BETRAYED! #25

Uppon the Occurence of Certain Births

by A.E.P. and Addison Lande

continued from issue #24

3420 Ellerslie Ave.

Baltimore, MD 21218

3 December 2012

Dear Asher,

Asher, I fail to discover any refuge. For a short time, no more than a week, I halted both my research and pathetic attempts at self-defense. Life continued around me unabated. I remained a still point within the vibrant organic tissue of Baltimore urban ecology. No monsters assaulted me. I received no further ghosting from my life's dearly departed. I had lunch with Dora. That was magnificent. Believe it or not, I began to feel my weariness and madness peel away in layers. Then, with one evening's dreams all of that enshrouded me once again.

You must tell me of your little girl's Secret Family! Please do not construe what I narrate as a brash try at getting you to succumb to my delusions. I regret that I may have endangered you and your family through confiding in you.

On December 8th, there was a murder-suicide in a row home in Mt. Vernon. Just like the housing bubble bursting in 2008 ruined many lives, the recent collapse of the Green Bubble has pulled millions into a maelstrom of insurmountable debt and failure.

Timothy Bradkowsky placed pillows onto the faces of his recumbent children and then shot them both in the face. There was a struggle with Gloria, his wife, soon after, but he emptied the magazine into her abdomen. Within an hour, Mr. Bradkowsky downed a bottle of sleeping bills and a bottle of Ketle One. He was dead within hours.

Before I knew of that unpleasantness, Dora and I met for lunch at Pete’s Grille. The location harkens to a day when restaurateurs treated their guests with a gruff indifference that emanated resentment for patronizing the establishment. The location occupied a corner in Remington and was all counter space with no tables. It only served greasy, thick, American breakfast. Dora loved it. Her choice of pedestrian locale fit with her burgeoning idealism and sense of connectivity with the hoi polloi. Do you remember what is what like to hold unwavering convictions that rational argument could never dispel? I suspected she also chose it to goad me on.

She slurped at her black coffee, and gestured at me across her fried eggs. “You really ought to be ashamed of yourself,” my own daughter said to me, “you know that?”

Dora pushed a piece of untoasted wheat bread through yolky mess and popped the dripping morsel into her mouth. She sucked a bit of stray yolk that clung to her thumb and paused in her beratement to think of the next volley. Chewing, swallowing, she turned to me, and said, “I don’t relate to my own friends any more, Dad. Their concerns seem, so, so, damn childish.” Dora leaned across the counter, brining her face close to mine.

“I spend all my energy keeping Travis on track in that special school of his, and, and, and keeping Mom together enough so she can keep going.” Her hand struck out at her steaming coffee like a viper and she took the other half of the mug in gulps. She set the mug down and turned from me to call a server.

“Sweetie,” her tone changed radically as it always did whenever addressing a person she thought ‘worked’ for a living, “can I get a refill please?”

“No problem, hon,” chirped the crone that spent a shuffling life shuffling orders back and forth.

Dora faced me to deliver the finishing blow, but I had already started to laugh. The laughter slithered its way out of me like a thing being born. It started crawling and gnashing in my throat and bubbled from my lips with all the pent up emotional tension from almost a year of hiding from the unknown. I wonder if I appeared a monster to the staff and idle customers.

I leaned over Dora’s plate, as much to reestablish dominance as anything else, and grabbed the salt. Dashing salt over my grits, I moved a spoonful to my mouth, still chuckling. “You,” I said, “are such an adorable child.

“Acting like the detached revolutionary, belabored youth persevering against the odds, and teenage girl with feelings all in one.” I learned cruelty at the hands of things beyond time that I pray you never see. I ate more grits to hide my indecision with what I said next, but I said it anyway.

“All of it’s going to be great material for your college admission essays. Here’s a working title for you,” I drop the spoon on the counter and hold my hands up with the thumbs facing inward to suggest a placard, “’I Deserve to Study at Dartmouth Because My Pop Is a Paranoid Schizophrenic and I Held My Family Together, Studied, Had a Real Job, and Did Afterschool Activities to Boot.’”

Dora looked completely unmoved by my assault. This was a trick she learned from her mother.

She pulled out her wallet to pay for the meal. If what I said affected her, then she did not show it. I felt like I betrayed the filial bond between us. At that moment, I became aware that our relationship as father and daughter made something greater than ourselves. That thing is unquantifiable and I would demean it with words if I tried describing it to you. When I made that jest, I felt that I destabilized the cornerstone of an important metaphysical edifice. I weakened something grand beyond my understanding with my weakness.

Light seemed to dim in the diner, as if the sun passed behind a cloud. The place quieted it. My mind began to slip back into that world I described to you in our correspondence. The faces of friends and allies I forged during this experience flowed through my mind and then out of it like a broken sieve.

Dora nonchalantly tossed a series of three manila envelopes onto the counter one after the other. She pulled rolling papers and loose tobacco from her messenger bag and began to roll a cigarette. “I found a box of your preliminary notes in the crap Mom was collecting to throw away six weeks ago.”

“You are almost dead to her,” she said, and she started to fish through the bag. I presumed it was for a lighter.

“Your writing on how all this links up to the Voynich Manuscript and other medieval occult theories is interesting, but the whole affair is like a novel. I thought, at first, I stumbled on a sophomoric stab at writing like Umberto Eco instead of the work of an engaged academic.”

She put her treasure, an old Zippo of my father’s she rescued from obscurity in the attic onto the counter. “The stuff that a real person could sink her teeth into. Now, now, that had substance. Masons are alive. I can watch the Masons. Bizarre events in the papers, conspiracies, all that Deep Throat shit, that is something else entirely.

I gulped. “What are you imply—,”

Dora concluded: “Whatever’s gotten to you, imagined or real got you good.”

Then, I shared with my daughter everything that I have shared with you. Everything and more. She revealed her own insights and wealth of data on the subject, and that’s how the murder-suicide in Mt. Vernon came to my attention.

After she finished, I gathered all my remaining calm and poise.

“Dora, I want you to cease all involvement in this affair. You are to rededicate yourself to your studies and duties as a sister and daughter. You—.”

Now, that laughing monsters that birthed itself from my throat scampered from hers. Bright laughter tumbled from her face.

“John, you do not get to be a father and a crazed intellectual beleaguered by the supernatural at the same time,” Dora said. My daughter addressed me using my first name.

She stood and slid into her jacket. Dora made for the exit after leaving money and tip on the counter for both our meals.

I gathered up the folders and followed her at an attempt to talk sense into her. For close to an hour, I followed her through Remington and into Charles Village. We walked down St. Paul Street, where the fronts of the row homes were painted bizarre colors. Pastels, purples, bright oranges, and light blues. The character of the brick and plaster leapt to life under the startling hues of new ideas. Under the shadows of these buildings and many others, I tried to convince Dora to stop her investigations lest she end up like me.

She continued ignoring me and smoking Dunhills. My attention swayed to the folders I swiped from the counter. They were full to the brim with expert research and analysis of related murder-suicides of whole families in the Baltimore/D.C. metro area stretching back into the late 1970s.

As I finished reading the article detailing the tragic events I related at the beginning of this letter, we arrived at our destination. 805 St. Paul Street. Site of the Bradkowsky slayings.

“Here we are!” Dora exclaimed. She paused for a moment to register my shock.

She vaulted up the stoop of an unremarkable three-story row home made of stately brick. The place, however, ate the afternoon sunlight. I noticed “For Sale!” signs covering the iron grid work of the handrail leading up the stoop and figured the place impossible to move for the best of real estate conmen. Buildings around the tenement became less distinct. Not blurry, Asher, but the places around 805 St. Paul Street lost their presence. The row home consumed it.

I mounted the steps after my daughter.

Here I must stop. For summoning the courage to relate what happened inside is a feat in and of itself. Pray I or Dora is not alive to tell you. This would be an easy miracle for the Mad Gods that make play with our world to deliver.

Sincerely,

John Wren

NAOMI TWENTY YEARS OLD: JOURNAL OF A HOST ANIMAL

Original concept by Lotte Rubbish

This section of the story by Addison Lande

My brain was a battlezone for a host of different ideas, emotions, visions of the future. It was days before the car accident, but I still felt like Ben was talking to someone else. It's like he's created a completely artificial personality to trick me into going along with his plans.

"It's the right thing to do. If I'm not ambitious now, I'll die without fulfilling my dreams." He looked at me.

"Our relationship isn't enough?"

"Naomi, you know I can't think that way... It would destroy what we have. Just look at where we live, we need to get out of this dump!"

"Dr. Alianthus gives lectures to the cockroaches in his bedroom walls," I said. "He'll probably never reach tenure because he never bothers to publish much of anything. And he's crazy. But he's the best professor I've had."

Ben coughed. "The last time I visited one of his classes, he was going on and on about some theory he had about displacement, how people are taken from this world by horrific events. Sounds like hypno-therapy garbage to me."

I waved away his criticism. "His theories reach well beyond hypno-therapy garbage! What about fractal judgment in the flashbulb of the moment, the terrible room, and entertainment's concealing or exposing gesture. The man is a genius."

"None of that stuff can help me." Ben said. "What I need is an agent."

...

When I first moved in with him during college I thought we had bed bugs. My skin perked up at points all around my body, crawling. I had been thinking about money and the future.

"I think we've got bed bugs," I said to Ben as I squirmed over the sheets. He was on the computer working on some promotional materials in Photoshop.

I thought about getting out of bed but it was safer than anywhere else. Who knew what might be scurrying along down there on the carpet? There are many formulas for bugs. Spilled soda, pretzel crumbs, unwashed bowls of crusty cereal. All of these things can combine to create a bug boutique. It's bad when they crawl up with their shaky antenna, but the worst is the ones you can't see. They are the ones in control.

It was getting late. Cars put brief lights on the ceiling and walls. I closed my eyes and I thought about bugs until a song began to form, a kind of Bug Opera...

...

My worm half was born the same time as me, from underground, where a lifeless form lay breathing. At the center of the Earth there is a worm factory where worms are created at a rate that follows exactly the birth rate of humans. Ants represent dead human souls, or worms cut in half.

They speak to me about "I would like to know why I was not informed sooner of its absence, and whether this delay will affect my admission." Worrisome topics of the past that make me scream inwardly. Like that asshole on this Internet forum who made me feel bad with his pathetic jokes. He responded to my criticism with more insipid jokes, this time at my expense. I wanted to murder him, but he was just a disembodied voice.

Afterwards, my mind wanders back to the admissions process that never ended.

Ben has always been supportive of my desire to get an education, despite his own professional aspirations. But he's no good with paperwork

"RING We have your application papers. Oh really? Ok, good, I'll call back in two weeks. RING Hello, I'm calling to check up on the progress of my application. We are missing a letter of reference. I see. I will...get that to you. RING Hello, did you get the letter of reference? No? I see. We have your application completed. But you didn't fill out..."

I try to change the subject to the cataclysmic event in the near future. What I said in the past doesn't interest me. In fact, it disgusts me. It doesn't live up to my current standards of falsification, which is to lie about everything to Ben so that he can't see that our relationship is in immediate danger because of his ambitions. He's off at the gallery, drinking toasts to Success while I'm here on hold, navigating an insect colony in the midst of collapse.

The ants don't listen, saying "You thought you could subtly tailor yourself to become appealing to others. It's a kind of entertainment, but you can't keep it up."

I try to think about something else.

"When the cataclysmic event occurs, you will be secretly relieved. You have been acting entirely on anxiety. That's why you've lost so much weight. Decisions will be made for you, by you, in waves of fractal judgment over a period of months. You need to admit your feelings, but you don't. Idealization occurs in the flashbulb, the terrible room concealed instantly."

"That's not true. It can't be true, you're just bugs!" I scream, but my vocal cords only tremble.

"You know it is - art was never meant to be a replacement for speaking. That's why you're talking to bugs, you idiot."

Ben turns over in his sleep, mumbling something about gallery exhibitions.

...

The ants crawl all over his shoes. The patterns seem to be meaningful, and there are dread sounds in the room. I freak out and decide to visit Manny. He lives on campus and sells drugs to pay for classes.

Manny's room is a fucking disaster, but his presence is comforting. He's smoked so much weed over the past year his face looks like it's going to fall off. Despite this, his smile is still the same. Still radiant.

I speak to him while he silently prepares a drug cocktail made of leftovers he collected from other freshmen's refilled prescriptions. Adderall, Bupropion, Risperdal, and Imipradine. He is one of Dr. Alianthus' students, too. He sees the insects that take control. Manny thinks that he is closer to finding the cure to mental illness.

When I speak my voice sounds strange, like someone else.

"I used to think that my mood, disposition or choices had no effect on this world. I bought into the theory of the atomized individual wholesale. I thought that I was a pinball in a materialist machine. Or maybe I thought that I was nothing more than an ant colony with a face."

"I had to appease everyone, or else I would fall apart and swarm on them, eating their flesh. After being displaced, I saw clearly into my home on Earth. I realized then that how I treated myself changed the world around me. I am the personality known as Naomi."

Manny speaks: "Naomi, I'm sorry, but soon you will be thrown entirely from this world. During a catastrophic event, a car accident, you will be displaced. Not killed, but sent elsewhere."

I stare at Manny, realizing that the knowledge from adulthood has taken a strange form, but it is true and I should listen to it. Suddenly, a future vision visits me.

I turn the wheel, but it's too late. The invisible bugs are in control, and they have told me everything I couldn't admit to myself. They give me no other choice.

By the time I'm dead the worm will have reproduced a hundred times, and all of its children will find me and eat my corpse. From my corpse a thousand ants will be born, and they will eat the dying worms on the pavement.

My Worm Half.

Open Mic on Zine Core Radio

Addison and I performed our song "Cosmic Bowling" last night on Zine Core Radio. Afterward we discussed Betrayed! with the show's host, Hannah Neurotica. You can hear our segment at this link.

BETRAYED! #24

Upon the Occurrence of Certain Births

This one is for Ned.

By Addison Lande and A.E.P.

4242 Cherry Hill Road

Baltimore, MD 21225

15 November 2012

Dear Asher,

Before I begin, I must clarify something. The depth of my friendship for you has not dulled in a decade or more. The precise number of years escapes me, but Asher, you were wrong about Boethius. The slight of your obduracy, especially after being proven wrong, was too much to bear. I, however, digress at the start of this missive. I offer no forgiveness and seek no apology from you. I happily let the dead rest.

Pardon this typewritten epistle. Take it as a nostalgic harkening back to simpler, better times. Savor the archaic intimacy. Hear the clatter of a dusty machine. See your old friend hunched over a Smith Corona, feverishly hammering in the magic hour before the sun crests the horizon but there is just enough ghost-light to discern form.

The purpose for not availing myself of e-mail or forums shall soon become clear. The fact that I write without computers is of the utmost importance. My breath quickens at the thought of this letter being discovered. Use, your, discretion!

Asher, I implore you. Burn this before reading further. Throw the letter out. Tear it to shreds. Remember your Pope: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” A maxim as true in life as it is concerning criticism. Stop reading, your wife and children will thank you. I will thank you. God may, but for reasons relating to my writing, God's grace is lost to me. I suspect it was never there to begin with.

Rebecca took the children and left me three years ago, in April. The day was glorious. Impossibly bright sunshine cascaded through the tree branches outside that house in Roland Heights that I boasted I'd buy for her as a jest all those years ago. Remember that, Asher? Well, Rebecca bought it for me. Her practice took off, and I was free to pursue my work and raise the children. She possessed the will and fire to duel with D.L. Piper, but I only had the gumption to tackle Coptic and Hebrew.

Yesterday, or maybe it was a week ago or a month, I bumped into Dora. My daughter stole her mother's car keys. Bless her soul! She took the car to come see me. I only leave my tenement for food and necessaries. Dora caught me descending to the street below. Pray you never know what it is to be stopped by a stranger only to realize after her shaking you and screaming that that stranger is an estranged child. “It's Dora, Dad!” she hollered. “Travis and I just want to talk to you. Take you out to eat. Why are you wearing those rags? Mom puts thousands in your account every, fucking, week!”

What did I say? What should I have said? “Dearest, if Daddy uses an ATM he risks arousing the notice of unseen forces that will drag him into unspeakable realms.” Is that it? Truth, above all, is what our profession seeks, but life and love demand that we lie, and lie, and lie.

“Who are you?” I grumbled and shouldered past. The feeling of her tears drying on my neck burns even now.

I am not paranoid. I love my wife. I love my children. For that love, I sequester myself in industrial and social ruin.

I hear footsteps. The trodding is too loud and large for human feet. Insectoid, static voices howl in the halls. These sounds fill the world. I must stop here. Take this as a final confession if you will. If I do not hear from you, then I presume you were wise enough to throw away the letter and dismiss it as the ramblings of an old friend that languishes in a collapsed life. If you write and do not hear from me, then I you may presume me lost.

Yours truly,

John Wren

***

John,

It's good to hear from you, but I wish it were under better circumstances. You always were a little self-involved, but this is taking it a bit too far, don't you think? I understand the technological paranoia. I myself am disturbed by the barrage of information that assails me on a daily basis. But what makes a typewriter - or the postal system for that matter - any different from an ATM? They are both machines, only they function at different levels of complexity.

Boethius… Those years seem like ancient history now. Remember when we used to stay at the library late into the night reading the pulps? Lovecraft, Howard, Leiber. When the lights flashed to signal the final 15 minutes before closing, it was as if our very minds were on the blink - everything was distorted by our imaginations. Even the slightest movement in the shadows made my heart jump. On nights when the library closed before we could leave, I don't think I could have escaped if you didn't lead the way through the darkness. I pored over those texts and worked hard during years of study, but it was you who possessed a singular brilliance and vision. We had a partnership, but you truly pushed our intellectual pursuits beyond the mundane. John, you were gifted with an expansive, florid imagination. Don't let it go to waste like this.

I left my professorship at Brown with a deep sense of regret. For years I missed the intellectual camaraderie we enjoyed during our college days at St John's and our collaborations during grad school. But over time, those feelings faded, and I gradually integrated myself into society. It seems that you started to do the same, but somehow the commitment was too much for you. Sadly, I can't say that I know you as well as I once did. But if you're anything like the person I knew, the visions you are experiencing are most likely a creative allegory for your struggle to balance work and home life.

I'm disappointed in you, John, but I'd love to meet up somewhere and discuss your feelings. God knows I lost a lot of sleep in my day over the guilt I felt for ditching my fiancé to immerse myself in the world of ideas.

Consider this: you are an intelligent man. Perhaps too intelligent, certainly too educated. Your ideas have gotten ahead of you and have begun to color your mind. Turn back now and ground yourself before it's too late.

Please, take a break from your work. Your wife and children deserve it - and so do you.

Charlotte is calling me for her bedtime story. I hope to hear back from you soon, but until then I will purge my mind of your words so I can tell her a tale of wonder and joy.

Best,

Asher

***

3420 Ellerslie Ave.

Baltimore, MD 21218

27 November 2012

Dear Asher,

Let me apologize now for the grave news I have for you, but indulge me in some pleasantries.

The news that your family is well gladdened my heart. Your letter proved an uplifting diversion from another dreary move. Circumstances once again necessitated that I use the money Rebecca leaves in my account to change addresses. Please do not misunderstand me, Asher. Rebecca and the children are at the forefront of my thoughts. Their welfare, in fact, is the motivation for my nomadic lifestyle.

My new neighbors in Waverly stood from stoop and doorstep shooting me curious looks as I emptied my moving truck on Thanksgiving. For a moment I stopped unloading my library and let sweat dribble down my nape. I watched the local children bundled in Fall jackets play. Sharp autumnal air burned my nostrils, and the timbre of their shouting permitted me to forget the unpleasantness that consumes my life.

The idea that there is anything innocent about play or that there is something idyllic to be found in childhood is fatuous. This delusion, however, allows us to survive. Nostalgia is a refuge to which many of us turn when things are at their worst. We are all children playing in a dangerous world whose boundaries and rules I conclude now are not just ephemeral but also very, very important. Perhaps, they are the most important thing there is.

But, I digress. Asher. I must point out that if you truly thought my claims the writings of an irresponsible madman abandoning his family in some sort of fugue, then you would not have written me back. I know you well!

Remember Thomas? He was that lout you caught sneaking into the Dons' offices rummaging about for the essay questions at the end of the term. Imagine! At a pass-fail institution, the pitiable oaf reduced himself to cheating. Thomas's arrogance during every seminar discussion left your face bright red. The dismissive grunts Thomas made when someone made a point he disliked drove you to the brink. You, however, let all of it go until you caught him cheating. No quarter was shown. You crafted letters to every dean, don, guest lecturer, and senior student official on campus. You even attached photographs. Of course, each letter contained a cock and bull story about academic honesty, and you sent them anonymously. Asher, forgiveness and empathy eluded you then and now, so if you think me mad I assert you would have left me in the lurch.

Discussing your character brings me to a crux. I mean you no ill will by bringing these matters to your attention. I only seek the assistance of a powerful mind that I trust.

Your mention of Susan is important. It is indeed a shame that you two had a falling out. I must confess that I worked with tireless energy to ensure that your union would exist at all. Chance meetings, orchestrated encounters where the two of you would just happen to meet, casually pointing out shared interests to concoct an awareness between you of your commonalities. I was your Pandarus. Life, however, unravels all our best plans.

Perhaps, I idealized the chemistry and summoned variables that failed to reflect your characters. Your coldness made me feel that at the time I needed to step in for you. You found happiness on your own and for that I congratulate you.

Asher, Susan died seven years ago. She moved to New York and worked as an archivist at Columbia. Here is her obituary. It came at some expense. Physical editions of The New York Times are a costly commodity these days.

On Tuesday October, 17th 2005, Susan Mandrake left us for God.

We will not know why she made her choice, but we will continue

with a wealth of memories, all of which are pleasant. She left

no survivors.

-Staff of Barnard College Library

The coroner's report stated that she slit her wrists and bled to death in her apartment. Enclosed are copies of that report. This seems academic and gruesome. It is essential that you understand and fully believe that Susan Mandrake is dead.

I always took my coffee at a charming place just astride Patterson Park off of Eastern. Even with my nerves strained, I failed to resist the impulse to indulge minor vices. Compounded, these small pleasures will be the end of me. It was there that I saw her. Susan is alive. I watched them put her in the cold hard Minnesota ground. I was one of six people, all co-workers, who made the trip to inter her. Her family was so traditional. Purity balls, every boy a soldier, daily church services. Even going to college was a severe perturbation in her destiny. She was truly alone when she died.

Hot java flooded around my lips, leaving them numb and blistered. She sat outside on the patio, at a table next to mine. For years, from time to time I saw a woman that resembled her and my heart thudded at the startling false recognition. This was different.

Susan was radiant. She looked better than she did when she was alive. Perfect. Bright. She wore an elegant peach colored blouse. A breeze crested the buildings and it brought her scent to me. Persimmons. I looked at her wrists, Asher. There were no scars.

In Minnesota, there is a lonely grave that opened. I flew from that place. Packed my meager possessions and made arrangements to move to Waverly that day.

Asher. My dead Mother and Father watched me from a park bench in front of the Basilica opposite the Enoch Pratt main branch downtown. They died soon after my marriage in a car wreck. Edith, my cousin, rode a bus with me yesterday. Breast cancer took her when I was fifteen. They all looked like they did in their prime.

I told a therapist, Asher. He recommended an institution upstate for a week of observation. I heartily agreed. One of the male nurses was my dead friend Teddy who overdosed on prescription painkillers when I was a senior at the Key School. I pretended I didn't notice. In every encounter, I ran. I ran with such force and speed that if someone dared stop me I do not doubt I would have killed them to keep running.

At the asylum, I couldn't run. I maintained my composure and watched the watcher watching me. He made no threatening move, nor acknowledged me beyond strange piercing looks that peeled apart every layer of my being and let me know that Teddy saw everything about me with his dead, alien eyes.

The other nurses talked with Teddy like nothing was amiss. I survived the week and was prescribed a regimen of intense psychotropic drugs to control hallucinations brought on, supposedly, by untreated bipolar depression.

They were alienists at the turn of the century and all the behaviorism, cognitive therapy, and medication and the world makes them nothing more than the same quacks that performed transorbital lobotomies on weird children.

My work calls me, but there it is. Forces upset with my recent discoveries and inquiries animate the dead close to my life to watch me.

All they do is watch.

Please peruse the enclosed photographs at your leisure. Pray for me, John.

Your friend,

John Wren

***

John,

Susan's death is unbearably sad, but the bleak feeling that has taken hold of me since reading your letter has nothing to do with the supernatural. It emerges from the time she and I spent together, devoid of alien invaders. I was unable to help her. Has it occurred to you that it is possible to be haunted by people entirely from within? Susan's life suffocated her. You knew her well, and because of your interest in getting us together, perhaps you knew her better than I ever did. You of all people should know that she was so beautiful in life because of her unfortunate condition. Her beauty and her ruin existed simultaneously. Susan is no longer with us, neither living nor undead, but you have taken the conflicted core of her life and let it loose on the stage of your mind.

At the end of your letter, you ask yourself to pray for you. By dwelling on the tragedy of others, you have done exactly that. Prayer will not be enough. You need to move on from these mental machinations and return to your family before the tragedies you have reanimated are let loose on the world.

These...Watchers are an interesting idea. A similar concept was referenced quite often by crank radio man Art Bell when he was still alive and broadcasting. Whether these ideas bubble up from the media pool or from man's subconscious is of little consequence. Both are explainable in scientific terms. I'll admit that I'm not always objective. Sometimes I see or hear things that aren't there, but it is obvious to me that these creatures are derived from our late night readings of the paranoid pages of paranormal pulp. I love that stuff as much as you do, John, but you've got to take a moment to seriously ask yourself: are you making excuses? There are examples of parasitic creatures in the wild that 'zombify' their host. But no such thing exists in the human world. It simply wouldn't work. We live in an advanced society that requires complex skills just to survive, much less play spy.

People do act like zombies. Even a slight shift away from what we normally consider human can make someone seem destroyed or deeply ill. I don't mean to be insulting, but a one example would be you. Since we last spoke, your personality is intact, but something has switched off inside you.

When we last met, your mind was playful and nimble, but there were limits to your thoughts. These could be described in moral terms... Before, you would not have thought it prudent to incorporate a former love of mine into your byzantine brain. I'm sure the idea would have occurred to you, but you would have set it aside. Whether these morals have lapsed or you have fallen ill, you no longer see that boundary.

It seems to me that you have created the Watchers to explain your recent aberrant activities. Claiming possession by external forces is a classic way to shirk the blame - but you're not possessed, and neither is anybody else. You are ill, John, and I advise you trust the health care professionals who tried to help you.

Although, on the one hand, it is a little strange that Susan did kill herself. Her depression was powerful, but being a deeply religious woman, I would never have thought she would have killed yourself. And these photos. It seems you haven't forgotten what you learned in our college's darkroom. But now you're in a different darkroom altogether. The photos are frightening, I must admit. I considered showing them to my wife, but thought better of it. I will take another look at them tomorrow, after work.

For the past few nights my daughter has taken to writing me bedtime stories... Work has been hard lately, and I've had trouble sleeping. I go to bed early, but thoughts about the day ahead haunt me. If you want horror, try working as an editor for the Post in these trying times. Subscriptions are so low they sent out old Al Hughes to set up a table at the Giant down the street to get some pity attention. We have sunk so low - lower than I could have imagined. I nearly had a panic attack on the way home from the meeting when we cut Book World. I thought of you, then, as I often do when life becomes absurd.

Today at work I briefly imagined that my coworkers were controlled by a mysterious force. For a few minutes I convinced myself that they were all there only to create the illusion that I was safe and living in a sane world whre reality is immediate and true. The fantasy worked quite well. Everyone is already listless, ideas for stories lack ambition and editing has become dull and tiresome. We've been reduced to mere survival. It's bad PR to point the finger at the Internet, but we all know it's the death knell. But before it took over I put the thought aside and got to work on more important things, like hacking away at the day's copy. Elaborating on such nightmares is best left to the hubris of novelists.

My daughter has written a story about a Secret Family. She is calling me saying it's time for my bedtime story. I think she's right.

Best,

Asher

BETRAYED! #23 - A Message of Love to the World

Naomi
by Addison Lande

"Sam,

I realize it's been weeks now since we broke up, but...

I still have feelings for you.

I hate you beyond measure.

My misanthropy before was just to cover up my insecurities, but now it's real, and it's your fault. Well, maybe not, but you'll suffer just the same - it's out of my hands now. My hate is an invisible
cruise missile, and soon you will feel the full force of its undeniable reality.

Its arrival in your life will be hearkened by a warm glow as if my body were lying next to you, like when we were together. That soft heat will soon grow into a bonfire, searing your skin. My presence will be violent - like it was, but I never showed you. I was afraid of hurting you. But now I'm not, and my hatred will be more intimate than anything you have ever experienced.

You know me well. You once loved me, perhaps. I truly hope that being engulfed by my psychic projection will not be an entirely unpleasant experience.

Love,

Naomi"

Naomi is taking refuge in a broken-down church, writing missives in the musty, dusty accounting office. Hiding out in a church threw The White Family off her course for a few hours, but She knows that they will be after her again as soon as dawn breaks. They have charged Naomi with the murder of Naomi. The punishment? Death.

"I haven't seen them for days, now. Maybe they've given up." Naomi says to herself. But she knows that can't be true. Like the Terminator, the White Family cannot be stopped, only destroyed. And that's no easy task. Their brains have been permanently altered by their insane convictions, making them especially resistant to psychic attack.

Though resilient, they are also somewhat deranged. Their familiar Buick Lesaber will pull into the church parking lot anytime, now. As they step inside with their homemade sweaters and righteous fury, the chase will begin again.

What's that, footsteps in the hall? Naomi quickly shuts off the electric typewriter and searches for a way out.

"Maybe I should stick with pen and paper, it's quieter" she mutters to herself, but it's much less satisfying than working with a machine. Naomi steps onto the desk and pushes open the English window, pulling herself through the tiny opening. She's almost free when she feels a
tug at her dress.

"I've found you, Naomi. Funny, I didn't think you were much of a churchgoing person!" It's Gerald's voice, the youngest of the White Family. He starts to yank with his entire weight as Naomi kicks at the air.

"I've been tracking your emanations... The sinful are easy to sniff
out. And snuff out." She knocks over a box of dot matrix printouts,
whose toppling causes a landslide of Bibles and V.C. Andrews novels.

Gerald yelps as the paperbacks fall onto him, but he's still holding on, coughing from the kicked-up dust.

"Get off of me, you freak!"

Finally, one of Naomi's kicks lands on its target - the boy's face.

"Ow, my nose! I'm B-b-bleeding! Blood... Precious blood!"

The blood stains Naomi's socks and a vision stains her mind, transplanted from Gerald's suffering brain.

Bleeding out. The stimulation of the world is too much. The planet is too much. Finally, I embrace my father's tradition and bleed out for good. The cross, the three women of stained glass, absolute concentration. All interaction written in the stained glass, my perception blotted out, all memory of a world bleeding out. The nervous energy can no longer be quelled, bleeding out.

When I look at someone's face I just see a collage of media, not even cyborg. It's that crowded in the city. Worship is the only bypass, it's the only tool I have. Everything else is electronic money.

I go to church, I see my friend in the urn, then the preacher tells me she is not in the urn. Then I shake his hand and eat his food. But something else brings me here.

There are no more than three in the world I live in, now. Bleeding out. The one had to be broken into three, then three populate my new world into the millions. I'm afraid I might be the last person on Earth with an internal world. People judge me without knowing it, they see me and make a decision subconsciously. It is instant and absolute judgment - just like me.

Their new ideas of wealth over God obscure my face, and I'm Picasso's painting, no longer human. A freak of history. As you may have guessed: they too are bleeding out.

Naomi shakes the vision and pulls herself from the church, breaking into a run. From behind she hears Gerald screaming, "We'll find you, Naomi! You can delete your Facebook, but you can't delete US!"

Running through suburban forest in flight from a brainwashed ten-year-old with psychic powers, Naomi plots the untimely deletion of the White family. If only she could orchestrate their destruction with a few keystrokes... But until the day that technology comes, she has to keep running.

Open Letter to the Internet
by Addison Lande

Hey. Sorry I haven't been so great at keeping in touch lately. I've been using the Internet less and less. I used to exchange emails on a daily basis but now I only email at work. I miss our
conversations, the chat logs are some of the few scraps of information I was able to salvage from the wreck that used to be my computer.

No, I haven't decided to transfer off of my data to hard copy and destroy my computer. (I don't get as many extreme ideas as you do.) I'm still not sure if I want to commit the time or energy to switching to Linux. Prices on paper are going up, and the rain forests are rapidly being depleted... But I feel like what needs remedying isn't entirely the computers themselves. It has more to do with my attitude, I think.

I do feel like a security disaster waiting to happen. But there's a greater fear growing inside of me now. I always considered our conversations private, but now I realize that there are signs of a filter, like the Great Firewall of China, only less obvious. I'm starting to realize that the only privacy we have on the Internet is the privacy that we create. Communications like email are assumed to be private but they fall under a new category: "personal." As AI pattern recognition becomes more robust, the noise created by millions of simultaneous conversations will be less and less daunting. It's not the government I fear...

As I carry out my research it becomes more and more evident that I don't have to be merely a consumer in the realm of communications. I can protect myself by joining efforts to promote privacy and institute methods of creating private realms. The silence of the LANs. Google makes huge jumps in technology like storage yet they pay little attention to fixing the problem of privacy.

I am being I feel more. Detached from the Internet than I have in years. When I first began to explore and discovered people like you. Garbles, D and the rest I sent emails, posted to newsgroups and chatted on IRC without any second thoughts. Nowadays, with more commercial and government activity I could move underground, crawling through cramped passageways. A PROGRAM. VARIATION one. Note scribbled on used gloves they are tacked onto a huge bullet in board. They appear to be left over from previous operations, when the technology was removed from my brain.

The bulletin is located in a maintenance hallway behind the operating room. I am erasing or otherwise making illegible all the names in all the written discourse I have not set aside for burning. I am keeping these for sentimental reasons. I am changing my name. I am setting up
new aliases on the Internet. I will not answer my email. I will not use the Internet without the precautions. It will be expensive, because the cost of protective and the cost of accessing the Internet without implants add up. Finding a pay phone won't be easy these days.

I cannot speak with my family. They don't understand what's at stake. I mentioned to them the software that they should invest in. My mother shrugged and said, "It's very nice of you to think of us, but we just haven't got the time. Besides, Harold is always online using Ebay or playing chess."

I tried to explain to her that there are more secure protocols for chess. If only they would switch to Linux, they would be so much better protected. They have plenty of time. They just don't want to change.