheme, he laughs at the prospect and decides to spend the afternoon taking apart the vest: he no longer needs to wear it.

The next morning, the vest has been dismantled. Brady carefully disconnects the plastic explosive blocks from their detonator wires and distributes some of them elsewhere: some go into a bright red seat cushion printed with the slogan ASS PARKING, and two more are remolded into wired cylinders and placed in a bright blue Urinesta peebag. He decorates the bag with a ’ROUND HERE FANBOY #1 sticker bought at the MAC gift shop. By converting the vest into concealed components for a concert device, Brady turns his original wearable plan into a different form of attack.

Components and Continuing Plans

The vest’s contents continue to serve Brady’s preparations even after the vest itself is gone. Its ball bearings, once part of the vest, are now in three mayonnaise jars. Brady begins portioning them into gallon-size Glad food-storage bags, a repetitive task that soothes him as he prepares for the coming concert. The explosive and bearings have separated into distinct materials and uses: the explosive is redistributed into objects intended to conceal it, while the bearings are organized for further preparation.

That process also makes the vest an unstable object in Brady’s plans. It is first a carefully constructed garment meant to carry him into the concert, then something he can abandon when another opportunity to attack Hodges takes precedence, and finally a source of materials for further devices. Its disassembly does not end the threat represented by its construction; it marks the transfer of that threat into other forms. The change from vest to scattered components gives a concrete shape to the movement between Brady’s competing plans, without making any one design his final answer.